Prevarication?

 

 

 

 

The weather cools further: this time I may have the French door open, but I do not have the small fan on.  By such things one measure the descent to the depths of autumn and on to winter!  I am also doing up my coat when I go for my second bike ride, rather than leaving it unzipped.

     On my bike ride to Gavà on the beach side paseo, I see more evidence of the removal of the last of the temporary chiringuitos, a true commercial indication of the changing of the seasons.  But, in spite of all these portents, the weather remains generally fine, and I have not had to take the car to my early morning swim, so far!

     Although my timing for my swim is exact, the time that I leave for my bike ride to Gavà differs, depending on whether I have written anything of consequence in my notebook, or if I am engaged in conversation with people in the café, but seemingly at whatever time I leave, there are the Unknown Regulars that I pass or am passed by.

     The start of Autumn sees the re-emergence of all the retired folk who have been nudged off their parts of the paseo by the summer visitors and the kids.  Now that the kids are (mostly) back in school there is a sort of spaciousness to the beach area which is being reclaimed by those of a certain age.  Some of them (us?) are defiant in their appearance and their actions, relentlessly throwing themselves into the cooling waters of the Med or parading along the paseo in temperature-ignoring wispy coverings and pretending that the summer is still with us.

     There are plenty of cyclists, many of whom are in Lycra and, at first glance, look to be common or garden wearers of that revealing material, but a more searching look shows that the costumes are holding the riders together rather than making them more aerodynamic!  But that is to be commended.  Just as TV series are now ‘colour blind’ when it comes to casting, so clothing is ‘body-blind’ – you wear what you want and the fit is what you decide it is, rather than having to make reference to some sort of unobtainable body-ideal that can only be achieved by self-inflicted starvation or torture in the gym!

     You can see where this is going.  It will end up with my justifying anything in a reductio ad absurdam that (in spite of the poor Latin) will allow me to feel smug!

     Enough!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I find that I am oppressed not by the number of books that I have, but rather their weight.  I have lived with ‘too many books’ since I was a kid, so that in my smallish bedroom I had to be careful when I awoke as the shelves on my bedside wall, actually stretched over the bed itself, so that I slid out of bed rather than rose from it!    

     There was never enough space and gradually every room in the house became, as my mother would phrase it, “infested” with books.

     The move from Cardiff to Catalonia was beset with problems because of the number of books that had to be housed (or flatted) and not all of my prized possessions made it onto new shelves in my new country, but an inordinate number of IKEA Billy Bookcases later and a substantial number of the books found a space.  Not that the space was coherent, as the moves from Cardiff, to storage, to flat, to releasing more storage, to house meant that an overall system was never really imposed on my books and in the various rooms of the house there are now what you could describe as “colonies” of like-minded books forming interesting islands of partial coherence but separate from an over-arching empire of classification.

     I must admit that I have got used to the disparate nature of my literary holdings and quite enjoy the serendipitous discovery of a long-lost volume tucked somewhere where it has not logical reason to be.  Some of the juxtapositioning of some of my books simply looks far too contrived to be aleatory, but I assure you that however pretentious the shelf might look to the outside eye, it is what it is by luck rather than intention!

     The problem that I am presently wrestling with is to do with the placement of new books.  In spite of the lack of available space, that has in no way hindered my purchase of new volumes that I “need”.  And sometimes “need” is augmented by “bargain” – in the sense of value for money.

      I try and tell myself that I have no problem in paying an inordinate amount of money for a decent seat in the Opera, but I would hesitate to pay the same amount of money for a book.  Even though books, I have to admit, have given me more (if different) pleasure than Opera.  I can pay a triple figure sum for a seat for a momentary experience, but not pay the same amount for something that can give lasting tangible pleasure.

     I am not the sort of person to pay vast sums of money for a first edition.  The first editions I have were bought because I bought the books when they came out first.  I do have a 1702 edition of Swift, but that was an unexpected gift and not something that I bought for myself.

     My problem was that Taschen Books had a sale.

     Taschen Books is an imprint that produces spectacularly impressive volumes as well as what you might call domestic books, but their key, or one of their USP is in producing books that are large, opulent, and very heavy.

     In the on-line sale I bought a number of these books which, when they were delivered, it was impossible to carry them all upstairs at the same time.  It is also difficult to hold them and if you rest them on your knees, they crush them.  They are ‘table’ books and, when they are opened up, they need a big table to accommodate them.

     At the moment they form an arty looking pile by the side of my chair, looking almost like a stage prop of a pile of large books.  The trouble is that I have nowhere to put them.

     A set of my large art books are in an extra open section that I have attached to the top of a whole series of Billy Bookcases.  But these books are too big to fit into those oversized shelves and anyway, the idea of reaching up and bringing one of them down to reader level without doing irreparable harm to yourself, or at least breaking an arm or a hand is not to be considered.

     Their weight is too great when they are put on any domestic normal shelf for it to survive.  They have to be put at the base of the bookcase, but it means taking out two shelves to fit them in – and I simply do not have the room to rearrange without (perish the thought) actually getting rid of some of my books.

