Another date filled

 

Well, the one good thing is that I have only missed one meeting or appointment - and I thought that I might have missed three.  But no, blood test and concert are still in the safe future, it is only the student representative meeting that has slipped me by, and the teacher concerned seemed far more concerned about my new pressure stocking than the meeting.  The lack of my attendance at the meeting apparently could be solved, or at least mitigated, by a short chat with one of the teachers.

My pressure stockings are another factor.  These are stylish (for pressure stockings anyway) free gifts from China.  I only had to pay the postage (and that wasn’t very much) and I got three pairs!  It reminded me of the trip that Toni and I made to stay in Catalonia where the flight cost us nothing – except for the landing charges.  I do not understand the economic logic of giving away a flight for nothing, but I gratefully received the largess.  God knows we have paid back that free gift many times over given the amount of travel that we have run up over the years since.  But I do remain grateful for the inexplicable gift!

The pressure stockings are perhaps easier to explain as a sprat to catch a mackerel and the assumption must surely have been that I find out that the link with the supplier is real and you stand a chance of getting what you hoped for, and you buy much more stuff - and god knows, China is the home of stuff nowadays.  Was it enough for the Chinese supplier merely to get hold of my email and start sending me information, to get me on a mailing list, that they could write off the merchandise. 

 

And again, I insist that the postage was so small that I could afford to speculate and give it a go not really worrying about losing the pittance that they had asked to get the stuff to me.  They have since asked me to comment on my purchase, but I assume this is merely a device to ensure that I am still a live customer and that any giving of stars will unleash a whole catalogue of offers too good to miss!

Give my predilection to submit myself to the blandishments of the capitalist system and buy stuff for the mere sake of it, I have steeled myself to be rude enough not to reply – even though I am wearing one of the said stockings even as I type this.

The net two months should prove to be revealing, with the possibility that I will not need to wear the bloody stockings any more.  The function of them is to increase the blood flow in my right calf so that the thrombosis will be dissolved away.  To that end, my diet (low salt, low fat, no alcohol, decaffeinated tea and coffee) added to the half a tablet of rat poison that I take daily should all be working together to get rid of the thrombosis in a gradual way.  Over the next couple of months, I am scheduled to have various tests and appointments that should enable my doctors to determine the extent or otherwise of the offending clot and adjust my treatment accordingly.

I had thought that I would be taking the rat poison for life, but one doctor seemed surprised by this assumption on my part and assured me that there was a possibility that it would be discontinued in a few months’ time.

I continue to be impressed with my treatment and the thorough way in which I have made a Grand Tour of most of the hospitals in the area for consultations and tests.  The important ultra-sound scan will be in January, so I won’t have a Christmas present of my treatment being ended, but I will settle for a late gift!  At least by the New Year I should be in a better position to know how my appointments calendar will look for the rest of the year!

Meanwhile, my book “Stephen’s Health” continues to grow as each new sheet of information, results and appointments is added to the plastic pockets.  I take it with me whenever I go to see a doctor as a sort of visible token of my active participation in my treatment.  I can also refer to any of the information about my case (downloaded from the secure Internet link) to encourage those doctors battling with their ageing computers.  In one or two instances it has been very useful to point to relevant information to help the consultation along!

I feel fine, though I am not able to walk as far or as fast as I used to.  My shooting stick has been invaluable and I am now back to my normal swim and bike ride quota for each day.

My replacement watch for my Pebble, the Amazfit takes a dictatorial view of my activity and gives me reams of information that I totally ignore.  It tells me where I have cycled and how – though I am not sure that it realizes that my bike is electric; it analyses my swim, using acronyms that I do not know; it noted my ‘run’ that I did not do – and I am still wondering about that; it measures my sleep and its depth; it takes my heartbeat; it tells me (and nags me) about sitting down for too long.  And it also tells the time.  Its battery life is nothing near the longevity of the Pebble, but it is at least four or five days between charges and I can live with that.  The text it uses is too small for me to read without my reading glasses, but I am used to making sense of the out of focus – I have been doing in for as long as I can remember – so that is not something that worries me.

