Ways of speaking, ways of thinking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a decent early morning swim, a nicely surrealistic accompaniment to my post-swim cup of tea by sighting a man with a parrot on a collar and lead, arriving to have a coffee (the man and his lady companion, not the parrot) at an adjacent table.  The white parrot (cockatoo?) alternated his perch from the man’s shoulder to the top of a free chair, but was generally unobtrusive, and certainly quiet, though constantly disconcerting. 

     I think it was the collar and lead that discomforted the most but was not enough to distract me from answering Carles’ questions about English Usage, with which he assaults me most days.

     Yesterday, he wanted to know about expressions of surprise and, knowing his predilection for the archaic (he uses “spiffing” with relish!) I offered him “Goodness gracious me!” as something suitably outré in modern use!  He had forgotten it by today, though after a Herculean effort of memory he dredged up the “gracious me” part.  I wonder if it will make it to his RAM tomorrow!

     Today’s Word of the Day was “spoil” and its use with regard to children (specifically his grandchildren) and to things in general. 

     I enjoy our little chats because it keeps me in touch with my teaching side and, while I do not think that I have the same agility with explanations that I had when I was in the classroom, it does make me think to try and find the way to explain things that to a native English speaker need no explanation.

     I hasten to add that these little forays into education do not, even in the slightest, make me regret my “retired” status from the teaching profession. 

     Teachers have my admiration and sympathy, but not my emulation!

 

The weather is certainly on the change.  I have not only started wearing a short jacket when I set off in the early morning on my bike to the pool, but also when I go on my extended bike ride to the end of the Gavà Paseo after my swim.  The days of a t-shirt being adequate for both are now gone, as indeed are the nights without a sheet and with an open French door.

     Although somewhat overcast, there are intervals of sunshine, and I am still using a small electric fan to keep cool in my chaotic squalor on the third floor.  There are still times in the mid afternoon when the big fans are needed, but the weather is decidedly “fresher” which is our euphemism for colder.

     As with the UK, though not in such a squalidly chaotic way, Spain is dreading the winter with the increases in power and prices generally.  Although the winter is cold, it is not as bitter as the UK, though central heating and blankets with a couple of eiderdowns are necessary to get through the colder snaps.

     Castelldefels is a rich little town with a selection of Russian oligarchs and Barça players living here in multi-million-euro houses (as well, of course, as we, the genteel poor-ish) so the fear of what the winter can bring is somewhat modified by the fact that many here are well able to compensate for the hike in prices and still smile.  But, like any sizeable town, you need an army of lower paid people to keep the place running – and how are they going to survive?

     As part of my forced awareness, I am determined to find out how and what the council is planning to mitigate some of the deleterious effects of the coming financial hardship.

     From time to time, we have volunteers stationed at the check-outs of our local supermarkets asking for donations for Food Banks.  I have no idea where these are situated in our town, and I also don’t know how they are funded.  But I am going to find out.  And Do Something.

     With my not-fit-for-purpose knees there is a limit to what unskilled help I can give, but there must be something that I can do.  I am aware that, though I might “preach poverty” I am comfortably well off compared to many given my status as a Baby Boomer who got born at the right time for virtually everything!  So, even if we have to make some cutbacks in our expenditure to cover exorbitant fuel bills, there will still be something left over to help those who are really having to make the decision between buying food and staying warm.

     I suppose that I am writing this down as a way of forcing myself to do something more than just ruminate.  For example, I am sure that my pool would be more than prepared to collect food for the Food Banks, they have done it before, and perhaps they might be prepared to do it on a more regular basis during the winter months. 

     Before I ask anything of institutions and myself, I have to find out just how these things are organized in Castelldefels and then take it from there.

     Responsibility begins at home, and my home is here.

 

Being rather than succeeding?

 

 

A most unsatisfactory swim today.  Not entirely my fault, because whatever Toni had yesterday that made him a little hors de combat, struck me as soon as I got up.  A slightly otherworldly feeling and a distinct disinclination to go through the necessary processes to get me to the pool for opening time.

     At first I though it could be a case of ‘sympathetic panic’ at the onset of the new school term.  Although VERY happily retired, I do share a sort of hysterical malaise at this time of the year.  Usually it passes, almost at the same time as I see active teachers going through the doors of their respective schools, but this feeling of being down took me into the morning darkness and towards my trusty bike.

