Memory - Remembering

I will never visit the War Graves of the First World War.  It is not because no members of my immediate family are buried there

My paternal grandfather was a member of the armed forces throughout the duration of the war from the start until the end. He was wounded and sent back to ‘Blighty’ (after refusing an ‘offer of a fiver’ for his wound by a passing Scots soldier!) and was returned after his recuperation to the same point in the line that his company had occupied before he was hit.  The only difference on his return was that the whole of his company had been killed.

His description (second hand via my dad) of waking up in the trenches because he was being eaten by a rat, had a thrill of primal horror about it.  He told my father that as he jerked his hand away, as a rat was eating his finger, the rat did not release its grip and followed the trajectory of his hand.

I have read fairly widely about the First World War, not only in terms of history books but also in the literature of the period.  The poetry of the period is at once searing and compulsive.  From the poetry of Owen and Sassoon to the prose of Graves, I have sensed the horror, frustration, inhumanity, bitter irony and humour of the War to End Wars.  I have seen the photos, watched films and visited museums.  I have feasted full on the horrors of an almost unimaginable reality, that, as the real experience of the soldiers was allowed to be shared in an almost unexpurgated form was unparalleled until the truly unimaginable inhumanity that was the Second World War.

As a life-long (belligerent) pacifist I have always had problems with the glorification or normalization of War: our family outing to the Edinburgh Tattoo was a fraught moral conundrum for me.  And, just in case you are wondering about my ethical purity, I swallowed my reservations and went.  And I was moved and stirred by what I saw and heard!

In the same way, I cannot wear a poppy.  I pay money to the collectors, but I do not wear the flower.  I don’t know whether they still do, but the black plastic centre of the artificial flowers used to have the words “Haig Fund” embossed on them, and I simply couldn’t wear the name of the military commander who tried to kill my grandfather with his suicidal plans of attack (for the PBI, not of course for him) with any degree of equitability. 

And yes, I did dry-spit every time I passed his equestrian statue in the centre of London.

So, what did I do, here in Castelldefels to mark the Centenary of the Armistice?

I have my grandfather’s medals form WW1 and I have had them framed.  I may not have joined up as my grandfather did, and we obviously have differing views on the military, but I respect and value his dedication.  He was most proud of his 1914-1915 star, showing that he was one of the first to be involved in the war before conscription was needed to keep the numbers up as the disastrous swathes of destruction - ugh!  Attempting alliteration about deaths in that war is a grotesque literary trope!

Whatever I feel about the war, I respect my grandfather’s period in the Killing Fields of France and he is my real link to the conflict: not a slab of elegantly carved stone in a garden of carefully tended grass. 

I do not denigrate the cemeteries with their immaculate rows of white, but I know that I would not be able to take them.  I know that I would feel truly miserable and depressed rather than educated by such a spectacle.  I fully recognize that, for some, visiting these graves can be a valuable and emotional experience.  It is not one that I want to put myself through.

But the man, my grandfather, is worthy of thought and consideration and to that end I made some notes and jotted down thoughts to get me started on a new poem.  Work in progress.  And my grandfather’s medals will stay on the wall where I can see them as I type for the future. 

 

And perhaps those last four words should be something of a moral for me!

-oOo-

I have now, officially, taken more time trying to find a document about two Catalan artists in Word that I wrote some time ago than giving up and doing it all over again.  Well, not quite doing everything again.  I have managed to find a copy of the original document, so I will not need to do the research, I could just copy the couple of pages that I have found, and this time create a file and put it somewhere where I will remember putting it.  

And before you start thinking that if I have found a copy of the original document all I need do is look at the document’s directory or copy and paste, I might add that I have found a ‘printed’ copy of the original not an electronic one.  I do not have the program that can take a page of print and scan it into a Word document.  I understand from cursory search-glancing at the stuff on the Internet that OneNote used to have OCR capability, but no longer.  Or not if you look elsewhere on the Internet.  The end result, after attempting to take an image of the writing, download it from my phone as a PDF file and then attempting to save it to something else in the hope that the something else would recognize that the image had words in it and treat it as something that could be edited in Word. 

Didn’t work.

I re-typed it.  It doesn’t sound much, a couple of pages, but it was a couple of pages with accents, right left and centre with the odd umlaut.  And Word trying to foil my typing of foreign names with distracting underlining!  Still, it is done, and I know where to find it again!

And that is something more than nothing!

Work and play

 

The ‘A4 blank sheet of paper approach’ to the writing tasks that I still need to complete has been effective.  So far.  The individual sheets forced me to break down the tasks into their component parts and I have been able to produce notes towards a draft that now look quite impressive.  I keep telling myself that, "The most important thing about a draft is that it has to exist"!

