New Lockdown, Day X, Tuesday
Not everyone starts their day by stabbing themselves with their electric toothbrush. And I mean real stabbing. With blood.
Not an easy feat, but I managed it. The head of the brush somehow or other came away from the main body of the brush and I then was distracted by the perception of distance and I brought the vibrating metal stalk forcibly into in the right-hand side of my mouth, just below the bottom lip! It certain woke me up, and any lingering drowsiness was jabbed away in a concentrated moment of pain.
Before you start thinking of wasting any sympathy on me and my injury, I would point out that the puncture is small and it looks more like a shaving nick than anything else – but still a wake-up call to the unwary to beware of seemingly domestic dental devices.
When I checked the errant brush head, it did look a little worn and perhaps I should have replaced it earlier.
Toothbrushes (and electric toothbrush heads) are in a category of simple things that could be easily and cheaply replaced but aren’t, until something happens. This is a category they share with wooden kitchen spoons and spatulas; face flannels; tea towels and coffee mugs.
Actually, the last item, the mug, is something that I will throw away as soon as I detect even the smallest chip or crack – some things are ingrained in your innermost soul by maternal edict that cannot, dare not be gainsaid. My mother regarded a chip or crack in pottery and china as being as toxic as a vomiting fly, safe harbours for unmentionable and uncountable germs. Discard instantly! And I do.
But the other things? I have some wooden spoons (not thrown away) which look as though they were carved from a beam in the ark; tea towels that have only the faintest suggestion of pattern, others delicately threadbare. Why? They are so cheap to replace, and I am not known for my thriftiness – indeed, in certain respects I am an eager celebrant at the altar of planned obsolescence. But you can almost read the history of our family in the tea towels that we use, whereas my purchases of watches or computers brings tears to the eyes of my bank manager, and untold you to manufacturers.
I have known people (well, one person) who would refuse to go into a café for a cup of tea because of the mark-up on the cost of a cuppa compared with what he knew it cost at home. He would actually wait outside the café while the rest of us imbibed in feckless luxury and then re-join us when we had finished our squander. But for other things, he paid the price asked without question, even when the profit margin was just as substantial. Ah well, one shouldn’t always look to logic to explain how humans work.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” he laughed hollowly. It didn’t work.
The reason it didn’t work is that the link to the router has to be direct to the socket in the wall. That, in this house is a problem. Built in the days when a couple of sockets was more than enough for any home, the availability of power is an ongoing quest. And an extensive use of extension leads.
The router is in the living room and the radio is in the kitchen. The area behind the television and almost hidden from view is a writhing mass of cabling for the basic electrical necessities of modern life. There is no socket available for the frivolity of getting Radio 4 when so much else needs power.
No problem. We have another router on the third floor. The house is built of concrete and is terrifyingly solid, wi-fi needs boosts to get all the computing machines to work, so all I had to do was find the socket on the third floor and we could try that.
The third floor is my workroom. It is also a comically unreal picture of cluttered chaos. Bookshelves line the walls and extension plugs proliferate.
Finding The Source of The Nile was one of the great stories of exploration and daring, but it pales into vapid insignificance when compared with the Search for the Socket on the Third Floor.
There is no space. For anything. On the Third Floor. If anything is moved, then something else must be moved to make a space for the thing that has been moved to a new location. At the moment, when many, many things have been moved, the space looks like a vindictive labyrinth, and my progress from desk to stairs is in a slow undulating slink as I manoeuvre around insecure piles of stuff and am rewarded by sharp book corners biting into ankles and shins.
Like some demented game, I followed power leads, trying to find their source – only to be frustrated by finding one trailing socket only led to another trailing socket, not to the true source of power. Crouching, crawling, moving books to move bookcases, shining a torch behind pieces of furniture (and ofttimes being bewitched into reading volumes that I had not seen for some time, but then needed by immediate attention) I felt the full weight of despair. Indeed, I began to doubt that that there was ‘a’ source of power – it (The Power) was numinous, it was ubiquitous, it was ‘there’ and not to be questioned or assumed to have a simple source: it simply Was.
Well, that is fine and dandy thinking for Scholastic monks, but I needed the physicality of a plug. Which I eventually found directly behind me. A four-socket thing, with leads going off in all directions but, amazingly with one socket free. End of story.
No. The lead supplied with the magic plug is too short to reach the router and the router cannot be moved. So, in spite of all my misgivings about the pernicious influence of Amazon in the world today, necessity bent my principles (again) and a longer lead has been ordered and will be delivered to the door tomorrow. When we will discover the next problem to cope with. Plug and play indeed!
Tomorrow the Liceu is putting on a performance of an early Mozart Opera. The original date of the performance has been changed twice. The time of the performance has been brought forward by two hours, and the audience has been limited to 500 people. Masked, we sit in a circle of empty seats – and are grateful that at least something is being done in the season.
Because of the re-arrangement the cost of the ticket has been halved, and as I sit in an aisle seat in the front stalls, that is a considerable amount of cash!
This is a concert version of the opera, which is never a truly satisfying way to see an opera, but it was always going to be a concert version so I have nothing to complain about there. The countertenor in the piece has a wonderful voice and I only hope that it is enough to keep me interested in a less than convincing narrative – though there are powerful human passions behind those ordered notes!
It will also give me an opportunity to see at least some of the Christmas Lights in Barcelona, and perhaps I will feel a little more of the spirit of the ‘festive’ time – though the only present that anyone really wants is a double dose of efficient vaccine!
The excavations on the Third Floor have revealed more items that will be added to my growing Catalogue Raisonné, including one thing that I had thought was long lost! It is good to see that there is some gain from the pain of sorting out!
