Prevarication?

 

 

 

 

The weather cools further: this time I may have the French door open, but I do not have the small fan on.  By such things one measure the descent to the depths of autumn and on to winter!  I am also doing up my coat when I go for my second bike ride, rather than leaving it unzipped.

     On my bike ride to Gavà on the beach side paseo, I see more evidence of the removal of the last of the temporary chiringuitos, a true commercial indication of the changing of the seasons.  But, in spite of all these portents, the weather remains generally fine, and I have not had to take the car to my early morning swim, so far!

     Although my timing for my swim is exact, the time that I leave for my bike ride to Gavà differs, depending on whether I have written anything of consequence in my notebook, or if I am engaged in conversation with people in the café, but seemingly at whatever time I leave, there are the Unknown Regulars that I pass or am passed by.

     The start of Autumn sees the re-emergence of all the retired folk who have been nudged off their parts of the paseo by the summer visitors and the kids.  Now that the kids are (mostly) back in school there is a sort of spaciousness to the beach area which is being reclaimed by those of a certain age.  Some of them (us?) are defiant in their appearance and their actions, relentlessly throwing themselves into the cooling waters of the Med or parading along the paseo in temperature-ignoring wispy coverings and pretending that the summer is still with us.

     There are plenty of cyclists, many of whom are in Lycra and, at first glance, look to be common or garden wearers of that revealing material, but a more searching look shows that the costumes are holding the riders together rather than making them more aerodynamic!  But that is to be commended.  Just as TV series are now ‘colour blind’ when it comes to casting, so clothing is ‘body-blind’ – you wear what you want and the fit is what you decide it is, rather than having to make reference to some sort of unobtainable body-ideal that can only be achieved by self-inflicted starvation or torture in the gym!

     You can see where this is going.  It will end up with my justifying anything in a reductio ad absurdam that (in spite of the poor Latin) will allow me to feel smug!

     Enough!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I find that I am oppressed not by the number of books that I have, but rather their weight.  I have lived with ‘too many books’ since I was a kid, so that in my smallish bedroom I had to be careful when I awoke as the shelves on my bedside wall, actually stretched over the bed itself, so that I slid out of bed rather than rose from it!    

     There was never enough space and gradually every room in the house became, as my mother would phrase it, “infested” with books.

     The move from Cardiff to Catalonia was beset with problems because of the number of books that had to be housed (or flatted) and not all of my prized possessions made it onto new shelves in my new country, but an inordinate number of IKEA Billy Bookcases later and a substantial number of the books found a space.  Not that the space was coherent, as the moves from Cardiff, to storage, to flat, to releasing more storage, to house meant that an overall system was never really imposed on my books and in the various rooms of the house there are now what you could describe as “colonies” of like-minded books forming interesting islands of partial coherence but separate from an over-arching empire of classification.

     I must admit that I have got used to the disparate nature of my literary holdings and quite enjoy the serendipitous discovery of a long-lost volume tucked somewhere where it has not logical reason to be.  Some of the juxtapositioning of some of my books simply looks far too contrived to be aleatory, but I assure you that however pretentious the shelf might look to the outside eye, it is what it is by luck rather than intention!

     The problem that I am presently wrestling with is to do with the placement of new books.  In spite of the lack of available space, that has in no way hindered my purchase of new volumes that I “need”.  And sometimes “need” is augmented by “bargain” – in the sense of value for money.

      I try and tell myself that I have no problem in paying an inordinate amount of money for a decent seat in the Opera, but I would hesitate to pay the same amount of money for a book.  Even though books, I have to admit, have given me more (if different) pleasure than Opera.  I can pay a triple figure sum for a seat for a momentary experience, but not pay the same amount for something that can give lasting tangible pleasure.

     I am not the sort of person to pay vast sums of money for a first edition.  The first editions I have were bought because I bought the books when they came out first.  I do have a 1702 edition of Swift, but that was an unexpected gift and not something that I bought for myself.

     My problem was that Taschen Books had a sale.

     Taschen Books is an imprint that produces spectacularly impressive volumes as well as what you might call domestic books, but their key, or one of their USP is in producing books that are large, opulent, and very heavy.

     In the on-line sale I bought a number of these books which, when they were delivered, it was impossible to carry them all upstairs at the same time.  It is also difficult to hold them and if you rest them on your knees, they crush them.  They are ‘table’ books and, when they are opened up, they need a big table to accommodate them.

     At the moment they form an arty looking pile by the side of my chair, looking almost like a stage prop of a pile of large books.  The trouble is that I have nowhere to put them.

     A set of my large art books are in an extra open section that I have attached to the top of a whole series of Billy Bookcases.  But these books are too big to fit into those oversized shelves and anyway, the idea of reaching up and bringing one of them down to reader level without doing irreparable harm to yourself, or at least breaking an arm or a hand is not to be considered.

