Pet Hates

When you are as contrary as I tend to be, ‘Pet hates’ as a title is far too wide-ranging to be meaningful.  So much irritates and annoys me that one has to compartmentalize the discomfort.  So, today I will be concentrating on those elements which disturb my enjoyment of the swimming pool.  Here is the first dozen or so that spring to mind!

My Swimming Pool Hatreds

1     People who do not put their clothes away in lockers in the changing room, but leave them hanging up on hooks over the benches.  These people have what amounts to an ostentatiously proprietorial attitude to a public space.  And they limit space for changing too.

2     Other swimmers in my lane.  I know that it is inevitable that a pool with five lanes, is going to have more than five swimmers are popular times – especially when the two outer lanes are taken up with older folk doing exercises for their health or families with babies and therefore the lanes are not available for real swimming.

3      Children.

4   Single long hairs in the water.  In our pool it is obligatory for all swimmers to wear caps, except for some extraordinary reason in the summer time when the roof of the pool is open to the elements, but it is easy for the hairs to escape.  This is not resentment because I am follically challenged, and I do not really blame anyone for the hairs, it is just the disgust at feeling a hair wrap itself along your face or find its way between your fingers.  Not really logical, but the revulsion is real.

5      Clumsy swimmers splashing me.  I loathe this in a way I find difficult to explain.  The spray from another lane is a constant irritation.  This morning was a more than appalling example, where the swimmer appeared to be digging his way through the water and flinging handfuls on me!  Ugh!

6      Children.

7     Taking up too much of the bench on which towels are place before your swim.  This is a simple case of selfishness and poor consideration.

8     Children (of all ages) hanging on to and pushing the lane float line.  If you have an energetic stroke having your fingers hit the plastic floats is actually painful.  My nail ends are in a parlous enough state as it is without having the abrasion of floating plastic making them worse.  There is also the effect of clunking the buttons of your smartwatch and therefore negating the information being collected on your swim.  Information, I might add, that I do nothing whatsoever with when it is collected – but that is not the point.

9    Invading my lane.  This is mostly having to deal with people who have no idea whatsoever about when to make a move if they want to pass through a lane.  They do not seem to be able to judge speed and proximity.  They should learn!

10   Ambient music.  I am more than content with the sound of the bubbles breaking against my ears and the music of my own thoughts!

11  Men peeing with the door of the toilet open.  Do women do this in their changing room?  I think probably not.  Is this a macho sort of thing?  Whatever.  Stop it!

12  Over equipped swimmers.  Unless you are a professional (in which case you probably shouldn’t be doing your training at our pool) the only equipment you need is: costume, goggles, cap, slip-ons, towel, ear plugs.  Anything else is mere ostentation.  Some people have water bottles, plasticised sheets of their regime, flippers or fins, hand thingies and other bits and pieces.  No.

13  Cold showers.  I’ve done the exercise, I deserve the pleasure of a warm shower not the punishment of something more befitting one of the more vicious old English public schools.

14    Children 

15    Swimmers chatting in the pool at the lane end.  Pools are for swimming not talking.

16    Men who wear anything other than brief swimming costumes.  That sounds more overtly sexual than I meant it to sound.  I was only making a practical point about practical swimwear for serious swimming.  One person this morning was wearing shorts that came down to mid shin!  What next?  Full dress costume and the re-emergence of Victorian bathing machines?

And I better stop there (though there’s more, much more) because you probably get the idea!  And probably too clear an idea of my character!

Far more pressing and disturbing is the fact that our select class of language students was hit with the unwelcome news that we have an examination a week today.  That did not go down well.  Our attendance is patchy.  There should be as many as twenty students in the class, but we have never had more than a dozen at best.  I can’t imagine that the examination will encourage them to creep out of the woodwork for the ritual humiliation that attempting to speak a language you do not know brings.