I think that my inaction was a function of having too much to do and therefore doing little or nothing because I couldn’t decide where to start!  This is a common problem and is sometimes used to justify laziness rather than anything else!  Yes, there are some problems in the completion of my work that are beyond my individual reach and I am getting frustrated waiting for a response from particularly unresponsive colleagues, but that is only one small part and should not really have caused me to do anything other than write speculatively and wait for back dated permission!

I feel energized by the amount of work that I have done in the last couple of days and the trick, as ever, if continuing the momentum in producing drafts of the individual elements that will be going into the next book.  The next book that I intend to publish has just “growed” (like Topsy) from its initial conception to become something altogether more ambitious, though, as there are photographs and illustrations, I am not sure about the economic reality of its actual publication – perhaps it will end up as a more substantial form of chapbook.  Who knows!

But I am positive about the production and I am raring to go as far as the last pieces of writing are concerned.

There is something exhilarating about having three separate books ‘on the go’ and I am hoping that the overkill of creativity will spur me on to completion!

-oOo-

Our last lesson in Catalan was something of a waste of time.  We all arrived – some of us on time – and then just sat around wondering where the teacher was.  Eventually I went to the office to enquire and discovered that our tutor was ill and that there might be a cover teacher for us.  Work had been set, but no one was found for us so we dispersed to our homes – not before a few of us had a chat and a cup of coffee (tea) to make the morning more civilized!

But what I take from that ‘wasted’ morning was something that used to be so ordinary for me.  When I found out what was going on, I marched up to the teacher’s desk on my return from the office, put the books that I had been carrying down on it and spoke to the class, informing them of what was going on and what work they had to do.  And, as I was doing it, I realized that this was the first time that I had been ‘in front of a class’ for a long, long time.  Never mind the fact that this class was not mine, and that I was delivering information in broken Spanish and English, it was still a ‘class’ and, even in the short period of time that I was out the front, a period of time that could be counted in seconds rather than minutes, I felt the old teacher in me stir, and I could swear that my tone of voice changed the pedagogue of old shook off retirement for a brief moment!

Not an experience, you understand, to tempt me back to the reality of teaching.  Just an interesting brush with the concept!

And now for the Catalan homework, it behoves me to make the effort as I was the one who told the rest of the class about it!

-oOo-

Before I go: I wonder how my watch dealt with my swim this morning.  

After my slow warm-up length and gentle warm-up exercises, I now set my new watch to monitor my achievement and progress.  For the last two days I have clicked on the ‘swimming pool’ icon and later tried to make sense of the bewilderingly complete information about my efforts.   

Today however, I made things a little more difficult because of my faulty eyesight.  With my contact lenses I can see distance, but reading is more of a challenge.  A challenge that is almost impossible when I am trying to read a small moisture covered watch face.

I clicked on what I thought was the right icon, and was passingly concerned at the lack of the 3-2-1 countdown that usually appears (with vibrations) before I start, but thought nothing of it as the watch face looked suitably complicated.  It turned out that I had pressed the wrong icon and the watch thought that I was actually running rather than swimming.

I am assuming that action is action and the watch will have registered something, but it will be interesting to see just how the watch processes it!

I have now realized (with my reading glasses on) that the ‘running’ and ‘swimming’ icons are actually different colours and that is something that I will have to remember tomorrow morning!

How much have I spent!

 

 

If people took as much time to research their partners as they do to buy a smartwatch then the world will be, um, a different place. I suppose that I will now have to hurriedly bring in a whole series of disclaimers that this is not about me and mine, it is just a casual thought.  A casual thought, brought on however, by my own experience.  And I will stop there as I appear to be adding to the depth of the hole!

I have been researching watches for some time.  I need little impetus to do so as watches and their purchase are a ‘thing’ of mine.  Ever since my first Ingersoll (8 jewels, or was it even more?) that was my first real timepiece – discounting the red plastic with yellow moveable arms thing on which I learned to tell the time – and the start of a life-long casual (but serious) affair with watches.

I have never been a fan of the upper range of absurdly expensive watches for much the same reason that I shun expensive fountain pens: I am drawn to both, but know that my less than serious approach to things material will mean that they will go the way of all flesh before I have had my money’s worth out of them.

I have always maintained that my favourite Madge song is “I am a material girl”.  I adore things, philosophically and materially, but I do not look after them in the way that I should.  I was brought up with grandparents and parents who were firmly in the ‘make do and mend’ generations, but they produced someone who, even though he had a cub badge which represented the fact that he had proved himself not to be a spendthrift (for a stipulated period of time) has yet to learn the true value of money and via that the value of things.

