A Stab to Start the Day

 

 New Lockdown, Day X, Tuesday

 

 

 

Not everyone starts their day by stabbing themselves with their electric toothbrush.  And I mean real stabbing.  With blood.

      Not an easy feat, but I managed it.  The head of the brush somehow or other came away from the main body of the brush and I then was distracted by the perception of distance and I brought the vibrating metal stalk forcibly into in the right-hand side of my mouth, just below the bottom lip!  It certain woke me up, and any lingering drowsiness was jabbed away in a concentrated moment of pain.

     Before you start thinking of wasting any sympathy on me and my injury, I would point out that the puncture is small and it looks more like a shaving nick than anything else – but still a wake-up call to the unwary to beware of seemingly domestic dental devices.

     When I checked the errant brush head, it did look a little worn and perhaps I should have replaced it earlier.

     Toothbrushes (and electric toothbrush heads) are in a category of simple things that could be easily and cheaply replaced but aren’t, until something happens.  This is a category they share with wooden kitchen spoons and spatulas; face flannels; tea towels and coffee mugs.

     Actually, the last item, the mug, is something that I will throw away as soon as I detect even the smallest chip or crack – some things are ingrained in your innermost soul by maternal edict that cannot, dare not be gainsaid.  My mother regarded a chip or crack in pottery and china as being as toxic as a vomiting fly, safe harbours for unmentionable and uncountable germs.  Discard instantly!  And I do.

     But the other things?  I have some wooden spoons (not thrown away) which look as though they were carved from a beam in the ark; tea towels that have only the faintest suggestion of pattern, others delicately threadbare.  Why?  They are so cheap to replace, and I am not known for my thriftiness – indeed, in certain respects I am an eager celebrant at the altar of planned obsolescence.  But you can almost read the history of our family in the tea towels that we use, whereas my purchases of watches or computers brings tears to the eyes of my bank manager, and untold you to manufacturers.

     I have known people (well, one person) who would refuse to go into a café for a cup of tea because of the mark-up on the cost of a cuppa compared with what he knew it cost at home.  He would actually wait outside the café while the rest of us imbibed in feckless luxury and then re-join us when we had finished our squander.  But for other things, he paid the price asked without question, even when the profit margin was just as substantial.  Ah well, one shouldn’t always look to logic to explain how humans work.

 

 

 

The radio in the kitchen is a Roberts and is Internet linked, so, in theory I should be able to get Radio 4 (without which civilized life is not even remotely possible) but the reception is unruly.  Toni has suggested a solution which involves turning the electrical wiring system into some 

 

sort of conduit for the Wi-Fi link to the internet.  All this involves is the purchase of a link from the router to the socket and then another link from the socket to the radio: one of those “plug and play” solutions.

       

     “Ho!  Ho!  Ho!” he laughed hollowly.  It didn’t work.

     The reason it didn’t work is that the link to the router has to be direct to the socket in the wall.  That, in this house is a problem.  Built in the days when a couple of sockets was more than enough for any home, the availability of power is an ongoing quest.  And an extensive use of extension leads.

     The router is in the living room and the radio is in the kitchen.  The area behind the television and almost hidden from view is a writhing mass of cabling for the basic electrical necessities of modern life.  There is no socket available for the frivolity of getting Radio 4 when so much else needs power.

     No problem.  We have another router on the third floor.  The house is built of concrete and is terrifyingly solid, wi-fi needs boosts to get all the computing machines to work, so all I had to do was find the socket on the third floor and we could try that.

     The third floor is my workroom.  It is also a comically unreal picture of cluttered chaos.  Bookshelves line the walls and extension plugs proliferate.

     Finding The Source of The Nile was one of the great stories of exploration and daring, but it pales into vapid insignificance when compared with the Search for the Socket on the Third Floor.

     There is no space.  For anything.  On the Third Floor.  If anything is moved, then something else must be moved to make a space for the thing that has been moved to a new location.  At the moment, when many, many things have been moved, the space looks like a vindictive labyrinth, and my progress from desk to stairs is in a slow undulating slink as I manoeuvre around insecure piles of stuff and am rewarded by sharp book corners biting into ankles and shins.

