Decisions!

 

Having finally found somewhere reasonable to have our Christmas Meal, the conversation and concern has now veered towards the advisability of taking up the reservation and actually turning up there.

     The description of the inexorable international advance of the Omicron Variant, and more especially the way in which the disturbing news is being treated in a frighteningly reasonable way, are true causes for concern.

 

      

 

     Taking the Johnsonian and ‘10’-idian approach as being ipso facto wrong because it is emanating from such laughably untrustworthy sources, we can assume that the ‘Christmas as normal’ advice is profoundly and totally unacceptable.  It therefore leaves reasonable people (i.e., those that didn’t vote for Brexit or the bloody Conservatives) debating the choices.

     And what the choices are for Christmas, are by no means clear.

     At one end of the operational scale there is the lockdown.  A reversion to the restricted days of only emerging from house isolation for essential shopping.  Or some version of ‘lockdown lite’ where there is freer movement, but the meeting of anyone outside your bubble is to be frowned on.

     The Christmas Meal will involve extended family and close family: parents, aunts, cousins, and their children.  But this will be in a setting where there are others from outside this tight little group in the Functions Hall of a restaurant.

     Even with The Family we do not have a day-to-day physical proximity.  All the adults have been (at least) double jabbed, but there are kids, some of whom are under the age of ten, and therefore presumably not injected.  What does vaccine safety mean in those circumstances?

     There are also the festivities of Christmas Eve (in Catalonia the traditional time to give out presents) and the traditional lunch of St Stephen’s Day, during which I expect to receive presents for my Name Day!  No plans for either of these days has yet been shared with me, so what will happen then is just up to my lurid imagination!

     The more the authorities do not give us anything like the full picture of what is actually going on in the world of the pandemic, the more I feel that we have to take pro-active steps to protect ourselves from what is probably happening that they are not telling us about.

     But most of me believes that what will actually happen for the festive season is that we will speculate away before, during and after the event – and only with hindsight will we know if our masterly inaction was justified!

 

 

I have taken the first step in junking my socialist principles, by looking at a list of sites on the web that offer a consultation with a specialist for about 50€.  I have worked out that I cannot reasonably wait about a year for a consultation and then another year before anything is done.  With the way things are going that would mean that I would have to camp out under the house to avoid having to go up and down stairs all the time.  This is something I am not going to do.

     I have discovered that the ‘telephone consultation’ with my doctor that follows my recent blood test was not within a couple of days as I had thought when I was told that that the call would be on the 16th, but rather yes, the 16th, but of the next month.  As I waited a week or so for the call to be made before going to the health centre to find out why it hadn’t happened, the gap between my first expectation and reality is considerably narrower, and I have to wait only two further weeks for it to occur.

     I am going to have to try and find out what, reasonably, I can expect from the Health System and then work with what I have to find a solution that is physically acceptable.

     Just to put things into some sort of perspective, I was speaking with a friend this morning who had had liver cancer and who had treatment not only here in Barcelona but also in America.  The treatment in America cost 44k dollars.  OK, the treatment was cutting edge and for cancer, whereas my operations will be orthopaedic, with more carpentry than anything else about them.  But such a sum gives one pause for thought.  And encourages an acceptable pause in treatment if it means that it can be done on the national health of Catalonia!

     But I am flailing about in the financial unknown dark at the moment as I have no certain knowledge of what exactly is wrong with my knees, and secondly what exactly will have to be done in order to make them more acceptable.  I have few illusions about them being transformed into good-as-new, but I will settle for less painful.

     One thing I do know is that I will have to lose weight.  This has been a perennial cry for medics and one that I will have to take incredibly seriously from now on.  Which is depressing.

     I have recently discovered (or should that be re-discovered) a book for recipes for diabetics.  This could be a double advantage find, as it offers not only good wholesome recipes of limited calories, but also as it is written in Spanish, it can only aid and succour my present attempts to learn the language.  Again.

 

In spite of my distain for the wiles of electronic apps in drawing you in, I have become infected by Toni’s paranoia about where in the league you end up at the termination of the number of days it lasts.

     Toni has managed to be first in each of the leagues in which he has been placed, while I have won one (you see, I used the word ‘won’ as if my language course was some sort of competition!) and been placed in the ‘Top 3’ in two others and finished in the promotion area in the rest.

     Toni is thousands of points (literally) ahead of his presumptuous challenger in second place, whereas in my league the leaders are more equitably spaced so that there is a certain amount of jostling for the top three places.  At the moment I am placed second, but with learners 3 and 4 within double figures places of me.  All is to play (see, I’m using exactly the language the app wants me to use) for – with three days to go before the competitors in the Sapphire League see whether they have made it into the Ruby League!

