Onwards, onwards!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is always the temptation with a new bit of technical kit, to expect it to do more than the previous versions of it that one might have possessed.  And there is the expectation too that one will have the technical ability to push the envelope of comfortable achievement just a little further with something that is bright and new.

     So with my new watch.  In spite of the fact that I need it merely to tell the time and to count the number of lengths that I do in the pool to ensure that I get to my daily target of 70 and therefore 1,500m , I always hope that I can get it to do more.

      My relationship with my mobile phone is one of restriction.  Not, you understand imposed by anyone outside, but by my own limitations in using the device.  I use my phone to read The Guardian and the various volumes on the Kindle app and do my Spanish lessons on the Duolingo app.  And that is basically it.  You stand virtually no chance whatsoever of getting me to respond to virtually any form of communication, unless I am actually handling the phone at the time of the message.  I almost invariably have my phone set to silent and so phone messages come and go without my noticing them.

     At one time and with a past version of my present smart phone, I did have, for a limited period some sort of link between the phone and my watch so that when a message or telephone call occurred, it sent some sort of message and/or a vibration to the watch that could (on a good day) alert me to the fact that someone somewhere had tried to make contact.  This brief period of being ‘linked-in’ did not last and I accepted that watch and phone were devices apart and never the twain should meet in any digital sense.

     With my ‘new’ watch – which I might also point out is now ‘so last iteration’ as the next model is already being reviewed in the more salaciously flagrant hi-tec publications in certain parts of the world – I feel, yet again, emboldened to try and get some sort of link-up so that I can deflect the opprobrium that comes my way when I fail to respond to emails, telephone calls, or any other form of electronic messaging.

     Although, in theory, a great fan of linked-up electronic devices, in reality I have always been a separates sort of guy, with each piece of gleaming expense existing in its own little branded bubble of usefulness, while never quite achieving the connectedness that has been the vain aim of justifying all the bits and pieces of historical computing that I have acquired through the years-

     But this time (he says yet again) this time will be different and, behold, there will be an efficiency of through device computing that will link everything in a professional and useful way.  Well, at least I have got Alexa to work on the phone.  Though, when, by way of experiment, I asked Alexa how she was (I was ever polite, even to the inanimate) her reply that she was feeling ‘windy’ as so many people had asked her about ‘farting’ – was something of a surprise, as was also her unsolicited offer of doing her ‘rapping on farting’ if I so desired!  I did not and turned her off.

     It says something for the way that people are using the pseudo AI of Alexa that a perfectly civil asking after health gets such a scatological response!  What sort of depraved ‘conversations’ with the poor woman have been taking place for an ingénue of AI rapport to be so abused?

     The watch has now beeped, not to obliterate the racier utterances of Alexa, but to tell me that some twisted chess grandmaster is prepared to play naked to show that he is not cheating. 

     With news like that one almost turns with relief to the political situation in the UK where the Conservative Party has gone ‘all out and obvious’ in pandering to its paymasters and is now openly boosting the wealth of the obscenely rich at the expense of the obscenely poor.  A sort of refreshing honesty from a party that has previously tried to dress up its class preferences with mealy mouthed platitudes to try and ensure that the poor people that they are fleecing to feed the rich will not notice the Tories’ real intentions.

     As my (UK taxed) pension is paid in pounds sterling and transferred to me here in Catalonia in euros, every fall in the value of the pound is not a momentary worry about how much spending money you are going to have on the next holiday, but is rather more ‘here and now’ in the worry stakes for someone who relies on the cash being sent over to pay for basic living costs.

     If you are concerned about the cost of living, you might ask, why buy a new watch, rather than use one of the many that you have in reserve?  Well, you’ve got me there.  But I might point out that you are questioning a man who went out and bought a couple of new shirts rather than ironing one of the many clean but creased ones he had waiting to be attended to.

     I am not sure, exactly, what that little anecdote is supposed to illustrate, but it does certainly point towards an attitude to money where reality is only accepted when it bites.  Hard.

     Now, off to the first concert in the new season!  Make music as the pounds falls!

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!

Royal Excess!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It looks as though BBC Radio4 is going to be something of a no-go area for the next couple of weeks. 

     The wall-to-wall coverage of the death of QEII and the subsequent fawning hagiography, where people who barely knew her regale us with inconsequential anecdotes of the minutiae of royal protocol allowing them to see, uniquely, the momentary all-too-human interactions of the real person under the crown.  Frankly, they should have found something better to do than facilitate the beefing up of the repetitive narrative of a long reign until it becomes an unassailable national myth.

     I will be glad when the broadcasters begin to focus on the logistics of a State Funeral, that will at least give them something real to concentrate on, rather than scratching around trying to find something concrete to say about someone who is best known for what bad things she (as opposed to her dreadful family) hasn’t done rather than achieving something of moment.

     The high point of nationalistic absurdity came, courtesy of our (God Help Us!) new Prime Minister who actually said in all sincerity (in so far as that wooden dummy is able to articulate that quality) that QEII was, “one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known”! 

     Truss does the memory of the late Queen no service by stating such a ridiculous claim.  Such sycophantic hyperbole tells us more about the vacuity of the speaker than giving an insight into the character of the Queen.  The truly dreadful delivery of Truss’s speech made it appear as though it had just been thrust into her hands and that she had to make the best of an impromptu performance as she winged it through the to the stilted peroration. 

      Johnson, lurking in full sight on the back benches, just couldn’t stay away from an occasion to raise his debased profile, but he must have seethed internally as he saw a golden opportunity for his particular populist pomposity, thrown away on a ventriloquist’s dummy.