     Like some demented game, I followed power leads, trying to find their source – only to be frustrated by finding one trailing socket only led to another trailing socket, not to the true source of power.  Crouching, crawling, moving books to move bookcases, shining a torch behind pieces of furniture (and ofttimes being bewitched into reading volumes that I had not seen for some time, but then needed by immediate attention) I felt the full weight of despair.  Indeed, I began to doubt that that there was ‘a’ source of power – it (The Power) was numinous, it was ubiquitous, it was ‘there’ and not to be questioned or assumed to have a simple source: it simply Was.

     Well, that is fine and dandy thinking for Scholastic monks, but I needed the physicality of a plug.  Which I eventually found directly behind me.  A four-socket thing, with leads going off in all directions but, amazingly with one socket free.  End of story.

     No.  The lead supplied with the magic plug is too short to reach the router and the router cannot be moved.  So, in spite of all my misgivings about the pernicious influence of Amazon in the world today, necessity bent my principles (again) and a longer lead has been ordered and will be delivered to the door tomorrow.  When we will discover the next problem to cope with.  Plug and play indeed!

 

 

 

Tomorrow the Liceu is putting on a performance of an early Mozart Opera.  The original date of the performance has been changed twice.  The time of the performance has been brought forward by two hours, and the audience has been limited to 500 people.  Masked, we sit in a circle of empty seats – and are grateful that at least something is being done in the season.

     Because of the re-arrangement the cost of the ticket has been halved, and as I sit in an aisle seat in the front stalls, that is a considerable amount of cash!

     This is a concert version of the opera, which is never a truly satisfying way to see an opera, but it was always going to be a concert version so I have nothing to complain about there.  The countertenor in the piece has a wonderful voice and I only hope that it is enough to keep me interested in a less than convincing narrative – though there are powerful human passions behind those ordered notes!

     It will also give me an opportunity to see at least some of the Christmas Lights in Barcelona, and perhaps I will feel a little more of the spirit of the ‘festive’ time – though the only present that anyone really wants is a double dose of efficient vaccine!

 

The excavations on the Third Floor have revealed more items that will be added to my growing Catalogue Raisonné, including one thing that I had thought was long lost!  It is good to see that there is some gain from the pain of sorting out!

 

 

 

 

 

First, catch your metaphor!

 

The Internet is sometimes like an over eager and terminally earnest student scientist friend who tries to answer seriously and comprehensively a casual question like, “So, how do neutron bombs actually work then?”  And fails to notice the growing hysteria in his listeners as they realize that they are stuck in a comprehensively incomprehensible monologue.  And I speak from experience!

So, I was thinking about my activity in our outside pool.  Our pool is surrounded by trees, including the pine trees that give their name to our district and, although these trees are evergreen they also discard their needles throughout the year – and a fair quantity of them fall into our pool.  We do pay for our community pool to be cleaned and serviced, but the constant rain of pine needles and cones is a problem on a daily basis and our pool persons are not that frequent visitors.

If you are a regular swimmer you will know how unsettlingly irritating a single strand of free-floating hair can be, so imagine the shock of a series of sharp pointed pine needles can be – especially if you have just come from our stretch of the Med where for the past week or so we have been dealing with an outbreak of medusas (jellyfish) that do sting, so the instinctive reaction to anything sharp in water is to fear future pain.

My major swim is in our local pool (medusa free) where I generally swim a metric mile and feel quite smug about it, so our community pool is more relaxed semi-swimming.  And this is where the thoughts at the beginning of this writing come in.

As I dislike being pricked by pine needles, I of course, assume that no one else likes it either.  I have therefore taken, in my community pool swims, to skim the surface collecting the pine needles and throwing them out of the water.

From time to time I perform (what I consider to be) an elegant surface dive to retrieve and discard the seed cases and fractured cones that litter the floor of the pool.  So, in my mind, after the mindless lengths that I do in the swimming pool, I feel that I have a sort of purpose in our community pool.  Just like those fish that are kept in aquaria solely to clean the place up.

And I should have left it at that. 

But no, I decided to examine my image in a little more detail and typed a fateful enquiry into the box and got sucked in to a whole wealth of information in the same way that I did every time I ever ventured to look inside the Guinness Book of Records.  But the digression with the Book of Records is of a different nature to that in the Internet.  I have started off trying to find out the size of the largest uncut diamond ever found and ended up being fascinated by the wing span of birds.  With the Internet you tend to go deeper into the same thing in a profoundly superficial way!

I now know more about sand sifting stars, gobies, Cory doras, freshwater catfish, bluestreak cleaner wrass, grandpa snails, suckermouth catfish and Nerite snails, than is strictly necessary for a quiet life.  I have also discovered an intense community of fish lovers who are truly preoccupied with the problems of aquarium cleaning.  I mean really, truly, preoccupied!

