Heat and Hatred

 

 

 

It actually had the temerity to rain a few drops when I was in the swimming pool, though the weather now is not marked different from the last few days when it has been hot in a way that is not usual for this time of year.  August is traditionally a time of vague disappointment, when the weather is more variable than one remembers from previous years, ironically, even though one expects to be dissatisfied: Schrodinger’s expectations!

     At the moment we only have two fans working in the living room (out of a possible three) as a desperate attempt to mitigate the heat and since we don’t have air conditioning there is little else that we can do to make the living temperature well, liveable.

     There is something about the quality of heat this year that hasn’t been present in past years and if this is a harbinger of what we can expect as the norm for the summer in future years then we are going to have to do something different to cope with the temperatures.

     In a country that has hot and very hot summers and generally mildish winters, there is no talk of hosepipe bans and, in spite of the hot weather continuing for months, there is not talk of proclaiming a drought.  Whereas in the UK, the situation seems to have reached a crisis point.  Again.

     Trump sneered that the FBI raid on his Floridian swamp was turning the USA in to one of the “shitehole” “third world countries” that he has so often dismissed with contempt in the past as a condescending image to cover his own criminality and the eventual, glacial, movement of the institutions of justice finally catching up with him.  His images, as always, are absurd and insulting, but when I look at the situation of the UK then there appears to be an element of truth in the first world status slowly ebbing away.

     With twelve years of Tory misrule and the callous cutting of health, welfare, education and everything else the grasping Conservatives can get their dirty mitts on, the stories that one hears are more suited to a developing country than one of the richest in the world.

     The position of health services in the USA has always been something that has been beyond the comprehension of Western European nations, who generally do not regard providing health care for their citizens as being akin to rabid Communism.  Many Americans are frightened of ill health because of the financial penalties that treatment will entail.  The concept of healthcare free at the point of need is something far beyond the imagination of many American voters who see such a process as rampant Socialism and a denial of the American Way.

     In the UK, the NHS is something in which we can take a justified pride, but a Health Service that has been hollowed out by 12 years of cuts and austerity and one that has been put under almost intolerable strain by dealing with Covid is struggling to cope and, after the last 12 years of Tory Misrule who could possibly believe that the “NHS is safe in our (Tory) hands”?  Such a quotation from a past (and well hated Tory premier) seems like a sick joke.  Private healthcare is rejoicing in the boost that 12 years of Tory Misrule have given them – as well, of course as the illegal boost to their funds by the corruption of the crooked Tory crony profiteers who milked us in the procurement process geared towards Conservative chums.

     The provision of NHS dental care is a disgrace with whole swathes of the country described as “dental deserts” where 80% of dentists are no longer taking any new patients.  The stories of people travelling for hours to get to any NHS provider, is one of shame.

     Someone once told me that the worth of a country is found in the way that it treats the disadvantaged, the criminal and the sick.  If we use those criteria to judge the present state of Britain then perhaps we are nearer to a third world (in itself that is a condescending term) country than one that uses its wealthy status to ensure that there is provision for all.

     Inequality is rampant in Britain, crystalized by the grotesquery of a chancer like Johnson being (still) Prime Minister, and is unlikely to be mitigated by the lying equivocator lined up to take over, the woman who John Crace in the Guardian characterised as having grown up in “grinding middle class poverty” with her professor father and her sinkhole school only just managing to squeek her into Oxford.

     Nothing that either of the “candidates” have said to the Neanderthals that are going to elect one or other of them, show a concern for the realities of the situation that the majority of the country is experiencing and is indeed dreading in the near wintery future.  They are mired in the reality that allows such creatures as Rees-Mogg to be in government.  They, like the Republican Party in the USA are now far to the right of the general electorate, but Conservative parties are adroit in the manipulation of the processes of power, in pushing institutions to their will, of gerrymandering and obfuscating in plain sight, while their tools in the right wing press present a twisted version of reality to maintain power and wealth in the hands of the very, very, few.

 

Cold days, cool thoughts

 

 

It’s cold and wet and blustery and dark.  A thoroughly depressing day but, as I sulked my way upstairs, I looked through a window and noticed the two dogs who live in the flats opposite us, sitting together at the top of a flight of steps, just inside the overhang of the building watching the weather with patient indefatigability.

