Have they ever thought of trying politics?

 

There was a two-and-a-half hour meeting between the laughable (yet viciously contemptible) President of Spain, leader of the corrupt and corrupting PP group in parliament and the leader of the opposition and general secretary of the so-called socialist party PSOE.  The President does not have an overall majority in Parliament, but is able to govern because of the supine attitude of PSOE who (incredibly) abstained during the last vote of confidence against the government, and the active support of C’s the right wing sluts of Spanish politics.

God knows there is more than enough for these two ‘leaders’ to talk about ranging from the rampant corruption that marks the way that politics is lived in this country to the crucifyingly high youth unemployment rate; the rising numbers of the poor and dispossessed to the rising cost of living.  And much, much more.  But the pressing problem at the moment (leaving aside their own real failings and those of their parties) is Catalonia.

 

On the first of October of this year the government of Catalonia has said that it is going to hold a referendum asking the simple question of the population of if they are in favour of forming and independent republic of Catalonia.  If the vote is positive, the government has said that it will start the formal process of withdrawing from Spain within days of the vote.

This is not the first vote that Catalonia has had.  There was a previous vote where the overwhelming majority of those who voted, voted for independence.  The qualifications in that last sentence are important.

The PP government in Madrid said that such a vote was illegal.  The question was referred to various courts including the Constitutional and High and all of them ruled that the vote was both illegal and invalid.  The government did not allow government buildings to be used to facilitate the vote; voter registration lists were denied to the organizers; various threats were made about the participation of any civil servants; there was a propaganda war against the government of Catalonia.

The vote was held and I voted.  The result was dismissed by the same government that had done all it could to make the holding of the vote difficult.  Considering the difficulties and the opposition, the turnout was remarkable.

The government in Madrid prosecuted the president of Catalonia for holding a democratic vote and he had to go to court.  He was found guilty and was banned from taking part in public political life for two years.  The Spanish government was a laughing stock for being seen as such an active opponent of democracy.

We have had the same sort of build up by the Spanish government for the next vote.  Legal arguments have been made and various courts have pronounced on the essential illegality of holding a democratic vote.  Our joke president of Spain has said that the only legal vote would be one in which the whole country of Spain takes part.  So, for example, the recent vote about Scottish independence, according to the rules of the Spanish government, would have been open to the voters of the entire United Kingdom England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - and not restricted to Scotland!  Absurd and ridiculous.

There has been some bellicose talk, with one minister in the past referring to the use of tanks!  But surely, even at this late stage, politicians could try politics to work out their problems?

I am constantly amazed by how little politicians in this country actually use politics to try and diffuse situations.  Their first loyalties are to party and not to country, and their nauseating repetition of platitudes fails to hide the paucity of ideas to take Spain forward.

 

Our television screens give us a daily diet of graphic depictions of corruption largely unchecked by what passes for Justice here.  The politicisation (in the worst sense of the word) of daily life of the rich and the powerful means that they evade the consequences of their actions.  Ministers refuse to resign in spite of votes in parliament and reams of evidence against them; proven criminals walk free from prisons; liars and thieves pay eye-wateringly large sums of money IN CASH to get out of prison; some convicted liars and thieves have yet to be put away.  But, speak in the ‘wrong way’ about the Roman Church, or the police, or the royal family, or make jokes in poor taste about ETA and you will find that ‘justice’ in this country can be swift and exemplary.  We have laws that ensure that if an individual films say, police brutality, then the person taking the film will be prosecuted before the offenders!

This is a country where a government grant is given to the Franco Foundation (sic.) but the same government is proud that it has not given a penny to fund the work of scientists who are trying to discover the DNA and therefore the identity of those who were murdered during the Civil War and thrown into common graves. 

 

Recently, a 92-year-old woman was able to bury the remains of her murdered father after an Argentinian organization funded the DNA work.  In her moving responses on television she expressed her gratitude that she was finally able to give her father the burial respect that he deserved, but she pointedly said that she gave no thanks at all to the Spanish PP government as they had done nothing at all to help.

Catalonia has banned bull fighting in the region and refused it regional finance; the Spanish PP government has tried to get bull fighting listed as of national historic importance and part of the patrimony of mankind and, where it is in power, it has financed it.  You go to the Plaza de España in Barcelona and the historic bullring there has been converted into a shopping centre. 

 

That just about sum up the attitude of many Catalans to the central government.

In my view the Spanish government seems set for a showdown with Catalonia, which is going to achieve nothing - except to harden attitudes on both sides.

I would give Catalonia a referendum.  Not immediately, but I would commit to holding one in the near future.  I would then work with the Catalan government to restructure the relationship between the Generalitat and Madrid.  Having drawn up a new map for the relationship between the two, then I would hold a referendum using the new relationship to urge voters to go with a united Spain.

