A pre Christmas adventure!

It wasn’t my fault. It was because my wallet was black.

Or I could blame Ceri. I was wearing the wireless headphones with the Afternoon Play on Radio 4 soothing my ears. It was a twee version of ‘The Borrowers’. I have to admit that when it comes to the afternoon play I prefer something with someone like Janet Suzman in it (a voice made for radio) and themes touching on all the major horrors of humankind. You know the sort of play: one that suddenly stops just after one of the major characters makes a portentous statement which leaves you wondering what the hell is going on and then there is the continuity announcer dragging you back to ‘reality.’ Whatever.

The point was that I was listening to a radio play when I should have been elsewhere.

Why I should have been elsewhere relates back to a small oblong of printed paper which had details of my appointment with the medical person who is giving me stern looks and sharp words about my weight. I should have gone to see Pablo (sic.) on the 15th of December in Room 18 of our Medical Centre.

It does not take the sharpest mind to look at that “should have” in the previous sentence to work out that I may, inadvertently have transposed those two numbers. Which I did, realizing on the 17th of December that it was two days after the date at which I should have been in the centre.

As Pablo (who is a mere child and therefore lacks the decency and tact to restrain him from nagging his elders) would undoubtedly have used this mistake to add vigour to his admonishes I was somewhat reluctant to shuffle into the centre and admit my guilt.

However, as my medication has recently been changed as an experiment I had only been given enough to take me up to round about the date of my next appointment. On the 15th. I was therefore getting perilously low on the pills and had to get more.

Therefore, biting the bullet (which was more than I could do with the pills) I marched into the centre and attempted to explain what had happened. This went relatively well and I was given another appointment with Pablo in January. The pills could, I knew, be supplied by going to the pharmacy in the centre where a few clicks on the computer and a prescription would fall into my hands.

Unfortunately I had forgotten my e-book to make the inevitable waiting bearable but following the tradition of asking ¿Ultimo? To the scattered fragments of humanity littering the seats around the pharmacy I managed to identify the gentleman who was last and take my seat. Once again I marvelled at the complex social and psychological problems which faced each new comer who, after asking who was last, then had to take a seat in the rows of seats down the corridor from the door of the pharmacy at the end of said corridor.

I remember once being shown a very funny (and deeply disturbing) animated cartoon film about the correct etiquette a gentleman should adopt when entering a public convenience and selecting an appropriate urinal. The film adopted the form of a public service announcement and the voice over was delivered in a deadpan manner which increased the humour. Needless to say the logic which determined the selection became more and more extended and the film ended in mayhem and considerable carnage. I feel that such a film could be made based on the complexity of the moves (people do not keep to the same seats throughout their wait) in our medical centre. I sometimes feel that a newspaper should take a photograph of the corridor and the seats then take another photo of a new arrival and ask the readers put an ‘X’ where the person would be most likely to sit. Compared to this the chess problem would be easy.

After my endless wait which I filled by jotting down some responses to the P G Wodehouse stories that I have been reading recently I eventually made my way into the holy of holies. And was told that my new drugs were not on the system and even if they were I would not be entitled to them until January. The only option was to see a ‘Medico.’ As I have now become partially acclimatized to nugatory waiting I returned to the desk where I attempted to explain to the same person who had given me a new appointment for Pablo in January that I needed to see a doctor to get my new pills. She now adopted Pablo’s technique and gave me a good talking to intimating that to run out of pills was patient behaviour of the most pernicious kind. At that moment Pablo appeared on the edge of my vision smiled at me in an pitying manner and passed on.

I was given an appointment for a quarter to four in the afternoon of the same day. Today. I was well pleased. Things seemed to be working out well. I was so complacent that I decided, on my return to the flat, to clean the floors. I am no sloven and I relish cleanliness; but you have to understand that all our floors are tile, so to clean them is no mere running of the hoover around but an altogether more serious affair of brush and pan and mop and pail. So you will appreciate my positive state of mind that I contemplated this Herculean task with something approaching composure and Radio 4 on the headphones.

I had extended the area of operations to the balcony when, with the sun tempting me to a laze with a cup of tea I glanced at my watch and noted that it was a quarter to four. I now know what Saul must have felt like when the scales fell from his eyes – I immediately remembered that I should have been in the medical centre.

In less time than was physically possible (and keeping roughly to the speed limits) I got to the medical centre. In a sort of staggering run from the car I attempted both to rush to my late appointment and also to brush the tell tale signs of cleaning which had besmirched my jeans. Arriving at the door of the centre I felt in my pocket for my wallet which had my medical card and the appointment details.

Nothing. Empty.

Spain is not the sort of country that you can get anything without a number, an official number, on an official card.

With sinking heart I approached the counter for the third time in as many hours. I poured out my sorry tale in at least three languages and maintained that my wallet was lost. They eventually pitied me and directed me to a room and a doctor.

I was flustered and thinking about my wallet and when I had last seen it. Then the doctor appeared and called my name.

He asked me how I was and, as he turned to the computer I poured out my sorry tale again. At the end of it, he said, in Spanish that he had not understood a single word! As I had repeated (roughly) what I had said at the counter downstairs, I realised just how eager the girls must have been to get rid of me. They must have adopted the age old strategy for inexplicable situations and pushed it up to the next level and dismissed it.

I know that this doctor can speak good English but he refuses (quite rightly) to use it unless there is total incomprehension bordering on violence. I therefore revisited my previous multi-lingual explanation and tried to bring it back into the bounds of something approaching Spanish. This I eventually did (with minimal help from the doctor) and all was eventually made well. My blood pressure was lower; my next appointment was confirmed; my next blood test scheduled; my prescription given; my next general prescription date noted.

All I needed to do now was to collect my wallet from the flat and go to the Chemist and get my subsidised prescription.

But my wallet was not in the flat. As the saying goes, the more I looked for it, the more it wasn’t there! All the obvious places were checked. I retraced by steps. I checked everything three times and took everything out of anything that I had put things in. I thus followed Madster’s recipe for finding things. But I didn’t. It resolutely refused to be found.

I now have my wallet. It was not in the flat. It was in the car. It was on the passenger’s side front seat. It was black you see. Like the seat. I had not noticed it. Neither, more to the point had any passing thief.

I poured myself a cup of tea.

It's all downhill now!

Is it possible to be allergic to Christmas?

For the last two successive years I have been hors de combat for the actual day. My pathetic attempts to eat the truly delicious meal which passed me by two years ago remain as wounds in my culinary memory which are still painful to revisit. Last year I had to lapse into blissful unconsciousness in my small bedroom while the whole of the rest of the family ate in the dining room.

Today, the first day in Christmas Week, I felt distinctly unwell. I dragged myself from bed to have a shower and then seriously considered returning to bed to continue the great tradition of festive failure that has characterised my approach to one of the jolliest days in the calendar.

Even with the best will in the world I still think that I would be on shaky ground if I tried to intimate to anyone who knows me that my malaise was in some way linked to a well thought out physical expression to a moral objection to the progressive commercialization of Christmas.

I am a man who made it part of his personal credo never to find himself living more than three miles from a branch of Marks and Spencer. I am also a person who can be deflected from serious purpose in a moment by a well dressed shop window for things that I would never consider buying. It therefore follows that it would be disingenuous to pretend that ‘buying things’ has ever been something inimical to my way of life.

Perhaps it is a rejection of the ‘vulgarization’ of a Christian festival. As Christianity is a bit of a Johnny come lately to claiming the ancient Yuletide and pagan date as its own, it might be said that the festival is returning to its more sybaritic roots. My Christmas tree with five sets of lights, heavy with baubles and topped with a filial (which denies composed description) is hardly understatement. My Belen (the stable scene with 15cm figures) has a cast of thousands and six wise men. It also has a (15cm) figure of the caganer next to the stable whose appearance and function I will leave in the decorous Spanish of our version of the Wikipedia, “Un caganer es una figura de una persona defecando que se suele colocar en los belenes.” So hardly without a certain degree of vulgarity there!

It is a mystery.

There are however a few precious days in which my constitution could be encouraged to sort itself out so that I will be able to participate in the solid and liquid pleasures that the day usually holds. I live in hope!