     It only took a few metres, experiencing that sickening bumpiness on the back wheel, to realise that something was wrong.  A flat tyre.  And not on the front where it is easy to take the wheel off and get it repaired, but on the back wheel that has the gears and all sorts of other things that I do not mess about with.

     So, back home and putting the bike back under the tarp and going over to the car to get to the pool.  Even if not entirely well, I have a built-in rugged determination to have my daily swim!

     Which I did.  In a desultory and unconvincing way, with my even swimming extended periods of breaststroke, which is not a good sign for me as a dyed in the wool crawl swimmer.  I did do my time, if not the full number of lengths, but honour was satisfied and I drove home.  And promptly felt worse.

     Whenever I feel under the weather (giving it is glorious sunshine who isn’t under?) I take to my bed.  And I get better.  It never fails to enrage Toni, who has a much more expansive attitude to illness than I, as a few hours prone usually does the trick for me.

     As it has done this time too.  I can’t pretend that I feel 100%, but I feel more than prepared to take on the normal stresses of life without whimpering for pity.

     As is also normal during these times of unwellness, I have little to no appetite, though even as I type those words, the ‘concept’ of food is appealing, which is only one step behind getting something to satisfy what should be a growing hunger. 

     Time will tell.

 

The start of the month also opens the way for the medical establishment of Catalonia to attend to my clinical needs.  There has been something of a hiatus during the summer, but now that the first of September has come and gone, there is a feeling of ‘let’s get going’ that seems to jolly up the whole country.  I am, of course, hoping that this positive attitude will be part of my treatment in the coming months.

     The first hospital appointment I have is a scheduled one (on a rough annual basis) that is more to do with my proving to the doctors that I am alive than having anything done to me.  I will go and have my appointment (usually with a doctor coming to the end of his employment) who will look at me, voice a few platitudes and then say, “See you next year!”  With any luck.  Though he will probably have retired by the time I go back.

     The more important appointment comes next month when I will see the fabled traumatologist for the first time.   

     I am building up a truly absurd amount of hope linked to this appointment.  I know that my knees are a lost cause and that for them to be made workable, an orthopaedic surgeon will have to take hammer and chisel to them and sculpt something artificial to take the place of the bone rubbing on bone that is my present case.  

      I am also more than well aware that such ‘routine’ operations are way down the pecking order to be completed, given the pressures that have been placed on the health service by the pandemic and other financial restraints.  I also realize that the likely waiting time for the first of the two operations that I need will likely be at least eighteen months or two years away at very best.  And that, is a daunting thought, to put it mildly.

     I understand that there are stop-gap measures of injecting something (any bloody thing!) into the space where there should be a membrane separating the end of the bone, that could give relief for a month at worst and months at best.

     At the moment I am not even near being put on a waiting list, so I am looking at getting my first operation in my mid-70s!  At which point I can hear a whole chorus of younger and needier people chanting, “Let him hobble!”  And one does have some sympathy.  But that is in the abstract, and the pain in my knees is in the very real and so I hope that Something Can Be Done.

     The Opera Season will just have started before that first appointment.  I wish I could find something apposite to say about arthrosis-ridden knees and Don Pasquale (the first opera of the season) but, apart from ridiculing old age, I can think of nothing! 

     At least Donizetti’s music is lively and that should buoy up my mood!

 

Judgement!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retribution was swift.

     It took less than five minutes from a viciously casual remark to a teacher friend about to start school tomorrow, “When you go through the gates, I want you to know that there is a retired teacher smiling!” to trapping my little finger’s pad in the pre-swim shower button and producing a momentarily, intensely painful blood blister that my grandmother of unregenerate, pre-woke days, referred to as “a blackman’s pinch”!

     I can’t remember the last time that I had one of those, but it must have been in my distant youth, and I did now what I did then, and bit through the skin to allow the blood to escape.  So, I sat in the hydraulic chair (my ceremonial and arthrosis-friendly way into the pool) looking like some barely sated vampire.

     I judged, almost certainly wrongly, that the various chemicals in the pool (as opposed to the various substances in the pool that necessitate those chemicals) would be beneficial for my small wound and that, in any case, I knew that I had a bottle of TCP at home, so all would be medically well.  Eventually.

