A future tinge of normality

 

I have been able to book a place for a swim on Saturday! 

     We have not been informed that the pool is actually reopening then after our latest bout of lockdown, but I am taking it as gospel and will be there, bright eyed and bushy tailed.  Well, as b.e.a.b.t. as one can be at 7.15 am after a couple of weeks of indolent snoozing in the morning courtesy of Covid - restrictions rather than the disease I hasten to add.

     I have to admit that it will be a relief to get back to my early morning routine, as the swim gives a sort of impetus and structure to my day – as well as exercise of course!  I am not sure that restaurants and cafes will be open again, so my cup of tea might have to wait, as will my writing in my notebook, as that seems heavily dependent on my being in the café as well.

 

 

 

 

I have made an executive decision to stop counting those people not wearing masks as I take my daily bike ride along the paseo.  My insufferable superiority in always wearing a mask when I should, as opposed to the lesser breeds without the law who do not, is already at such astronomical levels that it is impossible to boost further.  All I do, therefore, by my continued counting is to make myself angry as I give hard looks to all those unmasked selfish viral assassins who feel themselves allowed to parade (literally) their homicidal proclivities as I cycle by.  This is not productive.  I must open my sense of forgiveness and pretend to be blissfully unaware of their murderous irresponsibility. 

     I have to admit that it makes the bike ride more enjoyable as well as I can concentrate on the more scenic elements in my journey rather than noting in every face I meet marks of weakness marks of woe.  And I just know that bonkers old Blake would be much more forgiving than I.  So, I really should make the effort.

 

Although my new watch does not have the battery life of my old Pebble (Ah! The watches of yesteryear!) and not even the battery life of my old-new Amazfit, I have decided that the life that I am getting from the new-new watch is, one might say, acceptable.

     As is always the case with watch/app co-existence there are always problems with synchronizing, but I have come to understand that as par for the course and I take such irritations in my stride.  Though I have to admit that the last instance of my app not recognizing the watch in spite of Bluetooth being on and the bloody watch being next to the mobile phone was difficult to work out.  And, although I tried a number of things to make it work (and yes, I did try switching in off and then on, more than once) when it did, finally, decide to do what it had done perfectly normally up to yesterday, I am not sure what it is that I did that worked.  But, extensive experience with things electrical means that I accept success and a glowing screen with a look of quiet competence rather than total surprise.

 

 

Tomorrow is my flu jab.  This is not going to be administered in our medical centre, but in a civic building in the centre of town.  I understand that the flu injections are being administered on an industrial scale and medical centres are pooling their resources and making the process fully central.  Presumably this is something like a dry run for the truly frightening logistics that will have to be run when the Covid vaccine (DV) is finally available for use.

     As far as I can work out, my age group is likely to be in the third tranche of the general population, at least going on the UK’s way of measuring these things I would be.  It will be interesting to see how the state (any state) copes with what is going to be a mammoth undertaking.

     I am not sure how far ‘normal’ doctoring will be affected by the vaccination of the entire population, though we have already seen a change in the way that our medical centre is working and that change can only be more radical when the roll-out of the vaccine is in full flow.

     This part of the world rejoices in bureaucracy which can always be a pain, but at the same time we all have readily available numbers and cards so we can be fairly easily be ticked off on some great flow chart in the sky.  It remains to be seen how fluidly this flows!

 

Meanwhile, two bike rides today – and neither noted by my fitness app because of the recalcitrance of my watch.   

     But tomorrow, things will be different!   

     And roll on Saturday and my first real swim for weeks!

Jabs, art & politics!

When you feel smugly self-satisfied that you have started the day well by popping into your local health centre and having a flu jab - then there is possibly something wrong with the way that you are looking at life!

I even told myself that going there on my bike and having a swim afterwards was exactly the way to get all the goodness from the injection coursing around my veins or whatever.  I was in and out of the nurse’s office in a couple of minutes and that included a greeting, an enquiry after my general health and a hearty goodbye.

