Pointless power

 

There is always something exhilarating about an electric storm, especially in this part of the world, as they seem (when they happen) to be the showy Drama Queens of thunder and lightning with constant flashes and histrionic rolls of thunder.  As I open the door of third floor to gain greater immediate access to the shenanigans of the weather, I am reminded of what we used to do in my first primary school.

     We were not allowed to use ball point pens, but instead we were issued with wooden nib holders and a metal nib to use the ink that was portioned out into the inkwells that were part of the desks that we used.  The inkwells had a sliding metal cover which was put in place when the ink was not being used to limit evaporation and keep things from falling in.  During thunderstorms, as we had been informed of the propensity for lightning to find a metal conduit to “earth” itself, we very carefully put pieces of blotting paper over the metal inkwell covers so that we were not electrocuted by a stray branch of lightning finding its way into our classroom.  Even though, even at that age, we suspected that a small piece of blotting paper was unlikely to be of very much help, it seemed better than doing nothing, and gave a most pleasurable sense of danger possibly prevented to liven up we already storm-excited kids.

     The storm has now passed, with the rolls of thunder being more of the distant grumbling variety rather than the window shaking type that really did buffet us just a few minutes ago.  The lightning remains, but more as distant fading flashes looking like poor theatrical attempts to try and mirror the real thing.

     A storm like the one that we have just had has an immediate legacy in this district of Castelldefels.  The name of the district is taken from the number of pine trees that abound and any storm washes off quantities of needles from the trees which, unless they are removed with expedition block gutters and drains and produce almost instant flooding.

     We have no pine trees growing in our garden, but we are surrounded by them in other gardens and so our garden is covered in needles, all of which need to be gathered up and put out on the pavement on a Friday when the organic collection of rubbish takes place and the raked debris disappears.

     I must admit that in my first year of teaching, I vividly remember a lad giving a passionate and informed talk to the rest of the class about his dad’s job in the local sewerage works.  His description of nematode worms and their essential part in dealing with waste and his simple wonder about the worth of sewerage and waste management has stayed with me through my career and beyond.

     I do find the whole logistical exercise of waste collection fascinating and I never fail to be moved and astonished by the way that it is done.

     In Castelldefels we have had a system of rubbish specific bins that are emptied on a daily basis by the use of massive lorries with a hydraulic arm that picks up each (large) bin, empties it into its appropriate section and replaces it with amazing precision when it has been emptied.  It must all be computer controlled and the lorries must cost a fortune, but it seems to work.

     I’m now typing in silence, the storm ended, and only the sound of the two fans which more than cover the sound of a very distant thunder roll.

     There are several pinch points in Castelldefels where storm water accumulates and the drainage system is inadequate in dealing with it.  As I make my way to the pool tomorrow I åshould pass at least two of them, but on the bike, it is easy to find a dry way through and not have to plough through the massive puddles.

 

 

Well, all that was last night and now its the afternoon of the next day, so to speak - and the sun is shining and the fans are on!  Ah, what a joy to live in a country where the weather is not lingeringly spiteful!

     The results of the downpour last night were obvious in the amount of leaves, needles and small branches littering the streets, pavements and more importantly gutters.

     My cycle to my morning swim was uneventful apart from the new bumps of tree litter strewn along my way, but the more spectacular even was to turn into the leisure centre and see the new lake that had formed taking over a chunk of the seating area and part of the parking area as well!     

     The attempts of the technical staff to use an electric pump to get rid of the water at first resulted in a small ornamental fountain, but by the time that I had finished my post-swim tea, the water had gone.

     As will the rest of the organic rubble as tomorrow is the leaf collection day and the little piles that have now accumulated outside our houses will magically disappear.  I hope.

     If not then our parking spaces (because some people put their tree and grass waste on the road) will be limited for another week - and not everyone obeys the rule that no waste can be put out for collection until Thursday at the earliest.

     It is very difficult not to feel resentment against those people who Take Advantage.  And what do we saintly others who obey the rules do?  Grumble a little, but actually do nothing.  I have read that some parts of the UK have draconian rules regarding the sorting of rubbish into correct receptacles, and woe betide the recidivist who makes a second mistake about the placing of egg shells: punishment is condign and expensive!  So, I'm told.

     One of the pleasure of owning a bike was the ability to ride along the Paseo and see the sea.  That is now forbidden.  It was done in stages: firstly on the narrower part of the Paseo and then extended to all of it.  And I obey the rules.

     Except, each time I come back from my morning swim, I cycle along the road which runs parallel to the out of bounds Paseo, and I ALWAYS see a few cyclists enjoying the forbidden sight of the sea.  And what happens to them?  Nothing!

