How to fill a Sunday-feeling Saturday

 New Normal, Second week, Saturday

 

 

 

 

It’s raining. 

     I had to take the car to the swimming pool today, because, while I enjoy riding my bike, I am not a fanatic and for me, riding in the rain cuts the fun to less than zero. 

     I did try and remember the last time that I took the car rather than rode the bike to the pool, and I couldn’t.  Which rather makes the point that I continually make about the weather and my reaction to it in the two countries - three if you count the country of my birth and my later year-long “missionary work” there as a qualified English teacher teaching the natives their language, as befits any true Welsh teacher – in which I have lived.  I don’t like rain.  Or the cold.  But I can do with a bit of cold as long as there is the promise of a fair amount of rain-free time during the year.

     Alas!  Britain does not promise that, whereas Catalonia does.  Simple.

 

 

I have decided to do a bit of delving into the war service of my paternal grandfather.  I have his name and his number and his war service stretched from 1914 to 1918.  He was one of the early volunteers and so had his 1914-1915 Star.

     He never talked to me about his war service, and my Dad said that he was only told about a very few of his experiences.  I can well imagine that my grandfather found it difficult to relate details of his life in the army to anyone who wasn’t there.  The disconnect between what the soldiers actually experienced in the field and what was reported must have made it difficult to have a meaningful conversation.  And why would the soldiers give an accurate description of the almost unimaginable horrors that they witnessed to their loved ones on their return?

     I have tried to find out about his war service from the internet and I think that I will need to pay to get the detail that I require.  I am, as they say, looking into it.

 

 

 

I have now put some battery powered LED fairy lights around the newly framed watercolour (and glitter) paintings of winter trees by SQB and it looks magical.  I have never, ever started to put up Christmas decorations in November before, but then I have not experienced a year like 2020 before either, so a little jollity does not seem out of place no matter how vulgarly distant Christmas actually is.  And anyway, I have seen the first Christmas decorations being sold in Tesco in the past before the end of the summer holidays, so if anything, I am rather tardy in “trimming up” as one of my friends used to say!

 

Today has been one of those odd days when, in spite of evidence to the contrary, it has stubbornly felt like Sunday.  In the “Old Days” i.e. before retirement, such a misconception had its advantages as assuming a Saturday a Sunday meant that when one woke up on what, by extension of the faulty reasoning, could be a Monday – it was in fact, only Saturday and no work!  Now, of course, Mondays have lost a lot of their sting – well, to be fair, virtually all of their sting, but there is still something different about weekends that still gives me something of a buzz, in spite of it being an attitude rather than harsh reality!

 

We had lunch in Suso’s, a restaurant that we often patronize on a Saturday because it has a reasonably priced menu del dia, Suso being one of the few restaurants that do not take the opportunity of the weekend to inflate their prices.  The value is extraordinary, even though I do not nowadays take advantage of the bottle of wine that can come with the meal.  I felt very virtuous in restricting myself to pure, cold water – and I am sure that I felt all the better for it!

 

Now back to military records and finding out just which of the pointless bloodbaths my grandfather was forced to participate in by generals safely way behind the front line.  I will never forgive Haig for his attempted murder of my grandfather!

Reason to be grateful!

I went out to lunch a week last and didn’t come back home for eight days!

It wasn’t the food, you understand – my lunch was excellent (and slimming) with special excellence reserved for the Tast home made tiramisu, oh, and the excellent sangria.  But basically within the limits of my regimen.  Sort of.  The real problems with the day started, or perhaps continued, when we walked from the meal to the post office to get the latest instalment in the series of archaeological books from National Geographic that was waiting for me there.

I took a few paces and had to ask for Toni to stop while I got my breath back.  This was not normal and we headed for our local medical centre.  There, because of the suggestion that my condition might be connected to the heart we were seen in super quick time and were talked to by a very personable doctor who went through the usual tests.  At the end of the series, we waited for a new prescription to be offered, but instead we were told in a matter-of-fact sort of way that I should go to hospital and that an ambulance had been called and I was placed in a waiting wheelchair.  Protocol.

There is nothing that concentrates the mind more than an immanent ride in an ambulance.  Looking out at the passing motorway and the cars and lorries on it through the semi-frosted panes of glass in the ambulance windows I had the semi-detached feeling of someone who has been suddenly placed in an oddly disorientating position of a person whose very physical stability had been called into question.

