Traditions are for the making!

 New Normal, Day 3, Wednesday

There is something deeply satisfying in being in on the creation of a new customary procedure.  Especially as I had little or nothing to do with its physical creation, I merely curated it into existence.

     Sitting outside the Liceu on my shooting stick, propped up against the railings leading down into the Metro, just before by time slot for entry to the first Covid restricted performance of an Opera for ages, I received a phone call from a friend in Cardiff.  It has to be said that actually making and receiving phone calls on my mobile phone is one of the least important functions as far as I am concerned.  And that lack of interest in the ostensible raison d’être of the machine shows itself in my customary total confusion if the thing actually rings.  As I always have the phone set to mute, it is a chance in a thousand that I ever get to realize that a call is occurring, and then answering it with the correct finger movements on the screen makes the likelihood of it being successful even less likely.  However, this call sort-of worked and I found myself talking to SQB.

     Not only did we manage (eventually) to converse, but also she managed to send me photos of cards that she had been making for charity, I instantly ordered some to be sent to me in Castelldefels, together with a selection of tree decorations that she had also made.

     Even before the cards arrived I began to formulate plans for them which did not include merely putting them in envelopes and sending them off to other people.  The end result was that I selected four of the cards that SQB sent and took them off to be framed.  I now, therefore, have a square grouping of four of the cards in a bright red Christmas surround in a gold metallic frame.  And it is now up on the living room wall as part of our Christmas festivities.  And will be a recurring part of Christmas from now to the end of time.  A tradition is born!  Thanks, SQB!

     This means that SQB now has a third entry in my Catalogue Raisonné, which, by the way is going from strength to strength with almost 40 works of art listed, not including some books, pottery and a fluffy bunny.  My catalogue will be nothing if not eclectic.

     I have still not decided what I am actually going to ‘do’ with the catalogue.  The one clear practical result of my starting it, has been that I have re-examined what I have, and have at least started the process of moving some of the paintings around and bringing others out of storage and onto the walls.

     In one case, that of my paternal grandfather’s First World War medals, I have discovered that I have had them framed in the ‘wrong’ order.  My grandfather was in that bloody conflict (wounded but not killed, in spite of the best efforts of that bastard Haig’s battle ‘plans’ {sic} [!]) from the start and was therefore awarded the 1914-1915 Star, as well as The British War Medal and The Allied Victory Medal.  That order is the order in which they were usually worn and I suppose it should have been the order in which they were framed, left to right.  He was also given the Abergwynfi and Blaengwynfi Commemorative War medal, a rather different looking medallion, and I have no idea where that should have gone in the sequence – probably at the far right.  I have always regretted that I did not have a contemporary photograph of my grandfather framed with them.  One does exist showing him wearing his metal helmet in a jaunty and, for the army, in a totally inappropriate way.  Perhaps my finding out the order was ‘wrong’ gives me an opportunity to have them reframed with his photograph giving the lifeless pieces of metal some sort of personal humanity.

     I think that my underlying intention of compiling the catalogue was to use it as a basis for further writing: the stories or thoughts that go with each piece.  Some of the works of art have obvious ‘stories’ – at least to me – while others are perhaps more subtle in the way that they can lead on to other more tangential considerations.  Who knows?  See where it goes.

 

When cycling along the paseo, for no particular reason snippets of songs come into my mind.  They are rarely of my generation of popular songs (whatever generation I think I might be a member of) they are more usually odd lines from the songs that my parents sang.

     One of the songs, that I often think I would choose to be part of the “What my parents gave to me” part of the radio 4 programme on a Saturday morning, the sort of legacy music that you pick up because your parents chose to sing it.

     I do not remember the whole of the song, but the lines I do remember and they were the ones that stuck in my mind for most of my cycle, in the way that earworms do, were:

“From New York to the state of Maine

They went in search of more cocaine

Oh, honey have a [sniff] have a [sniff] on me

Honey, have a [sniff] on me!”

One of reasons that the song stays with me, is that the [sniff] part was an actual sniff and not the word.  I thought that was very good.  At that age (less than 8 years old) I had no idea what cocaine might have been, and the fact that the two main (ill-fated) characters in the ballad were called Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue, and it really doesn’t end well!

     A few questions present themselves: which version of the song did my parents know?  How did they know it?  Why were they singing it in the hearing of a seven-year old?  I do remember that I used to join in with the chorus with the sniffing!  Ah, the innocence of ignorance.

     Doing a very small amount of research, it is amazing how many people have covered versions of the song, or composite fragments of a few songs, including names revered in Blues and Folk.  But it is still a remarkable snatch of song to graft into your child’s mind!  And before anyone gets the wrong idea, my parents were respectable non-drug taking folk!  A pipe and Australian sherry were their vices! 

     And singing inappropriate songs, as I have just remembered another favourite that I loved hearing because of the ending, was Frankie and Johnny, where after shooting her double-timing man, Frankie is strapped to the electric chair and “sparks flew out of her hair” he was her man, but he done her wrong, as the song puts it so forcefully, so justice had to be done! 

     O! the unfairness of life!  Such valuable lessons to teach a child.

 

 

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 10

Hoovering, dishwashing, Guardian, tea, muesli, rant at renovations next door: all done!  What a domestic soul I am becoming.  As if.

     The sharing of homemade videos is becoming rampant and the innate lunacy contained within them is becoming more pronounced; but there is a sort of defiant dark humour that is positively uplifting in them as well.

     The dark humour connected to the virus is best exemplified by the writing of John Crace, the parliamentary sketch writer, in the Guardian. 