Although the days continue cold we have been treated to a staggering parade of casually spectacular sunsets. Living in a town or city, too often buildings impede the constantly changing display but looking out to the open sea one is staggered sometimes by the path of liquid gold shimmering across the swells leading to a cloud diffused light show of sunshine which bleeds from the central fire of yellow into a whole palette of glowing colour.

And just when you are thinking that this amazing show is Nature’s gift, free, gratis and for nothing – you remember the rent on the balcony on which you are standing and then think about the laughable horror of wilting pound sterling visibly shrinking from the haughty and contemptuous sneer of the muscular euro.

I always knew, instinctively, that you should spend money as soon as you get it; that saving was full of bad calories and that owning three ipods shows what a heroic determination I have always shown to be a good solider fighting on the front line for reflation and the saving of the world economy.

Where is my medal please!

'Tis the season to be jolly!

The happy chatter of children’s voices.

Where does that happen then? Where precisely can you hear this “happy chatter” as opposed to the raucous shouting which punctuated the afternoon as I attempted to read “A Lust for Window Sills” a lover’s guide to British buildings from portcullis to pebble-dash by Harry Mount published by Little, Brown ISBN 978 1 4087 0900 7.

Admittedly some of those children were almost three or four feet apart so anything less than a yell would be incapable of penetrating the sticky air of a beach open to the sea. Furthermore, as if by a malicious twist of municipal fate one of those open weave wigwam rope climbing frames has been plonked not far from our back wall. This acts as a positive encouragement to the neophyte humans to leap about vertically and horizontally emitting high pitched whoops of noisy triumph as they move from level to level.

The devilish construction of these contraptions seems purpose built to obviate the only hope of the aspiring reader in the vicinity that as these creatures scuttle higher and higher they will be claimed by Newtonian physics and be dashed to silence on their plummet to earth. It never happens. Cursed be the political correctness that employs three-dimensional geometry to preserve the lusty vocal chords of these obstreperous pests!

The book, however, did manage to draw me in, in spite of the cacophony on the fringes of my irritation.

The book is written in 31 fairly short chapters with some desperately unfunny chapter headings like ‘1666 and All That – Professor Dr Sir Christopher Wren Arrives’ and ‘Strawberry Hill For Ever – An Eighteenth Century Gothick Romance’ or a studied popularism like ‘The Brideshead Revisited School of Baroque Architecture’ and ‘The Empire Strikes Back – India Comes to Gloucestershire.’ These chapter headings give you a flavour of the book: it tries to wear its learning lightly but it merely comes over as crass.

To be fair Harry Mount encourages his readers in the introduction to dip into the book, “this book is a dipper not a read-straight-througher” – though I read it from beginning to end because it is, quite frankly presented in a narrative form. Mount has constructed the book to include anecdotes and autobiographical snippets and facts and (dreadful) black and white illustrations a style which he hopes will be “like being shown round Edwardian public baths in Harrogate by Alan Bennett.” It isn’t. He lacks Bennett’s seemingly unforced easy wit and perception, he is much more like an over earnest pally teacher trying to make a hard subject palatable.

I did enjoy part of this book and I treasure some of the facts that Mount gives. How have I gone through my life with not knowing that in battlements or crenulations the gap is called a ‘crenel’ and the blocks of stone on either side are know as ‘merlons’?

Mount also makes a telling comment that, “It isn’t surprising that the country that has stayed richer longer than any other in history has a greater variety of architecture than anywhere else.” And the equally telling pendent, “But we refuse to acknowledge it.”

This is a book whose impulse, to popularise the appreciation of architecture on a day to day basis, is laudable – but I don’t think that this is necessarily the book to do it. It’s worth a look, even if it isn’t worth a purchase. I should add that my copy of the book in the publisher’s information states, ‘First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Little, Brown. Reprinted 2008 (twice)’ so what do I know about popularity!

I have had my faith in the Tabac shattered as they did not come up with the goods as far as the replacement of my little white bulb for the Christmas tree lights.

I was met with blank incomprehension with just a tinge of contempt about my presumption in asking for a bulb in the first place. The supermarket was a little more accommodating in so far as I was vouchsafed a dismissive wave of the hand from an assistant and a blank denial of possession from another. No suggestion that I might try anywhere else to obtain a bulb – which is par for the course. Nevertheless I will persist. This bulb is exactly the sort of thing that you would be able to find in Woolworths.

I never thought that I would speak nostalgically about a store like Woolworths, but there again when I was a kid I don’t think that I would ever have thought that a store like Woolworth could ever go bust. When I was younger the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton was regarded as the Holy Grail for anyone wanting to marry for money!

How times change!

Seek and ye shall find!

Defiantly I have kept the balcony doors open.

This far into December it seems worth it, if only to irritate the people back home. I have to admit that it has been one of those days when I considered putting the central heating on as well but that would be cheating in the same way as café culture in northern climates survives with space heaters.

When I finally ventured out into the sun (fully clothed) I was shamed to see a couple of people throwing themselves into the sea – one of them ripping off all his clothes and frolicking naked in the icy waves. As this was done to shrieks of laughter from his companions and much taking of photographs I feel that this was more a statement than a bathe. Much like my reading in the afternoon sun well sheltered from the slightest breeze whose softest touch would remind you of the month!

The rituals of Christmas are beginning to parade themselves before me. The first today was when the top set of lights on the Christmas tree went out. I half heartedly checked the plug and connections; considered checking the fuse but felt that it was far too technical and fiddly and finally looked at the branches and wondered if it was possible to take off the string of lights without stripping the tree.

I then noticed that this set of lights had one of those bulbs with a splash of white paint on the tip. This, I knew was important as some hazy memory returned telling me that this was the outward sign of inward electrical safety. I am now not used to replaceable bulbs so I gingerly pulled on the tip of the glass and low and behold it came out. Microscopic examination revealed (I think) that the filament was broken so it was simply a case of replacing the bulb for the array to burst forth in multicoloured lighting glory.

The first shops that I asked about a replacement bulb looked at me as if I was insane.

Now I am prepared to believe that my Spanish was capable of the most amazing interpretations (in a recent screening of the film ‘Heat’ I translated “this shirt was given to me by my son” as “my son needs an operation” – I take comfort from the fact that at least one noun was common to both versions) but I did take the bulb with me so that I could point at the actual item that I needed. This made no difference at all.

In my experience Spanish people have two responses to their inability to provide you with what you want. The first is pained indignation that you have asked them for anything in the first place, while the second is complete contemptuous dismissal that they could have, would have, or ever will have what you want.

Asking where you might find the item merely produces the vaguest of indication of a location which prompts you to start on a futile soul destroying pilgrimage from shop shrine to wayside street monument all of which do not contain the item you require.

The only reasonable response to a commodity request that I have discovered in my eighteen months in this country is to go to the Tabac.

Whatever you want a simple request to these purveyors of cancer sticks will usually prompt a retirement to the back of the shop and a later reappearance with what you want. I don’t know why it works, but it does. You want a stamp: Tobacconist. You want a walking stick: Tobacconist. You want a small ball point pen to fit in your wallet: Tobacconist. You want an A4 envelope: Tobacconist. You want a pen with a built in laser pointer: Tobacconist. You want open heart surgery: look elsewhere. Most needs though: Tobacconist.

Tomorrow: the test.

The end of the beginning?

Alas! The School That Sacked Me seems to be entering its final degenerative phase in its downfall.

The Owner, driven by her charmingly idiosyncratic view of education, has now shown herself to be mendaciously self-destructive. I can only hope that her dysfunctional implosion finally encourages parents to do the honourable thing.

The Owner’s view of who is important is somewhat exclusive and excludes pupils, staff and parents and suppliers, oh yes and local and governmental authorities. Her astonishing lack of concern makes her a difficult target. When you meet a person who considers a school as her personal dolls’ house with the contents of that ‘dolls’ house’ able to be manipulated, repositioned or discarded at her whim, it is not to be expected that the dolls start fighting back.

There comes a point, however, when even the very stones start to rebel. I know that anticipations of a new headteacher vary, but there is an expectation that the person in post will have some relevant educational qualifications and some experience of the various levels of education that will form the school. The Owner has decided that these basic requirements are not necessary for her dolls’ house!

In the ‘real world’ I would say that The Owner has taken that one step too far and disaster will assuredly follow her ignorantly petulant appointment. But, given the back catalogue of over a decade of impossibly unprofessional behaviour which has gone signally unpunished by the appropriate authorities – who knows?

