Cold days, cool thoughts

 

 

It’s cold and wet and blustery and dark.  A thoroughly depressing day but, as I sulked my way upstairs, I looked through a window and noticed the two dogs who live in the flats opposite us, sitting together at the top of a flight of steps, just inside the overhang of the building watching the weather with patient indefatigability.

     Dogs, especially large dogs seem to be good at patience.  Rat dogs are of course more known for their insistent irritability and hyper-sensitivity, and one barely counts them (and that is my being kind) as dogs at all.  No.  But smaller dogs with a touch of Collie in them are more than acceptable and accepting. 

     Take, for example, the dog in the restaurant we went to on Sunday (isn’t it usually ONLY guide dogs that are allowed into restaurants? But let it pass, let it pass) where the dog (some sort of Collie cross) settled down almost immediately, finding himself a place between his owner’s foot and the window, and there he stayed for the course of the meal sustained only by a few pats and a scrap or two and a water bowl provided by the staff in the restaurant.

     Far be it from me to draw a parallel between a young dog and a young human, but the difference in acceptable behaviour by the latter compared with the former when grown-ups are around in a social public situation is telling!

     I should however take some guidance from the dogs opposite where their patience in this instance (usually they are yappy buggers) is to be commended, and indeed emulated.

     I half-joke with my Catalan friends that my ‘contract’ with the Generalitat in Catalonia stipulates sun for 365 days a year, and that I have an undoubted right to a refund for every shitty day I have to experience here!

     Although the weather can be bad here in Catalonia, indeed as I type the rain is lashing down outside and we have had overly dramatic thunder and lightning, usually every day will give you a moment of sunshine to see you through the bad weather interludes.  Today for example, although the morning was cold and cloudy, there was also some hazy sunshine – not enough to tempt me to sit outside with the smokers to have my cup of tea after my early morning swim, but still, sunshine.

     It didn’t last and after lunch the rain set in and hasn’t stopped.  Yet.  But I preserve my composure by putting total faith into the quick return of scraps of sunshine to keep me sane.

 

 

 

The saga of The Christmas Lunch has now developed a further chapter as another, and who knows even better, location has been found and we are going up to Terrassa tomorrow to give the menu del dia a try. 

     My most pressing concern is not the food, but the parking.  With my knees in their present condition, each step is something to take into careful consideration.  And there are lots of quite steep hills in Terrassa as well, and while going up slopes is bearable, the going down (even slight) slopes is not.

     Whatever we think about the quality of the food tomorrow, a table for the Christmas Lunch has been booked at the restaurant and so we are hoping and praying for the best.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Duolingo app continues to dominate our lives, and some of Toni’s hysteria (what else would you call the decision to take up Navajo in the expectation of earning simple points to add to his total) has rubbed off on me and forced me to make a doggedly determined assault on the points total of the people in front of me. 

     The end result of that is that my index finger of my right hand is rapidly growing a callous with the screen-jabbing finger writing I have had to do to amass the points to ensure my ‘safety’ in the top ten to guarantee my progress through to the Sapphire League!

     My enthusiasm is bound to wane soon, but until it does, I am gaining by going over yet again those points in the acquisition of a language that I have already gone through many times before. 

     Some day they will stick.  Please!

Sport?

With only the sound of passing jets to break the tranquillity of a sleepy Sunday morning, it took more than good intentions to get me on my (electric) bike to make the arduous journey to the swimming pool – you have to understand that I count the bridge over the motorway as an actual hill.  But it is amazing what sheer peer pressure will do to get you moving.  One comment from Toni and I was out of my all-too-comfortable chair and finding a fresh towel.

As it is a Sunday I eschewed my normal route to the pool via the longer way, allowing me to cycle along the paseo next to the sea and beach, as the bright sunshine would have brought out an overwhelming crop of dominguerros (Sunday visitors to our seaside resort) and cycling with oblivious pedestrians is far too hard work in the mornings, and anyway it encourages negative homicidal approaches to progress.  Even along the clearly delineated cycles paths it took relentless dinging of my less than authoritative bell to get the more resentfully recalcitrant walkers to get over on to their bit of the pavement.

My Herculean efforts to get to my daily lengths were surprisingly rewarded by a totally empty pool.  There is little (at least to a swimmer) more satisfying than breaking the pristine surface of a tranquil pool: an example, if ever there was one, of the sort of hidden pleasures of a peculiar life.

I know that everyone has quirks and, while some may be socially disadvantageous there are others that are particular, do not harm and give great pleasure.  I know someone whose choice of beach is purely dictated by the fact that it is next to the airport and lying in the sun had the added advantage of low flying, noisy aircraft enlivening the tedium of tanning.  Another friend has an eye for vegetation and always has her phone camera at the ready to capture the bounce of a bough or the lilt of a leaf; yet another regards a trip to Matalan as justification for a visit to Britain; another regards the Crunchie Bar as the highest achievements of the confectionary trade, while yet another relishes Marmite.  You will note that I have not ventured into the realm of sexual proclivities because, well, because as soon as you go there then all the other little innocuous kinks can be seen as sexual as well.  Take, for example, the diving into a pool.  It doesn’t take a doctor from Vienna to make something suggestive about that!

It's all in the noticing, taking note of something and seeing it in a way that is personal to you.  This line of thought was brought on my sunbathing.

