Sunday start

A lazy day today, I didn’t get up until 8.15 am!  I decided to give swimming a miss and will compensate by having an extended bike ride on the way to and from getting lunch in the local chicken place.

     I’ve completed the quick Guardian crossword, though it was a little more taxing than usual and I am sometimes stuck by the brevity of the clues that give a slanted version of the necessary word’s definition, so I often get the word before I realize its link to the clue!  Still, it’s done and that gives the start of the day a sort of achievement to add to the impetus of filling time with something useful.  Not that I have to search around for things to do as each day ends with my only having completed a part of my ‘to do’ list.  At the moment, for example, Catalan homework is handing over me and this writing is, yet again, displacement activity to compensate for my not doing it!

     There is a whip to get me in line with the work that I need to do for Catalan, as the examination for this section of the course will take place on the 13^th of this month.  We have been given fair warning, have been told what sort of vocabulary is going to be tested and have been given direct and clear indications of what sort of writing we will need to complete.  With such clear directions it is perverse and churlish not to get stuck in to the work and start the process of learning.  But I haven’t yet got round to starting this.  In my notebook that is supposed to be for my ideas for poems, I often find myself writing encouraging or admonitory notes to myself about work that needs to be done.  This writing too is another way of my communicating with myself to get geared up to start the hard work of learning.

     I find learning new words difficult; I discover a new, often useful word in Catalan, look at it, try and memorize it, write it down a few times – and then it’s gone.  The amount of effort needed to set the words in my memory seems disproportionate and I therefore tend to enter my learning zone with negativity washing around my mind.  I try and reason with myself: I live in Catalonia, I am surrounded by the language, learning it is merely a matter of common courtesy as well as increasing my understanding and so on and so on – but whatever psychological boosts I give myself, the simple inability to retain new vocab. Is a settled fact.  This in turn means that the examination will be another depressing indication of inability as I stagger my illiterate way towards the end of the scholastic year!

     In my own language, however, I continue to thrive.  The latest work on the ‘recalcitrant’ poem is producing good results.  Even though I may not have written a single line of poetry, the ideas and some phrases are steadily coalescing and the structure is beginning to emerge from all my pencilled scribbles.  I know for past experience that the present discrete idea elements scattered throughout the pages that I have already written will, eventually come together into a (hopefully) coherent poem.  Even if it doesn’t, the process is one that is enjoyable if demanding!

 

Today is Saint David’s Day and I have hunted around (as I do each year) to find the little artificial daffodil (purchased in aid of the Marie Curie Foundation) to wear for my National Day.  And, each time I wear it, it focuses my attention on my nationality.  In my next book, The eloquence of broken things, there is a section that brings together poems I have written that consider my nationality and what it mean to me.  For a numerically small nation, identity is a constant preoccupation and with the swamping proximity of England and the overwhelming use of English as the language of Wales the relationship between Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom is a critical element in the national sense of identity.  Each St David’s Day has become an opportunity for me to indulge (and I think that is the right word) in a particular form of introspection that rarely affects me on other days of the year – which is significant in itself!

     Only once has anyone commented on my wearing of a daffodil on St David’s Day and I assume that it will go generally unnoticed today as well.  Though there is a slightly different dimension because daffodils are yellow. 

     Let me explain.  I wear a metal pin of a yellow ribbon to show my support for the Catalans who are still in prison or restricted in their public lives because of the Spanish justice system in the aftermath of the referendum for Catalan independence.  Putting the question of independence aside for a moment, I consider the jailing of so many Catalan politicians to be reprehensible and perhaps an indication of the politicisation of the Spanish justice system. 

     The reaction of the Spanish to the Catalans has sometimes been little short of paranoid, with some instances of the banning of the colour yellow e.g. football supporters wearing yellow t-shirts or scarves having to give up pieces of yellow clothing before they were allowed into the games!  So a yellow daffodil could be seen as a statement of support for the prisoners and Catalan independence.

     In my case as I am wearing it next to the yellow ribbon, obviously for aesthetic rather than political reasons, the link is more obvious!