Another lull

I think the weather is trying to lull us into a false sense of security.  Another day has dawned and it’s bright and sunny, while on the television we see nothing by graphic representations of the End of Days with floods, destruction and chaos. 

Not for us on the Med, here it is tranquillity and brightness.  I am sure that we will pay for this, but while we are sunning ourselves we have to make the most of it.  Even the balmy conditions here are as nothing compared with those further down the coast where people have been openly sunbathing on the beach and even going into the sea!  The most I do is take my cup of tea outside when I have completed my swim and gaze with closed eyes at the strengthening sun.  We all need a daily dose of Vitamin D!

           

This week has not been a good one for my new diet with drink and potatoes taking a fairly central place in my eating choices – so Sunday, or tomorrow as it is sometimes known, is going to be something of a day of reckoning.  And there is dinner with Irene to contend with this evening.

            I know that, theoretically, it is possible to have salad, grilled fish and fresh fruit and call that an evening meal, but it seems to lack a certain something, or indeed all of something to me.  I crave carbohydrates: pasta, potatoes, rice – anything other than green leaves.

            Don’t get me wrong, I like salad as next as the well man (sic) but there does come a time when grass coloured vegetation simply does not hit the spot.  On the other hand there is the realization that at the very least (dear god, how awful those last five words sound) I have to lose another ten kilos before I am within the area of ‘considering where we go from here’.  10K.  That’s a lot and it will definitely mean new trousers.  Still encouraged and threatened by doctors I do not have that much choice in the matter and will have to plough on regardless and take any setbacks with a return to leafy plates of insubstantiality and two swims a day.

           

On an altogether more satisfying note the bloody TMA is almost complete and should be sent off to the tutor this weekend.  I also need to start the preparations for the course that I originally wanted to start my new bout with the OU with: history of modern art.  It may be two years late, but it is one that I am really looking forward to.  As it is at level 3, it will be more of a challenge than the other courses that I have done recently, but at least it should stretch me somewhat and anyway I like looking at pictures!

            It is now the evening and we are waiting for Irene to finish her classes and come to Castelldefels for a well-earned dinner.  I will be able to eat with a reasonably clear conscience as I have now (all but) finished the poetry assignment and it only needs a few more keystrokes to make it ready to be sent off.  This is one assignment that I will be glad to be rid of, though the mark I get will be directly relevant to what I attempt to do next in this course.

            Interesting.

I want to be something or other

When I arrived at the pool this morning, it was swarming with small humans.  Barely restraining my natural scorched-earth urges (admittedly fairly futile in a place mainly composed of liquid water) I soon spied a vacant line which would facilitate my lengths and so I was placated enough to merely pass by the small humans rather than pass through them with whips and scorpions.  I wonder, in these benighted times how many people will recognize the biblical allusion there. 

Come to think of it, I am not sure that I know precisely where it comes from.  Old Testament definitely, which book though is a little more tricky.  Judges?  Possible.  I think it was one of those Jeroboam or Reheboam type characters.  Or indeed not.  I know it only takes a few key presses to find out the answer, but I choose not to do that and prefer to live a little longer in the delicious discomfort of easily avoidable ignorance.  Come to think of it that is something which is a direct result of the development of technology and the ease with which a whole mass of knowledge (ask not of its value) can be accessed in seconds.

As I have found to my cost, it is easy to find poems by John Clare on line.  But when you are checking the punctuation of a particular line in a particular poem things get more difficult.  I found versions of the same poem (allegedly) which various forms of punctuation and no indication of the provenance of the version.  It was impossible to be sure that any one of the variants offered to me in reasonably prestigious sites was more authoritative than any other.

In the same way the name of the first woman to swim The Channel, which I was trying to discover for reasons too obscure to go into now (and whose name I have totally forgotten) was spelled in three or four different ways depending on which site you thought was more convincing.  As two of the sites were of national newspapers, and as they had different ways of spelling the name I was left little the wiser – except of course I had a fairly specific general idea of what she might have been called.  There was more unanimity about the date of her venture and her nationality, but the name, no.