There are many foreigners in Catalonia.  Not only those from other countries of the EU and the rest of the world, but also those specifically  including important sources of immigration from Morocco, China and Russia.  There are many from the ex-colonies of Spain and Portugal in South America.  To many those Spanish citizens from outside Catalonia (and there are many in this region) are also foreign.  I am sure that a renewed relationship, a more equitable relationship could be sold easily to unconvinced Catalans and a majority of ‘foreigners’ who are uneasy about the position of an independent republic of Catalonia.

But the government of PP shows no sign of reasonableness, shows no sign of being able to listen sympathetically to justified complaints.  As is not unusual with sides entrenched in positions because of years of intransigence, it looks as though, as usual, lack of political nous will ensure disaster.

And that brings me to Brexit.

But this post has been depressing enough without that!

Tomorrow I will be more cheerful.  Honestly!

It's only a phase!

I am not happy.

Not exactly sad either.  I am more dissatisfied.  That ill-felt sense of not-rightness that sometimes irritates and leaves you with an unsettled approach to life.

So, at times like this I do what comes naturally to me: I write things down and then read what I have written to see what I think!  I know that this sounds depressingly like the actions of the Blond Buffoon who was rumoured to have written two versions of a piece for the Spectator concerning his approach to Brexit – one in favour of staying in the EU and the other for leaving.  He read both and then made up his mind, as ‘any fule no’ to do what was best for his career and to show himself up as a brave champion of the worst dregs of the xenophobic Conservative party and go down fighting as, in spite of his most loquacious efforts, the pro-remain camp wins.  His face the day after the Brexit ‘victory’ as he realized what he had helped to do was indeed a picture of oh-god-what-have-I-done-ness. 

To be fair to me, I am just trying to find the source of a nagging discomfort, not destroy the financial, cultural and political future of a country, so writing things down can be seen as something helpful and innocent rather than, well, how should one describe Boris’s asserted actions?

Accepting for the moment that the story of the two versions is true, rather than an elegant fabrication, it is obviously significant that Boris would be influenced by his own literary style rather than content.  After all, the most obvious way of helping yourself come to a decision is to list elements of an argument for and against rather than write them out as a polished essay.  For a reasoned approach, you need to strip away excrescence and get to simple, fundamental points.  That is the sort of basic ‘summary’ approach that used to be taught in the early years of secondary education to allow the discriminating reader and writer to get to the nub of the argument.

Following my own advice, I made a stark list of those elements that I am finding negative and then read them through while, of course, sipping my post-swim cup of tea in the sun. 

They made sobering reading. 

The points that I made were not so much disasters as ‘slants’, more of a way of seeing than actual negative fact.  Many of my grumbles were subjective assessments rather than facts, and my judgements were relative rather than absolute.  And trivial.   Lots of the points that I made I hesitate to share as their sheer irrelevance to personal happiness would be too stark to tolerate.  I will illustrate the sheer unfairness of the points that I made to justify my feelings by citing just one: the non-arrival of a yet to be published book.  Once you read something like this, in black and white, then the absurdity of the thing strikes you – or more precisely, me!

Some of the things that I noted can be dealt with by more efficient use of my time, though I also have to admit that some of them will only be dealt with by a radical change in my character – and that ain’t going to happen any time soon!  But I have shown myself that by the simple act of writing niggles down their essential triviality can be emphasised.  In this case and at this time. 

Let’s face it, I can easily imagine an approach where writing things down will starkly illustrate the real horror of a situation rather than contain it.  One only has to think of Brexit, or the continuing idiocy of 45 to imagine a rather different list of points that, having been read through would leave you even more depressed than when you started writing!  This however is not the case with me.  At the moment.

And having written this, I feel better.  The sun is still shining and we are about to go out to lunch.  And in spite of the political programme that is playing on the television at the moment showing smiling faces of corrupt politicians escaping the condemnation that they richly deserve, and the graphs showing just how unjust the distribution of wealth is in this country, I prefer to concentrate more on the jolly ballet music that is playing through my headphones. 

It may be escapism and my writing may be deflection, but it is getting a smile back on my face.

The Great Stink

We have a great beach - it may not be very wide, but it is certainly long.  The entire population of Barcelona can easily fit on it, and on many sunny Sundays in summer I think it probably does!  The currents in the sea generally bring people in to the shore rather than drag them out to their deaths; the water is fairly shallow until you get out a reasonable distance; we have restaurants, bars and chiringuitos, and, above all we have sun.  A perfect little seaside town with all the facilities that you would expect.  Perfect.

Except for the smell.  One redolent of drains and not the sort of ambience in which the consumption of anything (including sunshine and sea bathing) is encouraged.

