Frustration and release

 

 

 

Most days I get up at 6.15 am to get ready for my morning swim at 7 am in the local pool.  As it is August, I have the luxury of a lie in until 7.15 am as the pool opens at 8 am for that month.

     I would like to say that I feel a sense of smug satisfaction for rising so early and taking physical exercise before many people have stirred from their beds - and I suppose I do.  But, the thing is that I find it difficult to stay in bed after my accustomed rising time.  When I was working I went for a swim before work started and I have sort of continued that regime.  If truth be told, I do not really ‘lie in’ with any degree of sincerity.  At the time that I need to get up, I get up and if I try and stay in bed I feel uncomfortable.  So, my soft, musical alarm on my mobile phone goes off and I get up.

     This morning, my arrival at the pool was greeted by what appeared to be a small meeting at the gate.  It turned out that the increasing murkiness of the water in the pool over the last couple of days had prompted the technical services to Do Something and thus “product” had been added to the water, but for the “product” to work, we swimmers had to be excluded.

     The helpful message from management that the pool was closed was sent to members of the leisure centre via email at 10.10 am today, that is some two hours after we arrived to start our swim.  Sigh!

     I made the best of a bad job and decided to go for an extended bike ride from the pool to Port Ginesta, so that I could tell myself that I had kept up my morning exercise.

     Admittedly the effort of cycling those kilometres was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I have an electric bike and I make full (full!) use of its electric capabilities, but it is still exercise under the meaning of the act and as such it is duly recorded by my Smartwatch and adds to my daily PAI rating (whatever that is) – one of those acronyms linked to health and exercise that, in spite of its meaning being ambiguous (or even unknown) is something I take semi-seriously and try and maintain a rating of 100 or as near as I can get.  Because, yes.

     Not only did I go all the way to the beach in Port Ginesta, but I also went as far as the Gavà bike lane could take me in the opposite direction, which amounts to a total of 17.85 km which, even on an electric bike (for me) is quite a lot.

     Not that the electric bike is my only form of ‘personal’ transport.  The electric scooter was taken out of the boot of the car AGAIN yesterday and I used it to get to our favourite ice cream shop as a jaunt to get out of the house.

     I am not a natural bike rider, but I am semi-professional compared with my shaky progress on the scooter.  On the scooter, like a highly-strung thoroughbred horse, I am spooked by: anything other than a completely level surface, traffic, people, turns, crossings, pavements, other scooter users, hills, slopes and the state of the world.  I do not, I have to admit, exude confidence when I am a-wheel, but it is the only way that I can match Toni’s walking without having to pay the price in pain for days afterwards!

     So far, my two trips on the scooter means that I have paid 150 euros per trip, given the total cost of the purchase.  A sobering thought.

 

 

The weather is a little cooler, I think, but that doesn’t make me particularly happy.  Yes, the sort of heat that we have been experiencing has been of a different quality than in previous years, but I’d still prefer that to the cold of winter – that any diminution of heat now makes me far is almost upon us!  But that is only may paranoia speaking.  I hope.

Broken Un-Birthday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The week of un-birthday festivities and presents following my actually single birthday took a downward turn today.  Not only has it been raining all night, with howling wind and melodramatic thunder and lightning, but also, when I woke up the electricity had failed.

     I washed by the light of my mobile phone, refused to shave as the hot water wasn’t – see above, electricity failure – and hobbled downstairs (knees still not even remotely right) like some senile hi-tec Lady of the Lamp to do ‘something’ to the box of electricity switches and fuses.  I duly pushed up all those that were down, and nothing happened.

     I debated not going for my early morning swim in the local pool, reasoning that perhaps the outage had extended to their premises, and while I am more than prepared to get up early, I draw the line at swimming in cold water.  But I thought to myself, who else is going to brave the rain, the dark and the pre-dawn?  Only I!

     I was, of course, wrong, and there were plenty of other saddos ready and eager to get their daily exercise over and done with before most people were awake.

     As I am retired, I do not need to be there early ‘before work’, but I find that getting up (at what I am sure my grandparents would have called a ‘reasonable time’) has now become so engrained in me that to lie in bed after the alarm goes off gives little pleasure.

     I wish that I could say that I make full and enthusiastic use of my gained time – but what I do is read The Guardian and thoroughly depress myself before breakfast.

