Oh shut up!

 

 

 

 

 

The sound of full-blast Heavy Metal music from my neighbour would thump its way through the walls of my semi-detached house once every couple of years.  How I wish that such a biannual interruption to my placid way of life could replace the almost pathological need for noise in this part of the world.

 

 

     Dogs are the bane of a quiet life.  As many of the places around us are flats, people have adapted their canine needs and usually plumped for those grotesque rat-dogs with bulbous eyes and spindly legs that they have reasoned by virtue of their shrunken size are more adapted to life within the confines of a flat.

     I am sure that they take up less room. But their moronic, high-pitched yaps belie their bonsai appearance with a ‘bark’ volume seemingly designed to cut through concrete.

     Here in Catalonia, as I am sure was true in other places that had a severe lockdown, we have the left-over ‘walking’ dogs.   

     At the time of the restrictions, we were not allowed to leave our homes unless it was to get essential provisions or to take a dog for short walk.  The rules were that the dog was not allowed to be walked more than a couple of hundred years from its home, but some people (don’t they always) bent the rules and used the dog as a passport to roam freely.  And a number of dogs were bought during the height of the pandemic (how?) specifically to allow access to a reasonable walk.

     Now, the dogs are not strictly needed, and their walks have become, not a freedom to be enjoyed, but a chore to be resentfully endured.  And they all bark.  Probably including some of the owners, too!

     But dogs are not the half of it.

     We are on a sometime main flight path for aircraft landing in the airport in Barcelona – although it is only when the wind is in certain directions that planes are directed to fly over the residential parts of Castelldefels and Gavà.  And if you believe that then you will believe anything.

     The pandemic gave us an unnatural piece of peace, with the number of flights severely restricted.  To be fair, while the noise from the aircraft is loud, you sort-of get used to it as just one of those things and, after a few seconds, the sound is gone.  As opposed to the bloody dog next door that has been left alone at home and has been barking for the whole of the bloody afternoon and who will not, in spite of screamed instructions to shut up, shut up.

     But the true horror has been house improvements, or complete makeovers.

     The house we live in is rented and, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing has been done structurally, aesthetically, horticulturally, electrically or any other damned word ending in -ly since they were built.  To give you some idea of the hands-off approach of the owners, basic things that you would expect the landlords to take care of like fixtures and fittings, including damage to sinks, toilets, etc, or for an even more glaring example the gas boiler for the heating and water – they wash their hands of entirely.  The ‘nothing to do with us guv’ approach reached its apotheosis in Catalan landlords!

     This also means that when one of our houses ceases to be for rent and is sold, as a couple have over the last couple of years, then the new owners look askance at the age of the decoration (avocado bathroom suite, anybody?) and realize that they will have to do some major refitting.  The electric system and wiring are not fit for purpose and woe betide anyone foolish enough to put the kettle and the microwave on at the same time!

     You get the idea.  Everything needs to be changed.  And for the last two years we have lived through two refits.

     One thing you should know about our houses is that we live in what is in British terms a terraced house, one of five three floor structures.  They are solidly built of concrete throughout, but it also means that if you hit a hammer on the wall in one of the ‘houses’ every single other house can hear it.

     Perhaps at this point I should add that all the floors are tiled, as well as the stairs, and there are lots of stairs – so taking up tiles from all the floors of all the rooms, all the stairs and from the walls of the kitchen and two bathrooms means a lot of work, a lot of very noisy work with jack hammers that make life one long nightmare.

     Changing the electricity means cutting into the walls to get out old wiring and put in new.  With hammers.

     Changing the kitchen is a whole symphony of noise in itself.  And then there is the cutting of the new tiles to fit.

     In a place that is being newly built, you expect noise, and it doesn’t really matter because the eventual residents are not there.  When you have a densely populated residential area with two households treating their houses as building sites, the result is total dissatisfaction and a resentment that is going to continue for as long as the neighbours live there!

    

 

Enough!

     Tomorrow the visit, the first visit for a couple of years, to the doctor to see if he can recommend something (anything) to make my knees more cooperative.

     The more I think about the visit, the less I expect from it.  I suppose to be realistic, the most I can hope for is a referral to a specialist to see if anything can be done inside the knee in a rather more professional way than my rather desperate application of oodles of fisiocrem™ to the outside!  I sincerely hope so, as I am getting tired of limping along using a growing collection of walking sticks, well, three – and I can justify the purchase of each of them as they fulfil different needs in the assisted walking arena.  So there!

