LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS – DAY 4

It has taken a pandemic to shut our bloody neighbours’ noisy reconstruction efforts.  The silence of their absence is absolutely delightful, though it doesn’t compensate for the intolerable thumpings that have characterised their reformations.

     In fact, we now have a silent cordon sanitaire as the neighbours on one side only use their house for the summer holidays and on the other side, the reformations make it unliveable for the owners while the work is going on and the lockdown restrictions make it inaccessible.  If we could only cause the terminal laryngitis of the bloody rat dog of another neighbour, we could even be sort of content.

     Traffic that passes us on the main road is at a minimum and there are few planes overhead.  For Spain, our surroundings are disturbingly silent – not for Britain perhaps, but for us, certainly!

I am missing my daily swim and am getting progressively more worried about the lack of exercise that I am taking.  Normally I would use my bike to get to my swim and back and then use the bike for a few shopping trips or whatever, so this enforced inaction is grating.  This afternoon I was driven to Take Measures.  I ventured out to the communal swimming pool and made a number of stately circuits of the pool leaning on my walking-stick.  I was alone with only the sound of a howling kid to keep me company.  Not literally, this one was in a flat next to our houses and I dread to think what his parents must be going through, his being too young fully to understand why his little life has been so suddenly cramped!  Good luck to them.  I did manage to get to my step goal according to my watch, so I must be very unsettled around the house!

     I will have to make circling of the pool a daily chore because it doesn’t look as though the relaxation of the restrictions on our movement are going to be any time soon.

     If the UK is going to shut the schools and cancel end of year examinations, it doesn’t really look too positive that our little class in Catalan is going to be restarted before Easter.  In theory our class could restart on the 30^th of this month, but that looks remote.  I think that it is unlikely that our class will restart this academic year, but who knows what will actually occur.

The PP and PSOE King (he was created by an agreement between the two political parties and nothing was put to the people) made a broadcast last night.  He said nothing about the continuing scandal that engulfs him and his elephant shooting father about off-shore accounts and kickbacks.  But his shameless broadcast did give the opportunity for right thinking people to show their disgust at the corruption by banging our saucepans.  It is wonderful how much penetrating sound is created by the simple application of wooden spoon to saucepan bottom!  The drive for an independent enquiry into the behaviour of the so-called king and his even more so-called emeritus king father continues.  The first call for an enquiry has been rejected on what I think are obviously spurious legal trickery grounds, but the parties of the real left are not letting a single obstacle stand in their way and are trying again.

     I think that the royal family in Spain has lost a great deal of popular support.  The antics of the king ‘emeritus’ towards the end of his reign before he was forced, by a surge of public disgust, to abdicate really did damage the prestige of the family.  The scandals that have involved other members of the family with consequent jail time have not helped.  I am sure that politicians will not put the continuation of the royal family to a public vote, but if they did, I think that the royal family would loose.  I think it is also getting closer and closer with the British version too, and when QE2 finally dies, the sobering prospect of Charles III will concentrate the minds of a large number of erstwhile monarchists towards the republican cause.  I hope.

I have started putting drafts of my most recent poems on smrnewpoems and that gives me the incentive to write more.  That came out as seeming to be more of a threat than an invitation to read!  But I assure you it is the former.

Toni is getting a trifle stir crazy with not going out, and it has only been four days!  Well, that four days is my computation.  Toni says that last weekend of Saturday and Sunday is actually counted in the lockdown, but I assumed that the lockdown was from Monday of this week.  Toni was with his mother on the Saturday and he came back to Castelldefels on Sunday afternoon, so his time in lockdown is questionable.  I am feeling quite chipper about my enforced detention at home, and I have done a quantity of writing: if nothing else confinement does concentrate the writing impulse. 

    

     Long may it continue.

Verbs and worse!

The number of tenses we, in our Spanish class, are supposed to know has now reached some form of critical mass.  God knows, I am unsure enough of the names for tenses in English let alone in a foreign language.  And let me tell you that you cannot be as sloppy in the formation of tenses in Spanish as you can in English.  You have to be exact.  Verb endings indicate who or what is happening without the use of pronouns.  So your listeners can tell.  Or, of course, not.

Well, we have recently had a test.  A written test.  I experienced some sort of brain freeze when I took this one and what little knowledge I had of various verb endings fled from my consciousness like die-hard Conservatives from social justice!