     Their weight is too great when they are put on any domestic normal shelf for it to survive.  They have to be put at the base of the bookcase, but it means taking out two shelves to fit them in – and I simply do not have the room to rearrange without (perish the thought) actually getting rid of some of my books.

     So, they sit there at the moment, like a monument, waiting for life to rearrange itself so that they can be enjoyed.

     I have spent my life, giving preference to books, and I am girding my literary loins to Find A Solution.

     The books will win.  They always win!

 

Wet thought

 

 

 

 

 

 

My early-ish swim in the community pool continues, as I find an alternative to my local pool that is closed for annual maintenance.  Apart from two Dutch visitors who looked shocked to be at the pool so early in the morning and equally shocked to find someone else there, I have swum alone.  Which is good.  Not because I am misanthropic, but because the pool is too small to do reasonable lengths and the only way to get value for money for your effort is to swim in circles.  When you are swimming in rapid circles in a smallish pool, there really isn’t room for anyone else, not that that would stop me, as avoiding people gives an added interest to the almost terminal boredom of straight-line swimming.

     And, I’m saving money!  My original plan was to go and swim in the municipal pool in Gavà, where you have to buy a pre-paid card for a certain number of swims.  This plan may yet come into operation as I am watching the temperature and the weather: I don’t swim in the cold or the rain.  I may be a dedicated swimmer but I am not fanatical!

 

 

 

Yesterday evening was another meeting of the Barcelona Poetry Group.  This time we had two Americans, two Indians, a Catalan and a Welshman and a dog.

     I had a relatively clear run through from Castelldefels to get to the meeting and, arriving early I was told about the medical issues that have recently been affecting the dog.  Today a further visit to the vet and hopefully some good news about how to proceed with her treatment.  She is now 11 years old, but looks younger and is still spritely.  We live in hope!

     The next meeting will be in October (we have a meeting a month, though a few years ago they were weekly) and I am responsible for choosing the topic and selecting a couple of poems for reading and discussion.

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

“Dreams and Nightmares” was the theme for last night’s meeting and the discussion was wide ranging, thoughtful and thought making!  I realise that this group is the only opportunity I have for an in-depth consideration of literary topics, and I truly value it.

     The poems we read were “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes – a fairly famous poem and one surely known by generations of American school children – and “Scarecrow on Fire” by another American poet called Dean Young.

     The title of Young’s poem was immediately arresting and put me in mind of Dalí’s painting “The Burning Giraffe” which haunted my as a kid after seeing it in (I think) The Story of Art for the first time, and Hughes’ poem has Surrealistic touches throughout.  It may also be significant that the image of the scarecrow is often used as a metaphor for Man, “an empty coat upon a stick” in Yeats phrase, a worthless thing unless “soul clap its hands and sing” to give meaning to existence.

     There is a great deal of negative language in this poem: disappearing, alleyways, small, graveyard, black angel, goodbye, last, winter, nothingness, stitching, vomiting, nightmare, illusion, dirt, wound, but there is also the assertion of “Hell, even now I love life” and the last words of the poem “This is my soul, freed.”  But there are no exclamation marks after either statement and that omission lessens the force of the positive.  And his freed soul is linked to water boiling, to evaporation, to vapour, just like his line where he says that “Maybe poems are made of breath” an exhalation into emptiness, just as earlier in the poem he asserted that, “We all feel / suspended over a drop into nothingness.”

     This is a dense poem, rich in images and associations from a poet about whom I want to know more!

     A key part of the evening is a short meditation on the theme, accompanied by a randomly chosen essential oil.  This is a nod to Californian Hippydom and was instituted by the founder of the group as a defiant reminder of her home state, and is continued because, well, it’s a nice idea.

     After the meditation there is a period allocated for writing.  This can be one the theme or not as the individual desires, and the end results of the writing can be shared or not again as the individual decides.

     I wrote on the theme and came up with the following.

 

 

The Dream

 

It is unnoticed ease,

a facile roll of incidents,

a wave of disparates,

that link and coalesce to make

a comfort carapace

that frames fragile reality.

A passageway located

Nowhere and yet Everywhere.

A known unknown.

A shell, a wall, a hill –

and all, yes all,

within a moment’s touch;

though sense is different.

 

Dimensions wax and wane

to morning’s death.

 

 

Something to work on!

 

     And now to start thinking about the theme for the next poetry meeting.  Among my first thoughts were “Courage” “Fear” and “Food” – gives great scope for the poems that we can talk about.  I will think on!

 

 Barcelona Poetry Group can be reached via this website:

 

 

https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/barcelona-english-speaking-poetry-group/?_cookie-check=XfrmrxLlMnboHNW7

 

Being rather than succeeding?

