What now!

One definition of ‘hardship’ is having to use the outdoor community pool rather than my rather more congenial local swimming centre.  I realize that this definition is not one that will be enthusiastically shared by those, for example in the UK, where the number of outdoor community pools for private citizens is somewhat restricted.  And even if they were in greater supply than they are, when would an ‘outdoor’ pool ever be used?

And that brings me to the serial untruthfulness of my friends in Britain.  It is a ‘given’ that any telephone conversation between Catalonia and the UK will touch on the weather.  Even though we have had an indifferent early and late spring with weather that all of us grumbled about, I refuse to believe that the weather in my country of birth is markedly better.  Yet, in every telephone conversation I have to listen to my British friends say (yet again) that “Today” (or more tellingly “yesterday”) has/had been glorious!”  [I know that the quotation marks in that sentence are not exactly correct, but merely thinking about them brings back memories of fiendishly difficult exercises on punctuation in Form 4 or 5 that took sick minds to devise - and certainly created nausea in the stomachs of hapless pupils who were called on to ‘solve’ them]  At first we took such statements on trust, but then the suspicious nature of the consistency of response encouraged us to be a little more circumspect and we started to check up on these statements of nationalistic climate one-upmanship.  And behold! the facts would invariably cast (at the very least) doubt on the assertions of flawless skies and tropical temperatures.

It was refreshingly direct, when my cousin Margaret came to Castelldefels, she sent a selfie by the pool or on the beach to the folk back in Maesteg and, at the same time she checked the weather.  Rain, rain, and more rain.  Or, as one of her correspondents put it, “It’s pissing down here!”

It’s odd, isn’t it - the weather is a topic of national conversation, whose awfulness is bewailed at every opportunity.  We hark back to the ‘Great Summer of 1976’ and somehow seem to ignore the fact that it is a warm experience of over forty years ago!  But let foreign weather attempt to better our (for want of a better word) climate and suddenly we become all protective and start rationalizing ‘light rain’ as something that can be ignored, or ‘a patch of blue’ as a sunny day.  Trump’s alternative facts have a lot to answer for.

I have a simple way of showing the difference between the weather in Cardiff and Catalonia.  Every day I use my bike (admittedly an electric one, but I still have to pedal) to go on an epic journey to my local swimming pool.  I do not use my bike if it is raining.  So far this year, I have had to use the car on four occasions.  I ask you, members of the jury, how many days would the bike have been kept at home in Britain?

Of course, you could say that my continuing concern with the weather is a form of displacement activity to encourage my thinking of something other than my health.

Six months ago I was diagnosed with thrombosis, embolism and strained heart.  Eight days in hospital; two weeks total rest; weeks of gradual exercise; hospital appointments; blood tests; health centre visits, a doctor’s visit to the house (!) {sic.}; twice daily injections etc etc etc.  The six-month period is a time for more evaluative tests to see exactly how I am doing.

The last visit to the hospital doctor (as opposed to my local doctor) was generally positive: blood, pee and heart all passed muster.  Now on to leg and lungs!  And it’s the lungs that are the worry as the damage that the embolisms did might well be permanent and if that is so, Other Things Will Need to be Done.  What these things are, I know not of.  But they will be the thorough irritation of my world.  There are Dark Mutterings about some sort of ‘mask’ that might have to be worn during the nights, but I was told not to worry because the newer ones are almost silent.  If that was meant to comfort me, it did not.  My ever-active imagination has already sketched out some form of modern/medieval form of nocturnal torture instrument!

So, while I get browner, as an actual and real sign that our weather is really quite good, and stride about looking the soul of health, I still have nagging worries that I will have to take my local doctor’s injunction that I will have to “remake my world” and live with the consequences of what happened six months ago.

The visible signs of this remade life are that I now walk with a stick (when I remember to take it) and I wear a pressure stocking (when I am shamed into putting it on) and my pathological hatred of the act of walking is now a sort of medical imperative.  I do not look ill.  I do not feel ill.  My swimming times are the same or better than those before January.  But it is difficult to feel totally at ease when you consider that my basic medication is rat poison.  Admittedly it is packaged in little white tablets that can be easily broken into quarters to match the ever-changing daily dose, but the fact remains that I am ingesting rat poison.  On a daily basis.  You might be interested to know that Warfarin killed the rats by causing internal bleeding, and it is that ability to thin the blood that is supposed to help those with thrombosis etc.  And I hope that it is.  This month will demonstrate exactly how effective the drug has been.