Meanwhile there is reading.

I am getting back into the stories of Algernon Blackwood one of the true masters of suggestive horror. ‘The Damned’ is a remarkable story of virtually nothing (and yet everything!) describing the visit of two ‘arty’ types to the country house of a friend. This is the setting which gives a vivid personal account of the conflicts destructive bigoted religion enforces on a sense of place all tinged with a whiff of the damned in hell. It is only when the story becomes a little too narrative that it lessens the tension.

It is the sort of story which almost demands a film treatment. There is not that much of a story, but the suggestions in the words could be translated into a very interesting film with a director who uses technique for the narrative. It’s the sort of story which a director like Alejandro Amenábar (‘The Others 2001)could make something of. ‘The Others’ was at least partly based on The Turn of the Screw with its suggestions of horror being far more effective than any deliberate overt physical statement. That sense of suggestiveness is exactly what ‘The Damned’ needs as a cinematic treatment.

I wonder if it has already been done.

Back to the internet.

Another school has shyly popped its head above the parapet of educational indifference and coquettishly beckoned me to come for an interview.

No job of course. Another one of the ‘just checking out for the future’ sort of occasions. If this carries on I am likely to be one of the most interesting potential employees not employed in the whole of Catalonia!

As with so much else it is yet another case of waiting and seeing. but with my love of gadgets I do need other sources of money to feed my habit other than rapidly dwindling savings held, I am sorry to say, in that discredited currency ‘sterling!’

My response to El Crisis has been to revisit the money laundering restaurant. I am probably doing it a grave disservice and perpetrating a serious calumny on a perfectly reputable eatery but, yet again, I was the sole person sitting in the place having a meal. So I had a manager, a bar person, three waiters and a kitchen staff to myself. How do they make money? How much must they have lost in feeding me?

And what a lunch! A subtle bean, prawn and mussel soup (I know that sounds like a culinary oxymoron, but take it from me you had to be there to taste it work!) This was followed by medallions of beef with a savoury sauce on basmati rice, culminating in a home made Tiramisu that would have had Paul One weeping into his café solo! And a glass of red wine for round about a tenner. O tempera O mores!

The e-book continues to please as I relentlessly add more and more books to its ever accommodating SD card enhanced memory. Given the grotesquely high pricing of commercial e-books I have no desire to purchase any.

Reading the comments on any site concerned with e-books it is obvious that there is a surge of what appears to me to be quite justified rage about publishers not passing on the obvious savings that they make by not having to produce a physical book and therefore have no shipping, storage and expensive commercial outlet expenses. In some cases the electronic e-book is actually MORE expensive than its paper equivalent. It seems as though the previous experience of the film and music industries in product pricing is something that publishers think they can ignore. Who was it who said that the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history!

Luckily for me there is a whole life time of ‘out of copyright’ reading that is electronically available free, gratis and for nothing on a multitude of sites. All those books that one had to pretend that one had read in university will now come back and form an orderly line, their little electronic impulses waiting their turn to tickle my neurons. Just think of all those brick-like novels from the nineteenth century which form the impossible walls of reading than even a dedicated bibliophile will find impossible, let alone a university student!

Some libraries have whole shelves of Ruskin in elegant closely printed and sometimes illustrated volumes of his collected works (perhaps I still have some in the anonymous boxes in storage.) How many books did Thackeray publish - most of which I haven’t read. I could always revisit pre-Shakespearean drama.

No, pre-Shakespearean drama is one genre too far – but merely concentrating on the copyright free parts of the twentieth century will afford fascinating acres of forest saved if I read the books in electronic form.

And for nothing!

Wet sand and a goodish book - who can ask for more?

The best you can say about a day of rain is that it makes the beach look clean and changes the colour of the sand.

I have learned not to resent these days of dampness so much as they also give a veneer of cleanliness to the pavements which, in this part of the world, are not washed by celestial moisture in quite the same way and with quite the same regularity as they are in my home country!

‘Not resenting’ is not the same as liking and I look forward to the progression of clear, cold days which characterise the winter here.

The winter is also the time when the municipality makes good all those things which will not be able to be mended in the summer when all the good tourists pour in and dislodge their cigarette stubs and money. It sometime seems as if we are due for some sort of royal visit as little persons in fluorescent yellow jackets descend on us and rip up roads, change sewers and strip off topsoil in what appears to be an uncoordinated rampage of ostentatious civic spending. Then we see nothing but the refuse collectors for weeks.

We do apparently have a police force but, apart from the two dune bike riders who ‘patrol’ the beach in the summer and are conspicuous by their absence in the cooler months, I am prepared to side with the natives here who opine that the police are always “in the bars” fortifying themselves for the fray rather than dealing with it!

Talking of illegality, yesterday I met a past parent from The School That Sacked Me. This was while I was still reeling from hearing how much it was going to cost to replace a (very, very, thin) arm on my favourite Silhouette™ glasses. Ophthalmic technology seems to borrow from the logo ridden rag trade where it appears with both that less is much, much more. The skimpier the bikini the more you pay. I believe. This is not from personal experience you understand but one does want to feel that Mies van der Rohe’s comment on architecture is a general rather than a subject specific truth!

The parent and I after effusive greetings set about doing what all do when two or three are gathered together with memories of that infamous place of learning: we shared comforting abuse at the expense of The Owner and the travesty she owns. This parent was a person who spoke to the school about her own experiences in Burma to give weight and reality to our efforts to raise money by means of a Readathon. The same Readathon about which The Owner and her minions have said nothing to anybody.

How one wishes that one could take her Iago-like silence (though she doesn’t even say, “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.”) and give Graziano’s reply, “Torments will ope your lips.” If only!

The parent said that, because of the remorselessly increasing fees in The School That Sacked Me she had to withdraw her son, but she was eloquent in her denunciation of the place and all its works.

Her son, though a positive star in my Maths class has struggled in his new state school and now she was desperate. So desperate indeed, that she asked if I was giving private lessons! To ask me to give Maths lessons is akin to asking Lazarus about life insurance: we both know that the subject is quite important but we are not quite sure about what relation we have to it!

I may still be able to recite the formula for solving quadratic equations (“ALL over 2a!”) but I’m buggered if I’d be able to apply it and so what ever residual quantity of scruples I still possess preclude my even remotely being taken for a Maths teacher!

The parent and I parted with warm wishes for the immanent destruction of The Owner and even warmer wishes for our mutual survival!

I have started reading ‘The Black Arrow’ by Robert Louis Stevenson a novel set in the times of Henry VI and concerned with a wronged gentleman fighting to rescue his true love etc etc and all the dialogue in pseudo-medieval English. Were it not for the status of the author I think I might have given up already, but I’m over half way already, so the adding of another Stevenson novel is worth the effort. I think.

Having had a cursory look at information readily available on the web about the novel I find that my lack of enthusiasm matches Stevenson’s own. He intimated that he did not want to write an introduction for the novel when his collected works came to be published and, further, in a letter to a friend he described how “the influenza has busted me a good deal” so he took the easy way out and indulged in writing in archaic language which he described as, “Tushery by the mass” and he summed up his story by saying, “may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush!” Not exactly shining commendation!

The story was serialised in Young Folks; A Boys' and Girls' Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature a title which is surely just about enough to put anyone off reading anything inside such a ponderously labeled magazine!

If only for that reason I will obviously continue with the story to the end. ‘The Black Arrow’ is the sort of thing that Aunt Bet and my Dad will have read as they steadily exhausted the literary resources of the library in Abergwinfi - omniverous readers as they both were when children!

Sometimes it’s easy to see where character traits have come from!

The parental twist

Some books have to be read twice.

And some books shouldn’t be read once.

Though it’s only after you’ve read them that you find out which one is true for you and for that particular book!

There are all sorts of reasons for reading books twice. With ‘The Big Sleep’ by Raymond Chandler it’s to find out what the hell has gone on during the novel. I took it as the only English language book on a holiday to France. At the end of the holiday I was brown and I knew who dun it. Though that information has slipped out of my memory now, so perhaps I’ll have to read it again!