     Dogs, especially large dogs seem to be good at patience.  Rat dogs are of course more known for their insistent irritability and hyper-sensitivity, and one barely counts them (and that is my being kind) as dogs at all.  No.  But smaller dogs with a touch of Collie in them are more than acceptable and accepting. 

     Take, for example, the dog in the restaurant we went to on Sunday (isn’t it usually ONLY guide dogs that are allowed into restaurants? But let it pass, let it pass) where the dog (some sort of Collie cross) settled down almost immediately, finding himself a place between his owner’s foot and the window, and there he stayed for the course of the meal sustained only by a few pats and a scrap or two and a water bowl provided by the staff in the restaurant.

     Far be it from me to draw a parallel between a young dog and a young human, but the difference in acceptable behaviour by the latter compared with the former when grown-ups are around in a social public situation is telling!

     I should however take some guidance from the dogs opposite where their patience in this instance (usually they are yappy buggers) is to be commended, and indeed emulated.

     I half-joke with my Catalan friends that my ‘contract’ with the Generalitat in Catalonia stipulates sun for 365 days a year, and that I have an undoubted right to a refund for every shitty day I have to experience here!

     Although the weather can be bad here in Catalonia, indeed as I type the rain is lashing down outside and we have had overly dramatic thunder and lightning, usually every day will give you a moment of sunshine to see you through the bad weather interludes.  Today for example, although the morning was cold and cloudy, there was also some hazy sunshine – not enough to tempt me to sit outside with the smokers to have my cup of tea after my early morning swim, but still, sunshine.

     It didn’t last and after lunch the rain set in and hasn’t stopped.  Yet.  But I preserve my composure by putting total faith into the quick return of scraps of sunshine to keep me sane.

 

 

 

The saga of The Christmas Lunch has now developed a further chapter as another, and who knows even better, location has been found and we are going up to Terrassa tomorrow to give the menu del dia a try. 

     My most pressing concern is not the food, but the parking.  With my knees in their present condition, each step is something to take into careful consideration.  And there are lots of quite steep hills in Terrassa as well, and while going up slopes is bearable, the going down (even slight) slopes is not.

     Whatever we think about the quality of the food tomorrow, a table for the Christmas Lunch has been booked at the restaurant and so we are hoping and praying for the best.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Duolingo app continues to dominate our lives, and some of Toni’s hysteria (what else would you call the decision to take up Navajo in the expectation of earning simple points to add to his total) has rubbed off on me and forced me to make a doggedly determined assault on the points total of the people in front of me. 

     The end result of that is that my index finger of my right hand is rapidly growing a callous with the screen-jabbing finger writing I have had to do to amass the points to ensure my ‘safety’ in the top ten to guarantee my progress through to the Sapphire League!

     My enthusiasm is bound to wane soon, but until it does, I am gaining by going over yet again those points in the acquisition of a language that I have already gone through many times before. 

     Some day they will stick.  Please!

Who counts the cost?

 

Just when you thought that Trump could not sink any lower in the human degradation scale, he is now, a lame duck president rushing to kill judicially as many death row inmates as his federal powers allow him.  The fact that no lame duck president has sanctioned judicial killing for over a century is of course not a deterrent to this sick joke of an incumbent.  Trump knows (I assume, though that is an assumption which credits Trump with a little too much knowledge or interest) that Biden is an abolitionist as far as capital punishment is concerned and so he is deliberately taunting the president-elect with a fatally childish display of time-limited residual power.

     I had thought that I was inured to shock from the antics of the most powerful man in the world, but as always, Trump confounds what you thought were the profoundest depths of his depravity.  In a way there is a certain consistency in his approach; his mismanagement of the response to the Covid catastrophe in the USA though his light touch indolence was at the expense of the death of Others, and his display of judicial slaughter is also at the expense of Others.  His presidency has been marked by misery and death, but he has survived and prospered, and that of course shows that he has been right all along.

     To use lethal injection or whatever barbaric means capital punishment is administered in the USA as a sign of your own power is disgusting and is a travesty of justice.  I do feel for the victims of the actions of those on Death Row, but judicial murder can never compensate for another death.

 

     Meanwhile our own pale reflection of Trump parades on the international stage as if he has a shred of credibility.  Marina Hyde summed it up beautifully in today’s Guardian:

 

“Received wisdom seems to be that this is all theatre – designed to show that the UK, which has rapidly ceased to be a serious country, is serious about its threats. If there is a flaw to this plan – and really, it’s such a tiny cavil – it’s that our prime minister is a liar of international repute. Possibly even intergalactic. For Boris Johnson, lying is not second nature: it is nature. Even on the occasions he wants to tell the truth – a rarity, but imagine it momentarily aligning with his self-interest – he has to make a vast, almost physical effort to override his psychiatric biology. It’s like watching a cat try to bring up a six-kilo hairball.”

