And the next thing?

 

 

 

  

It says something for my state of underwhelmed-ness about the new Amazon Prime Series The Rings of Power, that I have not bothered to watch the latest episode, which was released last Friday.  The idea of my ignoring something that plays to all my sci-fi fantasy weaknesses, does not say a lot for its impact!

     I am more even more disappointed because I read previews by trusted critics like Bradshaw in The Guardian which were so enthusiastic that I watched the pedestrian opening episode with an avidity that was soon rapidly dwindling to disinterest, bordering on boredom.  I’ve now reached episode three and I am still not engaged, in the way that the books or films of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit captured my reading and watching dedication.

     The Silmarillion on which the new series is loosely based, I found unreadable in its book form, and regarded it as a piece of donnish self-indulgence – as indeed is the series, if you think about it in terms of the commercial hopes of Amazon who made it!

     Yes, of course the look of the series is spectacular, the landscapes are staggeringly beautiful, and the set piece grandeur of fantastic civilizations amazing, but then it should look good given how much cash has been expended on it.

     I find little ‘new’ in the series, and the clunking reveal of ‘random human who turns out to be an unrecognized king” etc tedious, and a weak re-run (pre-run?) of Aragorn/Strider.  I do recognize that the series is a prequel and that there is a sort of satisfaction in seeing the ancient pre-history of the more interestingly critical moments in Tolkien’s created world that far better known, but it does take the sting out of what might happen as we do know how things eventually turn out, and this series does not have the ‘wow’ factor that the films had.  We have assimilated director Peter Jackson’s epic visual conception of Tolkien’s world and we now take for granted visual effects that would once have blown us away.

     I will, of course, watch the whole of the series.  And I will maintain my hope that there will be moments that justify the time I spend watching and the money burnt to make it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have completed my open-air-early-morning-swims.  The fortnight of local pool closure for maintenance is over today, and I have already checked that the pool will open at the normal times for normal use from Monday.  I have been relatively lucky with the weather so that I have not had to swim in challenging circumstances – or cold water, but I still do feel a sense of Mission Accomplished that I have swum all fourteen days in our community pool.

     One of my lecturers used to swim, every day of the year, in Swansea Bay.  I am not made of such stern stuff, though I can say that I swam on Christmas Eve off a beach in Sitges.  When I say swam, that is something of an exaggeration: I immersed myself in the water and immediately exited the sea.  The sunshine that was streaming down, did not, as I vividly recall seem to have any part in heating the icy wavelets.  There is a fine line between resolution and stupidity and staying in the water for any longer than I did would clearly have been an illustration of the latter!

     The pool-absence period has jinxed my writing by changing my routine, and I have only scribbled ‘thoughts’ in my notebook on a couple of occasions, whereas I always write in it when I am taking my cup of tea and baguette in the pool café.  Have jotted down a few phrases and ideas, but it remains to be seen if they are actually worth working up into something real.  There again, even ‘failures’ are interesting, and it is rare that I can’t salvage something from the wreckage of a poem ‘gone wrong’!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Opera Season is almost upon us, and I still haven’t decided if I should take out a ‘Saturday Afternoon Subscription’ to a series of orchestral concerts in Barcelona.  This is an odd hesitation on my part because I am essentially an orchestral music sort of person, with my going to Opera being something of an indulgence for me.

     As is usual with any subscription series, there are some concerts that don’t really appeal, though from past experience, the concerts with low expectations very often surprise with unexpected delights.  At least that is what I keep telling myself.  And afternoon concerts mean a Barcelona exit at a reasonable time!  Worth considering.  And going.  Perhaps I will buy a subscription.  There you are a decision made in under one hundred keystrokes!  If only the other things in life were so easy!

Pushing the boundaries again!

 

 

 

The graph of the usefulness of my knees would look like the inside of a shark’s mouth as the pointed tips of relative pain-free mobility are swamped by the depths of gum deep shitiness.  A rather laboured simile to emphasise that the utility of my knees as working points of articulation in the furtherance of locomotion, is basically low.  I find that I am limiting the length of my walking more and more, and the little that I do is with the aid of a stick.