     As time goes on the league in which you find yourself is more and more likely to be composed of people who have made a concerted effort to be promoted (demotion is also a possibility if your work rate slows) so the pressure on you to strive is more and more pronounced.  Even as I am sucked in, I can take a moment to admire the automated structure that electronically pushes my buttons!

 

T

 

 

Talking of pushing buttons, I must give a call out to the animated series on Netflix, Arcane.  The nine episodes so far have been gripping.  This is high quality animation with artwork of cinematographic sophistication.

     The narrative is apparently backstory and origins of characters in some sort of arcade (are they still called that?) game of which, of course, I had not heard.

     Although the conflicts that animate the narrative are tried and tested: magic/science; rich/poor; privilege/powerlessness; strength/weakness; morality/practicality; law/lawlessness; drugs/sobriety; politics/truth; war/peace; etc etc the progress of the story line uses strong characterisation and allows individuals to develop within a taut narrative.

     Well worth watching.

 

 

Other things in Life

NEW LOCKDOWN, Day 11, Monday.

Lockdown has put me in mind of Wendell Urth – a fictional ‘extra-terrologist’ created by Isaac Asimov in a few of his detective sci-fi stories.  Urth is regarded as the world’s foremost expert on distant worlds, but he has a morbid fear of leaving his own rooms, so while his mind is universe wide, his living space is enclosed.

     It doesn’t take a very dramatic shift to think about our own limiting conditions under lockdown with its radical lessening of our personal spaces, while at the same time encouraging our compulsive fascination with an election half a world away! 

    

Perhaps the American Election is the modern day equivalent of ‘Bread and Circuses’ for the Enclosed Folk of Lockdown: it keeps us off the streets; gives us something to concentrate our minds; allows us to be safely (domestically) judgemental about all those Republican idiots without masks; deflects attention from the situation at home; is a soap opera that never seems to end; it has a moral (of sorts); it has clearly defined Goodies and Baddies, and so on.

     I am almost tempted to say that if there had not been something like the American Election to fill our newspapers and TV screens then something would have had to have been invented.  And I don’t mean a new series of Celebrity Big Brother.  Which I wouldn’t have watched.

     What Biden needs to do is make American politics competent and boring.  A time when each day does not need to start with a convulsive clutching of the mobile phone to find out what new horror The Orange Outcast has leashed upon the world.  Biden is decent, politically savvy, a born compromiser – if he is allowed to do his job then things will settle down and be predictively tedious.  Please.

     This morning I clicked on a link which took me to Biden’s Transition Blog or webpage or whatever and there was a section to be filled out which invited the reader to join and be the recipient of regular updates.  I filled it out, but the thing needed a further registration or forgotten password, or something.  And I just let it go.  And that is surely right.  We have now come to a stage where we need to be weaned away from an easy reliance of the Orange Antics of Small Handed Narcissists and we should not seek to place the onus of entertainment on plodding dependable Biden.

     Let’s face it, although the thrill got less with each unparalleled outburst, Trump was entertaining.  As long as you forgot that he was the most powerful man in the world and leader of the Free World etc.  He was pure, totally sullied, entertainment.  He just wasn’t a politician.  Or decent human.  But, like the witches in Salem, he provided not only spectacle, but also a Manichean boost for leftie liberals, where Trump’s mere existence showed that they had to be right because they were opposite.  I’m not sure that the comparison works, as I seem to be equating witch-burning bigots with the left, which is not my intention at all.  A more responsible writer would cut the whole of this paragraph and either re-work the idea or scrap it; but that ain’t me! 

     Liber scriptus es, as they say, though thinking about it again, that quote can get me into more trouble and be even more confusing and confused. 

     Well, on to the next topic.

 

 

Which is, the algorithm that Netflix uses to keep its patrons (!) secure is getting more blatant in its ensnaring of me.  Today, as I popped in for a little light comedic fare from my usual pushers at The Big Bang Theory, I was presented with a childish, garish advertisement for what was obviously a juvenile animation called Wonder Park, the figures were cartoonish rather than draftsman drawn and the appearance was rigidly commercial.  Something to pass by, to ignore, to find something a little more amusing and a little more intellectually stimulating.

     It reduced me to tears.  OK, I fully admit that, rather like my mother, some Andrex adverts have been enough to make me emotionally wobbly, but they used unfair tactics like Yellow Labrador puppies, and who can then resist?

