Traditions are for the making!

 New Normal, Day 3, Wednesday

There is something deeply satisfying in being in on the creation of a new customary procedure.  Especially as I had little or nothing to do with its physical creation, I merely curated it into existence.

     Sitting outside the Liceu on my shooting stick, propped up against the railings leading down into the Metro, just before by time slot for entry to the first Covid restricted performance of an Opera for ages, I received a phone call from a friend in Cardiff.  It has to be said that actually making and receiving phone calls on my mobile phone is one of the least important functions as far as I am concerned.  And that lack of interest in the ostensible raison d’être of the machine shows itself in my customary total confusion if the thing actually rings.  As I always have the phone set to mute, it is a chance in a thousand that I ever get to realize that a call is occurring, and then answering it with the correct finger movements on the screen makes the likelihood of it being successful even less likely.  However, this call sort-of worked and I found myself talking to SQB.

     Not only did we manage (eventually) to converse, but also she managed to send me photos of cards that she had been making for charity, I instantly ordered some to be sent to me in Castelldefels, together with a selection of tree decorations that she had also made.

     Even before the cards arrived I began to formulate plans for them which did not include merely putting them in envelopes and sending them off to other people.  The end result was that I selected four of the cards that SQB sent and took them off to be framed.  I now, therefore, have a square grouping of four of the cards in a bright red Christmas surround in a gold metallic frame.  And it is now up on the living room wall as part of our Christmas festivities.  And will be a recurring part of Christmas from now to the end of time.  A tradition is born!  Thanks, SQB!

     This means that SQB now has a third entry in my Catalogue Raisonné, which, by the way is going from strength to strength with almost 40 works of art listed, not including some books, pottery and a fluffy bunny.  My catalogue will be nothing if not eclectic.

     I have still not decided what I am actually going to ‘do’ with the catalogue.  The one clear practical result of my starting it, has been that I have re-examined what I have, and have at least started the process of moving some of the paintings around and bringing others out of storage and onto the walls.

     In one case, that of my paternal grandfather’s First World War medals, I have discovered that I have had them framed in the ‘wrong’ order.  My grandfather was in that bloody conflict (wounded but not killed, in spite of the best efforts of that bastard Haig’s battle ‘plans’ {sic} [!]) from the start and was therefore awarded the 1914-1915 Star, as well as The British War Medal and The Allied Victory Medal.  That order is the order in which they were usually worn and I suppose it should have been the order in which they were framed, left to right.  He was also given the Abergwynfi and Blaengwynfi Commemorative War medal, a rather different looking medallion, and I have no idea where that should have gone in the sequence – probably at the far right.  I have always regretted that I did not have a contemporary photograph of my grandfather framed with them.  One does exist showing him wearing his metal helmet in a jaunty and, for the army, in a totally inappropriate way.  Perhaps my finding out the order was ‘wrong’ gives me an opportunity to have them reframed with his photograph giving the lifeless pieces of metal some sort of personal humanity.

     I think that my underlying intention of compiling the catalogue was to use it as a basis for further writing: the stories or thoughts that go with each piece.  Some of the works of art have obvious ‘stories’ – at least to me – while others are perhaps more subtle in the way that they can lead on to other more tangential considerations.  Who knows?  See where it goes.

 

When cycling along the paseo, for no particular reason snippets of songs come into my mind.  They are rarely of my generation of popular songs (whatever generation I think I might be a member of) they are more usually odd lines from the songs that my parents sang.

     One of the songs, that I often think I would choose to be part of the “What my parents gave to me” part of the radio 4 programme on a Saturday morning, the sort of legacy music that you pick up because your parents chose to sing it.

     I do not remember the whole of the song, but the lines I do remember and they were the ones that stuck in my mind for most of my cycle, in the way that earworms do, were:

“From New York to the state of Maine

They went in search of more cocaine

Oh, honey have a [sniff] have a [sniff] on me

Honey, have a [sniff] on me!”

One of reasons that the song stays with me, is that the [sniff] part was an actual sniff and not the word.  I thought that was very good.  At that age (less than 8 years old) I had no idea what cocaine might have been, and the fact that the two main (ill-fated) characters in the ballad were called Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue, and it really doesn’t end well!

     A few questions present themselves: which version of the song did my parents know?  How did they know it?  Why were they singing it in the hearing of a seven-year old?  I do remember that I used to join in with the chorus with the sniffing!  Ah, the innocence of ignorance.

     Doing a very small amount of research, it is amazing how many people have covered versions of the song, or composite fragments of a few songs, including names revered in Blues and Folk.  But it is still a remarkable snatch of song to graft into your child’s mind!  And before anyone gets the wrong idea, my parents were respectable non-drug taking folk!  A pipe and Australian sherry were their vices! 

