Unity?

Spain is a divided country: that is a fact.  The only point of discussion is how you think it is divided, and by whom.

This division was brought home to me by the reaction of a lady I spoke to this morning when going for an early morning swim before my first Catalan lesson of the week.  She remarked my yellow ribbon badge and we had a whispered conversation about those of the country who are opposed to the attitude that the ribbon represents, and who, to use her words, have the brains of mosquitoes.

The yellow ribbon badge is a signal to observers that I support the political prisoners that we have in Spain.  The leaders of two organisations that were involved in the referendum about Catalan independence have now been in prison awaiting trial since October 2017. 

 

The charges that the Spanish government has brought against some Catalans, via their politically appointed judges, have signally failed to convince any other European government to extradite Catalans who have been charged with “rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds”. 

The continuing humiliation of the Spanish government in the eyes of other Europeans and the hugely negative impression that has been left in the collective mind since the police violence that attempted to suppress the referendum combine to force those supporters of the Spanish state into ever more ludicrous justifications to bolster up their positions.

For me, there has clearly been mismanagement (at the very least) and judicial corruption (at the very worst) and there seems little chance of a satisfactory solution to a problem that polarises and divides. 

 

The last (disastrous) PP government of Spain took a pugnacious and absolutist attitude towards Catalonia and refused negotiation and manufactured ugly confrontation.  The new “socialist” government of PSOE is little different, while it has said that it will talk to the Catalan government, it has made it clear that the unity of Spain is of absolute, paramount importance. 

 

They have also authorised the expenditure of something like half a million euros of public money to finance the legal defence of Llarena (the appalling Supreme Court judge heavily involved in the (il)legal opposition to independence) even though the case being brought against him by our President in Belgium is a Civil issue.  And the Spanish government has delighted in accusing the Catalans of the misuse of public funds!

We are coming up to the anniversary of the referendum and, as you would expect, demonstrations have been planned.  Each demonstration hardens attitudes on both sides and makes a negotiated settlement even more difficult.

I have even had the, “Why are you learning Catalan?” question thrown at me, as I start the new academic year in my Beginners Catalan class.  With the supplied accusation that, “Catalonia is part of Spain, and Spanish is the language of Spain, not Catalan!” 

To which you might reply that Catalan is the language of Catalonia and is an officially recognised national language in Spain itself – though try speaking it in the Senate or Congress and you will get short shrift!

I think that one of the problems about the language in Castelldefels is that the linguistic make-up of this particular part of Catalonia is one where Spanish is the dominant language.  There are many people in the city who are not native Catalans so it is natural to hear Spanish as the language of general use.  Get away from the coastal strip of Catalonia and you hear Catalan much more.  All Catalan speakers also speak Spanish and it is fairly common to hear conversations where one person will speak Catalan while the response will be in Spanish: there being a clear difference between understanding and speaking.

It is inevitable that there is a political dimension to the language.  Statistics vary, but 70%-80% of the Catalan population speak Catalan and more than 90% understand it – figures that Welsh can only fantasise about! 

These are not proportions that can be dismissed and they have to be taken seriously.  Quite how you define “seriously” is, I suppose, part of the problem.

I have not been in Catalonia for very long.  Years, yes, but not very long in the history of Catalonia and the generations of resentment about the way that they have been treated  by the powers in Madrid!  But in the (relatively) short time that I have been here I have seen a marked difference in the attitudes of people to the concept of independence. 

 

For reasons that I do not entirely remember: firstly, I went to a football game of Catalonia versus China in Camp Nou, and secondly, I went alone!  I remember looking around at the Catalan supporters and seeing Catalan flags waved vigorously.  These were the ‘ordinary’ Catalan flags of a plain ground and four bars. 

There were very few Catalan independence flags, that is, the ordinary Catalan flag with the addition of a star within a triangle of blue.  When the Catalan national anthem was played, one person near me raised his right arm in a clenched-fist power-salute until his clearly embarrassed companion told him to put his hand down!

Now, in any mass gathering of Catalans, the independentist flag is in the majority

and you hear talk of the founding of a republic and cutting links with Spain as an ordinary topic of conversation.  How times have changed!  And those inept politicians who find is so hard to ‘do’ politics are to blame for the present on-going disaster.

So, my determination to learn ‘some’ Catalan is not only a recognition of one of the cultural values of the area in which I live, but is also a political statement that sides with the Catalan desire to be seen to be different from the suspect government from Madrid.

In some ways I realise that I am emphasising the political dimension of my attempts to learn Catalan to counteract my horror at having been introduced to the first verb we have to learn in Catalan, by making the learning of it some sort of political/cultural activism!

