No time for 'work'!

Well, if nothing else I have done my Catalan homework.  To an outsider, I must have looked like some casually dressed general planning an invasion as I consulted double page spreads of grammatical explanations and examples, thumbed my way through my totally inadequate “easy learning” dictionary, and resorted from time to time to Google Translate on my mobile phone.  

And all of that was for a relatively easy grammatical exercise!  God help us all when we get to the rest of the declensions of the verbs!

 

Still, it gives me a sense of satisfaction to think that I am at least starting from the very depths of ignorance and any accretion of knowledge will be a bonus.  And, I have to say, that the odd words are getting through to me when I watch the Catalan television station.  Bit by bit.

This all sounds very commendable until you realize that there are students in my class who are learning Catalan after being in the country for fewer weeks than I have been here years.  And the most that I could use the language for was to ask for a cup of iced coffee!  That is, at least, in the process of changing.

-oOo-

I have had a letter from yet another hospital summoning me to yet another appointment.  Don’t get me wrong, I am more than appreciative about the way in which my thrombosis, embolisms and dicky heart have been treated – after all, I did manage to produce a chapbook based on my stay in hospital – and I am more than prepared to turn up promptly and wait while another doctor reads my details for the first time and makes a pronouncement.

This time the hospital I have to visit is in the third town away from Castelldefels along the motorway towards Barcelona, in St Boi.  We usually go to St Boi to visit the supermarkets (or ‘Sheds’ as we used to call all those large stores on Rumney Common in Cardiff along the Newport Road) and very little else.  It is, it has to be said, an unlovely place, and it is further hated by motorist commuters who have to go through a bottleneck there to change motorways.

 

For as long as I have lived in Castelldefels there have been roadworks in St Boi as the slowest road construction in the world eventually will (please god) transmogrify itself into a motorway interchange and cut out the need to navigate ever-changing temporary roads whose ineffable structure is presumably there to facilitate the building of the big new quick roads that will make the daily commute just a little less miserable.

But this deliverance is in the unknowable future, like Tantalus’s sustenance, just out of reach.  To be fair, a decade’s worth of roadworks has accomplished the moving of the traffic jams little further along the motorway, so that is something.  Not much, but you really have to experience the bone grinding futility of parts of the network of roads feeding Barcelona to be able to appreciate even the smallest amelioration.

In my darker moments (like, for example, at 6.30 am taking Toni to work because there is no public transport to get him to there for 7.00 am when he starts) I fear that I will see the completion of the Sagrada Familia before this bloody road is opened.  What makes things worse is that you can see pylons stretching emptily towards the skies that should be carrying a road bridge – they have been there so long that they are now covered with graffiti; you can gaze at empty stretches of multi-lane highway running parallel to our inefficiently winding road; you can see machines, lorries, equipment – but no people actually working on the bloody thing.

In my lighter, and therefore far more pretentious, moments, I have assumed that these ‘roadworks’ are nothing of the sort and are actually a vast piece of performance art/installation piece and as such I should be grateful that I have been able to appreciate its developing complexity over the years.

Talking of complexity, tomorrow morning should be an example of the sort of life that can only be lived by the very fortunate - or the retired.  The day starts with my staggering out of bed well before half past six, and having a cursory wash before taking Toni to work.  Returning to Castelldefels, I get to the swimming pool just as it opens at 7.00 am and have my 1,500 m swim.  By the time I am done, having had a shave and completed more thorough ablutions, the café is open so that I can have MY special cup of tea and do a little desultory writing in my ever-present note book.  

I then go directly from the pool café to Bellvitge hospital in Hospitalet de Llobregat for my monthly Control where a single drop of blood, from the tip of the middle finger of my right hand, is tested to see that the viscosity of my blood is within the limits set to encourage the disappearance (the gradual disappearance) of the thrombosis.  I am then given my schedule of rat poison (because that is what I am taking in reality, dress it up with scientific names as they might) for the next month.

Once I am released from the hospital I then make my way back to Castelldefels to go to my first Catalan lesson of the week.  At 12.30, my lesson ended, I make my way into the centre of Castelldefels to go to the framers to discuss how best to bring to concrete fruition a little idea for a ‘picture’ that I have devised.   

Its realization all depends on how much the framer’s bits and pieces that are essential to make it work, cost.  And I should have a price in my mind beyond which I will not go.  There again, ‘should’ is not ‘will’!

The afternoon can be given up to writing.  My publications are lagging behind schedule and I need to get them back on course.

