"Corby" - a name and a trigger.

 One hundred and twenty-seven pounds sterling.  One hundred and twenty-seven pounds to renew my aged passport.  Not counting the expense of the car park and the cost of the postage to send my old passport to Corby.

Corby.  A name from the past.  The outré sister town of the so much more prim Kettering.  I remember during my first year of full time teaching in the Boys School in Kettering that I much preferred going to Corby than going in to town in Kettering - though, of course, Kettering was the place with the Waitrose and not, emphatically not, Corby.  

There was a more immediate vitality about Corby, and then there was always the shock of hearing the Scottish accent as the predominant one in that town in the centre of England.  I was told that a steel works had shut in Scotland and the work force flocked to Corby to take jobs in the steelworks there and the accent had persisted.  I was also told, to take taxis and ignore the busses there as "Corby was rough".  

I never found it so myself and often scoffed at people in Kettering who wondered at my bravery in chancing my arm in such a place.  So, as my old passport was stamped and slotted into the system in Castelldefels to get it to Corby and get a new one sent to me, I supposed that the Passport Office situated there was a government initiative to try and find some work for the folk who having moved from Scotland to find work in an open steelworks after their own had closed, had to think about upping sticks again after the Corby works closed.

It brings back a whole slice of my early working life, whose memories are now more of a melange of impressions rather than distinct narratives of day to day existence.

I can no longer find my way about the haunts that marked my home in Saint Botolph's House in Barton Seagrave and my way to school and into town.  Not unreasonable you could say as my memories are half a century old and based on my being there for little over a year before I moved back to Cardiff and promotion, in a city that would see me to the end of my teaching career.

The passport is being renewed because I am going back to Cardiff for a pre-birthday Birthday Party, and in digging out my passport (not used for years) discovering that it expires in August of 2025.

My passport is a burgundy one, with the European Union stamped across the top of it, a passport that gave access to a bewildering number of countries until the narrow-minded cretins of Brexit ensured that our insular geographical situation was mirrored in our political and social states.  

My new passport (one hundred and twenty-seven pounds worth of it) will be a British Beggared one, and my saving grace is that I moved to Spain before the idiocy of Brexit limited possibilities and therefore I have permanent residence and a card to show for it.  It means that when I come back into the country I show my residence card first so that my passport is not stamped, and therefore does not start the countdown of the time that I am allowed to spend in Spain.

The longer I spend time away from the country of my birth, the less Britain remains a living reality in my mind, and the more it appears as a sort of stage setting for past memories.

I don't really know the price of anything.  I understand that the price of 20 fags is now astronomical, though it is still not enough to repay the lost revenue from early death that the cancer of smoking steals.  I don't know how much a pint is, or how much a loaf of bread is.  I am used to Catalan prices and I am prepared to be shocked by how much the staples now cost.

But this visit is about Time, and my seventy-fifth birthday, and more importantly about seeing friends, ex-colleagues and family whose lives have gone on without my day to day involvement!

There are some people where no matter how long the time has been since last seen, to meet up is to be back where the relationship has always been.  This is something that is especially relevant considering the death of my old friend of more than sixty years, Richard.

In writing about him for his funeral service I went back to the essential triviality of shared experience, the nothing occasions that mean everything - the slight and the transient that stay with you for ever.

The death of friends of such long standing, are not tragic, they are unthinkable, in so far as it is so difficult to imagine a constant presence (in spite of geographical distance) not being there.  It takes time to realise the loss, with memory fighting to fill the gaps to kid you that nothing has really changed.

One part of my mind does, obviously, register the loss, and that will give an added urgency to the meet-up in early October (the passport office and the good folk of Corby allowing) in seeing people who have not remained the same age as I last remember seeing them, but, like me have lived the years through.

I remember talking with my Uncle Eric (a teacher who was retired and drawing a pension for longer than he had been in teaching!) once telling me that he had watched his entire generation, one by one, die off until, as he said, "I think that there is only one boy I was with in Junior School left, and I'm not sure that he is still with us."  

This was a man who was evacuated after Dunkirk, in a much less well-known chaotic rescue mission from Cherbourg, and whose stories about the farcical, quasi-Surrealistic experience of fighting in an all-out war had to be heard to be believed.

Unlike my father and my grandfather, I have not had to fight in any war.  Indeed I was a decade too late to have the horror of Conscription forced on me, and I was able to toddle my way from school to university lubricated by free milk and free tuition.

Although I seem to have digressed, it isn't really a diversion from the main theme of memory and responsibility: the memory of what was and the responsibility to articulate a response to who you are now.

