Cabined, cribbed, confined!

 

 

 

Day 3 without the car, and I am having definite withdrawal symptoms!

     It’s not as if the car wasn’t working, it was only the air conditioning and while that is an important component in comfortable driving, it doesn’t stop the wheels turning!

     It is also a worry that each day has a financial element associated with it.  I mean, given that the air con can (please God no!) cost over a thousand euros to replace I am willing to wait for them to discover that it is, eventually, only a valve or minor part in the set up that has to be replaced.  The ‘easy fix’ of recharging the system (whatever that means) has already been ruled out and the actual fault is (obviously) proving difficult to discover.  And with each passing day I become more apprehensive about the rising cost, because in the world of the car, even failure comes with a price.

     But even more worrying than the cost is the clamp that has suddenly been put on free action.  You do not realize just how much you are dependent on the car until you do not have one at your beck and call.

     Yes, I know that I have my bike, the bus and taxi, as well as the extreme alternative of actual walking.  But my bike is ruled out by my questionable equilibrium given my two new knees, the bus is not readily accessible, and taxis are ruinously expensive to use for ‘run-about’ excursions.

     So, we are now, stay-at-home carless people, moping about and resenting every house bound moment.  Luckily, we are well provided with the essentials of life and do not (at the moment) need to do any emergency shopping.  Which is just as well, as the nearest supermarket shops to us are car trips away rather than walks.

      Our one sort-of super (!) market was part of a parade of restaurants that for some inexplicable reason have suddenly closed.  So, pizza restaurant, pollo a last, bakery, ordinary restaurant (with a fair menu del dia), and corner shop – all gone, or at least all closed.  To me it makes no commercial sense at all as all the elements in the business seemed to be thriving.  It is set on a main road, has a hinterland of domestic dwellings houses and flats, and is near a camping site that always has food needs.  We have often tried to work out the Reason Why behind the changes, opening hours, closures, and change of business that happen in Castelldefels – and have failed to find any logical justification for some of the decisions made by owners and managers.  But, there again, what do we know of commercial pressures – one fears that it is a murky world behind the smiling faces and clean table napkins.

     I remember once asking a friendly waiter in our local commercial centre if the Mafia played any part in the criminal life of our town, and he answered, “Which Mafia do you mean?”  And then rattled off a list of nationalities who all had a criminal stake in our town.  I keep telling myself that despite the awful state of our roads, we live in a very wealthy city, where house prices are sky high and our residents include the very wealthy in enormous houses behind over-the-top security to guard them.  And us of course!  Those families would not have just the one car, and so would not feel as bereft as we do!

 

However, there is one bright spot amid the static misery of carelessness.  Yesterday I took delivery of my new robot cleaner!

     I must admit that I have owned a number of these devices and while I am enthusiastically in favour of them in principle, in practice I find that they are lacking and woefully lacking.

     When they first came out, and I bought mine from Kickstarter or some such enticement, I was more than happy to have the thing suck up dirt.  I was prepared to empty the machine each time I used it, and I felt that I was in the forefront of what used to be science fiction in those glossy projections in the 50s about what the future would hold.

     As is the way with gadgets like this, each innovation that I read about made me less and less satisfied with the pedestrian nature of my own machine, to the extent that I was glad to have it give up the ghost so that I had (had) to buy another one.

     I will not go through the sad procession of inadequate machines that I cherished and then despised, before, after extensive research, I bought a machine (at a reasonable price) that purported to hoover and mop at the same time, with a self-emptying facility as well.     

     The key indicator that I should have noticed with this machine was the “reasonable price”.  It did indeed do what it said on the box.  It hoovered, it emptied itself and, when you filled it up with water it did (sort-of) mop.  But not particularly well.

     Eventually, I stopped using the ‘mop’ function because it was so ineffective and cast glances of contempt at it each time I passed.

     At last, it stopped working, and I was able to cast about for a replacement.

     I did do some research, and used Chat to help with evaluation, and this time I looked for what I wanted rather than looking for a “reasonable price” i.e. cheap.  What I wanted was not available for what I paid for the last one and so I have now ended up with something that hoovers, mops, cleans the mops, dries them, uses AI for god knows what, and is equipped with an onboard light and a camera!

