Gusty times ahead!

 

 

High winds meant that I declined to use my bike and took the car instead – and everyone else appeared to have made the same decision and so the car park was relatively full within a couple of minutes of the opening of the centre.

     As the pool is enclosed with a retractable roof (I am not insane!) we are fairly well protected from the surrounding weather, but I noted as I gained the end of my first length that a door to the outside world had been opened and one could experience the cool gusts of a thoroughly unpleasant wind.

     It was only at the end of the swim when you have to go from the pool area via a short flight of steps and a linking corridor to the changing rooms that you see the weather clearly.  Not pleasant, and I was grateful to have a hot cup of tea and sturdy plate glass to give me an acceptable climate.

     But, by the time I came to leave, the wind had dropped and the sky was showing a little more blue.  In the afternoon we had sunshine, but not enough sunshine to tempt me to go on the bike ride that is the usual end of my morning of exercise.

     As ever, another cup of tea and my mobile phone with The Guardian were enough to keep me stationary in my armchair until it was time for lunch.

     From my reading of the actions of what one might laughingly refer to as ‘my government’ in the UK, it really does look as though, after four years of the bloody Conservatives saying that a deal was easy and oven-ready and all the other lying descriptions given, we are headed for a no-deal Brexit.

 

      

 

     The latest piece of ill-judged, crass, idiocy by Johnson is to flaunt four Royal Navy gunboats to patrol our fishing waters in the event of a no-deal Brexit and foreigners attempting to do what they have been doing for the past umpteen years.  Four ships for the entire coastal waters of Britain, that’s about 11,000 miles, divided by four, that means that each of the Royal Navy ships will have to patrol about 2,700 miles of coast each.  And what is the speed of these ships?

     So, the threat of these ships is purely, but not entirely, cosmetic, harking back to Britannia Rules the Waves and all that.  In other words, an empty gesture, that the EU must have been expecting from the empty vessel that they have had to deal with.  For years.  And years.

     I am still hoping that Johnson is going to have some appreciation of what he is about to do and realize that he will have to take a hit (however he spins it) in the interest of the nation.  As the seconds tick away, my hope is getting more and more hysterical, especially when I remember that no matter how cataclysmically stupid a decision appears to be, people still make it.  Brexit did win the referendum and the USA elected Trump.  However stupid and unthinkable, it could happen.

     But I will relax into the remaining hours of the weekend, yea! even unto the last minute to midnight on Sunday in the weary hope of sanity (at least partial) governing our 'government'.

 

Meanwhile to get my mind away from events that I cannot influence, we had a decent menu del dia in our usual Saturday restaurant and even felt buoyed up enough to do a little light domestic shopping.

     On the cultural front, I have re-discovered my tidied-up notebook and am working on the structure and content.  I am reasonably confident that the concept is workable, but the rest of this weekend should give me a clearer idea of the direction and, more importantly, whether that direction is worth taking!

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!