The writing has moved on!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It looks as though I have lost/mislaid my current notebook.  This is a bad thing.

     It is a bad thing because the notebook represents, in however scrappy a form, my thoughts and ideas over a period of months.  It is also a bad thing because I am fairly free with my thoughts and ideas in it.  True, there are mundane comments about the weather and whether or not I had a lane to myself for my morning swim, but my thoughts can be more wide-ranging and much more personal than that!

     The only built-in security system, that virtually encrypts the notes themselves is the almost illegible scrawl in which they are written.  I have to admit that I sometimes, no quite often, find myself puzzling over certain extravagant calligraphic patterns and wondering if they have any relation whatsoever to English orthography.  This ‘difficulty’ does give a certain freshness to a perusal when undertaken long after the words were written.

     I have hunted around all the spots in the house where the small, pocket-sized, notebook could have been discarded or lodged.  I have checked pockets in a range of clothing.  I have checked down the side of the armchair that I use.  I have checked the car seats.  I have looked everywhere reasonable that could be a place where the notebook could be.  I have even looked in places where, where it to be there, I would spend the rest of my life wondering how it possibly got there.  But in places reasonable and unreasonable, the more I look, the more (as they say) it isn’t there.

     The only place left is the swimming pool.  At the end of my morning swim, as I have my expertly made cup of tea, I write.  I write something, anything, just to keep the process going.  Sometimes I am less than convinced by what I produce, but at other times the notes seem to write themselves and there is a sort of genuine excitement in the hastily scribbled lines.

     In some ways, I am hesitant to ask in the pool, because if they say that nothing has been handed in or found, then I am left with irreconcilable loss.

     Though, having said that, I have taken the cellophane off a notebook-in-waiting, and I jotted down my thoughts for the day.  Tomorrow will be the test, and if nothing is put aside waiting for the owner to turn up, then I will accept the fact that The White Notebook is no more, and I will get on with the new red one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a couple of days hiatus, my doctor phoned me in response to my asking for an appointment to see him with a view to Getting Something Done about my knees.

     I suppose that prior telephone conversation is the new normal for medical appointments nowadays, almost like a telephonic triage to see by electronic conversation whether further consultation of a more immediate and personal nature is necessary.

     As my knees have never been the same after a few tumbles form my bike, an x-ray was deemed necessary and I was given the time of a possible face-to-face appointment, as long as the x-rays had been taken before hand.

     I was phoned with the date and time of an appointment for an x-ray examination in short measure, and I was (or at least the knee part of me) was snapped from various angles and I was sent on my way.  This means that the x-rays are already in the possession of the doctor and my appointment on Monday of next week will be the next step in outlining the possible courses of action.

     It is at this point that I am reminded of an old tennis injury – well, not so much from the actual game itself, but rather from not quite jumping over the net to celebrate my victory, and landing on my elbow.  I split the bone and the bone has never been quite the same.  Some years after the initial injury, I had major problems with fluid collecting around the joint and then with persistent pain.

     The fluid was drained off, but the pain in my elbow and the arm did not give in so easily.

     After a failed process of sports massage (horrific!) and more conventional remedial massage failed to do the trick, I was sent back to the doctor, and I was given a (fairly gruesome) series of cortisone (I think) injections.  The term ‘series’ gives the impression of a number of injections stretching over an extended period of time.  It was not like that.  What I had was a single injection but administered in a sort-of internal jabbing sort of way.

     Whatever!  When I left the doctor’s surgery at the end of the jabbing, I had no pain.  It was positively magical.  And the problem has not (touch wood!) recurred.

     I am hoping that there is some sort of similar ‘magical’ injection that will do its stuff with my knees.  But my more fatalistic reality check suggests that the ‘answer’ will probably be an operation or two.

     My house is almost comically unfit for a person to recuperate who does not have full use of his limbs: the living room is on the first floor and the loo is on the second and my computer and printer is on the third.  There are lots of stairs and there is no lift.  Toni’s suggestion that there would be no problem as I could live in the bedroom, with an invalid table and a laptop, is not to be considered without hysteria.

     Monday may well turn out to be a defining moment in my time in Catalonia.

     Or, given the backlog in routine operations, any medical intervention may be years in the future.  And that too, is rather a depressing thought.

     But I am running ahead of myself.  Sufficient unto the day is the imagining thereof!   

     Let’s wait for something a little more concrete than frantic supposition!