Reason is gentler!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My barely restrained frothing at the mouth over what I see as the cringingly subservient attitude of many of my fellow countrymen to the royal family, to the past Queen and the present King, are put to shame by some of the well-tempered and constructive analysis by papers like The Guardian.

     While it is generally clear that most of these writers regard a hereditary monarch as an aberration in a mature democracy, a denial of the meritocracy that Britain has paid lip service to for generations, and a reinforcement of the inequalities that still hinder the development of the country, they are still able to write with a subtlety and depth of analysis which brings reason into the argument.

     While I am sure that the republican feelings in the country are growing year on year, I am also fairly convinced that the statistics show that a majority of the country would probably support the continuation of the monarchy if it were ever put to a vote.

     We have to work within the bounds of reality.  Much though I would like to see the institution of the monarchy abolished, it is unlikely to happen.  What is glaring obvious to me is just as obviously not to a large number of people.  But that is what we have got to work with.

     At this time of National Grief, or however you define what is going on at the moment with all responses being fuelled by the unending coverage of the BBC, it is perhaps not the time to call for all out republicanism!  But, at the same time, this so-called transition period as we move from one long serving monarch to a new/old king is surely a time for reflection.

     At the moment the political system seems paralyzed by the concerns for the funeral and succession but as one commentator pointed out, the poor don’t stop being poor for the days until after the funeral.  We need action now.  Action on the cost-of-living crisis and some sort of discussion about the way that we want to see the future of our political systems develop.

     When Macmillan was asked what the most difficult problems in government were, he replied, “Events, dear boy, events!”  There will always be “events” and there will always be reasons for inaction and for kicking difficult problems down the road or into the tall grass of whatever other metaphor you want to use for not doing something.  With people genuinely concerned about affording food and heat next winter; with a serious war in Europe; with political division more pronounced each day – they are plenty of reasons to feel overwhelmed.  But I keep telling myself that the most far-reaching reform of the education system was developed during the Second World War.  Whatever issues seem overwhelming at the moment, compared with the last War we are still sitting pretty, and we have more than enough time and space to consider and debate the future without resorting to panic!

     As guns are fired in salutes; as various officials read out proclamations; as the stately procession of the coffin of the Queen makes its progress through the country; as politicians speak to reassure us of continuity, and as newspapers and the media give worldwide graphic images of a particular vision of our country, everything appears to be slipping back into place. 

     Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

On an altogether more mundane note: I have swum earlish-morning in the community pool for a week (or one half) of the period that my regular indoor pool is closed for annual maintainance.

     I can tell that it is getting cooler and the jump into the pool to start my lengths (or circles in this pool) is something of a shock - but not an unbearable one, so I will continue to do it, until the breath is knocked out of my body by my first insertion!

     My smart watch is set to "Open water swimming" for the pool and seems to take a variable attitude to how far I swim.  On the first occasion I felt that I had not done my customary 1,500m, but I was more than prepared to believe my watch rather than my level of breathlessness.  Today, the obverse of that occurred and I felt (and believe) that I did far more than my allotted length.

     I miss the ritual of my usual morning swim, where I don't have to wait for a smidgeon of sunshine to make the ordeal a little more bearable!  And then there is my tea and baguette in the cafe, that I also miss - but I tell myself that I will be all the more appreciative when I finally return in another seven cold-water days!

 

 

 

Wet thought

 

 

 

 

 

 

My early-ish swim in the community pool continues, as I find an alternative to my local pool that is closed for annual maintenance.  Apart from two Dutch visitors who looked shocked to be at the pool so early in the morning and equally shocked to find someone else there, I have swum alone.  Which is good.  Not because I am misanthropic, but because the pool is too small to do reasonable lengths and the only way to get value for money for your effort is to swim in circles.  When you are swimming in rapid circles in a smallish pool, there really isn’t room for anyone else, not that that would stop me, as avoiding people gives an added interest to the almost terminal boredom of straight-line swimming.