     Which leads to the question of what I am going to have to do about it.  The obvious solution is to get new kneecaps but, with the backlog of clinical cases given the underfunding of the health service and the horrific demands of Covid something being done in the immediate future seems remote.

     When I finally went to the doctor after the periods of lockdown that we suffered, I was greeted by his saying that the x-rays that he had looked at giving a graphic picture of the state of my knees were among the worst that he had seen.  Nice to see you again too!

     Various (legal!) subterfuges were used to get me on to some sort of list to be seen and I was eventually told that my first visit to a traumatologist would be almost a year in the future!

     To cut a long story short, that “year” is now almost up, and in October I will have my first face-to-face meeting with someone who has the power to do something radical to reduce the pain and to make me fully (?) mobile again.

     Because the state of my knees is so variable, I have, over the last number of months resorted to crutches, sticks, pain killers and highly expensive off-the-shelf powders to bring some sort of relief.  In so far as I am no longer using crutches to move about, I would have to admit that I have made progress.  In so far as I am still in pain and can walk only limited distances, there is much further to go.  So to speak!

     Things were brought to some sort of head when we accompanied my cousin and friend to Sitges for a meal in a restaurant that is situated over the shallows of the sea.  And you can see real fish!

     Our usual parking place in Sitges is far too far for me to walk to get to the sea and so we decided to use the car park under an hotel on the sea front, thereby giving me a fairly flat walk to the restaurant.

     It took me the best part of a week to recover from the walking that I had to do – and the meal was ordinary, over-priced and badly served!  Something had to be done.

     The solution, of sorts involved buying something.  As I am never averse to spending money, especially on gadgets, I was all-in for Toni’s suggestion that the answer may be the purchase of an electric scooter.

     I am well aware that the average age of an electric scooter user is a mere 25% of mine – or less – but I am inured to expressions that look askance at me and what I am doing, so that the only question that arose in my mind was would I be able to balance on it.  And more pressingly, would it fit in the back of the car, as I had absolutely no intention of making it my prime mode of urban transport.

     A further energy depleting walk, and I was ready to buy.

     Although I am given (wholeheartedly) to the concept of the ‘impulse buy’ which my support of various good (and not so good) purchases from sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo can vividly demonstrate, I had to be somewhat circumspect about this purchase as it had to take account of my weight and height and also be something that was not dependent on being sent back to China in case something went wrong.

     Eventually, after yet another bad experience of overestimating how far I could walk, I bought one and awaited its arrival.

     It arrived (via Amazon) very quickly and it was waiting to be unboxed after I returned from my morning swim.

     The amount of construction involved in its formulation was minimal – four screws to keep the handlebars on the stem – but, without Toni it would have been, for me, insurmountable.  Three of the screws went in.  Eventually.  But one was stubborn and now matter how I (or indeed Toni) tried, it would not ‘go home’.

     Far from being downcast (as I was) Toni was jubilant, as this particular problem gave him the opportunity to try out something that he had bought because, “It would come in useful” – a screw thread re-doer.  The thread was re-done and it worked perfectly.

     The machine was charged up and all it then needed was for me to use it.

     At this point, I should point out that I did indeed own a mechanical scooter when I was a single digit child, but I had not tried one since that time.  Over sixty (60) years previously!

     It was therefore with some considerable trepidation that I ventured out onto the road and put foot to platen and pushed myself off.

     While I would not describe myself as a confident, or indeed competent, rider of the scooter, I did not fall off and I managed to return to the house after a trip of a couple of kilometres, with machine and myself undamaged.

     Result!

     The next thing to do is to try and fit it into the boot of the car and then to actually use the thing for the purpose for which it was bought.

     I am trepidatiously confident.