 Think that I have realized a valuable life lesson: metaphors and similes are approximations and, unless you are a Shakespeare, the depth of your metaphor only reaches down a single level of association and the further you research your initial thought the further, like the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella - so to speak.

Why are things, sometimes, so difficult!

Why is it so difficult to transfer music with iTunes from my Macbook Air to my mobile phone?  And that is a real question.  I have downloaded the programs that are supposed to help and all I have got is increasingly frustrated as the music stubbornly stays on the Mac and will not seamlessly transfer itself to my phone.

At which point, I know, some of you are going to ask, “Why are you trying to transfer music anyway?  Haven’t you heard of things like Spotify?”  Well, I have.  But I feel that there is something deeply unsatisfying about instant access to infinite music without some sort of effort.

This explains my love/hate relationship with the Internet.  There is nothing more satisfying that having an informational itch that can be satisfied by a few key clicks. 

I always forget the word for the technique of putting opposites together like “hot ice” in Romeo and Juliet, but I know that I can find it out by going on to Google.  Which I just did.  I first searched with “technical term for hot ice” and found a whole series of scientific, chemical references which, if I had not been writing this, I might have been tempted to delve into and spent god knows how much time getting further and further away from the original investigation! 

However, I added “Romeo and Juliet” to the search terms and got to a whole range of references.  Glancing through them I soon found the word “oxymoron” and didn’t even have to click on anything further to find it!

I had the whip of writing this to keep me on task, but the number of times that I have started off looking for something like, “When was Cervantes first translated into English?” and found myself, half an hour later looking at the latest finds from the ancient Antikythera wreck, and looking at the amazing “Mechanism” that was found that might well be the oldest computer in the . . .   You see what I mean! 

Fascinating stuff, but not what I was looking for.  [Though, if you haven’t heard of the wreck, you really should read about it.  The quality of stuff that has come from this sunken ship already is amazing, and the finds that might come to the surface next year promise wonders!  You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_wreck  Well worth reading.]

But to be realistic, you don't always diverge from your appointed task and find yourself reading about something as culturally uplifting as an old Greek wreck!  No, most of the time you discover that, for the last twenty minutes you have been going through a horror show of pictures that show "25 child stars who have not aged well" or "50 famous people you did not realize have died this year" or something similar and generally unedifying - but compulsive!

So, the excitement of the chase for knowledge has been made much easier.  The laborious use of the index in various encyclopedias and the frustrating page turning has gone.  But I seem to recall that my page searching days were just as frustrating, as my eye would inevitably fall on a tempting title and be drawn into seductive byways having nothing to do with the original search.

But the speed with which you can get through the ‘little’ things; correct the lapses of memory; check an irritating, questionable reference – for these the Internet is wonderful.  When I think of the amount of time that I have spent during my life in long, exhausting searches that could easily have been completed in a few seconds had I been able to move forward into the future and use the Internet I could weep!

But you can often only get so far putting your trust in the Internet.   

I have found that using the Internet in traditional specific research, certainly in the arts, encourages you by gains in the early stages.  You get the sense that you are making real progress and then something, sometimes something that you consider to be a minor obstacle, becomes immovable and whatever you do, the Internet does not seem to have the answers and you have to return to more traditional methods to get where you want to go.

As someone who is now outside the traditional university system, I do miss access to a decent University library and the library services that it provides.  Sometimes a thoughtful librarian can save you days of work!  

In my case, a couple of years ago, I was looking for an article in an Arts magazine published in the 1970s.  The Open University, with which I was then studying, had electronic copies of the magazine but not including the 1970s.  The ‘Night Librarian’ of the OU – a service of international librarians accessed via the OU website – found copies of the magazine for me in Milan and somewhere in Germany, but not in Barcelona. 

I sulked.   

I knew that I could go to the British Library, but that was a flight away from where I was.   

I sulked.   

It was only when I enquired about a book in the art gallery shop on Montjuic and the shop assistant casually asked if I had tried the library on the first floor that things became to happen for me.   

The library, whose existence I had not guessed at, was a positive treasure trove.  My magazine was there, and was photocopied for me; other books that I had hoped to read but had given up finding were there; suddenly, everything seemed possible!

Perhaps the mistake is mine.  I am in a foreign country and I have not exhausted the availability of institutions that might be of help to me.  But, sometimes you just have to admit that you have failed.