     And, I’m saving money!  My original plan was to go and swim in the municipal pool in Gavà, where you have to buy a pre-paid card for a certain number of swims.  This plan may yet come into operation as I am watching the temperature and the weather: I don’t swim in the cold or the rain.  I may be a dedicated swimmer but I am not fanatical!

 

 

 

Yesterday evening was another meeting of the Barcelona Poetry Group.  This time we had two Americans, two Indians, a Catalan and a Welshman and a dog.

     I had a relatively clear run through from Castelldefels to get to the meeting and, arriving early I was told about the medical issues that have recently been affecting the dog.  Today a further visit to the vet and hopefully some good news about how to proceed with her treatment.  She is now 11 years old, but looks younger and is still spritely.  We live in hope!

     The next meeting will be in October (we have a meeting a month, though a few years ago they were weekly) and I am responsible for choosing the topic and selecting a couple of poems for reading and discussion.

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

“Dreams and Nightmares” was the theme for last night’s meeting and the discussion was wide ranging, thoughtful and thought making!  I realise that this group is the only opportunity I have for an in-depth consideration of literary topics, and I truly value it.

     The poems we read were “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes – a fairly famous poem and one surely known by generations of American school children – and “Scarecrow on Fire” by another American poet called Dean Young.

     The title of Young’s poem was immediately arresting and put me in mind of Dalí’s painting “The Burning Giraffe” which haunted my as a kid after seeing it in (I think) The Story of Art for the first time, and Hughes’ poem has Surrealistic touches throughout.  It may also be significant that the image of the scarecrow is often used as a metaphor for Man, “an empty coat upon a stick” in Yeats phrase, a worthless thing unless “soul clap its hands and sing” to give meaning to existence.

     There is a great deal of negative language in this poem: disappearing, alleyways, small, graveyard, black angel, goodbye, last, winter, nothingness, stitching, vomiting, nightmare, illusion, dirt, wound, but there is also the assertion of “Hell, even now I love life” and the last words of the poem “This is my soul, freed.”  But there are no exclamation marks after either statement and that omission lessens the force of the positive.  And his freed soul is linked to water boiling, to evaporation, to vapour, just like his line where he says that “Maybe poems are made of breath” an exhalation into emptiness, just as earlier in the poem he asserted that, “We all feel / suspended over a drop into nothingness.”

     This is a dense poem, rich in images and associations from a poet about whom I want to know more!

     A key part of the evening is a short meditation on the theme, accompanied by a randomly chosen essential oil.  This is a nod to Californian Hippydom and was instituted by the founder of the group as a defiant reminder of her home state, and is continued because, well, it’s a nice idea.

     After the meditation there is a period allocated for writing.  This can be one the theme or not as the individual desires, and the end results of the writing can be shared or not again as the individual decides.

     I wrote on the theme and came up with the following.

 

 

The Dream

 

It is unnoticed ease,

a facile roll of incidents,

a wave of disparates,

that link and coalesce to make

a comfort carapace

that frames fragile reality.

A passageway located

Nowhere and yet Everywhere.

A known unknown.

A shell, a wall, a hill –

and all, yes all,

within a moment’s touch;

though sense is different.

 

Dimensions wax and wane

to morning’s death.

 

 

Something to work on!

 

     And now to start thinking about the theme for the next poetry meeting.  Among my first thoughts were “Courage” “Fear” and “Food” – gives great scope for the poems that we can talk about.  I will think on!

 

 Barcelona Poetry Group can be reached via this website:

 

 

https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/barcelona-english-speaking-poetry-group/?_cookie-check=XfrmrxLlMnboHNW7

 

First, catch your metaphor!

 

The Internet is sometimes like an over eager and terminally earnest student scientist friend who tries to answer seriously and comprehensively a casual question like, “So, how do neutron bombs actually work then?”  And fails to notice the growing hysteria in his listeners as they realize that they are stuck in a comprehensively incomprehensible monologue.  And I speak from experience!

So, I was thinking about my activity in our outside pool.  Our pool is surrounded by trees, including the pine trees that give their name to our district and, although these trees are evergreen they also discard their needles throughout the year – and a fair quantity of them fall into our pool.  We do pay for our community pool to be cleaned and serviced, but the constant rain of pine needles and cones is a problem on a daily basis and our pool persons are not that frequent visitors.