 

 

A most unsatisfactory swim today.  Not entirely my fault, because whatever Toni had yesterday that made him a little hors de combat, struck me as soon as I got up.  A slightly otherworldly feeling and a distinct disinclination to go through the necessary processes to get me to the pool for opening time.

     At first I though it could be a case of ‘sympathetic panic’ at the onset of the new school term.  Although VERY happily retired, I do share a sort of hysterical malaise at this time of the year.  Usually it passes, almost at the same time as I see active teachers going through the doors of their respective schools, but this feeling of being down took me into the morning darkness and towards my trusty bike.

     It only took a few metres, experiencing that sickening bumpiness on the back wheel, to realise that something was wrong.  A flat tyre.  And not on the front where it is easy to take the wheel off and get it repaired, but on the back wheel that has the gears and all sorts of other things that I do not mess about with.

     So, back home and putting the bike back under the tarp and going over to the car to get to the pool.  Even if not entirely well, I have a built-in rugged determination to have my daily swim!

     Which I did.  In a desultory and unconvincing way, with my even swimming extended periods of breaststroke, which is not a good sign for me as a dyed in the wool crawl swimmer.  I did do my time, if not the full number of lengths, but honour was satisfied and I drove home.  And promptly felt worse.

     Whenever I feel under the weather (giving it is glorious sunshine who isn’t under?) I take to my bed.  And I get better.  It never fails to enrage Toni, who has a much more expansive attitude to illness than I, as a few hours prone usually does the trick for me.

     As it has done this time too.  I can’t pretend that I feel 100%, but I feel more than prepared to take on the normal stresses of life without whimpering for pity.

     As is also normal during these times of unwellness, I have little to no appetite, though even as I type those words, the ‘concept’ of food is appealing, which is only one step behind getting something to satisfy what should be a growing hunger. 

     Time will tell.

 

The start of the month also opens the way for the medical establishment of Catalonia to attend to my clinical needs.  There has been something of a hiatus during the summer, but now that the first of September has come and gone, there is a feeling of ‘let’s get going’ that seems to jolly up the whole country.  I am, of course, hoping that this positive attitude will be part of my treatment in the coming months.

     The first hospital appointment I have is a scheduled one (on a rough annual basis) that is more to do with my proving to the doctors that I am alive than having anything done to me.  I will go and have my appointment (usually with a doctor coming to the end of his employment) who will look at me, voice a few platitudes and then say, “See you next year!”  With any luck.  Though he will probably have retired by the time I go back.

     The more important appointment comes next month when I will see the fabled traumatologist for the first time.   

     I am building up a truly absurd amount of hope linked to this appointment.  I know that my knees are a lost cause and that for them to be made workable, an orthopaedic surgeon will have to take hammer and chisel to them and sculpt something artificial to take the place of the bone rubbing on bone that is my present case.  

      I am also more than well aware that such ‘routine’ operations are way down the pecking order to be completed, given the pressures that have been placed on the health service by the pandemic and other financial restraints.  I also realize that the likely waiting time for the first of the two operations that I need will likely be at least eighteen months or two years away at very best.  And that, is a daunting thought, to put it mildly.

     I understand that there are stop-gap measures of injecting something (any bloody thing!) into the space where there should be a membrane separating the end of the bone, that could give relief for a month at worst and months at best.

     At the moment I am not even near being put on a waiting list, so I am looking at getting my first operation in my mid-70s!  At which point I can hear a whole chorus of younger and needier people chanting, “Let him hobble!”  And one does have some sympathy.  But that is in the abstract, and the pain in my knees is in the very real and so I hope that Something Can Be Done.

     The Opera Season will just have started before that first appointment.  I wish I could find something apposite to say about arthrosis-ridden knees and Don Pasquale (the first opera of the season) but, apart from ridiculing old age, I can think of nothing! 

     At least Donizetti’s music is lively and that should buoy up my mood!

 

Liquid musing

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pool water has returned to its crystalline clarity in our local pool, but one does wonder just what “product” we have been swimming in that has been used to banish yesterday’s murkiness.  But that way madness lies, and life is too short etc etc to worry (overmuch) about such things.

     In a sign of technological spitefulness because of my forced missed swim yesterday, my smartwatch refused to record accurately my latest swim, only giving about half the meters of each length, but my internal length counter guided me to a satisfactory completion where, in spite of the evidence of the resentful watch, I think that I more than exceeded my usual lengths.

     The local pool is one of the only places in Castelldefels that can supply me with a decent cup of tea (a mixture of Earl Grey and English Breakfast) which is my reward for completing my swim.  Today, they had run out! 