One piece of work that I was doing concerned the artists Álvaro Guevara and David Hockney. 

I was comparing Hockney’s A Bigger Splash with swimming paintings by Guevara.  I had seen one of Guevara’s paintings in an art book I owned, and I was able to find a colour reproduction on line from an auction catalogue, but I did not know where the original was. 

After much searching on line, I did see what I thought was the painting in a lifestyle magazine and I was eventually able to contact the owner who very kindly allowed me access to the paintings that he owned and I was able to complete my work. You can see the finished essay here:

http://independent.academia.edu/StephenRees

But one painting by Guevara (with a tempting title that paralled Hockney’s) I was never able to find.  I knew that it existed and had been exhibited, but beyond that, nothing.  I wrote, I telephoned, I searched, but I could find out nothing about the present whereabouts of the painting.  A dead end.  

Or a nagging lack that might, one day, prompt me to revisit what I didn't find the last time I tried!  

Something for the future!

As is getting to terms with Spotify if I persist in being unable to get music from one machine to another!

Search and ye shall find

 

The one aspect of the Internet that is clearly superior to using books is that if you type in specific information it will give you a specific answer. 

For example, I was wondering who was the author of the aphorism, “Politics is too important to be left to politicians”.  It seems to be that the sentiment is particularly appropriate to the present situation in Catalonia and I felt that it would be wrong to use the phrase without giving the source.  So, in an atavistic moment I turned to my books.  My dictionaries (well, just a small selection of them if I am honest) are within arm’s reach, which explains why they were a possibility.  If I had had to get up and walk to a bookcase I would have used the computer.

But I didn’t.  And, while I have the Encarta Dictionary nearest to me (a hefty tome bought by me through one of my sixth form students at a discount while she was working in Blackwell’s) next to my (well, Toni’s actually, but I use it more than he does, so there!) Macmillan English Dictionary For Advanced Learners, next to seven dictionaries of quotations, a Dictionary of Ideas and The Pelican History of Art: Painting in Italy 1500-1600.  A heavily weighted shelf!

My first choice to look up the quotation was in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations with an irascible Isherwood staring leftwards towards the back cover and to a rather more serene looking Don Bachardy in Hockney’s double portrait of the couple.  I opened the book at random, hoping to read through a thematic section on ‘Politics’ to find that the dictionary had been arranged by name of author.

This was a disaster. 

My random page had a quotation from my favourite composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and I was surprised to learn that he was the man who first said, “a statue has never been set up in honour of a critic”.  I must have know that, mustn’t I?  But, whatever, it is back in the forefront of my memory now! 

Just before Sibelius’s entry was one by Manny Shinwell (1884-1986) a Labour politician from my youth and, in the next column another Labour politician, Sir Hartley Shawcross (born in 1902 and still alive according to my book published in 1991, but actually deceased in 2003) saying after the victory of 1946, “We are the masters now!”  Except that is not what he said, the exact wording was, “We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come.”  If only that had been true!

On the same page are the last eight of the 130 quotations devoted to George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) including one of my favourites, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”

There are song titles on these two pages (200-201 if you must know) “Goodbye cruel world” Gloria Shayne; “Little man, you’ve had a busy day” Sigler and Hoffman, extracts from songs like “Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas today.” Silver and Cohn; “And here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know.” Simon; “Down in the forest something stirred: it was only the note of a bird.” Simpson.  We have the title of a musical, “A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum” Shevelove and Gelbart, and title of Sillitoe’s novella “The loneliness of the long-distance runner.”

I am not listing these just for the sake of doing so (though they are worth reading) these phrases have survived because they have associations.  We may not give true credit to the authors whose names we might not know or have never know, and even if we have we soon forget, but we might remember their words.  And there are historical, cultural and personal resonances that each one of these phrases unlocks.

For example, the extract from a speech to the Electrical Trades Union conference in Margate in 1947 that is Shinwell’s only contribution to the book is not one that I know, but I remember the character.  I can remember him speaking on the radio and television and I have a picture of a rumbustious, amusing and socialist firebrand.  A living (if ageing, even then) representative of the Labour politics of the Wilson era, during the time in my early teens when I became interested in what the good and the great (yes, that is irony) were doing to my country and trying to understand just why they were doing it.

Some of the songs have come down to me in snatches that my parents sang; I remember seeing the old black and white film of “The loneliness of the long-distance runner” and of reading the book; everyone has his or her own memories connected with “Mrs Robinson”, I would have been 17 or 18, just the right age to appreciate the angst!