I was processed efficiently and I was soon wearing one of those terminally unflattering white cotton smocks, lying on an unnecessarily uncomfortable wheeled bed with a chest full of stuck-on electrodes.

Although I spent an uneasy night, it was as nothing compared to Toni’s night of absolute torture on a stock issue metal hospital chair!

For anyone who has been in hospital the contents of the next days will be familiar: blood tests, blood pressure readings, temperature readings, radiological tests, and on and on, day after day.  At least I progressed to a more comfortable bed!

Rather than give a daily account of my time there, I will choose a few instances of what happened and leave it at that.

“Your chest is too hairy!” remarked one radiologist who was ripping off electrodes as she spoke, and removing clumps of said hair at the same time.  Indeed, in hindsight, I would shave my chest were I to go into hospital again.  Not only is removal of the electrodes somewhat painful, but also if you have to sleep with electrodes attached (and if you are a restless sleeper as I am) then each toss and turn will dislodge a lead and fumbling to replace them is a hit and miss matter and lord alone knows what my erratic reconstruction actually did to the readings!

If your diet stipulates that it is very low fat and salt free, then most commercial eateries are going to struggle to give you something appetizing.  The soups that I was offered were generally insipid and one or two were impossible to define in terms of what they might have been made of!

The first meal that I was (eventually) given was of a series of small yellow sausages that looked, frankly odd.  I cut one of them open and I was unable to identify what the interior of those cylinders might be composed of.  I ate them.  All.  I was hungry.  But I was no nearer to identifying what I might have eaten.  They remain imprinted on my memory, though not on my taste buds.

My next evening meal was of some unidentifiable and completely tasteless white fish fillet garnished with a slice of lemon.  The lemon tasted like the smell of cheap toilet cleaner, but again, I ate it all.

I don’t want to be unfair to the hospital, these were two stand-out awful meals, the others that I had during my week’s stay (given the restrictions of my diet) were more than acceptable and they certainly made the most of the limitations that they had to work with to ensure that we had something half-way tasty to eat.  Though, I have to say, it was never more than halfway!

Meals were one way of ordering the day.  Whatever else was going on, the times of our meals was the one certainty in our ward lives.  Once one meal was finished we could start thinking about the next.  Given the tests, scans, blood taking, pressure measuring, injecting, pill popping, temperature taking and consultations, it is hardly surprising that any form of stability is more than welcome when intrusive but essential things are being done to you!

I didn’t manage to sleep for any real length of time for the first five days in hospital.  The bed that I was first put on was extraordinarily uncomfortable.  I sleep on my side and that was not a possibility on that bed of pain.  It is also very difficult to get any rest when you are linked via stick-on electrodes to a machine that bleeps, buzzes, flashes various colours and periodically inflates a blood pressure cuff.  To say nothing, of course, of the abnormally normal sounds of an emergency unit at work 24 hours a day and therefore through the night.

When I was eventually taken from the emergency unit to a four bed ward, it was quieter outside the ward but there were different noises to cope with inside.  

All of the members of our ward needed oxygen and all the ways of delivering it to individuals come with their own sound signatures.  The quietest one is the nasal feed where a tube is looped over the ears and under the nose where two small tubes jut out and into the nasal orifices.  This type just adds a low level hiss to the sound landscape.  The nose and mouth mask is louder and makes a variety of noises depending on the intensity of the oxygen flow and whether a medicinal filter had been added.  The worst form of delivery was a small portable machine with a larger diameter tube which, when turned on sounded like a jackhammer!

Then there were the noises of the men.  I know that I snore, but I didn’t have an opportunity to add my orchestral part to the nocturnal symphony of groans, shouts, wheezes and coughs that was a normal night.

The day started at some time after 6 in the morning as each patient was attended to.  One man had to be changed; another had to have his blood sugar level checked.  The lights would come on and go off again and again as the day got under way.

After a breakfast (for me) of a couple of small French toast rounds with some sort of fruit slime, together with something I have not had for over 25 years: a cup of milky instant coffee!

The most interesting test that I had was in radiography where, lying on my side with the operator’s over me so that my side was firmly lodged under her arm, I heard the actual sounds of my pumping heart and the different sounds that different parts of it made.  

And that is one of the things about being in a hospital and undergoing the probes that the doctors have to make: all that it inside is brought to the outside.  You can see the beats of your heart, you can hear the sounds it makes, you can see the force of your breath, and you can count the oxygen level of your blood.  Your internal organs become photographic images.  No part of your inside or outside is away from prying eyes!

