Bike trials!

I think that I have the wrong type of bum for my bike.  Either that, or I am jinxed.  [One should never give the opportunity to use a work like ‘jinxed’ is looks so exotic]  And yet, ironically, the pronunciation is excruciatingly difficult for an ‘exotic’ person to say!  Try saying it out loud and then think about a foreigner trying to come to terms with the way that you have said the ‘ed’ part of the word!  Take it from me, that sort of pronunciation (together with ‘phrasal verbs’) are part of the reason for the strained expressions on faces of non-natives trying to get to grips with the language!

Before this bike, my Mate – and that is its trade name, I am not so desperate that I have to claim friendship with inanimate objects, though, come to think of it, I have had on-going, very personal animosities with other things: cars, printers, computers, programs, tools, pencils – and I had better stop there as the list is becoming somewhat disturbing!  Anyway, in all of my previous bike-oid experience, I have never (repeat, NEVER!) had a wheel spoke break [and I rather like the rhythm of those three words, “wheel spoke break” it sounds almost like a chorus if you go on saying them] but now it happens every couple of weeks.

My bike repair person, with whom I am now on terms of incredulous intimacy due to my repeated returns with exactly the same problem, is mystified by the fractures and he has tried various remedies (one of which was quite costly) to no real avail.  I now take the breakages are part and parcel of having a bike and it will have to do until I get a new one.  Which should be in a couple of months time.  Or not. 

This is because I have ordered it from Kickstarter and the proposed schedules are always rather flexible when it comes to reality.  The new bike is going to small wheels, but the tyres are ‘fat’ and I am trusting this to lessen the forces that create the problems with the present bike.

I have ordered, you will be totally unsurprised to hear, all available upgrades from a full-colour bike computer screen to posh hydraulic brakes.  And it is of course electric.

Which brings me back to the present bike.  As the spokes break, I fold up the bike (it is collapsible as well) and put it in the back of the car.  The bike is solid and it takes a certain amount of manipulation to get it in place and the ‘cantilevered’ stage of putting it in the boot is a taxing one, and the frame sometimes lands on the floor of the boot with a bit of a bump.

I freely admit that what happened is (partly) my fault.  To cut a short story even more shortly, I have broken the ‘ignition’ key in the battery.  The battery is enclosed in the frame of the bike, and in the ‘on’ position it is locked inside the frame.  And, therefore, I cannot get the battery out.  To be recharged for example.  True, it is possible to recharge the battery while it is still in the bike, and true again, we do have power downstairs outside – but the idea of putting a charger on in the open is not one I relish or think safe – for all sorts of reasons.

Looking on the bright side, at least the thing is locked ‘on’ so that it can be charged on the bike and used in the normal way.  Unfortunately, the battery in the bike at the moment is slowly losing its ability to recharge; it is coming to the end of its useful life and soon I am going to be using a heavier than usual bike without the delight of easy power to get up those hills.  Well, hill.  Well, road bridge over the motorway.

I have no idea where to take the bike to see if anything can be done, as the manufacturer is in China (surprise!) and the company that produces the bikes is in Denmark.  I live in hope that something good will happen, though too much has to occur for that to be reasonable!

Meanwhile my second Catalan lesson of the week is looming and we have been expected to learn the numbers up to 100 – at the moment just being able to say them, not actually write them down.  Our accents are abysmal and, frankly, we all sound exactly like our nationalities when we speak in ‘Catalan’ – I’ve put in in inverted commas because it doesn’t (yet) bear any resemblance to the language that we hear around us everyday.

Not only is there the stress of having to articulate words with combinations of letters that are simply too foreign to allow ease of acceptance, but also, I have to go, immediately the class finishes, to a doctor’s appointment in Viladecans.  It’s all go!

Later.

Well, I suppose I should count myself lucky.  Not about the broken key, I have done nothing about that except worry, no, my luck held in the car park.  I found a space and was able to (almost) cover the time that I would be in class with the money that I put in the machine to get my ticket.  I reasoned that an extra 10 minutes or so would not be unreasonable to chance.  And so it proved, as my windscreen was little-plastic-bag-less when I returned from my lesson and set off for my next appointment in the hospital in the next town but one along the motorway.

