Eat in Style!

 

 

The Christmas Meal conundrum has been solved.  We are going to eat in the middle of an Industrial Park!

     This is not quite so depressing as it sounds.  While my first statement is basically true and we are indeed going to be in an Industrial Area, the part we will be eating in is actually the site of a converted eleventh century hermitage, complete with outdoor crucifix, set in its own gardens with extensive foliage botting out the Industrial Units with which we will be surrounded.

     We have already sampled the culinary delights of the place, by going for a menu del dia yesterday, by way of evaluation.  Delicious meals were had by all, and we are much more jocose about the offerings on Christmas Day.  We have to choose a main course (the first course is a selection of shared tapas-like starters) and turkey does not figure at all – I am delighted to say.

     I rejoice in the opportunity to go to a restaurant for Christmas Meal as it means that no one in the family has to prepare the food and absolutely no one has to do the washing up afterwards!  And the price is not extortionate at all.

     To be strictly fair, although we had the menu del dia in the converted hermitage complete with stone floors and rough wooden beams, the Christmas Meal is going to be held in a rather more modern structure in the grounds that is obviously used for weddings and functions – we will however have views of the more architecturally interesting building while we eat in our more functional space.

     This is not the first time that I have been introduced to a hidden oasis of good food in something architecturally interesting as a while back Suzanne and I had a lunch in Barcelona in an unprepossessing part of the outskirts of the city, but the building cwtched away from the vulgarity of the main road was an absolute delight of semi-open air (it wasn’t winter!) with greenery and soft lighting and lovely (if expensive) food.

     Part of the joy of eating out is being surprised by quality – be it food, building or service.  Tasty memories!

     Although there will be a number of us eating, our party of eighteen is just one of many, I am hoping that the quality of the menu del dia will be strongly reflected in what we have to eat on The Day.

     After Christmas Day, the next problem is My Name Day, which is on the 26^th of December.  I think it would be presumptuous to urge everyone to go out for an equally expensive meal on the succeeding day to the excesses of the 25^th and, as the Name Day Person is supposed to pay for the meal for the family, I have no intention of spending hundreds of euros myself.  But the problem is where and with whom are we going to eat?

    As with all problems of this sort, it will be the payment of some of the cost of the final meal that will satisfy all!  I hope!

     Last Christmas didn’t really exist in any way linked to how the Day had been celebrated before.  This time round things are supposed to be a touch more normal.

     But, having said that, new rules have been announced that will require a Covid Vaccination Passport of some sort to be shown for entry into gyms, restaurants, bars etc.  If my understanding is correct this will be introduced from tonight and so tomorrow, I will have to show my vaccination information before I can have my swim.  I have had no information from my pool, and they are usually quick to keep us informed about the latest restrictions.  So, we will have to see what happens.

     I don’t want to travel into the Conspiracy Theorists territory, but I do worry about how much we are not being told about the full potential for disaster in this Pandemic.

     I have had my flu jab and my booster shot and so I am as protected as I reasonably can be, but the news that kids are now going to be vaccinated seems to indicate that we are nowhere near the end of this pandemic.

     And Christmas may pose problems, but the implications of people gathering together is something else.  I am wholeheartedly in support of passports and an insistence on the wearing of masks in all crowded places, but the stirrings of unrest about the ‘imposition’ of rules and regulations and the ‘taking away’ of individual freedom, are things that are going to make any easy resolution impossible.

 

Today my early morning swim was truncated because I had to go for a blood test – which meant queueing up (partly in the rain) while each health card was individually taken away, a sheet for the blood test results generated, and patients allowed in to wait their turn.

     It was all done relatively quickly, and it was certainly relatively painless, with only two test tubes of blood samples taken from me.  The interesting thing was when I attempted to make an appointment to have feedback on the results.

     I was not allowed to make an actual appointment, instead I was told that the doctor would contact me by phone on a particular day, “So keep the volume turned up!”

     Is this going to be the new normal?  No face-to-face appointments, with telephone links filling in.

     I know that in the UK there are plans to make telephone appointments, just that.  Your doctor will be available at the end of a line.  Given the number of ailments that have been supressed by patients during the pandemic, perhaps it is to be expected that medical staff are going to be under real pressure now that things appear to be loosening up.

     I think it is something to be concerned about.

 

 

I have been basking in the pleasure of a considerate gesture.   

     A lady who swims in the early morning with us is not well and she is confined to bed.  I was able to send her an sqb original card, and I included the famous quotation from The Three Musketeers, that she had used herself.  She was delighted with it and had the swimming pool give me her telephone number to express her thanks.

     As anyone learning a language will tell you, telephone calls in ‘foreign’ are taxing.  With my level of fluency in conversational Spanish, they are disaster areas.   

     Luckily, what was looked for in the telephone conversation that I eventually built up enough courage to make, was more conviviality and contact.  Her pleasure came over, as I stumbled my way through the requisite pleasantries.  It was good to speak to her and even better to know that in some small way my tiny gesture had helped.

     Soon may she reclaim her lane!