I have also had to change my diet.  I am on a low fat and no salt regime and I haven’t had a drink of alcohol since January.  Admittedly I was told that I could have an occasional small glass of red wine - but I would rather do without than be so glaringly abstemious!  No salt is just about impossible unless you cook all your own food and I have less than no intention of doing that, so I tell the waiters that I need to have a ‘no salt’ dish and believe in their veracity.  Well, don’t knock it, I’m not dead yet!

It is ironic that in the The Guardian today (the on-line version that I read) there is a report that suggests that the NHS could save billions by encouraging doctors not to over prescribe and not to encourage patients to have series of tests and examinations that may not be strictly necessary.  I think that the succession of tests that I have had in Catalonia and the level of medical care that I have received are in marked contrast to the service that I would have had if I had still been living in Cardiff.

As a Baby Boomer (Leading Edge) I am of the generation that is now entering into the age when the availability of medical services are going to be called on with greater regularity.  On the 70^th Anniversary of the NHS now is the time to start funding the service as it should be funded and, incidentally, to be taken out of the hands of a Conservative Party (“lower than vermin”) that did everything in its power to try and halt its foundation.

You see the way my mind works.  I start talking about the weather and end up with the NHS.  But thinking about it, they are both linked, and the more I think about it, the more one appears to be a metaphor for the other!  But such literary niceties are for another post!

Only connect, if you can be bothered.

There is something unacceptably cruel about an unexpectedly delayed dental appointment.

I turned up at midday, on my bike, to be met by blank incomprehension about my check-up that had been arranged almost a year ago.  Eventually my name rang a bell in the receptionist’s mind and she wittered on about not having my telephone number to let me know that circumstances had changed and that my new appointment was for Tuesday of next week.  They do have my telephone number, indeed they have both of them and my address, and my full name and probably my NIA as well - so they could have used the telephone directory or looked me up online.

But people don’t do that nowadays.  If your mobile number or email (which they also have, come to think of it) is not immediately to hand then contact is impossible.  I call it The Full Dishwasher Syndrome.

The FDS is when you cannot fit anything else into the dishwasher and you find that you have one cup left over?  What does one do?  From experience you know that the higgledy-piggaldy approach to randomly piling things together will result in imperfectly washed items that will also have retained water because they have not been placed in their correct, drain-ready position.  Better to leave the extra item to one side so that it can be added to the next load.

Or you could (as you used to) wash and dry it by hand.  A squirt of washing liquid (or a mere drop of the more expensive stuff), some reasonably hot water, a quick brush over, rinse and a fresh tea towel to dry.  But that doesn’t enter one’s mind.  FDS obliterates the idea that washing dishes can be done by hand: the lone, dirty cup becomes A Problem.  “My dishes,” so runs the mantra, “are more hygienically dealt with by the dishwasher.”  The machine is more thorough, it works at higher temperatures than your hands can stand, it produces cleaner results - even as it washes off some decoration and leaves streaks on glasses and fails to remove some stubborn stains.  No matter - dishes are washed in the dishwasher.  It’s a fact.

Just like clothes are washed in the washing machine and dust and loose dirt is picked up by the Hoover and getting to places is by car and . . .

It is only when you consider how your life is lived that you realise that it is very different from the way that your parents lived.

In no way do I consider myself to have had anything other than a comfortable and privileged upbringing, but we did not have an electric record player until I was 10; we didn’t have a fridge until I was 12, which was around the same time as we got our first television; we had an outside loo; our first automatic washing machine was when I started secondary school; dishes were washed by hand; our first telephone had a ‘shared line’; our first motorised transport was a Bonmini three-wheeler. 

 

But this was all in the 1950s where I was the only person in my year in school to have gone on a foreign holiday.  I could safely roller skate down the road because most people did not have any motorised transport of any sort and photographs of the time (B&W) show me in an empty road, with few cars parked.  So-called white goods were only starting to become affordable.  It was the time when you had to apply for a telephone and you had Hobson’s Choice about what you got.  There were just two channels on the television, BBC and ITV. My grandparents’ television had a tiny screen and took an age to ‘warm up’ and faded to a single bright spot when you turned it off - and of course it was black & white, not colour.  I still remember my first viewing of a mobile phone: a large wooden box with a normal handset and rest used by a telephone engineer.

Things have obviously changed and we have many more ‘things’ than we ever used to have.  But our ways of doing things have also changed: our expectations and our approaches.

