Always waiting!

Day 0 + 6  [DD -1]

Today and tomorrow will be like the Ides of March for us.  Every small sound and every movement of our next-door neighbours will be garnered and analysed to provide incontrovertible proof that the Great Migration back to the City has begun.

We have not really considered the consequences of their staying any longer than Sunday.  If they are still here next week then our only recourse will be to apply to the United Nations to get their behaviour recognized as “cruel and unnatural” and therefore be considered officially as torture.  I would anticipate getting the Consul in Barcelona involved first then via our Embassy in Madrid bringing the full weight of the British Government to put our case to the Security Council and then presumably tactical air strikes from the USA (with the help of France nowadays!) to put us our of our misery.

Talking of the United Nations, I was gratified to see that United Nations Day this year is the date for a General Strike in support of Education here in Catalonia!  As that date, of the 24^th of October, is also the celebration of a much more important event I find the synergy of the two occasions converging as something which is too good an opportunity to miss.  I do hope that there is some way for the Birthday Boy to give his support to such a significant event.  A birthday to remember. 

And that reminds me, my little red flags of the CCOO which have been proudly stuck in flowerpots in the garden have pinkified and disintegrated so I will need new ones to show my affiliation and support!

Next week should see the arrival of the learning material for the next OU course arrives.  And if it doesn’t then I am going to the post office here to make enquiries as their past history is not very convincing on the actual delivery of any parcels entrusted to their tender care.

I am still waiting for the mark for the last essay.  Our poor tutor has had a complete technological deprivation as the Wi-Fi and telephone service in her remote location collapsed and without computer access the whole of the OU tutor system fails. 

As she is a rapid marker she rarely takes up the allotted “ten working days” to get the work done but she has asked us to be patient this time.  As usual I have worked out that she doesn’t actually need to get the work back until the 18^th of September, but I do hope it is sooner as there is a sense of limbo which comes when you are waiting for the last piece to be tidied up and it is a nagging distraction to getting settled down to make the next concentrated effort.

Toni is now getting back to his studies as his course has now started again and he will have an examination some time in December of January.  At least mine will be out of the way some twelve weeks before his – though I have another one looming in the summer of next year and five or six tutor marked assignments to complete before then.  And all of it self-inflicted!  Ah, the masochism of learning!

Disaster!

OK, it’s my fault . . . but . . .

Through an oversight I left my iPhone on a table on the terrace of the third floor.  And it rained.  Luckily I left the phone on a table that was partially sheltered from the storms but a “few” drops of rain did get to the iconic surface of the machine.

I dried it and hoped fore the best and, lo and behold, it worked.  For a while.  This morning I unplugged the thing and it had not taken its charge.  And now it is just an inert block of well-designed metal and glass.

We are about to go out to lunch and I have left it plugged in in the hope that . . . in the hope . . . in the . . . in . . .

And another thing. 

I find it deeply suspicious that my phone should give up the ghost at precisely the moment that Apple has announced a new iPhone 5S.  Suspicious and fatal!

However, for this lunchtime I will live in hope and pray that my phone recovers and that all things may be well.

Please.

But they weren’t.

The phone was taken out of its enclosing battery case and plugged in with the official plug and lead.  And nothing.

So admitting defeat I came downstairs and demonstrated to Toni how it wasn’t accepting its charge.  When it did.  Why do things behave like that.  At least I hadn’t admitted the putative disaster and so it just seemed like a slight glitch, obviously the fault of a power adaptor upstairs.

So that happy event has saved me a few hundred euros!  Thank god for inconsistency!

Still waiting!

Day 0 + 5

Again alone in the pool.  Well, guards and odds and sods, but no one else parting the waters.  Delightful.  It didn’t last and I soon found myself the slowest of the swimmers – apart that it is from an old duffer who did a version of the vertical dogpaddle that becomes the stroke of choice for those of a certain age.

I remember the times when I set myself a couple of lengths to lap a swimmer to my left or right, and now I fear that I am that lapee rather than a lapper!  Times change and they were both much, much younger than me.  Why weren’t they respectively in school and work!

