Is there life afterwards? (Rhetorical.)

No pressure – but Spain are playing the USA in basketball. 

I do not like the sport and I especially dislike the American ball players who seem to have all of the petty arrogance of football players but without their style.  And yes, I am being ironic.

 

It is difficult to choose any one aspect which irritates me the most: is it the ridiculous matey touchy-feely skin-on-skin rituals before during and after their plays; the absurd secondary sexual characteristics of extraneous tufts of hair that many of them sport; the vulgarity of the body graffiti they display; the ludicrous names they flaunt; the constant stopping of the clock – who knows, but I loathe the thing.

However, Spain are the only country which can stop the Americans in their relentless occupancy of the House of Gold for this sport and so they have my full and unalloyed support.  The score 30-21 is not looking good for Spain but there is still time.  I hope.

Toni has now started the more extreme aspect of his diet before the examination on Monday.  He is now confined for the best part of 30 hours to water and orange juice.  And he has Other Drinks this evening which is why I will be going to pick up the Pauls alone!

My swims continue with my magical luck of empty lanes for my up-and-down approach to the pool.  Today there were two people in My lane, but they left almost as soon as I entered the water: a rare display of consideration – or perhaps it was merely the backwash!

My twenty-minute swim is now becoming a necessity, my day does not seem right if I delay or do without.  Which is what it used to be like in the UK.  Which is a good thing isn’t it?

Spain lost (because of the refs according to Toni) and had to be satisfied with the silver medal.  The Games are virtually over with only the Modern Thingie to go with our interest running to shoot, so to speak.  It would be great if someone was able to get a gold to take our total up to 30 – but that is pure and simple greed in my desire to get the greatest number of FDCs for my collection!

Paul has phoned and the plane is allegedly on time so they should be touching down at about 9.30 pm. 

Excellent!

There are things other than the Olympics. True.

I’m not quite sure how to evaluate the film version of The Magic Flute that Suzanne and I saw recently in the Comedia Cinema in Barcelona.  It was a La Scala production directed by William Kentridge which set the action in some nineteenth century milieu with a welter of line drawings projected here there an everywhere.

My overriding impression from the experience was just how uncomfortable the seats were.  Considering how plush they actually looked, deep and high backed they were extraordinarily inefficient in their sole function.

The singing was wonderful with The Aria positively otherworldly in its shining melodic clarity.  All the singers major and minor were much more than acceptable with the sole exception of Sarastro who seemed to me to be woefully under sung.  Somewhere or other I have a scrap of paper with information about the production but that seems to have gone the way of all flesh.

We had tapas afterwards in a dishearteningly touristic place but they turned out to be tasty and fairly good value for money – but as they were eaten some time after one in the morning I do not have any information about the name of the café.  It was a late night and I still had to drive back to Castelldefels after paying an extraordinarily fabulous amount of money to get my car out of an underground car park near the cinema.

Throughout the days since I was told about Stewart’s death, little flashes of anecdotal pleasure have informed my memory of him.  That’s immortality, living in the loving memory of those who care.

My swimming continues apace – to the astonishment of the swimming pool attendants who now seem to regard me as someone who needs to be protected – hence the shooing away of children in My Swimming Lane.  I find it difficult to believe that I am one of a very few people who actually swim in straight lines rather than lounge around lazing about in the water.  Though, come to think of it I have seen precious few actual swimmers in the pool.

In Cardiff there were well-established lane swimmers, and I was never alone (except in terms of speed up and down the pool) when I was swimming.

I want to get back into the habit of having an early morning swim and having another one “at the end of work” time – whatever time I decide that to be!

I enjoy my twenty minutes, though to do more bores me.  I have great respect and not a little wonder at those professional swimmers who only get that good by doing thousands and thousands of lengths in a 50-metre pool at unsocial hours.  How do they keep their sanity!

Meanwhile tomorrow sees the arrival of The Pauls.

Their first meal in Spain is traditionally an indulgently raucous affair but this time it will have to be without the presence of Toni who is having to stick to a rigorously uninteresting diet in advance of his intrusive medical examination on Monday.  He can only drink orange juice and water.  And even the water has to be without the excitement of gas!

The Olympics continue to fascinate with our even getting a gold to start the morning off, though it has to be said that the rest of the day has not been quite so golden – but we do have racing and diving this evening.