     Future blog entries should show whether such hope was justified or not!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 57 – Monday, 11th May

The weather forecast for today was totally wrong and I therefore took advantage of what I understood to be freakish sunshine and went for my morning bike ride.  This time, I did not attempt to go into the Marina at Port Ginesta, being a law-abiding citizen of Castelldefels and not of Sitges, so I turned around at the end of the cycle lane on the Paseo and came home.

     After my dutifully disturbing read of the Guardian, it was then time for the sojourn to the shops.  Masked, and latex gloved I drove to Caprabo to get the ant traps and I attempted to do the rest of my shop there.  Not going to happen, so I slipped along to Lidl to finish off.

     In spite of the fact that Lidl did not have the 15-month mature Cheddar, I willingly settled for the soapier stuff and thought that Lidl is basically a better store than the small Caprabo that I frequent.  But, and there is always a but, there were things that I could get in Caprabo that are never available in Lidl; Lidl is never a one stop store, and that is a real disadvantage: when in lockdown you really do not want to visit multiple shops – you never know when you may come across a Plague Child or three!

     At the end of the shop, I was well and truly knackered, and not finding a parking space outside the house because of the bloody workers next door parking their various vans in OUR spaces was the final, energy sapping straw!

     I gave cursory help in unloading the car when it was parked in the front garden space, and then the heavy lifting, and the meticulous cleaning and putting away was done by Toni while I, literally, put my feet up!  [Are there too many commas in that sentence? Ed.]

It is almost lunchtime and we should be back in rain, if not thunderstorms, according to the weather forecast.  I wonder what the weather is like in the UK, and I wonder how people have reacted to the Blond Buffoon’s clear as mud instructions, suggestions, fugitive thoughts or whatever his broadcast was supposed to be.  It comes to something that, even after a scripted talk by the Buffoon, ministers have to be deployed at once to explain what he might have meant.  For example, who would have know that when the Buffoon uses the word ‘Monday’ he actually means ‘Wednesday’ – perhaps our Prime Minister (sic) is working to an Old Etonian (or Estonian, as my spellchecker wanted it) calendar where there is a languorous two-day difference from the Proles’ week to allow for an elite cushion of prevarication and indolence?

     My British friends and relations are not all of a type, but they are united in their contempt for the leaders who fail to take responsibility, fail to lead, fail to be imaginative, fail to save lives, and then treat us with condescension assuming that we have memories of the same capacity as the much maligned goldfish!  We have not!

     On a Catalan television station that had academics commenting on the Covid-19 Crisis, I noted one subtitle on a part of the discussion had something about the “extreme recklessness” of one group of nations in their approach to the virus.  Four states were listed: Mexico, Brazil, the United States of America – and the UK!  What exalted, socially responsible company to be in!  With equally delightful leaders!  God help us all, what have the Conservatives reduced us to?

     The fall out from the Sunday burbling meander to the nation continues with reactions of bafflement, amazement and disgust now augmented with further negative abstract nous being applied to the muddy exposition that was supposed to enlighten us this afternoon.

     When, by the way the Blond Buffoon going to accept responsibility for being Prime Minister?  He has a duty to appear before the press and answer questions; he has a duty to appear in Parliament and respond, he has a duty to justify his actions in a democratic society.

     We know that he cannot be trusted live to answer questions without there being an extensive amount of damage limitation after he has waffled his way through questions.  He was too frightened to be questioned by Andrew Neil; he fled into a fridge rather than be questioned by a television reporter; he has still not appeared before the Parliamentary Liaison Committee; he has missed PMQs; he prefers pre-submitted questions on Facebook to hard questioning from trained reporters; how often has he actually been in parliament – the parliament that he has tried so hard to limit, either by proroguing it for ILLEGAL lengths of time or by simply ignoring it?  Illness, holidays and cowardice – anything other than facing up to what he has done and is planning (if that is not too strong a word) to do, anything other than public accountability.

     And, in spite of the second highest death rate from Covid-19 IN THE WORLD; in spite of the obvious U turns, the evasions, the missed targets, the criminal lack of preparedness, he still has a reasonable amount of public support!