‘Catch-22’ you re-read because it is darkly funny, and laugh out loud funny every time you read it. ‘Winnie the Pooh’ has to be re-read because who can take in philosophy of such complexity at a first reading? ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a drug and sometimes you just have to give in to a benign habit. The best short stories by Saki, O. Henry and Maugham always delight no matter how many times you read them.

All of the above are classics read and reread by millions but there are personal favourites too, odd things that may not be to the popular taste but give an individual pleasure which is sometimes difficult to explain unless you are talking to yourself: ‘Old Saint Paul’s’ by William Harrison Ainsworth; The Book of Jonah; ‘The Age of Austerity’ edited by Michael Sissons; The Lion Book of Religious Verse and The National Curriculum.

Apart from the fact that one of those is not necessarily one of my favourites, let us continue and think about ‘Great Expectations’. A book well worth re-reading for all sorts of reasons but one in particular. I think that Dickens does have a real perception of what it means to be a child. When I read the novel when I was very young I had no problem in imagining a person like Miss Haversham living a few streets away from me in Cathays in Cardiff; I was able to sympathize with Pip’s horrified realization that he really wasin peril when Magwich told him that he wouldn’t even be safe if he pulled the bed clothes over his head! Reading the novel as an adult gives an entirely different perception. I’m glad that I have both readings.

For some reason I felt drawn to re-read ‘Father and Son’ by Edmund Gosse (1907). My paper copy is still locked away in storage, but I did have an electronic copy on my e-book reader.

My memory of this book was of an autobiographical account of an impossible childhood in the second half of the nineteenth century where the parents were members of a narrow bigoted religious sect (The Plymouth Brethren) and the poor boy had a horrendous childhood deprived of normal experiences and instead was chained to a microscope producing intricate drawings for his ‘scientist’ father.

This reading was very different. There was same suffocating horror as one imagined oneself growing up in that household, but this time as I read through I sensed a real attempt on Edmund Gosse’s part to emphasise the genuine passionate concern by his parents’ for his development. It was also easier as an adult to pick up the irony with which Edmund Gosse wrote, so the two newish perceptions made this a much more satisfying read.

Gosse also emphasises what a strange boy he must have appeared to others and what a prig he was. His pride at being admitted to the adult section in his religious group at the age of only ten is described in a less than spiritual way and his poking out his tongue at the youngsters who had not made it was disarmingly honest.

When the final break comes with his father it is described at first in measured terms but Edmund cannot keep the rancour out of his final assessment when he describes his father’s lack of compromise in his expectations for his son’s complete acceptance of the tenets of the sect with which he was associated.

It is a touching working out of a difficult childhood in a way in which is interesting, cathartic and compelling.

If it’s true.

The power of this ‘autobiography’ is essentially contained in its adherence to the facts which comprise the upbringing that Edmund describes.

In a book which I haven’t read, ‘Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse’ by Ann Thwaite is published by Faber, Thwaite questions the factual baisis of ‘Father and Son’. She quotes Henry James (a friend of Edmund Gosse) who once said that Edmund had “a genius for inaccuracy." She also quotes TH Huxley who said, "autobiographies are essentially works of fiction, whatever biographies may be."

This is not merely extra interesting information, it strikes at the heart of the book. If this is not autobiography but literature in the same way that ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Sons and Lovers’ combine autobiographical elements with a constructed story then my attitude will change in some sort of subtle way.

I will still like the book. Who cannot be drawn to a description of a family reading of the bible where Edmund says, “In our lighter moods, we turned to the ‘Book of Revelation!’” Or when describing his father’s relentless praying: “It might be said that he stromed the citadels of God’s grace, refusing to be baffled, urging his intercessions without mercy upon a Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive to his prayers or wearied by them.” I also like Edmund’s description of refusing to try and evangelize his friends by saying that he “let sleeping dogmas lie.”

Edmund wrote this autobiography twenty years after his father had died, and he obviously structured what he had to say by artistic manipulation and with the advantage of considerable hindsight. But for me this remains one of those books which define a certain approach to a life which illustrates the dilemma of the generational divide made worse by extremism and a sort of emotional tyranny.

And worth a re-read, perhaps after I have read Thwaite’s book!

What is that?

A silhouette by nature is insubstantial.

This was borne in on me by the tragedy which struck this lunchtime. My silhouette™ glasses have broken. This time is isn’t merely the attachment to the lens it’s the arm of the glasses themselves. Snapped!

Now the cost of these glasses has been on a par with the price of women (being above rubies) and I had a not unreasonable expectation that the metal sides of these spectacles should have been unbreakable. Alas! For the naive belief that advertisements are true! And for the even more naïf belief that living in another country would be no drawback to cheap repair and replacement!

I am now back to the heavy, irritating glasses with lenses looking like jam pot bottoms.

There is of course an alternative.

I gave up the wearing of contact lenses some time ago and, apart from a few isolated occasions, and for no apparent reason, I have worn glasses constantly. I could go back to contacts but as I am now not only short sighted but also long sighted there are problems with the choice of lens.

The history of my attempts, ably abetted by optician, to get used to a whole range of contact lenses which might be able to cope with this optical problem is a never ending story of failure.

I have tried bi-focal contact lenses; graded strength contact lenses; different material of contact lenses; different strength contact lenses. All failures.

The eventual ‘solution’ was to have one eye corrected for close work and the other eye corrected for distance. “Your brain,” I was told by the optician, “will learn to compensate and choose the appropriate eye for the appropriate job.” Not true.

I also have a series of half frame glasses which are supposed to be able to be used with the contact lenses to allow me to . . .

Alternatively I can go to Sitges and get the things repaired in double quick time. Life, I am afraid, is just too short to try and find the requisite combination of on-ball lenses and nose-adjacent lenses.

And reading is always something which tests the most careful arrangement of glasses, distance, lenses etc. Whereas wearing nothing in front of the eye is still the best for reading that I have found. Or is that merely an argument for indolence?

Those with perfect eyesight will never know the sheer time wasting irritation of faulty eyesight. Losing glasses; cleaning glasses; adjusting glasses; losing glasses again; rain on glasses; growing out of glasses; changing glasses; not quite seeing properly; glasses steaming up. And all the expense!

And don’t get me started on contact lenses. Try saying, “tiny fragment of grit” to a confirmed contact lens wearer and watch the reaction. The eye is a wonderful thing and will go into ‘automatic’ when it encounters a sharp foreign body: it causes the eye lids to close and tears to be produced to wash away the irritation. This is fine. Unless you have a contact lens on your eye in which case the automatic closing of the eyelids merely ensures that the sharp foreign body (did I mention ‘sharp’?) stays exactly where it hurts most.

There are advantages in an out of focus world of course: as a metaphor for the state of the planet; softening wrinkles; creating exciting abstract designs from unprepossessing blocks of flats and making driving just that little bit more challenging!

My Christmas tree looks spectacular, each light with its halo, courtesy of myopia.

And that comment about driving was only a joke. Honestly!

Aren't books real life?

A day of complete indulgence!

I don’t really know if it is a commendation or a condemnation of my essential character that this ‘indulgence’ has entailed a compulsive reading of the book I managed to wrest from the clutches of the post office yesterday, ‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ a Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films by David Thomson.

The problem (or pleasure) in reading about films is that the whole experience of watching them comes back to the reader, especially if the critic doing the writing is capable of encapsulating an evocative element of the work in his description or offering a revelatory fact to develop the perception of the film. And David Thomson is always capable of that!

This book is best read in conjunction with Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film – which is just as stimulatingly personal and provocative as ‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ I cannot recommend both too highly. Buy them! Read them!

I have read about films that I haven’t thought about in years and been stimulated to make fresh protestations that I really will attempt to find a copy of others that I have been trying to watch for years!

I have managed to drag myself away from the book to make my Christmas tree a little less tasteful.

The Christmas and Yuletide story is hardly a study in restraint what with stars, kings, heavenly choruses and half the working population of the area turning up – and that’s before you think about the pagan associations! I therefore think that a Christmas tree decked out with restraint and a harmonious eye to design is somehow contrary to the spirit of the season!

There is also the problem that I do not think that I could actually produce a tree which could stand in a shop window without comment. Go with what you do best: stylistic chaos!

The decoration of our little resort is spectacularly unimpressive with only two or three municipal messages shining above a few chosen streets. Some of the hotels and blocks of flats have attempted their own lighting by using the cheap and cheerful alternative of light ropes.