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/johncrace

     He was a point of sanity throughout the whole Brexit farrago and he continues to be a guide through the shameful antics of the so-called government of the United Kingdom.  If you have not read his withering condemnation of the Blond Buffoon and Dom then you should.  It might be gallows humour in these dark times, but it always manages to raise a laugh, yes, that laugh might well be rueful but it is better than allowing yourself to plumb the depths of disbelief at what the Conservatives think they can get away with!  I recommend him without hesitation, as I recommend any and all of the books that he has published.  Long may his pen show up the vicious charlatans for what they are!

     While we are on the subject of the worth of our present government, you might like to read the following:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/confused-dangerous-flippant-worlds-media-pans-pms-handling-of-coronavirus-boris-johnson

This is a summation of the reactions of the rest of the world to the way that the Blond Buffoon and his circus have handled the pandemic in the UK.  When this is over, we must hold our political ‘masters’ to account.  It is more than likely that the Conservatives’ policy over the virus has directly led to more deaths than if they had adopted some of the measures that other countries have put in place.  There must be an accounting with an independent report that aims at transparency when apportioning blame.

     My jaundiced view has been tempered by the fact that the renovation next door continues (illegally?) with much banging and that is the last thing that you need when you have been locked up for the last nine days – with the prospect of months to come!

     Another irritation (if that is the right word for it) is that I have not managed to dislodge the various earworms of snatches of the operas that I recommended yesterday.  The bits and pieces of “Four Saints in Three Acts” by Virgil Thomson is particularly difficult not to hear.  Stein’s libretto is nonsensical and I pity the poor singers having to learn some of the sequences that they have to sing, but it is undeniably (for me) catchy.  When Stein was taxed about the fact that nobody could understand what the opera was about, she countered with the brave assertion that if you enjoyed it you understood it!  And the opera was popular and ground-breaking.  It had a black cast of singers in its first performances and the set design used the newly invented cellophane as part of the decoration: very avant-garde!  Well, for 1927 it was!  I do urge you to go to YouTube and listen and look at the fragments of this fascinating opera!

     I do also urge you to look at the classic repertoire as well.  It is easy to cheat your way through famous operas on YouTube as they often give you the famous bits, in terms of overtures, preludes and arias, in manageable bite-sized chunks.  And you never know what you might like.  I know someone whose first operatic experience was ‘Tristan and Isolde’ by Wagner, a long and dense opera.  She loved it and become an enthusiastic operaphile on the spot!  It takes all sorts.  And it has taken me a long time to honestly admit that I enjoyed a performance – which I did with the last production of the Liceu.  Some operas, like ‘Eugene Onegin’ by Tchaikovsky I first heard in a dress rehearsal and instantly ‘knew’.  It helped that I knew the dance music from it that I had given to me as one of my first EPs (extended play discs) when I was a kid, but operas like that are almost absurdly approachable.

Enough of this escape into Culture.  Back to reality.  We have now been in lockdown for 9 (or officially 11) days, so that means that we are getting to the end of the incubation period for the virus and this week may well be one in which there is a jump in the figures of those who are infected.  It has been suggested that people should think twice about ANY journeys outside the residence (yes, I am talking to you people next door!) for any reason at all.  Even bread buying, which is an almost sacred ritual in this country, is too weak an excuse to leave the house!

     We are not entirely breadless.  We do have individually sealed, square, flat, wholemeal, calorie reduced, ‘buns’ that seem to last for ever.  Whether you can actually convince yourself that what you are eating bears any resemblance to ‘bread’ is something else, but in times of crisis it is better than nothing.  Just.

     We have enough food to get us through to next week and we can assess the situation then and decide whether it worth while for (Toni) to venture out again for supplies.

I have just come in from my morning walk around the pool.  The weather is not as clement as it has been for the past few days and it was more of a chore than usual.  As I trudged my way around (varying the direction) on my lonely circuits, during which nobody has joined me, I felt like a Rudolf Hesse figure, plodding his way around the empty exercise yard in Spandau.  Having typed that, I realize that there are too many associations with that image that have nothing to do with my present situation.  But it is interesting that I did not delete it, but rather chose to discuss its inappropriateness; or on further consideration there are elements that illuminate: the sense of isolation in an institution made to accommodate more; the artificiality of the incarceration; the politics of continuation – and I think that I am overthinking an image of an aging man in a prison exercise yard!  A bit.

The number of Covid-19 infected people in Spain has not surpassed that of China!  The largest number of cases is in Madrid, which is not locked down in the same way as Barcelona.  It seems foolish not to be truly Draconian in a situation of absolute crisis, but that is politics for you!

I have always taken a ghoulish delight in following the build up to each Olympic Games.  I am not so much interested in the sports as in the various crises: political, financial, social, architectural etc that illuminate the via dolorosa from the moment the games are awarded, to the opening ceremony.

     It used to be the almost comical corruption of the IOC members and the shocking ways in which the successful city managed to capture the games that added to the delight of nations.  The IOC has (allegedly) cleaned up its act, a little and there is more transparency about the awarding of the games, so my prurient interest has to concentrate on unrealistic timetables for delivery and the corruption in building that seems an Olympic Event in its own right.

     I well remember the tune of the BBC presentation of the Olympics in Tokio in 1964 - I am humming it in my mind as I type)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw1mgjrXZ0c

Only surpassed as an Olympic tune by the brilliant song for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgVGl5bnf8c

Tokio 2020 has had its share of scandal, but is obviously going to be overshadowed by Covid-19.  If (and it’s a big ‘if’) the games take place in 2021 they will still be called the 2020 games apparently.  I like quirky things like that!  Does this mean that the next games will be three years later, not four? 

     Such considerations keep me occupied.