     I understand that, in times of crisis, there is an understandable “rallying around the flag” effect, to go with the authority that one knows to work together and get through this all, sort of thing – but with him and the motely crew that he has gathered about himself?  Really?  What, in any aspect of his past life, would encourage anyone to trust or rely on this proven liar and opportunist?

The rain-filled day has not materialized and so I will be able to go for my evening bike ride as well, making the culmination of an excitement-filled day – you have to take your pleasures where you find them in lockdown!

     But just to make sure that I do not become complacent in my joy, my computer upstairs has decided to half start.  I get the Apple logo and the little line underneath that gradually fills up to the half way point, and then it blacks out.  With all my years of experience of the wayward ways of computers (I will not frighten you with the nomenclature of the early version of Windows that made me the gibbering technological wretch that I am today) I have turned the computer off and will hope that turning it on again will make all things well.

     As far as computers are concerned, I am a simple, trusting, peasant soul when things go wrong.  And I comfort myself with the fact that I have two laptop computers (at least) that will keep me typing!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 55 – Saturday, 9th May

In one of those convoluted areas of jurisdiction that are more usual in Republican Party gerrymandering, part of Sitges curves over the hills outside the tunnels and engulfs the end of Castelldefels in the Port Ginesta area.  As this is a continuous part of Castelldefels most people actually forget that it is not part of our town.  The police, however, do know.  And this morning they were on the Paseo looking pained as all we people from Castelldefels were walking (or cycling) along the road.  Toni told me later (as he had gone for a walk in the opposite direction) that Gavá was also similarly policed and ‘isolated’.

     This is not something that happens on a regular daily basis and I think that it is confined to weekends when the ‘danger’ of outsiders infringing local boundaries is at its highest.  To be fair; it’s a fair cop.  We are, after all, supposed to be confined to our localities – however artificial they actually are.

     The news from the UK is not good in this area where six weeks of lockdown are facing what could be a sunny Bank Holiday weekend with police in London saying that they are losing the battle of the parks with people flocking to them to sunbathe and drink, and gather in groups not segregated by physical distancing.  As the weather here is not particularly sunny it will be interesting to see how many people are out and about this evening at 8pm when my age group is allowed to exercise.

On a more festive note, today is Toni’s birthday and I filmed him opening his presents (at a few minutes past midnight last night!) and put it online in the Family site so they could see the presents that they had only seen in photographs in Amazon!  It is a strange time with customs adapting to new circumstances.

     I hope that the chocolate cream birthday cake that I hid in the fridge has not yet been discovered so that it can make a suitable impression when it makes its flaming way into the living room!

     And it was delicious!

My evening bike ride was taken a little later than usual, in the dark rather than the twilight and it was, ironically, revealing.  Setting aside for a moment, my pet peeve of cyclists without lights, the most glaring element I observed was the grouping of teenagers in ‘bike gangs’.  Obviously they have their mobile phones to arrange the coordination of their exercise times and that gives them the opportunity to meet up.  As many of them use their bikes as seats there is a sort of built-in physical distancing, but they are more gang than individuals and there is little sense of viral threat.  Perhaps it is futile to expect teenagers to be constantly on their guard against a virus that they think will not single them out, but they must be made aware that they could easily be asymptomatic and therefore they could be a real threat to their parents and especially their grandparents.

     Perhaps I was looking for evidence of shirking the rules and therefore found it, but I do sense a feeling of relaxation that I think will be even stronger on Monday after a weekend of seeing television pictures of people exercising their ‘freedoms’.  It is something that concerns me.

     As it should!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 53 – Thursday, 7th May

My bike ride today was truncated by the police.  Not violently, you understand, but rather by an obstinately parked police car and a flick of a police finger.  The way to Port Ginesta at the far end of Castelldefels was blocked off and I had to return the way that I had come.  To compensate for the distance lost, I decided to add the ‘evening cycle’ of going to Gavá before I came home, but that too was blocked off.  Those in Castelldefels had to stay in Castelldefels.  The Port Ginesta end of Castelldefels is technically in Sitges and Gavá isn’t Castelldefels, in spite of the fact that both places flow naturally into the city.