     Living in Catalonia, you would think that I would be able to be fairly detached from what is going on in the UK – and, to a certain extent I can be (or at least try to be) but the political, social, and economic situation in Spain is not rosy either.  Admittedly, we have not committed the idiocy of Brexit, and our Covid figures are nowhere as horrific as those in the UK, but there is little in present day Catalonia to make one wake up and skip one’s way cheerily into the day – but at least the day in Catalonia usually has sun in it!

     My art books are my escape.  Which is an odd thing to say because the sort of art that I like is rarely of the chocolate box niceness, and the arresting images that contemporary art slams into your mind rarely take you away from the world but force you back into it in an uncompromising manner.

     Sometimes the struggle is not with the images, but rather with the juxta-positioning that some curators impose on collections or exhibitions.  Having read through the catalogue for the Poussin exhibition in the National, I was reminded of another exhibition involving Poussin that I went to see in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in which Poussin’s paintings were paired with the coloured scribblings of Cy Twomby.  The Poussin paintings were his series of The Sacraments while Twomby’s paintings were, um, not.

     I am no fan of Twomby’s art, though you might be interested to know that I am in a minority, and in 2015 his Untitled (New York City) was sold at auction for $70,530,000 – so what do I know!

     You might like to compare the two artists:

 

Go

 

 

 

 

 

 

POUSSIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWOMBY

 

As I keep telling myself, the money is not relevant to the art.  Money is just the commodification of art.  What value people and institutions place on individual artists is something to consider in evaluating the place of art in a particular society, but it has little to say about the true value of art. 

I still don't like Twomby.

 

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 86 - 10th June

It is getting progressively more difficult to tell that there is a pandemic still raging in this country.  A couple of days into whatever stage we have reached so far and people are behaving, for the most part, perfectly normally.

     People generally wear masks in town, though along the paseo they are very much in a minority.  The tables on the terraces of the restaurants are more generously spaced out and now there are tables inside the restaurants as well.

     It is still difficult to tell how many of the smaller shops are going to open after the virus has finally been dealt with.  The supermarket that I went to yesterday and which is closing down has been failing for some time and most of us are amazed that it has managed to last this long.

My early morning swim is now part of a regime again, it doesn’t take long to slip back into sometime established ways, though it might be difficult to get the same slot in which to swim each day.  We are only allowed to book up to 2 activities at a time and as there are only five lanes in the pool and one person to a lane, it is going to be difficult to bag a spot at the same time each day.  So far, I have been lucky and I am OK until Thursday, but I think that I am going to have to get used to using the kitchen calendar more noting the different times when I have been able to get into the pool.

     I met two teachers from the British School just before my swim and they told me that the lessons have been on line for some time and that they will not be going back until September at the earliest.

     In the UK the bunch of inadequate wankers that make up the government have done yet another U-turn about their insistence of kids returning to school in England before the end of the summer.  They have, at last, done the special sum of cutting class size and finding physical space to put double the number of classes in the space that previously accommodated half the number.  To say nothing of the extra teachers that are needed to make this happen.

     In education we are, of course, used to politicians telling us to do something and then ignoring the advice of experts saying why what these ideological purists want is simply not possible.  The real problem is that, with the cabinet of no-talents that Johnson has formed around himself, every department is failing and as chaotic as education, to say nothing of the writhing incompetence that the Home Office has come to personify.  It is intensely depressing to think that the immediate future of my country is in such inept hands.

     And then there’s Brexit.  Dear god!

Fight the good fight!

In my own language, I am an articulate, responsive and witty speaker.  In Spanish I am enthusiastic early Tarzan and in Catalan epsilon semi-moron.  As someone who loves language and the speaking thereof, my inability in any other tongue than mine own is baffling.

     Of course, you could point to the fact that, apart from the lessons, I do virtually no other work.  My expectation that language will work by osmosis, though patently not working in my case, is still firmly a methodology to which I adhere with monomaniac fixation.  Well, it beats methodical working and revision!

     Even though I am something of a past master in blagging my way through Spanish, I have even less basic linguistic information with which to work in Catalan.  And we are now getting close to a crunch time as, in the middle of next month (which, horror of horrors, starts tomorrow) I have an examination.

     It makes no difference how many times our present teacher assures us in his class than the examination, nay, not examination, more of a test, really, is simple beyond belief – I still know that with my level of ability ANY bloody casual (let alone searching) examination of my knowledge will lead to hot-faced humiliation.

     At this point, the more incisive reader might wonder about my typing about these concerns, rather than actually doing something about them.  If so, you haven’t read the previous short paragraphs where I freely admit my lack of effort in acquiring or attempting to acquire another language.