I now use my Matrix watch (the one that runs by making electricity out of the difference between your body heat and the ambient temperature of the watch case!) as a backup when the Amazfit is charging.  I good, if expensive, compromise about their use!

The major problem I have is making sure that the alarms on any and all of my pieces of wearable electronics do not go off as inopportune times.  I take my half of rat poison at 8.00 pm.  That is the time of the start of the operas to which I go.  The trouble is that merely switching off the phone (which I do when I go to performances) does not always stop the bloody alarm and once or twice I have fumbled with the phone during the applause for the conductor in a frantic effort to silence the thing before the music starts.  My watch merely trembles and that can easily be turned off by jabbing at the screen.  The anticipation that an audience feels at the start of the performance is given an added layer of fear by the threat of my electronic alarm orchestra playing an unwelcome additional melodic line.

And I am looking forward to this performance: Janacek, Katya Kabanova.  Let’s see just how well my ‘education’ in the works of Janacek by WNO and Richard Armstrong with the voice of, among others, Elizabeth Söderström, will be in my appreciation of the performance tonight.  I am all anticipation.

And now to get ready.  As a point of principle, I wear casual clothes to the Opera, in spite or rather because of the fact that I will be surrounded by those who ostentatiously dress up.  I am still wearing shorts and sandals (for me Summer Never Dies) but I might wear jeans tonight.  Not because of the cold, you understand, but rather because getting out of the Liceu and walking up the Ramblas late at night can be a dispiriting experience, and if you look ostentatiously like a tourist then you might well be the target for one or more sex workers to come up to you with blatant offers of gratification!   

Better to be taken for, if not a native, then at least a resident, and hobble (in my case) my stick-assisted way towards my expensively parked car!

Eating is difficult

Real August weather (he wrote bitterly): warm to hot, muggy, overcast, but in the tradition of off-days in Catalonia, brightly dull.  Were this Britain, I would write off the day – but Catalonia isn’t and therefore I expect better things weather-wise later.  Please.

Meanwhile there is the prospect of lunch.  And, more importantly, the new Thai restaurant in town.  Catalonia is not noted for the quality of local Indian or Asian restaurants.  The problem is that people here are not given to spicy foods.  Yes, there are types of local cold sausage that are piquant, but nothing like the solid fire of an after-drinking ‘Indian’ in any typical British late-night restaurant.  I am still trying process Toni’s sister saying that her first British Indian meal in Rumney in Cardiff was too hot for her – and she was attempting to eat a chicken korma!  With that in mind, it is hardly surprising that the blander ‘commercial’ Chinese food found in virtually any moderately priced Chinese restaurant is much more acceptable to the Catalan palate.

I have checked out the new restaurant and there is no indication that they have a menu del dia.  The a la carte offerings look to be quite expensive for this area and I am not prepared to pay evening meal prices for a light lunch, but it is worth trying to find somewhere that can give me an ironic ‘taste of Britain’!

As it is the height of summer many menus offer the cold soup of salmorejo.  This is a very simple soup to make, but its very simplicity means that each person’s take on it is distinctively different.  It is usually very thick and is a different colour from the more recognizable cold soup of gazpacho.  Salmorejo usually has cold chopped egg mixed with bits of Spanish ham as an (essential) garnish and is delicious.  Here is a recipe to try!

Ingredients

Ingredients for 4 people: 1 kg tomatoes, 1 clove of garlic, 200 g bread (preferably a day old), 100 g extra virgin olive oil, 10 g salt. Optional: egg and ham.

Method

Wash the tomatoes, blend them and strain them to remove the skin and seeds. Add the bread (before this, leave to soak in water or in the blended tomatoes), extra virgin olive oil, garlic and salt, and blend again.

Presentation

Serve in individual bowls and garnish with chopped hard-boiled egg and bits of ham.

Perhaps the greatest culinary news for me this month occurred in Aldi.  Our local store has undergone a refit to accommodate an in-house bakery and a reorganization of the aisles.  Considering the way in which retail management has now become one of the dark sciences I don’t know whether the creation of bottlenecks at various points in the store, together with the narrowing of some of the aisles to make the passing of shopping trollies difficult is engineering or incompetence, but I am prepared to overlook those because I have discovered that Aldi is selling Taramosalata and Tzatziki in little plastic tubs.

