Twelve days early morning swimming in the outdoor community pool! Only two days to go before my local indoor pool reopens after the yearly fortnight maintenance closure. Considering I was contemplating paying to use the Gavá pool, I’m quids in! But it will be a relief to get back to my normal routine on Monday of next week
In spite of the fact that I have given myself an extra hour or so in bed, to allow the sun to rise before I immerse myself in the chilly waters, I can’t say that I have benefited from the lie-in. My body clock will not be denied, and I continue to wake up as if my swim was at 7 am, and any bedtime after my inexorable early rising time, is forced rather than easy and so, in the scheme of things, doesn’t really count.
Apart from two startled Dutch strangers, I have swum alone since a week last Monday, and those interlopers were obviously just proving they had access to everything, as you do when you have just arrived for your holiday and feel that you must use all the facilities at once to get value for money!
I would like to report that my lonely circling of the pool allowed my mind to drift into poetic reveries and that I, immediately on exiting the pool, rushed to my notebook, and wrote out my exquisite thoughts before they evaporated like the water on my skin. Alas! Not so!
The only time an image suggested itself was when, this morning, I (grudgingly) swum in the aftermath of a short, quasi, sun-shower, and the drips from the overarching pine trees produced little, short-lived bubbles on the surface of the pool. Even then, when I did get out, writing in my notebook was not the first thing I did, and you might say that noting that omission is my way of encouraging myself to get on with it and at least jot down the phrases that (while swimming at least) seemed to have some poetic legs!
I have also written nothing ‘poetic’ about the “collective hysteria” (one cousin) that has prompted actions like the laying of flowers (another cousin) to mark the death of QEII.
The royal circus has now reached Wales, and there is a service in Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff and then a meeting in the Senedd. Welsh First Minister Drakeford has made it clear that protest by anti-royalists is something that must be allowed and has suggested that the South Wales Police will be appreciative of that right. We’ll see how that goes.
Memories of my first and only trip to Mexico came back to mind when hearing about The Queue – it surely deserves the capital letter as it has become a defining aspect of The British Character.
Our arrival in Mexico for holiday after a very long and excruciatingly uncomfortable sardine-flight was just the prelude to a series of what I can only describe as humiliations. We had to queue to get inside the airport, then queue to join a queue for customs, and then further queue to get through the various obstacles that Mexican bureaucracy provided before we were finally allowed to enter the country.
Now, from the comfort of my own armchair in Catalonia, I can watch a similar queueing quandary as the Main Queue for the lying-in-state has been (allegedly) closed because the maximum length has been reached, but people undeterred by the eleven-hour wait, have taken it upon themselves to unofficially queue in a park to wait to join the official queue! This is tantamount to insanity.
I am reminded also of a story I heard about The Festival of Britain in 1951. Although the war ended in 1945, rationing would not end until 1954, so the futuristic architecture, plate glass and colour of The Festival of Britain was something extraordinary. It was a very popular exhibition, a statement of determination and optimism in the somewhat dreary post-war years and intended to be a “Tonic to the Nation!” In total over eight million people visited the main exhibition site on the South Bank of the Thames, and I have been told that people were employed to go around the site and break up queues that had formed spontaneously.
Giving rationing and the scarcity of so much just after the war, people were used to queueing, and once a queue formed, it developed its own integrity with the people at the head of the queue thinking that there must be something worth waiting for because there were people behind them, and the people behind them assuming the same things given the people in front!
I would, of course, maintain that both the queue for the late Queen and also the phantom queues of The Festival of Britain are alike in having no ‘real’ end destination. I know that there is the viewing of a coffin on a catafalque in an ancient hammer-beam roofed hall, and there is always an off-chance of seeing a prince or two or the changing of the guard to justify the wait, but essentially the whole thing is a nothing. It is a celebration of absence, of a distant unknowable entity now gone. It is a fantasy of historicism and of significance, it is an illusion tyring to pretend to be something real. But it’s not, no matter how many people emote when they see the symbols and think that they are participating. They are as deluded as those people queuing for nothing on The South Bank in 1951, and ironically in 2022 they are back queueing on The South Bank again.
Where are the people to break up this queue and say, “Move on, there’s nothing to see here!”
