How to fill a Sunday-feeling Saturday

 New Normal, Second week, Saturday

 

 

 

 

It’s raining. 

     I had to take the car to the swimming pool today, because, while I enjoy riding my bike, I am not a fanatic and for me, riding in the rain cuts the fun to less than zero. 

     I did try and remember the last time that I took the car rather than rode the bike to the pool, and I couldn’t.  Which rather makes the point that I continually make about the weather and my reaction to it in the two countries - three if you count the country of my birth and my later year-long “missionary work” there as a qualified English teacher teaching the natives their language, as befits any true Welsh teacher – in which I have lived.  I don’t like rain.  Or the cold.  But I can do with a bit of cold as long as there is the promise of a fair amount of rain-free time during the year.

     Alas!  Britain does not promise that, whereas Catalonia does.  Simple.

 

 

I have decided to do a bit of delving into the war service of my paternal grandfather.  I have his name and his number and his war service stretched from 1914 to 1918.  He was one of the early volunteers and so had his 1914-1915 Star.

     He never talked to me about his war service, and my Dad said that he was only told about a very few of his experiences.  I can well imagine that my grandfather found it difficult to relate details of his life in the army to anyone who wasn’t there.  The disconnect between what the soldiers actually experienced in the field and what was reported must have made it difficult to have a meaningful conversation.  And why would the soldiers give an accurate description of the almost unimaginable horrors that they witnessed to their loved ones on their return?

     I have tried to find out about his war service from the internet and I think that I will need to pay to get the detail that I require.  I am, as they say, looking into it.

 

 

 

I have now put some battery powered LED fairy lights around the newly framed watercolour (and glitter) paintings of winter trees by SQB and it looks magical.  I have never, ever started to put up Christmas decorations in November before, but then I have not experienced a year like 2020 before either, so a little jollity does not seem out of place no matter how vulgarly distant Christmas actually is.  And anyway, I have seen the first Christmas decorations being sold in Tesco in the past before the end of the summer holidays, so if anything, I am rather tardy in “trimming up” as one of my friends used to say!

 

Today has been one of those odd days when, in spite of evidence to the contrary, it has stubbornly felt like Sunday.  In the “Old Days” i.e. before retirement, such a misconception had its advantages as assuming a Saturday a Sunday meant that when one woke up on what, by extension of the faulty reasoning, could be a Monday – it was in fact, only Saturday and no work!  Now, of course, Mondays have lost a lot of their sting – well, to be fair, virtually all of their sting, but there is still something different about weekends that still gives me something of a buzz, in spite of it being an attitude rather than harsh reality!

 

We had lunch in Suso’s, a restaurant that we often patronize on a Saturday because it has a reasonably priced menu del dia, Suso being one of the few restaurants that do not take the opportunity of the weekend to inflate their prices.  The value is extraordinary, even though I do not nowadays take advantage of the bottle of wine that can come with the meal.  I felt very virtuous in restricting myself to pure, cold water – and I am sure that I felt all the better for it!

 

Now back to military records and finding out just which of the pointless bloodbaths my grandfather was forced to participate in by generals safely way behind the front line.  I will never forgive Haig for his attempted murder of my grandfather!

Traditions are for the making!

 New Normal, Day 3, Wednesday

There is something deeply satisfying in being in on the creation of a new customary procedure.  Especially as I had little or nothing to do with its physical creation, I merely curated it into existence.

     Sitting outside the Liceu on my shooting stick, propped up against the railings leading down into the Metro, just before by time slot for entry to the first Covid restricted performance of an Opera for ages, I received a phone call from a friend in Cardiff.  It has to be said that actually making and receiving phone calls on my mobile phone is one of the least important functions as far as I am concerned.  And that lack of interest in the ostensible raison d’être of the machine shows itself in my customary total confusion if the thing actually rings.  As I always have the phone set to mute, it is a chance in a thousand that I ever get to realize that a call is occurring, and then answering it with the correct finger movements on the screen makes the likelihood of it being successful even less likely.  However, this call sort-of worked and I found myself talking to SQB.