     It is at times like this that I pity John Crace, The Guardian political sketch writer, who actually has to sit through and watch the unutterable tedium of politicians scrabbling around for their five minutes of televisual fame as they mouth yet more platitudes about a person they hardly knew.  John suffers for the rest of us, and I do look forward to his acerbic take on the sad (in all senses) spectacle of politicians emoting on a Grand Occasion!

     Tomorrow QEII’s coffin will be on the move and at least we will have a change of scene from damp people laying flowers on a granite bridge in the Scottish Highlands.

     We were in London during the lying-in-state of The Queen Mother and the queue to view her coffin, when we passed it on an open top tour bus, stretched from the south bank over the bridge and into the distance!  

      Why?  This was a woman who was allegedly slighted by a member of the press umpteen years previously and did not talk to the media from then on.  She was an almost totally remote figure, who kept herself remote, apart from the hand waving and hat wearing that is a sine qua non of female royal ‘duty’.  And yet, an estimated 200,000 people over three days queued to see her coffin!  Extraordinary!  Why did they do it and what did they hope to get out of it?

     I do not for a moment doubt the sincerity of the grief that many people have expressed, and their sense of loss is palpable, and I too, am not insensible to the power of symbols – but, for me I look askance at such public displays of emotion for an unknown, highly privileged, fabulously rich person who are where they are because of an accident of birth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

I feel infinitely more concerned for the well-being of Salman Rushdie who has solid achievements to his name, than I do for the well-being of any member of the so-called House of Windsor.

     I do not wish ill to the royal family, but I certainly look forward to the day when their personification of the built-in, hereditary, inequality in Britain is finally broken.

     Like Truss, a Prime Minister ‘elected’ by a tiny minority of the population, and Charles III who is king and head of state because his mother has died, both are emphatically Not In My Name!

 

 

 

 

 

If only it was a comedy!

 

 

 

 

 

  

In the interests of truth and fairness I need to set the record straight.

     I thought, simpleton as I was, that Johnson might have had the good grace to let Paterson know that he was dumping him before it was generally known.  But no, the serial paid lobbyist MP, found out by telephone call from a BBC journalist while in a supermarket.  Of course, Johnson did not give him a head’s up, that would have shown concern for “a friend and colleague of mine for decades” and that is totally foreign to his narcissistic nature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

     I also thought that there might have been a little bit of negotiation to make the resignation happen smoothly with the promise of some honorific goodie some vague time in the future, but that too was crediting Johnson with a degree of strategy of which he is incapable.  Much better to just do it and the hell with the consequences – after all, that has served Johnson well in all the past fiascos.

     As a postscript to that paragraph, I have now read in the paper that No 10 does not rule out a peerage for the serial paid lobbyist ex-MP.  Who knows what that means?

     In a piece in the Guardian (4/11/21) by Kevin Rawlinson, he itemises Johnson’s U-turns writing that “a conservative count gives more than 30 often panicked policy changes since the 2019 general election.”  It makes sobering reading.  so, while urging you to read the original article in The Guardian, I'll list them:

 

 

 

'Ignore Covid' to national lockdown

Mass community testing

Bereavement scheme

Visa surcharge

Proxy voting

Rashford's free school meals campaign

NHS app

Reopening primary schools

Face coverings in shops

Huawei ban

Local contact tracers

Exam results in England

Face masks in schools

Eviction ban

England's second lockdown

Furlough scheme extension

Rashford's free school meals campaign - again

Cancelling Christmas

Lockdown a day after opening schools

Health secretary's resignation

Johnson and Sunak self-isolating

Foreign aid spending

Taking the knee

Air passenger quarantine

The Northern Ireland protocol

Critical worker pingdemic

Afghan guards

Natikonal insurance rises

Vaccine passports

Foreign lorry drivers

Sewage

Parliamentary standards and corruption

 

 

     How anyone can have faith in such a dithering incompetent like Johnson, defies belief.

     However, his abortive attempt to scrap the parliamentary standards system might point to his concern about what revelations and condemnations might result from the various financial irregularities, most pressingly in the refurbishment of his flat, issued by the very body he tried to abolish.  Junking democracy to safeguard his own selfish interests does seem a convincing explanation for the imposition of a three-line whip for something that was pretty self-evidently corrupt.

     Quite aside from party politics, the stench of corruption in the Conservative Party, is corrosive.  It taints the whole of political life, which is why it is essential that Johnson and the Conservative Party take responsibility for what the Conservative Party has done, apologise for the damage done and sack the persons responsible for the chaotic fiasco.

     The Daily Mail, in an otherwise scathing review of the despicable actions of Conservative MPs over the Paterson vote, tried to broaden the condemnation to all MPs.  That, in this instance is not fair, the only MPs who voted in favour of the abolition were Conservatives (with 1 DUP MP, quelle surprise!) they were not supported by any of the other parties.  The Conservatives own this particular piece of squalor.

     For me the viciously farcical air of the whole sordid episode is summed up in the story of Conservative MP Angela Richardson.  She was the parliamentary private secretary to Goblin Gove.  She abstained from voting in favour of the transparently corrupt motion and, on Wednesday evening she was duly sacked from her parliamentary private secretary post.  But 12 hours (sic) is a long time in politics, especially Conservative “politics”, and so by Thursday morning she had been reinstated in her job. 

     ‘Farce’ is too stable-sounding a term for what actually went on!