Sacrilege!

 

Hobbling my weary way, with the tapping stick (the only jaunty thing about my walk) from the underground car park to our rendezvous for lunch in Terrassa, we walked along a couple of streets that were littered with torn pages.

     At first, I took the pages for advertising, but then noted that the print was more book like and academic.  I then thought that they could be examination papers as the text looked suspiciously question-like and I thought that I could just about make out some equations.  I didn’t stop walking, as we were perilously near being late, and I certainly did not think picking one of the pages up seemed like a good idea.  So, I kept on walking and let my mind drift.

     One of the questionable ‘truths’ that we were fed in school was about academic progress.  The range of subjects (between 8 – 10) that we took for examination at what was then called O Level at the age of 16, would we cut down to only three at A Level, and then cut down to one at University.  We were also told that this ‘cutting down’ would allow us to focus on those, and then that, subject in which we were most interested.

     In my case, that was certainly true, as I ended up studying English Literature in University where I was academically forced to do, what I had always done – that is, read books.

     Not everything that I studied in University had my approbation: some of the pre-Chaucerian poetry that we had to study, written in Early Middle English, can still bring a sneer to my mouth and, although I answered a question in my finals where I pretended that I had actually fully read sir Gawan and Þe grene knyȝt  

 

and had something coherent to say about it.  For those who have not read this, here are the ‘famous’ opening lines:

Passus I

SIÞEN þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye,

Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askez,

Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt

Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erthe:

 

So, you will perhaps be a little more sympathetic when I tell you that I concentrated a little more on what I could actually read with some fluency, than deciphering a poem more than 600 years old, like wallowing in the prolixity of nineteenth century novels and worrying about what I was missing in the Modern Literature course that I took for two years!

     All in all, I relished what we studied, even if it was logistically impossible to keep up with the relentlessness of an historical approach to literature which gave reading lists that were unfeasibly vast.  It is not an exaggeration to say that I have spent all the years since my undergraduate course trying to fill in the gaps that our majestic sweep through literature left!

     So, to see a book, any book ripped apart and scattered to the winds, is something I find difficult to take.  I have, in my time, to be truthful, perpetrated violence against a book.  While reading Jude the Obscure by Hardy, I became so exasperated by the sheer vapidity of Jude that I threw the book against the wall of my room in my Hall of Residence.  But I also have to say, that I picked the bloody thing up and continued to read the thing to the end.  And I kept the book in my library.  But have NEVER re-read it!

 

     I’ve just remembered.  I have actually burned a book!  I bought a second-hand copy of The Naked Lunch after reading about its notoriety and read it in a sort of state of horrified delight.  I could not believe that something so depraved could have been printed.  Though I didn’t stop reading it to cast it away, until I had read every word.  I then debated what to do with such a potent piece of pornography.  As I was still living at home at the time, I could not of course put it on the open shelves of my growing library – what if my parents were to see it!  With the amazing double standards of projected innocence, I was more worried about what such stuff would do to my parents, who were obviously not as worldly wise as their young son!

     And I burnt the thing!  To protect my parents!  As if!

     It now has a place (a new copy not the burn remnants of the first purchase) on my shelves as an example of an experimental way of writing whose effects are still being worked out in literature today.

     So, good, bad, and mediocre, books now moulder (some, quite literally) on my shelves, waiting for my inclination or the current of taste to change to bring them back into my hands to be read.

     But I also know that the academic progression, refining its way to your personal point of delight, is not always true.

     One guy I knew in College was a mechanical engineer, I was friendly with him, something that did not usually occur between Engineering and The Arts as the two groups seemed to have diametrically opposed viewpoints on virtually everything. 

     Anyway, we finished our degrees at the same time and, as soon as he had finished his last exam, he piled all his engineering books in a heap and set fire to the lot!  And, as he watched the flames mount, he expressed his determination that he would never open another engineering book and that he intended to go into accountancy.  Which he did.

     I cannot imagine doing anything like that.  Three years of a degree (and he got a IIi) in which he did well, and then at the end of it, total rejection.

     Perhaps those pages on a Terrassa street were from a similar disillusioned academic – though mid-November is not the time of an academic ending.  Perhaps the student (if student it was) had simply had enough and freedom was a paperchase of white page academia on a pavement.

     I wouldn’t, couldn’t do that, not even with a Jeffrey Archer novel!

 

 

 

 

 

Knees Up Mother Brown!

sticks,          

 

Well, I suppose it is something to be told that the x-rays of your knees are “the worst that I have seen” by your doctor, as the opening gambit in a conversation that stopped before the Pandemic made seeing actually speaking face to face with your doctor a thing of the past.  Welcome to the new future.

      

 

My knees have never really been my strong point and a few tumbles while dismounting from my bike, have made them a damn sight worse.

     I can walk unaided, but it is so much better with a stick – and my walking is strictly limited to that which is strictly necessary.  Which sometimes means that I don’t even reach the unambitious target (set by my smartwatch) of 3,000 steps a day.

     The process of my future care is now slotted into The System and that will grind its inexorable way forward, although given the pandemic, the number of untreated cases of wonky knees is probably in the tens of thousands, and the medical mills grind slow.

     My prescriptions have changed, but only to give me better pain killers, which the doctor has suggested I use with caution – which makes you wonder just what drug they are derived from!  I have done without pain killers up until now and I can stumble my way onwards without them.  Hopefully.

     A blood test has been set up for me and another appointment with the doctor to see exactly what is happening and then, who knows?

     There was a horror story of a guy in the UK who needed to have a back tooth taken out and who searched for an NHS dentist to do the job.  He couldn’t find one locally, and after some fifty phone calls to increasingly distant practitioners, he eventually found one who suggested that the earliest appointment he could have would be THREE YEARS DISTANT! 

     Perhaps this is one of those instant urban myths that flourish in straitened times, but I am sure that I read about it in the Guardian, and since I put all of my faith into the probity of that newspaper, it gives you a mighty pause for thought.

     I have to say that the medical treatment that I have had in Catalonia has been exemplary and my doctor has been essential to my well-being.  But there is only so much that a local health centre can do.  Operations on the knee are well outside their remit.

     It is at this point that I remember my father.  He too had problems with his knees, but his problems came after a career as a PE teacher and playing professional Rugby League.  I really have to hunt around to find reasons for my knee problems, and I don’t think that a few nasty tumbles from the bike explains everything.

     Dad was told that he would have to have an operation but, even in those days, there were waiting lists and he would have to go on being in pain, waiting for a bed to become available.

     In spite of his socialist beliefs, he eventually listened to his surgeon who told him, “If you have a private consultation with me, I will be able to recommend you to one of ‘my’ beds in the hospital and then the operation will be done on the National Health.”  My father paid the fifteen guineas for the consultation, with the surgeon, which was obviously just a form of words, he was given a bed and was operated on, basically by jumping the queue.  Dad was in pain, and he couldn’t walk.  The NHS should have been able to deal with his condition but, we do not live in an ideal world, and the fifteen guineas was money well spent.

     When I find out exactly what is wrong with my ‘disaster area’ knees and what the specialist suggests needs to be done about them, then I will have to look at the possibilities and what is going to work for me.

     So far, the Catalan health service has been brilliant and has fully justified my faith in it.  My knees might pose a problem that will need a little more than faith to sort them out.    We will see.