Oh shut up!

 

 

 

 

 

The sound of full-blast Heavy Metal music from my neighbour would thump its way through the walls of my semi-detached house once every couple of years.  How I wish that such a biannual interruption to my placid way of life could replace the almost pathological need for noise in this part of the world.

 

 

     Dogs are the bane of a quiet life.  As many of the places around us are flats, people have adapted their canine needs and usually plumped for those grotesque rat-dogs with bulbous eyes and spindly legs that they have reasoned by virtue of their shrunken size are more adapted to life within the confines of a flat.

     I am sure that they take up less room. But their moronic, high-pitched yaps belie their bonsai appearance with a ‘bark’ volume seemingly designed to cut through concrete.

     Here in Catalonia, as I am sure was true in other places that had a severe lockdown, we have the left-over ‘walking’ dogs.   

     At the time of the restrictions, we were not allowed to leave our homes unless it was to get essential provisions or to take a dog for short walk.  The rules were that the dog was not allowed to be walked more than a couple of hundred years from its home, but some people (don’t they always) bent the rules and used the dog as a passport to roam freely.  And a number of dogs were bought during the height of the pandemic (how?) specifically to allow access to a reasonable walk.

     Now, the dogs are not strictly needed, and their walks have become, not a freedom to be enjoyed, but a chore to be resentfully endured.  And they all bark.  Probably including some of the owners, too!

     But dogs are not the half of it.

     We are on a sometime main flight path for aircraft landing in the airport in Barcelona – although it is only when the wind is in certain directions that planes are directed to fly over the residential parts of Castelldefels and Gavà.  And if you believe that then you will believe anything.

     The pandemic gave us an unnatural piece of peace, with the number of flights severely restricted.  To be fair, while the noise from the aircraft is loud, you sort-of get used to it as just one of those things and, after a few seconds, the sound is gone.  As opposed to the bloody dog next door that has been left alone at home and has been barking for the whole of the bloody afternoon and who will not, in spite of screamed instructions to shut up, shut up.

     But the true horror has been house improvements, or complete makeovers.

     The house we live in is rented and, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing has been done structurally, aesthetically, horticulturally, electrically or any other damned word ending in -ly since they were built.  To give you some idea of the hands-off approach of the owners, basic things that you would expect the landlords to take care of like fixtures and fittings, including damage to sinks, toilets, etc, or for an even more glaring example the gas boiler for the heating and water – they wash their hands of entirely.  The ‘nothing to do with us guv’ approach reached its apotheosis in Catalan landlords!

     This also means that when one of our houses ceases to be for rent and is sold, as a couple have over the last couple of years, then the new owners look askance at the age of the decoration (avocado bathroom suite, anybody?) and realize that they will have to do some major refitting.  The electric system and wiring are not fit for purpose and woe betide anyone foolish enough to put the kettle and the microwave on at the same time!

     You get the idea.  Everything needs to be changed.  And for the last two years we have lived through two refits.

     One thing you should know about our houses is that we live in what is in British terms a terraced house, one of five three floor structures.  They are solidly built of concrete throughout, but it also means that if you hit a hammer on the wall in one of the ‘houses’ every single other house can hear it.

     Perhaps at this point I should add that all the floors are tiled, as well as the stairs, and there are lots of stairs – so taking up tiles from all the floors of all the rooms, all the stairs and from the walls of the kitchen and two bathrooms means a lot of work, a lot of very noisy work with jack hammers that make life one long nightmare.

     Changing the electricity means cutting into the walls to get out old wiring and put in new.  With hammers.

     Changing the kitchen is a whole symphony of noise in itself.  And then there is the cutting of the new tiles to fit.

     In a place that is being newly built, you expect noise, and it doesn’t really matter because the eventual residents are not there.  When you have a densely populated residential area with two households treating their houses as building sites, the result is total dissatisfaction and a resentment that is going to continue for as long as the neighbours live there!

    

 

Enough!

     Tomorrow the visit, the first visit for a couple of years, to the doctor to see if he can recommend something (anything) to make my knees more cooperative.

     The more I think about the visit, the less I expect from it.  I suppose to be realistic, the most I can hope for is a referral to a specialist to see if anything can be done inside the knee in a rather more professional way than my rather desperate application of oodles of fisiocrem™ to the outside!  I sincerely hope so, as I am getting tired of limping along using a growing collection of walking sticks, well, three – and I can justify the purchase of each of them as they fulfil different needs in the assisted walking arena.  So there!

Something needs to be done! Now!

