To float at last!

 

Loath though I am to admit it, three weeks exile from the pool and ‘forced labour’ in the gym has had some sort of effect.

     Today was Liberation Day when the pool was finally reopened after the (extended) period of Maintenance work.  This grim period usually extends over a fortnight, and I can just about tolerate the regime of light-use machine work that I devise to fill up an hour of exercise.  But this year the work was over three weeks, and that extra week was almost unsupportable.

     With the liberal use of Kindle on my mobile phone for the bike and the walk, I am usually able to get through to the end of my stipulated period of torture and feel justified in my monthly payment which is specifically for Gym & Pool, so I am entitled to be there, in spite of my pointedly ignoring the gym for eleven-and-three-quarters months of the year.

     Yesterday I ritually knocked the dust from my shoes and vowed that my return to that particular circle of Hell would be no sooner than one long calendar year’s time, when the Maintenance work must begin again.

     Meanwhile, at 6.30 am this morning I was first into the water of the newly maintained pool and relaxed into the comfort of an adequately heated environment and started my swim/exercise that starts my usual day.

     And this is where what I have been doing for the past three weeks (apart from a few carless days) comes into its own.

     I start my ‘swim’ with physio approved exercises that when I first did them just after my knee operations made me yelp with pain.  Pain that was stonily ignored by the physio themselves (they were a moveable feast of considerate torturers) as they urged me to further exertions.  Now, using the cushion of the water’s hold, I can do the exercises with some ease, even the knee bends that at one time I thought would be impossible short of general anaesthetic!

     After about 30 minutes of stretches and bends and a couple of leg paddle lengths using floats, I start my swim proper with a push off from the end and crawl with my face submerged.  At one time I could do a length and a half with no real problem, but I have struggled to complete 20m of the pool in recent times.  So, it was with considerable surprise that I effort-fully managed to do a full length of the pool, which surely indicates that I have not been wasting my time during the pool closure.

     My swim was engagingly interrupted by other ‘regulars’ indicating by voice and air pumps their appreciation of the re-opened pool.  And, I should add, I do not mean to give a one-sided picture of the facilities of our city.  There are other pools that we could have used, quite apart from a chunk of the Med that runs along the southern edge of Castelldefels and an outdoor community pool for our houses.  But Our Pool is different, and to use other (lesser) pools (or seas) would be, somehow, verging on the treacherous.

     There are five lanes in our 25m pool, and, in theory, they can accommodate three people in each lane.  In practice, this is not true as the side lanes have steps leading into the water restricting the width, and more than two swimmers in those is uncomfortable.  Therefore, in total, the pool will work best with (at maximum) about 13 swimmers – if those swimmers are doing lengths and not socializing.

     It was, therefore, with some degree of horror that a mother and two young children arrived and entered MY lane.  If anyone needed a definition of sacrilegious, then there it was, in every splash.  I will reserve my wrath, unless this becomes an habitual invasion!

    

     Luckily by the time this invasion occurred I had reached the end of the swim part of my time and I was doing the final set of exercises, so I was able to complete my time at the opposite end of the pool, and propriety was observed.

     I am relying on the fact that this was the first day of the reopening of the pool and that the numbers generally tail off as we regulars soldier on.

 

Lunch today in the Pool’s restaurant, was preceded by a glass of Cava, a tradition that could (I mused) be extended to cover a glass before my swim each day. 

     A passing thought.  Though a tempting one!

 

 

And the next thing?

 

 

 

  

It says something for my state of underwhelmed-ness about the new Amazon Prime Series The Rings of Power, that I have not bothered to watch the latest episode, which was released last Friday.  The idea of my ignoring something that plays to all my sci-fi fantasy weaknesses, does not say a lot for its impact!

     I am more even more disappointed because I read previews by trusted critics like Bradshaw in The Guardian which were so enthusiastic that I watched the pedestrian opening episode with an avidity that was soon rapidly dwindling to disinterest, bordering on boredom.  I’ve now reached episode three and I am still not engaged, in the way that the books or films of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit captured my reading and watching dedication.

     The Silmarillion on which the new series is loosely based, I found unreadable in its book form, and regarded it as a piece of donnish self-indulgence – as indeed is the series, if you think about it in terms of the commercial hopes of Amazon who made it!

     Yes, of course the look of the series is spectacular, the landscapes are staggeringly beautiful, and the set piece grandeur of fantastic civilizations amazing, but then it should look good given how much cash has been expended on it.

     I find little ‘new’ in the series, and the clunking reveal of ‘random human who turns out to be an unrecognized king” etc tedious, and a weak re-run (pre-run?) of Aragorn/Strider.  I do recognize that the series is a prequel and that there is a sort of satisfaction in seeing the ancient pre-history of the more interestingly critical moments in Tolkien’s created world that far better known, but it does take the sting out of what might happen as we do know how things eventually turn out, and this series does not have the ‘wow’ factor that the films had.  We have assimilated director Peter Jackson’s epic visual conception of Tolkien’s world and we now take for granted visual effects that would once have blown us away.

     I will, of course, watch the whole of the series.  And I will maintain my hope that there will be moments that justify the time I spend watching and the money burnt to make it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have completed my open-air-early-morning-swims.  The fortnight of local pool closure for maintenance is over today, and I have already checked that the pool will open at the normal times for normal use from Monday.  I have been relatively lucky with the weather so that I have not had to swim in challenging circumstances – or cold water, but I still do feel a sense of Mission Accomplished that I have swum all fourteen days in our community pool.