Twenty-six golds is surely more than we expected and, in spite of the fact that the Pauls were not able to find the FDC cover albums that I wanted (and special attention must be paid to the amazingly unhelpful 0845 number of the Post Office which is there, ostensibly, to help and which did anything but) but I will get them from the Internet.

Meantime there is some tidying and cleaning to be done!

Stewart

Even after a long illness from which there was no real way back, it is still a profound shock when a friend dies.

Stewart I have known for decades and I am delighted to say that I have no bad memories of him.  I remember his perception, his wit, his knowledge and his waspish sense of humour.  I have relished knowing him and his loss is one that I feel deeply.

The last time that I was in the UK I stayed with Stewart and his partner Andrew and had an excellent time culminating in our visiting an exhibition in Dulwich Gallery where we were able to share our contempt for the childish daubs of Cy Twomby and reveal a hitherto supressed delight in the pictures of Poussin.  Though it might just have been that the comparisons were odious!

It is difficult to select just a few instances from thirty years to sum up a personality - but he was one of the few people in the world who was able to correct my quotations without fear of immediate bodily harm.  He was the one who demanded that I read Kramer and Benson – both good reads in their way!  He was always welcoming and good company.

I shall miss him.  My thoughts go out to Andrew.

Back to normal

A tedious day which, in spite of my repeated recourse to the computer, failed to produce a single medal for Team GB.  Quite frankly I feel cheated; with that amount of key tapping and worried scanning we ought really to have had at least a bronze.  It better be different tomorrow!

Life, as I used to know it, goes on with Toni visiting dentists and doctors being ferried by me and then my making full use of my Kindle which seems to be purpose built to cope with the tedium of waiting rooms.

For some reason my credit card has not worked with the powers that be in Kindle so my fourteen-day free trial of The Independent has been terminated. 

I must admit that I did feel a trifle underhand taking The Independent at all as I really am a confirmed Guardian reader and so now I have started a fourteen day free trial for the paper with which I feel most comfortable.  As if to welcome me home there was a sly dig at The Daily Mail and the journalistic arms reached out and took me back into the family!

To be accurate, I do have The Guardian sent to my I-pad but I find that I am not reading it as assiduously as I do on the Kindle so I will have to cancel one and extend the other.  I like the idea of catching up on world news on the Kindle after completing my daily swim!

I was forced from my wide lane to a “funnel” lane next to it when teachers of the little ones started encroaching on my water when constructing the floats and obstacles for the little ones to scamper across through over and under.  I dislike the funnel lanes because they are difficult to judge and invariably I scrape my arms when they narrow.  It is the first time that I have been a public pool which seems to have a policy of one V-shaped lane for individual swimmers. 

Perhaps it is just a mistake.  Well, it’s one I can work with.

More medals tomorrow please.

Well!

I feel as if I have known the Brownlee Brothers since they were splashing around in the garden plastic pool, toddling around in their nappies and trolling about on trikes – in fact, I have known about them since this morning.

That did not, however, stop me from committing to their race with total idiocy – at one point putting a cushion on my head in a desperate gesture redolent of some sort of ritualistic sympathetic magic to help the brothers.  The fifteen-second penalty for one (or possibly the other) brother was almost unbearable, but the end result of a Spaniard getting a silver in between the GB gold and bronze was more than acceptable for domestic peace!

At present we (!) have matched the total number of gold that we (!) got in Beijing.  We are still short of the total number of medals we (!) had then but that looks doable, so virtually anything from now on in would be a bonus.

Silvers look on the cards, with a real possibility of a few more golds.  This is unbelievable – and the Olympic FDC Album looks as though it could be quite a substantial volume.  I will have to phone the Pauls and get them to bring a couple of new albums with them when they come over in a few days time.

It is now reasonably late on Tuesday and GB have 22 golds and have reached the lower target figure for total number of medals set at 48.  As you can tell I am generally obsessed by the BBC medal website and their “live” notes about what is going on in the Olympics and Toni has just about reached the limit of his tolerance of my wittering on and on about what we have managed to achieve.

Life does go on, but I feel a certain panic when I am separated from my computer for any length of time!

After tomorrow I will start worrying about the Closing Ceremony!

I suppose I care!

I am now a total slave to the Olympics. 

Although our television coverage is limited to BBC1 (with no red button) I also have my trust computer and consult the medal table with all the assiduity of a passionate pilgrim or some devotee of a modern day Sybil asking for clarification of the Position of Britain.