     I had been prepared for this awful eventuality and took an orange juice as an alternative, but an orange juice topped up with ice cold Cava.  I have now entered that select grouping of ageing men who have alcohol first thing in the morning!  Well, not really, the orange juice was the major partner in the drink and freshly pressed too, so the Cava was more of jeu d’esprit than anything else.  Though one I could easily get used to!

    

 

I am beginning to understand that the cost of living I going to be a major problem.  Even casual shops are now costing over 100 euros.  I can still recall my parents have a serious discussion about finance after the weekly shop had exceeded five quid for the first time!  That truly was another age.

     It is difficult to think about winter when all available fans are on full strength to make the heat bearable, but with the rising cost of electricity and gas, coupled with the rise in general prices means that our minds are going to be concentrated.  Given the situations in our respective countries, I feel more secure in my adopted home of Catalonia than I would in the Conservative ridden dystopia that Britain has become.  Let us see how the future works out!

Heat and Hatred

 

 

 

It actually had the temerity to rain a few drops when I was in the swimming pool, though the weather now is not marked different from the last few days when it has been hot in a way that is not usual for this time of year.  August is traditionally a time of vague disappointment, when the weather is more variable than one remembers from previous years, ironically, even though one expects to be dissatisfied: Schrodinger’s expectations!

     At the moment we only have two fans working in the living room (out of a possible three) as a desperate attempt to mitigate the heat and since we don’t have air conditioning there is little else that we can do to make the living temperature well, liveable.

     There is something about the quality of heat this year that hasn’t been present in past years and if this is a harbinger of what we can expect as the norm for the summer in future years then we are going to have to do something different to cope with the temperatures.

     In a country that has hot and very hot summers and generally mildish winters, there is no talk of hosepipe bans and, in spite of the hot weather continuing for months, there is not talk of proclaiming a drought.  Whereas in the UK, the situation seems to have reached a crisis point.  Again.

     Trump sneered that the FBI raid on his Floridian swamp was turning the USA in to one of the “shitehole” “third world countries” that he has so often dismissed with contempt in the past as a condescending image to cover his own criminality and the eventual, glacial, movement of the institutions of justice finally catching up with him.  His images, as always, are absurd and insulting, but when I look at the situation of the UK then there appears to be an element of truth in the first world status slowly ebbing away.

     With twelve years of Tory misrule and the callous cutting of health, welfare, education and everything else the grasping Conservatives can get their dirty mitts on, the stories that one hears are more suited to a developing country than one of the richest in the world.

     The position of health services in the USA has always been something that has been beyond the comprehension of Western European nations, who generally do not regard providing health care for their citizens as being akin to rabid Communism.  Many Americans are frightened of ill health because of the financial penalties that treatment will entail.  The concept of healthcare free at the point of need is something far beyond the imagination of many American voters who see such a process as rampant Socialism and a denial of the American Way.

     In the UK, the NHS is something in which we can take a justified pride, but a Health Service that has been hollowed out by 12 years of cuts and austerity and one that has been put under almost intolerable strain by dealing with Covid is struggling to cope and, after the last 12 years of Tory Misrule who could possibly believe that the “NHS is safe in our (Tory) hands”?  Such a quotation from a past (and well hated Tory premier) seems like a sick joke.  Private healthcare is rejoicing in the boost that 12 years of Tory Misrule have given them – as well, of course as the illegal boost to their funds by the corruption of the crooked Tory crony profiteers who milked us in the procurement process geared towards Conservative chums.

     The provision of NHS dental care is a disgrace with whole swathes of the country described as “dental deserts” where 80% of dentists are no longer taking any new patients.  The stories of people travelling for hours to get to any NHS provider, is one of shame.

     Someone once told me that the worth of a country is found in the way that it treats the disadvantaged, the criminal and the sick.  If we use those criteria to judge the present state of Britain then perhaps we are nearer to a third world (in itself that is a condescending term) country than one that uses its wealthy status to ensure that there is provision for all.

     Inequality is rampant in Britain, crystalized by the grotesquery of a chancer like Johnson being (still) Prime Minister, and is unlikely to be mitigated by the lying equivocator lined up to take over, the woman who John Crace in the Guardian characterised as having grown up in “grinding middle class poverty” with her professor father and her sinkhole school only just managing to squeek her into Oxford.

     Nothing that either of the “candidates” have said to the Neanderthals that are going to elect one or other of them, show a concern for the realities of the situation that the majority of the country is experiencing and is indeed dreading in the near wintery future.  They are mired in the reality that allows such creatures as Rees-Mogg to be in government.  They, like the Republican Party in the USA are now far to the right of the general electorate, but Conservative parties are adroit in the manipulation of the processes of power, in pushing institutions to their will, of gerrymandering and obfuscating in plain sight, while their tools in the right wing press present a twisted version of reality to maintain power and wealth in the hands of the very, very, few.