     And singing inappropriate songs, as I have just remembered another favourite that I loved hearing because of the ending, was Frankie and Johnny, where after shooting her double-timing man, Frankie is strapped to the electric chair and “sparks flew out of her hair” he was her man, but he done her wrong, as the song puts it so forcefully, so justice had to be done! 

     O! the unfairness of life!  Such valuable lessons to teach a child.

 

 

 

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 75 – Friday, 29th May

Disaster!  My mobile phone (in its case) slipped out of my pocket and managed to land on a tiled floor in such a way that it came out of its case and smashed the mirrored back.  So much for my Huawei P20 Pro.  It’s still working, with an artistically crazed back and a large cavernous gap between the front and the back.  I will have to investigate to find out if there is any way in which it can be salvaged – it is after all working perfectly well; it is only the case that is broken.  I am not confident, and I expect to be both disappointed and angry at the built-in obsolescence or intentional difficulty in repairing it.  But, at the moment I have done no investigation to find out what is possible.  Perhaps I will surprise myself.

My bike ride this morning was again relatively quiet with few people joining me in their period of exercise.  The evenings are much fuller and more crowded with an age-blind selection of people walking, running and cycling.  When I go out only adults aged 16? to 69 should be there – but cafes and restaurants along the sea front are open and the whole family, regardless of age, can go to those so the discipline of lockdown is being made slacker by the day.

     According to our government, we will progress to the next stage of loosened restriction on Monday.  The progression is measured by days and not my figures.  There seems to be an assumption that the virus will be subject to a daily reduction in a whole area in an almost sequential way.

     As far as I can observe people in Castelldefels have already moved to the next level in their behaviour, so Monday’s new regulations will only make official what they are already doing.

For the first time for over three months we went to one of our favourite bar/restaurants for tapas and a drink.  We were outside, as restaurants are still not using interiors.  Even though the tables were generously spaced, it still felt as though we were getting nearer to some sort of normality, some sort of New Normality.

Back again!

 

Old habits die hard.  Or at least they have a way of rising zombie-like from time lost in laziness or indifference.

This writing is a case in point.  I am using, not my newish laptop bought after extensive trawling through reviews and at least one expensive mistake, but my old trusted MacBook Air.  Although I have abjured the buying of new Apple machines after the shameless pricing of the latest iteration of the Apple Watch, I am ever drawn to my MacBook Air.  It is the only piece of computer technology which, even after the decade (or ‘century’ in computer age years) of use that it has given, it still looks the business and its svelte metallic appearance still makes it a little object of desire. 

I understand (horror of horrors!) that the Apple logo does not light up on the latest versions of the machine – that surely is a travesty!  I speak as someone who bought an entire music system (there are three words that you don’t often see together nowadays) because it met two of my basic requirements: it had to have lots of flashing lights and the cassette eject system had to open in slow motion.  The user may not see the illuminated logo, but other people do and they either feel a fellowship with the user that they can see, or they know themselves cast into the other darkness of lost souls with dead logos.  It may not add to the operating system but the light from the logo paradoxically puts others in the shadow.

Little things are important.  And they are not ‘little’ either.  The last time that an Apple Dealer saw my MacBook Air when I was trying to update the system, he described it as ‘Vintage’, as all machines over five years old are described!  That lustrum is the age of a Secondary School generation as it progresses from Year 7 to Year 11, and I suppose that kids in Year 11 looking back to their younger selves in Year 7 would wholeheartedly agree that anything that they liked and admired when fresh-faced first formers (forgive my own regression to out-dated nomenclature there) playing ancient games on their outmoded mobile phones in those far-off times!

But the look and the feel of the MacBook Air from 2010 still looks good, still makes other machines look clunky and somehow stodgy.  So, in spite of the fact that my (expensive, compact and powerful) Dell is within a hand’s reach, I am typing on the Mac.

And typing a blog entry.  I have been very remiss over keeping up my blog and it has become very much an Occasional Feast for me instead of the Daily Duty that it was at one time.  My self-protestations that I will produce a piece of writing every day, have been empty, and each day without writing makes it easier to add a further day to the dilatory approach.  But today, today I feel inspired to put finger to key and get back into the habit.

