Cold days, cool thoughts

 

 

It’s cold and wet and blustery and dark.  A thoroughly depressing day but, as I sulked my way upstairs, I looked through a window and noticed the two dogs who live in the flats opposite us, sitting together at the top of a flight of steps, just inside the overhang of the building watching the weather with patient indefatigability.

     Dogs, especially large dogs seem to be good at patience.  Rat dogs are of course more known for their insistent irritability and hyper-sensitivity, and one barely counts them (and that is my being kind) as dogs at all.  No.  But smaller dogs with a touch of Collie in them are more than acceptable and accepting. 

     Take, for example, the dog in the restaurant we went to on Sunday (isn’t it usually ONLY guide dogs that are allowed into restaurants? But let it pass, let it pass) where the dog (some sort of Collie cross) settled down almost immediately, finding himself a place between his owner’s foot and the window, and there he stayed for the course of the meal sustained only by a few pats and a scrap or two and a water bowl provided by the staff in the restaurant.

     Far be it from me to draw a parallel between a young dog and a young human, but the difference in acceptable behaviour by the latter compared with the former when grown-ups are around in a social public situation is telling!

     I should however take some guidance from the dogs opposite where their patience in this instance (usually they are yappy buggers) is to be commended, and indeed emulated.

     I half-joke with my Catalan friends that my ‘contract’ with the Generalitat in Catalonia stipulates sun for 365 days a year, and that I have an undoubted right to a refund for every shitty day I have to experience here!

     Although the weather can be bad here in Catalonia, indeed as I type the rain is lashing down outside and we have had overly dramatic thunder and lightning, usually every day will give you a moment of sunshine to see you through the bad weather interludes.  Today for example, although the morning was cold and cloudy, there was also some hazy sunshine – not enough to tempt me to sit outside with the smokers to have my cup of tea after my early morning swim, but still, sunshine.

     It didn’t last and after lunch the rain set in and hasn’t stopped.  Yet.  But I preserve my composure by putting total faith into the quick return of scraps of sunshine to keep me sane.

 

 

 

The saga of The Christmas Lunch has now developed a further chapter as another, and who knows even better, location has been found and we are going up to Terrassa tomorrow to give the menu del dia a try. 

     My most pressing concern is not the food, but the parking.  With my knees in their present condition, each step is something to take into careful consideration.  And there are lots of quite steep hills in Terrassa as well, and while going up slopes is bearable, the going down (even slight) slopes is not.

     Whatever we think about the quality of the food tomorrow, a table for the Christmas Lunch has been booked at the restaurant and so we are hoping and praying for the best.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Duolingo app continues to dominate our lives, and some of Toni’s hysteria (what else would you call the decision to take up Navajo in the expectation of earning simple points to add to his total) has rubbed off on me and forced me to make a doggedly determined assault on the points total of the people in front of me. 

     The end result of that is that my index finger of my right hand is rapidly growing a callous with the screen-jabbing finger writing I have had to do to amass the points to ensure my ‘safety’ in the top ten to guarantee my progress through to the Sapphire League!

     My enthusiasm is bound to wane soon, but until it does, I am gaining by going over yet again those points in the acquisition of a language that I have already gone through many times before. 

     Some day they will stick.  Please!

Warm thoughts on a cold day

 

O

 

 

 

 

 

Today has been one of those November autumn days that you think you remember from your childhood: flawless blue skies, bright sun, and cold.  The world seems sharper, and the air is just a little bit more bracing.

     It says something for living in Catalonia, and living by the sea, that yesterday was the first night that we added an eiderdown to the cover sheet under which we sleep!

     The eiderdown is thin and stitched and was originally my grandmother’s, and possibly handed down to her too, it’s an antique, and still efficient and not looking anything like its age.

     It reminds me of the times that I used to sleep in my grandparents’ house under that eiderdown, in Maesteg, in the small back bedroom in a bed which I only later discovered was an old four-poster with the posts cut off. 