The smell reminded me of something that Cousteau said in the 60s, about the Med being already dead because of the amount of waste that the Med countries emptied into the waters.  He was wrong of course, but not for lack of unscrupulous countries trying to prove him right by treating (in whatever verb tense you would like to consider) the Med as a handy sewer.

What has caused our noxious effluvium?  Construction.  It turns out that one building site (and believe you me, we have many) has punctured or ruptured or simply buggered up one drain with the result that waste has flowed through storm water channels through the beach to the sea.  Television last night showed depressing black-rivers-of-death like pictures of filth flowing into our sand heavy waters.  To add to the drama of the situation, red warning flags were flown on the beach and lifeguards were patrolling urging people not to bathe.  We were also told that thing would be back to normal in a day.  Which is today.  And the smell, through reduced, is still there.

For any place this would not be good news, for a place that makes the bulk of its income from a family-safe tourist destination it is little short of disaster.  Having said that, on my bike journey back from the pool after my swim that takes me along the Paseo of the beach, I saw that, for a Tuesday the beach was filling up nicely and that there were quite a few people in the water.  And not dissolving!

To be fair, our town takes such things seriously and when something happens to threaten the reputation of the resort, they do something about it.  I will be interested to see the colour of the flags when we go out for lunch; whether I believe them or not, however, is quite another story.

In Castelldefels you are much more likely to be injured by the quality of driving and parking, than you are by anything to do with the beach and the water.  As a resident I have to keep telling myself that many of the drivers are coming here for the first time and looking for a parking space and, clearly, not thinking about other road users.  Pedestrian visitors usually park next to the beach on a long car park that is separated from the beach by the main beach road.  There are numerous zebra crossings linking the parking area with the paseo and beach, but pedestrians are not inclined to walk more than a few meters for a safe crossing and are much more likely to chance their arm (and all other part of their anatomy) by blithely walking across the road as through it was one extended crossing.  I have noticed in Spain that there is an assumption that there is an extensive zone around the actual painted crossing which has exactly the same rights in pedestrians’ minds as the crossing itself.  Remember, I tell myself, these people are visitors and the sight of the sea turns them into vulnerable lemmings.  And I further remind myself that having right on your side is insufficient comfort for injury.  So give them leeway and believe in the myth of the extra crossing zone.  I may tell myself all these reasonable things, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce my irritation by the continued unreasonable conduct of some of our visitors.  Most of our visitors.  No, that’s unfair.  Probably.

Parking, however, is in another universe of selfishness.  I use the Tesco Scale of Unreasonable Parking to guide my responses.  It never fails to horrify me to see just how far selfish parkers will go in Tesco car parks rather than walk a couple of steps and be legal.  Parking without cards in disabled spaces is the norm; double yellow lines are routinely ignored; parking across space lines, single people parking in family spaces, parking on crossings, double parking - I’ve seen all of them, and I’ve also seen just how near a legal empty space can be for these people.  Apart from some small Tesco’s in London with little car parking space, I have never been to a large Tesco where the car park was full.  Never.  So, I thought that I was prepared for anything.

Castelldefels is the only place in the world where I have seen a driver reversing on a small roundabout!  Now that is what I call spectacular idiocy!  There may be elements of inconsideration in the action too, but generally, given what a roundabout actually is, the no-brainer stupidity of the action is more of a characteristic!  But, leave that almost glorious piece of anti-driving aside, how do our visitors park in Castelldefels?

Appallingly.  Selfishly.  Dangerously.  Some of their decisions are aided and abetted by the way that our streets are organized.  It is a general truth that many Spanish towns developed before the widespread adoption of the motorcar.  Our streets are too narrow and curbside parking makes them perilous.  In Cardiff the go-to solution for any traffic problem is to seed the roads with traffic lights, in Castelldefels the solution is zebra crossings.  Except, of course, the solution is one that comes with ready-made problems.

I do not know the regulations for the position of zebra crossings in Castelldefels, and I am certain that if road designers know them they forget them as soon as they look at a road plan.  There is one large roundabout in the centre of the town where, each time I go around it, I tell myself that this time I will finally count the number of crossings that it spawns, but by the time that I finally get there after so may stop starts and sudden sallies by suicidally inclined pedestrians that I have inevitably forgotten the number by the time I emerge from the circular hell.

Although Toni tells me that it is illegal and not in the Spanish version of the highway code, cars park right up to zebra crossings and sometimes on them!  Cars park on corners, on pavements, on chevroned areas, on lines of any colour.  They park within inches of other parked cars - which make one wonder how they got in.  Well, no it doesn’t: I have watched Spanish drivers ‘parking by touch’ on more than one (or indeed twenty) occasions.  Your average Spanish driver may be better than I am at reverse parking into a small space, but not that much better.  Space is at a premium this close to the sea, so where you can find it you use it, and the hell with consideration!