The end of the investigation was that I had a thrombosis in my right leg, that thrombosis had probably been the cause of pulmonic embolisms that effected both my lungs and had some slight effect on my heart.  I had had, in effect, the equivalent of a heart attack but in my lungs.  I was told that it was serious and that I was lucky that it had been discovered before it was too late.

For the next six months or so I will have to alter my way of life and take things easy.  For the next two weeks I am confined to the house and I have been told to do the minimum of moving about and if I have to, to do it slowly.  

After two weeks I might be able to go for a very short walk and gradually build up my distance bit by bit.  My swimming (1,500m every day) has been terminated.  Perhaps in a couple of months I might be able to do four slow lengths of breaststroke.  I cannot use my bike.  I cannot drive the car for a couple of months.  And so it goes on.

And I don’t really feel ill!  If I take a deep breath I can tell that there is still some sort of tension, but, basically, I feel fine.  But I’m not, and I have to keep remembering that simple fact if I want to get better.  And believe me, I do!

I am very grateful for the care and attention that I received in Viladecans Hospital from doctors, nurses, orderlies, cleaners and caterers: it was exemplary and there is no doubt that their ministrations have saved my life.  

I will never forget that.

Rain, sun and lunch!

-->

YESTERDAY

 

Each time I took a breath going upwards towards the school end of my local pool I noticed the sky.  At first it was a light lilac, then it went to a grubby bluey-grey and finally it took on the appearance of the sort of sky that they use as a backdrop for those dystopian, Armageddon-like total disaster movies that at least take your mind away from what the 45^th POTUS might or might not be doing.  Then the first fat drops of rain began to fall.

It’s an odd experience swimming in the rain.  I am always amused by a shower of rain on the beach: there is instant evacuation as if the liquid that is falling (and in which of course they have been bathing) has suddenly taken on corrosive acidic properties and precautions must be taken.  Given where we live, fairly near a very large city and on the flight path of a busy airport, I would not be at all surprised to find out that our rain is anything but Ph. neutral - but generally all we worry about is getting wet.  Even when getting wet is something that we had been doing a few minutes previously.

But rain in an official swimming pool is different.  There is a different quality to drops of falling rain on skin to the splash of a passing swimmer.  And anyway, experiencing rain in a commercial swimming pool is a limited pleasure because Health and Safety regulations indicate that rain will affect the safety mixture in the water and consequently, as with our pool, the roof has to be closed.

As our Russian-doll roof structure began its slow progress enclosing the pool, we were able to go from outside and the rain, to inside and the gloom in a single length.  Luckily I had virtually finished my swim when the shower ended, and by that time the moveable structure had just aligned itself with the exit and so I was able to move seamlessly to my shower and my eventual cup of tea.

I dried off the water on my café chair with my towel and was quite happily imbibing in the threatening gloom when it started to rain again.  The cloud cover look as though it would quite easily be able to sustain  showers and downpours for the foreseeable future so I gave in to Nature and moved to a giant parasol (what irony!) protected table and sulked notes into my trusty jottings book.

But this is Spain.  A visit to the Birthday Girl in Terrassa and by the time we came back the sun was out and, even with odd clouds, all was well with the world and sunbathing was a possibility.

And that is what I love about living here: we do not have the sort of spiteful weather that cursed my life in the UK.  The sort of threatening clouds that I swam under in the morning could easily have accompanied my exercise for the next fortnight in Britain - but in Spain it is an isolated day when you do not get at least a sight of sunshine during it!  Yes, Spain, and Catalonia are not as green as Britain.  You have to go to a region like Galicia in the north west of the country for the lush greenness that Brits might recognize.  But I am content with a certain degree of aridity and the sight of the sun.

TODAY

 

I was beset with a lingering malaise of indolence and so decided (because I can) not to go for my swim today.  I suppose the idea was that I had thought that preparing, going, swimming, changing and tea drinking took up such a disproportionate amount of my time, I wanted to get settled into some sort of academic activity without the distraction of swimming to act as displacement activity.  Needless to say such laudable motivations did not translate into actuality and what I actually did was have a cup of tea, do the Guardian quick crossword and read further information about the Antikythera mechanism.

I think that there are two approaches to the acquisition of knowledge not previously known: the first, is one of sheer delight in discovering new areas of understanding that were previously blank; the second is a deep sense of shame that one didn’t know about it previously.

