Cold days, cool thoughts

 

 

It’s cold and wet and blustery and dark.  A thoroughly depressing day but, as I sulked my way upstairs, I looked through a window and noticed the two dogs who live in the flats opposite us, sitting together at the top of a flight of steps, just inside the overhang of the building watching the weather with patient indefatigability.

     Dogs, especially large dogs seem to be good at patience.  Rat dogs are of course more known for their insistent irritability and hyper-sensitivity, and one barely counts them (and that is my being kind) as dogs at all.  No.  But smaller dogs with a touch of Collie in them are more than acceptable and accepting. 

     Take, for example, the dog in the restaurant we went to on Sunday (isn’t it usually ONLY guide dogs that are allowed into restaurants? But let it pass, let it pass) where the dog (some sort of Collie cross) settled down almost immediately, finding himself a place between his owner’s foot and the window, and there he stayed for the course of the meal sustained only by a few pats and a scrap or two and a water bowl provided by the staff in the restaurant.

     Far be it from me to draw a parallel between a young dog and a young human, but the difference in acceptable behaviour by the latter compared with the former when grown-ups are around in a social public situation is telling!

     I should however take some guidance from the dogs opposite where their patience in this instance (usually they are yappy buggers) is to be commended, and indeed emulated.

     I half-joke with my Catalan friends that my ‘contract’ with the Generalitat in Catalonia stipulates sun for 365 days a year, and that I have an undoubted right to a refund for every shitty day I have to experience here!

     Although the weather can be bad here in Catalonia, indeed as I type the rain is lashing down outside and we have had overly dramatic thunder and lightning, usually every day will give you a moment of sunshine to see you through the bad weather interludes.  Today for example, although the morning was cold and cloudy, there was also some hazy sunshine – not enough to tempt me to sit outside with the smokers to have my cup of tea after my early morning swim, but still, sunshine.

     It didn’t last and after lunch the rain set in and hasn’t stopped.  Yet.  But I preserve my composure by putting total faith into the quick return of scraps of sunshine to keep me sane.

 

 

 

The saga of The Christmas Lunch has now developed a further chapter as another, and who knows even better, location has been found and we are going up to Terrassa tomorrow to give the menu del dia a try. 

     My most pressing concern is not the food, but the parking.  With my knees in their present condition, each step is something to take into careful consideration.  And there are lots of quite steep hills in Terrassa as well, and while going up slopes is bearable, the going down (even slight) slopes is not.

     Whatever we think about the quality of the food tomorrow, a table for the Christmas Lunch has been booked at the restaurant and so we are hoping and praying for the best.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Duolingo app continues to dominate our lives, and some of Toni’s hysteria (what else would you call the decision to take up Navajo in the expectation of earning simple points to add to his total) has rubbed off on me and forced me to make a doggedly determined assault on the points total of the people in front of me. 

     The end result of that is that my index finger of my right hand is rapidly growing a callous with the screen-jabbing finger writing I have had to do to amass the points to ensure my ‘safety’ in the top ten to guarantee my progress through to the Sapphire League!

     My enthusiasm is bound to wane soon, but until it does, I am gaining by going over yet again those points in the acquisition of a language that I have already gone through many times before. 

     Some day they will stick.  Please!

Writing is hard. Honestly!

 

Why is it that what seems like an excellent idea for a piece of writing or a poem when scribbled in a notebook, doesn’t work out when transferred to paper or a computer screen?  When the germs of a concept are transcribed, they often seem trite and disjointed.

     I had been moaning in my notebook about the condition of my knees and legs and feet (I like to be inclusive) and that fact that walking is painful, and it took only a moment’s thought to extend that moan into a thesaurus of words connected with personal disintegration using one of my favourite terms from an old dictionary of computers, “graceful degradation” (now known as “fail-soft”, a far less evocative term) and a general feeling that everything was leading down to death and ignominy.

 

 

 

     I then took an imaginative side-step into the graphic work of Escher and explained my use of his art as exemplifying “everything has to be redefined”.  The old certainties in a life with firm feet is now called into question when all walking must be pre-planned and calculated.  “My life’s future is calculation” I have scribbled down as a statement of the fact that what I used to do without a thought, now needs consideration: how far will I have to walk; where is the parking; is there anywhere to sit, and so on.

     I am aware that I give the impression in the previous paragraphs of a delicate invalid, sipping in weak beef tea, and coughing discretely into a pocket handkerchief.  I am generally in robust good health, and I swim 1,500m every morning, so there is an element of indulgent introspection and just a hint of reductio ad absurdum in what I write in my notes to myself.

     Then via a note which reads “underpants from M&S”, I get to a written equation “living + decisions = death” which I qualify with “eventually” and then burble on to an idea that life is algebraic, with all its unknowns, and then (inevitably) I come to the formula for solving quadratic equations: x equals minus b, plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4 ac all over 2a

     It looks so much better when written out like a proper equation, but trying to type it out and get this blog format to accept it was just too difficult.        

     I know that there was a time when I was able to use the equation to solve certain quadratic problems.  I never really understood what I was doing and, as far as I was concerned, the formula was something given to Moses by God and was found in one of the appendices to the Ten Commandments.  I may never have understood it or why I was using it, but I did (very occasionally) get correct answers and that was enough for me.

     As “Algebra” was a paper in the Maths O Level, and we had to have maths to go to university, it was justification enough for most of us as to why we were doing it.  I also had a vague idea that it was a way of finding out the value of something you didn’t know by using figures that you did, discovering an unknown, the value of .  It is not hard to see that such a process appeals to a literary mind as well as a mathematical one – if such distinctions are real or useful.

     My notes end with a description of something that I saw while I was having my cup of tea at the end of my swim: a father and young son playing a game of chess. 

     I realized, as I saw them, that I had not seen anyone playing chess in the pool café, draughts, dominoes, and cards, yes, but chess never.  It also struck me that chess is often played intergenerationally, you can never assume that just because there is an age difference, that the older is going to beat the younger. 

    Father and son might have been evenly matched: the board is the thing, not the age of the hands moving the pieces.

     Many years ago, I was in Norway and in a public park next to the main road there were a series of large chess boards set out on the floor with oversize pieces to move around.  One game I noted was being played between an elderly retired man, and a much younger man wearing an orange mini skirt and white calf-length boots.  There were spectators for that game, but not concerned with the mini-skirted man, no one looked at him, just the progress of the pieces.  The game weas truly the thing.

     In some way or other I felt that the chess game was connected (at least in my mind) to my other notes.  But the poem is not developing.

     I hope that writing this out has ordered my thinking in some ways and that tomorrow I can go back to my notes and to my sketchy draft and make something of it.

     Or not, of course.  Failure is also positive!