Which brings me back to my dental appointment.  One way of contacting me failed and, instead of trying another (in this over connected world) they gave up.  Because we do things this way and not in other ways.  After all, they could have written - but when was the last time that you had that sort of communication for a previously arranged appointment.  If you can’t Message it, it is not going to happen.   

O brave new world that has such full stops in it!

Two firsts!

Day 3 of the bike riding.

At least the chain did not come off today, so I count that as a bit of a triumph.  I also cycled up the hill over the motorway which I really think must count for something!  I can’t truthfully say that I am ‘getting into’ cycling, but I am doing it with something approaching good grace.  Unless it rains.

Tree destruction

I continue to watch the levelling of the area where the trees used to be with some grief, mixed with fascination in watching the speed and efficiency with which the workmen are effacing all traces of what used to be there before.  I may not like what they have done, but they are doing it well!

            What will be a telling indication of the level of managerial competence is the way that they put the lines in the space that they have now created for parking.  In my experience few humans (including myself) have the spatial and organizational imagination to paint a sequence of parking lines that uses the available area to its full potential.  Indeed my experience is that the almost arbitrary spacing of the lines creates vindictive confusion and bitter recrimination.

            Perhaps this car park will buck the trend in this country and they will actually give a reasonable amount of space.  For once.

Critical lunch

Lunch was eaten selflessly as an expedition to discover the quality of food provided in the restaurant connected to the apart hotel that some of our guests in October will be using.

            In due course an illustrated account of our meal will appear in Toni’s blog at http://catalunyaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es where other of our joint eating ventures are to be found.

            The meal was delicious and the glass of vermouth to start the meal was a welcome touch.  Still, details on Toni’s blog.

The inspiration

Toni heard, saw, hunted and killed the first mosquito of the season.  How the hell the thing survives this early in the year is difficult to imagine – though the weather has been fine and sunny.  Indeed it has been so good that I have had my first official sunbathing attempt.  It didn’t last that long, but it did happen.  I trust that this will be first of many tanning sessions so that I can get rid of my pallid skin colour!  The hell with health, I need my vitamin D!

The Muse

Although I have a couple of poems which are refusing to come together in anything like a form that I can regard as finished, or even as things with a positive direction – my notes after my swim and during my cup of tea translated into a poem with a speed which left me breathless.  The finished poem may be found at http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es and is available for comment!

Green transport is ecological quid pro quo

The cutting down of trees in the car park of the swimming pool means that I have had to resurrect my bike.  Or at least take it out from its partial hibernation.

            Destroying twenty trees was obviously not enough for the heartless people in the leisure centre.  No, they want to efface the evidence of their destruction and have closed the car park for the next month.  The leisure centre is in a residential area with lots of on-road parking.  Unfortunately next to the leisure centre is a school.  And that changes everything.

            Children go to schools.  A very good thing too, it keeps them off the streets when we retired people can wander about without the screams and general awfulness of the youngest generations spoiling our well deserved time away from work.  But probably the worst thing about children and schools?  Parents.

            In the general run of things I have nothing against parents, after all my entire existence is thanks to them, but my parents allowed me to catch a bus to school.  They did not see the need to take me to the school gates, drop me off and then wait around imagining me making my way through the yard towards my form room.  While being themselves double or triple parked, on a pavement or on the zebra crossing, across an entrance, at an angle, on a corner or any damn where they pleased with little or no consideration for any other non-parent-of-their-child whatsoever.

            So, now, added to the insanity of parents dropping off their kids, residents parking their cars, visitors needing a parking space we will have people going to the leisure centre, finding the car park closed and then trying to park within a maximum of ten paces away from the door.

            It is going to be chaos.  And nasty chaos as well!

            Having given this some thought, I imagine that one of the more unbearable aspects of this month-long torture is going to be car drivers stopping in the middle of the road trying to spot a non-existent parking space and effectively blocking the road for all other road users. 

Luckily, in this country, we are blessed with some of the most tolerant road users in Europe who never mind waiting and who show no impatience at any road user impeding their progress!  So that’s all right then.

As if!

This morning I had to park three streets away from the centre and half way down the street as well.  Things can only get worse, and I do not intend to emulate the Flying Dutchman endlessly roaming the area searching for a parking space!  The bike is the answer.  Possibly.

It is well over a year since I’ve ridden the thing and I have had to hack the dust off it.  Toni has oiled the bits that need oiling and I have attempted to make the dynamo work.  Not that I have any intention of riding the thing in the dark, you understand, but I do like to think that I could if I wanted to.

It will be interesting to see how I adapt to this new regime.