The hell with liberal sensibility and political correctness I just want to know how many golds we have and, more importantly, whether we are still ahead of the French.  So, all that crap about the just taking part rather than the winning is a thing of the past and all I am concerned about is our position in the league table.

I justify this pathetic abnegation of previously strongly held opinions because of the number of First Day Covers that I will be sent, one for each of the Gold Medal Winners who will have their own particular stamp.  I am paying for the bloody things, but as of today there will be eighteen FDCs at the end of the Games for me to add to my collection. 

I am even thinking of getting a specific album just for the covers because the Gold Winners’ stamps will be joined by the Handover stamps and the various issues building up to the games illustrating the individual sports and the Welcome to the Games series as well. 

If the insert card in the FDC is displayed as well I think the album will be attractive and informative.  And this just doesn’t really sound like me saying all this – but there, put it all down to the Olympic Spirit!

For the first time the Post Office are also issuing special stamps for the Paralympics along the same lines at the Welcome stamps for the Olympics – apparently the first time that any country has done this.  Well done to us!

I did manage to find time to go and have my swim, but it was more of an effort, probably due to emotional exhaustion brought on my vicarious participation in sports about which I know less than nothing.

It does seem remarkable that we are within one gold of the total for Beijing and we still have the best part of a week to go before the Closing Ceremony.  And I do hope that that statement was not the kiss of death to our future medal hopes!

We shall see.

Relax

Seeing one colleague from your last school might be regarded as unfortunate, to see two smacks of carelessness.  But what a splendid afternoon I had with a lunch and later an afternoon of talk and speculation.

We now have a respectable number of golds and I can relax and think about getting a new FDC album.  Thank God.

And that is all I want to say.

What is the gleaming light!

Hallelujah!  Praise Be!  A Gold At Last!  And two medals in one day!  

It is as if a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders and I can now relax because we are not going to be like the Canadians who put on the games and didn’t manage to get a single gold medal for anything.

I was getting to the stage where the medal could have been for Mixed Pair Mongolian Nose Flute Tossing as long as that precious metal was glittering somewhere among the other Welsh medallions we managed to wrest from the hands of the Chinese and Americans.

I shall now turn the force of my misery towards the appalling showing of the yellow stuff accumulated by the French. 

God knows I hold no affection for the present Prime Minister, but by god I do not like to see my representative being sarkily put down by some jumped up non-entity from the land of perpetual rain.  [This last statement being based on painful recent personal experience in the sodden fields of Normandy and the rain lashed city of Paris.]

I have to admit that I did enjoy what Hollande said and his elegantly mischievous and evilly witty comments contrast so entirely with the moronic pronouncements of that sad example of American intellectual mediocrity traipsing his gaff-prone way though friendly (!) countries before he returns home and loses the race for the Presidency.  Now say that Americans have no sense of “abroad”!

Talking of American intellectuals, the man who I would most liked to have interviewed, is dead.  Gore Vidal through his books and essays but especially through his magisterial media pronouncements was the very soul of East Coast Old Family viciousness.  I loved hearing him speak because his range of reference was effortlessly panoramic while his in-depth knowledge of American culture was unparalleled. 

He is a real loss.  But at least we have his writing.  Safe in my library!

When?

The horror continues with a complete absence of any glint or glitter of yellow from the Olympics.  I am now in the pits of despair and have decided not to order a new First Day Cover album because it is perfectly obvious that I will not be needing it.  The few spaces that I have left in my present album should be more than sufficient for the new issues of stamps that come with each gold (how hollow that sounds now!) that Team GB manages to get.

I have a quick link to the medal table and I am now becoming truly neurotic as I check on an hourly basis to see if there is any golden news.

I can feel the resentment building up inside me.  I know perfectly well all that rubbish about it not being the winning but the taking part – but that, self evidently is not the case for all the nations taking part.  It’s the winning and only the winning that counts.

And talking of counting, how much have the taxpayers actually paid for the rest of the world to go home to their countries clutching Welsh made medals.  The cost of holing these bloody games and the money pumped into “elite” sportspeople – and what have we got to show for it?  [I have just checked again and it is two silver and two bronze.  This means that we are being beaten by countries (and very nice they are too, I am sure, but . . .) like Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Georgia and Ukraine.  South Africa is also ahead of us.  We are in the humiliating position of being, at the moment, twenty-first – just above Colombia!