     The one positive point about this next ‘test’ seems to be that it is vocabulary heavy with an unnatural concentration on the direction and existence of accents on individual words and, in any choice between the two, ‘vocab’ is an easier option than ‘grammar’.  So, you never know, if I play to my strengths of being able to cram discrete points of information for the duration of an exam I might even be able to scrape through.

     Though, I do admit that scraping-through in the language of the country in which I actually live is not a very inspiring (or indeed worthwhile) goal, but it is what I am working towards. 

     And you never know, now that the date of the examination has been set, it might (just might) encourage me to make a start on the tedium of vocab learning this very weekend.  There is, after all, nothing quite so self-satisfying in doing a minimal amount of work sufficient to engender the feeling of complacency in knuckling-down to something worthwhile.  Obviously.

It’s all about the far end lane.  Of the swimming pool I mean.  Of those hardy folk (or nutters depending on your point of view) who turn up at 7.00 am when the pool opens, the one thing motivating their early appearance is the claiming of an empty lane for your lonely furrow.

     There are five lanes in our pool, and they fill up quickly.  Lane one is usually taken by a sedate looking retired lady who makes stately progress up and down the pool.  Lane three or sometimes four is taken up by two ‘youngsters’ whom I call the twins who are dedicated and athletic and look as though they are training for a triathlon.  Lane four is taken up by a recent arrival to the family of a snorkeler who rushes into the pool to try and get the Crown Jewel of lanes: lane five.

     Lane five is the lane to get.  Why?  Because it is slightly obstructed by the metal access ladders.  The way the ladders slightly jut out into the pool space means that two swimmers in a lane is somewhat awkward.  Therefore people go to double-up in the other lanes before trying the end lanes.  Lane one is for the slower swimmers and the periodic exercisers; they rarely go to lane five.  So, if you bag lane five early enough you are almost guaranteed to have it to yourself for the whole duration of your swim.

     The problem with this is, no matter how early I get to the pool, even if it is before the pool has officially opened, one man, the same man, always seems to get there before me.  So I am reduced to going to one of the other three lanes (remember lane one is given over to slower others) and hoping that it remains uncluttered with extraneous swimmers for my metric mile.

     If you are an early morning swimmer then the intensity of possession in the highly charged first hour of opening is something that will not need to be explained to you; if you have not experienced the rush of claiming a lane and swimming in a savagely elegant style to keep it to yourself, then I would suggest you think about the last time you went on a train or a bus and looked for a double seat for yourself and the looks and hopes that kept people away from you as a guide to how we feel.

     This morning, for example, I was, yet again beaten to the fifth lane by my friend, but I managed to claim the fourth lane and keep it to myself until almost the end of my swim when I had to share it with another swimmer for a few lengths until my friend left the fifth lane and indicated to the other person in my lane that he could take over the vacated fifth lane.  Now that is courtesy and civility of a high order!

 

I am working on a poem at the moment which grew out of notes that I made in my pocket notebook: two days’ work; five unsatisfactory lines, no, four and a bit lines now I look at it.  I mapped out the ideas behind what I want to write in annotations of the transcription of my notes, but the working-up is taking longer than I expected

Some poems write themselves, in so far as the structure is concerned, the skeleton is roughly assembled and then the hard slog of fleshing-out takes up the real time.  In the present instance, I only have fragments of bone, meaning that my construction of meaning in my writing is more palaeontology than poetry, but it is getting there, or more accurately it will get somewhere sometime.  And there is no title yet, either.  Working on it, working on it.

The daily crash-bang-wallop of reformation in the house next door continues unabated and is now producing a steady stream of rubble which is filling bags which are taking up parking spaces on the road.  One of the (industrial sized) rubbish bags has been in situ for over two weeks.  This is not satisfactory and ‘steps will be taken’.  I have already asked about them and the workmen have shifted the blame on to the company that should have picked them up.  As I recall, there are usually by-laws about leaving household rubble on the street and on Monday I will make a trip to the city hall after my Catalan class and find out the legal situation.  I will also take photographs (they like photos) to illustrate their wicked deeds.  Our city hall is generally helpful, and I look forward to being armed with the Regulations of the Righteous to smite the rubble makers hip and thigh – if necessary with the jaw-bone of an ass.  And I wonder how many people nowadays will pick up that reference!

So, lots to do this weekend: planning, scheming, writing and lino-cutting – never a dull moment.