As with everywhere else at the present time, construction work is going on in the hospital car park and a first glance showed it to be worryingly full.  I eventually found a space with very little wriggle room which made shimmying out of the car a painful experience.

I was half an hour or so early for my appointment, but the hospital has a system that uses your health card to log yourself in via some optical readers dotted around the corridors.

I settled down to wait with my mobile phone, but was actually seen in a few minutes and dealt with expeditiously in the company of bevy of medical students one of whom was picked on to explain what was going to happen to me in English.  She did not look particularly happy with this task, but started gamefully enough with an attempt at that condescending bedside manner that doctors sometimes adopt, you know the sort of thing, “ . . .we will have a little look at your leg . .” except she said “to your leg” and when I corrected here there was raucous laughter from all concerned.

After one particularly long monologue from the doctor, who then turned to the girl to continue her translation, I did take pity on her and say, “I understood that” and she smiled her relief.

The end result is that he wants me to restart wearing the bloody pressure stocking again and he has booked me in for another ultra sound investigation to see if the thrombosis is still there.

But the really important fact was that I was squeezing myself back into the car, five minutes before my scheduled appointment was to take place.  Now that, I call a real result.

To celebrate I called into the shops to do a little light shopping for Toni’s knees (his present job is somewhat physical and calls for me to be on said joints for long periods of time) with the result that I have now bought a sort of square padded prayer mat that can only be of help.

Oddly, talking of new possessions, books have come for the two of us!  Toni’s volumes for the next part of his course and a ‘Teach Yourself’ book of Catalan for me.  Unusually for me, I have sampled this book on the internet and found it congenial and, since my taught course is being delivered in Catalan and Spanish is it somewhat comforting for me to have a book where the language of instruction is English.   

The new book itself urges its use as an adjunct to to other forms of and from a cursory look through it appears to be a good buy.  It is a sign of the times that the usual CD accompanying such sorts of books is missing from this volume because the audio files are all available free on line and I have already (I think) downloaded them to my phone.  I progress in this course in a much more realistic way than I ever did in Spanish!  But these are early days and I will have to see how far my patience and dedication go!

-oOo-

The robot cleaner has been hoovering around the house and I wait for the silences that tell me that something has happened before I go and investigate.  Sometimes the machine has been trying and failing to devour something that will not go into its innards; sometimes it decides that it has cleaned enough, and sometimes it simply gets stuck.  I have to pick the thing up, get it back in to working order and set it down somewhere else, rather like a very elderly relative being wheeled into a new space and left to his own devices!

Its last location was in the kitchen where there are various worrying things that it can discover and fail to get around.

Its most worrying predilection is for the gently curved bases of floor mounted fans: these the little machine mounts with relentless orgiastic energy!  But enough of domestic chores.

-oOo-

Today is Toni’s half day at his new job and we are going to celebrate by going to the shopping centre over the other side of the road from his works to try another menu del dia in the restaurant we used on the when we checked out to to get there, and where exactly ‘there’ was before he started.

-oOo-

Now I have to find the spare key to the battery of my bike and attempt the grisly job of trying to extract the remains of the broken key from the ‘ignition’.  I am looking forward to neither of these tasks, but they have to be done.  The trouble is that I do have a ‘key box’ in which, unsurprisingly, I have put most of the keys that I have accumulated.  For many of these objects, I have little idea what they might unlock, but I know that, given time, I am going to be frantic in trying all of them when I find a locked thing that I want to use.  It is the fear of going to the box and not finding the key there that is making me carry on typing rather than taking action.  But, no, enough, have the courage of your ‘key box’ being comprehensive and get going on part one of the restoration of the bike to full working order.

To be continued . . .

The trackpad that lost its click

Once upon a time, and a very long time ago, when Windows 3 was ravaging the land (reducing grown men to bitter tears of impotent rage) with its malevolent vagaries, one hapless seeker after gadgets stumbled upon a machine with an operating system that seemed specifically designed to invite humans to interact, allowing (nay, encouraging) adherents to be instinctive and logical in their responses to particular problems and lo! they were resolved!  The Holy Grail of computer systems had been found, and that system was enshrined in a Mac.