To be fair our examination is only (sic.) on the first two units of the course book and has some fairly basic stuff in it – but it confuses the hell out of us anyway.  Today, for example we were doing an exercise where we had to add the ‘from’ bits to show where someone was, well, from – and we were hit with the definite article scam.  It is always amusing to hear those of a foreign inclination refer to The Big Ben having been seen on their trip to London.  In our explanations we tell the hapless non-English speakers that “We don’t say that.”  We then explain that The Houses of Parliament but Buckingham Palace; The London Eye and The Tower of London, but Piccadilly Circus and Wembley Stadium.  And we hope that clears things up!

I have now been paid back in my own coin as we have been told that India, in Catalan is actually The India and therefore the way you write things like, “He is from India” in Catalan has to include the definite article, so it becomes “He is from the India”.  O Dear!

 

Well, we have a week to get things organized in our minds before the sudden onset of bits of paper with other bits to fill in is suddenly upon us.  As I always say at this point, this week should be one of revision, of bringing to the surface those elements of language that have been drilled into my subconscious.  Real life is not like that.  There will be a week of frantic learning so that the devastation of the red marker pen is not scrawled too thoroughly on my tear-sodden paper.

-oOo-

In an act of nasty minded viciousness, someone or other has thrown a black plastic bag of rubbish into our neighbour’s front garden.  Cats and other vermin have been at the debris and it looks unsightly and insanitary.

We have no access to the garden, and our neighbours are not in residence, so I took the extreme measure of phoning the rental company to Do Something About It, as they own the building and they must have something like a duty of care.  I was assured that they would at 10.00 am this morning.  It is now 5.00 pm and the rubbish is still there.  I will keep track.

-oOo-

I feel as if I am in an R D Laing poem, where there is something I should know that I have forgotten.  I am fairly sure that there is a part of the domestic shopping list that I have not filled, but I am damned if I can remember what it is.  And there is nothing worse that endlessly going through the litany that my mother used when she was trying to remember what groceries she needed.  She always started the list with “Butter, lard, marge, sugar, eggs . . .”  And that has stayed with me. 

Its usefulness is limited as we don’t buy the first four items on the list and Toni is fully paranoid about eggs and checks the dates and is scrupulous about staying within the time limits.  I, on the other hand, am probably more flexible that I should be with sell by dates and best by dates.  Toni has never really recovered from going through my cupboards and finding items that were years out of date.  And he was insistent on his sharing his astonishment with me at each new archaeological discover that he made.  For the sake of a quiet life I allowed him to bin stuff that I would never have thrown out and would quite happily have used today.  I mean dried pasta is dried pasta – what can go off.  And anyway, some pasta is naturally green!

I have been hoping that typing will prompt my fingers in an unconscious sort of way to suddenly become possessed by the Spirit of Domesticity and reveal the item.  But, nothing!

Himself will soon be home and I am sure that as soon as he steps over the threshold it will come to me with a bump.

I can always aver that my mind is now consumed by the looming examination and I have no time for trivial things.

REVISION STARTS TONIGHT.  Unless there is a decent film on.  NO!  I will dedicate myself to the acquisition of the rudiments of the language.  I will.  I will!  A bit.

A taste of things to come!

My taste buds are adapting.

At least I’m telling myself that, and I am, in part believing it.  All of this is a direct result of my having to have a diet of low fat with no salt.  And believe me, pepper is no real alternative to the lack of sodium chloride, no matter how much I add to my flavourless food.  And yet, I persist in telling myself that my taste buds have become more sensitive and are able to take what pleasure they can in the rather more subtle flavours that saltless preparation offers.

This evening, for example, I had salmon with broccoli and I enjoyed it.  A sprinkle of salt would have improved it, but I resisted and made the most of what my taste buds could get from the food, that in the event was quite a lot.