These ropes of flashing lights used to be the preserve of the rich but now they are the cheap alternative to design thought. Their use is unimaginative and the light lines look like childish scrawl in the darkness, but there isn’t much else so it will have to do.

Perhaps the streets will sprout more satisfactory illumination in the next week, though I think that El Crisis is being used as an easy excuse for a lack of municipal extravagance.

Hard times ahead!

Eat and Read

Fresh from my success in the production of vaguely recognizable Welsh Cakes I have been searching for ways to make the finished articles more appealing.

My cakes were round rather than having the appropriate fluted appearance. I have therefore searched the shops in Castelldefels for the appropriate cutter. The most likely shops to contain these invaluable accoutrements are the Chinese Bazaars without which I am convinced that the entire life of Spain would cease. They have become the ‘corner shops’ which contain all those items that you search for with increasing frustration in the more conventional shops of the town.

In this case these emporia failed to deliver. The best I could do in something approaching an ironmonger’s shop was to find a selection of mini ‘fun’ cutters which were not what I had in mind.

This was not, however, the point of my wandering through town. I was making my reluctant way to the Post Office to collect a new book which had failed to be delivered yesterday – in spite of the fact that I was in during the normal delivery times for the post.

The Post Office was its usual heaving self and when I got my ticket I was some twenty or so numbers behind the one being served at the time. There is a particular sort of depression which is only found while waiting interminably in a queue for some supercilious functionary to give you a parcel that THEY have failed to deliver!

I will not dwell on the horrors that I had to suffer stuck in that bloody place for over half an hour, I will merely say that the person who FINALLY served me was delightful and human. I have no idea how she managed to get a job in the modern Spanish counter postal service.

The most important element in the waiting game which is the post office was that the result of my delay was my possession of a new book. This is ‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ a Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films by David Thomson (Masterpieces, Oddities and Guilty Pleasures with just a few disasters.) David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film which is an encyclopaedic, academic and deeply personal book and a stimulating pleasure to read.

‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ is an equal pleasure which actually encourages Thomson to “meet the question frequently asked of anyone with a reputation for knowing about films. It’s ‘What should I see?’ So ‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ is a response to that uncertainty.’

It is a celebration of film which reaches back to “1885 and ranging across the world – the landmarks are here, the problem films, a few guilty pleasures, a few forlorn sacred cows, some surprises.” Just to illustrate the range the first film discussed is from 1948 ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’ while the last is Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’ from 1970. The films are given a page each and are listed in alphabetical order so that a sequential reading produces some very odd neighbours: ‘Claire’s Knee’ is next to ‘Cleopatra’; ‘The Big Sleep’ next to ‘The Birds’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange’ next to ‘Close Encounters of the third Kind’. It is not so much the incongruity as the imaginative stimulus of thinking of these juxtapositions that gives pleasure!

The description of the first film I looked up, ‘The Bitter Tea of General Yen’, was enthusiastic and revealing: the information that Capra (director) was trying to re-ignite a failed relationship with Stanwyck (leading lady) during the making of the film gives a very different reading of some of the action seen in the finished product and Thomson’s positive evaluation matches my own.

Further reading revealed a range of personal responses which ranged from enthusiastic agreement to astonished rejection. There are many, many films of which I have never heard. This is obviously a book which is going to repay an extended relationship.

I look forward to following up some of Thomson’s commendations.

The only difficulty is finding a DVD store with the requisite range!

But hope springs eternal.

Music and electronics don't mix!

I have lost three composers.

The latest edition of the BBC Music Magazine arrived today in its silver plastic bag to ensure that I got my CD safely. I rarely listen to a music centre any more so the disc is whisked off to the computer to be fed into iTunes so that it can be downloaded onto my ipod(s).

It says something for my galloping gadget getting that I have three ipods with a combined capacity of 300GB. There is a very good reason for my having all three machines but it takes more than the description in a blog to convince; you need to be present to be bowled over by my informed enthusiasm in person!

The disc was duly fed into the computer and the BBC being the BBC had already downloaded the track details to the great librarian in hyperspace so all I had to do was click a button and the whole process was automatic.

The only problem came when I tried to find where the music was in my collection. The three composers’ names failed to bring the pieces to the screen. The titles of the pieces all failed too. I then noticed that the relevant information was being sorted on the name of the orchestra and the number of the disc. I could find the individual tracks by typing in their names, but who knows individual names of the tracks of ‘Pohádka’ (?) or even from the rather better known ‘Mother Goose Suite’ or ‘The Love for Three Oranges’? And when I raised one track I couldn’t get the whole album to appear!

I realise that I am not usual in having the whole of my CD collection of over a thousand discs on my ipod. And the way in which the albums are listed follows the learning curve which I went through in getting them on the drive. Some pieces of music are merely listed by track number; others are written (inexplicably) in Chinese; yet others are ascribed to the leading composer on a compilation irrespective of the range of composers found on the disc. Others are so oddly arranged that I sometimes just set the ipod to play ‘tunes’ and am constantly amazed by the eclectic wealth of music that emerges from the ear pieces as pop abruptly changes to plainsong; sonatas to sixties trash; Sibelius segues to the Sex Pistols and Glass stumbles into Greig. Outsiders observing me quietly sitting reading listening to my ipod must assume I am subject to mild fits as I jerk convulsively at some particularly wide jump in musical idiom as one ‘tune’ changes to another.

As far as I can tell the music I have just loaded has gone into that musical limbo which must feature on most ipods which are not loaded with pre packaged electronic pop where the ipod’s inadequate labelling of tracks fails miserably to cope with the multi headings of the classical. To say nothing of the various spellings of Cyrillic names like Tchaikovsky!

I am sure that there are people out there who can text at the speed at which I can type who pity my lack of sophistication in the way that I approach my ipod. Those people who never have to read a handbook no matter how complex the electronic machinery they are called on to work, assume that the machine will do what they want it to as long as they ask in the right way. I, alas, cannot understand the grammar needed to arrange the language which might lead me to a question, let alone browbeat a machine by a multiplicity of key strikes.

But I do still have the disc. And I know that I have an old fashioned machine - like an ordinary computer - that will play it. I will not be defeated by the electronic black hole into which so much computerised information falls and which constitutes the majority of the memory space on most peoples’ computers.

Free the BBC 3!

I’m working on it.

Some of my work was appreciated this morning during the last Spanish lesson of the term. In a (generally) vain effort to get us to talk in Spanish the desks in this conventional class room have been arranged in a ‘U’ format so that we can see each other clearly. As I usually, well, invariably sit at one end of the ‘U’ I am subject to being taken first in any of the innovations of a linguistic nature that the teacher decides to inflict.

Today was the Day of the Welsh Cakes.

We were all supposed to bring in something to eat which was characteristic of the way in which we celebrate Christmas. The Welsh Cakes prompted the teacher to start with me and cross question me (in Spanish) about the way in which we approach the festive time. This turned out to be more of a cross examination and to be far more extended than my vocabulary can stand. When I was asked to describe how to make the Welsh Cakes themselves and having to describe ‘bake stone’ I went, like Pooh Bear, “delicately to pieces!”

I was reminded of Clarrie who during the exchange visit between a German opera company and WNO who when taking a group around the buildings in the open air museum at St Fagans in Cardiff was asked what a circular, open sided, thatched structure was. Clarrie’s German translation was, “This is a circus of the male of the hen.” This was her take on ‘cockpit!’ My attempts to get the message across were certainly on a par with hers!

The important thing however was that the Welsh Cakes were well received. Other students brought in things which were also almost entirely composed of calories and more calories so that by the end of the lesson we were all suffering from various forms of sugar rush. It was probably just as well that we were not able to drink coffee as well as the double boost would probably have encouraged some of us to start teaching Spanish ourselves!

Luckily our little feat finished before anyone has over stepped the mark of linguistic limitations!

But it’s only a matter of time.

Party food!

A casual reading (or should I say ‘reading’) of a Catalan cook book has borne strange fruit today.

Reading a cookery book in English is akin to bluffing you way through a foreign language; not only for the number of terms in French with which our cookery is littered, but also for the unwritten assumptions of knowledge that link the steps from one point in a recipe to another.

Many times in a recipe I have stumbled against a hidden assumption that makes achieving the next step impossible – though guess work has sometimes produced interesting concoctions. And edible too!