I am swimming for longer – I think to justify the amount of time I spend afterwards drinking my “tea” and playing Candy Crush on my mobile phone.  I have discovered the way to play the game and that is to play it until the clearances are clearly impossible without resorting to payment and then get rid of the game from the device.  My iPad is now Candy Crush free and my mobile phone is rapidly going that way.

The sun shone again today and it was even warm enough to stretch out on the third floor – which I did.  It is getting cooler though, even I have to admit this - and autumn is in the air!

I will, however deny reality for as long as possible and my wearing of shorts and sandals will continue until the hairs on my legs freeze and my toe nails go blue.  And I will drink café con hielo until summer.

It now turns out that the alcalde (mayor) of Madrid was coached for her embarrassing speech in English to the International Olympic Committee for months before she gave it and the writing and coaching cost nearly a million euros!  I find this almost impossible to believe, except of course, I am in Spain where things like this are absolute normality and are usually lost in the tsunami of corruption which is expected. 

But things are being looked at in a little more detail thanks to the spotlight of the crisis, so the writhing, grasping and blatant theft which is daily highlighted by a growingly exasperated press must lead them to be wondering what more they have to do to get this bunch of self-seekers to pack their bags and go where they belong – behind bars.

The corruption stretches “up” to the royal family which, with the traditional greed of the very rich has show itself to be rooting around in exactly the same way as the lowest forms of political life.

Tomorrow lunch with Irene and more revision and tidying and, who knows, a little bit of sunshine too.

They do not move!

Day 0 + 3

The weather is now taking our side against the UNDN (Unmoving Next Door Neighbours) and the heavens have unselfishly opened for the last two days in an orgy of falling water in a (vain) attempt to wash the offending articles back to where they belong.  Which is not next door to us!

We are now clinging with a dogged faith to our belief that Sunday will be the Day of Release when silence, like a cool hand on a fevered brow, will reclaim one half our neighbours for the next ten months.  The odd days and weekends we can take, but the concentrated sojourn is something of a trial!

Today and been the Diada or national day of Catalonia.  Even the dampness of the day has been insufficient to lessen the enthusiasm of Catalans who formed a chain of people some 400 Km long the whole length of Catalonia stretching into France.  It has been estimated that one and a half million people took to the streets to show their support for Independence.  Out of a population of some seven and a half million.  A considerable show of opinion.

The Spanish State has no intention of letting such a wealthy milk-cow like Catalonia go, but it is easy to see that the past appropriation of money earned by Catalonia, siphoned off by the Spanish State and the State’s continual refusal to rethink the status of the Catalan fiscal arrangement has exacerbated the tension between Catalonia and the Spanish State.

I am no proponent of the breaking up of the present organization of Spain, but I do understand the real (and imagined) grievances of Catalans and the present government in Madrid of insensitive, arrogant idiots are only likely to make a difficult situation much, much worse.

And just in case you might be thinking that the situation of Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom is similar, you would be wrong.  Catalonia is much richer that most of Spain and would make a viable independent country.  So some reputable economists say.  Politically, however . . .

Just to ram the idea home I have just watched a film which takes the real life story of a boy called Eric who formed a society based on Harry Potter to try and get a supermarket to write information on its products in Catalan as well as Spanish.  The story is a graphic illustration of how stupid the state can be when it gets caught up in its own paranoia and ends up accusing a twelve-year-old boy of terrorism.  And of course the other groups who then use the boy for their own ends.

Actually there was a must better film which could have picked up more on the ruthless manipulation of the kid, but that was not what this film was trying to say!

It will be interesting to see how the Spanish State and the State Broadcasting System reacts to what has gone on today.

Yesterday I bought some box files in a further attempt to bring order to the free-organization which characterises my book and document collection.  Little does Toni realise that the Third Floor is a chaos of half inspected fragments of my past life: photos, work sheets, documents, bank records, tax returns, cards, fugitive writing, instruction leaflets, maps, letters – well, you get the idea, all the sort of stuff that would get a historian gibbering with joy were they to be found in a thousand years time.

