You can't force imagination

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday was a public holiday in Catalonia and today isn’t.  The difference in the café after my swim was marked.  I was virtually alone and, as I sit at a table next to the plate glass windows looking out onto the car park, I had nothing to distract me from adding to the writing in my notebook.  Except, I didn’t much.

     I have found, in the past, that even the most quotidian of reflections about the weather or the strength of a cup of tea can sometimes give rise to more profitable thoughts.  Today, that was not the case, “Overcast, cold, with some hazy sun” remained a description of the state of the day and didn’t progress to profundity.  Still, I had a decent cup of tea at the end of my swim and I had had a lane to myself, so to quote Lewis Carroll, I felt fully justified in marking the day “with a white stone” – which, if my memory serves me right is an old Roman custom, and which I claimed as my own as soon as I read about it in one of the footnotes of Gardner’s Annotated Alice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow is my flu jab, and I think it says something about the way that I fill my days that this has become An Event in my week.  It is a step in the process of defending myself from the vicissitudes of various viruses and, as I have mentioned before, in my age group if you don’t look after yourself you can expect little from the authorities to help you.  Though having said that I did get a message on my mobile phone yesterday telling me that I should be thinking about my flu jab and, if I hadn’t already made arrangements, I should get an appointment via the helpfully supplied link.

     This will be an added layer of protection, especially as many of the Covid restrictions are being lifted. 

     For example, next week is my next visit to the Liceu, not for an opera this time, but rather for a ballet.  If you have a season ticket then a couple of ballets and the odd recital are part of the package, and the package is worth getting because its purchase comes with a discount of 25%.  And 25% off a lot of money is well worth getting!

     During the course of the pandemic, we have had performances cancelled, and sometimes entire productions.  When the Opera House opened up again, it was to a severely reduced seating capacity with various safety aspects enhanced.  Our specified seats were no longer ours, and we season ticket holders were distributed around our chosen price area, to ensure that we could be islanded by empty seats.  The staged production of The War Requiem was the last of the adjusted performances and for the next we should be back in our accustomed places.

     But the pandemic is not over.  Although many young people act as if the Covid Pandemic is an historical event and nothing to do with their immediate lives, this is simply self-delusion, a self-delusion that could be fatal for those that fit into the most vulnerable age and chronic illness categories.  Double vaccinated people can get Covid and be capable of spreading the infection, even if they do not demonstrate symptoms of the illness itself.  The largest age category of new infections is in children.  We are not, in any way, shape or form safe from Covid.

     In Catalonia we longer are required to wear masks in the open air, though it is suggested that in more crowded places like paseos it is advisable to wear a mask and to keep to the social distancing rules.  But no one is entirely sure what, precisely, the rules are – and the mixed messages we get from our so-called political leaders do nothing to make the situation clearer.

     I will continue to wear my mask throughout the winter and well into the spring, and indeed until well after politicians have stopped trying to convince us that everything is back to normal, and we all please spend more money!

     It will be interesting to see exactly how the patrons of the Liceu behave in the new-normal dispensation.  As the vast majority of patrons in the stalls of the opera are people past the first flush of youth, I think it is more than likely that precautions will still be fairly firmly in place as the lights go down!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dinner this evening, at least for me, was the doggie bag remains of the paella that we had yesterday in the swimming pool restaurant.  I have to admit that the flavour had intensified after the dish had rested for a day and there is still some left for lunch tomorrow.  Though I will perhaps add a dash of curry to make the stuff taste a little different.  Please don’t tell any Catalan cuisine purists what I am doing, as they are easily shocked by the unconventional (or blasphemous, as they would term it) approach to native cooking.

     I am reminded of the time when I was charged with buying a melon for a ham and melon starter for a meal, and I returned from the shops with a sandia (a red watermelon) and there was chaos when the assembled company realized what I had done.  We did have sandia and jamon, but it has been a memory which always raises a shocked smile as the misstep is remembered and discussed. 

     Personally, I found the combination excellent and would readily eat it again.  

      I am alone in that determination in this part of the world!

Writing is hard. Honestly!

 

Why is it that what seems like an excellent idea for a piece of writing or a poem when scribbled in a notebook, doesn’t work out when transferred to paper or a computer screen?  When the germs of a concept are transcribed, they often seem trite and disjointed.

     I had been moaning in my notebook about the condition of my knees and legs and feet (I like to be inclusive) and that fact that walking is painful, and it took only a moment’s thought to extend that moan into a thesaurus of words connected with personal disintegration using one of my favourite terms from an old dictionary of computers, “graceful degradation” (now known as “fail-soft”, a far less evocative term) and a general feeling that everything was leading down to death and ignominy.

 

 

 

     I then took an imaginative side-step into the graphic work of Escher and explained my use of his art as exemplifying “everything has to be redefined”.  The old certainties in a life with firm feet is now called into question when all walking must be pre-planned and calculated.  “My life’s future is calculation” I have scribbled down as a statement of the fact that what I used to do without a thought, now needs consideration: how far will I have to walk; where is the parking; is there anywhere to sit, and so on.

     I am aware that I give the impression in the previous paragraphs of a delicate invalid, sipping in weak beef tea, and coughing discretely into a pocket handkerchief.  I am generally in robust good health, and I swim 1,500m every morning, so there is an element of indulgent introspection and just a hint of reductio ad absurdum in what I write in my notes to myself.

     Then via a note which reads “underpants from M&S”, I get to a written equation “living + decisions = death” which I qualify with “eventually” and then burble on to an idea that life is algebraic, with all its unknowns, and then (inevitably) I come to the formula for solving quadratic equations: x equals minus b, plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4 ac all over 2a

     It looks so much better when written out like a proper equation, but trying to type it out and get this blog format to accept it was just too difficult.        

     I know that there was a time when I was able to use the equation to solve certain quadratic problems.  I never really understood what I was doing and, as far as I was concerned, the formula was something given to Moses by God and was found in one of the appendices to the Ten Commandments.  I may never have understood it or why I was using it, but I did (very occasionally) get correct answers and that was enough for me.

     As “Algebra” was a paper in the Maths O Level, and we had to have maths to go to university, it was justification enough for most of us as to why we were doing it.  I also had a vague idea that it was a way of finding out the value of something you didn’t know by using figures that you did, discovering an unknown, the value of .  It is not hard to see that such a process appeals to a literary mind as well as a mathematical one – if such distinctions are real or useful.

     My notes end with a description of something that I saw while I was having my cup of tea at the end of my swim: a father and young son playing a game of chess. 

     I realized, as I saw them, that I had not seen anyone playing chess in the pool café, draughts, dominoes, and cards, yes, but chess never.  It also struck me that chess is often played intergenerationally, you can never assume that just because there is an age difference, that the older is going to beat the younger. 

    Father and son might have been evenly matched: the board is the thing, not the age of the hands moving the pieces.

     Many years ago, I was in Norway and in a public park next to the main road there were a series of large chess boards set out on the floor with oversize pieces to move around.  One game I noted was being played between an elderly retired man, and a much younger man wearing an orange mini skirt and white calf-length boots.  There were spectators for that game, but not concerned with the mini-skirted man, no one looked at him, just the progress of the pieces.  The game weas truly the thing.

     In some way or other I felt that the chess game was connected (at least in my mind) to my other notes.  But the poem is not developing.

     I hope that writing this out has ordered my thinking in some ways and that tomorrow I can go back to my notes and to my sketchy draft and make something of it.

     Or not, of course.  Failure is also positive!