The problems with cook books are exacerbated when the language is generally incomprehensible: even linking my little French and less Spanish doesn’t prepare one for the vocabulary of meat and veg. that is necessary for understanding even fairly simple lists of ingredients.

However, I stumbled my way through convincing myself that I had understood enough to evaluate the recipes and discard them. I had bought a tray of mushrooms earlier in the day and I was looking for a way to cook them with chicken.

Eventually I decided on a lemon marinade and using the mushrooms in a sort of paella base for the meat. Except, as I soon discovered, all the lemons had been thrown out as looking “not right” so the marinade was adjusted accordingly. In case anyone is wondering, that simply means that the marinade was made exactly as per recipe except for the lemons.

Lunch was a little late but the end result was more than palatable.

Of course this cooking was merely displacement activity for my proposed second attempt at Festive Welsh Cakes. I was hoping that success at the savoury would prompt activity in the sweet area.

I now deviated from the Carys recipe and amalgamated knowledge from other sites. The relative proportions of ingredients were subtly altered, new ones were added and I was ready for the off.

This time I kept the mixed flour and butter as ‘breadcrumbs’ and mixed full cane sugar with fruit and nuts. The resultant mixture when I added the egg looked and felt different and it reminded me immediately of the cakes of my mother and the treat of being allowed to scrape the bowl to get the last remaining remains of the mixture – which I loved!

The heat this time was reduced from ‘burning fiery furnace’ to merely ‘too hot to touch’. The resultant smell also reminded me compellingly of my mother’s kitchen and was welcome rather than yesterday’s acrid pungency and an open window.

The cooking process was leisurely, but I did manage to obtain the ‘caramel’ colour which is the sign of success rather than the . . . well, you can guess.

Tomorrow in my Spanish lesson they will be revealed as the typical cake without which no Welsh home could possibly celebrate the festive season! May I be forgiven!

Talking of food: I also have to eat humble pie. A couple of days ago I made a slighting and cynical reference to Barack Obama’s first volume of memoirs called ‘Dreams from my father.’ I now formally retract the main thrust of my cynicism and admit that the book is compelling.

What I was expecting was some sort of pompous pseudo religious screed linking hardship to fated progress and mealy mouthed platitudinous bunkum. Well, it wasn’t.

Obama’s style is intensely readable and he fashions his life into a satisfying narrative. He structures his experiences with all the urgency of a novel and uses the spaciousness of his prose to produce passages of descriptive beauty.

This is not a memoir of complacency based on rock sure faith; it is more a questioning of identity and a deeply uneasy relationship with religion.

Obama’s background is culturally diverse and he makes the most of the opportunities and frustrations that come with his family history. He is (as far as one can tell) open and disconcertingly frank about difficulties and tensions in his developing life, but he is always capable of making his discoveries something which has significance for all his readers.

At one point when his mother is relating the story of her first meeting with Obama’s father she laughs and Obama writes, “In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up – their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances.” A fine description of some sort of rite of passage that we surely all go through, though possibly not articulated quite as well!

Yes, this memoir is self indulgent and written by a young man. He sometimes strives just a little too hard to pin down the significance of some incidents and his via dolorosa is sometimes a little too wordy and fluent. But this is a fine book which presents a journey of discovery which I was delighted to follow.

From the evidence of this book we are going to have an intelligent, literate and questioning man in the White House. That can only be good.

Can’t it?

Welsh cakes are now a very real threat.

The day after tomorrow is the last lesson of my Spanish classes for this term. In a moment of cruel madness the teacher asked (to general self conscious silence) what we wanted to do on the last day. ¡Fiesta! (that dreaded word!) was brought up by one of the Russians and then elaborated into reality by the offer of real Russian turrón and accepted by an ever grateful teacher.

With painful memories of the primary school ‘Culture Week’ ever ready to inform my gloomy response it has been decided that each of us will bring to the next class something approaching a tasty seasonal comestible with a specific national flavour.

Put on the spot I had no real idea of anything specifically edible that was particularly associated with Wales and Christmas: at least nothing that I was prepared to make for the day after tomorrow!

Welsh cakes seemed like a feasible idea to me. I am prepared to bet that your typical Moroccan, Russian, Indian, Portuguese, Pakistani, French, Algerian and Italian (to give you some idea of the diversity in my class) will not know the seasonal appropriateness of Welsh cakes and will accept them with alacrity. I will also (to the fury of my Welsh speaking friends) throw in a few seasonal phrases in Welsh – they won’t know what has hit them.

There is but one problem.

I have never made a Welsh cake in my life. Eaten them, yes – but actually got my hands doughy, never.

As my recipe books mostly found themselves going to Oxfam I have had to rely on the internet for my guidance. I am going to have to use a frying pan as I have no bake stone, and even if I had I’m not sure that it would be appropriate athwart the radiant rings on an electric cooker anyway!

I am going to put my faith in something which purports to be a favourite recipe for Welsh cakes by Cerys Matthews. She adds a pinch of all spice and more of a mixture of dried fruit in her version. I have decided that the festive element of my Welsh cakes is going to be a fruit and nut mixture as purchased at great expense from Lidl. I might make a batch of the absolutely ordinary ones as well just to be on the safe side!

The ingredients are fairly basic which meant that I had none of them in the house.

Self raising flour is rare in this part of the world and I don’t know the word or words for it in Spanish. I had no raisins, sultanas, butter or caster sugar. I did have an egg! So I went shopping.

I did mean to get a cut out thingie and a rolling pin, but I forgot. Then I thought that it was not really important. A glass will cut out the cakes and a wine bottle can be used as a roller. I had bought three different types of sugar as not one of them looked like caster sugar. My logic is when you don’t have what you should have then a mixture of what you actually do have might do the job. I was, you might say, prepared.

So just setting out the scales and I would be away.

If I had scales. If I knew where they could be.

At least while looking for the scales I did find the plastic box that would do nicely to put the finished Welsh cakes in.

The scales were eventually found under the sink and cleaned up to look as though they might belong in a kitchen. They were cutting edge technology and I am sure that they would have been more than adequate to their task if the battery had been functional.

It was at that point that I decided to give my strenuous virtual cooking a rest, regroup and consider my options. The lack of battery is an almost insuperable barrier to my culinary expectations. Unless, of course, I find another one.

Which I didn’t.

I’m Back From The Shops Part II – and now it’s serious.

I have bought a rolling pin. I also bought (at the same time) another figure for my Belen and a bicycle pump. Go figure!

I have mixed and kneaded and added and, apart from having too many raisins the mixture looks fine to me. According to Carys I should now leave the mixture in the fridge for half an hour then the Great Experiment with the frying pan. There doesn’t look to be very much mixture and I will have to feed up to about 15 students. I will need to get started on the second batch – though I might be persuaded to leave this feat until tomorrow.

I am trying to remember the last time that I used a rolling pin but I think that it was some time in the last millennium! Just after meat rationing had been withdrawn! Dear God!

Well, after eating one of my creations I can claim a modified success. They look OK, but I think that I cooked them a little too quickly. One lives and learns. I will produce the Christmas Special Welsh Cakes with a slightly different approach. I think.

I wonder if they will mature by Thursday.

Perhaps taking some jam might be a good idea. Some of those little individual ones in Lidl. The speed of the hand deceives the eye!

It’s all planned.

I hope the Russian turrón will take away the taste!

Christmas? Now?

In an unprecedented display of preparedness I have officially opened the Festive Season.

Having an enforced storage area in Bluespace means that I have the luxury of making a trip to somewhere other than the perilous heights of the attic to get all the carefully stored Christmas decorations. My storage space is in the middle of a purpose built depository in the middle of an Industrial Estate which was complete deserted today as it was a Bank Holiday. Deserted that is except for a lone slow cyclist who made me pause frustratingly just at the entrance to Bluespace.

As far as I could tell I was the only person in the place as I walked towards my little storage room. It is easy to get delusions of grandeur as you walk along the yellow door studded corridors as each corridor lights up before you as you enter it. One almost feels like giving a grandiloquent wave of the arms and saying ‘Fiat lux!’ as a new corner is turned – though you never know who might be coming round the corner as the same time as you, so silence is probably the best policy!