However, my intention is to a very serious winnowing and make sure that the bulk of this so-called documentation is shredded and space created for stuff which I need now rather than dead paper waiting for an unexpected encounter to bring it to momentary life in a jaded memory!

The shredder broke down trying to get rid of the bank statements from BBVA (the worst bank in the world) which just goes to show that the Forces of Evil are alive and well and protecting banking!

Day 0 + 4

Although it is, allegedly, a delight to be able to stay in bed for the extra hours now that I do not have to go to the School on the Hill, I do not find that it is congenial to me.  Getting up early is so ground into the very bones of my way of living that I will have to follow my instinct and get up earlier than I am at present.  I think the Third Phase of sleeping is more draining that invigorating so I will have to readapt!

And I started this morning and was rewarded by an empty swimming pool!

Even though the pool is divided into lanes with floats there is still something magical about breaking the mirror surface of an empty pool and to know that all the turbulence created is your own work rather than a passing body.  One must take, as the saying goes, your pleasures where you find them!

The two spiteful days of rain have now gone and the sun, bless it, has deigned to reappear and I feel happier with the world.  It meant that the retractable roof on the swimming pool (which has been offensively closed for the past two days) was opened a tinge so that at one end of the pool one was able to feel actual sunshine on one’s back!

I cannot pretend that the water was actually warm, but it was the right temperature for swimming.  Which I did.  And for longer than usual as I have had a threatening talk with Toni who (presumably on the basis of his extensive training in medical exercise) stated that for “anything to happen” I would have to swim for longer than my regulation twenty minutes.  I don’t know if he expects me to develop gills, but I did the “extra mile” and felt duly exhausted at the end of it.  Which shows that something is happening – even if it’s only entropy!

I had my cup of tea in the company of droves of sixth from students from the adjacent school whose liveliness (aka noise) stopped abruptly when their break was over and silence descended once more.

Because of the Bank Holiday yesterday on the 11^th and the start of term in September there has been a staged re-start to the school year with some scholars not returning until Monday.  But I am typing this with only the moronic bark of the sociopathic next-door neighbour’s dog (on the other side) to break the tranquillity.  At least the dog barks on a note below middle C - as opposed to the voices of children-of-a-certain-age (whose communication is just this side of the ultrasonic) and which are able to cut through tempered steel!

I think we ought to go out for lunch to take advantage of the temperate weather and to give me the energy to tackle the rest of the reorganization of the Third Floor in preparation for revision and the next course.

Dark Days

Day 0+1

They still haven’t gone!  The neighbours from Lower Limbo (aka Hell borders) are still here and the female version is still Puffing for Posterity.

To our absolute horror, an overheard conversation seems to indicate that they might all be here until the weekend!  Unprecedented, unprincipled, untolerable.  And I am going to let that last word stand because its strangled form expresses precisely how we feel!

My morning swim was at its best because I swam in an empty pool.  An especial delight.  In the sunshine and in the open air – and warmish water. 

And my bone music system is still working well.  Well, the reproduction would result in my returning any other music system which did as badly – but you have to make allowances when you are dealing with something which works through cheekbones and under water!  It is an advantage if you like pop music and you are playing tracks that you know.  My original (some years ago and with a different system) plan of getting to know the late quartets of Beethoven while going my lengths was a basic non-starter!

My post-length cup of tea is now made to an approximation of a half-way decent cuppa and is at least acceptable – which believe you me is something of an achievement in this country – and was made for me while I responded to the greeting that I had when I got to the counter.

One of my ex-colleagues from the school next door saw me and said, with a considerable amount of aggression, “What are you doing here and not there!”  It took me the whole of the conversation to realize that I should have countered with exactly the same comment, as she should have been in school.  But let it pass, let it pass!

I do hope that this chance meeting is not going to result in telephone calls siren-like tempting me to quit my happy state and revert to early morning misery!  We shall see.

It certainly bucked me up to see my colleague scuttle off to her place of work while I settled down with my pseudo-cuppa and a versatile phone.