The Gadget Seeker was hooked.  And he stayed faithful, even though he was so lonely in his affirmation of the Wonders of the Mac because all his friends, colleagues and virtually everyone else in his little world owed allegiance to the false gods of Microsoft.  He stayed faithful, even when he discovered that the Grand Mufti of Microsoft had a secret decree that forbade those programs that worked on Windows from working with Mac – even though it said it would on the box!  Such deception!  So unlike the friendly, civilized world of Mac.

And the Seeker was true unto the Mac, and lavished praise and pounds, and more pounds, to affirm his faith, buying anything and everything that Mac made.  Soon his electronic life was enriched by iPod, iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air and a mighty all-in-one.

But our little Seeker didn’t realize that the providers of this profusion of goodies were no longer the welcoming, helpful, altruistic innovators of old – they had become hard and calculating.  They had progressed from their lowly garage cradle and had been shown the riches of the world - and they had Fallen, because the Voice had said that all of those riches could be theirs!

The Seeker was beguiled and listened not to the voices of reason that told him that his devotion was being manipulated and that he was being taken for a very expensive ride.  He clove unto the beauty of the design and the thinness and the lightness thereof and said that his eyes were wide open and he was prepared to suffer for his faith.  A little.

And the cost of his devotion was ever rising and he appeared to be getting ever less important ‘stuff’ for his money and doubt began to sow its seeds.

And then the dark minds that held sway in the realms of Mac began to flaunt their power and produced such vapid things as the Apple Watch - that was not really a patch on the Pebble and cost oh-so-much-more!  And the murmurings grew.

At last, as was inevitable, there was the Golden Calf Moment in the Messianic Empire of Mac and they flung a gewgaw of great price but little worth in front of their fanatics and screamed, “Buy!”  Behold!  It was the iPhone 6, and it was ridiculously expensive for what it was, but the Demons of Mac said, “Believe - and Buy!”  And many did.

But the veil was torn from the faithful eyes of the Seeker and he repudiated his faith (though not to the extent of getting rid of all the Mac stuff that he had, or not using it, or anything silly like that!) and vowed to turn towards Windows in a Dell.

Which he did, so now his MacBook Air (once his Pride and Joy) is now relegated to his jobbing ‘second’ laptop!  Ho!, and yet again, Ho!

But fate had yet a sneaky trick to play.

The trackpad of his main computer (a Mac) became skittish and refused to bend to his will.  And he was wroth.  It looked perfectly normal from the top.  Underneath, however, one of the two ‘pimple’ foot-bumps had become dislodged.  Its design was simple, it looked like the top half of a very small spaceship: a curved ‘dome’ with a circular flat flange around it.  That flange was supposed to fit underneath the bottom casing, but, try as he might, the Seeker could not get that flange in the hole, or at least not enough of it to make the connection secure. 

He knew that there must be a ‘knack’ to its re-insertion, or that there would be some useful (but specifically and exclusively Mac-type tool) that would facilitate the operation.  He also knew that there was a small Mac Temple in the town where the Followers of Mac-dom would work their magic.

Hoping that the practitioners would not be able to guess that he was an apostate, he tentatively entered the Temple and proffered the offending touch-pad with a simperingly dismissive smile at the simplicity of the challenge it offered to the Geniuses. 

The Chief Priest of the Mac Temple looked at the touchpad, looked at the foot, looked at the hole and made a few ineffectual attempts to reinsert the thing.  In much the same inept way, it has to be admitted that the Seeker had done.  Eventually, the Chief Priest turned to the Seeker and said, “The Engineer will have to look at this.  He will decide if anything can be done.  It may not be possible.”

The Seeker was puzzled, astonished, nay dumbfounded  Where was the specially designed tool for this particular job which could, obviously, only be used for this particular foot replacement?  Where was the easy display of ‘knack’ showing how melodiously simple and ‘right’ everything Mac was?