     I was much more worried by the recently discovered chocolate stains on the front of my shorts that I noticed only when I was getting changed.  And before minds whirl away on the wings of vile speculation, let me hasten to explain how they got there.

     Chocolate is one of the banned substances in my so-called diet, and I find it hard to remember when I last had a ‘real’ piece of that confectionary.  Everything is low fat and sugar free, and calorie reduced – and generally flavourless.  But a summer without ice cream is unthinkable, and so alternatives to the desired-forbidden have to be found.

     There are ice creams that proclaim themselves to be created with “No Added Sugar” and I have learned to be not too scrupulous in discovering exactly what that phrase might mean.  What I take it to mean is that the substances so described are ‘allowable’ for me to eat.  As with low-fat, sugar-free yogurt, you can enjoy such things as long as you do not, ever, eat the full-fat, sugar-filled, real alternatives.

     I still remember a period years ago when I had got used to the anaemic yogurts that were allegedly ‘healthy’ and I called into my parents, where my mother offered me an M&S “rich and creamy” yogurt to try.  Which I did, and almost fainted with the sheer pleasure and sensory overload that the deliciousness of “rich and creamy” was.  It was only with a supreme effort of will that I managed to stagger back to my home and NOT instantly throw away the cartoned crappiness that I had been suffering to enter my mouth and replace them all with “rich and creamy”.  But I resisted, though I never again (ever) ate a ‘healthy’ yogurt with anything less than resentment.  And I still do.

     Anyway, back to chocolate.  It is possible to kid yourself that 80% cocoa content is OK and that there is far less sugar in such things as the acme of real chocolate deliciousness (at least if you are British) of Cadbury Dairy Milk - the chocolate that had (has?) so little cocoa in it that it was deemed by the EU to be a mere ‘confection’ rather than actual chocolate! 

     But most of the chocolate that we eat is full of sugar, so given my diet, a big no-no – except there is some sort of brown covering which is able to be called chocolate and does not have the vast number of calories that usually accompany taste!

     We had discovered (and rejected) a whole range of chocolates (or ‘chocolates’) when we hit upon a whole series of ice creams in mini choc-ice form that seemed to combine the look of the real thing with about 40% of the ‘real’ taste – percentages we could live with!  And they were mini size!

     This discovery has kept us going through the summer with a taste of a traditional accompaniment to the heat.  What went wrong is that I didn’t read the packaging well enough.

 

 

 

 

     Yes, it has the equivocal banner, “No added sugars!” but what I hadn’t noticed was this particular box also had the words “Protein bar!” also inscribed.  Added goodness, one might think.  That’s as maybe, but what the ‘protein’ bit did was alter the consistency of the ice cream.

     Taking them out of the freezer they looked the same, but the differences became apparent when one took a bite.  The ‘chocolate’ (or whatever) looked and tasted the same, but the ice cream interior was hard and unyielding.  This meant that, when biting into the choc-ice the chocolate shattered and the ice cream interior remained unbroken, producing a welter of instantly melting stain makers and rebuffed teeth.

     Toni was all for throwing them away as unfit for purpose, but I was determined to thwart such ice-cream complexity and find a way to consume them.

     I have resorted to childhood (yet again) and the way that one sometimes ate Penguin biscuits, by nibbling away at the chocolate covering revealing the biscuit beneath.  This is only partially effective because such nibbling can, even with the most cautious canines, produce a catastrophic shedding of the chocolate coating that even the most nubile tongue is unable to deal with.  I have therefore resorted to the use of a bowl under my chin to catch any shards that my nibbling produces.  Ungainly, but effective.

     Luckily there are only a few more mini choc-ices of the protein variety left and I will be able to resort to the normal manner of eating these delights and not have the fear of staining.

     If I draw anything from this piece of writing it might be: always be kind to teachers, and always read the packaging. 

     Valuable life lessons!

Things are different?

When I was a kid . . .

There probably isn’t a greater turn-off opener than that one.  It is the sort of phrase that is regularly used as a weapon by the older against the perceived privilege of the young.  There is nothing that riles a certain proportion of the older generation that seeing a very young child with a mobile phone.  And especially the young child using it with a proficiency that the resentful oldie can only wish for.