I have managed to balance my work/life conflict today by engaging in a little light sunbathing and completing stage one of my revision, i.e. doing the course review.  I am going to enjoy the more detailed revision because there is no aspect of this course that I do not find interesting, taking in as it does subjects as diverse as the posthumous idolatry of the Bulimic Bitch; the history of overpriced Greek vases; Travellers taking black idols to the sea and back; strange Cabinets of Curiosity; incunabula; Khatyn, Katyn, Yama and associated places of death and memory; Elvis the King; a Native American’s brain and what the white man did with it – in short, the usual delights of a well planned and constantly fascinating OU course!

Sooner or later I have got to make the effort to synthesise the three or four “libraries” that I have in the house so that I can find what I think I might have when I need it.  At the moment my collections are scattered over three floors – and that phrase is partially literally true – so that finding an individual volume is an exciting, though exhausting, paper chase.  I am hoping that over the next couple of weeks (as light relief from revising) I can bring “even more” order to a system which has what one might kindly refer to as “ragged edges” at the moment.

One television programme to which Toni is addicted (and I am not averse) concerns a couple of Americans living in Ohio (?) who go “picking” or visiting scrap yards or junk houses to see if they can buy “stuff” which they will be able to resell for a profit.

Some of the places that they visit are literally junk yards with rubbish strewn over a sometimes-vast acreage of land, submerged in vegetation or covered with earth.  What is surprising is how this seeming chaos is like a carefully organized museum display to the owners who confidently assert that, “What you’re looking for is under that car chassis.”  And lo!  It is!

I feel that my books and I have the same instinctive relationship.  I sort-of know where things are, but sometimes it is just too much trouble to dig down or through or over to prove to myself that the volume is there, when the information I need is so simply available from the Internet!

Though the books are so much more and will never be replaced in my affection by eBooks no matter how slick and convenient they are.  I would not want to do without my eBooks but the reading experience is simply different.

For example, thanks to the generosity of Amazon (yes, I am being ironic) I bought an eBook called, “Why?  Answers to everyday scientific questions” by Joel Levy.  This book has an awful cartoon-like cover which reminds me of the worst sort of educational book of the early sixties, but the content is excellent.  It is popular science which perhaps tries a little too hard to be hip and funny, but is clear and interesting.

From time to time on the pages it refers you to another section of the book, and to get there all you have to do is click on the word and magically you are there.  How you get back to where you were is not quite as easy and it is simplicity itself to get yourself lost.

You also tend to read sequentially because you are tapping on pages to get to the next, but this book is quintessentially a “dipping” book where you flick-and-read – except you don’t in the electronic version.

On the other hand this is the sort of book that you read once and then it is just taking up space on your shelf.  It was too good a read to throw away but it is just dead space.  On a Kindle, who cares!  It can stay there forever and, although I have learned that there is a measurable weight of the information stored, I also know that you have to have a very, very, very sensitive balance to discover it!

In short is it a book I can recommend without hesitation (especially for 99p from Amazon) though I would prefer to have the book full of pages in my hand rather than a screen.

Madrid has not been given the Olympic Games for 2020 and there is a general witchfinder general approach to apportioning blame.  The most interesting personality to come out of the debacle astonishingly badly is the lady mayor of Madrid, some PP idiot, who mistakenly thinks that she can speak English.  Her grimace-filled, mispronounced and leering performance has been lovingly re-broadcast, especially her phrase urging members of the Olympic Family to have “a refreshing cup of café con leche in the Plaza Major” in Madrid.  This is already on a T-shirt and has been made into a rap song and is going to haunt her for the rest of her, hopefully, short career!

Corruption continues to blossom in this country with accusation of financial misdoing following creative accounting and the wiping of hard disks.  All of which end up with our glorious governing fiasco PP.  They are a bunch of contemptible clods and the sooner they are moved en mass to prison the better.

But the sun was shining today and the first tranche of pupils have been forced back to school so the streets and shops are gloriously un-crowded and the noise level has dropped dramatically.

The 11^th of September is Catalonia’s National Day during which there is going to be a Human Chain across the country to say something or other to the national government.

More importantly, the 12^th of September should see the rest of the school population returning so that civilization will be justifiably returned to the Just Retired – and I mean the word “Just” in all possible senses!   

We are counting the days to The Departure!