Oh, for the great outdoors!

I am beginning to forget what it is like to have the unmediated sun on my skin and feel the wind where my hair used to be!

I am not yet at the stir-crazy point of my enforced house holiday, but I am getting near.

I do realise that thrombosis in the leg and embolisms in the lungs with an effected heart demands certain restrictions if there is to be a realistic hope of recuperation, so I am trying to keep to the outline of what I should be doing and, more particularly, not doing.

Ideally, I should spend my days sitting in my armchair and being waited on hand and foot.  Not bad, you might think – but even slavish attention to one’s needs pales after a while.  Or a week in my case.  Not that I am not entirely grateful to Toni for butlering about in a most professional manner and providing me with sugar, fat and salt free dishes for my delectation.  I truly am grateful.  But I cannot walk very far (I mean, I can, but I mustn’t) and I can’t drive and I can’t swim and I can’t ride my bike and I can’t go to the opera.  Whoops, that last bit of self-denial makes me appear more bourgeois than I care to appear, however accurate it may be in reality. 

The point is, although I am working well in my enforced sedentary period of acclimatising myself to a New Way of Life, I am constantly frustrated by having to ask somebody else (aka Toni) to do the most trivial things for me if they require any physical effort.

At least this initial period of ‘rest’ should only take up the first two weeks, and already I have sat my way staunchly through one half of the time.  One week to go and I will be ale to go for a short walk.  Outside!

As someone who has been driving since he was able to drive – that, I now realize,  is half a century – it is much more difficult to adapt to not being able to get up and go whenever I like.  When you can’t, you realise just how much you use the car (or bike) for all those little things that are just out of reach, but no problem when you can slip into the car and get it done in no time at all.

I am sure that this experience will be a valuable life experience for me: I can’t really afford for it to be anything else!  And I am sure that not being able to do so much (if only for a strictly limited period) will (must) make me appreciate what I will be able to do soon enough.

As my existence has been circumscribed to contain only the living room and bedroom (with excursions to the bathroom) I have had time to read the Guardian in depth.  With a short period where I deviated towards the Independent, I have been a staunch Guardianista (and indeed in the style of that newspaper I actually reversed the ‘a’ and ‘r’ in the word!) and feel comfortable with the way that the news is reported and the articles that sum up the quirkiness and essential intelligence of the paper.

But it is also depressing as you surely feel yourself part of the minority/majority (who knows?) that thinks Brexit is an act of national self-harm unparalleled in our life times.  But this feeling of being on the right but losing side means that every opportunity to read about Brexit is compulsive – and the Guardian provides many opportunities to do exactly that.  It is the same with 45 in America where we (the Guardianistas) loathe and despise the man, but cannot stop ourselves from reading about him as if we were all suffering from some sort of addiction.

The only respite from my misery is that the coverage of Catalonia is hardly as exhaustive as the other two and therefore I do not sigh so much in that respect – but television here more than makes up for that lack as the Spanish government would rather talk about Catalonia than any of the corruption and disasters that comprises their contemptible administration.

Meanwhile, I am getting on with the poems drawn from the notes I made while in hospital.  I have to admit that my hospital diary stretches only over eight days.  And did I suffer!  Well, the only pain that I felt over that period was from the injections that I was given; the obtrusive inflation of an automatic blood pressure cuff – this actually caused sores; discomfort from an unyielding bed and a vigorously flesh pressing radiography nurse.  Hardly the stuff of great drama.  I didn’t feel truly ill when I went into hospital and I felt much the same when I came out.  There is no harrowing story of suffering and no real learning or change of situation or comprehension at the end of it.

There is, of course, the realization of just how lucky I have been: if this condition had not been discovered at the time it was then it probably wouldn’t have been discovered until it was too late!  That is something worth thinking about.  But my poetry has ever been the stuff of unexceptional observation and so my observations throughout the week should play to my strength.

At least that is my story and I’m sticking to it.

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!

Trees, food and poetry - in any order!

I think that I was misled by the word: webinar.  The excitement of coming into contact with a useful neologism got me up at the crack of dawn to participate in a web-based discussion called, you’ve guessed it, a ‘webinar’.

            As this was being hosted in America the time was in EST, which I duly translated into Madrid time.  And was twelve hours out in my calculations!  A mistake anyone can make, though the six hours difference should have been added rather than taken away from their starting time.  If I had thought about it for longer than a Nano second I might have worked out that the USA is to the west of us and that the sun rises in the east and . . . well, there is no excuse really.

            And when, twelve hours later, I finally joined the webinar (having decided that this mixture of web and seminar was not really so clever) I discovered that the whole enterprise was actually a selling opportunity for the couple of hosts who were taking the webinar.  I have to admit that they did give some good advice and I did have the muted thrill of hearing the title of my forthcoming book, ‘Flesh Can Be Bright’ read out by the female host, so a few hundred people have heard the title, which is the first stage, I suppose, towards buying the thing!

The shock of the day was finding out, when I attempted to park in the leisure centre, that all the trees had been cut down!  I never like seeing trees destroyed, but this seemed worse somehow as these trees have been my on-going inspiration for a whole series of poems and are the basis for a continuing series of poems.  I did, of course make copious notes as I sipped my tea and watched the workmen operating the grab and scooping up the remains of the shattered vegetation.  This is the poem I wrote:

Winter Trees

ii.   Gone

The blossom headed grab

picks up what’s left of

twenty trees.

When this year’s growth

was not cut back,

I should have known

that something was afoot.

And now these winter-winnowed

twigs protrude from that

closed metal sphere

like so much wayward hair.

Spaced equally, the twenty

shallow pits share emptiness

concave, not deep.

How easy to remove. 

And cut. 

Fresh, pungent stumps

that flaunt their age

in death.

Those trees were never huggable.

The rough, stained, ulcered bark

defied caress.  And yet.

Will asphalt fill the cavities

where roots once were?

And cars park easily

on obstacle free ground?

And memory forget

that there were ever trees?

This poem is the second that I have written about Winter trees and I hope, eventually, it will be a continuation of the series that I have already written on Autumn trees.  My latest poems can be found at: http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/  I am thinking about this series as forming part of my next but one book of poems!  There is nothing like thinking ahead.  I would like this series to be accompanied by original drawings, just as I hope the ‘Autumn trees’ series will be in ‘Flesh Can Be Bright’ to be published this September.  That all sounds so professional, I can almost believe it!

Lunch today was spectacular, one of the best that we have had in Castelldefels.  I had a started of Carpaccio of beef that I last had in Paris.  This was substantially better, and a bloody sight cheaper!  My whole meal cost about ten quid, including a class of Cava and coffee with ice.  The homemade tiramisu was something that my friend Paul would have killed for.  You can see photos of most of the dishes in http://catalunyaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es/ You will not see photos of the postres because we both started eating them before I thought of using the camera!  Again! 

Toni’s blog is growing nicely and the photos are a vivid reminder of the excellence of the eating experience that Castelldefels offers at such a reasonable cost.

Our eventual hope is that the blog will eventually be recognized as one of the formative eating guides and we will be fed for nothing where ’ere we go!  Fond hope.  But the blog is looking good and it is a clear guide about where to go for a good meal at more than reasonable cost.