 

In my consumer relations with various retail outlets there comes a time in our negotiations to try and right the wrongs that I feel have been done to me, when I feel the need to silently hand over a small printed card with the following message on it: “I am middle class, literate and tenacious.  Give up now while you still have some self respect, because you WILL NOT WIN.”

      I hasten to assure you that I haven’t actually handed over such a card, let alone printed one out, but it would have saved my shop-related opponents a great deal of time and effort.

     I remember watching one film about an evil insurance company (are there any other types?) where the default position to ANY claim made was, in the first instance, to refuse it.  As insurance companies have impressive financial resources and equally striking headed notepaper for their official missives to the grasping customers who have the unheard of audacity to expect the companies to do what they were paid to do, i.e. pay up when loss is experienced, there is an element of intimidation used against the clients.

     My father had dealings with one buildings’ insurance company when he claimed for storm damage to a chimney and part of the roof.  The work to repair the faulty structure had to be carried out on an emergency basis and my father was claiming after the fact.  He eventually received a letter informing him that his claim had been processed; a cheque was enclosed, and would be please sign and return the enclosed form.

     Needless to say the cheque came nowhere near the amount claimed and my father rejected the proffered cheque with contempt and started a length letter battle with the company that eventually resulted in a meeting in which my father suggested an independent assessment and arbitration.  He had no idea whether that sort of thing was covered under his policy but it seemed like a good idea and it was the sort of thing that he was teaching in his Liberal Studies lectures and classes (ah, there is a subject title from the brave new world of 60s education!) and it ought to exist.  The difference in the meeting was immediate and it was admitted that he did indeed have recourse to such an approach, but “we needn’t let it get to that sort of level” moderated the previously intransigent attitude of the blood sucking vampiric officials and a mutually satisfactory solution to the problem was soon arrived at.

     What lesson my father drew from his experience was not the quality of his letter writing, though he did regale Mum and me with some of the more lurid passages, but rather the underhand tactics of an unprincipled company.  As he reasoned it, how many people would turn down an actual signed cheque?  They would assume from the ‘official’ documentation accompanying it that the cheque was the end of the matter.  Dad used to talk about the situation of some OAP living alone with little or no support system in place feeling obliged to accept the cheque and being grateful for it!

     Having spurned the cheque it prompted my father into further and higher forms of letter writing, which, as I mentioned was, eventually successful in this particular circumstance and was generally successful whenever he put pen to paper in the interests of personal commercial justice!

     I channel my father when I have contretemps with suppliers who don’t live up to their PAID promises and I OPEN A FILE – dread words indeed!

     The foregoing is not a self-indulgent meandering, it has been prompted by my latest satisfactory outcome.

     I dropped my mobile phone and the glass back of the thing shattered – so much for toughened glass etc.  It shattered.  It still worked and I continued to use it, but this was not a situation that seemed to me to have long-term viability, so I tried to get it repaired.  This is a long story, a very long story, but I intend to cut to the chase.

     The point is not that the shop failed to get the phone repaired, but that they also managed to ‘brick’ it, and told me (eventually) that the phone was beyond economic repair and they would, very kindly, refund the money that I had paid them to replace the back of the phone!

     To be fair to the shop, the repairs were not carried out on the premises, but each shop in the chain sent them to a central technical station in a large Barcelona store.  I was given contradictory, confusing information about what actually had been or had not been done to my phone and the weeks dragged on.  From what they had said to me it seemed reasonable to assume that their attempts to repair had destroyed the phone.  I wanted another.

     The key questions remained (as the shop had my phone and it was not two minutes away from my house) did the thing charge and work.  Yes, I knew the back was smashed, but did it actually work as it did when I handed it in to be repaired?

   This (eventually) resulted in a brief email, which made me wonder if they were actually talking about my phone at all.  They told me it was working, that they had replaced the screen as I had asked (I hadn’t and they hadn’t) but they would give me a new phone.  Not, I might add, a replacement of my expensive phone, but a signally cheaper one, but by the same maker!  And they would pay back any money I had given for work that they had not done.

     I know that I could have held out for a duplicate, but I decided to cut my losses and retire with honour: full refund and spare phone.  Result.

     Because I have bought another phone.  The attempts to repair this phone started months ago, I knew it was going to be a long slog and so I listened to advice from One Who Knows and paid less than a quarter of what I paid for the phone with the smashed back and it does as much and more than the other one did.

     I also have the old phone.  I am not convinced that it is ‘beyond economic repair’ – I think that the shop simply gave up and bought me off.  As I have me new cheap phone and a newer cheaper one (courtesy of the store) I am sufficiently phoned-up to start a length campaign to get me old phone up and running.  At the moment it is charging (just checked 99% charged) and when it is ready I will see what it is still able to do.  If it appears to be serviceable then further steps will be taken to bring it back into full use.