     I know that I should be satisfied to do what is right and that feeling of rectitude should be reward enough.  But it isn't.  If I may paraphrase and overused saying, "It is not enough for me to do good; I must see those who do not, suffer!"

     Another character flaw I have to work on!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 40 – Friday, 24rd APRIL

Years ago, when I was a volunteer on Cardiff AIDS Helpline, part of the duties of the volunteer was to staff the phones so that you could answer questions on the disease from members of the public who were able to ask for information in a safe environment where their anonymity was guaranteed.  It was very rewarding and volunteers were only allowed to take phone calls when they had undergone a fairly rigorous period of training.

     I remember, in one of the training sessions where we were being presented with simulations of calls one of the trainers, after listening to my responses said, “A little judgemental there, Stephen!”  I put it down to my being a teacher where there is an obvious overarching sense of direction and intent in the pedagogic approach.  But, with the Helpline, it was all about the caller: whatever the caller said and whatever the caller talked about, the volunteer had to go with it and suspend judgement.  I found it refreshing!  Whatever the caller had done, was doing or thought about doing, I was only there to give unbiased explanations and to give advice if asked.  I heard some shocking things but I learned not to judge only to supply facts to give the callers the information they needed to answer their questions and to give them clarity in the direction that best suited them.

     In the early days of the AIDS epidemic ignorance was the great killer.  In spite of the eventual mass advertising campaigns, the sometimes-gnomic approach was not direct enough for the basic information to get to the bulk of the population and some of the questions asked showed a shocking lack of understanding.

     One caller asked if it was possible for, “Me to give myself AIDS if I cut myself?”  While another when being told that the AIDS virus could be killed with a weak solution of bleach asked, “Couldn’t you inject that into somebody to kill the virus in them?”

     I was reminded of my time with the Helpline when reading and listening to Trump in one of his latest deranged pronouncements where he seems to be urging the use of internal UV treatment and the ingestion of bleach as a way of combating the Covid-19 virus!  30 years later and still the same level of ignorance, and this time not a random anonymous caller from Cardiff but the so-called leader of the free world who, from the time of his inauguration has spoken, “some weird shit” as Bush put it.

     At one time you could smile at the antics of the Orange Grotesquery, but it has become increasingly apparent that his mangled language simply kills.

The second attempt at Google Meet for our language classes was not an entire success.  The sound quality was variable, to say the least and the pictures confusing.  Having seen Zoom conferences of neatly aligned video feeds and exceptional audio, this experience was a little less than overwhelming.  I do not even think that I managed to get the basic information from our little gathering, but I will persevere and see what happens.

     Our Catalan group is about five or six on a good day, but I was the only one there and will have to relay imperfectly understood information in the hope of getting some sort of on line lesson up and running.  As far as I can tell, the only good thing coming out of the crisis is that we will not have any examinations; for which much thanks!  But it does call into question any certificate that we might be given at the end of the year!  What little Catalan I did have before the advent of Covid-19 has now altogether disappeared.  Every time I open my textbook, it is as thought I am starting from scratch.

     To justify our continued places in the virtual classes we have to do a certain number of ‘tasks’ and submit on line for assessment.  Having looked at the first one, I am even more confused than I was before the meeting, but no doubt, I will cobble something or other together and stagger on in the way that has become second nature to me when it comes to the study of languages!

We have just had a loudspeaker car come around the streets telling us that the normal municipal Friday collection of garden clippings and pine needles has been suspended until further notice.  You may not consider this much of a hardship, until you realize that the constant dropping of pine needles (in an area called after the pine trees) is a major problem.  This is not because of any unsightliness, but rather because of the threat that the accumulation of pine needles poses to the efficient working of our drainage system.  The pine needles block drains and cause floods unless they are cleared from gutters on a fairly regular basis.  Everything is interconnected and ignoring one part of the system will lead in a fairly short time to its collapse.  One wonders what other services have been dispensed with during this crisis and when the end results of this neglect will start showing itself.

     We are now two days away from the release of the Plague Kids into the streets on Sunday.  The rules (as far as anyone really knows them) say that a youngster can be taken out on a short walk accompanied by a single parent.  I simply do not believe that this is going to happen and we certainly do not have the number of police available to make sure that the rules are followed.  But, perhaps I am being cynical.

The sun is out and the sky is cloudless and all is well with the world.  At least, all is well with the world when it is concentrated on the third floor terrace, my private bit of the ‘outside’!

First, catch your metaphor!