“Come back in one hour!” said the Chief Priest in a voice heavy with lugubriousness.  With a sinking heart, illusions shattered, despondency settling on him like dust from disintegrating floppy disks, the Seeker left

.

The hour passed.  He returned.

And lo! The job had been done!  The offending trackpad was brought to the Seeker by a lowly Server, who turned to the Chief Priest with a questioning look.

The Chief Priest looked at the trackpad long and hard, then he looked at the Seeker, then back to the trackpad and then, in a voice drained of emotion, he said, “That’s OK!” and dismissed the Seeker with a half-hearted wave.

Stammering his thanks, the Seeker backed out of the Temple, the only man to get something for nothing from Mac!

MORAL: Sometimes money isn't everything.

ANTI-MORAL: If you get lucky once - run!

Differences

It’s not just the language that makes things foreign.

I remember when I was younger and going to France by boat that it was the smell of Gauloise that told me I was not in the UK, that distinctly un-Players-like smell that reeked of foreignness!  That and the denim wearing surly workers with the said ciggie hanging from the sides of their mouths!

It is, so often, the small things that make you stop and think, or stare. 

I was fascinated by schoolchildren in France shaking hands with each other!  Bizarre - and what a coincidence that that word is of French origin!  The fact that the French mother of the (French) exchange student that I was staying with used the breadknife to scratch a cross on the baguette before she cut it for us to eat was also odd.  My French counterpart also had the use of a Solex motorised bicycle when we poor British kids were nowhere near the age where we would be allowed to own and ride such a thing!  And he smoked!  Altogether foreign!

I have now lived in Catalonia long enough to regard other Spaniards as foreign, when I compare them with the Catalans that I know.

Catalonia has, famously (and rightly) banned bullfighting so the central bullring in Barcelona has been converted into a shopping centre. 

Flamenco is not, absolutely not, Catalan and I have observed a positive shudder of revulsion from some of my Catalan friends when Flamenco music is laid down behind advertising images of Spain on the television: rushed frilly frocks, stamping feet, clicking castanets and Arabic inspired ululations are not the stuff of Catalonia.  Which does not mean that I understand my adopted region/country’s cultural effusions any more than the gyrations of snake hipped, tight trousered writhers!

The national dance of Catalonia is the Sardana.  This is a circular dance where people (men, women, children - if they know the steps) join hands and execute a series of sideways steps with hands raised to shoulder level.  It is like very sedate Morris Dancing, but without the funny clothes, sticks and bells.  And it seems to go on forever accompanied by music from a wind band of raucous instruments that seem to hark back to the music making in churches before the advent of the more melodious pipe organ.  They are fascinating if mystifying; democratic, and mildly hypnotic.  The Sardana is everything that Flamenco is not: calm, contained, regimented, and urbane.

Then there are the Castells - the ‘castles’ of people (Castellers) who form structures by standing of the shoulders of a gradually emerging tower of people.  The highest towers are 10 persons high - ten levels of people standing on each other’s shoulders.   

 It sounds unlikely and absurd, but viewing the construction of these towers is a strangely moving experience.

Once the structure is firm and developing the castellers are accompanied by a band that plays the Toc de Castells on instruments called Grallas (a variety of long, wooden oboe-like instruments) with rhythm provided by drums called timbals.

There is keen competition between the various Collas or groups and competitions are sometimes televised - though watching is never as exciting or involving as actually being there.

There is an element in my thinking that echoes the sentiments of Pierre François Joseph Bosquet when viewing the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, “C’est magnifique, mais ce ne’est pas la guerre: c’est de la folie.”  But, people don’t (usually) die building these human castles and they have become an essential element in the Catalans presentation of their culture to the world.  And it is a ‘folie’ that has been exported to many other enthusiastic countries, including the UK.  Well, ‘vive la difference!’ as we say in Britain.

But, there are some things that make you stop and think, and then shake your head in disbelief.

Look back to the picture at the top of this blog.  Not a remarkable photograph, rather messily composed indeed.  But look at it carefully and then answer the following question: which of the condiment containers contains the pepper?  The one on the left or the one on the right?