I have, courtesy of my ever-generous partner, already had one bout of sniffling, coughing and phlegminess.  It was an extended and miserable experience and had the disturbing feature of my getting better, having a sort of day off for good behaviour and then the illness returning with a vicious sneer of misery.  If the jab can keep a repetition of that unpleasant experience away then all well and good.  And, I might add, its efficacy is about to be put to the test because my partner has started sniffling again in what I can only describe as a professional manner.

Still, I have a “school trip” to look forward to!  I expect that you are expecting me to state that this will be the first school trip that I have been on as a student since the dim and distant days of my grammar school.  But wrong!  This will be my third school trip with my Spanish class.  The first trip was a tour of Gothic Barcelona; the second a much more satisfying visit to a Cava producer (with sampling of the produce) and tomorrow’s trip will be a guided tour of the houses of Los Americanos in Sitges.

 

These houses are the prestigious dwelling built by Catalans who went to the Americas and made their fortunes and then came back home to show off their wealth.  You should bear in mind that one of the famous brands of rum was founded by a Catalan - think of bats and you’ll get the one I mean, and there is even a museum in Sitges devoted to it.

The houses are built in a Catalan version of Art Nouveau and Sitges is particularly rich in these architectural pieces.  I have been on a guided walk around Sitges to look at them before, but this time the commentary will be in Spanish and will therefore not only challenge my knowledge of the language, but will also be a test of my memory of what was said in English the last time to help my translation.  It is so much easier reading Spanish rather than hearing it spoken by a native speaker, but that is the reason for these little trips, to get us to experience something approaching normality in the use of what we have been studying.

I have finished reading through the second volume of the textbooks for the Open University art course that I am not taking.  Buying the book is only (!) a hundred quid, rather than the two and a half grand for the actual course itself.

I have to admit that the book read itself.  It was an absolute delight.  I was going to stretch my reading by trying to limit the chapters I read at one time, giving myself, I reasoned, a decent period of time to let the new ideas sink in and perhaps do a little light research around the topics introduced.  Fat chance of that!  Once started I found myself allowing myself “just a little more” until it was more of a gorge than a measured read.

The contents of this excellent book taken from the course description on the OU site are:

Block 2: Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600-1800

You will explore art and visual culture of a period in which the major European powers competed with each other for global dominance. The influx of ‘exotic’ goods, above all from Asia, transformed European taste and artistic production, including seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and gave rise to the vogue for ‘Chinoiserie’ in eighteenth-century Britain. Art and architecture were exported across the Atlantic to Latin America, where some of the most spectacular works of the Baroque era were created, as well as to North America, where Thomas Jefferson built his ideal classical villa, Monticello. Local circumstances and cultural traditions helped to shape the transfer of art works, and artistic models from one context to another. A key theme for this book is the relationship of art and visual culture to slavery and the slave trade.

The one great thing about art books is that they have pictures!  Though there is also the point to be made that ‘reading’ the pictures sometimes takes up more time than a comparable block of text!  On the OU website for the course there is probably opportunity to load up the pictures on line and to search them by expansion so that hard to see details in the illustrations become clearer.  I compensate for my lack of access to that resource by wielding a rather impressive looking magnifying glass and looking, as Toni pointed out this afternoon, like an obsessive Sherlock Holmes - or is that tautology?

Anyway, I have a lot to think about as the book has made me re-evaluate some of my assumptions and has given my a whole series of associations to consider.  In that respect it is something like “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond - a book I whole-heartedly recommend.   

The volume is subtitled “The Fate of Human Societies” and its descriptive sweep of human history and pointed questions that arise from his observations force recognition of why history is as it is.  I can remember my first reading this book, and the fact that I had to put it down a few times because the import of what I had just understood struck home!

Part of the excitement of reading Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600-1800 is that it is obviously a base from which you need to expand.  There are suggestions and questions in each of the sections that beg for further study.  There is a “Reader” to go with the course that is rather harder work with smaller print, more pages and fewer illustrations (and only in black and white) and has critical, historical and primary sources to widen the inquiry.  This is where the web site, course guides and tutors, as well as the other students make the study come alive.  Still, I am supposed to be studying Spanish and not Art and its Global Histories.  So there!