     My mattress was feather filled, and something into which you sunk, and which I now understand is not very good for your back and posture while sleeping, but I was only a kid and all I thought about was the joy of soft acceptance.  I can’t now recall if I felt anything about the difference of my modern bed in Cardiff and the anachronism that I slumbered in in Maesteg.  I think that forgetfulness is more to do with the fact that kids are able to compartmentalise experiences, and link places with circumstances and not extrapolate to continuous ‘everyday life’.

     An example I always like to cite concerns Easter.  Every Easter my parents would buy me an Easter egg and I would be delighted.  Easter eggs were Easter eggs to me, they were made by Cadbury’s had silver foil and them and the chocolate tasted different to that in the chocolate bars. 

     But, one year a friend of my mother gave me an Easter egg that came in its own satin finish box with a thin white ribbon holding the lid, with the egg itself positioned in the centre of the box in its own cardboard cut-out place with the chocolate arranged around it!  It was opulence and luxury that I had never experienced.  It was overwhelming!

     The magnitude of the experience might be gauged by the fact that I managed to get over my initial reluctance to ‘spoil’ anything by actually eating the chocolate and dutifully consumed the lot, but I did keep the box for years.  And years.

     My parents had never given me anything so splendid for Easter but, and this is the interesting thing for me, I did not expect such a glorious, boxed egg to be repeated the next year when only my parents provided the eggy gifts.  I did not take the exception to suddenly become the norm.  The present was from an ‘outsider’, it was something different, and I was more than happy with what my parents provided.

     Although I stoutly maintain that I was not ‘spoiled’ by my parents, I have come to realize, as I have heard other people’s experiences, that I had a fortunate upbringing.  I lacked for nothing important and, while I did not get everything I wanted when I wanted it, I had most reasonable requests granted.

     So, with the kid’s ability to say ‘this happens here, but not necessarily there’ you can navigate a complex series of domestic and relationship conundrums.  The only sad thing is that degree of intelligent accommodation does not always inform your later adult life – unless you take the ‘that happened then, but not necessarily now’ variation on a childhood acceptance!

We exist too, Mr Johnson!

 

 

 

 

 

Only a two-faced lazy chancer like Johnson could appeal to “the power of sweet reason” to get a Brexit agreement “over the line” without apparent recognition of irony.  This is because there is no real link between what comes out of his mouth and any discernible link to what might be loosely termed “reality” in the Conservative dystopia that passes for politics nowadays.

     “Reason” is the very last thing that has driven the Brexiteer Vandals, they have behaved like berserkers drunk on their intoxicating brew of bigoted self-interest and blind adherence to a twisted ideology of purist Brexit where mere reality is relegated to a lowly, nay insignificant place in what passes for their thinking.

     Given Johnson’s morbid narcissism it is impossible to tell whether his assessment of a Brexit agreement as “looking very, very difficult at the moment” is yet another of his macho taunts to the EU showing that he can play the poker hand with steely nerves, or whether he is really preparing us for the fact that we are not actually going to get an agreement as all.

     The inherent contradictions (or lies as it might be fairer to call them) in the Brexiteers’ position have always been there.  The questions that are the sticking points today have been the areas of confusion from the start, and in the years that the Brexiteers have had to make their plans clear in how they were going to work, they have done virtually nothing, except talk incoherent, self-defeating nonsense.  They have no ideas about how to get what they want (when they actually know what it is that they want) except through tantrums and unreasonable demands.

     And in the middle (sometimes, when he can be bothered) is the joke of a man who wears the title of prime minister. 

 

Johnson must know that he is in a no-win situation.  To gain the agreement of the rabid Brexiteers in the Conservative party, he will lose the majority of the ‘moderate’ (whatever that means in Conservatism nowadays) majority that makes up the Parliamentary party.  If he gets anything like a reasonable (whatever that means in terms of Brexit nowadays) agreement, he will have the right-wingers frothing at the mouth.  Whatever he manages to get from a reasonable agreement to a full repudiation of Brexit to a no-agreement Brexit, he is going to be pilloried.

     You might say, with some justice, that he fully deserves to be attacked en mass; the only thing that drove him to espouse the Brexit ‘idea’ was naked cynicism wrapped in all-devouring ambition.  Public service and the country didn’t get a look in.  So, we could stand back and watch the blood bath and say, “jolly good riddance!”