     So, they sit there at the moment, like a monument, waiting for life to rearrange itself so that they can be enjoyed.

     I have spent my life, giving preference to books, and I am girding my literary loins to Find A Solution.

     The books will win.  They always win!

 

Result? Misery!

 

 

 

 

 

The chiringuitos (the pop-up bars and restaurants on the beach) are being dismantled: the sign that summer is truly over.  We may get an unobstructed view of the sea again, but, that sea will gradually take on the appearance of a more northerly stretch of water rather than the twinkling blueness of the Med.

     The sun however, continues to shine, though I have now taken to wearing a short jacket when I go for my early morning swim (defiantly un-zippered) but I do not need it (yet) for the return home.  Day by day, the temperatures get lower, but not low enough for us to dispense with the fans that have been godsends through the hot summer months.

     I dislike late autumn and winter because I feel more comfortable in t-shirts and shorts and I prefer the heat.  I do not ‘fear’ the winter, as so many of my fellow citizens both here in Catalonia and Spain and in my home country of Wales and the UK. 

     Prices are rising steadily and in some cases radically and people must, in their own words and their own languages be echoing the truism of William Micawber, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”

     So many (all!) the politicians in Westminster are at least comfortable in their financial states (unless they have, like Mr Micawber been feckless beyond) and they can look forward to the coming months with something approaching complacency – at least as far as their own personal circumstances are concerned.   

     They have no conception of the true horror of having no money, or being in debt and having no realistic way of paying essential bills to keep themselves fed and warm.

     This winter could see obscene numbers of people experiencing real ‘misery’, of seeing no way out of a situation that is financially impossible.  And, at the same time seeing the number of millionaires and billionaires expanding exponentially as circumstances which are crippling middle and lower earners bring a sense of real desperation to the working of the body politic.

     The last twelve years of vicious Tory mismanagement have seen a hollowing out of the functions of a caring state, with yawning gaps in essential provision failing to be filled by the charitable and voluntary sector.  We have food banks saying that they are not only running out of food to give to those who are needy, but also they are going to find it difficult or impossible to continue their work with the ever escalating costs of power, let alone anything else.

     The announcement of The Fiscal Event of the Tory government to be foisted on us on Friday, reminds me strongly of Putin’s cruelly euphemistic description of the bloody War in Ukraine (the largest war in Europe since the end of the Second World War) as a so-called "special military operation." 

     Semantics matter. 

     For Truss calling the mini or emergency or timely or desperate budget, a "Fiscal Event" allows the government to do without an up-to-date report from the Office for Budget Responsibility (a parliamentary committee with a Conservative majority) which would have given an assessment of the economic consequences of the proposals outlined in it.  As apparently, the Fiscal Event is not a budget, it allows her to escape scrutiny.  Again.

      Truss is developing something of a reputation for being what That Woman referred to as “frit” when it comes to putting herself forward to have her views examined.  She evaded a full scale, in-depth interview during her interminable campaign to get the genteel knuckle dragging Tories of the South East to vote for her, and she seems to be following that obscurantist trait in her first days in Number 10.  She has been a stalwart member of the "Hide & Silence" brigade and her disreputably repressive government seems eager to continue on its suppressive way, as far as possible out of the glare of any hostile scrutiny.

     Truss, it cannot be emphasised too much, has a conflicted mandate.  She has no mandate from the public and she was not selected by a majority of Tory MPs.  If Johnson drew his cabinet from the dregs of what was left after he had purged the government of any ‘reasonable’ one-nation Conservatives, I struggle to find the word for the strained dregs that Truss used to form hers!

     Look at the holders of the four great offices of state and weep!

 

  

 

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS – DAY 80 – Wednesday, 3rd June.

Iffy weather means easier cycling along the Paseo for me.  Although this morning was bright and clear there were clouds around, and it was markedly less warm than yesterday.  As I am virtually geared up to set off at a set time I am impervious to the weather (unless it is raining – there are limits) and so I get to see a sparser selection of the population on my little jaunts.

     I have made a decision that I will not get grumpy on my ride by noting all the people who are breaking some or all of the rules about exercise and the times when they are supposed to be doing it.  I now cycle along in what passes for Zen serenity, or as near as I can get to it with the .active supressing of my Victor Meldrew inclinations.

     All of the usual on-beach café/restaurants (chiringuitos) have now been constructed or are in the last stages of production and these seasonal edifices will soon be plying their trade – though with reduced numbers of clientele – at least in this stage of the lockdown.  I do wonder about the economic reality of these places, where their existence is only for the summer months and now with a reduced number of patrons, how are they going to make a profit?

     Over the next few weeks we are going to see more clearly which cafes and restaurants, and indeed small businesses have managed to survive the lockdown.  In my more cynical moments I wonder whether only those places which seem to be centres for money laundering are going to be able to survive – not that I am going to make any concrete accusations, I am merely putting it forward as a possible scenario.  Hypothetical, of course!

     We are still nowhere near getting back to anything resembling normality, and even when more shops and shopping centres open fully, it is going to be a damn sight later before the attitude of people get back to where it was.