During the week, even in summer, things are sort-of manageable, but during the weekends, and especially holiday weekends they are unimaginable.  Finding a parking space becomes the only moral imperative in driving, and all road rules are thrown out of the window as lane crossing and indication becomes something of winter, not a luxury that can be allowed in the height of summer!

“Zen and the Art of Spanish Driving” would be an interesting book to read, though I am not sure under which section it would be kept: Philosophy? Religion? Fiction? Self-defence? Fantasy? Dystopia? Wish-fulfilment? Humour? Adventure?  I am half inclined to type it into Google just to see if it exists!

My Chinese phablet is under repair.  Or possibly not.  It may be that repairing it goes beyond a necessary expense and becomes a ‘junk-it’ alternative.  The problem is that I keep my mobile phone in my short’s pocket and the phablet being oversize meant that I managed to bend the body slightly.  However slightly it was it has played merry hell with the charging of the bloody thing.  I have had to fall back on my Russian alternative.

Yota phone is a make that no one apart from myself seems to have heard of.  It was discovered by Toni who informed me that a phone existed that had two faces: one an ordinary mobile phone screen, and the other on the back something like a black and white Kindle screen.  I did not believe that such a thing existed, but now I have had three of them (1 stolen; 1 dunked in the swimming pool; 1 bought cheaply as a reserve and now in full use) and can recommend them fully but, as is noted in the parenthesis, they are not waterproof!

It may be that the repair to my phablet is affordable, in which case I will return to the phone and enjoy the large screen.  If it is not then I will either stick with my Yota phone or go for something more substantial and waterproof.  I rather like the idea of getting a new phone, but Toni will be disapproving of such warrantless expense.  I have found a phone called the Blackview BV8000 Pro, where even the product name seems defiantly rugged.  I must admit that I am tempted and the price is not too ridiculous.  As opposed, for example to the new proposed Samsung 8 Note.

I was one of the hapless potential owners of the ill-famed Note 7, that the entire technology world remembers as The Phone That Exploded, or at least burst into flame.  I pre-ordered one of these phones and, after a long waiting period was finally told (by the World Press) that Samsung had had to initiate a worldwide recall.  Which was a little harsh, as I didn’t even managed to get my hands on one for even the briefest moment of time.

Samsung have announced that they are going to refurbish some of the millions of recalled phones (with a non exploding battery) and sell them at a yet-to-be-announced price.  I am strangely drawn to this, especially as the new and improved Note 8 is probably going to be the first (non-bling) production mobile phone to break the four figure price barrier: certainly in dollars and perhaps in Euros as well!  Even I draw the line somewhere in my lust for cutting edge tech.  Though the suggested appearance of the thing does make it look lovely.  And it is waterproof - or however such a term is subscribed, qualified and defined in relation to expensive gadgets and liquids.

I will be strong.  I can resist.  But, as always, Oscar is right, everything but temptation.

I Don't Believe It! Again

The prime function of a school is to separate children from human beings.  As any teacher will tell you, the inclusion of children in the designation of ‘human’ is as absurd as linking Conservatism with “strong and stable” government.  During the greater part of the year, with the exception of those pernicious periods when children are allowed, nay encouraged, to flaunt their otherness in public manifestations at Christmas and Easter, we denizens of the human world are able to live reasoned and reasonable lives.  It is the summer that is the most trying part of the year.  In Britain the so-called summer is mercifully confined to a few bright days, while the rest of this season is usually the sort of rain-sodden dullness that encourages children to stay indoors under the supervision of their keepers and plug themselves in to various electronic devices.

Spain is different.  As various people have pointed out: Spain and Britain both have seasons, but it is only in Britain that all four of them can (and do) occur on the same day.  You could say that summer in Spain extends from May to October - obviously there are rainy and dull days, but it is rare indeed that a whole day passes during these months without the sun at least showing itself for a brief moment.  Eating outside, sunbathing, visiting the beach or just promenading are all actions that our sunny months encourage.  Unfortunately, for two of the key months of July and August (with almost two weeks of June) these are the same months of schools failing in their duty of containing the childish hordes from being unleashed on the human population.  Swarming, as my grandmother would say, like “black pats” (on reflection I think that I will try and ignore the double racism suggested by that oft heard dismissal) children spill onto the streets, the beaches, the shops and my leisure centre.