The Antikythera (I love the sound of the word anti-kith-ar-ee-ah, it is the sort of word you can roll around your mouth) Mechanism, falls securely into the second category.

An account of what the ancient shipwreck offered historians may be found here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/decoding-antikythera-mechanism-first-computer-180953979/ and you can tell that I have been doing courses in the Open University because I did not give you a Wikipedia entry first!

This ancient shipwreck has been described as the most astonishing archaeological discovery of the twentieth century, or indeed of the twenty-first century - the discovery of what might truly be called the mechanism of the first computer ever discovered, dating from some two thousand years ago!

And I had never heard of it!

I am not saying that I am the datum point of common knowledge, but surely something this astonishing and revolutionary should have impinged on my rag-bag accretion of general knowledge at some time since its discover in the early 1900s?

 

With the discovery of early ‘technology’ I am always reminded of the invention of the first voice recorder.  The mechanism and the raw materials and the whole technology while put together for the first time in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, were actually available in Classical times!  A way of recording the voice could have been available during the time of Christ, and we could have heard the last words from the cross or the text of the sermon on the mount as they were spoken.  But the machine was not invented and we didn’t.

The sophistication of the Antikythera Mechanism was around over a millennium before its next iteration!

And I knew nothing about it!  What shame!

 

It is at times like this that I am reminded of my first reading of Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years, where a revolutionary world view disrupts conventional acceptance.  This book is constantly revelatory and, rather like one of my tutors in university, constantly says things that you should have thought previously!  The sort of things that are blindingly obvious as soon as they have been articulated, but you need their help to get there!  Diamond’s book (as indeed are the works of M Wynn Thomas https://www.swan.ac.uk/crew/staff/professormwynnthomas/  are wholeheartedly recommended.

And now I shall echo Osvald’s plea, “Mother give me the sun!” - though, I am glad to say in rather different circumstances, and I will only retire to a sun lounger rather than the murderous ministrations of a mother!

Thoughts after lunch

A decent lunch always puts me in the right frame of mind to start writing.  Or to have a light nap and think pure, literary thoughts.  Today, it has been a case of eat, coffee and write.  And it is always so much better when someone else is cooking!

            Yesterday was one of those lost-ish days when, for a plurality of reasons I didn’t actually have my swim.  I could have, you understand, but when the optimum time to have a kid-free immersion had passed I somehow lose the energy to make the necessary effort.  And there always are plenty of other things to do to fill the time.

            One of which was to attempt to come to some sort of conclusion with a poem that I thought would ‘write itself’.  I have discovered that the ‘write itself’ sorts of poems are almost always the ones that demand unreasonable numbers of drafts.  The present poem fits neatly into this work-heavy scenario.  I have, so far, notched up something like 14 drafts and I am not convinced that I am totally satisfied with the ‘final’ result.

            I do try and make my poetry as accessible as possible and I have finally (and regretfully) said ‘good-bye’ to my initial approach to poetry, which was to be as elusive and opaque as possible, with the result that, after a few months, even I did not know what I was talking about!  There is a sort of fear in that sort of poetry writing that does not appeal to me now.  There are some (thank you Paul!) who still aver that my poetry is not at the satisfyingly Janet and John level and is deliberately obscure.  Well, that may well be, but it is not the end result that I am aiming for: I am inclined to say that what I write is as clear as I can make it given the resources of language that are available to me!  Or it may just be that my arrangements of words need yet more arranging!

            Anyway, my attempts are sometimes, thought not always, put on smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es where I also attempt to give some sort of context to what I write.  Please check it out; and I welcome any and all comments.

The anthology of poetry produced my members of the Barcelona Poetry Workshop is getting nearer to publication.  The printer has been informed and work is progressing on the cover and associated details of the book.  We get ever closer to publication.  My own book of poems is scheduled to be published in the Spring of next year, and, although that seems a decent stretch of time away, I am acutely aware that there is precious little time for everything that I want to be in the book to be produced in time.  But I remain ridiculously optimistic and believe that I am living in the best of all possible worlds.  Up to a point.

