MY Saint's Day!

SAINT STEPHEN’S DAY, 2017.

Not the first up today, as Carmen is already in her natural home: the kitchen.  But yesterday she was in a restaurant and so she had at least one day off!  At the moment she is cleaning the prawns and as well as trimming the legs and whiskers, she also takes out the eyes as she says she doesn’t like them looking at her.  I do not share her squeamishness, but I am going to say nothing to such a competent cook!

In Spain, one’s name day is almost as important as a birthday and presents are to be expected – one of which I already know, as I am the one who bought it.  

This is a boxed set of Solti’s complete oeuvre with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on CDs.  I know, I know, I have heard all the arguments for ditching my allegiance to such an outmoded form and turning to the dark side of Spottify (or possibly with one ‘t’?) for all my musical needs, but memory stops me. 

I can still remember the cost of the LPs and the first CDs of people like Solti at prices that I could never afford.  It was only with the advent of the bargain LPs that my classical music library grew. 

I am eternally grateful to Music for Pleasure, Heliodor, Marble Arch, Classics for Pleasure and one or two other more obscure labels that allowed me to spend 9/11 (nine shillings and eleven pence, under 50p!) to start off my collection.  Admittedly the prices soon rose to 10/- (ten shillings) then up to 12/6 and so on following inflation, but even I could afford one or two a month.

These labels gave me introductions to Nielsen, Mahler, Sibelius other than the Karelia Suite, Hindemith, 

music from the Middle Ages and other odds and sods that have become part of my musical vocabulary.  I found that the great thing about being interested in Classical Music as opposed to Pop was that every shop record sale, no matter how meagre, would yield something of interest.  Let’s face it, if you like The Greats in Classical Music then there is a substantial back-catalogue to get to know, and therefore always a justification to buy.  Which I did!

So, the opportunity to buy quality music for just over a euro a disc is not something that I can resist and anyway I tend to listen to the music in the car where the CDs are more convenient than anything else.  For Christmas I had two CD cases to contain the discs so that they can be kept in the dashboard compartment and then I go through the music fairly religiously disc by disc – though full operas I tend to listen to at home.  Though I do make an exception with car/opera if I am trying to get to know one of the operas in the Liceu season.  The amount that I pay for my seat gives me the incentive to do a little preparatory work for the ones that I do not know so maximize my investment, so to speak!

Nowadays with the ‘bargain’ CD boxes, the individual discs sometimes have the artwork of the original LPs, so, for someone like myself there is an added pleasure is actually recognizing some of the covers that were well out of financial reach when I was first flicking through the music years ago!

Much of the music will be familiar to me, some of it very familiar, but when was the last time that I actually heard it?  I am sometimes shocked by my reactions on hearing some insanely popular piece of music and realizing that I haven’t actually heard a performance of it in years.  For me the real pleasure is relaxing (if that is the word) into the detail of remembered orchestration and also sensing some of the associations of time and place of hearings. 

For example, my first hearing of The Manfred Symphony by Tchaikovsky was in the Swansea Music Festival in the Brangwyn Hall and being almost startled out of my seat by the entry of the organ that for me (in those days when I had the raw material for it) was literally hair raising.  Every consequent performance and recording has been compared with that first experience and found to be lacking!

Sometimes the experience can be less than ideal.  For example I got to know the Concierto de Aranjuez from a cfp LP where the soloist sounded as though he was actually inside the microphone, one soft pluck of a single string on the guitar was able to drown out the orchestra.  Imagine my disappointment on a student trip to Paris and a live performance where, from the lowly seat (i.e. very high and at the back) that I could afford, I could see the guitarist strumming away but all I could hear was the orchestra!

I am reminded of an amateur performance of The Country Wife by Wycherley, a text I was teaching to an A Level group in Cardiff, where the performance was so dire that, in spite of knowing the text pretty well, I couldn’t follow what was happening on stage.  Restoration ‘comedy’ is arguably something that amateurs should not attempt, but even so they managed to make my own language unintelligible and strange!  In the same way I have heard professional orchestras mangle music where sometimes it is physically painful to listen.  With the ease of access to the best in the world not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of editing, it is hardly surprising that some local orchestras suffer by comparison!