     This particular file is not yet closed!  Not yet a while.

 

Are Kids Evil?

 

If you are a believer (as I firmly am) that kids do not become fully human until they have reached the age of, say, 25 – then, you will, perhaps, recognize an ethical problem.  If these creatures are not human in the full sense of that word, is it even fair to ask if they are capable of being ‘evil’ which, after all, necessitates a human sense of recognizing that concepts like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ actually exist?

We don’t say that ‘brute’ beasts are evil, we just question their instincts.  Sharks (even allowing for Benchley) are not evil creatures; they are not good either – they just are.

So, there is surely a case for saying that apprentice humans just ‘are’ as well.

And yet, and yet.

Let us consider a test situation.  In this part of the world there is a game that kids play.  It is called ‘Marco Polo’ and is simplicity itself to play.  The rules are that when one person says “Marco!” everyone else replies “Polo”.  And that is it.  That is the game.  And kids play it with manic gusto.  And go on playing it.  And on, and on.

There is a sort of genius about it.  How, you might say, innocuous a game.  Where is the harm in it?  Well, let me tell you, if you have listened to kids raucously ‘playing’ this game around a swimming pool for what seems like hours you, as an adult begin to pray for death: either the kids or yourself, after a while it doesn’t really matter.  All you want is for it to stop. 

  

And this is where the genius part comes in.  How can you, seriously, tell kids to stop?  Who is it harming?  And, of course, you know that if a kid suspects for a moment that something they are doing is irritating then there is no inducement on earth that will make them stop.  And what sort of idiot would you be to angrily tell kids to stop saying the name of the great explorer?  Perfect.  The kids have created something that cannot be stopped without making the person stopping it appear like a crazed idiot.  And, once you have suffered from an extended “Marco Polo” just a single mention of “Marco” brings back all the dread that you have previously suffered – instantly.

Do they do it to annoy because they know it teases?  I’m not sure.  Kids love doing it.  It gives an immediate sense of community; it gives form to play; it allows the youngest to get an automatic reaction from elder; it establishes territory by claiming sonic space; it gives voice to youth; it is comforting – and I bloody hate it.  Hate it.

I am not sure if it is hell or purgatory where you would find yourself around a pool with kids playing “Marco Polo” for ever, but the adjective hellish seems to be not inappropriate.

The question of blame obviously centres on whether or not the kids know what they are doing.  If they do not, then they only have to wait until they are 25 when they will realize just how awful they have been for the past two and a half decades.  If they do know what they are doing, then it answers the question at the top.

And, don’t forget Damien!

On a completely unrelated topic – though, come to think about it, there could be a tenuous link using the concept of ‘youth’ – the words of a Christmas carol came back to me as I trudged off the beach through the soft sand.

Never let it be said that my time as a (moderately) angelic looking choir boy in Cathays in Cardiff was wasted.  I had a good boy soprano voice and found the high notes relatively effortless to reach.   

Being in a choir means that you tend to pick up new tunes relatively quickly, in much the same way as a (struggling) trombone player in school orchestras encourages to you get to know orchestral pieces after a couple of rehearsals – well, as trombone player you usually have so few notes to play that you may as well spend the time waiting for your entry by listening to the music that other players are creating.

Although I cannot say that I positively enjoyed my time in the choir (perhaps it was something to do with the stiff, white, plastic collars we had to wear with cassock and surplice) I did get to know a great deal of ‘sacred’ music, and the lyrics. 

There were some that we didn’t really have to learn, and those were carols.  Or should I say, we did get to learn something, because we had to know more than merely the first verses.  Just like being in the Cubs, where the one thing that I retain from my time there is knowing the second verse of the English national anthem, I also know more of the words of more hymns that I ever get the chance to sing.

Anyway, back to the trudging.  Given my thrombosis, embolism etc etc I feel I have a real and authentic reason not to like walking, and have a fully justified condition to find the easiest way to do things that demand physical effort.

So, trudge, trudge, trudge (resenting every step) when the words of one particular carol came back to me about a youngster whingeing about having to make his way through thick snow, following behind his master, who responds by saying:

“Mark my footsteps, my good page

Tread thou in them boldly . .

In his master’s steps he trod

Where the snow lay dinted

Heat was in the very sod

Which the saint had printed”

Works with sand too.  Where Toni left a footprint, I trod and, lo and behold, it was a good sight easier than making my own flat-footed way.

Therefore, Good King Wenceslas, not only gave me an easier way of walking through soft sand, but it also allowed angelic looking little boys to sing the word “sod” inside a church!

Of such things are memories made.