As I once had an allergic reaction to what was probably a dipped real Christmas tree, I have used the experience to justify having an artificial tree – though I have discovered that I also have an allergic reaction while trying to arrange the branches into something vaguely resembling a concept of the natural. I have, it must be admitted, been told that this is not an allergic reaction but merely lack of patience. Well, at least you don’t come out in an unsightly rash.

Setting up the Christmas tree was deceptively simple so I was prepared for the mare’s nest of interlocking (I use the word advisedly) wires of the various sets of lights that I have acquired.

As I had plenty of time and no distractions I determined to be reasonable and logical when it came to untwisting, unscrambling and disengaging the glittering mass which looked like a Disney cartoon version of the Sargasso Sea.

When that didn’t work I decided to limit my task by a system of elimination. I stopped trying to bring order to the self convoluting horror of the sets and settled only to disentangle those sets which were fully working. A single dark bulb and the whole set was discarded. When I say ‘discarded’ I do not of course mean that I threw it away. Oh no, that would be wasteful and make me merely part of the throw-away culture. So, the discarded sets were carefully left in their tangled state, put in a plastic bag and replaced in the ‘lights’ box. Where they will probably stay for the next twenty years; carefully tested every year to see if there is any change just as if light bulbs have a certain regenerative quality!

There is one great difference between lights from my youth and lights nowadays. The first set of ‘fairy’ lights we had as a family (or at least that I can remember) was a string of twelve multicoloured lights of a vaguely pear drop shape and they were linked in a circle. This meant that ‘one light out: all lights out’ so that you had to have a double faith when trying to find the blown bulb.

Sometimes it was just that one or more of the bulbs had unscrewed a little from their holders, so when darkness settled upon the tree the first line of attack was to tighten and trust to luck. That almost never worked, but like a British Men’s Champion at Wimbledon was always a fond hope.

The more common approach to restoring gaudy illumination is where faith came into the equation. You first needed to believe that you had one bulb which you ‘knew’ was OK. Using this working glass grail you had to go round the whole ring of lights replacing each in turn to find the dead one.

The second element of faith was believing that god would not be so cruel as to allow two bulbs to blow simultaneously.

One year tightening and replacing did not achieve the required result. The idea of replacing the lights did not even enter our heads: the lights were made by Pifco for goodness sake, with a picture of a threatening fairy of mature years on the box cover – they were the stuff of heirlooms and had to be made to work.

The answer lay in an old battery: one of those that I never see nowadays – a large thing with two (or was it one) flat flange of yellow metal poking out of the top. By placing the end of the bulb on one pit of metal and touching the flange on the screw part of the bulb it could be encouraged to emit a timid flickering gleam.

The bulbs were tested and the two (god can be cruel!) faulty bulbs were discarded with a certain amount of reluctance as these were two of the original bulbs whose colour was peeling off the glass and gave what we considered an interestingly sparkly effect to the lighting.

We then discovered that we did not have two replacements, and the corner shop (Mr Wilkins’) did not have any either.

An unlit tree is one thing; but a tree that cannot be lit is an abomination in the sight of the lord. I think that my little face must have spoken volumes as my dad disappeared in the Bonomini (don’t ask!) and returned with bulbs enough to light up the face of a doubting boy as well as the tree itself.

Having got the lights to work the next problem was always draping them around the tree, the circular construction of the set forcing you to lasso the tree to get the lights around it. This sometimes necessitated a flick of the wrist which, on one occasion, caused one bulb to hit the wall and explode.

The sets of lights I have are all modern. They are in a string. A string has an end so disentangling them has two fruitful approaches: the plug end and the ‘end’ end. This way means that when one approach becomes impossible you can retreat to the other end and work you way forwards and that end’s disentanglement usually means that when you start on the other end you . . . well, you get the idea. Keeps me sane anyway!

The other great difference is that new sets of lights have irreplaceable bulbs; not in terms of expense, it is merely that they are impossible to replace. They are therefore fully in step with the onward mark of consumerism: if one light doesn’t work then throw them all away.

I spurn such a shallow and dismissive approach and assure all shining lights on my tree that when their brilliance finally dims there is a black plastic bag in the light box waiting to receive them.

How green is that! (Rhetorical)

Seek and ye shall find!

Weekends are not normal.

In Great Britain we accept this with an easy nonchalance and look askance at those (foreigners) who believe that weekend shops should exist for customers rather than the true British way where they exist for . . . well, I’m not actually sure who they exist for in the Nation of Shopkeepers, but customers seem to come a very poor third or fourth, at best!

Shops (virtually all shops, not just the supermarkets) open until what we Brits regard as a ridiculously late hour in the evening. It means that I can get a fresh loaf of bread from our local bakery until 8.30 to 9.00 pm. As far as I am aware we have no 24 hour supermarkets and the large Carrefour hypermarket is closed on a Sunday, though the smaller one near us is open. Though not for the same hours as a weekday.

The vagaries of shop opening times was brought home to me again because I was trailing memories of the old country when I went to get some stamps and post two packages back to Britain. I have adjusted to the reality that stamps are available from the Tabac (the tobacconist) I no longer question this but merely regard it as a by product of totalitarianism. France has the same idiosyncrasy – in their case as a result of the later actions of the little Corsican.

Having consumed my home made lunch I made my way to the Tabac. This was closed. At five passed four in the afternoon. I mentally cursed myself and realised that I should have only ventured to get my stamps at five o’clock. The sign on the Tabac told me that the shop would be open at 4.30 pm to 8.00 pm. I returned home, but, foolishly I had not read the whole of the complicated arrangements for opening. On my return at 6.00 pm the shop was still closed. I then noticed the individual details for a Saturday. Rather like a pharmacy it told me that the shop I was outside would never open on a Saturday, but that another shop much further down the road would.

With a certain bloody mindedness I returned home and got the car and was henceforth a Man on a Mission. When Castelldefels began to peter out into solid rock I felt that I had probably overshot the shop. Turning around was not such an easy thing as you might imagine because Catalonia has the world’s highest concentration of ‘no right turn’ and ‘no left turn’ signs in the world.

There are far too many people and absolutely too many cars in each of the urbanisations that are sprinkled along the coast in Catalonia. The roads are usually too narrow to have parked cars on them (which of course does not mean that there are not parked cars there) and driving becomes, you might say, “challenging.”

As a way of making the four wheeled lunacy which passes for driving in this part of the world a little more tolerable, the local council has decided on a ‘traffic system’.

Once you are on this ‘traffic system’ you sometimes feel that the only explanation for the way that you are forced to drive through it is that the town traffic planner has used his ‘Big Fun Book of Mazes’ that he was given as a present by a parent hoping to keep him quiet for a few minutes as a guide to how to lay out the roads.

Often you can see where you want to go but it appears that all available approaches of an obvious nature are closed to you. So, leaving your destination behind you start searching for a more distant way of getting there. As you drive aimlessly, eventually turning randomly in the hope of serendipity getting you there, you sense the car following the pencilled route of a child, tongue firmly pressed into cheek, pencil grasped in fist as the indentation of the pencil point lurches from side to side looking for the elusive way through to the centre of the maze.

I had the sea on my left, the road was too narrow to do a U turn and all the turns to the right were forbidden. So I went to Sitges.

The coast road from Castelldefels to Sitges has the great advantage of being free, avoiding as it does the exorbitant charge of the way through the tunnels. The disadvantage is that it is composed of an inordinate number of hair-raising hair-pin bends with a sheer drop to the sea to swallow up any mistakes.

And it was dark. And I was followed by drivers who had obviously done this run since they were in kindergarten and were well able to take blind curves at 60 kph.

Well, they couldn’t because I was in front and I was doing more than the limit for the road as it was. To support me in my tackling of these automobile manoeuvres in the dark the car behind very kindly came within a few centimetres of the back of my car so that his full headlight could illuminate my way more fully. Wasn’t that kind!

I also needed diesel and I had convinced myself that the garage at the end of the coast road would allow me to kill two birds with one stone; though by the time that I arrived there I was thinking of using the stone for something else entirely.

I didn’t need to say a single word at the garage: the cashier spoke to me in English before I said anything. I replied staunchly in Spanish though she didn’t look convinced.

The Tabac in Sitges was indeed open but it didn’t have scales to weigh the packets so we guessed the amount necessary. I therefore apologise in advance if the recipients get the envelope over stamped with an amount to pay. In mitigation I have to tell them that there are philatelists who collect things like that – so they might be paying for something which will actually increase in value.