Why, you might ask.  The sad reason is that I have left my mobile phone upstairs and I am too lazy to go up and get it.  My morning schedule includes going the quick crossword in the Guardian and I usually complete that on my phone.  I can do the crossword on my iPad, but I have allowed the battery to run down and I have had to put it on charge.  I could, of course, use the very computer that I am typing on now to do the crossword, but doing the crossword on the computer smacks of slight perversity – so, it was either sitting down sipping tea and trying to look demure; going up stairs to get the phone, or setting-to and writing.

Today I had a lie-in and didn’t go for my usual early morning swim, so the opportunity to write in my notebook after my swim had been taken away.  Yes, I know that I can write in my notebook at any time, but I do it after my swim, so I hope that you begin to see that ‘circumstances’ have conspired to get me writing another entry for my long ignored blog, because ‘historically’ most of the entries for my blog have been written on the machine that I am using now, my Mac.

So, from the dark days of wordlessness, I lurch towards the light of articulacy and prose.

As someone who find the style of ‘Tristram Shandy’ eminently natural in its predilection for digression, I do not find it at all surprising that I have taken the best part of a couple of typed pages to say, “I’m writing a blog entry.”  And I now feel that I can get on with what might be appreciated as actual subject matter.

Since Christmas, indeed since a little before Christmas, we have been beset by noise.  Now, Catalonia is not a quiet place (although, paradoxically it is only the lingering sounds of the tail end of Toni’s cough that echo through the house at the moment) but we have had the cacophonous horror of the house next door being completely renovated.  As far as we can appreciate, this involves hitting all wall, floor and ceiling surfaces an infinite number of times with hammers.  As we live in a group of five conjoined houses, structural sound in one is seamlessly transferred to the others – and even more so if you live next door.  As far as I can tell, the workmen must have hit every square inch of the surface and each of those blows we feel.

One Sunday (sic) the noise was so intense that I couldn’t hear the radio in our living room.  I complained, but if the work needs to be done, what can I reasonably expect?  This is what you get when the skeleton of our houses is concrete; hit one part of the frame and it is shared with all!

This evening, Opera, Mozart’s last, La Clemenza di Tito – and not one that I know particularly well, but I am open to being enthused by the production, and of course the music!

When I go to the opera I take the opportunity in the interval to go to the Café de l’Opera in the Ramblas and scribble a few notes about the production with a view to writing a review in the blog.  I have again been rather remiss here too and my notes have remained notes.  Today, however, I will assume that tomorrow I write and post the review!

Talking of writing.   The production of my latest book, The eloquence of broken things[1], has been beset by problems.  The pdf of the book was used for the print but, for reasons that have not been discovered, a double series of printing errors made their way to the finished books.  The printer has not been able to explain how a good pdf copy produced faulty final product.  A reprint was necessary and I am more than pleased with the results.  But.  In reading through and admiring my and the printer’s handiwork, I noticed a typo in one of the first poems!  This could not be put down to the faulty printing; this was a proof reading error.  By the time I noticed it, it was too late to change anything.

I decided to make the best of a bad job and therefore wrote an insert ‘celebrating’ and explaining the error in a poetic mea culpa, tucked inside the front cover – each copy individually initialled to make it more official!

The poem is included here as part of the lead up to the publication of the collection.

 

Erratum

p.14,  l.2,  w.6
for hr read her

Within a Turkish rug’s

expensive symmetry

is woven an intentional false note –

because perfection’s the preserve of god,

and not of stumbling, imperfect Man.

But, isn’t there an arrogance

in saying, “Yes, of course there’s that –

but all the rest . . . !”  As if

parading of a self-made fault

limits additional faux pas?

It’s Baldrick’s bullet[2]. 

Logic?  False!

Yet it’s a way of life we all adopt

because we live inelegant reality,

not textbook-sharp, black-outlined clarity.

Mistakes and errors?  That’s who we are!

Come with the territory.

Flaws are the marbling of life.

We have to say.

Because it’s inescapable.

I’d read and read again

the poem that contains the fault,

and yet not seen the missing ‘e’

until the final print was done

and it was then too late to change.

The sticking-plaster-sized

erratum slip is grudgingly applied

accepting and bewailing

my falling short.

But, what are vowels in the scheme of things?

Thngs tht cn b thghtlssly gnrd –

and still the consonantal frame

allows a certain fluency. 

If there had only been a gap

the reader could have,

would have, filled it in

without a thought.

But these are cavils

trying hard to justify

imperfect sight.

I should regard the ‘humbling by slip’         

as something more akin to public sacrifice:

(expiation, celebration,

for inexact humanity)

than hoping that,

in spite of all the odds,

the misprint, all alone,

is by itslf.

---

[1] Rees, SM. (2020) The eloquence of broken things, Barcelona, Praetorius Books.