I am going to have to look into the range of spices that I can add to food that do not have a negative influence on my condition (thrombosis, pulmonary embolism and weakened heart) and can make the eating experience a little more exciting.  When I asked the doctor how long my present diet would last, his answer was, “For ever!” which makes the finding of ‘safe’ condiments something of urgent necessity!

Today, I have got down to the graft of getting something like a working draft of some of the poems that I have been planning out put down on paper.  I have four poems now in a working draft and I count that as something of an achievement.

It may just be the way that I work but I find that getting to the working draft stage of my poems is not sitting down and waiting for some mythical muse to touch my brow with inspiration, but rather hard work.  The slog of writing out notes, working them up into phrases or ideas and then trying again and again to put all that together into something that is satisfying.  At least to me.

I have not put any of my new poems on my poetry blog, but you are welcome to see past drafts of my other poems at:

http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es

The ‘problem’ of how to fill a day being confined to my seat for the bulk of my waking hours, does not exist for me.  As someone who delights to read, being forced to be sedentary and do something is an invitation to do the thing that I like most.  I now have the (enforced) leisure to read The Guardian thoroughly – though I am not sure how efficacious reading so much factual description of the idiocy of various countries’ leaders around the world, does not make for tranquillity.

The idiocy of Brexit and the glaring ineptitude of a hopelessly riven political apology of a party failing to articulate a reasonable response to it are constantly frustrating.  We still don’t know what exactly May is trying to negotiate for and the reports of her asking Merkle to “Make me an offer!” is cringemakingly embarrassing and terminally humiliating.

Trump, meanwhile, in the publishing of the shameless piece of political chicanery in the publication of the partisan Republican “Nunes Memo” shows that he is prepared to trash anyone and anything to protect himself.  This is a time when American Institutions are being pushed to their limits to contain a person who has no regard for anything other than himself.  He is of course aided and abetted by a Republican Party of such low moral imperatives that they are as much a threat to Democratic Institutions as the monster in the White House.

And Catalonia is in a bad place at the moment.  We still have no President and the PP is using the courts to muddy the waters.  Things should clarify in the next few weeks, but I find it difficult to see a realistic solution if the obtuse President of Spain refuses to be a politician and try and find a negotiated solution to the problems.

It is ironic that at present I am reading Andrew Marr’s History of the World that covers 70,000 years of human history.  The irony is that the problems that we see in the present are covered again and again in the sweep of the historical view that Marr offers in his eminently readable book.  Perhaps his book should be compulsory reading for the leaders in the world and perhaps they might see themselves and, more importantly see where actions like theirs have ended up the populations that they are supposed to serve!

Of course there is no way on earth that a person of the calibre of Trump could be encouraged to concentrate for long enough to read a multi-hundred page book.  Has he ever read a book of over a hundred pages?  I know he is supposed to have written a book, but I don’t think any reasonable person actually believes that particular fiction, not even the grandiose fool himself.

Still, I tell myself that worrying overmuch about world events that I cannot influence is not good for my health.  But not knowing about them is even worse – the Catch 22 position for anyone interested in politics!

When in doubt, read poetry!

The Way Ahead?

The relentless wave of injustice and blatant lying continues in this country.  The next election is going to be crucial in the modern development of Spain.  I am no expert, but it seems to me that the democratic process has not been under such sustained threat since the fall of Franco.

            The present government is a total disgrace, that 20% of the population can still express an intention to vote for the bunch of self seeking contemptible liars is absolutely astonishing.

            With the rise of the C’s party, which to be seems like a crypto-PP excuse for a political organization, there is a very real threat that tactical voting and plain ignorance could lead to PP uniting with the C’s and forming another government!

            People should realise that a vote for the C’s is a vote for PP and continued corruption and denial of fundamental human rights.  Already PP has pushed through education reforms with NO other party’s support.  They have altered basic citizen rights on protest and organization with NO other party’s support.  They put politics, their own politics, before the law, the police, and the citizens of this country.  They are a continuing shame to anyone who supports concepts of justice, equality and fairness – and they should have resigned years ago! 

