Definitions

Being retired is a state of mind, not just a date on which you stop working. 

At this point in September when virtually every pupil in Catalonia has gone back to school you really begin to believe that you are retired. 

But, at the moment, I am still finding myself enjoying the present by reference in what I might have been doing in the past.  It is not enough to enjoy myself now; I have to know that I would not have enjoyed myself in the past for it all to be worthwhile!

Thursday was one of the days on which I had an 8.15 am start; to get there on time I had to get up at 6.30 am each day – now the sheer delight of getting up in daylight rather than the gloom of the early hours is difficult to convey!

I went for my swim as children were making their way to school – and I even found a parking space within the centre so I did not have to compete with parents who park for an inordinate time after they have deposited their children and seen them through the gates and doors.  I have often wondered why they do this. 

Are they waiting for their kids to realize that they cannot possibly tolerate the enforced separation from their loving parents that school represents and flee through the gates and demand that their carers take them back into the comforts of home?  In my experience parents cannot wait to get rid of their kids and dread the summer holidays in an exact and direct inverse relationship to how much teachers love them!

The next couple of weeks will see me trying to work out the best time to arrive to have my early morning swim.  

So far I have arrived far too late and not found a single parking space within reasonable walking distance; I have arrived too early and found the place locked up; I have arrived at the swimming pool and found other people swimming in my lane; I have arrived at the time when many of the available seats have been taken up with a gaggle of freed mums – in other words I have not arrived at the optimum time when I make my way to my own free lane and after have my cup of tea in relative silence.  Work in progress.

Lunch today in our local seashore restaurant and, as usual, I did better than Toni.  

As it is Thursday I had the paella followed by lamb which fell away from the bone and concluded with whisky tart (which is a concoction which changes from week to week but certainly keeps the whisky flavour) with wine and bread all for €11.50.  

And without the tension of having to go to work, I was able to savour not only the food, but also the breaking waves made respectable by brisk wind and enjoyed by the hardy windsurfers and kite-surfers who decorate the sea when swimming is more of an ordeal than a delight.  There were people sunbathing and the weather, although changeable, was excellent and I only hope that it continues.

The 12^th of September was also an excellent day because our execrable neighbours finally left to return to the city and leave us in relative peace.  They have stayed on this year for an agonizing week beyond their normal time and we had fears that they might stay on, even unto the distant month of October.  They have been on average, quieter than in previous years, but even more obnoxious in their general attitude. 

The father of this dysfunctional family even indulged (I use the word advisedly) in an apology to us for something I will not go into.  Needless to say none of us took his words at face value and, sure enough, his later actions showed them to be a piece of breath taking cheek.  If I though he was capable of understanding irony I would admire his chutzpa in saying such a thing – but I know he actually thought we would accept his, I hesitate to use the word, sincerity!

And the family sits by the pool and smokes.  And talks.  Loudly.  All together.  But, thank god, they have gone.  With any reasonable luck for another eight or nine months.

My nerdish side is positively refulgent at the moment as the Post Office has finally got my order right and sent me the new First Day Cover Albums for the Olympic and Paralympic First Day Covers which should be on their way even as I type.

I have even decided to restyle the way I keep these covers (I cannot believe that I am typing this) and will display the informative card which I have until now kept inside and out of sight in the envelopes.

But enough of such limited interest stuff; I have to turn my attention to my books and their enforced reduction.

Now that is something I cannot contemplate with any degree of tranquillity!

Energy!

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider his ways and be wise.”

These words are firmly in my head, not only because of their appropriateness given my logarhythmic indolence but also because I can hear their cadences clearly as an echo from the past via the vocal chords of my parents.

I have left undone those pieces of writing that I ought to have done, and there is no health in me.  Actually I am feeling quite well, though I think that the Book of Common Prayer did not have physical robustness in mind when the words were written. 

And I might also add in relation to health that after my swim this morning (made even more delightful by seeing so many children being driven to school) I met my doctor who seemed pleased that I was taking exercise, but tapped my tummy and indicated that my girth was still a problem.  I lamely muttered “Tiempo!” to give myself some width-reducing time and felt the usual guilt that meeting one’s medical advisor usually provokes. 