My only fear is that this blog will be read by my friend Dianne whose first language is Welsh and has, in the past, threatened all sorts of trials and tribulations if I dare learn Catalan before I learn the language of the country I profess to come from.  With an even deeper irony, it turns out that there is another Welshman in my Catalan class.  And he does speak Welsh!

We shall see how far I progress.  And we shall also see if the idea that learning more than one language at a time is somehow easier, with the brain responding to informational overload with compartmentalized ease.

We shall see!

Sheep and goats!

 

There are, as is well known, two types of people in the world: those who find stationery (with an ‘e’ for envelope) endlessly fascinating - and those that don’t.

I am, enthusiastically and terminally, in the first category.

One can speculate about how such fixations develop, and I have thought back to my childhood, and I think that I can see the reasons that I am how I am.

My first ‘remembered’ pocket money was 6d (sixpence in old money or 2½p in the ‘new’) even in those distant days that was not much.  It would have bought me 24 blackjacks, 6 chews or one and a bit sherbet fountains: and it had to last a week.

This is where the lure of stationery comes in.  You could buy drawing pins or paper clips with part of your money and you got lots of ‘things’.  You didn’t ever use them all, but it was a real example of plenty for not very much.  Like staples.

Not every six or seven year-old would ask for a stapler for Christmas - but I did.  And I got one too (my parents probably delighted that a childish wish could be fulfilled at such little expense!) they may have been delighted, but it could not possibly match my ecstasy on owning a grey, sleek, official-looking piece of grown-up machinery.  There was not, it must be admitted, a whole stack of papers that I needed to staple, but the fact that I could if I needed to was the point.  And the further point is that a stapler needs staples, and for a very small outlay you could get a thousand of them.  A thousand!

It was the same with notebooks: lots of pages for small amounts.  It almost seemed a pity to have to write in them.  Which, again if I am fair, I seldom did.  It was the ownership of flickable blank pages that really mattered.

As I grew older I was able to rationalise my addiction into defined ‘necessity’: I needed folders for schoolwork.  And clips.  And pens.  And rubbers.  And Tippex.  And so it went on.

Any new system for stationery organization or display had my attention.  The different folders that I purchased usually had differing configurations of holes for the paper - and that necessitated the purchase of hole punches, and then the purchase of those paper Polos that you stuck around the holes to stop the paper from tearing through over use.

From where I sit typing this I can see two domestic paper guillotines to my right; behind me is a long arm stapler purloined from my last school (with the full knowledge of the senior management team); on a shelf in front, the thermal binder is next to the ring binder; further along is the plastificator, with A4, A5 and card sized plastic sleeves; there is a printer within arm’s reach, to say nothing of the serious table-mounted guillotine that can slice through 500 pages at once.

I have enough pens and pencils (for which, incidentally I have an electric sharpener) to supply a school; I have various small staplers (with staples) and a staple remover; I have post-it notes in many sizes and colours; I have stickers (both festive and plain); plastic rulers, metal rulers, cutters, tape dispensers, Dymo machines (manual and electric) and a bewildering array of magnifying glasses.

I am insatiable in my need for aspects of the stationeryatorial possibilities - even if I have nowhere to put my acquisitions and struggle to find a use for those I already have.  But I don’t smoke and so I am ‘allowed’ a minor aberration or three.

As with watches (I will go into that in another post) I am searching.  Searching for perfection.  In this case the perfect pen.

I much prefer to write with ink through a fountain pen nib and, over the years, Parker, Montblanc and Sheaffer have been purchased and gifted to me.  And I have lost the lot.  Some blotty biros stay with me for years, but give me a decent fountain pen and it will be lost before the ink cartridge empties!

I eventually found a solution that met my inky needs and my propensity to mislay, by discovering the pre-filled disposable fountain pen.  A wasteful extravagance, but one that I embraced.  The nib was a good match for my scribbled writing and seemed to be able to cope with my destructive scrawl through the length of the reservoir of ink, and the smallish cost of the thing meant that it didn’t really matter if I lost it.  This attitude of course encouraged me to buy the things in relative bulk so that I could, as it were, go on finding the ‘lost’ pens in a continuous serendipitous discovery process, before they too were lost in the never ending cycle of my stationery life.

Which brings me to Lidl, or possibly Aldi, but certainly one or the other.  Catalonia, unlike the UK, does not start putting out the ‘Back to School’ merchandise on the first day of the summer holiday, they wait until the calendar indicates that it is only a despairing teacher’s scream away from the start of term.  So, it was in early September that I noted a matched set of pen, roller ball and packet of ink cartridges set out alluringly in one of those impossible to breach plastic bump packs.  “Why not?”, I thought rhetorically, and put one in my basket.

