The little rituals of life

No matter how early I make it to the pool for its opening, my little friend with his cigarette is there before me and trips off to the pool from the changing room to bag his accustomed end lane.  It is a wise choice because the last lane is rarely doubled swum so to speak.  If you are in it then the people who come after you choose one of the other lanes.  I had to make do with lane 4, a good choice this morning as I had it to myself, and I was able to pace myself against my little friend.

     MLF can swim crawl, and he swims the first length using this stroke, but his succeeding lengths are steady breaststroke – steady, but relatively slow.  My pacing him therefore is lapping him.  I set myself to lap him ten times before he leaves the pool.  When he leaves the pool, it is time for me to do my ‘endgame’: six lengths, of which the last two are, respectively, an assessment lane as to how I think I have swum, and during the last length I try and estimate my total distance.  My aim is to complete 1,500 m and it usually takes me about 40-45 minutes.  If at the end of my last six lengths I have completed my fifteen hundred (my smartwatch tells me exactly) then I do one length as quickly as I can and then a leisurely length of sedate breaststroke.  I then have a series of stretching and cool down exercises at the far end of the pool and my last length is a high stepping walk to a final series of twenty knee bends and out.

     Usually I go to the pool café when I have completed my swim, but today was one of the two days when I have an early class in Catalan.   

     Today’s lesson was taken up with the searing film of a young girl’s experience of growing up in Afghanistan as the school contribution to activity associated with the Week of the Woman.

     The film was called Osama and it produced one of those experiences that leave you feeling weak with impotent fury about how humans treat each other.  Admittedly the Taliban does not have a very positive public image and most of us feel an instinctive revulsion against the whole ethos of what the Taliban stands for.  Like Apartheid in South Africa, the Taliban is something that can be rejected with something approaching complacency as their attitudes towards women are simply totally wrong.  No excuses, wrong!  To say nothing of their attitudes to culture and expression.

     Because the subject matter of the film is so appalling and so transfixing, it is difficult to evaluate the film as a film.  There were shots of great beauty and the director was not afraid to extend some shots and consciously dwell on squalor artistically viewed – but the story of a family of women forced to dress the child as a boy to allow them to go outside after the Taliban refused to let women work and be outside of their homes without the presence of a man or boy is gripping.

     There is a meeting next week in school that I may attend which builds on the momentum from the film - but it depends on how the Catalan revision is going!  The meeting, after all, will be in Spanish – which is not in the test!

First into the pool this morning (i.e. the day after the opening paragraphs) and safely within the untouchable watery embrace of lane number 5!  And I kept it until the end of my swim: alone, inviolate!  And as a bonus, during my after-swim tea (outside, though the weather was at the limit of outsidedness) I thought of a word that I had searched for in vain last night when I was doing more work on the memory poem: validation.  And that can be used easily in phrases to lessen its awkwardness.  Each small step towards completion is gratefully accepted.

     

     Today a lunch date with Irene and the opportunity for more cups of tea and word in conversation.

         

     My revision for Catalan has taken a backward step because the set of vocabulary cards that I wrote have disappeared and I am loath to make another set.  A clear case of prevarication – and the exam is now five clear days away!  O god! O Montreal!

     And now to go upstairs and do some real Catalan work.  And hope, against hope that it will result in some sort of residence in my memory.

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.

Reality check?

Say what you like about the Spanish education system, but they do like a good test.

            The use of that last adjective is an interesting one.  For the first time for a considerable time, I have had to do a test.  And I have not done at all well.  Not at all.

            The real problem is that I was not playing to my strengths, as this test was the first of what I am sure is going to be a continuing series of tests in my Spanish course in Castelldefels.

In most situations in my present country of choice I find that my Tarzan-like approach to Spanish (heavy on nouns, adjectives and expressive hand gestures, but low on verbs and grammatical forms) usually gets me out of most situations in which I have blithely entered into.  I have ‘spoken Spanish’ in all types of situations, formal and informal and, usually, astonishingly, I have managed to survive.  This impressionistic approach to language use while it is certainly a way of surviving is not the way of the Spanish educational test.  In such tests the lack of an accent is fully and totally wrong and no matter how you might have got away with saying the word, if you write it incorrectly, it is simply wrong            

            And tests like things like verbs and the correct use of prepositions.  Such things are not my strengths!