And if that sounds a little pretentious and high-fauluting, then I should also say that the return to Cardiff is also the opportunity to have a decent Indian Meal and to drink a real pint of authentic Bitter, preferably a pint of Brains SA!

The Coming Storm

 

 

          

 

 

 

 

 

Are people in denial?  Do they really think that the winter is going to be just another season?  Why isn’t there much more outrage at the threat of heat/food/accommodation poverty that IS going to take out a chunk of the population not only in the UK but also here in Catalonia?

     It is easy in an affluent seaside resort like one in which I live to see little evidence of deprivation.  The shops are open and seem to be doing well, people are coming in their drove to the beaches and exclusive new development along part of the beachfront is full steam ahead.

     And I suppose that is part of the point.  If you have money then much of the hand to mouth poverty is going to pass you by. 

     Am I going to stop plonking my bum on my expensive opera seat for the next season?  No.  Not yet. 

     But do I notice that even casual spends in the supermarket now always seem to be 100 euros and above? 

     Yes.  50 euros used to be enough to fill my tank, now it comes nowhere near.     My rent will be increased by the cost of living rise in percentage terms; my income will not.  If I wish to continue my present standard of living, then my pension will have to be augmented by dipping into my savings.  I tell myself, that savings are there to be used not to be mindlessly horded – as if I have ever had wallet that didn’t have scorch marks on it from the money burning its way through!

     I am by no means rich, but I also do not want to plead poverty.  I am aware of the increasing costs of everything and acutely aware of the diminution in the adequate provision of those social services that I have paid for throughout my life through taxes etc.

     My expectations (as a complacent Baby Boomer) are for my path through life to be relatively smooth (free education up to university level; job for life; pension; health care etc.) and I have little to complain about when I look back.  But the future is different.  Fixed income and rising costs are not good companions – and as I am reliant on my pension, government talking about the difficulties of maintaining the present levels of payment and then talk of different rates and speculation about not keeping to past rules are all things that concentrate the mind.

     The crisis of Covid was, while it was going on (and as long as you were careful, and lucky!) a fairly placid disaster.  Stuck at home, washing your hands like a fully conscious Lady Macbeth, finding ways to stay sane and waiting for things to get better.  The worry was not paying for things, but rather getting your hands on them.  It was almost as if time and the economy were in abeyance.  It was a period of waiting and hoping for something not to happen.

     That was then and this is now.  The idiocy of Brexit and its inevitable deleterious consequences; the catastrophe of the pointless invasion of Ukraine; the failure of normal politics; the lingering after-shock of Covid; the stuttering and virtual collapse of social services – a catalogue of horror and despair. 

     Yet the sun is shining and people are on the beach and in the cafes having a good time.  Because now, during the holidays, the summer holidays, is not the time to be thinking about the harsh realities that are going to hit, hard, in the autumn.

      In T S Eliot’s much quoted (and more often misquoted) “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” from The Four Quartets, he accurately summarises the tendency for us all to avoid those things that are difficult to take in or accept.  We like our dystopias and Armageddons to be narrative devices in stories or films rather than what’s going to happen in the next few months.

     We are going to have to bear it!

Liquid musing

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pool water has returned to its crystalline clarity in our local pool, but one does wonder just what “product” we have been swimming in that has been used to banish yesterday’s murkiness.  But that way madness lies, and life is too short etc etc to worry (overmuch) about such things.

     In a sign of technological spitefulness because of my forced missed swim yesterday, my smartwatch refused to record accurately my latest swim, only giving about half the meters of each length, but my internal length counter guided me to a satisfactory completion where, in spite of the evidence of the resentful watch, I think that I more than exceeded my usual lengths.

     The local pool is one of the only places in Castelldefels that can supply me with a decent cup of tea (a mixture of Earl Grey and English Breakfast) which is my reward for completing my swim.  Today, they had run out! 

     I had been prepared for this awful eventuality and took an orange juice as an alternative, but an orange juice topped up with ice cold Cava.  I have now entered that select grouping of ageing men who have alcohol first thing in the morning!  Well, not really, the orange juice was the major partner in the drink and freshly pressed too, so the Cava was more of jeu d’esprit than anything else.  Though one I could easily get used to!

    

 

I am beginning to understand that the cost of living I going to be a major problem.  Even casual shops are now costing over 100 euros.  I can still recall my parents have a serious discussion about finance after the weekly shop had exceeded five quid for the first time!  That truly was another age.

     It is difficult to think about winter when all available fans are on full strength to make the heat bearable, but with the rising cost of electricity and gas, coupled with the rise in general prices means that our minds are going to be concentrated.  Given the situations in our respective countries, I feel more secure in my adopted home of Catalonia than I would in the Conservative ridden dystopia that Britain has become.  Let us see how the future works out!