That last one is interesting.  As a child of two teacher parents, holidays were never the problem that most of the non-teacher-parent population must have.  My childhood holidays coincided with my parents’ holidays.  The only disruption that I can remember was when I made the transition from Primary to Secondary school, when one holiday was slightly different.  That problem was solved by accompanying my father to his school and bouncing for most of the day on a trampet!  [I note, by the way, that the word ‘trampet’ has been underlined by Word, but I have never referred to the small angled mini-trampoline used by those foolish enough to vault over a horse as anything else.  Have I been wrong for the last fifty plus years of my life?  You will also note that I have been too lazy to look it up on line - though, oddly enough I did make the effort to look it up in my massive Encarta dictionary!  And it wasn’t there.]  We also lived with my paternal grandparents when I was younger and so there were babysitters at hand.  Upstairs.  So, it is perhaps a little disingenuous of me to harrumph about how some children are treated during the long holidays.  But it will not stop me.

As soon as the holidays (any holidays) start my local leisure centre springs into action with Summer School or Easter School or Holiday School.  As far as I can see, these estimable organized activities exist for one (or perhaps two) reasons.  The first and most obvious is that of commercial necessity: the leisure centre makes money out of the invading armies of kids that are contained by activity after activity to fill the day.  The second is, of course, to get rid of the kids.  The Spanish are a tactile people and leaving your child in the leisure centre is accompanied by much hugging and kissing and fond waving of goodbyes.  But I have seen the faces of the parents as they finally turn from their progeny and walk (or skip) towards their cars.  That look of delighted relief is one that I recognize.  And, another thing, I have seen parents leave their children at times when it would be difficult to imagine the workplace missing them.  In other words, I think that parents go back to something other than work when they leave their kids in the centre.  Those smiles are not of delighted expectation of what their profession might offer to fill the rest of their day!

And this is where things get difficult.  Not for them (parents and kids) but for me.  I go to the leisure centre from my swim each day.  I swim a metric mile.  I feel smug and exercised.  But now that schools have abrogated their incarceration duties their escaped inmates impinge on my life.  Because of the swarms of parents hurling their kids with shrieks of delight towards the welcoming doors of the swimming pool my swimming has become cabined, cribbed and confined - to quote a poet of my acquaintance.  Probably wrongly.

There are five lanes in our 25m pool and nowa-summer-days by 9.30 am four of the lanes are given over to the young pretenders to leisure time.  This morning, for example, there were three of us in a single lane.

Two decent swimmers in a single lane is easy, as it is quite possible to swim expansively and safely in parallel.  A third person necessitates swimming in a clockwise or anti-clockwise way.  This is fine if all three swimmers are evenly matched, but if one swimmer is substantially faster than the other two there are problems.  None of which are insurmountable with the application of Basic Lane Discipline.  BLD is the thing that keeps chaos at bay, but it is a fragile concept and swimming (just like driving) does not generally bring out the best in people - especially if they are, or consider themselves to be, Serious Swimmers.

Suffice to say that, of the three of us, I was the slowest (and indeed the oldest, now I come to think of it) swimmer.  There was a lady swimmer who was punctilious in her adoption of BLD and was content to swim in circles and adapt her swimming to compensate for speed differences, e.g. using a breaststroke or a backstroke from time to time rather than her speedy crawl.  There was however, a gentleman swimmer.  With a goatee beard. 

I have an unreasoning prejudice against this hairy excrescence and was therefore prepared to think the worst of my fellow lane sharer.  And his actions more than justified my concern.  For him, BLD was as a foreign language and he committed the signal swimming crime of overtaking at a crowded end.  Let me explain.  If you are a powerful swimmer and you are stuck in a lane with two slower plodders then BLD dictates that you can overtake a slower swimmer as long as you can get in front of your target swimmer without impeding the third swimmer.  There is also another approach that involves judging things nicely and then reversing course mid length into open space.  This swimmer did neither but swam parallel with another swimmer so that he could push off from the side first and thereby bumping in to the swimmer finishing his (yes, reader, ‘twas I) length.  Very bad form.

My mood was not improved by noticing that one swimmer from the aquacize class was given a created restricted lane to himself!  Not happy - in spite of the fact that I have had exactly the same thing done for me on some occasions.  It wasn’t on this occasion and therefore I felt aggrieved!  And on either side of us, occupying four lanes (or rather three and a half allowing for the restricted lane) the children continued to bray and howl and generally gloat in their exuberant there-ness.

And another thing.

We have a communal pool for the sixteen or so houses that form our little community.  Access to this private pool is via a garden door for about half of us, and a lockable gate from the street for the rest.  Imagine my disquiet on my return from the pool to find the silence of the afternoon - usually only broken by the sound of the sea and the various building work which seems to go on for ever accompanied as always by the howling banshees of the electric leaf blowers - augmented by the shouting of Strange Children.  These were leaping in and out of the pool with their towels and then whupping the wet towels on the pool surround to produce a deep, resonant and supremely irritating sound.  Then these imps rushed towards the gate that they found locked and proceeded to scramble over it.  One boy (they were all boys) indeed re-scrambled over the gate to have one last plunge and thwack before he left!