Sometimes I don’t even convince myself!

Two faced wind!

Our Lady of Ghisallo or the Madonna of Ghisallo is, as you probably know, the Patron Saint of Cycling.

I merely wondered what she was doing when I set off on my customary cycle to Gava. I know that being by the sea can cause all sorts of interesting climate anomalies but how is it that I had the wind in my face both going to Gava and coming back? Diametrically opposed directions yet the same unforgiving breeze acting as a brake.

Perhaps you are supposed to sacrifice to the Madonna of Ghisallo before you assemble the bike. If so, what? Light grade lubricating oil sprinkled on the sand? A heartfelt prayer for level ways and dead calm?

I am, it has to be said, an unenthusiastic cyclist. I like the idea of a folding bicycle (it is, after all, a gadget) rather than its reality. And the saddle is so uncomfortable. According to Hadyn this is a mere cavil and objections will diminish with application. “You will have to cycle on with gritted teeth,” to which the obvious reply is that I do not sit on my mouth!

And it was cold. The wind off the sea was capable of slicing through thin clothing, though the sight of complete lunatics indulging in para surfing (or whatever it’s called when wind surfing with a kite) made me feel more centred and more part of the human race – even perched on a bike with tiny wheels!

I have just finished reading Bill Bryson’s newish book ‘Shakespeare’ published by Harper Perennial ISBN 13 978 0 00 719790 3 as his contribution to the Eminent Lives series.

It’s a short book at only 200 pages and the read is enlivened at all times by the sense of humour which illuminates all of Bryson’s writing. He makes no great claims for the work being a work of scholarship but rather as an informed overview enhanced by his own perception and literary style.

The book reads like the novelization of a popular TV documentary with Bryson including the script of some of his interviews in the course of writing the book. If this book is worth reading (and it is) it is because one constantly hears the voice of a sceptical friend leading you effortlessly through the available information that we use to follow Shakespeare’s life.

Most of the time Bryson stresses just how little we actually know and how much has been assumed, guessed and fabricated to make the story we think we know. Bryson (of course) finds the right sort of comparison to illuminate our perception of the life by suggesting that Shakespeare is “a kind of literary equivalent of an electron – forever there and not there.”

My favourite part of this book comes towards the end when Bryson is talking about the intellectual background that Shakespeare had. “Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from ‘Cymbeline’, ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/ As chimney sweepers, come to dust,’ which takes on an additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper.”

Nuggets like that are worth the price of the book – especially as I bought the book by using up the final book tokens that had been given to me by Ingrid a couple of years ago. I’m not quite sure how, but that makes it all so much more valued!

The second book which I squandered book tokens on was ‘An Utterly Impartial History of Britain’ subtitled ‘or 2000 years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge’ by John O’Farrell ISBN 978 0 552 77396 6 published by Black Swan.

This is a hefty tome of a book which is done no service by the rather weak jokes on the back and the rather juvenile cover on the front.

It is in fact a history book. Real history: you can tell because it has got an index. You can also tell it’s serious because it incorporates more than the ‘two real dates’ which Sellar and Yeatman included in their classic comic history ‘1066 And All That.’

For me the best way to describe this book is that it is written as if your history teacher actually cared about history and really wanted you to enjoy the subject. The comic tone is extended throughout (though he does get a bit po-faced and serious at the end) and I did not find it grating or irritating. Indeed I laughed out loud at various points throughout this fairly long journey.

The book reads like a novel and has the same pace and interest. He manages to give a sort of narrative coherence to the events in British history without the patronising inclusiveness of something like a Disney wildlife film.

It also has to be said that there is also the element of self congratulation which powers this book; like ‘1066 And All That’ it does assume a fairly large knowledge of history for real enjoyment as many of his comments would be lost without the shared knowledge of more historical background than is in the book. And how is that a bad thing?

I recommend this book without reservation; a thoroughly enjoyable, informative and above all funny read!

And now, by way of penance I have ‘Dreams from my father’ by Barack Obama to read. The front cover of this has a photo of him with arms folded, shirt open against a background of layered clouds of threatening grey frowning slightly as if his daughter had just come home and introduced one of the more unregenerate members of the dreadful Palin clan as her new boyfriend. The lighting effects on his face actually suggest that he is looking at a sun rise or sun set: perhaps he was trying to do a updated Canute act and become a modern day Joshua trying to stop the sun. And perhaps I should just read the book rather than trying to prevaricate.

Ho hum! Here we go!

Although anything described as ‘Thoughtful, moving and brilliantly written’ (The Times) by anyone unscrupulous enough to have got himself elected President of the United States must be twisted in an extraordinarily depressing way.

Enough already! Read!

Why wait?

So much for restraint!

I think that it is because I have not yet put up the Christmas tree that I have felt totally justified in opening anything that I have been given for the festive season. And I have.

The opening of Christmas presents is an activity whose every gesture has a meaning. And one for me which has changed over time.

I take every opportunity to praise and recommend the book, “Age of Austerity” by Philip French, Michael Sissons which takes as its subject matter the history of post war Britain from 1945 to 1954. The end year is not an arbitrary one as it was only in 1954 that meat rationing ended in Britain! Therefore my early years were lived in a period in which shortages were more normal than plenty. It is also obvious that 1954 did not mean that the country was suddenly flowing with milk and honey!

Presents in my youth were not as lavish in content or number as they are today, though I would not like to give an impression that I had a deprived childhood: I was trained early in Delayed Gratification which meant that if I asked for something I did not get it at once, but it often appeared at a later date when I could “appreciate it more!”

It was still possible for parents to give their offspring presents which were second hand in my early years and I felt nothing but amazed delight at the (bulky) tape recorder that I had one Christmas. It might have been (in that irritating weasel phrase) ‘pre owned’ but it was accepted with grateful alacrity and cherished for years afterwards.

Wrapping paper was always seen as an extravagance and, according to the information in one of the cottages in St Fagan’s Welsh Folk Museum, wrapping presents was only common after the 1920s otherwise presents were left unwrapped under the Christmas tree.

Wrapping paper I was told should always be unwrapped carefully so that it could be reused. I always attempted to do this as a child; but it is a form of mental cruelty to extend the principle of Delayed Gratification to the painstaking unwrapping of the present itself, forcing the child into an attitude of unnatural care when it all it wants to do is rip, rend and tear! And the sellotape always made un-ripped wrapping impossible for me!

Packaging was always something of a problem for me. If something was presented in a fitted box then removing and using the object which was the present was always a slightly irresponsible action for me.

There was also the “that will keep nicely” approach. This was yet another variation on the theme of Delayed Gratification which also utilized the “don’t use it all at once” method. This is best explained by example: Reeves coloured pencils.

One birthday I was given a blue cardboard flip top box of 24 coloured pencils made by Messrs Reeves. When you flipped the top there, in all their sharp pointedness in a dizzying array of colours were the pencils. I can still re-texture my delight (I always had a weakness bordering on penchant for stationery in all its forms) of that first sight.

It was quite permissible to take the pencils out of their box and read their exotic names printed in gold on the side of each pencil. What was not permissible or possible was to use them. To use them would be to blunt them. To sharpen one of them would diminish its size and therefore the regimented array of pristine points would be lost. What could I possible hope to draw or colour which could justify the destruction of newness and happy possibility?

The result was that they were kept for gloating rather than use and their particular penciloid function was lost in neurotic hoarding.

The same thing occurred with little notebooks or the section headed ‘Notes’ in a book. How could one write in these places when one didn’t know if something in the future would outrank what one was about to write in the present. Better by far to “keep it nicely.” The result was, of course, that I gradually accumulated various items whose use (when questioned about it by generous relatives) had to be elided into the nicely ambiguous phrase, “I liked it very much,” which implied use without stating it directly.

It has taken me half a century to open things at once and start using them. It has taken me even longer to dispose of boxes (even if they are plush and “something can be made of them”) so that there is no hiding place in its original home for any gift.

Which is why I am typing this while listening to Radio 4 on wireless headphones from a machine in the kitchen

while smelling faintly of Cerruti 1881‘Black’ for men.


Thank you Ceri and Dianne and Paul and Paul!

And Merry Christmas!