But Solti is a safe pair of hands, and I can be persuaded by a different interpretation of some music I know well, if it is sincerely compelling.  Tempi are the clearest point of divergence for listeners, and departures from what individual feel is the ‘norm’ for pieces of their favourite music can be unbearable.  For me there is one Sibelius symphony conducted by Karajan that makes my skin crawl because of its all-encompassing wrongness.  Even then my inability or disinclination to throw things away meant that I merely added a “DO NOT LISTEN!” sticker to the front of the LP and put it back in its place!

I will have to wait until after lunch to get my hands of what arrived in my house a week ago and, just like the books, I am still amazed at my restraint and ripping off the packaging and getting into them.

But resist I did, and I am sure that I will enjoy my present more as it comes with added deferred gratification!

Each Christmas has its own edge!

Well, the traffic was much lighter than I expected and we had a pleasingly uneventful journey to Terrassa.  And we, eventually, remembered the One Thing that, traditionally, we forget to bring.

We had remembered and wrapped all the presents.  We had the cards that we needed.  We had the leads and the electronic bits and pieces that modern life now demands.  We had packed the clothes that we needed for the three days, and enough Cava to see us through.  We thought, ah vain human vaunting, that we had remembered it all.

What we had forgotten was an element in the ‘something different this Christmas Eve’ sort of thing.  The ‘something different’ is a competition.  Three people, including my partner, are going to cook and I am going to judge the final offerings – thereby creating two enemies for life.

 

One of the few Classical myths and stories that does find purchase in modern life is the story of the Fall of Troy.  And while the concept of the Trojan Horse has become something which can be used without showing off, the Judgement of Paris is slightly less well known – but the Trojan Horse stratagem was necessary because of the judgement of that random Greek.

Paris was chosen to make an invidious choice: he had to give a golden apple to one of three goddesses who paraded in front of him.  He chose the goddess of love and was duly rewarded by her life long amity and the tangible benefit of getting Helen of Troy as his sexual partner.  Paris was not of Troy and Helen was already taken, but it is amazing what a goddess can accomplish when she has just humiliated two of her fellow deities.  Paris, of course, was instantly hated by the other two to whom he had not given the apple and I only hope that he was satisfied with his fleshly bargain.

In my Judgement of Stephen I do not stand to gain anything and stand to be reviled fluently in a language I imperfectly understand and to be reminded of my crime to the end of my days.

As my partner is also entering this competition there is an added complication.  His attempt to win has been adversely affected by the fact that the one thing that we forget was an essential ingredient in his dish.  It is sitting in the fridge at home in its expensive tin.  And is not here.  At all.

My partner’s mother seems to have taken the opportunity of the competition to cook for the 5,000 producing not merely a sample dish, but rather a whole menu of variations for general consumption!

This competition is to be just one part of the evening’s festivities.  It is traditional to get your presents at Christmas Eve by hitting the log (see previous Christmas blog entries for explanation) and taking your goodies as the log shits them (really, you should look at previous Christmas entries, it will all make sense then).

This year I am guaranteed delight because I know what at least two of my presents are!  One of them is a pair of books that I ordered from Amazon (one of the penalties of having Amazon Prime is that you are the go-to guy for deliveries for everyone you know) and, with an effort of will that is entirely foreign to me, I kept myself from looking at them so they can be fully enjoyed when I get them from the log.

Now off to Toni’s sister’s house for the meal and the goodies!

CHRISTMAS DAY, 2017.

The Spotlight of Condemnation in the judging of the meats was diffused a little because instead of being the sole adjudicator I was joined by the two kids for the final deliberation and decision.  The guilt, as it were, was shared!

We ate our way through five different preparations of pork ranging from the pure meat in a pate sauce to an elaborate construction with goat’s cheese.  The simplest form won, it being decided that the melt in the mouth quality of the meat with just the right coating of other flavours made it a worthy champion.  I will not say who made the final dish, but I think that my personal domestic situation will not be made more tense by the award!

It is now 11 0’clock and I am the only one up and doing.  Carmen has prepared well this year and I have a choice of two teas to choose for my morning (just) drink.  One is a Moroccan infusion with mint, while the other is a variety of Earl Grey that I am presently drinking.  I was also gifted a little ‘present from London’ box of ten authentic Earl Grey tea bags in it.  The pictorial design includes a black cab and The Big Ben (as Catalans stubbornly refer to the tower) and, as they are vacuum-sealed, they can safely be left to lubricate my next visit.