[2] Private S. Baldrick, Captain Blackadder’s idiot batman is caught inscribing his name on a bullet when in the trenches in 1917, his explanation is, “I thought if I owned the bullet with my name on it, I’d never get hit by it.”  Blackadder Goes Forth Series 4, Episode 1.  First broadcast 28^th September 1989, 9.30 pm on BBC1, written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton.

Confusion of things

 

 

From where I sit, my right hand can stretch forth and get an iPad, a Kindle, stationery, a Spanish dictionary, a rubber band ball, reading glasses, a Snow White tin of pens, pencils and markers, earphones, wipes for glasses, a magnifying glass, a Bluetooth loudspeaker, pills, a Catalan dictionary and so on.  My left hand can reach out and encompass more pens, pencils and markers, a ‘spare’ mobile phone, an internet radio, usb hub, a three-drawer trolley which is filled with even more impedimenta.

So why, I ask myself, when I needed to write down book details from an article that I was reading on the Internet, did I scribble them down with a stub of a pencil on the back of an envelope?  Within the scope of both right and left hands there is a stick-it note pad and more writing implements than I can ever need during the course of a normal day.  So why, when something is needed did I make do with the makeshift?

I have to admit that I am only slowly becoming a user of the mobile phone.  I don’t mean that in any ordinary sense, I have had a mobile phone for a long time and have changed my phones with a regularity that had brought delight into planned obsolescence hard-hearted capitalists through the years.  I also have to admit that I have rarely used the mobile phone as, well, a mobile phone. 

In the early years when the functions of the phone were really limited to making and receiving calls, I think that my possession of such a machine was more of a status symbol than anything else.  And, of course, because it was a gadget and therefore it was something that I had to possess.

Now that mobile phones do so much more than merely allow people to connect via voices, I find that I use the ‘phone’ function even less than I used to.  I read The Guardian on my phone, I read books, I use the Internet,

I play games (I am ashamed to admit that I am something of an addict of Candy Crush – it encourages that partial mindlessness that is so relaxing) and I take photos. 

The first time someone actually phoned me on my present phone (a Huawei P20 Pro) I couldn’t work out how to answer it and had to phone the person back after I managed to cut her off with all my frantic finger prodding of the screen.  My purchase of the P20 Pro (and I had to look up the name of the damn thing on the Internet to get it right, and that indicates where my prejudices lie!) was largely influenced by the fact that there were lots of lenses on the back of the case and that the camera had been developed in association with Leica – and, let’s face it, that is about as far as I am likely to get to owing a real one.  So, I bought it because it was a camera that I could read, so to speak.

But I still have the remnants of what one might call the ‘Box Brownie’ mentality where each photograph taken was using up part of the film that one had threaded (with care and difficulty) onto the spindles.  Each photograph had to be developed, each photograph was precious and expensive, its quality being linked to the fact that a photograph was part of a slow laborious process, there was nothing instant about it: buying the film, using the film, developing the film all combined to give an almost ritualistic feel to the whole rigmarole of taking a photograph.

Now digital photos are truly instant – though the physicality of what used to be the photograph has now all but disappeared: the camera is the photograph.  When was the last time that I actually printed out a photograph that I had taken?  The fact that I have to think about it (and I am still thinking about it) shows how long ago that was and what an occasion it must have been!

But I still behave as if each photograph was on film, as if each skeuomorphic[1] click (or whatever recorded sound you have playing on your phone) was the introduction of an element of cost in the production of a concrete piece of visual information.  But, nowadays, the camera is used as an aide memoire, as something to be used casually and then discarded as a visual reminder.

Which brings us back to the back of the envelope.  It didn’t occur to me to take a shot of the screen, or even a screen shot (as if I knew how to do that!) and save it for future use.  For something like book information, I needed to be the ideal of the scholar that I will never be, and scribble something down, to make it real, so that at a later date I could riffle through all my notes and marginalia and references and play at learning!

But, there is a function in all this writing: I find that things are more real when I read about them – even if I am reading what I have just written!  So, this might be taken to be a note to myself to make my life easier and remember that a digital photo, is just a free(ish) image that is just as useful, if not more so, that a fugitive scrap of paper that is in constant danger of being tidied up and lost.

As if I haven’t lost things on the computer, or on the phone.  But that is for another blog!

---

[1]

It is thanks to the Open University and a unit on Greek vases that I came across the word Skeuomorphic and I wholeheartedly recommend this essay because it says something about ancient tastes and a twisted modern interpretation of what they might have been at the same time.  It is a good read: https://www.academia.edu/8587519/Skeuomorphism_in_ancient_Greece_a_cost_analysis