     One of my lecturers used to swim, every day of the year, in Swansea Bay.  I am not made of such stern stuff, though I can say that I swam on Christmas Eve off a beach in Sitges.  When I say swam, that is something of an exaggeration: I immersed myself in the water and immediately exited the sea.  The sunshine that was streaming down, did not, as I vividly recall seem to have any part in heating the icy wavelets.  There is a fine line between resolution and stupidity and staying in the water for any longer than I did would clearly have been an illustration of the latter!

     The pool-absence period has jinxed my writing by changing my routine, and I have only scribbled ‘thoughts’ in my notebook on a couple of occasions, whereas I always write in it when I am taking my cup of tea and baguette in the pool café.  Have jotted down a few phrases and ideas, but it remains to be seen if they are actually worth working up into something real.  There again, even ‘failures’ are interesting, and it is rare that I can’t salvage something from the wreckage of a poem ‘gone wrong’!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Opera Season is almost upon us, and I still haven’t decided if I should take out a ‘Saturday Afternoon Subscription’ to a series of orchestral concerts in Barcelona.  This is an odd hesitation on my part because I am essentially an orchestral music sort of person, with my going to Opera being something of an indulgence for me.

     As is usual with any subscription series, there are some concerts that don’t really appeal, though from past experience, the concerts with low expectations very often surprise with unexpected delights.  At least that is what I keep telling myself.  And afternoon concerts mean a Barcelona exit at a reasonable time!  Worth considering.  And going.  Perhaps I will buy a subscription.  There you are a decision made in under one hundred keystrokes!  If only the other things in life were so easy!

Different perspectives?

 

 

I remember when I was having a picture window in my house in Cardiff replaced, that I was shocked by the difference in clarity and light through the empty space as opposed to the glazed space.  

     I don’t think that I had realized that the glass in a window makes an appreciable difference to the amount of light getting through, in spite of the fact that windows do open and so you would have thought that the difference would have been plain through extensive experience.  But apparently not.  Because window glass is transparent, the assumption is that all the light gets through – and when you find out that the assumption is false, it knocks your world a bit!

     I am constantly surprised by the fact that little things can change your world – or at least your perception of it, and sometimes, quite literally your view of it.

     I should imagine that I was not alone in having problems with pines.  To be specific those that grew at the bottom of my garden and, while effectively blocking out the unlovely sight of the house that occupied the plot, it also destroyed any view that I could have had from any part of the house.  As my house was built on the side of a fairly gentle valley, I could, in theory have had a panoramic view of the distant city centre of Cardiff from at least one bedroom and the bathroom.  The neighbour’s pines closed off such a possibility.

     And they grew and grew.  As pines will.  A few desultory attempts at ‘legal’ pruning of stray branches that impinged on my property did little to lessen the density of the growth.  And I simmered in (shaded) misery for years.  And then the neighbour cut them.

     The difference was immediate and liberating as light (and sights) were available again.

     Something of the same situation occurred yesterday.

     Along part of the border fence between my house and the neighbours there grew a tree.  At least I have always taken it for a tree, with rather attractive blossom in the season – but I think that it was really an overgrown plant.  If there is such a difference.  It certainly had tree height and in spite of furious pruning along the vertical line of the fence on my side, no amount of rough tearing of branches seemed to affect the health of this vigorous weed.

     New neighbours and new visions of how the garden should look have brought the once mighty tree (or whatever it is) to a series of nicely short stumps.  As you can tell from the picture above, not one of the trunks looks capable of being called a tree trunk, and yet it was 30 ft tall at least.  And now it’s gone.

     And suddenly we have an unobstructed view of the communal pool.  Admittedly, at this time of year there are only yellowing leaves floating in it rather than bronzed bodies, and the only thing that raises ripples on the surface is the wind, but still, an unobstructed view!

     And with the lack of the mass of vegetation there is also, now, a small gap in the trees of the houses in front of us, which give a view of the sea.  Small, it may be, and you might have to be sitting in a particular position, but it is undeniably a fragment of the Med and you can make out real waves thereupon!

      The removal of the tree, which was ornamental if obstructive, is like giving us an extra breathing space, making our view so much more expansive.  All we need now is the weather to enjoy it!

 

 

The use of the Covid passports or certificates in bars, restaurants, gyms etc is a little haphazard at the moment, with the people who have to check not being entirely comfortable with the software that authenticates the digital information.  I assume that these are teething problems and that soon the system will be up and running and people will, by and large, accept it as something which is reasonable giving the growth of the Omicron variety across the world.

     As I understand it, the information about your certificate is loaded into a database of the place in which you are visiting, and you do not have to show it multiple times for each visit.  So, for example, my daily swim, does not require me to represent the information as it is stored.  Allegedly.

     I will be interested to see how diligent bar staff and waiters are as the Christmas season develops, and how much ‘waving through’ there will be.  I remain sceptical about the dedication of people who have, in effect, been co-opted by the government to become unpaid civil servants fulfilling a civic dictat!

 

 

As of today, all our Christmas Plans (or the lack of them) are still in place, and the Christmas Meal in a restaurant is still go.

     What is of interest, is what happens on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day.  Concrete plans for those two days are not, as yet, forthcoming.

     And we have bought no Christmas presents.  Yet.  Sigh!

     Roll on chaos!