     Except we can’t.  As John Donne stubbornly reminds us, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent” – the irony of the word ‘continent’ being used when you  think about Brexit is tellingly ironic!   

     Although Johnson doesn’t give a damn about us, the ordinary people, we cannot share his wealthy distain for the realities of lived life, we are directly affected by his decisions and the decisions of his party.  Johnson may be concerned with his self-image and be concerned about how posterity sees him; we have to live in the world and country that he is making.  His wealth largely insulates him from the financial and practical effects of his policies: he is not concerned about the problems of being able to live, he is more concerned with how he appears.

     When all is said and done, I simply do not trust Johnson.  I don’t trust him as a politician and I don’t trust him as a person.  He lacks morality.  He is a liar.  He is a deceiver.  He is an opportunist.  And he is deciding my future.

     It is a sad and almost tragic thing to say, but I do put my trust in one aspect of Johnson’s modus vivendi, he is a betrayer.  He betrays because, as one commentator put it, he lives in the moment and the past is not of any real concern to him.

     And that is our hope!  Johnson will produce an agreement that goes back on virtually everything that he has said because that is what he does!

     It’s a frail hope, but I think it is the only one that we have because “sweet reason” left the room many years ago.

 

Today has been, continues to be, cold.  13c.  It rained briefly last night, but today we have had fluffy clouds with patches of blue – not much actual sunshine, but no rain.

     The weather is important because today is a holiday and this time (as opposed to the weekend) people from outside Castelldefels can legally come and walk along the paseo.  It is an opportunity for bars and restaurants to try and get some cash flow before Christmas.  We went to a restaurant, one of our usual haunts, and it was quite full (with the 50% limit), there were certainly people around and yesterday there were television pictures of queues of people waiting to go into shopping centres to get their Christmas gifts organized.

     Which begs the question of what people are going to do during the holiday period.  As I have said before, I think that the next month or so is going to be critical in the way that the pandemic pans out.  If people regard Christmas as a time to be laxer than they already are, then the middle of January will show a massive jump in infections.

     Realistically people are not going to be vaccinated until the middle of next year.  I think that I may be lucky if I manage to be vaccinated by April, as I manage to tick a few boxes for the early application of the needle!  This means that we will be well into the summer of next year before the majority of the population have had their double injections.

     But what I am hearing are sighs of relief that a vaccine, or series of vaccines, are being rolled out and that the horrors of the pandemic are numbered.  Which they are not.  We are not safe until everyone is safe and we have been told by numerous authorities that Covid is a virus that is not going to be eradicated and is something that we are going to have to live with.  For ever.  That hard truth has not found its way into many consciousnesses.  And that means more death.

 

On a different topic entirely.  I am trying to find out how to treat the rather exotic book cover that I talked about yesterday.  This cover is made of suede and is falling to pieces.  I am not sure what to apply to the cover to preserve it.  Would leather cream or polish do anything?  Any thoughts gratefully received!

 

 

 

 

Culture and lights and rain

New Normal, 1st week, Friday 

It rained during the night and the pavements was still wet when I got ready to go to the pool for my daily      swim, but it didn’t rain while I was cycling.  While I was swimming it rained again and as had my cup of tea and a bocadillo there were distinct spots of rain that I could see falling into the standing puddles.  But when it was time for me to leave the café and do my daily cycle to Port Ginesta, the rain stopped again, and I even had some fitful sun during the ride before I got home.

     The day has become steadily colder and the skies have become less and less welcoming – but my point is that it didn’t rain on me.  There is a spaciousness in the dismal type of weather that we sometimes get here in Castelldefels that gives the reluctant cyclist enough of a gap to get the necessary exercise done in the dry – even if the bottom of one’s legs do get a little gritty from the sand-in-solution splashed on them as I make my stately way through the shallow puddles on the paseo.

     It is the lack of perceived vindictiveness in the Castelldefels weather that (even in the cold) warms my heart.  I am now so used to an orderly sequence of seasons, with a marked lack of rain whatever the season, that I am not sure that I could get used to typical Cardiff weather now.

