LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 17th – 1st APRIL

A third day of indifferent weather – something that should be of supreme indifference given what is happening in the world today, but in the confined ‘world’ that one inhabits at present, something that is of irritating importance.

     The daily morning tasks being completed (up to and including the Guardian ‘quick’ crossword) it was a pleasant surprise to have a phone call from a Cardiff friend, Hadyn, informing me that he had purchased one of Ceri Auckland Davies’s[1] paintings in a recent auction.  This hawthorn is one from a series Ceri painted of trees in bloom, and a good choice!  The tree fills the picture space and is set against a moody sky-filled background rising from a low horizon – a dramatic and lively painting.

     From where I sit typing I can see two more examples of Ceri’s work: an atmospheric print of a night view of a lamp lit façade of a Venetian palazzo[2] painted in a freer style than the meticulous detailed manner that he usually adopts, and a large charcoal drawing of a rock cleft in which the quasi-abstract depiction of the faceted rock face encourages pareidolia in a busy surface that always engages my attention as it is directly opposite where I usually sit. 

     As a striking contrast to the ‘face-filled’ rocks, the focus of attention is nothing.  Literally nothing, whiteness, blankness.  The far opening of the rock cleft is onto sea or sky and that is a patch of vibrant white, unworked and blank whereas all around it is the detail of charcoal sketching. 

     I am endlessly fascinated by this work and, like the best Giles cartoons (and that is a signal honour of comparison from me!) there is always something new to find in the detail of the draftmanship and the juxtaposition of light and shade.  Each time I look at it, I highlight different sections and let my eye slide through the confined landscape in alternative ways.

     What has all of that to do with the current crisis?  Everything. 

     Our lives have been thrown into total confusion; the economy of the world is in free-fall; our individual freedoms are being compromised; millions are being forced into greater poverty; domestic violence is on the rise; we are being turned into ourselves, a forced introspection; and survival, for most of us in the wealthy west, usually a concept rather than an ever present threat, has now become visible, palpable struggle.  It is exactly at times like these that one needs to consider the worth of a painted tree!

     It used to be said that a society could be judged by how it treats the poorest and least advantaged in a community: the disabled, the imprisoned, the dispossessed, the mentally ill, the criminal, the refugee, the old, the homeless etc.  The point being made is that it is easy to look after those who are already able and keen to look after themselves, but what about the others?  In the same way, bare survival is obviously essential, but we must, we have to be concerned with the quality of survival as well.  It is to the everlasting credit of the wartime government in Britain that, at the same time that it was struggling to keep the effort to free the world of the threat of fascism, it was also working to ensure that there were clear plans for the betterment of society after the conflict was ended.  The 1944 Education Act was a gesture, no, much more than a gesture, of defiance and belief that something positive must come from something so negative.

     The Arts in all their forms are the way that quality of life can be guaranteed, in a way they encourage us to believe that there is something beyond mere survival.

     I am not so idealistic that I believe that a painting, or piece of music, or a good book; a well composed photograph or a well directed film are protection against the vicissitudes of this world, especially when they come in microscopic form, but I do think that the creative arts are there to make the struggle to survive worth it and they do, sometimes, provide the solace to make it bearable.

     That all sounds much more apocalyptic than I meant it to sound: I am warm, comfortable and well fed; I am protected from the elements and media to amuse myself surrounds me; I can write and I can speak.  My ‘prison’ is well appointed and I can take exercise outside the walls (just); I can contact friends and read about others; I am freely confined! 

     And yet, especially in a country when the death rate is rising day on day I do appreciate that I am of an age group where my continued life is dependent on my adhering strictly to governmental guidelines and the following of those guidelines by others around me.  For almost the first time in my life, I am directly threatened by a very present moral enemy.

     But, having talked myself into a state of sombre seriousness and existential angst, I can get out of it by merely (and that word is surely justified here because of the ease with which I can do it) looking at a painting, reading a book, listening to a piece of music.

     And, as far as looking at paintings are concerned, my emails have been filled with various institutions urging me to take a virtual tour or plunge into the catalogues and explore the holdings.  Galleries around the world are offering lectures and guides; things to do; things to make; ways to get involved.  Opera companies are offering performances streamed on their sites; books are being electronically offered – to say nothing of the television shows and films that are freely available on line.

