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!

Shades of the Prison House!

 

 

 

 

 

Swimming in my lane, trying to get used to the cut-off fins (the ones that ‘real’ swimmers use in swimming pools for reasons that elude me) I hear a voice from the next lane chant out a soulful, “One week!”  This was a teacher friend of mine counting down the days before she has to return to school.

     In this part of the world, at the start of term, there is a period when teachers are in school, and the kids are not.  A golden opportunity you would think for harassed members of the profession to get themselves and their classrooms sorted out; to check through class lists and timetables; check room allocation, and generally prepare themselves for the forthcoming fray.

     You might think that.  But if you do then the chances are that you have not taught in the Catalan or Spanish school system.  The Powers That Be consider time without kids to be the opportune time for meetings.  And more meetings.  And more.

     In my experience, and I have been to thousands of meetings, literally thousands – political, cultural, and educational, and what my mother would have described in a catch-all term of which she was very fond, “sundry”.  And I can truthfully say that the most soul destroying and quintessentially useless meetings that I have attended have been here in Catalonia.  I must make an honourable exception for Departmental meetings, but ‘whole school’ affairs have been viciously pointless.  And long.  Very long.

     In some educational administrative minds, The Meeting is an end in itself, and the content and participants’ response is secondary.  Even as I type I can begin to resurrect my feelings of almost homicidal hatred of the agenda-less meanders that took away hours of my life, without compensating me with anything even remotely educationally positive.

     A signal low point was a meeting on a Saturday morning (!) during which I was wearing my most pointedly casual clothes and throughout which I didn’t smile once.  Not once from the beginning of the pointless charade to the eventual will-sapped end. I spoke only when I was directly addressed, and my answers were clipped to the point of being marginally rude.  Not one smile.  And I left at the earliest point I could and went home, smouldering because the meeting had been (surprise!) pointless.

     But you are retired, I hear no one say.  You no longer go to meetings.  True.  I no longer go to meetings that I have to go to; I go to the meetings I choose to go to.

     The last meeting I went to was in our local city hall and was a gathering of individuals from the foreign communities, who had been invited by a general email to consider taking part.

     We gathered at the appointed time outside the City Hall and were ushered into the Council Chamber where we were seated, shown a short film, and then joined by the alcaldesa (the mayor) and encouraged to give our opinions about our city.  We were not a large group and we had widely differing proficiency in Spanish or Catalan, but we were listened to with courtesy and our points were considered and responded to.  At least verbally.

     One of the points that I made was about the state of the roads and especially those roads in the immediate vicinity of my house.  Some of the road surfaces are composed of what seems to be rafts of concrete and there has been some movement of these plates.  Round the corner from where I live one concrete plate in the road has risen so that there is a ledge lifted above the surface of the surrounding road.  As the ridge is so pronounced, it means that a car driven at a normal speed feels as though it is encountering a substantial step in the road with consequent jarring.  I had even taken a photograph of the ridge and was able to illustrate my point that the road was not only uncomfortable to drive on but also potentially dangerous. 

     I await further developments, and hope that it will not be the breaking of the axel of some unsuspecting car.

     To be fair I have not attempted any follow up and anyone who expects anything to be done in the month of August must be a very green newcomer to the country!

     The important thing is that a channel of communication has been opened with members of the foreign community and it is up to the individuals concerned in the initial meeting to make something of the opportunity offered by the City.

     We were not, in any way a representative grouping.  We had no mandate apart from our own interests.  We had an opportunity, and we were speaking directly to the political power brokers in our own area.

     We were listened to, and a group photograph was taken!  An overture has been made and it is up to us to find out if it can be taken further.

     I started this writing by concentrating on futility: the system grinding on, pointless and empty actions limiting expression. 

     But I end this piece with a new determination to make the channel of communication with the movers and shakers in my adopted city one that works for me and one that even might Get Something Done! 

     There is no point in being near levers if you don’t pull one or two occasionally and see what happens.