Far from the ‘make do and mend’ approach to life, I have always veered (quite directly) towards the ‘buy new’ approach to the capitalist society.  The evil fiends behind the planned obsolescence that drives our society must regard me as some sort of patron saint.  Cameras, computers, mobile phones and, above all, watches litter my life as I eagerly embrace each new fad, app and gadget.

As far as the watches are concerned, I had thought that I had found the smartwatch of my dreams in the Pebble.  This excellent watch was funded on Kickstarter or similar and produced a smartwatch with an always-on display, waterproof for swimming, a large face with digits easy enough for me to read, metal construction with metal band and all at a reasonable cost!  Job done!  And it was, until the firm produced a further watch, a development from the original (that I backed) and I waited for another great watch.

And it didn’t happen.  Because the firm was bought by the larger watch maker Fitbit and that was the last that we heard of the Pebble.  Except, of course, thousands of customers actually own them and have continued to use them.  But the apps that we use to make the most of the smart capabilities are gradually being un-supported and if anything goes wrong with the watch there is no real system to repair it.  The Pebble community does what it can, but our watches are gallopingly obsolescent.  One of the buttons on my watch is not now working.  It still tells the time, but that is a far cry from what it should be able to do.  So, I decided to search for a replacement.

The internet is awash with ‘reduced’ cost smartwatches costing between 20 and 100 euros, with the median price being just under 50.  What these watches offer is astonishing: they play music, take photos, locate you, tell you the weather, height above sea level – and tell the time.  Just as with modern phones, their primary function, the fact that they allow people to speak to each other seems to be the least of their capabilities!

But these ‘bargains’ were rarely waterproof, or if they were, they were not equipped with an always-on screen.  As soon as I had found a watch that seemed like a reasonable replacement for my Pebble, a more searching examination of the attributes of the watch would reveal that it actually had “everyday waterproof” status which mean that you could wash dishes carefully in it, or it would take a few drops of rain.  Or, more revealingly, it would say nothing about its waterproof status and so you would buy at your own risk.

I must have looked at scores of watches and rejected the lot.  Well, that is not strictly true.  I have ‘fallen’ for one or two too-good-to-be-true offers that have turned out to be exactly that.  I now own one watch that actually plays stored music on its tiny loudspeakers!  This was supposed to be waterproof, but the back of that particular watch is very easy to dislodge and is anything but waterproof.  There is another watch that I helped fund on Kickstarter that is powered by body heat and will never need a battery, and it is also waterproof.  But the most important aspect of this wonder watch is that it doesn’t yet exist!  Or at least its production seems impossibly delayed.

So, I have taken commercial action and bought a watch: the Amazfit Stratos.  It seems to tick most of my ‘must have’ attributes: easily readable watch face, good battery life, waterproof for swimming.  The proof of course will become clear in the next few weeks through use – but I live in hope.  And it will, after all, be the end result of many hours of pleasurable imaginary spending.

Later.

I have now been struck by the ‘waiting for a bus syndrome’ – in the sense that you wait and wait for the one you want and then two come along at the same time.  As with buses so with watches.  No sooner had a bought the Amazfit than the watch that I supported on Kickstarter, indeed the one I referred to above, suddenly became a reality and, after a hefty import duty paid to the delivery driver, I now have a Matrix that I could put on my wrist!

This too is waterproof and never needs a battery (in theory) because of its ability to extract energy from the difference between body temperature and ambient temperature.  I shall put the technology for this in the same category as the oscillating crystals that tell the time in watches!

Apart from the difficulty of pairing the Matrix with my phone – and that was solved by reference to the Matrix website and the FAQs – I now have two working watches, two NEW working watches, to replace my fading Pebble!

As it happens, I am wearing the Amazfit today.  Having made an executive decision last night after weighing up the attributes of both.  I can’t pretend that I have been scientific or even fair with the products, but a decision has been made.

The reasons: the Amazfit has a dedicated ‘swimming’ app that gives lots of information that I am sure will come in useful some time or other; it is easy to use; it has the bigger number size when telling the time; it looks better than the Matrix and it is lighter.  I think that they are roughly comparable in price and both have an always-on display on which I insist.  I could probably recommend either, but at the moment the Amazfit has taken pride of place with the Matrix being a reserve watch.

I don’t think that I have ordered any more watches in the deep past that are suddenly going to pop over the fence into my time reality – but I really am a sucker for a well designed face, so to speak and I cannot positively rule out the fact that I backslid some time ago and there is a timepiece with my name on it making its way to Castelldefels from China!

I await the next post.