            I spent last night in an increasingly desperate write-it-out-until-you-remember-it attempt to push a vast amount of specific grammatical information into a brain that seems to be wired not to accept such things as in any way important.

            My humiliation (to be revealed next Tuesday in the next lesson) has had one positive result: I am now ‘officially’ panicking and am determined to do something about it.  That last phrase has more than a touch of the defeatist optimism of King Lear, but I do believe that at least part of my mind is available to accept morsels of information linked to what might get me an eventual pass in the examination that I need to pass if I am to be qualified to become a Spanish citizen.  As an example I have (you might well say “at last”) understood the difference between the use of the verb ‘gustar’ related to singular and plural associations.  This is fairly basic stuff, but lots of basic bits put together equals proficiency!  At least I hope so.

            I suppose the real lesson to be drawn from the sorry tale of low marks is that it is not going to be easy.  Although I might be able to bluff my way through an easy conversation in Spanish – easy, conversational Spanish is not the sort of language that is going to get you marks in a Spanish examination.  I am reminded of my third year tutor in university who did not allow me to get away with any airy-fairy ‘interesting’ comments about literary texts: he wanted specific, text supported, page numbered evidence to back up anything I said.  I would do well to bear in mind his attitude to inform my response to my future studies!  Who knows, I might actually progress!

Only I could place all my gadget hopes in possessing a state-of-the-art mobile phone, the flagship machine of a world leader in communications, only to discover that it also had an exploding battery!

           I paid for this phone (in full) in August, proudly pre-ordering something that was obviously going to be the cynosure of all phone users’ eyes.  Each delivery date I was given, stretched my patience to breaking point and beyond.  And then Samsung (yes, it was a Note 7) announced that it was suspending production of the machine and instituted a worldwide recall.  Disaster.  And it was, in the brilliant advertising phrase used by Stella Artois, “reassuringly expensive!”  Well, not for me the glorious moment of ostentatiously using something that other people have not got.  With new tech. it is not enough to own something, other people must be without it!

            The seriousness of the situation was indicated by the fact that not only did I ‘open a file’ on the Affaire Samsung, but it also had its own box file to contain it!

            A phone call got me my money paid back into my account, and a quick check on the Internet checked that it was actually there.  Then Toni got to work.

            After the years that Toni has spent on his IT course, it is nice to get something back.  He set off on an Internet trawl to find the next best phone for me.  I have to say that he does not go for the obvious.  His previous suggestion was for a Yota phone, a Russian double-faced device – the only ones that I have seen have been mine.  I use the plural as the first Yotaphone was stolen and the second accompanied me into our pool and died.  Being far too expensive to replace a third time, I downscaled to a Huawei.  This was also on advice from Toni who had explored possibilities in the phone world when suggesting a phone for his sister’s birthday.

            I have been satisfied with the phone, but, as I rarely use the thing as an actual phone, it has not been ideal.  Therefore, again on Toni’s advice I have decided to go phablet and have ordered some sort of monster mobile phone from China.  And it is less than half the price of what the Samsung was going to cost me.

            And, as far as money is concerned, I have just had, coincidentally, back payment of my small Spanish state pension fragment that covers the cost.  And then some.  Though not much more.  So, to my way of thinking, the phone is actually free.  That sort of economic thinking developed in college and has stayed with me ever since.  And, as I do not smoke, I have always considered that the money I have not spent on a disgusting habit exists in some sort of financial ‘cloud’ to be called on when a mad moment of expenditure calls.

            I am not sure how the next piece of information fits into my money thoughts, but I had a phone call from the police yesterday informing me that my sports bag which disappeared from the back of my bike in the couple of hundred yards from the Correos to the optician had turned up and was waiting for me to collect.  Which I did and found that absolutely nothing was missing.  From earplugs to a small packet of mixed nuts for emergency energy and all the towels, bathing costumes and goggles that I stuff into the interior, everything was there.

            In the days after the bag disappeared I remembered all the things that I had forgotten were there: a case of bike tools; a mini tyre pump; a packable raincoat and cash.  Unfortunately, the return of the case was not timely enough to stop my buying replacements, but on the bright side it is always good to have spares!

            I now await my new phone.  With impatience.