     In the evening, both places appeared to be open again, so the blocking off in the morning was difficult to understand.  But that goes for so much of the civic life of this place!

     I must admit that the inability to go to either Port Ginesta or Gavá did actually make me feel a little trapped.  The feeling was more mental than practical as the freedom of the Paseo is more than enough for reasonable exercise, yet the simple prohibition made the reasonable feel a little cramped.

As Toni was going for a walk in the evening I ‘joined’ him after the eight o’clock clap, even though he was walking and I was on my bike.  I therefore postponed my watching of the NT Live production of Antony and Cleopatra, but I look forward to seeing that tomorrow evening, when I will need something to recover from our on-line Catalan lesson.

     The practical problems related to this class are legion.  There is the wonkiness of the system that we are using to create the class in the first place, which is added to the stubborn resistance of my computer to let me use the microphone, which, for a language lesson is a bit of a bummer.  Then there is the work that we are supposed to be doing.  The tasks are supposed to be on line and when completed on line they will be marked on line.  That isn’t working.  The one task that I found and did do I had to do off line because the document that I was supposed to use to write out my responses would not allow me to edit it.  I wrote out my work and emailed it to the teacher – and that is the last that I have heard of it!

     I am sure that these are all teething problems, but given the immanence of the end of term, we are not going to have many more attempts at getting it right.  My offering is to change the computer and the network to try and get a more practical link in the on line lesson.  I live, as ever, in hope.

Today has been one of those inexplicably tiring days.  Although my bike ride has a respectable distance to it, the bike is electric and I do welcome some level of assistance when I am peddling.  It is still exercise, but I realize just how much ‘assistance’ I am getting when, from time to time, I set the level to zero and therefore use the bike as an ordinary form of un-augmented transport: not a pleasant experience, and one that would not get me out of bed before eight in the morning if that was the norm!

     So, I cannot really blame my bike for my tiredness, nor my shortish walk around the pool – so I will blame the weight of worry about the way that life is being organized at the moment for taking away my natural vitality.

   The latest ‘worry’ is that the Spanish government has decided that the present hours that the Plague Kids are allowed to mix with human beings is inappropriate as the little virus ridden carriers are out in the midday sun and it is obviously far too hot for the little dears.  I would have thought that the heat would at least limit their viral load, but no, the hours will be readjusted and we will have to concede time to them.

     As I now regard every child below the age of 25 (sic) as a potential personal death threat, my suggestion is that we find some island somewhere and put them all on that until the crisis is over but, as usual, such reasoned ways forward are rejected by people who never see the wider picture.

     And talking of the crisis being over, there is a disturbing number of people whose public behaviour seems to indicate that as far as they are concerned, the crisis is a thing of the past.  True, there are people who ostentatiously keep the requisite distance apart, but they are in the minority in my observation, and the young cling to their immortality without responsibility and have rejected all PPE and physical distancing suggestions and are embracing the approaching summer with all the ebullience of the old normality.

     Hey ho!  So it goes!

Listening & reading & worrying!

Well, the years of living in Spain must have counted for something: the guided tour around the houses of Los Indianos in Sitges in Spanish was basically understood by me as long as I concentrated.  And therein lies the rub.  Art, poetry, gastronomy, swimming, music, literature and so on and so on - they are all more interesting than studying Spanish for me.

As a past language teacher I should find the acquisition of a new mode of communication an exciting challenge.  The trouble is, I don’t.  And don’t think that I haven’t rehearsed all the possible arguments in favour of knuckling down and getting stuck in and putting various parts of my anatomy to gyrating rough surfaces, I have.  And I have yet to be convinced.

You would think, would you not, that someone with my proven inability to keep silent on any subject completely irrespective of how much, or indeed if any, knowledge informed my contributions, would embrace the chance of finding another mode of expression.  But no.  I do my homework with sullen resentment and little sticks.  I have gone over verb endings (-í, -iste, -ió) in various modes (-ía, -ías, -ía) and at various times (-é, -ás, -á) and I still look at such constructions with unalloyed, clear, blank, incomprehension.