     Now is the time to explore, to take a whim and see how far you go and where you end up.  So much is available and only for the cost of the electricity that drives your Internet access.

     When arid introspection threatens; the digital world is available!

    

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[1] welshart.net; lionstreetgallery.co.uk; www.albanygallery.com

[2] https://www.redraggallery.co.uk/print-ceri-auckland-davies.asp

Green transport is ecological quid pro quo

The cutting down of trees in the car park of the swimming pool means that I have had to resurrect my bike.  Or at least take it out from its partial hibernation.

            Destroying twenty trees was obviously not enough for the heartless people in the leisure centre.  No, they want to efface the evidence of their destruction and have closed the car park for the next month.  The leisure centre is in a residential area with lots of on-road parking.  Unfortunately next to the leisure centre is a school.  And that changes everything.

            Children go to schools.  A very good thing too, it keeps them off the streets when we retired people can wander about without the screams and general awfulness of the youngest generations spoiling our well deserved time away from work.  But probably the worst thing about children and schools?  Parents.

            In the general run of things I have nothing against parents, after all my entire existence is thanks to them, but my parents allowed me to catch a bus to school.  They did not see the need to take me to the school gates, drop me off and then wait around imagining me making my way through the yard towards my form room.  While being themselves double or triple parked, on a pavement or on the zebra crossing, across an entrance, at an angle, on a corner or any damn where they pleased with little or no consideration for any other non-parent-of-their-child whatsoever.

            So, now, added to the insanity of parents dropping off their kids, residents parking their cars, visitors needing a parking space we will have people going to the leisure centre, finding the car park closed and then trying to park within a maximum of ten paces away from the door.

            It is going to be chaos.  And nasty chaos as well!

            Having given this some thought, I imagine that one of the more unbearable aspects of this month-long torture is going to be car drivers stopping in the middle of the road trying to spot a non-existent parking space and effectively blocking the road for all other road users. 

Luckily, in this country, we are blessed with some of the most tolerant road users in Europe who never mind waiting and who show no impatience at any road user impeding their progress!  So that’s all right then.

As if!

This morning I had to park three streets away from the centre and half way down the street as well.  Things can only get worse, and I do not intend to emulate the Flying Dutchman endlessly roaming the area searching for a parking space!  The bike is the answer.  Possibly.

It is well over a year since I’ve ridden the thing and I have had to hack the dust off it.  Toni has oiled the bits that need oiling and I have attempted to make the dynamo work.  Not that I have any intention of riding the thing in the dark, you understand, but I do like to think that I could if I wanted to.

It will be interesting to see how I adapt to this new regime.

Commercial & Cultural

You are never safe in a capitalist society!

Just when you think that you have got the safely-living-in-a-consumer-society thing sorted, Pebble asks for money. 

To those benighted Luddites that have no response to the word Pebble with a capital letter, other than thinking of important stones on the sea shore, I must inform you that the company of Pebble was originally a Kick-starter company which an early developer the workable concept of a reasonably priced smart watch.  I bought one.  No surprise there I suppose, but I did resist until the watch worked with Mac products and it was waterproof enough to go swimming in.  Oh, yes and it was made in metal because I didn’t like the early plastic versions that they had.

            The watch was worth the money I paid.  Not because it is the best watch that I have ever owned or the most elegant – or indeed is it the watch that I am wearing at the moment.  And that final comment is one of the major drawbacks of the whole enterprise.

The battery life of the Pebble Metal (which I think is the name of the model that I have) is about five days.  The watch I am wearing at the moment is powered by the sun and by the actual action of wearing it.  The watch I am wearing gives time, date, etc. it has digital and analogue and checks itself every day with some sort of atomic clock which sends out a radio wave.  In other words, it’s magic.

But.  And it’s a big ‘but’ – my smart watch has a large and informative watch face and it also informs me when I am called on my phone.  I virtually never turn the sound of my phone on so, as far as Toni is concerned, for this aspect alone, the watch is worth what I paid for it.  In my particular set of circumstances, given the way I use my phone, a smart watch works.