The books that were a present from Toni are from a Thames & Hudson series that give short illustrated lives of significant characters from the Renaissance and The Middle Ages. 

The format of the books appeals to my informed dilettante approach to knowledge.  Each entry is no more than a few pages long and each has extensive illustration.  They are informative and accessible without being condescending and they have references, acknowledgements and an index.  They are both hardbound and feel substantial.

The characters chosen vary from the world famous to the delightfully obscure – or it could be that the ‘obscure’ ones merely point to gaps in my knowledge, after all they have been deemed significant to make the cut as individuals out of the millions who were alive in the chunks of time covered.  I will do a little test and look at the lists of names and see how far through them I can get before I have notched up 10 people of whom I have not heard.  I will post the results (as long as they are not too humiliating) in a future blog!

[I've actually done this now, and I got to personality 37 in both volumes, before my 10 unknowns had been used up.  I'm not sure how my IQ (Ignorance Quotient) rates based on these figures!]

My perfume stocks have been augmented by bottles of Kouros and 1881 – both favourites of mine.

Over the last decade of so I have altered my approach to New Things.  I am still as acquisitive as ever, but I have altered my way of acceptance.  When I was given something in the past, I used to keep it in its packaging for as long as possible – who does not respond to the concept of pristine?  But it also meant that things were not used. 

There is always the nagging approach to ‘make things last’ and therefore only use them on significant occasions.  Sometimes the ‘significant occasions’ were so infrequent that things became out of date or simply forgotten before they were used up.  So now whenever I get something I open it up and try it at once.  I suppose it is a variation on the ‘live and make merry, for tomorrow you die!’ approach to life.

So what this means in effect is that with perfume, for example, I open it at once and use it, throwing away the sometimes elaborate and expensive packaging that it came with.  This is especially true with packaging that has fitted spaces for the elements in the gift, for example with the Kouros 

where the classically elegant box had a space for the white marble-look bottle and a tube of shower gel.  I was, however determined to cast the packaging into the vast and growing sack of rubbish from the presents as soon as possible.  In this case the perfume and gel were stubbornly set in their respective niches and were disinclined to budge.  So I resorted to destructive force and that is the reason that I am now the walking wounded!

Paper cuts are bad, but cardboard cuts are worse.  I managed to slice my little finger just on the crease of the first joint, where the constant flexing of the affected line of pain will ensure its longevity!  But a small price to pay for a fragrance that, like Proust’s madeleine takes me back in a single whiff to another time in my life!  However long you go on using a particular perfume, its emotional appeal is rooted in the time when you first used it!

Still no movement from the other bedrooms, and it may well be time for me to have another cup of tea!

CHRISTMAS DAY, EVENING, 2017.

An excellent meal in a restaurant in Terrassa.  I had homemade canellones, followed by a fish and sea food platter and finished off with pineapple with crema catalana garnish.  With red wine, gaseosa and a decent cup of tea, oh yes, and with catalan bread.  And water.  And all for 30 euros per person.  On Christmas Day!  We gave the chef a round of applause when she came out to see us after the meal - and she well deserved it.

Then came the pongos.

Now the point of these 'presents' is to provoke appalled amazement in the faces of the recipients when they are finally unwrapped.  This year the wrapped presents were distributed by the kids and then two minutes were allowed for the mystery gifts to be exchanged.  There was also the option of forcing a change by throwing a couple of dice and then exchanging the gift you had with the person how ever many places away from you the total number showed.

Then the reveal of what you had got.  The three worst pongos were, in reverse order:

3rd - A metal tea light holder with garishly coloured jewels held at artful angles by a fretwork of irregular length wires to catch the flickering light.  Grotesque.

2nd - A plaster construction of a semi circular arc on which three owls perched.  The owls were depicted in an humorous manner which merely added to the general sense of horror that the 'object' produced.

1st - A vase.  Its colours were late seventies or early eighties browns and its construction was like a three dimensional projection of a talentless imagining of what an abstract painting might be if it offended nobody.  A vile piece of pottery!