The situation in Catalonia continues not to improve, mainly because of the almost criminal intransigence of the national government as represented by members of the right wing, systemically corrupt minority government of PP and its depressing Prime Minister Rajoy.

What did bring a smile to my face was watching the interview by Tim Sebastian of the foreign minister of the minority government, Alfonso Dastis.   

All credit to Dastis to go on a programme and speak in English, something the prime minister could never do.  His performance, however was execrable and his bluster in response to Tim Sebastian’s well researched, well supported and well put questions was depressingly familiar to those who have heard politicians go out to speak to the media when they are under prepared and have a poor case to put.  The interview can be heard here 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Wupp5IcL4

                       and is well worth listening to at length, although when you consider that this is real life for us rather than a politician making a fool of himself, it does get really depressing.  And he is one of the more impressive members of the government!  God help us all.

But tomorrow, school trip.  Take your pleasure where you can!

How ill do you have to be before you can look at what is happening and Catalonia and accept it?

-->

I am not good at being ill.

There are certain people who seem only to thrive when they are not well.  Rude heath for them would be exactly that, vulgar and unnatural.  As a teacher you know that the one way to get a class to talk is to ask if anyone has suffered any gory injury.  Even reticent kids will tumble over themselves to relate gruesome tales of hacked flesh, broken limbs and unsightly diseases.  Detail piles on detail as each bloody fragment is lovingly recalled.  Ask those same kids to explain in as vivid language any of their positive achievements and all you will get is a smirkingly smug enumeration of the unlikely level of Candy Crush that has been gained though abuse of opposable thumbs.

One of my great aunts made, as far as I can work out, an entire life out of having a ‘delicate heart’ and therefore had to be cossetted and due attention to her frailty had to be given to preserve her life.  Her very, very, very long life.  I think she outlived all of her sisters who had rather more sturdy hearts!  But they hadn’t worked at ill health in the single-minded way that she had.

Anyway, some accept illness, some fight illness and some have illness gifted upon them.  My compact with god was that I would be a blood donor as long as I was kept out of hospital and never had to use any of my own liquid contributions, or indeed those of anyone else.  As a sub-section of this divine agreement there was an acceptance that one-day’s incapacitating illness a year would be acceptable as long as the medicine to get better was a few hours bed rest.

Generally speaking this agreement has worked well.  I do have a couple of chronic conditions, but those don’t really count as they tend to go on and do their thing as a sort of subtle counterbalance to glowing health and are dealt with my daily pill taking, in the same way that my eyesight is ameliorated by the wearing of contact lenses.  So a day’s illness every other year or so; taking to one’s bed; getting better has been the general run of health in my life.

Now that I Am Of An Age I get a yearly flu jab and that then tends to limit my seasonal discomfort to a few sniffles and an occasional little cough.

It does not account for the generosity of partners, whose cough, runny nose, sore throat and irritating headache over the left ear is a gift that I have been trying to get rid of for the past week.

I got better (as I do) and even had an extended telephone conversation with Dianne with neither a sniff nor a liquid cough as a sure sign that the mucus had dried out when, uniquely in my experience, I had a relapse during the night and woke up much worse that I had been!  Unprecedented.  Since then I have had to cancel my Spanish lesson and start wandering around with a toilet roll to mop up what seems to be the effluent from some sort of factory in my nose.   

I have abused the reality that you can get massive (1g) painkillers over the counter in this country and then had only patchy pain free results. 

I have slept in!

That last admission is shocking and a clear indication that Something Is Wrong.

Having said all that, I do think that I am now getting better.  But it has been a salutary reminder of the fact that next United Nations Day I will of an age where virtually all the movers and shakers of the past had long gone to their graves.  With the signal exception of the painter Titian who, it is said, and who am I to disagree, did not complete his finest work until he was in his eighties.  I have no intention of searching my mind to unearth (perhaps the wrong word) more octogenarians (though Shirley Bassey and The Pope spring to mind, but let it go, let it go) to encourage me to consider that there are decades of useful life ahead of me - I am much more concerned that the life that is left is not filled with snot and snorts.