-oOo-

Being up so early, I heard a healthy chunk of the Today programme on Radio 4 and therefore caught the ‘puff’ for Melvyn Bragg and the new book celebrating the twentieth anniversary of ‘In Our Time’.  I made the serious mistake of looking it up in Amazon and bought it at once!  In hardback!  It looks exactly the sort of thing that I like – with pictures!   

 I will review it in a later blog, as soon as it arrives!

Put a spoke in it!

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Why do the spokes on the back wheel of my bike keep breaking?  In all my time of owning bikes in the past this has never happened, but with my new electric bike it happens all the time.

OK, the wheels on this bike are small and I am not, but I refuse to accept the depressing analysis that says that my avoirdupois is the reason for metal failure!  Taking the bike back (again) to the shop, the technician was mystified by the constant breakages.  I have to admit that the original spokes looked somewhat flimsy, but those have been replaced (at great cost) by much sturdier struts and so there is even less justification for breakage.

The shopkeeper did point out my foldylock (one of those jointed thingies that locks your bike to something immovable) and suggested that I might have hit its bulk against the spokes when locking the bike, but this is something that I have thought about too and make every effort to keep foldylock and strut apart.  So the mystery continues as does the outpouring of money.

But the money will have to be paid because I am now reliant on my bike.  This has nothing to do with a zest for exercise, but all to do with the fact that my bike is electric.  This is the sort of bike that I needed when I was growing up in Cardiff.  Living in the suburb of Rumney, going in to the centre of the city was a delight because you could coast your way down the long length of Rumney Hill.  But any delight was limited by the thought that to get home you would have to cycle up it or, following the eminently sensible philosophy of my dad’s “If it’s easier to push the bike than ride it: push it!” by pushing it.  The long slog either way of attacking the slope was waiting and depressing.  How might my early life have changed if all I had had to do was put the bike in first and the assist on five and peddle nonchalantly.

I do not want you to feel that I have succumbed to old age and smile vaguely at passing scenery as I press a button and whizz along.  No, my bike (electric though it is) uses the battery to ‘assist’.  The bike has seven gears and operates as a normal bike if you want it to.  The motor gives you five levels of assist to make the peddling easier.  To be absolutely truthful there is also a throttle which does give you a ‘free ride’ but I tend to use this feature to cross roads where the throttle will propel you forward without the need for clumsy peddling, especially if you are stationary and starting off in seventh gear!

So I am reasonably ‘good’ about the level of cheating that I use with my bike and even though I use the fifth level of assist to go up hills, I leave the bike in seventh gear which means that you still have to peddle to go where you want.

What owning the bike has meant more than anything is that I now use it more.  I am much more likely to go into town on various errands using the bike because not only is it easier to park when you get there, but you are able to enjoy the experience without too much effort.

You also have to bear in mind that I am not in Britain and I do not have to worry as much about rain and cold as I do here.  It is only in the last week or so that I have started wearing a jacket and I am still wearing shorts and sandals!  And as I am typing this, the setting sun is illuminating the tops of the pines and wispy cloud adds interest to an otherwise faultlessly blue sky.  So there is an incentive to get out and about - and to feel good about making the effort too!

My Spanish lessons (two hours, twice a week, subsidised by the city hall, god bless them) are in the centre of Castelldefels in an adult education centre whose immediate vicinity is devoid of free parking spaces.  Or at least the nearest free parking spaces are up a one-in-one hill and ‘officially’ too far away.  On the bike there is no problem as I can lock the thing up next to my classroom and within feet of the front door.  And since the classes started last month there has not been a single occasion where adverse weather conditions have encouraged me to use the car!  Not one!

My bike is also foldable.  Its construction is solid so, although various bits and pieces fold up and down and together it is hardly easy to manhandle into the boot of the car when it needs to go to be seen to, but it can and has been done and will be done again when in an hour or so I go to pick it up so that it will be available for me to go to my lesson tomorrow.  I wonder how much the guy who has repaired the spokes on three or four occasions will have the temerity to charge me?

This typing, as my more experienced readers will have guessed, is more displacement activity than literary endeavour.  I have the exercises 3B in both our textbooks to do on the use of the subjunctive in Spanish.  In one of my informative Spanish/English dictionaries in the middle ‘note’ section the explanation of the subjunctive and when to use it stretches from page 58 to 65 - and that is in note form!  What chance have I got!

Well, I’ve stopped typing, so I will now have to go and get the bike, then it will time for a cup of tea and a little light TV watching - and then copying from the back of the book!

Oh, I have drafted another poem called, 'The Victors' - it's about flies!  You can read it at:

http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/