The sleep of reason produces monsters!

 

 

 

This particular time in early September is a date I dread.

     This is not because of any lingering horror of being a teacher and the inevitable quoting of the deathless line in Wordsworth, “shades of the prison house begin to form Upon the growing boy” which seemed to me to work for pupils as well as teachers approaching a new year, and I have thought and quoted it through my life – right up until retirement.  From retirement onwards the metaphor of the “prison house” takes on a rather more terminal meaning that merely getting a new timetable!

     No, the dread here is the annual closing of the swimming pool for its “Essential Maintenance”.  This usually means a fortnight of closure which in the past I have compensated for by using other pools in Castelldefels and Gava, using the community pool, and swimming in the sea.

     The community pool and the sea are free, but the other options come with complications.  As I no longer use my bike thanks to the element of instability that my new knees have gifted me, I need to take the car and park, and in some cases the distance from the pool that a vacant parking space offers itself, I might as well as walked from home!  That is not strictly true, but a long walk is something that I do not relish, and neither do my knees.  There is also the cost of swimming in another pool.  A one-off swim is expensive, so you need to buy a season ticket or a multi-swim card and that is all a bit of a faff.  So I look for alternatives.

     For the last couple of years during this time of enforced dryness, I have reasoned that as I pay a subscription to my swimming pool and gym, I should really take advantage of the latter and use the various machines that are dotted around the torture area assigned to those who like to sweat.

     As I vividly remember asking one attendant at a gym in Cardiff to “walk me though” a reasonable workout regime – and not being able to move a muscle without exquisite pain the next morning, I now take things relatively easy.  When you are a swimmer, you take for granted the cushioning and supportive elements of the water in what you regard as fairly hard exercise.  When you transfer that level of effort to the air, the gravitational drag on muscles is rather different.

     Therefore, when I go to the gym, I have a Survival in Relative Comfort approach to the machines which, to my eyes all look like instruments of torture.  I start with the static cycle, especially one machine that has real back support, I then move on to some sort of knee bend thingie where the weight that you push is adjustable by the use of weights.  I always check where the rod in the weights is situated before I start, because once or twice I have started without looking and almost popped my knees with the astonishing heaviness that some people take in their stride.  I then move on to the rowing machine and end up with a gentle walk on the treadmill.

     There are variations in the order and selection of machines because sometimes the ones I want are occupied so I have to improvise with the schedule.  Some machines I do not use because I have yet to work out how one threads one’s body into to them to get them to work.  You might well say, just look at how other people use them and then emulate.  Which is good advice, though I have also noticed that the more professional users have their own individual variations in how they utilize the various flanges and bits of the machines – and given the way that their bodies look with triple layer muscles, I do not intend to match their exertions, even in my imagination let alone in what I like to call “real life”.

     There is obviously an overlap between gym and pool, though there is a distinct sub-species of masochist that concentrates solely on the gym, and usually specializes in an area I never walk in (let alone participate in) the area of the Free Weights.  This is the area that has a mirror wall so that the sufferers can watch their pain.  Each to his (and it is usually ‘his’) own.

     I would imagine that tomorrow, for my first visit to the gym there will be some people that I am on ¡Hola! Level acquaintanceship with who will in various ways question why I am there, when most of them will have seen me (there is a row of machines with a view of the pool) ploughing my lonely (if I’m lucky) furrow up and down ‘my’ lane.

     I am an early morning user of the pool and there are a number of regulars in the pool and the gym who I tend to assume are the ‘users’ of the facilities, but I really fail to understand that there are many more people who have a different timetable from me and so there are layers of ‘ownership’ of various aspects of the pool and gym that are time sensitive.

     It’s like a Sci-Fi story I read that described an over-populated world in which your life was lived according to a particular day, so that if you were a Monday person, you would live your active life on a Monday and then go into suspended animation for a week, until on the following Monday you would be revived and assume that you were in day two of your particular week.*  So, in the pool and gym there are people who would not consider using the facilities at the time that I use them and vice versa.

    The few times that I have swum out of my time I have been confused by the differences in clientele almost as if it was a different place.