 

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow Irene arrives for a short stay.  As I have said before, friends who have moved away, or from whom you have moved, are missed – and oddly, they are missed even more after a meeting.  Their presence emphasises their absence!  But I am looking forward to drinking tea and chatting.  Those I do well!

Speak out!

 

I think that Toni and I are both now officially addicts to Duolingo, the language learning app.  Not content with Italian and French as his chosen languages, he branched out today on a series of lessons in German.

     I am sticking, one might say severely sticking, to ‘only Spanish’ in an increasingly desperate attempt to get the rudiments of the language to stick, somewhere, in my brain.  Considering that I am a retired language teacher, English admittedly and usually Literature, but a language none the less, it is astonishing how little I have assimilated of either of the languages from the multitudes of native speakers who surround me.

     Don’t get me wrong.  I can find my way around and usually I am able to talk and bluff my way through most situations ranging from official business with the city hall and the notorious Iberian paper-pushers that inhabit them, to getting my car seen to by technicians who defiantly do not speak English.

     Still, my fluency in English is a constant accusation against my enforced Trappist approach to general conversation in Spanish.  Somehow or other Spanish is simply not ‘taking’ with me, and it is constantly frustrating.  There is only so much that a slight smile and a depreciating hand gesture can convey: communication needs words placed in a firm grammatical structure.  And that is something that I am still working on.

     Though, come to think of it, although I have been to Spanish (and indeed Catalan) lessons, there are still basic piece of linguistic information that slips through my brain with the accomplished ease of a Johnsonian lie.  I have not been truly serious about learning the language, and perhaps Duolingo is the sort of mechanical relentlessly repetitive emphasis on the essentials is the thing that I need to get me truly started (after all of my time in Catalonia) in acquiring proficiency in a foreign tongue.

     Both of us are well and truly caught up in the striving towards the next level and competing against named but unknown people arbitrarily placed with us in our respective leagues.

     Absurd that it might be, I was inordinately proud to have come first in the 'starting' Bronze league and to have been promoted to the Silver league where, coming in the top three I was then promoted to the Gold league.  Apart from being told that such progress is found in a fraction of the percentage of learners in the app there do not appear to be any tangible gains from such exertions, except for the kudos of being at the top.  But, by golly, Toni and I are putting in the lesson time to gain points so that we can stay in the upper reaches of our respective leagues.  So, however futile the status, there is a real gain in the amount of time put into the hard slog of repetitious learning.

     It is far too soon to know if we are going to keep the effort up.  But I have to admit that I have done more work on my Spanish over the past ten days that I have done in the past embarrassingly large number of months!

     We are both still very much in the present tense of our languages, and I like to think that I am capable of attempting past and future tenses in Spanish if the mood takes me, but there is a sort of grounded satisfaction in regressing to simplicity and convincing yourself that ‘this time things are being done thoroughly’ and ‘every little helps’ and ‘anything is better than nothing’ so that in Ruskin’s words I will be able to see whether my efforts are ‘availing to good’ – whatever that means

 

The Saga of The Christmas Meal continues, with The Family finding out that many of the suggestions that they have come up with are all fully booked!  To the surprise of no one.  However, in spite of it being late (far too late) to find anywhere decent, we (or rather they) have found a place which has dropped like Manna from Heaven, or via a cancellation and another venue has been found.

     This Wednesday, we two are going up to Terrassa to have a menu del dia to find out the worth of the place, but in late November, we do not have the luxury of being able to be picky about the place that we finally decide on.  And what can one really judge from a normal menu del dia compared with what they might offer for a significant meal like the Christmas Repast.  Still, I maintain my rigid optimism and look forward to being pleasantly surprised next week.

Next week is also my blood test as part of the preparatory work for Doing Something About My Knees.  I am not sure how much further forward knowing about the composition of my blood will advance repairing the bone of the knees, but I await medical enlightenment, that might come the week after next.

     Since Christmas is horrifyingly near, it is obvious that nothing of any import will happen until the New Year and my hobbling will have to suffice until more specific descriptions of what can be done and how long it might take.  Something, neither the waiting nor the actualité, that I consider with anything approaching equanimity.

     But, there again, all personal conflict has to be seen as grist to my literary mill.

     If nothing is done, I shall write.    

   And if something is done, I shall write.   

     Hardship is a double-edged sword to someone who writes!   

And I’m not sure that that image works.  And I do know that I don’t care.

Another date filled

 

Well, the one good thing is that I have only missed one meeting or appointment - and I thought that I might have missed three.  But no, blood test and concert are still in the safe future, it is only the student representative meeting that has slipped me by, and the teacher concerned seemed far more concerned about my new pressure stocking than the meeting.  The lack of my attendance at the meeting apparently could be solved, or at least mitigated, by a short chat with one of the teachers.

My pressure stockings are another factor.  These are stylish (for pressure stockings anyway) free gifts from China.  I only had to pay the postage (and that wasn’t very much) and I got three pairs!  It reminded me of the trip that Toni and I made to stay in Catalonia where the flight cost us nothing – except for the landing charges.  I do not understand the economic logic of giving away a flight for nothing, but I gratefully received the largess.  God knows we have paid back that free gift many times over given the amount of travel that we have run up over the years since.  But I do remain grateful for the inexplicable gift!