  I double-clicked and I was hooked.  And once involved in something like fantasy/Sci-Fi/animation, I can always find an intellectual, literary, cultural reference to justify my continued attention.

     In most of the big company animations today where money has been spent on a decent script and the process, there is usually a sequence or some witty (adult referenced, to keep them interested) dialogue to make a moment and to give pleasure.  And there were more than a few such moments in this feel-good movie.  Yes, you could tell and list the animation films that they were shamelessly ripping off, but they did it with some style and so I am prepare to allow them to count as ‘influences’ or homage!

     I’m not entirely sure that I would recommend it as something for everyone, but a competent piece of animation, it is a delight.

 

And now, to complete the evening, some reading.  Or rather, some reading which is not about the American election in the Guardian.  A real book, well, a freebie downloaded to my Kindle, but it all counts!

 

 

 

Things are different?

When I was a kid . . .

There probably isn’t a greater turn-off opener than that one.  It is the sort of phrase that is regularly used as a weapon by the older against the perceived privilege of the young.  There is nothing that riles a certain proportion of the older generation that seeing a very young child with a mobile phone.  And especially the young child using it with a proficiency that the resentful oldie can only wish for.

Technology means that kids have things like music players, film players, TV, radios, cameras and, yes, telephones way before the generation that includes me ever had, but – just think about what my generation had and continues to have.

Free milk, free school, university grants, free university tuition, full professional employment, good health care, generous pension scheme, professional retirement at 60 with professional pension, state pension at 65, membership of the EU throughout my working life, free access to foreign countries within the EU, access to the work markets of the EU, and so on.

Yes, my parents did not buy a television until I was 11, though we did have the radio.  I did not have a ‘real’ record player until I was in my teens, though I had had a second hand wind up version with some old 78s for one birthday.  Our holidays were usually in the UK and in B&Bs, though I did go to Spain when I was 7, and I was the only kid in my year in primary school who had been abroad.  Our camera was a Kodak box camera, until we had the next model up, eventually – and those two camera kept us going for years and years and years.

Although we were not rich as a family, I did not lack anything important.  I was loved and secure and, most importantly (as I was really too young to truly worry about the Cuban missile crisis) I felt secure.  I felt that I had a future and that I would easily be able to get a job and that I would be able to keep it for the whole of my career.

How many young people today can say as much?  I know younger colleagues in teaching who are dreading the extra years that they will have to work until they are able to retire and I sympathetically share their dread, though I cannot imagine what the awful reality must be like.  In my view you cannot be a classroom teacher beyond the age of 60 in any sort of normal school.  Forcing people to work beyond that is like a sort of death sentence, or at the very least they are not going to be paying many pensionable years for the unfortunates who are able to make it.

This serious thought was brought on my thinking about cartoons.  One channel on the television this year has been given over to a whole series of ‘blockbuster’ animated films and I am constantly amazed at their quality.  There was a scene of one of the monsters from Monsters Inc II where he was sitting by the side of a lake in moonlight which was stunning, a beautifully rendered part of the film.  And in another film I was fascinated by the sheer complexity of the rendering of hair and fur with a naturalness that would have had early animators reaching for their crucifixes!

It used to be that Christmas would see the latest-old Bond film trotted out to general delight, but I am not sure nowadays that there is a single screen franchise that would bring viewers together now in the way that 007 did.  After the gloriously clever first film of the 'Pirates' franchise, for example, the whole series descended into a narrative nightmare which denied coherence to the story, but did give individual moments of success, as for example in the umpteenth film when the company baddy walks, with manic serenity, down a flight of steps as his ship is destroyed about him.  It is a sublime moment and deserves a better film around it!

But the mechanics of showing films have changed.  When I was in school we did have 'Christmas Treat' films.  The two I remember are 'Fanstasia' and Tony Hancock's 'Punch and Judy Man' - the first we loved and the second we hated.  But both these films were shown via a film projector, the cans of film had been rented and were shown projected onto a screen.  In an age when films are available on your phone, the attitude towards a 'grand' production has changed somewhat!

So time, place, technique, everything has changed, and the 'gift' of a major film at Christmas is not longer the 'treat' that it once was.

But for me, at least, the power of a great animated film, something like 'Up' for example has me as glued to the picture as if I were a child watching fireworks - and you only have to see my open mouthed wonder and fixation with exploding rockets to understand how quickly I can regress to childhood!

Perhaps cartoons are the nearest things we get to keep us together, to bring back the sense of wonder that over exposure to CGI in so-called reality films has taken away.