My own pongo turned out to be a be-jewelled and silvered tortoise.  Which, I have to say I rather like and immediately thought would do very well in the garden as an unexpected piece of sculpture!

Tomorrow, my Name Day!

Football and forgetting!

¡El Clasico!  The super-hyped football battle between Real Madrid and Barça is now on the TV and Toni is glued to the set.  As this game is a pay to view affair he is watching via some sort of site on the computer where the quality of the picture is smudged impressionist at best!  Still, any sort of depiction that allows spectators to differentiate between the ‘evil’ figures in white and the ‘good’ chaps in blue is better than nothing to facilitate anguish and abuse!

I have just come back form my swim and I have to say that the café of the centre was not as full as I would have expected.  Usually a Clasico will ensure a full café and this game (played at lunchtime for the convenience of a Chinese audience, I am informed: money speaks!) I would have thought would have guaranteed all tables to be taken, but there were spaces!  Probably all the tables are booked and people are just slow in turning up.

I can’t believe that people are not just as partisan and involved in these games as they were, but I was thinking about changing attitudes while having my traditional post-swim cup of tea, which eventually brought me to think about my attitude to swimming.

“Do I actually like swimming?”

It’s a fair question.  I have, after all, been doing it all my remembered life, so I should have a view about an important element in my life.  I did a series of highly impressionistic scientific calculations in my notebook and came to the conclusion that 1/30^th of my life is spent swimming.  Two seconds of every minute in my life is spent in a pool or the sea (or a changing room or a shower) and I’m sure that it would be more if I took into account that I do sleep, where swimming is rather more difficult.

So, this activity that takes up a significant chunk of my life: like? dislike?

I have set myself a metric mile (60 lengths of our pool) each day.  This takes about 40 minutes for me on an average day and I am always happier when it is done.  Let’s face it, swimming is basically boring – you just go up and down completing length after length.  Not much to see, doing the same thing minute after minute.  But if I don’t do it I miss it and feel that the day is somehow incomplete.  Is that the same thing as liking it?

True the sense of freedom, in being able to glide through water, to have it support you is something which is always a delight - but the actual drudge of swimming, actually doing it, rather than bobbing around?  Not so sure about that.

There is the psychological aspect: the swimming pool is a different environment and it is always good to vary the constraints in one’s life.  And in health terms, it is a good thing to take at least 30 minutes exercise a day.  It gets me out of the house and I meet a whole different set of people every day.

And then there’s the question of style.  I think that I swim reasonably well and there is something to be gained in doing something, anything, competently.

But the Great Delight is, of course, finding fault with others.

You would have thought that recreational swimming was a fairly tranquil and placid activity.  You would have thought wrongly.

In an empty pool I am sure that swimming can be energetically relaxing, but add anyone else and there is ample room for annoyance.

Firstly there is the simple crime of inelegance.  Some people swim by appearing to crawl through the water, with each limb apparently with a curious life of its own.  My reasonable and logical self says that any progress through water is positive and should be applauded and encouraged, but the aesthetic motivation in me finds some swimming simply gross.

And then there are the faults of lane swimming.  There is a strict etiquette about swimming in lanes, but only the individual swimmer knows exactly what they are so they can use their specific unique knowledge of the rules against whoever is invading their space.

For example: there is an unwritten rule that, if only two people are swimming in the same lane then the rule that you should swim in a clockwise direction is overtaken by the more obvious rule that each swimmer should take half of the lane and do end-to-ends instead.

As there was no free lane I had to join another guy in his lane and, in spite of my swimming deliberately in an end-to-end way, he steadfastly refused to comply and stubbornly stuck to the ‘rules’.  This in itself would be no bad thing if swimmers are equally matched, but we weren’t, I was the faster swimmer and I soon caught him up.

He then displayed a second ‘fault’.  Rather than a touch turn at the end of his length, he completed a clumsy tumble turn and then angled himself to go into the other half of the lane, thereby cutting across the line of the following swimmer!  Crime!  Selfishness!  Inconsideration!  It is so easy to get worked up when all you are doing is going up and down!

The solution was simple of course.  All it needed was for me to change halves when I caught up with him and go in the opposite direction.  I could then play at catch-up giving myself a set number of lengths to reach him again and get at least 20m ahead of him in another set number of lengths.  In such ways I keep some sort of interest in what I am doing.