What ever we are doing as far as sport is concerned, we are not doing it properly.  And the sports that we do well in are limited in worldwide participation or reflect on the class-ridden nature of this country.  I find it sickening that a country that invented and regulated the majority of modern sports languishes so wretchedly in world rankings.

The men’s gym team aside, these games are a woeful testimony to British sporting ineptitude.

Prove me wrong Team GB, prove me wrong.

Where is the treasure for GB?

There is the first waking up of the day as you drag yourself out of bed and do the necessary.  The second wake up comes for me as I throw myself into the pool and taste that oddly salty tang of the water that they use in the baths and the third wake up comes when you pay for your cup of tea after the swim and notice that the bank card is not in your wallet.

That is the real eye opener and senses a-tingle occasion in the response to another day.

World weariness follows as your now hyper active brain attempts to re-live the immediate past financial transactions while attempting a CCTV approach to how, when and where one actually replaced the card in the bright blue aluminium case that now operates as a summer wallet.

As I sat down and concentrated my mind by staring at the milky tea with its two tea bags gradually turning the insipid liquid into something vaguely drinkable, I thought that I remembered picking up my card each time I had used it.  Then I tried to imagine myself putting it back in the accordion-like compartment inside the summer wallet and got the sensation that once I merely put it in my pocket with the receipt.

I think it was a Betty Boop cartoon showing her trying to find something everywhere and then pausing at a drawer because it was the last place and if it wasn’t there then it was truly lost.  I too paused before plunging my hand into my pocket because the tedium of stopping the card was too tiresome to contemplate.

My left pocket was cardless, so it was with something approaching desperation that I tentatively reached into my right.  And my fingers closed around something comfortingly hard and thin.  And I think I will change the subject as I now realize that things are getting a little too close to the bone.  Which is also capable of double entendre.

Anyway the card was found and all seemed well with the world.  The cad was placed back where it should have been and I was able to address my cup of tea with something approaching relish.

This was the emotional counterbalance to the positive endorsement given to me by one of the lifeguards in the pool who complemented me on my swimming when I was taking my end-of-swim shower, my twenty minutes of determined crawl at an end.

I am determined to get at least one of my summer tasks done today.  I think that I will choose the most alluring of them – getting membership of the Olympic Canal.

I have recently had yearnings for the rowing that I used to do in Roath Park and the Olympic Canal is the nearest that I can get to the lake with its islands that loomed so large in my youth.  Although I do not pretend to any competence in rowing I do (did) enjoy it and I would like to get back into the rhythm of the stroke.  Oh god I appear to have degenerated to the lowest form of double entendre again.

This may have something to do with the second of the books which I have actually bought for my Kindle.  “You talkin’ To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama” by Sam Leith.  The title is irresistible and when I read a positive review in my electronic copy of The Week I decided to take the plunge and buy.

The book is written in an engagingly chatty way and, like the best of economic text books cf Nevin, it is full of easy to appreciate examples which claim delighted understanding.  It is a riveting read so far, even if some of the technical terms are not going to stick in my memory.  I am enjoying it, but there is a problem with my card (again!) and Amazon are trying (while not taking the book away from me) to get me to give them up to date information.  I fear that their information about bank details comes from an earlier version of my card which when lost stayed lost.

Today is one of the traditional “brightly dull” days which I am prepared to settle for as they are cooler and there is no rain.

There is a deathly depression in this house after the disgracefully reffed game that Spain played last night.  Even I think that they were denied at least one and probably two penalties.  They hit the woodwork with monotonous regularity and the end result is that they are out of the competition!  This is a disaster for Spain as the football was one of the most possible Golds that they were expecting.  Nadal is out through injury and they also lost out on a Judo bronze yesterday.

I am trying (and failing) not to panic at the fact that Team GB’s total medal tally at the moment is just 2.  Neither of them golds.  At the moment it looks as though I am going to have precisely zero additions to my FDC collection at the end of the games.  Disaster!

I am sure that I am being unduly pessimistic, but it happens every four years and this time around we really did seem to be best prepared.  The loss of the gold in the racing on the first day was a real dampener and I am sure that it had an appreciably negative effect on the team. It certainly did on me.  Nevertheless, I will preserve the stiff upper lip and only break down in the closing ceremony.