     On one of my last visits to the city, I noticed the amount of moss growing in the shadier nooks and crannies, thriving in damp conditions.  I do not thrive in damp conditions, unless they are in temperature-controlled swimming pools!

     I am still wearing T-shirt, shorts and sandals – though I do add a windcheater when I am on the bike – I may be hardy but I am not stupid!

 

Christmas is a pressing topic of urgent consideration, by not being talked about.  I have no idea what plans are made or are being made to celebrate (a word so out of place in the disaster of 2020) the occasion.  Our typical Christmas since we have been together in Castelldefels (apart from one trip to Gran Canaria) is to go to Terrassa for a family lunch, in recent years in a local restaurant.  It looks, clearly, as if this is going to be impossible, and probably illegal this time round.  It is difficult to know how many households will be allowed to mingle and the age range of possible diners is from teenage to over 70.

     It is perfectly understandable for Toni to want to see his family during Christmas, as he has seen little of them in the flesh for months.  But the risks of going to Terrassa (even if we are allowed to do so) are great.

     I suppose it is all speculation at the moment, but in this country plans seem to be made almost on the hoof, in spite of there having been plenty of time to consider viable alternatives.  I hate being bounced into doing something!

     And then there are the presents.  In spite of one’s justified reluctance to use the well-known Luxembourgian delivery company, it does make life so much easier and sometimes it is worth it just for the savings on postage!  But we have to get the orders in quickly as god alone knows how many others will be using the same delivery point to make the Christmas season seem that bit more normal.  But again, everything will be left until the last moment and . . . 

     Well, I’ve said my bit, we will have to wait and see just how this all pans out.

 

I’ve had some ideas about how to make the Catalogue Raisonné useful for further writing.  Although I will add to it in the future, I think that there is enough there now for me to start working on the basic format.

     As is my usual way, I can also start writing the Introduction.  As I am not entirely sure where I am going with this, the writing of an Introduction might seem to be counter intuitive, but I have found in the past that such a piece of work sometimes clarifies my thoughts and, anyway, as it will be written on the computer it is simplicity itself to dump, change or edit!

     Well, I say that, but my Word is proving to be somewhat difficult.  The program itself is slow and, as I am working on an Apple machine, I see that damned multicoloured revolving circle too often at the moment, which means that everything freezes while the computer works its way through god knows what before it allows me to start writing again.

     I suspect that the catalogue is the faulty element in the equation.  Each item in the catalogue has a thumbnail illustration to accompany it.  I always choose the ‘reduce the size’ option when I save pictures, especially when I take them on my mobile phone, so that any documents that I use them in does not become too unwieldy, but I think that I might have made a few omissions in the compiling of the thing and so it is absurdly overloaded.  I am sure that there is a way of stripping out some of the quality without reducing the effectiveness of the catalogue, but that is something for the future.

     But for the moment, I am happy with what I have and I will start using the raw material to get some sort of sequence going.

 

We went out this evening to have something to eat in one of our regular haunts.  Normally this would not be an occasion of note, but this is only the second time we have eaten out in weeks; the used-to-be normal becomes extraordinary when it is denied; and is even odd when some semblance of old ways are restored.

     We had an opportunity to view the Christmas lights in the centre of the town and surely this is one extravagance that has to be justified in the hope that it lifts spirits.  Even though it was finally raining, they looked good.  They looked good, and appropriate!

 

Our timing was perfect in that we arrived back in the house with a couple of minutes to spare before the National Theatre performance-

 

Official Death of England: Delroy | Free National Theatre Full Performance

12,240 views1 hour ago

Watch Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ Death of England: Delroy, an ‘urgent, timely solo work, performed with firecracker energy’ (★★★★ Evening Standard) by actor Michael Balogun. The play explores a Black working class man searching for truth and confronting his relationship with Great Britain

 

It is still available for the next 24 hours free!  It is a tour de force and you should watch it!

 

 

 

 

Tracking exercise makes it real!

 New Lockdown, Third Week, Sunday

 

 

 

 

Even colder this morning, though still stubbornly bright and sunny.  For the first time this year I could have done with something more substantial than sandals on my feet – but I will persevere.  Last year I wore sandals throughout the year and I will attempt to do the same this year too!