 

Do read the rest of her piece in The Guardian, and indeed anything else she writes, it is one way to stay sane!  The link is here:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/11/boris-johnson-charm-prime-minister-england-dover

 

And it rained today as well.  It’s just one damn thing after another!

How to fill a Sunday-feeling Saturday

 New Normal, Second week, Saturday

 

 

 

 

It’s raining. 

     I had to take the car to the swimming pool today, because, while I enjoy riding my bike, I am not a fanatic and for me, riding in the rain cuts the fun to less than zero. 

     I did try and remember the last time that I took the car rather than rode the bike to the pool, and I couldn’t.  Which rather makes the point that I continually make about the weather and my reaction to it in the two countries - three if you count the country of my birth and my later year-long “missionary work” there as a qualified English teacher teaching the natives their language, as befits any true Welsh teacher – in which I have lived.  I don’t like rain.  Or the cold.  But I can do with a bit of cold as long as there is the promise of a fair amount of rain-free time during the year.

     Alas!  Britain does not promise that, whereas Catalonia does.  Simple.

 

 

I have decided to do a bit of delving into the war service of my paternal grandfather.  I have his name and his number and his war service stretched from 1914 to 1918.  He was one of the early volunteers and so had his 1914-1915 Star.

     He never talked to me about his war service, and my Dad said that he was only told about a very few of his experiences.  I can well imagine that my grandfather found it difficult to relate details of his life in the army to anyone who wasn’t there.  The disconnect between what the soldiers actually experienced in the field and what was reported must have made it difficult to have a meaningful conversation.  And why would the soldiers give an accurate description of the almost unimaginable horrors that they witnessed to their loved ones on their return?

     I have tried to find out about his war service from the internet and I think that I will need to pay to get the detail that I require.  I am, as they say, looking into it.

 

 

 

I have now put some battery powered LED fairy lights around the newly framed watercolour (and glitter) paintings of winter trees by SQB and it looks magical.  I have never, ever started to put up Christmas decorations in November before, but then I have not experienced a year like 2020 before either, so a little jollity does not seem out of place no matter how vulgarly distant Christmas actually is.  And anyway, I have seen the first Christmas decorations being sold in Tesco in the past before the end of the summer holidays, so if anything, I am rather tardy in “trimming up” as one of my friends used to say!

 

Today has been one of those odd days when, in spite of evidence to the contrary, it has stubbornly felt like Sunday.  In the “Old Days” i.e. before retirement, such a misconception had its advantages as assuming a Saturday a Sunday meant that when one woke up on what, by extension of the faulty reasoning, could be a Monday – it was in fact, only Saturday and no work!  Now, of course, Mondays have lost a lot of their sting – well, to be fair, virtually all of their sting, but there is still something different about weekends that still gives me something of a buzz, in spite of it being an attitude rather than harsh reality!

 

We had lunch in Suso’s, a restaurant that we often patronize on a Saturday because it has a reasonably priced menu del dia, Suso being one of the few restaurants that do not take the opportunity of the weekend to inflate their prices.  The value is extraordinary, even though I do not nowadays take advantage of the bottle of wine that can come with the meal.  I felt very virtuous in restricting myself to pure, cold water – and I am sure that I felt all the better for it!

 

Now back to military records and finding out just which of the pointless bloodbaths my grandfather was forced to participate in by generals safely way behind the front line.  I will never forgive Haig for his attempted murder of my grandfather!

Culture and lights and rain

New Normal, 1st week, Friday 

It rained during the night and the pavements was still wet when I got ready to go to the pool for my daily      swim, but it didn’t rain while I was cycling.  While I was swimming it rained again and as had my cup of tea and a bocadillo there were distinct spots of rain that I could see falling into the standing puddles.  But when it was time for me to leave the café and do my daily cycle to Port Ginesta, the rain stopped again, and I even had some fitful sun during the ride before I got home.