Later, however I was mortified to see the same doctor sitting under the trees in the café courtyard blatantly smoking!  Yet another case of do as I say and not as I do!  I shall harbour this knowledge against future admonitions.

Today is the first real day of my retirement. 

Pupils will be clogging up the corridors of The School on the Hill with their bodies and the extraneous sound that is such an irritating characteristic of the semi-formed humans who prowl around places of learning. 

The summer is truly over and for my poor ex-colleagues darkness is come upon the face of the earth.  And Christmas is a very inchoate idea in the far, far distant future.

Eschewing the future let me turn to the past.

My fingers are stiff with the unaccustomed actions of key hitting and my erudite comments on so much that has occurred within the space of two month have now drifted into the misty ether of lost expression.

The guests we have had: the Pauls; Emma; Ceri and Dianne have all come and gone and their various exploits remain unrecorded.

Sun, sea, the Third Floor; restaurants; cafes; bars; shops; telephone conversations; the Olympics and Paralympics; reading; cameras; Kindles; swimming; finance; funeral; visits – all have played their part in making this a summer to remember, but without my prose to kick start the process it all risks fading into a sepia wash of half grasped thought.  All gone until I start remembering the names of the kids who were in my Primary School classes – a sure sign of senility I am told and a way of opening up early memories!

I am determined not to forget The Meal in Girona and intend to describe this artistic foodie art in some detail.

El Celler de Can Roca in run by three brothers: Joan Roca i Fontané who is the chef; Josep Roca i Fontané who is the “Cambrer de vins (or as we say in English the Sommelier) and Jordi Roca i Fantané who is the pastry chef.  We saw two of the brothers during the meal and Toni had his photo taking with Josep as he is a fan of the television programme on which he appears.

The restaurant is roughly L-shaped around a thrusting glass-enclosed and tree-filled courtyard and the atmosphere is quietly but refreshingly opulent.

The price for the menu we had is eye-wateringly large and the bill for four of us came to just under a thousand euros – and it only failed to make four figures because Toni did not have the “samples” of the fifteen wines that came and went throughout the evening!

The first course was enclosed in a sort of Chinese paper lantern and, when opened it revealed a chunk of wood with six metal prongs on each of which was a national appetizer to represent Mexico, Peru, Thailand, Morocco and Japan: a caramelized olive; truffled bombon; ring calamari adapted; Campari bombon; marinated mussels and lastly truffled brioche.

Oyster with black pearl, wrapped in its own juice with melon juice, dots of cucumber, celery, apple, lime jelly, oxalis acetosella, melon flower and heartleaf iceplant followed.

Next was green wheat with smoked sardine, grapes, ice cream of toasted bread with olive oil and yeast foam.

Black olive gazpacho with spicy gordal-olive mousse, black-olive fritter, manzanilla-olive ice cream, tasted bread with oil, fennel jelly, winter savory jelly and picual olive was a refreshing dish.

One of my favourites followed: white asparagus comtesse and truffles – a truly astonishing ice cream.

This was followed by a rippled plate of ice-whiteness on which was a charcoal-grilled king prawn, king-prawn sand, ink rocks, fired legs, head juice and king prawn essence.  You really had to be there to see it, let alone eat it!

Red sea bream with yuzu and capers was almost prosaic when compared to the preceding extravagances!

Salt-cod brandade with braised salt cod tripe, salt-cod foam, olive-oil soup, shallots and honey, thyme and chilli pepper with vegetable contrast was the next course in a seemingly unending sequence.

Iberian suckling pig blanquette with Riesling and mango terrine, melon and beetroot, beetroot puree, black garlic, onion and orange concentrate followed.

Red mullet cooked at a low temperature was a striking contrast to the previous complexity.

The common wook pigeon liver and onion with curry caramelized walnuts, juniper, orange peel and herbs was the last of the savour dishes – and the only one at which Toni balked.