I am still basking in the warm glow of delight not only at receiving my miniscule Spanish pension, but also by getting it backdated – so it appears to be a healthy sum!  And has paid for my new phone.  I regard the ‘money back’ on the exploding Samsung as ‘free’ money to splurge out on something of no practical value at all.  And believe you me, in my retail dream world; there is always something that I ‘need’!  Money is there to be spent.  In the present environment with the plunging pound, it is positively sensible and, indeed, essential that you spend what you get as soon as possible before it looses even more of its value.  Thanks to the foot-shooting Brexiteers, I now find myself 33% poorer than I was before the turkey voters of the UK voted for Christmas.  Thank you very much for absolutely nothing, and indeed less than nothing!

            It is with something approaching disgust that I read and see an increasing amount of xenophobia, which is, of course, the fancy word for racism.  The traitors in the Brexit campaign who are now in government (!) have a lot to answer for, though given their own personal wealth and position they never, ever will.

            Please do not assume that my default position is to consider all those who voted the opposite way from me in the Brexit campaign as idiots.  The EU is hardly a model of efficient democracy.  Let’s face it, the Common Market was set up by the French to give a financial boost to inefficient French peasant farmers, which is why the Common Agricultural Policy was and is an absurdity.  The traitor Boris made his career by writing disinformation about the EU, which exacerbated the perceived idiocy of the institution, and we are now reaping the whirlwind of callous self-interest painted as conviction.  Such attitudes by our so-called elite have worsened the reputation and authority of the governing classes and distanced them ever further from the voter.

            

     Brexit is the apotheosis of disenchantment, the inevitable result of distance that voters feel when they no longer believe that those who are ‘placed in authority over them’ have any concern or idea about how they live.  Perception is all.  Forget about reality.  What people ‘feel’ is more important than facts.  But when facts are more ‘facts’ with the way that the media presents them it is hardly surprising that sense becomes rather more relative than it should be and, as a way of showing independence from a hierarchy that doesn’t seem to represent people (however you define that term) any more, then the counter-intuitive becomes the new norm.

            The Republican Party in the US has reaped its own whirlwind from the denigration of intelligence, experts and statistics; in just the same way that the Brexit campaign pushed out-and-out lies as truth and pushed ‘feelings’ as the new reality.

            I find myself needing to believe in what I have called the ‘teacher effect’ to make something positive out of Brexit.  Generations of teachers have had to put up with uninformed, non-experts (ministers of education) deciding the way that schools operate.  No matter how ideologically impractical some of the ‘educational’ ideas were, teachers had to make them work because they were dealing with pupils’ lives.  Whatever idiocy had been deemed the political flavour of the month, teachers made sure that pupils got the most that they could out of a bad situation which was none of the teachers’ fault.  I have to hope that the same effort will be made with Brexit and, in spite of the clear negativity of the process, people (including the politicians that got us into this mess) will find a way to make it work to our advantage.  I am not holding my breath.  As someone living in Spain with a pension from Britain paid in pounds and therefore worth 33% less than it did before the vote, I have paid and am paying a price for a policy for which I didn’t vote and, horror of horrors, we haven’t even left the EU yet.  If this is what it is like with the future threat of our leaving, what the hell is the financial reality of actually being out of the EU going to be like?

            The one good thing of course is that each percentage point that the pound loses increases the (relative) value of my tiny Spanish pension.  And that word ‘relative’ is the key, after all whatever value in pounds might be; I live in Spain where the value of the euro is constant.  Sort of.  After all, my euros would only be of more value if I was able to spend them in the UK.  Where I do not live.  Ah well, that’s international living for you!

I have decided to go back to contact lenses.  I have hated and continue to hate wearing glasses but, with the selfishness inclusiveness of an only child I now find myself both short sighted (as I always have been) and now also long sighted (as an added aspect of the riches of ageing) and have not got on with attempts to use contact lenses to compensate for both elements of my seeing.  The one eye for reading the other for distance, simply did not work for me and so now I have decided to go with the everyday contacts with magnetic glasses (well, there has to be some aspect of a gadget to keep me happy) for reading.  Never let it be said that I was averse to new experiences!

            My optician was going to provide me with monthly lenses but, from past experience, I know that I am only suited to daily lenses – then I do not have to go through the procedures of actually looking after them.

            I will have to see if I can get back into the habit of wearing lenses.  At least these days they are soft and not the hard bits of plastic that took my eighteen-year-old eyes weeks to get used to.

            I am hoping that the ‘broken’ glasses worn around the neck will make me look more intellectual and that look might transfer itself to my efforts to learn a more grammatically and orthographically correct form of Spanish!

            Because, if perception works for Brexiteers over reality, then perhaps it might work for me in the linguistic wasteland in which I am struggling!