I must admit to my shame that the use of superglue and broken glass did flit into my mind before the word ‘curmudgeonly’ suggested itself to cover everything that I was thinking, and indeed everything that I have written.

But there is a serious point (ish) to this musing.  Since retirement I have been delighted at the spaciousness that having the whole of a day to do something allows.  No longer trying to get things done in a break-time or during lunchtime, or after 4 pm.  I can go (and park) easily and if something needs more time for it to be completed, then more time I have.  And it’s the empty shops, especially supermarkets that are the delights.  I sometimes forget and get to a shop at 5pm (when most shops re-open after the afternoon closure) and am horrified at the number or children-clutching parents who get in my way!

When I was with my parents, we rarely went anywhere on Bank Holidays, my parents rightly suggesting that the roads would be clogged and places crowded and, anyway, we had other holiday days to use and we shouldn’t make things even worse by adding ourselves when we had other opportunities.  I well remember, for reasons that I forget, going to Weston-Super-Mare on a bank holiday and being scarred by the whole experience.  I am well prepared to admit that I am hopelessly prejudiced against that ‘seaside’ (sic.) resort, and, to be fair, Burnham-on-sea on a wet Sunday was an even worse experience, but I was not prepared for the horrific tackiness and unpleasantness that Weston offered.  And the people, my dear!  And didn’t the odious ex-Chairman of the Conservative party and hack, Archer take his title (has he still got it?) from the bloody place.  ‘Nuff said.

I will now go out on to the terrace and take the sun and allow the golden rays to sooth me to better thoughts!

Having a cup of tea after having a swim (even though it is to my onw special brew requirements) is hardly the most exciting thing to do, and yet simply sitting, sipping and looking have provided me with an amazing amount of raw material for use in my poetry.

     When I first went to Turkey I was armed with a sketch book.  I do not, for a moment, pretend to possess any technical artistic ability, but I doggedly sat and drew some sort of picture for every day of my three week stay.  I would love to be able to report that by the end of my time there I was producing fluent, artistic and compelling work, but I wasnt.  My drawings were just as pedestrian at the end of my holiday as they were at the beginning - but I had looked, and I mean LOOKED at things.  Sitting down in front of a mosque, monument, landscape, bottle of after sun (don't ask) or a knife and fork (when I almost forgot to do the daily drawing) made me appreciate the detail of what we usually only glance at.  It was a valuable lesson and one that I apply today.

     I know that as I take my accostomed seat and have my usual cup of tea something will be new and different from what I have seen before.  I look and, if I concentrate I see.

     To be fair, it doesn't take a highly developed form of perception to realize that with a title like "I watched a pigeon die" there is visual material that should be obvious.

     The dramatic nature of the incident also posed its own questions about guilt.  The title was anticipatory and also accusatory - though I am not sure what I could have really done about it.  I felt that I was in a sort of Christopher Isherwood mode, when he wrote "I am a camera" recording rather than acting, my writing in my little yellow notebook gives me a distance which allows inaction.  If you see what I mean.

     As you will see from the poem, there is a sort of twist.

     This was a satsifying poem to write.  Though it didn't 'write itself' the strength of the opening line encouraged a direction that guided the production.

I watched a pigeon die.

It limped, theatrical, goitered left leg,

into the sun.  Once found,

it folded, wearily, into itself,

looking, oddly, as though about to lay.

Its head, sleek in the light,

made jerky quarter turns until

it too sank in the feathered heap.

A public path was this bird’s grave:

its headstone was an open gate.

Approaching feet -

                       and what was moribund

took to uneasy wing and landed,

painfully, a few sad foot along.

A Desperate Last Flight, I thought,

and now The End Game plays.

The feet walked on, and once again

the tired bird pushed

from the ground,

                       but this time

made an arching loop,

above the fence, beyond the trees

into the open blue.

And death will be a little late this year.

At least for some.

Or just, perhaps, for one lone bird

whose flapping flight made false

my quick fatality of thought.

Though, there again,

who knows what must occur

beyond our seated sight?

As always, comments are more than welcome!

National Lemmings Day - 29th March!

Frederick North, Second Earl of Guilford. (1732-1792)

Portrait of Lord North (1753) by Pompeo Baloni (1708-1787)

So, National Lemmings Day is to be the 29^th of March. 

This was decided by the party that brought you the second Earl of Gilford, Frederick North (1732-1792) whose indolence and idiocy lost us the American Colonies and British prestige and influence, just like another of his later party hacks whose fear of a repugnant group of narrow minded, right wing extremists allowed him to think only of the Conservative Party and not worry about the larger country that he was supposed to be defending.  

Though even the possible loss of Scotland from the Union is small change compared to that other Conservative inspired disaster – Brexit.