     Well, for the next three (sic.) weeks I will be changing my habits and (resentfully) following a different path. 

     Life is hard sometimes.  But at least I’m not teaching!

*Philip José Farmer's “The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World” (1971). 

 

This & That

 

 

 

 In the compensatory way of Catalan weather, it is now gloriously sunny and raining!  I managed to get my tempest-delayed bike ride from this stormy morning in, just before the lashing rain thoroughly soaked me – and that last bit can be read in both ways, and both are right!

     In this part of the world, thunder sounds as if it is being ‘played’ by an over enthusiastic ASM in some ropey rep.  It grumbles away in the background until you suddenly feel as though you are in the front line in WW1 as a cataclysmic clap of thunder sounds as if it has taken over all of your immediate surroundings.

     As I have been typing, the rain has stopped and a sunny dampness has settled around the blissfully quiet pool, devoid as it is of persons of limited age.  It won’t be long before the determined sunshine chimes in with their youthful energy and the (imagined) solitude is rudely broken.  Again.

 

 We are approaching the two-week period when our local pool is closed for essential maintenance, or whatever.  This means that each year I have to decide about where I go to maintain my daily exercise.

     Let me be clear, only the pool is closed, all other aspects and facilities of the centre are available.  My knees preclude padel, so the only other alternative is To Go To The Gym.

     When I first came to join this centre, I was given the guided tour by one of the managers who asked, “Would you like to see the gym?”  To which I replied, “No.”  I was there for the covered 25m pool and nothing else.

     I am not going to the other main pool in Castelldefels because I have bad (and expensive) memories of using the place, so my choice in past years has been to go to the municipal pool in the neighbouring town of Gavà (Gavá, in Spanish) which means that I have to use my bike to wing the desolate abyss (an unlighted link road) between Castelldefels and my destination pool, with frankly rather frightening traffic obviously resenting my presence on the tarmac!

     This year, however, I am seriously considering To Go To The Gym in the pool with a much shorter bike ride, and most of it on an actual bike lane!  My reasoning is, that if I can find a gym instructor who lacks that sadistic side that seems a common factor in so many of their approaches to exercise regimes, and someone who actually appreciates the bone-on-bone reality of arthrosis, then I could profitably do some exercises to strengthen by leg muscles to show willing by the time I (finally) get to the traumatologist where something might be done.  I have to admit, I am not entirely convinced by that reasoning, and I am telling myself that the early morning cycle ride to Gavà in the dark was frighteningly exhilarating and availing to good.

     The internal debate can continue until the 5^th of September (when I have a delayed routine hospital appointment in the morning) but by the 6^th I will have to have decided.  Probably before then, because the days of just popping into a pool and being able to have a swim, post pandemic simply do not exist.  So, some planning needs to be done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I sit in the sunshine drinking my tea and adding pepper to my tortilla francesa baguette I am often regaled by music that is entirely unknown to me, piped to the outside sitting area by who knows who inside.  Most of it washes over me, but occasionally I perk up a little and take notice.

     Yesterday was one such day because part of the lyrics of one of the songs sounded odd to me.  The song (I have since discovered) was a “collaboration” between Yves V, INNA & Janieck.  How it took that many to write the deathless lyrics or the equally deathless tune, is somewhat beyond me, but one particular line stuck out, “You haunt me like a déjà vu” (written without the accents in the original, but let it pass, let it pass – and I might add that they were added automatically by Word when I typed them and not with my fingers.) 

     And I realized that I have never seen the phrase used like that.  Yes déjà vu is a noun, but I had never seen, or indeed heard the phrase with only an indefinite article to keep it company “a déjà vu.” One hears things like, a sense of déjà vu; it is déjà vu; it was déjà vu; a feeling of déjà vu, but never, “a déjà vu.”  In the chorus of the song the first line uses “a déjà vu” but the repeat is “You haunt me like déjà vu” which is how I would use it.

     Obviously, using the indefinite article is not in any sense wrong, but it is odd that it is generally not done.

     I am now wondering if I should find an opportunity and try out the song’s way of using the phrase and see how it sits with my way of expression.

          

                    Words, I love them!