     At least, it will be for those “of riper years” as the Book of Common Prayer has it.  Some of us who are retired and with one or more of the conditions that place us ever so firmly in the “at risk” category will need a vaccine or at least a convincing treatment to be readily available before we return to anything like pre-Covid behaviour.

     The same does not, emphatically not, go for youth.  Although many of the members of the 14-24 year old groupings wear their masks, they do not wear them with anything like sincerity.  Too often the mask is on the chin, or in the hand, or wrapped around the elbow or simply not in evidence at all, when groups of kids are socialising, and that socialising does not often respect physical distancing.

     Don’t get me wrong, I do understand their scepticism and I only wish I could share their obvious belief that any infection will be like an infant infection of chicken pox – over in a day or so with the ‘sufferer’ hardly noticing.  And, let’s face it, statistics are on their side: the vast majority of Covid infections are mild and only a tiny minority necessitate hospitalization.  But as a person who contracted chicken pox in his forties, rather when he was four months or four years old, I have never felt so utterly ill and sorry for myself!  Being now a couple of decades older, I do fear what an infection of Covid-19 might mean for me now.  And indeed for those with whom I may come into contact.  The lesson is clear, it is up to the individual to follow the rules for the benefit of all – but the Cummings Cop-out seems to be all too ready to be called on by all too many people in this crisis.

Here in Spain the government is asking for a final extension to the State of Alarm to keep the restrictions in place during our transition to a looser approach to the virus.  Spain’s economy was not in the strongest of positions before this crisis and it will be a damn sight weaker after it.  The summer is the tourist season and, considering that the Easter Holidays were a disaster, it will be catastrophic if something is not salvaged from the summer holidays.  Spain is allowing the opening of hotels (though not their common areas) at a limited occupancy rate and in another week or so even we in Catalonia will probably be allowed to swim in the sea.  It is tantalizing to have the Med at the bottom of the street and not be allowed to swim in it.  I can’t swim in my local swimming pool either, and I fear that the restrictions that will be placed on public swimming when finally is allowed will make the experience something of a chore rather than a pleasure, but it will be interesting to see how our swimming club interprets the rules!

Johnson’s irascibility at PMQs when Starmer had the audacity to question him, is a clear sight of his lazy lack of preparedness and yet another example of his assumed possession of entitledness.  His bumbling non-answers are embarrassing in the extreme, and the sooner he is dispatched from the dispatch box the better.  I will have to devise an acronym to express his supreme unfittedness to the post for which he is paid.  Perhaps NAPM (not a prime minister) or TOAMP (travesty of a prime minister) or BIAL (bumbling idiot and liar) – they ned some work.

The situation in the USA is horrific in virtually every aspect: morally, socially, politically, legally, criminally, judicially – the list could go on and on.  As a white man, I do not know what it is to walk in a black person’s shoes, but I do know that my wholesale support is for the Black Lives Matter movement and I hope that something real comes from the world wide revulsion to the poison of racism that limits the development of so many black lives, not only in the US but also the UK, Spain, Catalonia and the rest of the world.

My addiction to the news, no matter how depressing it is, is something that I have mentioned before, and I can’t fight it.  I get even more depressed if I think that there are news stories that I might have ignored merely because my fragile sensibility finds it difficult to take.  I have to have my fix of Johnson, Trump et al, but I find that it is easier to take if I take it through the vision of writers like John Crace, the Guardian political sketch writer.  His wry writing lets you know that there is a voice of reason, articulating your sense of contempt in writing, which is so much more intelligent and wittier, allowing a Voltarian smile to leaven the misery of current political events.

Yesterday, before I went out on to the terrace on the third floor, I grabbed a book at random from the shelf nearest the door of my ‘library’ and started reading.  My choice was Lucia in Wartime by Tom Holt, which is a ‘continuation’ of E F Benson’s series of ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels the style of which one admirer described as being as if “the pens of Evelyn Waugh and Jane Austen had mated”.  The novels are studies in middle class mores and snobbery centred on the rivalry of Mapp and Lucia for pre-eminence in the small town of Tilling.

     There was a superb Channel 4 television production of three of the novels in 1985 and 1986 with Prunella Scales as Mapp, Geraldine McEwan as Lucia, Denis Lill as Major Benjy Flint and Nigel Hawthorne as Georgie.  As someone said about the writing of James Thurber and his cartoons, “If you don’t find them funny – there is something wrong with you!”  I feel the same way about Lucia.  I urge you to sample any and all of EF Benson’s oeuvre and of Tom Holt too.

     It may seem perverse to single out a book about Mapp and Lucia which was not written by E F Benson, but rather by Tom Holt over forty years after Benson’s death, but the book is so well written and such a tribute to the power of Benson’s creation that it can be mentioned in the same breath as that of the master himself!

     I might add that my copy of Lucia in Wartime by Tom Holt was a 1986 Christmas present, inscribed by the two friends who gifted it to me, “An imitation Lucia, for an imitation Lucia” 

     How well they knew me!