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!

Practical problems

The changing of the shower hose has now assumed crisis proportions.

What should have been a simple case of unscrewing the end of the hose from the tap attachment and putting the new one on has filled parts of three long days with increasing frustration and hopelessness.

The trouble is that the bit that should have stayed in the tap, didn’t and I cannot (no matter how I try) get the bit that didn’t stay to leave the bit that has to be replaced.  If you see what I mean.

I have tried brute force and liberal applications of penetrating oil.  Well, I say that, but I don’t really know about the ‘penetrating’ bit, its just oil from a spray can – but I do remember hearing about the ‘penetrating’ bit applied to recalcitrant un-screwable things, so I’m hoping for the best.  Wrong tense there, I have tried to separate the two parts and there was absolutely no movement whatsoever, so perhaps I should have said something like, “I had hoped that the oil would have done the trick, but, alas, I was to be unhappy with the lack of outcome” – that seems complicated enough to mirror the problem!

I have used spanners and wrenches and nothing works.  I went to our local Chinese supermarket and bought things.  And they didn’t work either, so I now have yet more tools that will rest unused in a big plastic toolbox for years to come.

There was a moment’s hope when it appeared that the use of an allen key might be able to be inserted into the tap bit and the purchase gained with a set of pliers might do the trick.  None of the allen keys that I possess was bulky enough so, foolishly I bought a hefty set - and not one of those works either.  The two largest are just too big and just too small to be of any use.

I am beginning to despair.  And I’ve probably paid too much for the completely useless tools that I have bought to try and do the job.

As I live in a rented house and as this is Spain - where no landlord appears to pay for anything, no matter what reason or reasonableness is involved, I am determined not to replace the taps to benefit the rapacious landlords’ future tenants. 

 

The concept of things wearing out and needing to be replaced by the people who actually own the house and who, after all, are getting a substantial rent on a monthly basis, does not apply here.  If it breaks, it appears to be the responsibility of the renter – even if such things are usually covered by the insurance of the house owner e.g. fitments like sinks, baths, toilets.  But what I assumed from the UK does not apply here.  Apparently.

So, a fully justified attempt to deny the landlord a lasting benefit is, it appears, going to cost me more than if I had shelled out the cash for a new set of taps in the first place.

I have not given up entirely.  There must be a shop open (even though this is August and NOTHING HAPPENS in August) with a sympathetic person who has more technical nous than I posses who is willing to take pity on me and use some as yet untired tool and achieve separation.

Saturday is probably not the best day to go around with a woefully winsome expression asking for help.  At this time of the year you are far more likely to get some startled student wondering what the hell you are talking about rather than a competent workperson.  But, as always, I live in hope.

And my failure with the bike spokes is just as complete.

My bike seems to have a penchant for snapping back-wheel spokes.  I have never previously owned a bike where the spokes have broken.  But this one has made up for all of those spoke-solid years by ones breaking on a regular basis.  As I have had to take the bike to the shop to have them replaced, it seemed like a sensible idea to have the raw material (as it were) and do the job myself.  After all, how difficult a job can it be?

The answer, as you will have guessed, is impossible.  At least for me.  

I seem to remember my bike person telling me that he had had to cut them to fit.  So I tried cutting them.  I prefer not to think too closely on the ineptitude of my attempts; I am telling myself that the fret saw I used was the wrong sort – it certainly seemed to blunt its teeth almost instantly.  Disturbingly, the broken one appeared to be the same size as the uncut spokes.  But then there is the problem of fitting them inside the rims. 

 

There is at least a workable solution to this problem and that involves swallowing my pride and taking the bike back to shop, tail between my legs and spokes in my hot little hand and pleading for professionalism.

With both my technical problems, I suspect that there must be a simple solution, but I am buggered if I know what it is.  And part of me doesn’t want to know.

I spent the morning in the library of MNAC in Barcelona looking at the books that they have on Elsheimer.  At least one of them looks ideal for what I want to use in my writing, while most of the others are, not unreasonably, in German - but there are some useful illustrations in them, and there is always Google Translate in extremis!

It was odd getting back into an academic library.  And there is that musty smell that comes with opening old books that you are certain have not been consulted for years!  Heady and depressing at the same time.

I am still in the area of ‘finding out’ about my subject matter and I have not settled on the topic that I want to develop.  But, I’m getting there.  Or at least I’m kidding myself that I am becoming clearer about where I am going.

To go from a life in books in the morning, to one in which I get my hands dirty in the afternoon, is not something that I appreciate. 

 

Perhaps I should.