The illness that has laid me low is the sort that precludes intellectual activity, so I have been watching marathon sessions of continuous episodes of The Big Bang Theory - and I still can’t sing along with the opening ditty!  I have very much enjoyed the experience, but as I get better, I find the need for more of that particular drug lessening.  It is always a good thing to find a self-weaning comedy programme!

From time to time as the programmes came and went I did manage to drag my consciousness from its mucus filled nasally blocked dungeon to make some interestingly perceptive apercus about what I was watching - but alas, those pithy observations are now in the same place as the recipients of my nasal discharge.

As I have convinced myself that I am getting better, I have advanced to watching Westworld, the major delight of which is watching the acting and more particularly listening to the enunciation of Anthony Hopkins.  He is one of those British character actors who can make the most banal piece of dialogue sound profound.  His vocal mannerisms may be, uh, mannered, but by god they make you listen.  An unexpected pause, a slight slur, and in-drawn breath, a half look and an impeccable sense of timing - continuous pleasure.

As opposed to the political situation in Catalonia and Spain.

We have had a sort of apology for the brutality of the Spanish police by the senior representative of the Spanish Government in Catalonia.  Not from the central government you understand, where our clueless President still refuses to concede the need for dialogue and compromise.

The latest piece in the browbeating of Catalonia is the action of a couple of very big banks that have threatened to move their headquarters outside Catalonia so that they are still in the EU if the government declares UDI.

And that last paragraph gives the wrong impression.  As far as I can tell, the banks are threatening to move their registered offices out of Catalonia.  Not quite the same thing - as any two-bit shady organization hoping for a bigger return on their capital will tell you.  We can hardly look to the banks as paragons of ethical steadfastness: they go with the money and wherever their financial lawyers say they can get the best deal.  So this form of financial blackmailing is hardly new and it would be interesting to see the real outcome of moving a registered office rather than an entire organization with all its real estate.

The propaganda war is hotting up in Spain and the ‘interpretations’ of reality that we are presented with on television would gladden the heart of a nit-picking pedant like Saint Augustine.  Jesting Pilate would have a field day with the varieties of truthfulness on daily display.

The Socialist party of Catalonia is opposed to independence and they asked their followers to take no part in the referendum.  They have now asked a judicial court to block the proposed sitting of the Catalan parliament on Monday where the results of the referendum were going to be put to the representatives and where a possible UDI could be declared.

I do have some sympathy with those political parties like PP, PSOE and Cs (and their Catalan counterparts) who opposed the referendum and played no part in it.  This is a perfectly good position to take.  But.  And the big ‘but’ here is that when the referendum looked as though it was actually going to happen, everyone should have piled in and either forced the minority right-wing PP government to come to some sort of settlement with the possibility of a fully legal referendum at a future date in Catalonia, or voted ‘no’ in the referendum.  As it is now, we had over two million people defy the central government and, in spite of appalling police brutality and obstruction cast their votes.

The other parties have been wrong footed.  The vote could never have taken place if the political parties had done some politics.  But they didn’t.  And they suddenly have to deal with a disastrous/farcical situation where they fulminate about the grotesque obscenity of people casting a democratic vote.

OK, you can debate ‘legality’ and ‘illegality’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ and all those other high sounding words - but the reality of the situation is that a vote has been held, votes have been counted and a president is poised to declare UDI from Spain.  The posturing of the opposing political parties seems woefully inadequate and the ‘solutions’ that the government of Spain has suggested are ultimata rather than bargaining positions.

Does the Spanish government really want to send the ‘police’ in again?  Augmented by troops?  Do they really want to invoke article 155 of the Constitution and take over the government of Catalonia?  Do they really want to stick to their inflexible standpoint of absolutely no negotiation about a binding referendum some time in the future?

From the outside it must seem, especially about the disastrous pictures of police brutality, that something must give.  Some reason must prevail.  To which I say, live in Spain for a few years and see exactly how this minority PP government acts and reacts and then you will consider that anything is possible.

God help Catalonia!