So, I would be better employed in getting one of my copies of the Bible out and beginning to have a quick flick through.  I have more trust in the printed page than I do in the glowing pixel!

In the case of the John Clare poem, I do have a fairly scholarly book of his poems which does give variant readings and so I was able to satisfy myself by turning pages rather than clicking keys.  And I read other poems by him as I pretended that I was an academic.  As I recall, it was all to do with a comma.  The placement of a comma can completely alter the meaning of a line.  It was very satisfying to discover the ‘truth’ about that particular line.  It went no further than my personal satisfaction, but it was deep satisfaction.

Which is more than I can say for my complete failure to find a version of the original poem which was set to music by Gustav Holst and is now known as ‘I Vow To Thee My Country.’  The original poem was written by Spring-Rice and published in the first decade of the C20th, as far as I know, but what we have in the ‘patriotic’ hymn is a later version.  If anyone knows of a copy of ‘Urbs Dei’ or City of God, then I would be interested to read it and compare it with the final version that is sung.  And sung without much understanding of what is being sung.  Which is what could be said about Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ which is sung before (or is it after) meetings of the WI.  Wonderful words and a great tune, but do the ladies actually ever consider what exactly they are singing?  I fear not, all they hear are the words ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ and they tend not to think too much about the ‘dark Satanic mills’!  I am not sure what the WI would make of it if William Blake were to rise from the dead and go and give a little talk about his poetic inspiration!  It would be worth listening to him and watching the reaction of the audience though!

As the more astute will have recognized, all of the preceding writing is displacement activity.  What I should be doing is writing the commentary which has to accompany my poems which, for better or worse, are now ‘complete’ and reading to be sent to the tutor.  The commentary is the second part of the assignment and has to describe the ‘creative journey’ from blank paper to lyric verse.  Or something.

I am determined to have a rough draft of this by the end of the evening and tomorrow it will be read, checked and sent.  And life can proceed with something approaching normality.  Or at least normality according to the way of the OU.

Lunch, as we have no real food in the house, was in the ‘new, new, tapas place’ where the bravas have to be tasted to be believed.  No low-cal in any way, shape or form, but delicious none the less.

Now to work - the draft calls!

Paucity of pills

It is surely a sign of age when the major delight of the morning is the doctor telling you that you can take two fewer pills each day!  One must take one’s triumphs where one can find them.  And two pills are two pills – even if one of them is a minute dose of Aspirin.

            The doctor was virtually bubbling with delight and he drooled over my latest blood test results and my next appointment is sometime in the middle of summer.  This meant that my consequent swim was swum with a lighter heart and a more relaxed series of strokes than previously!  The trick is obviously carrying on carrying on.

            The swim segued almost effortlessly into an appointment with the dentist who polished the rough edge of a tooth in a couple of minutes for which he was paid €20.  This was part 1 of my treatment as plaque removal took place later in the afternoon which took €55.  Sixty quid and not even a filling to show for it!

            A doctor’s appointment; two dentist appointments and a swim all in one day – something only possible because I am freed from the tyranny of a weekly educational timetable.  One of the greatest delights about Life After School is the flexibility it gives to Get Things Done – even (or perhaps especially) if they are the less pleasant, yet essential mechanics of keeping alive!  The spaciousness of a day which is your own cannot be under-estimated – I even manage to get some recreational reading done as well.

           

The writing part of my existence is not quite a well developed.  I spent today changing single words and then changing them back again to what I had originally written.  Tomorrow I will draft out the second part of my assignment and then consider it done.  I want to move on from what has been a challenging and sobering piece of work and then reassess my future assignment prospects in the light of the response of the tutor.  Who would have thought that I would be so tentative concerning something which should be a undisputed strength?  Such is the power of education when you are on the other side!