So, our unelected Prime Minister, she of the “tin ear” when it comes to real discussion about the impending catastrophe, has decided to start the process of disengagement from our continental neighbours on the 29^th of March.  And God help us all!

It is at times like this that I turn to the 1948 speech of a fellow countryman, Aneurin Bevan who, when talking of the Tory party said, “So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.”  I wonder at his moderation!

So far as I am concerned personally, I am shocked at the level of racist comments from sections of the British public and an acceptance of the most distasteful right wing populism.  The fact that UKIP is still a force to be reckoned with is a continuing insult to what I used to think was the basic morality and decency of the British voting public. 

Let’s not get carried away.  Although I despise the Conservative Party and find their basic assumptions and policies repellent, I do not regard them as fundamentally anti-democratic.  They are antipathetic to virtually everything that I value and their contempt for the working class is only matched by the loyalty of those sad working class Tories who vote for them through thick and thin.  But Brexit changes everything.

Brexit is not merely a different view of generally accepted policies, it is also a dramatic reworking of decades of generally positive international co-operation.

So far, and let’s remind ourselves that nothing has actually happened yet, my pension (which is paid in pounds sterling in Britian before being transferred to Spain after British tax has been deducted at source) has lost 20% of its worth with the fall in the value of the pound.  I know that I am not going to get much sympathy from those in Britain for retirees beside the Med, sipping Sangria and basking in the sun, but I have had a substantial drop in my annual income because, because . . . well, because of what precisely?

I can well understand people who have little job security in areas where the industrial infrastructure has been decimated feeling disgruntled with the powers-that-be for not listening to their concerns.  I can well understand a feeling of dislocation (to put it mildly) from the political classes in Westminster experienced by those same people.  I can well understand the feeling that ‘they’ need to be taught a lesson, be taught to start listening to what ‘real’ people think and want.  What I can’t understand is taking the Brexit route to do this.

I would be the first to admit that the EU has its faults – what system of government does not?  But to cut oneself adrift from an economic, social and political grouping that has kept the woefully dysfunctional continent of Europe from instigating yet another World War is something to value.  Yes there have been disgraceful and bloody conflicts, and yes, the economic situation was criminally mismanaged, but there is so much more positive than the obvious negatives that the right wing press so gleefully parades.

Still.  It is done.  And the 29^th of March will be the beginning of the . . .

Well, I am not going to add ‘end’ to that sentence.  I still have enough belief in my fellow countrymen to believe that somehow or other we will make a go of a situation that looks so very negative.  

As a retired teacher I know from past experience and the idiot pronouncements of successive Ministers of Education that whatever asinine educational rubbish comes out of politicians’ mouths hard working teachers can, have and will make stupid policies work for the benefit of the kids.  Sometimes it takes stupendous effort to square the educational circle, but, if there is a way to do it so that education survives, teachers will find that way.  I am trusting that the way that teachers have worked throughout the years with unsympathetic political interference will be the way that the country works so that Brexit is not the inevitable disaster that it looks to be.

And, to go back to the justly maligned Lord North; some historians have suggested that although there was a real loss for Britain from the result of losing The American War of Independence, there were real advantages as well.  In hindsight, the increasing problems attempting to retain the colonies if we had ‘won’ would have demanded more and more resources in an geometric progression of difficulty in trying to maintain our position.  It would have been a dangerously large drain on British resources which could have been even more catestrophic if the break had been delayed.  

And it turned out that the American colonists eventually did quite well.  Though they had powerful allies, the French, not only supporting them, but fighting with them as well.  Where are our allies?  At the time of the American conflict we were fighting virtually every other nation in Europe.  And now, having learned nothing, we are cutting ourselves off from Europe again.  45 (POTUS) in America seems to be a seriously capricious ally (to put it mildly) at best.  And who else is there on our side whom we have not offended?

But, we have always found a way, we tell ourselves. 

Except, of course, when we haven’t. 

That is what worries me.

Catch-45

The Zulus considered that the greatest honour that they could give to a person was never to mention his name.  I draw this information from my childhood reading of King Solomon’s Mines by Rider Haggard - a book, I might add that I heartily recommend, not for its implicit and explicit racism and colonial assumptions, but rather for some excellent characters like Gagool the witch and for being a damn good yarn.  I, and the greater part of the world, am not Zulu.  Never to mention a person’s name is not seen as an honour, but as a distinct mode of contempt.

I am adopting this approach to the Orange Holder of the Post of President of the United States.  That arrogant narcissist sets such store by his fabricated name (seemingly oblivious to the fact that, in English slang it means ‘fart’) that to deny its use is obviously hurtful to his thin-skinned sensibility.  From this time, onwards I will refer to him as ‘45’ (as the 45^th holder of his position) and I encourage all those thinking people who are offended by any or all of his spiteful pronouncements to join me in limiting the space given to his odious name.  You might look here about this attitude:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/the-power-of-not-saying-his-name/516483/

Thinking about the attitude of 45, I was reminded of the novel Catch-22 (which everyone in the world should read at least once) and in particular his resemblance to one character in that crushingly funny book, especially in Chapter 21, General Dreedle.