 

The Internet is sometimes like an over eager and terminally earnest student scientist friend who tries to answer seriously and comprehensively a casual question like, “So, how do neutron bombs actually work then?”  And fails to notice the growing hysteria in his listeners as they realize that they are stuck in a comprehensively incomprehensible monologue.  And I speak from experience!

So, I was thinking about my activity in our outside pool.  Our pool is surrounded by trees, including the pine trees that give their name to our district and, although these trees are evergreen they also discard their needles throughout the year – and a fair quantity of them fall into our pool.  We do pay for our community pool to be cleaned and serviced, but the constant rain of pine needles and cones is a problem on a daily basis and our pool persons are not that frequent visitors.

If you are a regular swimmer you will know how unsettlingly irritating a single strand of free-floating hair can be, so imagine the shock of a series of sharp pointed pine needles can be – especially if you have just come from our stretch of the Med where for the past week or so we have been dealing with an outbreak of medusas (jellyfish) that do sting, so the instinctive reaction to anything sharp in water is to fear future pain.

My major swim is in our local pool (medusa free) where I generally swim a metric mile and feel quite smug about it, so our community pool is more relaxed semi-swimming.  And this is where the thoughts at the beginning of this writing come in.

As I dislike being pricked by pine needles, I of course, assume that no one else likes it either.  I have therefore taken, in my community pool swims, to skim the surface collecting the pine needles and throwing them out of the water.

From time to time I perform (what I consider to be) an elegant surface dive to retrieve and discard the seed cases and fractured cones that litter the floor of the pool.  So, in my mind, after the mindless lengths that I do in the swimming pool, I feel that I have a sort of purpose in our community pool.  Just like those fish that are kept in aquaria solely to clean the place up.

And I should have left it at that. 

But no, I decided to examine my image in a little more detail and typed a fateful enquiry into the box and got sucked in to a whole wealth of information in the same way that I did every time I ever ventured to look inside the Guinness Book of Records.  But the digression with the Book of Records is of a different nature to that in the Internet.  I have started off trying to find out the size of the largest uncut diamond ever found and ended up being fascinated by the wing span of birds.  With the Internet you tend to go deeper into the same thing in a profoundly superficial way!

I now know more about sand sifting stars, gobies, Cory doras, freshwater catfish, bluestreak cleaner wrass, grandpa snails, suckermouth catfish and Nerite snails, than is strictly necessary for a quiet life.  I have also discovered an intense community of fish lovers who are truly preoccupied with the problems of aquarium cleaning.  I mean really, truly, preoccupied!

 Think that I have realized a valuable life lesson: metaphors and similes are approximations and, unless you are a Shakespeare, the depth of your metaphor only reaches down a single level of association and the further you research your initial thought the further, like the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella - so to speak.

Refuse refuse - it's all in the way you say it!

A short, sharp, apocalyptic, thunder and lightening storm yesterday afternoon has left the path strewn with pine needles.  Yet again.  From trees that are not ours.  This means that we have the imminent appearance of the noisy leaf gatherers to look forward to.

The invention of the leaf-blower has to one of the major banes of the modern urban leafy suburb - if our little zone could be called one.  As our area is named after the pine trees which are a characteristic of our streets, it is not surprising that we are well used to the howl of the leaf-blowers - both private and municipal.

It is not out of any aesthetic civic pride that the pine needles are gathered up; it is rather because of our inadequate road drainage system.  Fallen pine needles gather into impressive clumps and block the drains, so any delay in collecting the organic excess, when linked to a sudden downpour, will result in extensive flooding, or at least large areas of standing water on the roads.  The collection is therefore necessity rather than cosmetic.  Our economy relies on the tourist, usually the day tourists from Barcelona, so any discomfort and inconvenience has a direct relationship with the wealth of our municipality.  Our resort, through undoubtedly popular, does have rivals, and it doesn’t take much to persuade fleeting visitors to fleet elsewhere.

The one good thing about refuse collection here is that it is daily via the system of collective bins that are found along all the roads.  In addition, each Friday (in our zone) any pine needles or tree clippings or general plant waste will be collected separately.  On a Thursday evening, therefore, I brush together all our neighbours’ pine needles that have fallen in our back garden and sweep them into a neat heap outside our front gate.  And by Friday afternoon they are gone.