The Sitwells are on these pages, Dame Edith and Sir Osbert; B. F. Skinner (always a good name to drop into conversation) with his observation, “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten”; Red Skelton aka Richard Skelton with his deathlessly acerbic comment on the crowds attending the funeral of Harry Cohn in 1958, “Well, it only proves what they always say - give the public something they want to see, and they’ll come out for it.”

And I still haven’t mentioned Georges Simenon (1903-1989) honoured with two quotes, the first about having sex with 10,000 women and the second where he asserts that, “Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.”

Memories, delight and instruction from two pages that I “shouldn’t” have looked at and of course wouldn’t have looked at if I had used the Internet and got the information at once.

If nothing else, my meandering around the two pages touched on memories, courses and reading I had done.  It reminded me of a play “One Way Pendulum” by N F Simpson that I haven’t re-read in half a century and the equally dated concept of a “smoke-filled room” (Kirke Simpson) about where the male power brokers were when they chose Warren Harding as Republican presidential candidate in 1920.

Eventually, after much cogitation and amusement I turned to the back of the book and looked in the index for politics, and found an entry,

                              p. are too serious a matter   DE G 66.3   

and was able to find what I had been looking for quickly and efficiently.

Two adverbs that cannot be applied to the continuing disaster of Catalonia’s quest for independence and the authoritarian PP led minority Spanish government’s violent and mendacious response.  It appears increasingly improbable that any real sort of accommodation will be made between the two sides.

With Rajoy’s typically lethargic approach to tackling a difficult problem before it becomes intractable, we now have a situation where Catalonia is probably going to announce or proclaim unilateral independence from Spain on Monday.  The situation has not be ameliorated by the schoolmarmishly negative contribution from the king yesterday where he reprimanded Catalonia’s people and politicians for trying to break up Spain and his cosy kingdom.

Although the referendum had over two million voters participate, the majority of the voters did not.  Three of the main national political parties vowed to have nothing to do with what they termed an “illegal” referendum and urged their supporters to follow their lead.  Many did.

The violence that the national Spanish police used to try and stop the referendum will have revolted many more than those who voted, but Rajoy knows that his tactics (if his woeful indecision and negativity can be called that) will play to the prejudice that many Spaniards have against Catalonia and the Catalans and he will lose little electoral advantage by playing the heavy hand with an area which has long been the subject of envy and distrust by the majority of their fellow citizens and the source of few votes for his party.

If the President of Catalonia goes ahead and declares independence then Rajoy will have to respond.  As Rajoy seems incapable of any political subtlety, and as he has shown himself incapable of any reasonable compromise he will have to resort to force.

Over the past few weeks the central Spanish government has been stealthily taking over control of certain aspects of the Catalan government’s responsibility.  If independence is declared then the Spanish government has a number of choices available.

It could regularise the taking away of responsibility by invoking article 150 of the Constitution.  This article that has never been invoked before, will allow the central Spanish government to take over all the functions of the Catalan government.  This will and must lead to massive civil unrest.

I hope that the Rajoy minority government are not so cynical as to hope that their constant pushing will produce some sort of violence that will ‘allow’ the state to bring in the armed forces, above and beyond the armed national police, to restore ‘order’.  I do not like to speculate on the consequences of such action.

In a positive sense I would like to think that even at this late date, some sort of common political sense will prevail and the two sides will settle down to serious, real negotiations in which nothing is ‘off the table’ - up to and including a binding referendum about independence for Catalonia at a future agreed date.

I have to be truthful and say that nothing over the past few years in the political field of Spanish government has encouraged me to think that anything approaching common sense will guide our political masters.

I ask those inside and outside Spain and Catalonia to keep watching what is happening and use your voices to try and get a settlement to the present situation that benefits all sides.

And if you don’t feel that you can do that, then please note how power is being abused in Spain and Catalonia and use your voice to tell the perpetrators that they are being watched and that there will be a time when they will be held to account.

Your voice and those of your friends and neighbours are going to be increasingly important in getting out to the world exactly what is happening and what is likely to happen in Catalonia.

Keep watching.

Oh, and in case you were still wondering and hadn’t worked out the clues in the index listing, the quotation at the start of this piece came from the mouth of Charles De Gaulle, perhaps the quintessential non political politician!  And the actual, accurate quote is, “I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”