     I am too afraid to look, but I suspect that there are short films on line which show the cleaning from the point of view of the machine.  I know that on the mobile phone that runs the thing, I can click a button and watch its progress.  I have to admit that there was something strangely fascinating to see your house at floor level, and a little shaming as well as, equipped with a light and a camera there is no hiding place for the underside of lower unit doors nor for the insalubrious division between floor and white goods.

     The machine is not plumbed-in, so you do have to fill the reservoir with water and empty the other one with the dirty water, but everything else is automatic with occasional beeps to show that it is still working.

     It is far too soon to give a thumbs up or down for the things yet, but its first trial run (apart from the usual glitches in the technology of getting the thing paired with the phone) it was excellent.  And since it will have to be used daily (and perhaps more than daily) to justify its price, I will soon have much experience to give an authoritative evaluation of my outlay.

     And that last bit of writing at least took my mind off what might or might not be happening to my car.

 

Oh, for the great outdoors!

I am beginning to forget what it is like to have the unmediated sun on my skin and feel the wind where my hair used to be!

I am not yet at the stir-crazy point of my enforced house holiday, but I am getting near.

I do realise that thrombosis in the leg and embolisms in the lungs with an effected heart demands certain restrictions if there is to be a realistic hope of recuperation, so I am trying to keep to the outline of what I should be doing and, more particularly, not doing.

Ideally, I should spend my days sitting in my armchair and being waited on hand and foot.  Not bad, you might think – but even slavish attention to one’s needs pales after a while.  Or a week in my case.  Not that I am not entirely grateful to Toni for butlering about in a most professional manner and providing me with sugar, fat and salt free dishes for my delectation.  I truly am grateful.  But I cannot walk very far (I mean, I can, but I mustn’t) and I can’t drive and I can’t swim and I can’t ride my bike and I can’t go to the opera.  Whoops, that last bit of self-denial makes me appear more bourgeois than I care to appear, however accurate it may be in reality. 

The point is, although I am working well in my enforced sedentary period of acclimatising myself to a New Way of Life, I am constantly frustrated by having to ask somebody else (aka Toni) to do the most trivial things for me if they require any physical effort.

At least this initial period of ‘rest’ should only take up the first two weeks, and already I have sat my way staunchly through one half of the time.  One week to go and I will be ale to go for a short walk.  Outside!

As someone who has been driving since he was able to drive – that, I now realize,  is half a century – it is much more difficult to adapt to not being able to get up and go whenever I like.  When you can’t, you realise just how much you use the car (or bike) for all those little things that are just out of reach, but no problem when you can slip into the car and get it done in no time at all.

I am sure that this experience will be a valuable life experience for me: I can’t really afford for it to be anything else!  And I am sure that not being able to do so much (if only for a strictly limited period) will (must) make me appreciate what I will be able to do soon enough.

As my existence has been circumscribed to contain only the living room and bedroom (with excursions to the bathroom) I have had time to read the Guardian in depth.  With a short period where I deviated towards the Independent, I have been a staunch Guardianista (and indeed in the style of that newspaper I actually reversed the ‘a’ and ‘r’ in the word!) and feel comfortable with the way that the news is reported and the articles that sum up the quirkiness and essential intelligence of the paper.

But it is also depressing as you surely feel yourself part of the minority/majority (who knows?) that thinks Brexit is an act of national self-harm unparalleled in our life times.  But this feeling of being on the right but losing side means that every opportunity to read about Brexit is compulsive – and the Guardian provides many opportunities to do exactly that.  It is the same with 45 in America where we (the Guardianistas) loathe and despise the man, but cannot stop ourselves from reading about him as if we were all suffering from some sort of addiction.

The only respite from my misery is that the coverage of Catalonia is hardly as exhaustive as the other two and therefore I do not sigh so much in that respect – but television here more than makes up for that lack as the Spanish government would rather talk about Catalonia than any of the corruption and disasters that comprises their contemptible administration.

Meanwhile, I am getting on with the poems drawn from the notes I made while in hospital.  I have to admit that my hospital diary stretches only over eight days.  And did I suffer!  Well, the only pain that I felt over that period was from the injections that I was given; the obtrusive inflation of an automatic blood pressure cuff – this actually caused sores; discomfort from an unyielding bed and a vigorously flesh pressing radiography nurse.  Hardly the stuff of great drama.  I didn’t feel truly ill when I went into hospital and I felt much the same when I came out.  There is no harrowing story of suffering and no real learning or change of situation or comprehension at the end of it.