The pressure stockings are perhaps easier to explain as a sprat to catch a mackerel and the assumption must surely have been that I find out that the link with the supplier is real and you stand a chance of getting what you hoped for, and you buy much more stuff - and god knows, China is the home of stuff nowadays.  Was it enough for the Chinese supplier merely to get hold of my email and start sending me information, to get me on a mailing list, that they could write off the merchandise. 

 

And again, I insist that the postage was so small that I could afford to speculate and give it a go not really worrying about losing the pittance that they had asked to get the stuff to me.  They have since asked me to comment on my purchase, but I assume this is merely a device to ensure that I am still a live customer and that any giving of stars will unleash a whole catalogue of offers too good to miss!

Give my predilection to submit myself to the blandishments of the capitalist system and buy stuff for the mere sake of it, I have steeled myself to be rude enough not to reply – even though I am wearing one of the said stockings even as I type this.

The net two months should prove to be revealing, with the possibility that I will not need to wear the bloody stockings any more.  The function of them is to increase the blood flow in my right calf so that the thrombosis will be dissolved away.  To that end, my diet (low salt, low fat, no alcohol, decaffeinated tea and coffee) added to the half a tablet of rat poison that I take daily should all be working together to get rid of the thrombosis in a gradual way.  Over the next couple of months, I am scheduled to have various tests and appointments that should enable my doctors to determine the extent or otherwise of the offending clot and adjust my treatment accordingly.

I had thought that I would be taking the rat poison for life, but one doctor seemed surprised by this assumption on my part and assured me that there was a possibility that it would be discontinued in a few months’ time.

I continue to be impressed with my treatment and the thorough way in which I have made a Grand Tour of most of the hospitals in the area for consultations and tests.  The important ultra-sound scan will be in January, so I won’t have a Christmas present of my treatment being ended, but I will settle for a late gift!  At least by the New Year I should be in a better position to know how my appointments calendar will look for the rest of the year!

Meanwhile, my book “Stephen’s Health” continues to grow as each new sheet of information, results and appointments is added to the plastic pockets.  I take it with me whenever I go to see a doctor as a sort of visible token of my active participation in my treatment.  I can also refer to any of the information about my case (downloaded from the secure Internet link) to encourage those doctors battling with their ageing computers.  In one or two instances it has been very useful to point to relevant information to help the consultation along!

I feel fine, though I am not able to walk as far or as fast as I used to.  My shooting stick has been invaluable and I am now back to my normal swim and bike ride quota for each day.

My replacement watch for my Pebble, the Amazfit takes a dictatorial view of my activity and gives me reams of information that I totally ignore.  It tells me where I have cycled and how – though I am not sure that it realizes that my bike is electric; it analyses my swim, using acronyms that I do not know; it noted my ‘run’ that I did not do – and I am still wondering about that; it measures my sleep and its depth; it takes my heartbeat; it tells me (and nags me) about sitting down for too long.  And it also tells the time.  Its battery life is nothing near the longevity of the Pebble, but it is at least four or five days between charges and I can live with that.  The text it uses is too small for me to read without my reading glasses, but I am used to making sense of the out of focus – I have been doing in for as long as I can remember – so that is not something that worries me.

I now use my Matrix watch (the one that runs by making electricity out of the difference between your body heat and the ambient temperature of the watch case!) as a backup when the Amazfit is charging.  I good, if expensive, compromise about their use!

The major problem I have is making sure that the alarms on any and all of my pieces of wearable electronics do not go off as inopportune times.  I take my half of rat poison at 8.00 pm.  That is the time of the start of the operas to which I go.  The trouble is that merely switching off the phone (which I do when I go to performances) does not always stop the bloody alarm and once or twice I have fumbled with the phone during the applause for the conductor in a frantic effort to silence the thing before the music starts.  My watch merely trembles and that can easily be turned off by jabbing at the screen.  The anticipation that an audience feels at the start of the performance is given an added layer of fear by the threat of my electronic alarm orchestra playing an unwelcome additional melodic line.

And I am looking forward to this performance: Janacek, Katya Kabanova.  Let’s see just how well my ‘education’ in the works of Janacek by WNO and Richard Armstrong with the voice of, among others, Elizabeth Söderström, will be in my appreciation of the performance tonight.  I am all anticipation.

And now to get ready.  As a point of principle, I wear casual clothes to the Opera, in spite or rather because of the fact that I will be surrounded by those who ostentatiously dress up.  I am still wearing shorts and sandals (for me Summer Never Dies) but I might wear jeans tonight.  Not because of the cold, you understand, but rather because getting out of the Liceu and walking up the Ramblas late at night can be a dispiriting experience, and if you look ostentatiously like a tourist then you might well be the target for one or more sex workers to come up to you with blatant offers of gratification!   

Better to be taken for, if not a native, then at least a resident, and hobble (in my case) my stick-assisted way towards my expensively parked car!