Technology means that kids have things like music players, film players, TV, radios, cameras and, yes, telephones way before the generation that includes me ever had, but – just think about what my generation had and continues to have.

Free milk, free school, university grants, free university tuition, full professional employment, good health care, generous pension scheme, professional retirement at 60 with professional pension, state pension at 65, membership of the EU throughout my working life, free access to foreign countries within the EU, access to the work markets of the EU, and so on.

Yes, my parents did not buy a television until I was 11, though we did have the radio.  I did not have a ‘real’ record player until I was in my teens, though I had had a second hand wind up version with some old 78s for one birthday.  Our holidays were usually in the UK and in B&Bs, though I did go to Spain when I was 7, and I was the only kid in my year in primary school who had been abroad.  Our camera was a Kodak box camera, until we had the next model up, eventually – and those two camera kept us going for years and years and years.

Although we were not rich as a family, I did not lack anything important.  I was loved and secure and, most importantly (as I was really too young to truly worry about the Cuban missile crisis) I felt secure.  I felt that I had a future and that I would easily be able to get a job and that I would be able to keep it for the whole of my career.

How many young people today can say as much?  I know younger colleagues in teaching who are dreading the extra years that they will have to work until they are able to retire and I sympathetically share their dread, though I cannot imagine what the awful reality must be like.  In my view you cannot be a classroom teacher beyond the age of 60 in any sort of normal school.  Forcing people to work beyond that is like a sort of death sentence, or at the very least they are not going to be paying many pensionable years for the unfortunates who are able to make it.

This serious thought was brought on my thinking about cartoons.  One channel on the television this year has been given over to a whole series of ‘blockbuster’ animated films and I am constantly amazed at their quality.  There was a scene of one of the monsters from Monsters Inc II where he was sitting by the side of a lake in moonlight which was stunning, a beautifully rendered part of the film.  And in another film I was fascinated by the sheer complexity of the rendering of hair and fur with a naturalness that would have had early animators reaching for their crucifixes!

It used to be that Christmas would see the latest-old Bond film trotted out to general delight, but I am not sure nowadays that there is a single screen franchise that would bring viewers together now in the way that 007 did.  After the gloriously clever first film of the 'Pirates' franchise, for example, the whole series descended into a narrative nightmare which denied coherence to the story, but did give individual moments of success, as for example in the umpteenth film when the company baddy walks, with manic serenity, down a flight of steps as his ship is destroyed about him.  It is a sublime moment and deserves a better film around it!

But the mechanics of showing films have changed.  When I was in school we did have 'Christmas Treat' films.  The two I remember are 'Fanstasia' and Tony Hancock's 'Punch and Judy Man' - the first we loved and the second we hated.  But both these films were shown via a film projector, the cans of film had been rented and were shown projected onto a screen.  In an age when films are available on your phone, the attitude towards a 'grand' production has changed somewhat!

So time, place, technique, everything has changed, and the 'gift' of a major film at Christmas is not longer the 'treat' that it once was.

But for me, at least, the power of a great animated film, something like 'Up' for example has me as glued to the picture as if I were a child watching fireworks - and you only have to see my open mouthed wonder and fixation with exploding rockets to understand how quickly I can regress to childhood!

Perhaps cartoons are the nearest things we get to keep us together, to bring back the sense of wonder that over exposure to CGI in so-called reality films has taken away.

The new white feather?

As a Baby Boomer (Leading Edge) I have never had to make the sort of problematic choices that the previous generation to my own had to make.  I have not been involved in a World War, I have not had to do Military Service, I have been able to find work without problems, I have been looked after through my educational life and in terms of medical help in a way in which I have not had to think too hard about the financial consequences.  I have, in short, been fortunate in choosing the time to be born! 

Central of course to that opening paragraph of gloating, though not actually stated, is the reality of my pension.  I now have three pensions from two countries: which sounds a damn sight more impressive than the reality!  I have a professional pension from my job, I have a much smaller state pension and I have a truly tiny (but welcome) pension from Spain.  The generations that have come after my own look at my experiences and feel envy and resentment.  This is an attitude that I can easily understand, especially as the retirement age seems to be getting more and more distant for some folk.  But this piece is not about finance and comfortable old age, it is more about responsibility.