I have tried, in a desultory way through the years, to find Taramosalata in Castelldefels and did indeed find it (or something like it) in a so-called Greek restaurant – though they looked at me blankly when I called they called the ‘salsa rosa’ Taramosalata.  The taste was near enough for me to kid myself that if not back in Greece on the beach in Mykonos, I was at least back in Wales where it was easy enough to get!  After a few visits to the restaurant, the staff there began to deny that they had ever had the stuff and my weary search continued.

In the way of the taste of Catalonia, humus is easy enough to get – in my view the least tasty of the trinity of Taramosalata, Tzanziki and Humus – because it is the blandest of the three.  Admittedly you can now get a piquant version which raises the taste level by a notch or two, but by itself, it is insufficient.  At least for me.

I am tempering my delight in finding these delicacies by my belief that with Aldi nothing lasts.  Buy it when you see it because tomorrow it will be gone is a commercial necessity with the discount stores.

I certainly did my bit when humus was introduced by buying quantities of it to try and ensure that it became a staple.  And I am now doing the same with the neophyte tara and tzanziki.  I am relying on the fact that there are substantial numbers of my fellow countryfolk in this area to make their retention a retail fact.

Not (as Toni continually reminds me) that I should be eating any of the above.  The fat and salt content is way beyond my limits, but I have convinced myself that the psychological satisfaction I can get from their consumption outweighs (a moot word) the deleterious effects on my physical health.

Talking of which I am steadily working my half-pill-a-day (except for Sundays when it is three-quarters) way to my next Control on the 21^st.  If my results are within the limits then the next Control could be in Castelldefels rather than in a more distant hospital.  It will be cheaper (you have to pay for parking in the hospital), quicker because I can use my bike for the short cycle of my health centre, and a damn sight less wearing.  The rat poison that I am taking is supposed to ‘thin’ my blood making coagulation less effective – this means that the clot in my right leg will thus be gradually dissipated and things will be well!

The key to my continued health is in getting the thinning component in my blood to register between 2 and 3, that is, my blood is between two and three times less likely to coagulate than normal.  This sounds dramatic (and I hope it is for the thrombosis in my right leg) but has little effect on normal life.  The advice from my doctor was, “Don’t fall over.  Don’t cut yourself!  Don’t run for the bus!”

Before you think that I have become the living incarnation of the Tsarevich looking for a modern-day Rasputin, my condition is nothing like as dramatic and I have indeed cut myself (accidentally) and did not bleed to death!  Or indeed, in my view, bleed any more dramatically than normal.  After all, I tell myself, they do prick me for a spot of blood for my Control and that in itself must tell you something!

So, as part of my regimen I am now off for my metric-mile swim.  On my bike.  Even though my bike is electric and has five levels of motor support for my pedalling, the battery level is very low and (horror of horrors!) I might actually have to rely purely on pedal power to get me to the pool.  As we are on the coastal plain, I do not worry too much, but the bridge over the motorway is officially classed as a hill in my book and is an obstacle to be overcome.

But, at my father was fond of repeating: “If it is easier to walk with the bike then pedal, then walk.”  It took me a long time to work out that the advice was not purely for the bike, but was more generally a view of life.  Making pointless effort because of peer pressure or how something looked was, well, pointless.  It links with Occom’s Razor and gives the sort of obvious direction that we frail humans are often too loath to take.

Which, philosophical musing aside, will get me to the pool somehow.  1 ,500 meters here I come!

Well, the swim took place, but the restaurant was a washout.  It turns out that the restaurant has suspended the menu del dia for the month of August.  So, we looked elsewhere for sustenance.  Unfortunately, we settled on an establishment that provided us with a sub-standard set of tapas.  Not a place to go back to.  But I am too lazy to find the receipt to give a name to the guilty.  Perhaps I can edit it in later.

A stint on the beach after Irene left and the threat of a concert at eleven thirty at night of non-classical music will bring an eventful day to an end.

Roll on tomorrow.