There is, of course, the realization of just how lucky I have been: if this condition had not been discovered at the time it was then it probably wouldn’t have been discovered until it was too late!  That is something worth thinking about.  But my poetry has ever been the stuff of unexceptional observation and so my observations throughout the week should play to my strength.

At least that is my story and I’m sticking to it.

How to fill time when you are really trying

There was a time when, if I had to wait for something, I would have a book with me and I would read.  It’s not rocket science.  A simple activity with built in cultural kudos.  But now.  Now things are different.

Having forgotten about the service for my car once, I took extreme measures (well I set the alarm) to make sure that I took the thing this time.  A very discrete alarm did go off and I found myself up and doing with enough time not to complete the quick crossword in the Guardian.

And now, I am stuck in Gava for two and a half hours while my car is done.

Luckily, there is a major shopping centre within walking distance of the garage where my car is being done and you would have thought that somebody with the mother-shopping training that I have had would find it easy to wander around picking up spoons that I have not intention of buying and ogling the piece of technology that I have to stop myself buying.  But no, shops are not enough!

I never thought that the day would dawn when I said something like that last statement.  My mother must feel that all her schemes of getting me to like shopping as much as my father hated it – like always meeting me in the Wedgewood Room of Howells and then asking my opinion on various suites of glass and china – have come to nothing!  That a child of hers could possibly find shops boring, or at least inadequate!  The shame of it.

But I came prepared.  No books: but a smartphone, iPad and MacBook Air.  Now you might feel that there comes a point where one is a little over-technified for a wait which is of such a short duration.  But I have been sitting here for at least three hours and only 40 mins have gone by!  So I have decided to write.

I do feel a little ostentatious sitting in the walkway, promenade, paseo, concourse (I knew the word would come to me if I exhausted all the other synonyms) but not as ostentatious as I would have felt a few years ago.  After all, how long have portable computers, the laptop (an apt description at the moment because all I have is a chair and no table) been with us.  A frighteningly short period of time for the universal adoption.  Now it is an everyday sight to see people tapping away in all of the most odd places.  And so am I.

Yet more time has gone by and I am still more than an hour and a half away from the car being ready.  I know that I should be reading, but I feel like being a little more active and so I am typing.  Though whether this is a more productive activity is moot!

Talking of activity, I am now going through the oh-god-what-have-I-left-out-of-the-essayI-have-just-sent-in syndrome, which is normal and natural for all students of the Open University once the TMA has been thrown (electronically) at the tutor.

There is a sense of melancholy loss on the forums, where people who have been working at their degrees for umpteen years now realise that they have completed their last tutor essay and that in a matter of months their years of study will be at an end.  A degree certificate is poor recompense for the loss of the welcome stress that doing a degree at a distance gives you.  Rather than being gleeful that the end result is within reach, people are sad that one of the ways in which they have regulated their lives will be taken away.  As I have been ‘doing’ my degree since the 1970s (admittedly there is a thirty year gap in my study!) I am in a different sort of position, but I do agree that it is a very odd feeling.

And I have to start packing!

The day after tomorrow I am going to Cardiff.  An aunt of mine has died and I am going to the funeral.  It is a melancholy thought that, of all my uncles and aunts there is now only one left.  It does remind you that my generation is the next in line!  These occasions are virtually the only time that I get to see any members of my family – but that comes with living abroad.

I hate packing with a totally unreasonably high level of detestation.  This time I don’t even have to do that much, but, however small the effort – I resent it.  And the suit.  My all-purpose suit is not as smart as it once was and so as fitting, in all senses of the word.  I might attempt to buy a new suit when I am in the UK as clothing is usually cheaper there than it is here, but alas, I am no long an off-the-peg size and so I have to factor in adjustments and I’m sure that those can not be done in the limited time that I am there.  But, I have plans and it will be interesting to see if they come to anything like fruition! 

It’s at times like these that I think of Paul Squared who has probably already packed his case for his holiday in May.  Try as I might I can imagine no change to my essential character that would allow me even to consider doing something like that

There is now an hour to go before my car is supposed to be ready.  I wish I could believe that it will be waiting for me when I return to the garage, but past experience does not make me feel jocose.

Well time for a wander.  Tea, shops, lottery ticket and toilet.  That should take up some time!