And Spanish has two verbs for the English verb ‘to be’ so ‘I am’ can be ‘yo soy’ or ‘yo estoy’!  So, the English sentence ‘I am ill’ can be written in Spanish as either ‘Yo soy infermo’ or ‘Yo estoy infermo’ - but they mean different things.  And you probably wouldn’t use the ‘Yo’ in Spanish either, because the verb form tells you the person.  So, ‘Estoy infermo’ would indicate that you have something like a cough that you hope will clear up soon, while ‘Soy infermo’ means that you are permanently ill.  That’s quite a useful differentiation, but not useful enough to merit having to use two different verbs, when the use of an explanatory phrase might clear things up!  But one has the learn the language as it is and not as one would like it to be.  And English has phrasal verbs that are revenge enough for Spanish learners of our tongue!

 

Anyway, I was quite pleased with myself for following a fairly detailed social, historical and architectural wander through the narrow streets of Sitges and there were always English speaking friends to fall back on in the group when the sheer concentration on sequences of foreign words just got too much!

I got more pleasure from finding out that the name Sitges is derived from the word for silo!  There was, in times past, a small natural harbour near what is now the church and a brisk trade in the commodities that were stored on the shore in silos.  These silos were used for twenty years or so and then demolished and new ones built.  For archaeologists the delight is finding one of these disused silos because they are always filled in with rubbish, but historic rubbish, the bits and discarded pieces of what our ancestors thought worthless, broken and lost.  They were described by the guide in enthusiastic terms because of the ‘treasures’ they reveal to modern eyes.

We went to Sitges by train and I cycled up to the station, as there are racks and bicibox to store bikes.  As my bike is a fairly flash electric number I am very much disinclined to leave it on public display - even with the sturdy steel jointed lock that looks the business.  Far better to have my tastefully blue bike hidden from questing eyes.  The bicibox is a sort of Nissan hut looking construction that has a series of slotted covers that can be raised by the resting of a special credit card sized ‘key’ on the operating pad of the ‘hut’.  A screen will inform you of the available spaces for your bike and you can select a ‘box’ open it and place the bike securely inside.  That, at least is the theory.  For the first time in my experience I found that all the spaces in the bicibox outside the station had been taken.

There was a Plan B.  Behind the station in a large car park for the commuters who go to Barcelona every day there is another bicibox.  I confidently cycled a couple of minutes to that box and took the last available space.  Never before have I experienced such demand - even by the station.  I fear that what was a good idea used only by the few has now become an accepted way of bici life!  This is disturbing because if I cannot put my bike in one of these bici boxes I will not leave it out in the open air when using the train.  And for two full bici boxes there is no Plan C.  I will have to give this some thought.

Which I have now done and I have reminded myself that there is a third bici box a hundred yards away form the front of the station in the car park by the church.  So that is Plan B, but what do I do if all three of the bici boxes are filled?  There really is no Plan C - apart from returning home and taking the car!  Which rather defeats the whole idea.

I am typing this with the Diana Newall book, ‘Art and its global histories: A Reader’ lurking tauntingly or teasingly on my left.  The ideas from yesterday’s read are still fresh in my mind and I yearn for more information.  I have just opened the book at random in the section for ‘Art, commerce and colonialism 1600-1800’ and have seen a primary source text entitled:

‘Iohn Huighen van Linschoten. his discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies Deuided into foure books (London: John Wolfe, 1598) 

that the Reader informs me is, “one of the great travel narratives of the early modern period” - as any fule kno!  Well, I didn’t.  But do now, and I love that sort of thing!  And the spelling has been modernised for ease of reading - who can ask for more!

I have replayed the interview of Alfonso Dastis, the foreign minister of the minority right wing National Government of Spain and Tim Sebastian (see yesterday’s blog) for the unadulterated pleasure of seeing an over-confident Conservative apologist discomforted.