It was only when I got home that I discovered that the design on the barrel of each of the writing instruments, that I had thought to be vaguely Orientally inspired, was actually an open, monster’s claw.  I am going to continue using it in the expectation that other people will, like me, take the graphic to be bamboo rather than something else beginning with the letter ‘b’ related to the gruesome that I can’t think of.

As I am wise in the ways of ink cartridge fountain pens, I knew that while one cartridge was feeding the nib, an extra cartridge should be able to be fitted into the empty space of the barrel.  And it could and was.

I then turned to the rollerball.  And it didn’t work.  And it continued not to work even after some vigorous flicking to get the ink to flow.  Disgruntled I dismantled the pen to find that there was nothing inside.  I mean there was no refill there.  Nothing.  I then realised that the thing actually used the cartridges supplied.

This was a revelation!  It is surely a rule that the refills for rollerballs come complete with ink supply and nib, like the refills for ballpoint pens.  But I also realised that I had never seen an ink cartridge rollerball pen before.  And I further realised that, if a roller ball could work with an ink cartridge - why hadn’t it been done before?  Perhaps it has been done, but for something that momentous to escape my stationery eye would be remarkable.

It must be greed.

It is said that HP printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids on the planet. The cost of the printer machine has fallen dramatically over the years, but that it because the companies know that they can make so much more money by customers buying their ink.  Even a cursory exploration on the Internet about how computer printer companies limit the life of the ink cartridge in the printers is easy to find and surely, is little more than theft.  There are, allegedly, chips inside printers that count up the number of copies that you make and, at a number decided by the company, the machine will begin to display error messages urging you to buy a new cartridge, irrespective of whether you actually need one or not, and if you do not buy a new one, then the machine will simply stop printing.

This is yet another example of the planned obsolescence exemplified by the light bulb.  There is one electric light bulb that has been burning continuously for over 100 years and I believe that it had its own website and there is a camera trained on it so those with nothing better to do can stare at a lighted lamp and think about all the light bulbs that they have thrown away because they have ‘blown’.  

It’s funny, too, isn’t it, that modern cars don’t seem to rust like they used to?  New technology has nothing, or little to do with it, manufacturers have known how to make cars rustproof for years, but they got more money by ensuring that expensive welding would be needed after a certain number of years, ensuring too a continual replacement of the vehicles.  And don’t get me started on coffee capsules!

In spite of these examples, and many more, that show the uncaring nature of capitalism and the gullibility of we the consumers, I am still enthralled to know that I now posses a roller ball that uses ink cartridges.

And, in yet another example of how the things around me don’t really change, I couldn’t find it to get a real look at the design.

But it will turn up and it will give me pleasure when I find it.  Though I may not, or indeed, ever really use it.  

But that response is the nature of addiction and I am working on it.  

Sometime or other.

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Beach pimples!

 

Weather trumped work - at least the academic sort – and we spent the morning on the beach.  The weather varied from scorching sunshine to cloud filtered mugginess.  The other two set off on a long hour duration walk while I slumped in my chair, occasionally braving dead jellyfish to dip myself in the sea.

This year has seen a marked increase in the number of jellyfishes rolling through the surf to die in the shallows.  At least we think they are dead, once they are out of the water and stranded on drying sand they look inoffensively inert.

Legend has it that jellyfish are still poisonous even in death, with the chandelier-like stingers able to inflict wounds on vulnerable flesh even when the malign force driving the living creature is no more.

This morning, there were three glistening ‘pimples’ with easy reach, occasionally washed by more adventurous waves, but anchored on the littoral.  They were viewed with interest by the passing pedestrians promenading along the water line, but it took a couple of young lads to do something about it.

It is obvious that the younger generation of beach dwellers have been deeply influenced by “Finding Nemo”, especially in the sequence where his dad and the truly wonderful Dory met the jellyfish when the dark (but safe) canyon is rejected in favour of the lighter, higher (but fatal) shallower water.  They know that the dangling stings are painful, but they also know from having seen it in the film that the rounded tops of the jellyfish are harmless.  So, the lads made their hands into crane-like grabs and lifted the blobs from their occasional sea-washed dampness to the fatal embrace of the perennially dry soft sand.

I have to say that the visible reminders of possible pain did not deter swimmers, including myself, from going into the briny.  I did “look about me” to check if there were any obvious transparent dangers, but satisfied myself that the odds of safety were on my side.  And, indeed, they have been so far this year as I have been signally un-stung.  Though I am aware that last statement is a hostage to fortune, especially given the prevalence of ghostly retribution swimming about in the waves around us.  But I have faith.

Tomorrow, with a rare sense of occasion, we have been invited out to a barbecue on the only day in recent weeks that is scheduled to have thunderstorms. 

Sometimes the irony of life is too obvious to be funny.