If you are British, you might ask whether this is some sort of trick question, the answer being so obvious, but bear with me and make your decision.

You said the one on the left, didn’t you?  Obviously you did because, just as obviously, it is the pepper pot.

But it was not!  The single-hole container was for pepper and the ring of holes was for salt!  And it was not a mistake!  This is what the Catalans and the Spanish do!

I was as shocked as I was when I found out in a first year university linguistics class that not everybody had used the word, “cree” when crossing fingers when playing a childhood game to claim immunity.  I discovered that ‘cree’ was confined to South East Wales and parts of the West Country!  While other outlandish terms such as ‘fainites’ or ‘barley’ or ‘scribs’ or the snobbish sounding ‘pax’ were used with familial confidence by otherwise normal fellow students!

It was a salutary lesson, teaching us that our (until then) assumption about something we had never questioned was not as secure as we had thought. 

And if something as basic as our word for a childish truce was incomprehensible to the majority of our fellow students, then what else might need to be rethought? 

Well, that was the lesson that I drew from the experience, and have thought about often since.  And read the Opie’s book on the Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, I thoroughly recommend it - though the studies that they largely founded have developed somewhat nowadays!

Oh yes, and there is a suggestion about why the difference in the salt and pepper might have developed. 

The British, it is suggested, were more likely to put a little pile of salt on the side of the plate and dip food into it, therefore the single-hole would be perfect for forming the pile. 

It is further suggested that pepper was an expensive spice and not one that could be merely sprinkled with abandon, remember that in the C15th it could take half a day’s work by a craftsman to earn enough to buy just 100 g of pepper, so not something you would sprinkle with reckless abandon - presumably we Brits had cheaper supplies!

It has also been suggested that the restriction to a single-hole for salt might have something to do with health, restricting the amount of salt to benefit a healthy diet?  Whatever the reasons, it was shocking to find that a time-honoured assumption was, yet again, called into question by ‘other people’ doing things differently.

Presumably I didn’t learn the lesson sufficiently the first time round and so I needed the reinforcement of surprise. 

So like us, and yet so different!

And another one bites the dust?

Having struggled through years of incomprehensible lessons in the Spanish language and failed to learn it with the requisite fluency that my stay in Spain would seem to demand, I have taken it upon myself to fail to learn Catalan too.

Let it be said at once that I do have two qualifications (of sorts) in Spanish and that, in spite of my signal inability to come to terms with even the most straightforward of verbs in the language, I do find that I can flannel my way through conversations (or monologues) in most everyday situations and, although my partners in this unequal linguistic exchange come away paler and older than when they first encountered me and my ‘way with the foreign words’, they also (generally) seem to understand what I have been on about.

I take this admittedly low bar of foreign communication as an achievement, and am prepared to give it my best in Catalan.

I have had my first three lessons, in the same school that has been valiantly trying to teach me Spanish.  For the princely sum of 10 (ten) Euros I am now enrolled for 150 hours (one and a half hours twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays) for the next year.

Unlike my Spanish courses, where because of my specious confidence in attempting to speak the language I started in media res, so to speak, in Catalan I start at the very lowest entry level. 

And that has to be a good thing, as from the lowest of the low, the only way is, of course, up.  At least that is the theory to which I am adhering and in which I fondly believe.

By way of preparation for the first class I learned the days of the week in Catalan (though not how to spell them – little by little does it!) and how to give my name and nationality.

My nationality (a moveable feast at the best of times) is firmly placed in Wales when asked about it in foreign lands.  Catalonia’s National Day (11^th September, the Diada) marks a disaster in the history of the country when the final outcome of the War of the Spanish Succession was finally decided in favour of the Bourbons and not the Hapsburgs.  England had been firmly on the side of the Hapsburgs, as had the Catalans, and the Catalans were assured that England would stick by them whatever the outcome.  That commendable solidarity lasted right up to the defeat when the English hightailed it out of the conflict leaving their erstwhile Catalan allies to take the consequences. 