And there the expense could have rested.  I have my watch.  Other non-Pebble companies have produced their versions and I have carefully checked them out and they usually fail on battery life or compatibility with Mac or, more usually than not, on being waterproof.  It seemed that I was safe.

And then Pebble started a new Kick-starter appeal with a new watch that does something or other and is waterproof.  And, out of a misplaced concept of commercial loyalty I have joined the countless thousands of people who have probably been Mac-trained and therefore have developed an instinctive gadget loyalty hardwired into their wallets – and bought a new watch.  Which hasn’t been made yet and for which I will have to wait months.

But it might be engraved on the back saying that I helped ‘Kick-start’ – so that’s all right then, isn’t it?  Oh and its plastic – and that means that I will have to buy the metal version when it is produced.  And.  And I don’t care.

Poems against arboreal outrage!

Priceless artefacts are being smashed by religious fanatics; corruption stalks the land; the situation in Ukraine worsens; nuclear proliferation threatens world peace and the Israeli Prime Minister is sinisterly terrifying – yet I get worked up about cut trees.

            The car park continues to be closed as the final remains of the twenty trees await their final destination.  Workmen are walking around, sometimes with bits of paper and looking at where the trees used to be with intense concentration.

            A lone workman is doing something with a pneumatic hammer and is possibly tracing out the course of a future drain.  Things have changed.

            And I sit inside the café (all the chairs outside have been taken away for some reason) forcing the hopelessly addicted smokers to stand around looking even more shifty than usual, while I sip and note, sip and note.

            I now have pages (admittedly small pages) of comments and notes about what I see, delightedly, as an outrage against the trees.

There is something determinedly small-minded about cutting down a single tree - cutting down twenty smacks of inhumanity.  Except of course, it’s not.  There are many more important crimes in the world, but this ‘crime’ is here and now and is a substantial part of my world.

Like one of the cultural and moral vultures that I denigrate, I am now using my feelings about the ‘slaughtered’ trees to provoke a poem.  I have written one (see yesterday’s post) and I fully intend to write at least one more.  In a reworking of a famous French phrase: ‘What I have I use!’  It can always be edited into oblivion, or at least a sort of oblivion, at a later date.

I am aware that anything that I post has a sort of illusory permanence.  Though my blog is a ‘hosted’ one which means that Google can stop or destroy it at any time they choose for any reason they choose.  Which is a sobering thought.  But I am not sure that I am prepared to pay a monthly fee to own my site. 

I need to take advice on this.  Not sure from whom though.  In the same way that I expect someone to come to the house, knock on the door and hand me a winning Lottery tickets that have been bought on my behalf, I also hope that advice about what to do in Blog terms will simply happen.  I should take note that, in spite of my patience in waiting, no one has actually offered me a ticket and therefore I need to be a little pro-active.  Writing about being pro-active is stage one.

You call that art?

Conceptual art does not usually bring out the best in people.  Especially when you try and defend it.

            The Open University course is creeping closer to the end of the twentieth century and trying to chart a way through all the excesses of Post Modernism – a difficult task when there is not really a settled definition of what the term means!

            Still, flicking through the final volume in our course material I can see that there is a fairly extensive concentration of Louise Bourgeois, an artist I like and admire.  I think that we will be concentrating on her more challenging pieces so that they can link with concepts of race, gender, identity and everything else that the OU finds important.

            As far as I can see, there is a lot of work in a limited amount of time.  I have therefore decided to be a little more anal in the way that I approach this assignment and study to the essay.  I think it is the only way.  Then my ‘release’ will be the work that I do on the mini-thesis that ends the course.

Getting my money’s worth

Walking in to the new British Library as a full ‘reader’ is something that I am looking forward to.

            According to a telephone call with the British Library, now in Kings Cross and not the Reading Room of the British Library, I will be able to renew my much lapsed Reader’s Card and pre-order books to be looked at when I am staying, coincidentally in Kings Cross, when I go to London for the Study Day. 

            In the British Library I always find that I am drawn to the fact that they have a copy of everything ever printed in Britain and a great deal more besides.  I therefore I have to resist the temptation to order things that have nothing to do with what I am supposed to be studying!