Let’s hope that Spain has the informed self-interest to get rid of them in the General Election.

Another tongue!

The first three poems in my Autumn Trees sequence have now been translated into Catalan and are printed ready to be ‘looked at’ by Catalan speaking members of the Poetry Group tomorrow.  This is an important step forward in making the idea in Flesh Can Be Bright a reality!

            The other parts of the project are slowly taking shape, though what I thought was a more than generous time scale, seems to be getting tighter by the day!  I have plans to deal with most permutations of what might finally occur, but I would be more than gratified to have everything work out as originally planned.

            There are a couple of poems on the go at the moment; one is largely worked out, but the ending is proving tricky.  The other is plodding along an is the sort of thing that will come together with concentrated effort as many of the creative bits have been done and it is ‘just’ a matter of putting it all together.

            Well, something should be done in the next couple of days and, tomorrow,  Wednesday is also the day of my Poetry Group and that is usually the opportunity to respond to a stimulating theme and start the germ of another idea.

            Things are going well as far as The Eloquence of Broken Things is concerned, which is scheduled to be published in October 2016.  The only dangerous thing is to give myself the luxury of thinking that it is well over a year away and there is time to do as much as I like!  This is where time melts away and everything is eventually done in a rush.  I do not intend to be caught out!

Reader’s Card

I have now been given an ‘extension’ to be British Library Reader’s Card.  This is slightly odd as the last time that I used my card must be over thirty years ago!  Still, rather like the OU system, with the British Library, if you are on the system once you tend to stay there until, presumably, you are “Destroyed by enemy bombing during the war” (which I once had for a book published in the 1960s not being delivered to my desk in the Old Reading Room!)

            I have visited the new British Library, but my visit in May will be the first time that I will have used it as a library.  I will have to be canny about its use as I will only be there for a few days and the number of books that you can order is limited.  I will have to use the rules of book ordering to its full if I am to get the full benefit. 

I am looking forward to the experience and am very impressed by the on line catalogue actually giving you how long the book will take to get to you! 

It will be interesting to see how this all works out in practice.

Browning

The continued and more hysterical the warnings about the dangers of sunbathing become, the more they are tucked securely away in the corner of the mind marked ‘non used on voyage’.

            I have always favoured my father’s skin colouring rather than my mother’s and tend to tan relatively easily.

            There was a time when I used to shed skin with the facility of a snake – the tell-tale itch on the back generally leading to sheets of skin peeling away leaving me looking like a piebald creature.  Those days seem to be over, though I think that it has more to do with a born-again approach to moisturising than anything else.

            I also think that the change of sun tan lotion might have something to do with it also.  The family cream was Boots own Cooltan which I chiefly remember as a white cream which stubbornly refused to be rubbed into the skin and being protected (by one’s mother, of course) was a lengthy tactile experience!  And it didn’t really work, as skin fell away in chunks – though one always regarded that as a prelude to brownness as once the outer layers were stripped away it revealed the eventual tan underneath.  Though as I recall it the skin was always white underneath and it was the brown skin which fell to earth!

            Ironically, the brownest I have ever been was after a holiday to Scandinavia, and more especially Finland!  No accounting for sunshine!

Parking

The epic restructuring of the leisure centre car park continues with a second (unused) entrance now being opened up with consequent access road being created to link this entrance with the main road.  So far, every thing that the workmen do seems to create several other ‘things’ that have to be done before the new and improved, all-concrete, electronic-access car park gets back to use for the paying members!

            I think that most of us have now accepted that, in effect, there is no car park and have adapted accordingly.  In my case, as long as it doesn’t rain.  I am sort-of enjoying biking it, but this will change a the first sign of dampness.  Or winter as it is sometimes known!

            I have not yet had the opportunity to cycle when the car park is open, so that testing time is still ahead.