     Not only did we manage (eventually) to converse, but also she managed to send me photos of cards that she had been making for charity, I instantly ordered some to be sent to me in Castelldefels, together with a selection of tree decorations that she had also made.

     Even before the cards arrived I began to formulate plans for them which did not include merely putting them in envelopes and sending them off to other people.  The end result was that I selected four of the cards that SQB sent and took them off to be framed.  I now, therefore, have a square grouping of four of the cards in a bright red Christmas surround in a gold metallic frame.  And it is now up on the living room wall as part of our Christmas festivities.  And will be a recurring part of Christmas from now to the end of time.  A tradition is born!  Thanks, SQB!

     This means that SQB now has a third entry in my Catalogue Raisonné, which, by the way is going from strength to strength with almost 40 works of art listed, not including some books, pottery and a fluffy bunny.  My catalogue will be nothing if not eclectic.

     I have still not decided what I am actually going to ‘do’ with the catalogue.  The one clear practical result of my starting it, has been that I have re-examined what I have, and have at least started the process of moving some of the paintings around and bringing others out of storage and onto the walls.

     In one case, that of my paternal grandfather’s First World War medals, I have discovered that I have had them framed in the ‘wrong’ order.  My grandfather was in that bloody conflict (wounded but not killed, in spite of the best efforts of that bastard Haig’s battle ‘plans’ {sic} [!]) from the start and was therefore awarded the 1914-1915 Star, as well as The British War Medal and The Allied Victory Medal.  That order is the order in which they were usually worn and I suppose it should have been the order in which they were framed, left to right.  He was also given the Abergwynfi and Blaengwynfi Commemorative War medal, a rather different looking medallion, and I have no idea where that should have gone in the sequence – probably at the far right.  I have always regretted that I did not have a contemporary photograph of my grandfather framed with them.  One does exist showing him wearing his metal helmet in a jaunty and, for the army, in a totally inappropriate way.  Perhaps my finding out the order was ‘wrong’ gives me an opportunity to have them reframed with his photograph giving the lifeless pieces of metal some sort of personal humanity.

     I think that my underlying intention of compiling the catalogue was to use it as a basis for further writing: the stories or thoughts that go with each piece.  Some of the works of art have obvious ‘stories’ – at least to me – while others are perhaps more subtle in the way that they can lead on to other more tangential considerations.  Who knows?  See where it goes.

 

When cycling along the paseo, for no particular reason snippets of songs come into my mind.  They are rarely of my generation of popular songs (whatever generation I think I might be a member of) they are more usually odd lines from the songs that my parents sang.

     One of the songs, that I often think I would choose to be part of the “What my parents gave to me” part of the radio 4 programme on a Saturday morning, the sort of legacy music that you pick up because your parents chose to sing it.

     I do not remember the whole of the song, but the lines I do remember and they were the ones that stuck in my mind for most of my cycle, in the way that earworms do, were:

“From New York to the state of Maine

They went in search of more cocaine

Oh, honey have a [sniff] have a [sniff] on me

Honey, have a [sniff] on me!”

One of reasons that the song stays with me, is that the [sniff] part was an actual sniff and not the word.  I thought that was very good.  At that age (less than 8 years old) I had no idea what cocaine might have been, and the fact that the two main (ill-fated) characters in the ballad were called Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue, and it really doesn’t end well!

     A few questions present themselves: which version of the song did my parents know?  How did they know it?  Why were they singing it in the hearing of a seven-year old?  I do remember that I used to join in with the chorus with the sniffing!  Ah, the innocence of ignorance.

     Doing a very small amount of research, it is amazing how many people have covered versions of the song, or composite fragments of a few songs, including names revered in Blues and Folk.  But it is still a remarkable snatch of song to graft into your child’s mind!  And before anyone gets the wrong idea, my parents were respectable non-drug taking folk!  A pipe and Australian sherry were their vices! 

     And singing inappropriate songs, as I have just remembered another favourite that I loved hearing because of the ending, was Frankie and Johnny, where after shooting her double-timing man, Frankie is strapped to the electric chair and “sparks flew out of her hair” he was her man, but he done her wrong, as the song puts it so forcefully, so justice had to be done! 

     O! the unfairness of life!  Such valuable lessons to teach a child.