Sunbathing is a tedious occupation, and the sometimes-blotchy results make you wonder if it is all worthwhile.  You tell yourself that the ‘modern’ preoccupation with a tan can really be traced back all the way to the middle of the last century, as, previously (at least in Europe) white skin was more highly valued than tanned skin.  Tanned skin was the normal preserve of the working agricultural classes and was therefore seen as rather infra dig.  In the same way that Chinese Mandarins’ long fingernails was a visible indication that everything (and I mean everything) would have to be done for them rather than their having to do things themselves, therefore showing their high class and their ability to afford the servants necessary to live a long-fingernailed life style.

Nowadays tanning is seen as a sign of health, and to hell with scare stories of skin cancer.  People like my good self, prefer to think that the acquisition of Vitamin D from sunlight is enough of an excuse to indulge.

Anyway, getting away from why I was sunbathing and getting towards how I was sunbathing.  For the purpose of extending my periods lying prone on the beach or on the third-floor terrace I had resurrected my iPod – that now, by the way, appears quaintly dated: so heavy, such a little screen!  But it worked and that was all I wanted.

Being by nature an incurable dilettante I always set the thing to ‘shuffle’ play.  This means that my musical experience is very much like the organization of my library: serendipitously chaotic, where juxtapositions of tomes is so random that it looks contrived!  I put an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence to stop those who know me from shaking their heads sagely and remarking, “Exactly!”

So, my ‘listening pleasure’ via my iPod might feature a movement from one of the less fashionable early symphonies by Tchaikovsky, followed by a Spanish conversation from a previous on-line course, succeeded by a piece of obscure German table music, followed by some random pop.

With earphone stuffed firmly into my ears (see ‘passing jets’ above) I actually listened to the lyrics of ‘Lola’ by the Kinks that were remarkably clear and easily decipherable.  Perhaps everyone else in the world (well, given the sales of the thing it must be a sizeable chunk) knew that Lola was a transvestite or trans-sexual, but I didn’t.  I listened again to check my perceptions and finally thought what a remarkable record that must have been for its time.  It was of course banned by the BBC – not for any sexual priggishness, but rather because the Kinks used the word ‘Coca-Cola’ and the Beeb did not go in for any sort of in song advertising, so the Kinks re-recorded it substituting a more generic ‘cherry-cola’ for the obnoxious ubiquitous liquid.  I am still at a loss to understand how that disgusting concoction has spread like a carbonated plague across the face of the earth.  It can’t all be down to advertising.  Can it?

So Lola, “she walks like a woman, but she talks like a man” or was it “moves”, I can’t remember, and I am typing this on the terrace so that the sun can get at my back, and there is no internet – lying again: there is internet and I have re-read the lyrics and they are worth looking at, you can find them here: https://www.google.com/search?q=lola+the+kinks&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b

The narrative of the song is fairly simple, a guy goes to a club in ‘North Soho’ drinks suspect champagne meets an ambiguous girl and declines to take things further.  Probably.  The interest lies in the detail of the lyrics where we discover that the protagonist is inexperienced “I’ve never ever kissed a girl before” he only left home “a week before”.  He admits that he is “not the world’s most physical guy” or “passionate” or “masculine” not really a traditional build up for the profile of a lover, but then, this is no conventional love song.  In spite of the fact that he is confused “Why she walk like a woman and talk like a man” he “drank champagne and danced all night” with her and it was only when she asked him home that he realized that in spite of living in a “mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world” where “Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls” he is able to assert that “I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man” and, in my favourite line before the final extended chorus, “And so is Lola.”!  I love the general ambiguity in the quality of the attraction between the ‘hero’ and Lola, seen at its most sexually poignant when he gets down to his knees and “that`s the way that I want it to stay” – is that a rejection or an invitation!  He admits that he “almost fell for my Lola” and I think that the use of the possessive is revealing!

This is a rhythmic, musically exciting and lyrically engaging song, it’s a pity that I did not notice the ironic complexity when I first heard it in 1971 when it first came out!  Better late than never.  And who knows what other linguistic delights there will be as I listen more attentively to the occasional erratic pop tracks that pass the time as I bake on the third floor.

The World Cup

I must admit that I have been less than stringent in my not looking at the FIFA (corrupt) World Cup (corrupt) in Russia (corrupt), in spite of my best intentions I have constantly been beguiled into giving this ‘competition’ some attention.  Not, obviously, to the ridiculous extent of actually watching England play, but I have watched some part of some of the games.

At the moment Spain (corrupt) is playing Russia (corrupt) and while I have little interest in the outcome, I did break my typing to go downstairs and get myself a cup of tea where I saw that the so-called King of Spain (corrupt) had ‘graced’ the game with his presence.  May I be the first to extend my congratulations to a Head of State from a fellow European nation giving credence to a state that ordered a murder, using their own noxious nerve agents, in Great Britain.  Thank you, your majesty, and you wonder why you are cordially loathed by your rightfully rebellious ‘subjects’ in Catalonia!  The sooner that a republic is declared in this country the better.  Independence for Catalonia might be a vexed question, but the case for a republic is surely a simple one!  And made simpler every day by the actions of a high handed, autocratic Borbón de Borbón!

And Spain have lost on penalties to Russia.  I am sure that there must be some sort of point that I can make, but the ‘bread and circuses’ simply depresses me too much!