I was far too young to have an opinion about Suez and the criminal behavior of my government: I was too young to understand the trauma of moving from an imperial past to an uncertain future – and very badly managed at that; too young to understand the full import of the Cold War, though old enough to appreciate the danger of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I suppose that the first real moral challenge that I felt fully engaged with was the Apartheid system in South Africa and the United Kingdom’s culpability in the continuation of the regime.

What did I do?  Looking back on it, the answer would have to be, not very much.  I supported Anti-Apartheid; I refused to buy or eat South African fruit; I didn’t drink South African wine; I sent money to organizations against Apartheid; I put up posters; I marched; I spoke against it.  But could I have done more, could I have been more pro-active?  And what about Viet Nam?  How much, or how little did I do to show my abhorrence about that grubby conflict?  When I look back, I think that I was more worked up about the Conservative government’s imposition of museum charges for our national galleries than I ever was about a war which claimed the lives of thousands and threatened the stability of the world!

In other words, I feel a nagging sense that I could have done more, and should have done more, but I was protected by a fairly comfortable sense that, in spite of a few local and international difficulties, things would probably work themselves out with, or without, my active help.  And my involvement was my choice.

In today’s world, with the rise of the extreme right, the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, the reality of President Trump, the growing obscenity of inequality in the world, the banking crisis, corruption and on and on – it is much more difficult to remain as a vaguely involved spectator.  To do nothing, is actively to encourage the situation to worsen: disengagement is denial.

What I am saying is that life in 2017 is the equivalent of life in the 1940s: there is an international crisis and everyone has a part to play in attempting to ameliorate what is turning into a national and international disaster.  You have to make a choice, in which not making a choice is a choice in itself.  It’s the same as it was living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles: the situation was dangerous, and if you had knowledge that might help the authorities then you would have to accept that your duty would put you in danger.  In just the same way involvement in the Word Wars that my parents and grandparents had to endure, put them in danger too.  Dangerous times, and god knows we are living in dangerous times now, call for positive action.

We can see that the growing opposition to Trump and so-called policies in the United States and around the world is an active statement that many people have accepted their responsibilities to hold power to account.  This is one of those times when inaction is the deadliest action of them all.

So, what am I doing, this time round?  Well, it basically comes down to reading the Guardian, shouting at the television, watching American late night political comedy on YouTube and typing futile screeds against the fading of the light!

Stuck (by my own choice) in a wealthy, sunny corner of Spain it is easy to forget that the rest of the world is going through a crisis and, in some ways, this period of time is a little like the so-called Phony-War before the actual war of 1939-45.  My Dad was in London when war was declared and remembered the sirens sounding soon after the announcement and . . . nothing happened: no enemy planes, no bombs, nothing!  Obviously that quiescence was soon to develop into the bloodiest conflict that the world had ever seen, but the immediate result of the challenge to German Nazi power was nothing.

You might say that quite a lot has happened over the last few years.  The banking crisis has weakened economies, and the paucity of cells filled by the perpetrators of one of the greatest pieces of financial fraud and duplicity ever has weakened the very concept of democratic accountability.  Governments have poured public money into the banking sector with the result that the very bankers who caused the crisis are now even more secure in their inflated pensions and high lifestyle.  Bonuses are back, the stock exchanges are booming and people are getting poorer.  This should be a time when implementing the ideals of socialism is seen as something that can take people out of poverty and make a fairer society – instead of which we see the politics of inequality and prejudice trumping any humanistic ideal.

You might think that, as a retired person with a secure pension, I am one of those people ‘sitting pretty’, but I am most certainly not.  As a British national living abroad in an EU country, I have seen the relative value of my pension fall by some 20% as the reality of Brexit gets closer and starts having a real effect.  I have the threat of punitive action by the government in which I reside when Article 50 is finally invoked and I find myself as a foreign citizen, living in a state which can, at a moment’s notice cancel my healthcare, and revoke my right to stay in the country that I now call home.  And that is just the local, Spanish situation.  Let us not consider the full ramifications of the Oaf in the White House!

We are all (including the country of origin) living in what the Chinese curse calls “interesting times” and what we do in response to those interesting times will define the conditions of development for the next generation, or indeed the next generations.  We all have to step up to the plate and ‘do’ something.