            Sad to say, I am looking forward to having a drink with my friend Caroline.  The sadness is nothing to do with her, I am looking forward to catching up on her news as we have not seen each other for a time, but sad because part of my excitement of seeing her is that I will be meeting her in a bar on the beach and it will be dark when we end our talk and then, gasp! I will have the opportunity not only to use my new lights on the bike, but also the flashing LED lights set into a niche on the back of my helmet!

            As I do not intend to go on any roads to get home, but to stick entirely to the paseo, this might seem like something of illuminated over-kill, but it makes me happy!  And biking home after drinking (not too much you understand) is all the justification that you need!

Whitman

Now to hunt through my poetry books to find the extract from Leaves of Grass that we are going to discuss tomorrow.  This is the nearest that I get to homework, as I don’t look at the work that I have to do for the OU course in the same way!

Poetry calls!

Realization

Apple – The Great Satan

I think that I am moving into my apostate stage in my relationship with Apple.

You must understand that this is being written on a MacBook Air, that there is an iMac upstairs, the iPad is on my left and my iPhone is in my pocket.  If I had to find an analogy for my situation I would suggest that it is like a Spaniard living in Spain.  This is a Roman Catholic country in which the church has an unfortunate political and social influence; where people cross themselves without a second thought – but where most Spaniards do not go to church and have what I regard as a healthy loathing of the institution.  So, while I am surrounded by Apple stuff I feel myself more and more distanced from it – even as I continue to use it.

And, of course, it really has to do with money.  Which at the moment is trumping aesthetics.

The Great Turning Point for me was the latest iPhone.  A beautiful thing with some interesting features – but the price!  The price is, I think, disgusting.  It is Apple at their grasping worst, confidently expecting to exploit, fully, their dedicated customer base.

And the Apple Watch!  I have followed the development of this item with all the avidity that one would expect from a person who was converted to Mac when the Windows experience was one of continued frustration.  My Mac (in those long lost days of customer consideration) was a friendly machine which usually did things that I expected it to and when I wanted something to happen I could follow simple logic and it usually worked.  Programs didn’t of course.  How cruel those words “Also works with Mac” were on most products.  It encouraged you to buy and then to cry and the things refused to work the way they did on Microsoft.  But that was then and this is now.

To me, the Apple watch looks like a thing of beauty – a rather big thing of beauty to strap to your wrist admittedly, but something you might (ha!) want.  Especially if you were an Apple aficionado com yo!

The first, and for me, crucial flaw in the Apple Watch enterprise was that it was not waterproof.  They produce a sports version of the watch and it isn’t waterproof!  Go figure!  The second was the absurd battery life.  They tried to take credit for it lasting a whole day!  Which means that you have to charge it each night and so the apps which monitor sleep are impossible with this watch.  The third was the fact that the watch came to life when you lifted your wrist, not in other words with a permanent display.

The more information that came out, no matter how well presented it was (and it was) just added to the disquiet.

And then there was the price.  Quite apart from the obscenity of the solid gold version of the watch, the regular price is high.  We are being asked to pay for a fashion item which is going to be out of date and sneered at in a year.  Few people look at television via the cathode ray tube anymore and, with the increased pace of fashion technology obsolescence wearing a first generation Apple Watch is going to be a faux pas in months!

I am no Savonarola, I have no intention of jettisoning the vast amount of money invested in my Mac stuff, just to make a point.  And, my MacBook Air was, and remains, a thing of beauty and elegance.  But my next computer is not going to be a Mac.  I now recognize that I can get a damn sight more bang for my buck by turning towards the dark side of PC, Microsoft, Windows and Android than I can ever expect from the profit generator that is Apple.

I still feel a bit of heel saying it though!

2001 – A Blog Odyssey

My stats tell me that this is my 2,001st blog entry!

            It’s difficult to know where to go after an opening sentence like that – though having written a couple of thousand blog entries it really shouldn’t be that difficult.  I do, after all, have something of a back catalogue to draw on!

