Passion for poems

The day did not start well; I was forced to go into the all-people lane for my swimming, all the real lanes having been taken my others.  This meant of course that I swam grumpily.  This means that I powered my way up and down in a careless way.  Unfortunately there were no other people in my line of swim to be careless about – but the attitude was there, even if the way in which I could have shown it was a little lacking.

            My stroke is certainly more powerful than it was and I swim a damn sight further in my strictly controlled half hour than I ever used to.  The impertinent people in the other lanes were no match for my speed.  There is much to be said for being a young retired person – at least compared with the others who are in the pool at the same time as me.  I am the young tyro swimming with a vigour that my fellow swimees can only think back upon!

            I will need to do an extra swim of three this week as I have given in to low impulses and eaten a beef burger, two chicken burgers and a plate of black rice.  To add insult to injury I have also had a glass of beer.  That glass would have been churlish to refuse as it was given to me by the place where I bought the beef burgers.  Free, gratis and for nothing!  And following the traditional Rees philosophy I didn’t refuse a good offer.  It is nice to see that my legendary charm can still work its magic on the odd occasion.  And to hell with the calories!

According to Spanish time, the deadline for sending in the latest TMA has now past and tomorrow I will post my submission for the assignment on the forum in the hope to prompt my fellow students to post theirs.  Share the pain!

            I am working on a sequence of nine poems which are related to the Muses.  This is not my choice, you understand, but one of the exercises in the Big Red Book which is the bible of our course.  I have already written a few poems based on the Muses (again an exercise not choice) but this present sequence will be a more controlled piece of work.  I hope. 

Some of the work has been done by producing Freewrites (a particular torture, the use of which still does not convince me) which are pieces of writing which are closer to flow of consciousness pieces than any form of structured expression.  The idea is that you write them and then ‘excavate’ taking out of them any gems that you might have produced.  You then work up the gems into something which is worth reading. 

That is the idea; it doesn’t always work out in reality.  But it is a useful starting point.  The poems I have to write are short.  Though there is no indication about what ‘short’ might actually mean.  I will find an interpretation and then will post them on the public forum to general consternation!

It says something for the situation in Spain that we turn to the horrors of Kiev with a sense of relief.  From the top to the bottom of high society in this country there is corruption and a total contempt for any who can be defined as ordinary – or not part of the rich and political who rule this country.

            The farce of the Royal Family continues with the Infanta’s evidence to the judge about her alleged (Ha!) corrupt deception containing 500 variants of replies to questions of the “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember” type.  This is, of course a form of contempt for the legal system – but being the Infanta she stands a bloody good chance of getting away with everything.  Our repulsive president or prime minister or standing joke has already said that he thinks that she is innocent.  Justice!  Ha!

            A lying member of PP (the party of government) has been shown to have a Swiss account with one and half million Euros in it which obviously slipped his mind as he denied having one in a televised interview.  He has resigned (!) which is almost unheard of in our corrupt system but not because he is a liar, but because he can’t stand being hounded by the press!  Poor thing.  If it wasn’t for the press we wouldn’t be able to pronounce the word ‘Justice’ let alone mourn its absence in this benighted country.

            The head of the Civil Guard has been lying his head off about what happened in the Spanish enclave in Africa when his police fired at immigrants swimming towards the Spanish beach.  He denied they did any such thing of course, but luckily we have mobile phone evidence which shows him to be the lying rat that he is.  Has he resigned?  This is Spain.  And that is your answer.

            A variety of corruption trials drag on with the criminals pointedly not going to jail.  One lives in deluded hope.

            I might mention bankers, but they are no worse than the scum in Britain and just as greedy about using our money to finance their disgusting lives.

            It goes on and on relentlessly, but Spanish prisons are never going to be overfilled with the guilty politicians, bankers and businesspeople who seem to be negatively charged against the power of the bars that should enclose them.

            But the sun shone today and I cannot be truly bitter when my favourite star shows itself!

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!