New Normal, Second week, Saturday
It’s raining.
I had to take the car to the swimming pool today, because, while I enjoy riding my bike, I am not a fanatic and for me, riding in the rain cuts the fun to less than zero.
I did try and remember the last time that I took the car rather than rode the bike to the pool, and I couldn’t. Which rather makes the point that I continually make about the weather and my reaction to it in the two countries - three if you count the country of my birth and my later year-long “missionary work” there as a qualified English teacher teaching the natives their language, as befits any true Welsh teacher – in which I have lived. I don’t like rain. Or the cold. But I can do with a bit of cold as long as there is the promise of a fair amount of rain-free time during the year.
Alas! Britain does not promise that, whereas Catalonia does. Simple.
I have decided to do a bit of delving into the war service of my paternal grandfather. I have his name and his number and his war service stretched from 1914 to 1918. He was one of the early volunteers and so had his 1914-1915 Star.
He never talked to me about his war service, and my Dad said that he was only told about a very few of his experiences. I can well imagine that my grandfather found it difficult to relate details of his life in the army to anyone who wasn’t there. The disconnect between what the soldiers actually experienced in the field and what was reported must have made it difficult to have a meaningful conversation. And why would the soldiers give an accurate description of the almost unimaginable horrors that they witnessed to their loved ones on their return?
I have tried to find out about his war service from the internet and I think that I will need to pay to get the detail that I require. I am, as they say, looking into it.
I have now put some battery powered LED fairy lights around the newly framed watercolour (and glitter) paintings of winter trees by SQB and it looks magical. I have never, ever started to put up Christmas decorations in November before, but then I have not experienced a year like 2020 before either, so a little jollity does not seem out of place no matter how vulgarly distant Christmas actually is. And anyway, I have seen the first Christmas decorations being sold in Tesco in the past before the end of the summer holidays, so if anything, I am rather tardy in “trimming up” as one of my friends used to say!
Today has been one of those odd days when, in spite of evidence to the contrary, it has stubbornly felt like Sunday. In the “Old Days” i.e. before retirement, such a misconception had its advantages as assuming a Saturday a Sunday meant that when one woke up on what, by extension of the faulty reasoning, could be a Monday – it was in fact, only Saturday and no work! Now, of course, Mondays have lost a lot of their sting – well, to be fair, virtually all of their sting, but there is still something different about weekends that still gives me something of a buzz, in spite of it being an attitude rather than harsh reality!
We had lunch in Suso’s, a restaurant that we often patronize on a Saturday because it has a reasonably priced menu del dia, Suso being one of the few restaurants that do not take the opportunity of the weekend to inflate their prices. The value is extraordinary, even though I do not nowadays take advantage of the bottle of wine that can come with the meal. I felt very virtuous in restricting myself to pure, cold water – and I am sure that I felt all the better for it!
Now back to military records and finding out just which of the pointless bloodbaths my grandfather was forced to participate in by generals safely way behind the front line. I will never forgive Haig for his attempted murder of my grandfather!