            It is daunting though – as much for my readers as for anyone – that the sheer number of words generated means that I have probably written the equivalent of the books in the Old Testament!  Though I now realise that the comparison I have made is a little sweeping, almost as if I am claiming the same profundity – which I am not, by the way!

            I have never pretended that this blog is anything more than an opinionated, prejudice filled, occasional diary, dedicated to the oddities that I find around my day to day life – but it is also a time capsule, like any diary, and I can read certain parts of this ‘journal’ with the same sense of discovery of a stranger!

            Sometimes reading parts of this extended reflection does not necessarily bring back my specific memories, but it does generate responses and some humour, almost as if I were another me reading what the former me was thinking and doing.

            It is amazing that these words are read around the world and it is humbling at the same time.  Quite what people make of them is also part of the pleasure of writing.  And as long as I have a single reader other than myself, I will continue to add to this quotidian saga!

            And to my readers: a heartfelt thanks!

What next?

 

Toni, as a steadfast non-reader of my poems, is constantly appalled at my choice of subject matter.  On being told that one of my latest poems was about a car park (Car Park Country at http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/) he asked when I was going to write a poem about underpants!

            Which I think is a fair point and, given the range of subject matter that I find appropriate for my muse, I feel it is only a matter of time!

            Meanwhile I am hoping to have sight of the first few poems of Autumn Trees translated into Catalan.  If my plan comes to fruition they will form part of the complex centrepiece of my forthcoming book Flesh Can Be Bright which, as I say as a sort of mantra in the hope that it will be true, will be published on United Nations Day, the 24^th of October, 2015. (DV)

Pillow talk

There are many hardships that I am prepared to undergo with silence and dignity, but uncomfortable pillows are not one of them.

            For me the pillow is the central feature of the bed and where I lay my head is central to the experience of rest.

            At the moment the experience is not restful.  Which is not to say that I do not go to sleep.  That is one thing that I do with expedition and profundity – but it is the lead up to oblivion that is taxing me at the moment.

            I prefer feather pillows and always have.  I know that there are authorities (there always are) that tell me that feathers are nowhere near the healthiest option you can choose, but that has never been an overriding constraint on my behaviour.

            The most comfortable pillow I have ever discovered was in El Corte Ingles and I was all for buying it, when I was told the price.  I can no longer remember exactly how much it (it was only one) cost because of the psychological counselling that I have had, but the sum was vast!  And more!  And even I have my limits for self-indulgence!

            I have been searching for a reasonably priced alternative ever since.  I thought that I had found a perfect compromise between composition and commodification (I wanted to say ‘price’ there, but it didn’t start with a ‘C’) in a local supermarket.  I thought that I have found the perfect pillow for price and performance (see, I got the word in!) until I needed to change the pillow and found that the store did not stock that particular type any more.

            I bought a feather alternative and it is like sleeping on rock.  Every time I put my head down I grumble.  Silently, just before unconsciousness.  Toni maintains that my entry to the Land of Nod is synonymous with my head touching the pillow – but that is not true and the ‘grumble period’ is becoming more irritating and therefore Something Must Be Done.

            I have geared myself up to sally forth after my swim and take in the shops (never a hardship for me) in pursuit of the perfect pillow.  Again.

The British Library

After a number of years I am going to re-join the British Library – or at least get a Readers’ Card (one feels that it deserves capital letters) so that I can use the facilities when I visit London at the end of the month.

            In theory, I have been told over the phone by a very nice lady form the membership department, I will be able to get a temporary Readers’ Card and order books which will be ready for me to read when I am in London.  I should also have full access to the digital catalogue.  All of this in theory.

            Today I intend to put the theory to the test and find out if such access is real.

            The best part about it will be to watch Toni’s irritation as I am prepared to bet that such a thing will be totally impossible with the National Library in Spain.  We shall see.  And, as always, I live in hope!