Although I know that the logistics of refuse collection are prosaic enough, I have always found the reality of rubbish collection almost magical: now you see it - now you don’t!  I also know that the reality of landfill and the general problems of disposal are rapidly assuming crisis proportions and we are probably living in the last age of the free-and-easy, throw-it-all-in-the-bin approach to refuse.  I know that Britain is gradually developing a fairly Draconian approach to when, when and how you throw things away, and I read with interest of local councils fining people for putting the wrong things in the wrong bins, or putting things out at the wrong times.  Here in Castelldefels while we do have bins for plastics, cardboard, glass and general refuse - there is nothing to stop you from putting veering in the same black bag and throwing it in the ubiquitous green bins.  I feel that this anarchic time is quickly coming to an end, and it is only a matter of (short) time before we too are dragooned (rightly) into a more caring attitude.

The Greek Way

On a related economic model, I have now reverted to something that I used to do years ago - make my own yogurt!

I used to own a rather nifty device which comprised a heated stand on which stood six yellow screw topped containers complete with overall plastic cover and which provided me with (though I say it myself) a rather fine yogurt.  I seem to remember heating milk with ‘starter’ yogurt in a saucepan while keeping an eye on the thermometer to ensure the reaction ‘took’.  That is obviously old school.  My new device comprises a cylinder inside what looks like a pressure cooker: you add the milk, add the yogurt, stir it a bit, turn the machine on and leave it for 10 hours or so.  Voilà!  It’s done!

The resultant yogurt was a trifle runny.  But the little book of instructions had advice (in Spanish) about making Greek yogurt - that, in theory should be more solid.  The complex instructions for adding this sort of value were merely to let the runny yogurt stand for 24 hours in the fridge then put it into a mesh strainer (provided) in the white receptacle (provided) and let that drain for a couple of hours in the fridge and the job is done.  And it worked!  And is delicious!

The next time I am in a supermarket I am going to look at the price of Greek yogurt.  My newfound machine makes 1ltr from UHT milk with the use of the machine (obviously) and 10 hours of very low-level electricity and the fridge.  I will have to start making ‘fruit’ versions and see how they go!

At the moment there is something very satisfying in having made a food that I eat every day, it is the equivalent to growing your own wheat for your daily loaf!  I am very smug about it all!

Slotting into place

When I was living in Cardiff, I could walk around town and sooner or later I would bump into someone who would say, “Hello!” with that element of genuine recognition that would suggest that we knew each other.  And to be fair, I am generally a good rememberer of faces to the same extent as I am an appalling rememberer of names.  My inability to recall names bordered, and continues to border on. the psychotic, but my ability to feel affinity with faces means that I am subject to an almost endless mental jigsaw as I attempt to fit the face into a pattern that never seems, at first glance to have the correct space to place it.

The last time this happened was in the changing room of my swimming pool.  I was about to walk to the pool for my swim when a naked young man came from the shower, saw me, smiled and said, “¡Hola!”  I replied with a smile and walked on to the pool, thinking as I did so, about where the hell I knew him from.

In Cardiff, as a teacher, you have a bewilderingly wide range of ways of knowing people they could, after all, be present pupils, past pupils, colleagues, past colleagues, Union Members, friends, family, shopkeepers, audiences (I had cultural season tickets) sports partners, parents (of pupils I mean - even my inability with names is not that bad!) and so on.  Here in Spain there are not quite so many possibilities, though I have taught here and the parents, pupils, colleagues thing can be brought into play here in Catalonia as well.

But this guy was in the sports centre.  He was slim and fit and so I tired to ‘dress’ him in the uniform of the centre, perhaps he was one of the summer guys brought in to cope with the summer schools being run.  But that didn’t really fit.  Past pupil didn’t seem right.  Customer?  Wrong time of the day for someone so young.  And so I went on, slightly resentful that he was naked as clothing would have been a clue!

Shops, supermarkets, opera houses, restaurants all went through my mind.  Not, you must understand because it was important to know where I knew him from, but because I was irritated by not knowing.  Wherever I placed his smiling and variously dressed face and body, he didn’t fit.  I made notes about him in my little notebook hoping 1) his habitat would come to me through the simple power of writing, and 2) if all else failed I could make a virtue of necessity and write a poem about it.  Neither occurred. 

As is usual in cases such as these it was while I was thinking about something else entirely that I got:  a) new waiter, in b) old favourite restaurant.  Of course!

And what have I got from expending a frustrating amount of time and mental effort in trying to remember something that is entirely unimportant? 

Here is where you, dear reader, can help me.  What have I gained? 

A quiet satisfaction in allaying the fear that my mind is losing its ability to organize information and bring past events to the surface when they are needed?  A triumphant reassertion of my capabilities of being able to deconstruct new combinations and find the essential truth behind them?  A complete lack of understanding of priorities?  A gleeful acceptance of mind-games displacement activity?  The lack of something better to do?

Who knows and, more importantly, who cares!