The evening, out for tapas with bread, wine and potatoes, and thus undoing all the good work of denial during the rest of the week.  Still, there are a few days before the Sunday weigh-in.  I have to keep the trajectory on its downward course.

Well, at least my teeth are squeaky clean at the moment!

Dripping hatred as usual

Much though I enjoy swimming in an empty pool – even one with floating lanes – I understood that some sort of Health & Safety rules demand that there be a life-guard there at all times that paying customers are in the water.  Perhaps I am wrong and, to be fair, there was a slight but pleasant sense of danger in swimming unobserved.  Except of course for the various cameras that are on all the time and watching – even if no one is actually looking at them.

            With no one to pace myself against I think I had a rather leisurely swim, even if I am swimming faster than I used to owing to the development of my improved breathing on a longer stroke rate.  If that actually makes any sense.  What it means in effect is that I do more stokes with my head in the water before coming up for a breath.  This is faster and more efficient and improves the speed of swimming but doesn’t use up as much energy.  Which is probably a bad thing as I am using the swimming to improve something or other that demands more and more effort to work – not finding ways to make the exercise easier!

            However I thoroughly enjoy my swim and I always have the added delight of the possibility of meeting colleagues from the school next door, whereupon I can remind them of the delights that are waiting for them many years ahead when they too retire.  Call me saintly, but I take real pleasure in this duty.

Yet more drafts of the poems for the next TMA and some of the revisions are fairly radical.  I am trying with increasing desperation to integrate all of the major elements that have been highlighted during the forums and tutorials.  I have, therefore, ticked the boxes – but I am not sure that I have ticked them quite convincingly enough.  As with the last exercise, time will tell.  As will the numbers.

The steady loss of avoirdupois is sort of on course towards the Day of Reckoning which will be April Fool’s Day.  I have set myself an arbitrary target (which I have no intention of divulging to all and sundry) and will therefore be able to announce my achievement of it with confidence.  Never be let it said that I have not learned something about the way that things are done in the country of my adoption!

            It is interesting that my wardrobe has now become a time capsule as I steadily make my way back through time discovering clothing which has lain fallow as my girth increased and is now being brought into the light again as my waist shrinks.  That last verb is perhaps a little dramatic for what is happening, but it is undoubtedly true that belts that were unusable are now serviceable.

            The sad thing is that, if things go according to plan then the clothing I am wearing now will, in turn be consigned somewhere or other by the end of the year as unwearable.  If that does happen then I will have achieved something which I thought undoable late last year.

            There is also the question of expense because the plan involves purchasing an entirely new set of outfits – but that, if all goes according to plan, is something to be thinking about in 2015.  It is good to have plans, but better that they actually come to fruition.  That is something that I need to keep telling myself.  Long terms plans they may be, but they need to be constantly updated and checked to see that they are on course.

Our cretinous government has voted to make abortion more difficult to obtain in this country.  This is despicable on at least three counts.  Firstly it shows the pernicious influence of hard line Papists in the upper echelons of government; secondly it is a conscious attempt by a beleaguered government to deflect attention from the plethora of scandals that surround them, and thirdly it is a gross violation of a woman’s right to decide.

            On the plus side, I have to admit that I have not felt this degree of loathing for the misfits of a duplicitous political party since the high and palmy days of the odious Thatcher and her supine bunch of self-seekers.  It keeps the muscles which deal with hatred supple and exercised, ready to lurch my body into action at the sight of any one of a range of the pygmies who find themselves in government in Spain.  To be fair a reasonable number of the government ministers look like small time crooks, still surprised that they are holding the levers of power.  Many of them look so much like caricatures that a simple photograph of them comes out looking like a professional cartoon.

            The Prime Minister is a walking joke; the minister of education a sick joke: the minister for taxation a contemptible joke, and the latter a nasal pip-squeak as well.  The leader of PP in Catalonia looks like a freak, though this does not distinguish her from her fellow party members.  They are a bunch of corrupt liars, undemocratic and selfish. 

I relish detesting them all.