The reality of the disaster of the test was not the worst of my fears.  Our teacher goes in for what you could call refreshing honesty or horrific public denunciation.  During one soul-searing lesson last year it rapidly became apparent that she was going to read out our results openly for the rest of the class to hear.  As there were fewer verbs involved in that debacle I had more chance of passing, but it was a damn near thing!

This time I thought that the “revelations” of ineptitude were going to be confined to a rapid distribution and collection of our finished papers just before we disappeared for the weekend.  I gazed at my paper in blank incomprehension (in much the same way in which I wrote it) and handed it back in, relieved that the humiliation was personal and private.

Imagine my horror today when I saw the pile of papers reappear on the desk of the teacher.  My horror increased as the teacher berated us (yet again) for failing to use accents on interrogatives.  This, we were told, was basic.  We did it last year.  It is something that we MUST know.  She then singled out a selection of students, by name, and asked them why the accents had been omitted!  Wearing an expression of what I hoped was optimistic contrition I gazed at the teacher and waited for the Name of Shame to pinned to my shrinking confidence.  As I knew that in past tests I had used French words rather than their Spanish equivalents, and that my use of accents was always more impressionistic than accurate that the raised eyebrow of pedagogic incredulity would arch in my direction.

But it didn’t.  My paper was given back without condemnation!  I know that in a perfect narrative world, I would now be telling you that in fact I got one of the highest marks in the class and silly me for ever doubting my linguistic ability.  Alas, this is and was not the case.

I looked through my paper and whole sections had the mark that the British Eurovision song entry gets from the more unfashionable fragments of the late empire of the USSR.  I had however managed to garner unexpected marks though luck rather than ability and my written prose piece was enough to get me a scrape-by pass.  I said nothing and showed my paper to nobody and have resolved to Get To Grips With Verbs.

I do have a plan.  Of sorts.  It amounts to cobbling together information from a selection of books that I have in a final attempt to get the forms into my head.

I have to admit that sometimes the circumstances in which you use these Spanish verbs sounds like a selection from the screenplay of The Paleface, starring the right wing, yet supremely talented, Bob Hope.  I mean that bit in the film where he (a confirmed townie) is given advice when he goes out to take on the gunslinger in the Wild West.  Eventually all the advice gets mixed up and he mutters to himself a Surrealistic amalgam of the helpful hints. 

Well, it’s the same thing with verbs.  If you are an English speaker then you will usually find that, after having spoken, you will have had not a moment’s difficulty in being able to have used the most complicated verb formations in normal conversation.  Rather like the grammatical form of that last sentence, whose translation into Spanish is not something I can contemplate with any degree of equanimity.

I swear that we recently had an explanation given to us in Spanish about the use of one of the past tenses which went something like this: “This is the tense that you use for something in the past which happened before something else and which was an action completed in the past but not in the distant past.”  I admit that I might be making some of that up, but I am not making this one up, I am copying it from a text book: “This tense is used for an action or state of being that occurred in the past and lasted for a certain length of time prior to another past action.”  [Their italics]  I mean what chance do I have!

Whinging, however will decline no verbs, so the Desperate Plan for Linguistic Fluency must / has to / will have to / be put in place with some dispatch - or at least before the next test so that I can boost my overall mark!  We were also told today that our particular examination has a pass mark of 65% and not the lowly 40% that we have been working with heretofore.

Something to think about.

As indeed is the continuing situation of chaos in Catalonia.

On Saturday I went into Barcelona and joined a million people protesting about the imprisonment of political prisoners created by the government of Rajoy and PP (the systemically corrupt party he “heads”(sic.)

Rajoy reminds me of the late and completely unlamented Dr. (sic.) Ian Paisley.  Like that reverend bigot the only word that Rajoy seems to favour is “No!”  Rajoy’s idea of conciliation is police violence.  How much the barbaric police “action” cost during the election in Catalonia on October 1^st has now been declared a “State Secret”.  I wonder why?  Rajoy referred to the President of Catalonia as a liar as his way of encouraging dialogue, Rajoy’s speech is always in absolutes, and there is no room for compromise unless the other side capitulates entirely.

Even the Brexiteer liars in Britain seem to be amenable to some sort of compromise; perhaps they could talk to their sister party in Spain and get them to recognize that politics is the art of the possible!

Probably not.

Never mind, I can always turn to the Imperfecto de Indicativo or the Pretérito or even the Pluscamperfecto de subjunctivo to take my mind off it all!

Alternatively there is the second volume of the third level Art course in the Open University to read that arrived this afternoon - and that that book has pretty pictures in it too!  And let’s face it who could seriously turn away from a volume entitled, “Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600-1800”?  I for one certainly can’t.