            My worst literary digression in the old Reading Room was ordering, on the most spurious of grounds, a first edition of ‘Noddy Goes to Toytown’.  I have rarely read a more sexist and racist book and I couldn’t remember it being quite so bad when I first read it.  Mind you there was a considerable number of years between my readings - and on my first reading I was the proud and passionate owner of a grandmother-made golliwog! 

Is one allowed to use such vocabulary these days, even in a memory!

Stay wet!

If the important research that I have done is correct then I should be within walking distance of a swimming pool when I am staying in the hotel in London.  I wonder if you have to wear flip-flops and a swimming hat in London pools?

            Perhaps I am thinking in the same way as British visitors to Spain think when they worry about forgetting the toothpaste, as if such things are not available here!

            It is second nature for me to think to myself that I could always buy what I do not have. 

When in doubt shop!

Trees, food and poetry - in any order!

I think that I was misled by the word: webinar.  The excitement of coming into contact with a useful neologism got me up at the crack of dawn to participate in a web-based discussion called, you’ve guessed it, a ‘webinar’.

            As this was being hosted in America the time was in EST, which I duly translated into Madrid time.  And was twelve hours out in my calculations!  A mistake anyone can make, though the six hours difference should have been added rather than taken away from their starting time.  If I had thought about it for longer than a Nano second I might have worked out that the USA is to the west of us and that the sun rises in the east and . . . well, there is no excuse really.

            And when, twelve hours later, I finally joined the webinar (having decided that this mixture of web and seminar was not really so clever) I discovered that the whole enterprise was actually a selling opportunity for the couple of hosts who were taking the webinar.  I have to admit that they did give some good advice and I did have the muted thrill of hearing the title of my forthcoming book, ‘Flesh Can Be Bright’ read out by the female host, so a few hundred people have heard the title, which is the first stage, I suppose, towards buying the thing!

The shock of the day was finding out, when I attempted to park in the leisure centre, that all the trees had been cut down!  I never like seeing trees destroyed, but this seemed worse somehow as these trees have been my on-going inspiration for a whole series of poems and are the basis for a continuing series of poems.  I did, of course make copious notes as I sipped my tea and watched the workmen operating the grab and scooping up the remains of the shattered vegetation.  This is the poem I wrote:

Winter Trees

ii.   Gone

The blossom headed grab

picks up what’s left of

twenty trees.

When this year’s growth

was not cut back,

I should have known

that something was afoot.

And now these winter-winnowed

twigs protrude from that

closed metal sphere

like so much wayward hair.

Spaced equally, the twenty

shallow pits share emptiness

concave, not deep.

How easy to remove. 

And cut. 

Fresh, pungent stumps

that flaunt their age

in death.

Those trees were never huggable.

The rough, stained, ulcered bark

defied caress.  And yet.

Will asphalt fill the cavities

where roots once were?

And cars park easily

on obstacle free ground?

And memory forget

that there were ever trees?

This poem is the second that I have written about Winter trees and I hope, eventually, it will be a continuation of the series that I have already written on Autumn trees.  My latest poems can be found at: http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/  I am thinking about this series as forming part of my next but one book of poems!  There is nothing like thinking ahead.  I would like this series to be accompanied by original drawings, just as I hope the ‘Autumn trees’ series will be in ‘Flesh Can Be Bright’ to be published this September.  That all sounds so professional, I can almost believe it!

Lunch today was spectacular, one of the best that we have had in Castelldefels.  I had a started of Carpaccio of beef that I last had in Paris.  This was substantially better, and a bloody sight cheaper!  My whole meal cost about ten quid, including a class of Cava and coffee with ice.  The homemade tiramisu was something that my friend Paul would have killed for.  You can see photos of most of the dishes in http://catalunyaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es/ You will not see photos of the postres because we both started eating them before I thought of using the camera!  Again! 

Toni’s blog is growing nicely and the photos are a vivid reminder of the excellence of the eating experience that Castelldefels offers at such a reasonable cost.

Our eventual hope is that the blog will eventually be recognized as one of the formative eating guides and we will be fed for nothing where ’ere we go!  Fond hope.  But the blog is looking good and it is a clear guide about where to go for a good meal at more than reasonable cost.