The first dessert was caramelised apricot which consisted of a blown-sugar apricot with vanilla and caramelised apricot cream.  This was beyond remarkable and a favourite of all.

The next desserts included strawberries and cream (where the cream was inside the strawberries) moka mille-feuille with anise mille-feuille with moka foam and coffee and a multitude of little cakes and sweets with a clear favourite being the cherries to which something had been done to make them exist on an ethereal plane of deliciousness.

We arrived at the restaurant at 9.30 pm and left just before 1.00 am.

It was (thank god) the best meal (though that word seems entirely too prosaic to define what we experienced) I have ever had.  A wonderful experience that everyone should try if they don’t mind paying a few hundred euros for a meal!

I suppose staying within a penitent’s crawl of Girona cathedral one feels that the excess of the meal can be mitigated by the proximity of ancient religiosity and somehow justify the expenditure of so much money for something so transitory.  It worked for me!

I think that I will try and work in other memories in the days to come to give my resumed writing the depth of scope that rejects the quotidian in favour of the more spacious view.

Worth the effort anyway.

New start again

Emma left early on Friday morning and the house seems strangely empty.  However, that is not for long as Ceri and Dianne are arriving on Sunday and then the countdown to The Meal begins!

Meanwhile I try and keep myself calm by attempting to find out how to work my new(ish) replacement camera which, at the moment, is still working with the zoom in a fully functioning state.

Having printed out the whole of the operating manual (in full and glorious colour - by mistake) I feel that I ought at least to make some effort to read it as I am not of the generation where operating a sophisticated piece of electronic equipment is intuitive.

I have to admit that the screen on the camera does sometimes flash up helpful hints which give me some idea of what is going on – but there are other bits and pieces of information that you simply have to know otherwise you remain in blissful ignorance of the true capabilities of the machine.

The USP of the camera is its Wi-Fi link which should mean that it can send pictures direct to my email account or to a printer or even that the camera is able to be operated via my mobile phone.  Quite why one would want to do that I am not absolutely sure, but if it can be done then I would like to be able to do it – and the usefulness can be worked out later!

It is certainly a neat piece of kit and I think that I will enjoy getting to know what it can do.  Obviously, that last sentence is something like a written pledge to encourage myself to do what I should!

After our day of cloud and rain yesterday, today was fine and hot but with that measure of coolness that betokens the end of summer.  I am eagerly searching the faces of the young to find the signs of desperation that the start of the autumn term usually brings to the surface.  Some of the less imaginative children who get bored on holidays (!) may actually think that they are looking forward to starting school and being reunited with their friends – but a few days of the juggernaut of the timetable lurching into operation and they will look back wistfully to the halcyon days of the summer holidays.

Teachers are slightly different.  The only teacher who ever told me that he was bored and was actually looking forward to returning to school was Paul 1 – and even he has changed his tune now and denies that the youthful and offensively jejune version of himself ever existed!

As if it were fated, I met a teacher from a previous school in a supermarket today and we exchanged cards as I told her that I was no longer teaching in the school on the hill.  That is, we would have exchanged cards if I had had one – instead I meekly took hers and will send in my email address to keep her records up to date.  One never knows when a stretch of supply might come in handy.  One cannot afford to ignore any serendipitous meetings that might be to my advantage in some undefined future.

I am half watching Chelsea being destroyed by Athletico Madrid.  Chelsea’s ineptitude is made all the worse by the obscenity of the players’ salaries and the worse than mere obscenity of the more than questionable worth (in all senses) of their oligarch owner.

I suggest that, instead of wearing some meaningless numbers on their backs they have a figure which is more immediately appreciable to the hapless punters who pay their wages and gives clear and shocking information.

I suggest that the number on the back of their shirts should be based on the average annual pay of workers in the country in which they “play”.  Thus the number “1” on the back of a shirt would indicate that the selfish, foulmouthed, incompetent “sportsmen” [see recent court cases and FA judgements] will be earning the total average annual salary of an ordinary worker every single week.