And severe consequences they were including the loss of Catalan territories in France on the other side of the Pyrenees; the destruction of the walls of Barcelona; the imposition of a Madrid appointed governor (just like the actions of the systemically corrupt PP government of recent memory); the suppression of the Catalan language (a go-to stance for all Spanish, Fascist, Right-Wing, nasty people), and various other humiliations.  This is what the National Day celebrates. 

It is hardly surprising that it is also a focus of nationality when more than a million people (or a few thousand if you read the Spanish press) take to the streets.  So, you can see why I distance myself from the perfidious Albion in this part of the world and emphasise the Welsh upbringing that I had – Wales having provided a higher ‘volunteers per 100,000 of the population’ to fight in the International Brigade against Franco and the Fascists than other parts of the United Kingdom.  And there is a monument to the fighters of the International Brigade in Cathays Park in Cardiff.

Actually I wouldn’t bet my life on that statistic, but I believe it to be true – and in the ‘World According to Trump’ that is all I need!

The only drawback to my Welshness in Catalonia, specifically in my language school, is that I am called on to provide words and phrases in my assumed national language to be written on posters on the walls to emphasise the multi-cultural background of the institution and to parade its diversity.  Unfortunately my suggestions of “Towards the light” (school motto);

“Bereft is he of craft without inborn gift” (college motto);

“Truth, Unity and Concord” (my other university);”

Awake, it is day” and “The red dragon leads the way” (city mottoes) were not acceptable as I knew them (or at least knew how to spell them) only in English.  My Catalan teachers wanted actual Welsh and I am ashamed to admit that I had to look up the Welsh before I submitted them to be written up!

The differences between Catalan and Spanish are not anything like so great as those between English and Welsh.  This is hardly surprising as Catalan has strong links to the group of languages derived from Latin; the links with Spanish and French are especially strong and some words differ more in their spelling in these languages than their pronunciation.  But Catalan is a distinct language and, like all minority languages comes filled with political and social overtones when you attempt to learn it.

In the part of Catalonia in which I live, in the city of Castelldefels, just outside Barcelona, I do not think that Catalan is the majority language.  This area has seen a vast influx of workers from other parts of Spain who have gravitated to Catalonia to take advantage of the job opportunities that such a highly industrialized part of Spain offers.  Catalonia is a rich part of Spain – and a potentially richer part, independentistas argue if it finally separates itself from the other regions and attains nationhood.

In the present febrile atmosphere, where the repercussions of the vicious attempted suppression of the referendum vote for Catalan independence by the Spanish State still reverberate: Catalan and Catalonia are flashpoints and discussion is divisive and at times bitter.

Among those who count themselves as Catalans, there is probably an overwhelming majority who would vote for independence; but there is a sizeable proportion of the population in Catalonia who see themselves as Spanish speaking Spaniards before they consider themselves Catalan – and that particular segment of the population is adamantly opposed to independence.

In the last election the population of Catalonia elected a majority of representatives who were (in theory) pro-independence.  Admittedly, the largest single party comprised C’s a repulsive party composed of political sluts who have achieved nothing and have exerted all their energies to trying to scrape their way to power with whoever and whatever will serve their purposes.  They are, however, a minority, and however they try and spin it, a majority in parliament in Barcelona seeks greater power for the region.  I say region there, because some of the groupings opposed to the unutterable shower of C’s have back peddled on moving towards independence and are engaged in muddying the waters to try and find ‘another’ way to resolve the situation, stopping well short of cutting themselves adrift from the encumbrance of Spain.

There are no easy answers to the political situation in Catalonia, and the gratuitous police violence that we saw against the peaceful demonstrations on Saturday marking the anniversary of the police brutality when they attempted to stop the referendum taking place on the question of independence, merely hardens attitudes on both sides.

Brexit, Trump and Catalonia are all ‘situations’ that require bi-partisan politics to produce satisfactory solutions.  There seems little chance of that in the ‘winner takes all’ approach that seems to govern politics nowadays.

Politics should be the art of the possible, not the fist of the powerful.

Meanwhile, I will cultivate my garden with writing and the learning of a new language.   

Every little helps!