He is described as “a blunt, chunky, barrel-chested man . . . His nose was squat and red, and he had lumpy white, bunched-up eyelids circling his small gray eyes like haloes of bacon fat.”  He is also, coincidentally, accompanied by his son-in-law “That bastard” as he complains to everyone, “Everything he’s got he owes to me.  I made him, that lousy son of a bitch!  He hasn’t got brains enough to get ahead on his own.”

The parallels do not stop there.  One of the funniest-unfunny parts involving General Dreedle is when, during an army briefing the airmen start moaning with desire about the General’s astonishingly beautiful companion (!) until ordered into silence by the General, “his great, red domineering face . . . gnarled with perplexity and oaken with awesome resolution . . . his eyes glaring with disapproval”.  A hapless Major lets out an involuntary moan of frustration at something else entirely and the General’s response is to demand, “Take him out and shoot him.”

It is at this point that Colonel Moodus (the General’s son-in-law)

“stepped out diffidently toward General Dreedle with a sickly air of self-sacrifice.  ‘I think you’d better wait a minute, Dad,’ he suggested hesitantly.  ‘I don’t think you can shoot him.’

             General Dreedle was infuriated by his intervention.  ‘Who the hell says I can’t? he thundered pugnaciously in a voice loud enough to rattle the whole building.  Colonel Moodus, his face flushing with embarrassment, bent close to whisper into his ear.  ‘Why the hell can’t I? General Dreedle bellowed.  Colonel Moodus whispered some more.  ‘You mean I can’t shoot anyone I want to?’  General Dreedle demanded with uncompromising indignation.  He pricked up his ears with interest as Colonel Moodus continued whispering.  ‘Is that a fact?’ he inquired, his rage tamed by curiosity.”

Far be it from me to point out similarities between the bellowing of General Dreedle and 45’s fury at the interruption of his racist programme via presidential edict and his ranting against the judges who have a constitution role in the government of the country – but I think it holds. 

45 has no conception of the different strands of government and considers that his powers are directly linked to those of an emperor!  One only hopes that 45 will be restrained from testing his supposed powers to the breaking point!

S C A N D A L !

The treatment of the sister of the king, the forgetful ignoramus of a bank worker who apparently knows nothing of finance, should have prepared us for the treatment of her criminal husband.  He was found guilty of a range of crimes for which he was given a prison sentence of . . . wait for it . . . no time in prison!  Today he has walked from court and is able to go back to his home in Switzerland!  Just when you thought that PP (let’s not pretend for a moment that the justice system in Spain is separate from the political parties) could do nothing more to take the breath away, they encourage the degradation of justice by allowing this glaring piece of toadying, fawning favouritism AND they have replaced some of the most honest fiscals (the legal characters who are leading investigations into the rampant corruption of the systemically corrupt PP and its unsavoury associates) in the hope that the scandal of the incredible treatment of the husband of the sister of the king, will deflect attention from the other disgusting activity that they are indulging in to ensure their escape from the punishment they richly deserve.

            Although it seems like overstatement, this country is looking more and more like a dictatorship in which the MINORITY government’s cynical scratching of the already thin veneer of democracy is looking more and more determined in their ruthless determination to stay in power.  The previous local PP government of Valencia shows what a cesspit of fiscal corruption is revealed when a sitting government is forced to relinquish the reins of power: presumably our national PP government must be terrified about what might come out of any other than themselves is able to see the true situation in this country.  I feel nothing but contempt for most of the political system and for almost all of the questionable characters that run the justice system.  There are, of course, notable exceptions who plough an increasingly lonely furrow in trying to get the truth into the public arena – but in my view, it is easier to think of Spain in terms of a banana republic than as a modern democratic state.  And, what is more depressing is that the government thinks that it can get away with it.  No, they know they can get away with it, because that is what they have been doing, with impunity.

            This is a bad day for democracy, justice and the reputation of Spain.  The actions of this government must be rejected by anyone who cares about the future of the whole country rather than just for one political party.  This should be a wake up call for people to reject the debased ethical stance of a systemically corrupt government and ask for real separation of powers between the judiciary and the legislative in this state. 

The political farce that we have watched with fascinated horror for the past umpteen years as generations of politician and constructors fleece the public purse and get away with it must be stopped.  Most of our present political caste seem unwilling or unable to offer anything more than more of the same.  This is intolerable, and it is up to that part of the disgusted population of Spain to teach their political ‘masters’ the true meaning of that word.