Let’s assume that the average annual salary in Britain is 25K that would mean that the number on the back of a player like John Terry would be 4.4!  Almost four and a half times the average annual salary every week!  That would give people something to think about as they watch the ineffective performance of individual absurdly paid footballers fail to stop a real drubbing from a team which isn’t even at the top of the Spanish league!

I wonder how many of the louts we have to put up with parading their tattooed bodies and ridiculous hairstyles on national television would only have a single digit figure on their backs!

I am not very happy with the progress of Paralympic Team GB.  We have lost our position and are lagging far behind the Australians and indeed other nations which are too shaming to mention!  No doubt I will settle down as soon as we have won a few more golds.

This weekend is the end of the holidays and 31^st of August was the last day of my employment in the School on the Hill.

September 2012 (and for the rest of my life) a true pensioner!

Back again!

I plead the vicissitudes of keeping visitors happy as the transcendent reason for delaying all those key strikes that might have made my writing a little more exhaustive.

The intervening days between discourse and actual production can only be explained by the reliance on alcohol in one of its many forms and the necessity to make the most of conversation in my native tongue.  I feel the two aspects of delay mentioned there mayhap be linked in some way!

The Pauls now seem but a hazy memory with Emma being the second course.  We have eaten to satiety and sampled a couple of the “gourmet” meals that are advertised as Castelldefels makes its claim to be the Catalan version of Ludlow or Abergavenny.  [And it says much for the colonialist twist of the spellchecker on this machine that it recognized the first English jumped-up border town with no problem but baulked at a true Welsh place name.]

We have not done the touristy thing with our visitors this time round and haven’t been into Barcelona once!

Sunday sees the arrival of Ceri and Dianne and our expedition to Girona for our long-booked extraordinary meal in one of the great restaurants of this part of the world.

As a lead up to this gastronomic treat the meal that Emma and I had in the Don Jaime last night was more than acceptable.

Set on a hill overlooking the town and sea we sat in an outside terrace and had a meal for which the final payment seemed something of an insult.  The waiters were attentive without being intrusive and the Cava was well chilled.

My meal comprised an exquisite “cep” risotto, followed by steak with truffle and sherry sauce.  The steak was extraordinarily tender, but I must not let this exception encourage me to rely on the buying policy of most eating places where the meat may truly described as “sole food” – something which is more akin to the bottom of the shoe than the bottom of the stomach!

My sweet was a series of little cakes which were pure indulgence.  Forty quid for a meal for two like that in a setting like that seems like charity.  Almost.

It does encourage me to try out some of the other €25 offers in the Gastronomic Passport and, unlike the Ruta de Tapa which seems to have finished, this set of meals is available until the start of December.

Yesterday was the worst day of the holiday as far as weather was concerned but the adverse conditions were of little moment as I spent my time ferrying people to doctors and chemists for most of the day.  Nothing was too serious (I hope) but there is a different concept of time when waiting for medical personnel to do their stuff – especially as we were tricked into complacency by the first visit of the day when we were seen almost at once.  We did of course make up for that later in the day when the bloody-minded unhelpfulness of a particular member of the reception staff in our local medical centre ensure the waste of at least an hour of pointless inactivity.  Toni was incandescent with fury, and I was reminded of the line in Julius Caesar “Thus with a prick I damn him” as another traitor has a depression in the wax next to his name signifying his death.  I would not like to be that particular gentleman when someone like Toni is gunning for you!

The Paralympics has (have?) started and we have had the “relaxation gold” which means that I can stop worrying – but the target of 103 medals from umpteen different sports does seem a little ambitious as a target.  I fear that we can no longer rely on our having invented these games to ensure a flow of gold.  It is very disturbing to note that, at present, we lie in third play behind Australia and of course China.

It is frustrating that we can get none of the extras from British broadcasting stations on the net and I am getting tired of reading “Not available in your country” whenever I try to access some of the goodies on display on the web pages.

I do however have the official web page which lists the medal totals and that, after all is the important bit.