     The day has become steadily colder and the skies have become less and less welcoming – but my point is that it didn’t rain on me.  There is a spaciousness in the dismal type of weather that we sometimes get here in Castelldefels that gives the reluctant cyclist enough of a gap to get the necessary exercise done in the dry – even if the bottom of one’s legs do get a little gritty from the sand-in-solution splashed on them as I make my stately way through the shallow puddles on the paseo.

     It is the lack of perceived vindictiveness in the Castelldefels weather that (even in the cold) warms my heart.  I am now so used to an orderly sequence of seasons, with a marked lack of rain whatever the season, that I am not sure that I could get used to typical Cardiff weather now.

     On one of my last visits to the city, I noticed the amount of moss growing in the shadier nooks and crannies, thriving in damp conditions.  I do not thrive in damp conditions, unless they are in temperature-controlled swimming pools!

     I am still wearing T-shirt, shorts and sandals – though I do add a windcheater when I am on the bike – I may be hardy but I am not stupid!

 

Christmas is a pressing topic of urgent consideration, by not being talked about.  I have no idea what plans are made or are being made to celebrate (a word so out of place in the disaster of 2020) the occasion.  Our typical Christmas since we have been together in Castelldefels (apart from one trip to Gran Canaria) is to go to Terrassa for a family lunch, in recent years in a local restaurant.  It looks, clearly, as if this is going to be impossible, and probably illegal this time round.  It is difficult to know how many households will be allowed to mingle and the age range of possible diners is from teenage to over 70.

     It is perfectly understandable for Toni to want to see his family during Christmas, as he has seen little of them in the flesh for months.  But the risks of going to Terrassa (even if we are allowed to do so) are great.

     I suppose it is all speculation at the moment, but in this country plans seem to be made almost on the hoof, in spite of there having been plenty of time to consider viable alternatives.  I hate being bounced into doing something!

     And then there are the presents.  In spite of one’s justified reluctance to use the well-known Luxembourgian delivery company, it does make life so much easier and sometimes it is worth it just for the savings on postage!  But we have to get the orders in quickly as god alone knows how many others will be using the same delivery point to make the Christmas season seem that bit more normal.  But again, everything will be left until the last moment and . . . 

     Well, I’ve said my bit, we will have to wait and see just how this all pans out.

 

I’ve had some ideas about how to make the Catalogue Raisonné useful for further writing.  Although I will add to it in the future, I think that there is enough there now for me to start working on the basic format.

     As is my usual way, I can also start writing the Introduction.  As I am not entirely sure where I am going with this, the writing of an Introduction might seem to be counter intuitive, but I have found in the past that such a piece of work sometimes clarifies my thoughts and, anyway, as it will be written on the computer it is simplicity itself to dump, change or edit!

     Well, I say that, but my Word is proving to be somewhat difficult.  The program itself is slow and, as I am working on an Apple machine, I see that damned multicoloured revolving circle too often at the moment, which means that everything freezes while the computer works its way through god knows what before it allows me to start writing again.

     I suspect that the catalogue is the faulty element in the equation.  Each item in the catalogue has a thumbnail illustration to accompany it.  I always choose the ‘reduce the size’ option when I save pictures, especially when I take them on my mobile phone, so that any documents that I use them in does not become too unwieldy, but I think that I might have made a few omissions in the compiling of the thing and so it is absurdly overloaded.  I am sure that there is a way of stripping out some of the quality without reducing the effectiveness of the catalogue, but that is something for the future.

     But for the moment, I am happy with what I have and I will start using the raw material to get some sort of sequence going.

 

We went out this evening to have something to eat in one of our regular haunts.  Normally this would not be an occasion of note, but this is only the second time we have eaten out in weeks; the used-to-be normal becomes extraordinary when it is denied; and is even odd when some semblance of old ways are restored.

     We had an opportunity to view the Christmas lights in the centre of the town and surely this is one extravagance that has to be justified in the hope that it lifts spirits.  Even though it was finally raining, they looked good.  They looked good, and appropriate!

 

Our timing was perfect in that we arrived back in the house with a couple of minutes to spare before the National Theatre performance-

 

Official Death of England: Delroy | Free National Theatre Full Performance

12,240 views1 hour ago

Watch Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ Death of England: Delroy, an ‘urgent, timely solo work, performed with firecracker energy’ (★★★★ Evening Standard) by actor Michael Balogun. The play explores a Black working class man searching for truth and confronting his relationship with Great Britain

 

It is still available for the next 24 hours free!  It is a tour de force and you should watch it!