If you are a regular swimmer you will know how unsettlingly irritating a single strand of free-floating hair can be, so imagine the shock of a series of sharp pointed pine needles can be – especially if you have just come from our stretch of the Med where for the past week or so we have been dealing with an outbreak of medusas (jellyfish) that do sting, so the instinctive reaction to anything sharp in water is to fear future pain.

My major swim is in our local pool (medusa free) where I generally swim a metric mile and feel quite smug about it, so our community pool is more relaxed semi-swimming.  And this is where the thoughts at the beginning of this writing come in.

As I dislike being pricked by pine needles, I of course, assume that no one else likes it either.  I have therefore taken, in my community pool swims, to skim the surface collecting the pine needles and throwing them out of the water.

From time to time I perform (what I consider to be) an elegant surface dive to retrieve and discard the seed cases and fractured cones that litter the floor of the pool.  So, in my mind, after the mindless lengths that I do in the swimming pool, I feel that I have a sort of purpose in our community pool.  Just like those fish that are kept in aquaria solely to clean the place up.

And I should have left it at that. 

But no, I decided to examine my image in a little more detail and typed a fateful enquiry into the box and got sucked in to a whole wealth of information in the same way that I did every time I ever ventured to look inside the Guinness Book of Records.  But the digression with the Book of Records is of a different nature to that in the Internet.  I have started off trying to find out the size of the largest uncut diamond ever found and ended up being fascinated by the wing span of birds.  With the Internet you tend to go deeper into the same thing in a profoundly superficial way!

I now know more about sand sifting stars, gobies, Cory doras, freshwater catfish, bluestreak cleaner wrass, grandpa snails, suckermouth catfish and Nerite snails, than is strictly necessary for a quiet life.  I have also discovered an intense community of fish lovers who are truly preoccupied with the problems of aquarium cleaning.  I mean really, truly, preoccupied!

 Think that I have realized a valuable life lesson: metaphors and similes are approximations and, unless you are a Shakespeare, the depth of your metaphor only reaches down a single level of association and the further you research your initial thought the further, like the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella - so to speak.

What now!

One definition of ‘hardship’ is having to use the outdoor community pool rather than my rather more congenial local swimming centre.  I realize that this definition is not one that will be enthusiastically shared by those, for example in the UK, where the number of outdoor community pools for private citizens is somewhat restricted.  And even if they were in greater supply than they are, when would an ‘outdoor’ pool ever be used?

And that brings me to the serial untruthfulness of my friends in Britain.  It is a ‘given’ that any telephone conversation between Catalonia and the UK will touch on the weather.  Even though we have had an indifferent early and late spring with weather that all of us grumbled about, I refuse to believe that the weather in my country of birth is markedly better.  Yet, in every telephone conversation I have to listen to my British friends say (yet again) that “Today” (or more tellingly “yesterday”) has/had been glorious!”  [I know that the quotation marks in that sentence are not exactly correct, but merely thinking about them brings back memories of fiendishly difficult exercises on punctuation in Form 4 or 5 that took sick minds to devise - and certainly created nausea in the stomachs of hapless pupils who were called on to ‘solve’ them]  At first we took such statements on trust, but then the suspicious nature of the consistency of response encouraged us to be a little more circumspect and we started to check up on these statements of nationalistic climate one-upmanship.  And behold! the facts would invariably cast (at the very least) doubt on the assertions of flawless skies and tropical temperatures.

It was refreshingly direct, when my cousin Margaret came to Castelldefels, she sent a selfie by the pool or on the beach to the folk back in Maesteg and, at the same time she checked the weather.  Rain, rain, and more rain.  Or, as one of her correspondents put it, “It’s pissing down here!”