     On the exercise front, tomorrow is the first day for weeks that I will be able to go to the local (indoor) pool to do my customary metric mile.  That means that I will be getting up at 6.15 to be ready for the first swim at 7 am.  In spite of the weeks of enforced lie-ins that I have been able to enjoy, I haven’t.  Enjoyed them that is.  My internal clock is set for an early rise and my staying in bed seems forced and unnatural.  That is not to say that I get up that early with a merry whistle and a song in my heart – but I do feel better for it.  Eventually.

     Getting up that early does mean that I set off on my bike in the dark to get to the pool.  I always think that gives an extra bonus point on the “if it’s more difficult it must be doing you good” principle, and you do feel a certain smugness at wobbling your way along a generally deserted road with only a single beam to light to guide you through the darkness.

     It will be a relief to get back (literally) into the swim of things.  And, I think if my reading of the new regulations is correct, the café of the pool will be open for me to take my cup of tea at the end of my swim and just before my bike ride.  That little part of ‘normality’ is enough to make me somewhat satisfied.

     Talking of normal and new normal, the central government has been setting out their plans for the mass inoculation of the population.  Just talking about plans like this is encouraging, it gives the impression that we are now on some sort of roller coaster of administrative functionality where everything will just slip into place and everything will be hunky-dory by the Spring of next year – or that might be just one of the ‘saving lies’ that I tell myself to keep myself sane.  Hard to tell if it’s working!

 

 

 

 

One of the problems that face the modern technologically aware person is what watch face to have on your smartwatch.  Do you stick with conventionality and get something which looks like a digital rendering of an expensive watch face, sometimes with the logo of an expensive watch worked into the design?  Or do you go with the technology and have some all-colour over-informative face where the mere time is almost an extraneous detail in a wealth of numbers, colours, bar charts and moving bits?

     In early iterations of my present watch, a Fitbit, or possible Amazfit GR2, or something – the choice of faces was severely limited.  Yes, there was an option to customize the different elements that made up the face, but that was for the more advanced users who were not put off at the first signs of defeat.  I settled for a choice of the few designs that were built-in to the watch itself.  All you had to do was select, not create.

     You soon learned that what looked good in the app looked very different when it was portrayed by the limited number of pixels of your watch face.  Vibrant colours faded to insignificant pastels, and everything is so small!  With restrictions you soon found that even though there might be a dozen watch faces to choose, most were inadequate in some way or plain ugly.

     I tried to list what I wanted on a watch face apart from the time (and I had a series of ‘wants’ for the way that the time was displayed) and the essentials I decided that I did not want to do without were indications for: day, date, steps and battery power.  Anything else was extra and probably confusing.

     There is also the problem of the ‘always on’ aspect of the watch face.  Ever since the days of the good old Pebble watch, I have been used to an ‘always on’ face and very good battery life.  The Apple watch for example, always coming out the top or near the top of any list of ‘best’ smartwatches, has a battery life of a day, or more if you take all the power saving measures that make you wonder why you bought a smartwatch in the first place, if your discarded old self-winding watch gives you more!

     My present watch has an option for ‘always on’ but it does use up battery more quickly.  I have also found that not all watch face options are equal in their battery use, so I have set an ‘off’ period for the ‘always-on’ during the hours that I am asleep.  There is also a limited function for the ‘always on’ watch face when you are not using the watch as a smart watch.  At present all it shows is the digital time and an indication of PM.  If I twist my wrist then the screen bursts into full colour and all sorts of information is conveyed – including all of the elements that I consider essential.

     The problem with this watch is that, after the last update, there is now a superabundance of watch faces to choose.  I have meandered my way through them and chosen one or two to see what they look like in reality, but I have had to be stringent in my application of what I need and expect to allow me to reject the colourful blandishments of vulgarly attractive faces.

     My real problem is that, as far as watches are concerned, I am never satisfied.  Or you could say that is my real delight.  There is always the prospect of a new watch fulfilling all my present and future requirements and I will find watch buying peace.

     I hope not!