And that piece of writing is an attempt to keep politics at the back of my mind at a time when it is difficult to think of anything else!

This is one of the oddest Christmases that I have ever spent, with a crucial election set by a hostile political party with a 4% vote in this country four days before Christmas Day!

And that same political party seemingly determined not to accept the democratic will of the Catalan population.

Roll on 2018!

But one good thing, the result of El Clasico, 23/12/2017 Real Madrid 0 - Barça 3.  Hooray!

What next?

 

The Day After The Night Before Syndrome has struck the political ruling class in Spain. 

They had a worrying few hours, as it seemed that their Master Plan to stymie the onrush of the independent movement in Catalonia had disastrously backfired, and then it was confirmed that far from being stopped, the independence parties had managed to retain their absolute majority in the new parliament of Catalonia.

How to spin the disaster? 

The Spanish ruling PP party did exceptionally disastrously in Catalonia: they lost 11 of their seats and now have the shaming total of 3 (three) seats in the new parliament!  And even more humiliatingly, they fail to justify the numbers to be considered a separate group and are now lumped in with the minor parties in the ‘mixed group’ of parliamentarians.

But there was one bright spot for the woefully inadequate political leader Rajoy to go on about.  The fairly new right wing party of Cs gained 25.4 of the votes and 37 seats and will be the largest single party in parliament.  But an absolute majority is 68 seats and so they are nowhere near that number.  If they were to go into coalition they could count of the mighty support of the party with whom they slavishly vote with nationally, PP - so that boosts their total by 3 (sic.) to 40, still 28 seats short of an absolute majority.

They might be able to use the votes of the Catalan ‘socialists’ PSC, as PSC have allied themselves with their natural enemies of PP and Cs against the independence movement in Catalonia.  PSC gained 17 seats, so if they voted with PP and Cs the total strength would be 57, still 11 short of an absolute majority. 

The only other party which is opposed to independence for Catalonia (though they do advocate a binding referendum on Catalan independence some time in the future) is Comú, the Catalan version of Podemos.  Comú is more left wing than the other parties in this grouping and is a very, very uncomfortable bedfellow, even if they could be persuaded to join such an unholy alliance.  And even if they did, their 8 seats would give a final total for the anti-independence grouping of 65 - 3 short of an absolute majority.

On the other side: JxC with 34 seats; ERC with 32 and CUP with 4, make a total of 70 - 2 over an overall majority.  They win.

So, our exiled President in Belgium has offered talks with Rajoy anywhere in Europe other than Spain (where he would be arrested as soon as he set foot on Spanish soil) to start the political dialogue.  This is a situation that needs a political solution.

Rajoy has refused.  Or rather he has offered talks, or as he puts it in his alternative universe, “continued dialogue” (!) as long as the Catalan side is legal i.e. have rejected the idea of independence.  This is a sort of Catch-22 situation where the reason that there is a problem is the only thing that can’t be talked about in trying to resolve it.

I sometimes wonder if Rajoy doesn’t have some orange sash wearing Northern Ireland protestant unionist blood in him somewhere as the only word that he can say (and does with boring regularity) with absolute confidence is, “No!”

Our Spanish “entirely independent legal system” (sic) has stated that it has its sights on other rebellious, seditious and criminal persons of interest who all happen to be leaders of independence groupings.  As some of our political leaders are already political prisoners we can see where this is going.

As these political prisoners have now been elected to the new parliament, how is that going to work?  Are the imprisoned parliamentarians going to be ferried to the parliament building in prison vans and taken back to prison at the end of the day?  How is our likely president going to function when he is in exile in Belgium?  How will the voting take place?  Will the prisoners be allowed to vote?  Is that how Rajoy hopes to reduce the absolute majority of the independence parties to allow more ‘friendly’ fellow travellers to take over?

Rajoy has already said that he will ready and willing to talk to the ‘winner’ of the election in Catalonia: the leader of the Cs.  This is not the way forward.  Unfortunately Rajoy is too politically myopic to see any way forward but his own.

The New Year will bring the first meeting of the new parliament. 

Who knows what might have happened before the vote for the next president!

Everything is still to play for.