It’s odd, isn’t it - the weather is a topic of national conversation, whose awfulness is bewailed at every opportunity.  We hark back to the ‘Great Summer of 1976’ and somehow seem to ignore the fact that it is a warm experience of over forty years ago!  But let foreign weather attempt to better our (for want of a better word) climate and suddenly we become all protective and start rationalizing ‘light rain’ as something that can be ignored, or ‘a patch of blue’ as a sunny day.  Trump’s alternative facts have a lot to answer for.

I have a simple way of showing the difference between the weather in Cardiff and Catalonia.  Every day I use my bike (admittedly an electric one, but I still have to pedal) to go on an epic journey to my local swimming pool.  I do not use my bike if it is raining.  So far this year, I have had to use the car on four occasions.  I ask you, members of the jury, how many days would the bike have been kept at home in Britain?

Of course, you could say that my continuing concern with the weather is a form of displacement activity to encourage my thinking of something other than my health.

Six months ago I was diagnosed with thrombosis, embolism and strained heart.  Eight days in hospital; two weeks total rest; weeks of gradual exercise; hospital appointments; blood tests; health centre visits, a doctor’s visit to the house (!) {sic.}; twice daily injections etc etc etc.  The six-month period is a time for more evaluative tests to see exactly how I am doing.

The last visit to the hospital doctor (as opposed to my local doctor) was generally positive: blood, pee and heart all passed muster.  Now on to leg and lungs!  And it’s the lungs that are the worry as the damage that the embolisms did might well be permanent and if that is so, Other Things Will Need to be Done.  What these things are, I know not of.  But they will be the thorough irritation of my world.  There are Dark Mutterings about some sort of ‘mask’ that might have to be worn during the nights, but I was told not to worry because the newer ones are almost silent.  If that was meant to comfort me, it did not.  My ever-active imagination has already sketched out some form of modern/medieval form of nocturnal torture instrument!

So, while I get browner, as an actual and real sign that our weather is really quite good, and stride about looking the soul of health, I still have nagging worries that I will have to take my local doctor’s injunction that I will have to “remake my world” and live with the consequences of what happened six months ago.

The visible signs of this remade life are that I now walk with a stick (when I remember to take it) and I wear a pressure stocking (when I am shamed into putting it on) and my pathological hatred of the act of walking is now a sort of medical imperative.  I do not look ill.  I do not feel ill.  My swimming times are the same or better than those before January.  But it is difficult to feel totally at ease when you consider that my basic medication is rat poison.  Admittedly it is packaged in little white tablets that can be easily broken into quarters to match the ever-changing daily dose, but the fact remains that I am ingesting rat poison.  On a daily basis.  You might be interested to know that Warfarin killed the rats by causing internal bleeding, and it is that ability to thin the blood that is supposed to help those with thrombosis etc.  And I hope that it is.  This month will demonstrate exactly how effective the drug has been.

I have also had to change my diet.  I am on a low fat and no salt regime and I haven’t had a drink of alcohol since January.  Admittedly I was told that I could have an occasional small glass of red wine - but I would rather do without than be so glaringly abstemious!  No salt is just about impossible unless you cook all your own food and I have less than no intention of doing that, so I tell the waiters that I need to have a ‘no salt’ dish and believe in their veracity.  Well, don’t knock it, I’m not dead yet!

It is ironic that in the The Guardian today (the on-line version that I read) there is a report that suggests that the NHS could save billions by encouraging doctors not to over prescribe and not to encourage patients to have series of tests and examinations that may not be strictly necessary.  I think that the succession of tests that I have had in Catalonia and the level of medical care that I have received are in marked contrast to the service that I would have had if I had still been living in Cardiff.

As a Baby Boomer (Leading Edge) I am of the generation that is now entering into the age when the availability of medical services are going to be called on with greater regularity.  On the 70^th Anniversary of the NHS now is the time to start funding the service as it should be funded and, incidentally, to be taken out of the hands of a Conservative Party (“lower than vermin”) that did everything in its power to try and halt its foundation.

You see the way my mind works.  I start talking about the weather and end up with the NHS.  But thinking about it, they are both linked, and the more I think about it, the more one appears to be a metaphor for the other!  But such literary niceties are for another post!