There is even one example of a host nation not gaining a single gold to haunt us too!

Things have now gone from bad to awful.  The almost unprecedented medal in gymnastics for the men seemed, at first to be a totally unbelievable silver until the Japanese team who had been edged out of the medals completely made an objection and were not only reinstated in the medals but given the silver and we were demoted to bronze.  Which is still an amazing result – but not a gold.

As if to make things worse the French seem to be gaining gold like rabid Californian prospectors.  And their president is in the crowd watching their acquisition.  Unbearable.

I am now prepared to settle for one gold in anything.  Absolutely anything.  A single FCD.  That would be fine – as long as there is at least one.

Things and stuff.

Today is going to be a day which should be momentous, but alack the reality is far more unimpressive.

I am going to see a film in Spanish.  Not, I hasten to add because I will understand it, but rather since it is –Borat’s “The Dictator”, it will be slapstick enough for me to understand without the need for too much extra language.  It is always frustrating that the original language of the film is of course English.

Appalling film with some horrifically poorly judged “jokes” a complete (no, too harsh “almost” complete) waste of money – and the filmic experience not made any better by having a row of young people eating noisily and fairly constantly, which at least meant that they did not talk all the time.  I remembered why cinemas are usually such a disappointing experience.

And I hope and trust that those last two words are not going to be a summation of the taxpayer funded extravaganza this evening when, at last, the Opening Ceremony takes place.

There is already a slightly sour feel to the Olympics as a Welsh competitor was described as English in the programme and anyway the men’s bloody football team could only manage a draw against that mighty footballing super-nation Senegal.  Well, good luck to them.  We are long used to footballing disappointment.

And talking of disappointment, Spain men’s football team actually managed to lose their opening football game against Japan.  I have been told to curb my disappointment (Spain, after all is my fall-back nation when we fail to make it out of our group), as it is traditional for Spain to lose their opening match to inject an element of tension into the whole affair.

In order to calm my nerves before the possible debacle this evening I have decided to look at the manual for the camera again to try and get the bits that it was bought for to work.

That should pass the time!  Or give a new definition to futility.

The lighting of the cauldron was, as perhaps it should be, the triumph of the evening.  I particularly liked the fact that each nation had a “petal” of the cauldron associated with it and that the young athletes lit the first petals which linked to the others so that when all were alight they rose up and formed a sort of burning flower.  Immensely powerful and dramatically inclusive.  This is by far the most stimulating lighting of the flame that I have seen.  Though I also have to admit that the Barcelona archer shooting a burning arrow into the cauldron to start the flame is difficult to beat and remains in the mind.

The overall impression from the Opening Ceremony is one of relief that it wasn’t embarrassing and even greater relief that it did not rely on the techniques of the repulsive version of Beijing.

What I loathed about the Beijing approach was that it reduced human beings into live pixels in the way that the old Communist regimes used to in their Spartakiadas; the individual subordinated to the general picture.  We are not like that and Boyle’s presentation reflected it.

I liked the opening rustic idyll and its dramatic transformation into the Industrial Revolution.  The nods to popular culture – James Bond and the Queen, Mr Bean, the music all worked to a lesser or greater extent.  The visuals were sometimes stunning and sometimes mysterious but always engaging – but the saving grace was the cauldron.

No sooner over one fear than the other comes to haunt: we haven’t got a medal, not even of any sort.  One of our “banker” golds failed to be anywhere within reach of a medal and now the cold hand of failure is gripping my heart.

As you know, I have a stake in our golden future as the Post Office has said that they will issue a new stamp to recognize the achievement of any team or athlete gaining a gold medal.  In St Louis over a century ago we gained a single gold.  We have never failed to get at least one in any of the Olympic Games of the Modern Era – and we have been in all of them.  Come on (he said diffidently) Team GB.

“Team GB” is a designation of the British athletes that Toni finds objectionable and I think that I do too.  After all Great Britain means England, Scotland and Wales.  If we include Northern Ireland then the name of the country is the United Kingdom.  So we should be Team UK.  Or has Northern Ireland thrown its lot in with the Republic for the Olympics?  I think not.  Or perhaps there are no athletes from Northern Ireland taking part?  I think not.  Most unsatisfactory.

Or perhaps I am just being pedantic and objecting to a trendy abbreviation.  I think not.