A Warning!

Never sit opposite a lone diner in a restaurant.

I speak from experience: I am often that lone diner.

There are two techniques that are adopted by LDs (Lone Diners) to while away those tedious minutes that elapse between the order for food and the comestibles arriving. The first is to drown time in alcohol; the second is to observe.

I usually find that a judicious combination of the two leads to the best results. But you should always realise that the seemingly self obsessed LD is probably chuckling internally about his perceptions centred on YOU – the innocent customer!

Today was a case in point.

I had lunch at one of those places that you go to in spite of yourself. It is a restaurant near my flat and it offers a Special Menu which is not cheap but is still good value for money. The restaurant is one of those establishments which make a clear distinction between ordinary diners and customers who are prepared to spend a little more than necessary. There is, in this restaurant, rigid class distinction: menu del dia with bare wood tables; a la carte with tablecloths. The Special Menu classes you as a Tablecloth with a good view of everyone else.

My pica pica courses were eaten with only a view of another LD’s back, but the gap before my main course allowed three other diners to enter and place themselves in my line of vision.

The one great minus point about this restaurant is the tardy service. I like to think this is because everything is cooked from fresh, though the sullen, unsmiling, midriff bearing waitress might indicate that I am wilfully misinterpreting. Delay focuses observation, and I had plenty of time to evaluate my fellow diners.

Two of the trio of workmen who entered the restaurant for a quick meal were rotund and undistinguished (though one of them should speak to his wife about her lapse in letting him wander about in daylight wearing horizontal stripes) and hardly held a momentary glance. Their young companion, however, seemed to be a walking apotheosis (my word of the moment; see yesterday’s blog) of those elements guaranteed to irritate me.

Because of his inclusiveness I will itemize his gaucheries.

1 Wearing thick sided sunglasses indoors
2 Having a snake tattoo under his left ear
3 Wearing two dark, gold trimmed earrings
4 Wearing a large link gold chain hanging low outside his shirt
5 Sideboards extended unconvincingly to join in a thin line of bum fluff
6 Smoking
7 Wearing industrially frayed jeans
8 Parading pierced eyebrows
9 Sporting an iguana crested jelled central hair peak
10 Wearing a dirty brown anorak with fur trimmed hood
11 Being young
12 Wearing an oxymoronic pair of expensive black daps
13 Speaking in that slurred Spanish that sounds drunken

Who would eat their food so casually if they knew that lurking just outside their line of vision was someone like me taking careful note of their lives? I don’t really know if such a list is a credit to my perception or a sad reflection on the amount of time that I have to look around!

Today has been a cleaning day: this means that I push around a floor mop in an unconvincing sort of way and waltz through the flat with the hoover. As a signal honour for the flat I also cleaned the sinks and the bath.

Domesticity, thy name is Stephen

Wine and Music!

I was astonished to see a little notice on the table in the restaurant in Gava where we had gone for Sunday lunch stating that “Beaujolais Nouveau est ariveé!”

My astonishment was not because a French wine was being sold openly in Catalonia – though it has to be said that this area does have a few wines of outstanding quality and amazing cheapness.

No, my astonishment was more because I assumed that only the
British would be taken in by such a transparent marketing opportunity like Beaujolais Nouveau.

Think about it: this is a fairly ordinary wine made even more ordinary by being sold when it is very, very young. So young and forced, indeed, that it has to be drunk at once because it doesn’t keep. The whole affair has the grubby hands of unscrupulous wine merchants spinning a cheap wine to inexperienced indiscriminate wine consumers (aka the British) who have been caught up in the pseudo sophistication of a blatant pseudo ‘event.’

So I ordered a bottle.

Oh, come on! I can still remember buying a few cases of Beaujolais Nouveau from Bottoms Up and using the ‘drink at once’ recommendation as a specific injunction! I remember returning home after school to find my parents in my house picking their way delicately over empty bottles, glasses and other debris from the over indulgence of a select group of friends from the previous night. “Bit of a party?” my father asked as I scrabbled about trying to restore enough order for my mother to sit down. Bit of an excuse would have been nearer to the truth; an excuse to indulge! As soon as Bottoms Up started making too much profit (in my view) I stopped buying the bottles and those nights of indulgence waned. So the bottle today was to remind me of past indulgence.

Toni hated it, but his detestation of the taste of this unremarkable bottle, was lost in the importance of our eating the first Calçots and romanescu sauce of the season.

For those who don’t know, Calçots look like thinner versions of leeks and are cooked barbecue style and served with romanescu sauce. We were given paper bibs and a thin plastic glove as calçots can be a messy affair as they are best eaten in the same way as a sword swallower consumes his weapon! And I think that I am getting into a dangerous area of double entendre now!

We finished the meal with a glass of pacharan notable for the Spanish measure used rather than the parsimonious British equivalent.

Then home to vegetate on the balcony in the setting sun.

Ah!

I have now paid my first visit to the Palau de la Música for an orchestral concert.

This was given by the Orquesta Sinfónica Estatal de Dnepropetrovsk conducted by Nataliya Ponomarchuk. The programme was the overture to The Barber of Seville (Rossini) the Concierto de Aranjuez (Rodrigo) and Carmen Suite Nº1 and Suite Nº2 (Bizet) The soloist in the Rodrigo was Rolando Saad.

Fundamentally, the concert was depressingly poor. I can truthfully say that I have never heard the Rossini played as the orchestra played it. The orchestral balance was absurdly idiosyncratic with the bass drum drowning any harmony and the most penetrating piccolo dominating throughout. The strings were ragged and the horns had that brittle quality where you felt tension every time they played almost expecting duff notes.

The Concierto de Aranjuez was worse. The relationship between the orchestra and the soloist was uneasy with the first movement being particularly jagged. Saad showed little fluency in the more complex fingerings and emphasised difficulty rather than melody. Not only the dynamics of orchestra and soloist but also the weightings were faulty – the piece seemed to need much more rehearsal time.

The second movement started better with liquid strummed chords form the guitar, but that was an accompaniment to an orchestral player and the old unease returned when the soloist took the more commanding position.

The audience waited for the cadenza for their cacophony of coughing to reach a crescendo. You had to be there to hear the unreal concentration of hacking coughing to believe it! When the racking coughs subsided, extended sweet unwrapping started which only women of a certain age really know how to extend to the point of intolerability.

At no point did I feel truly comfortable with Saad’s playing and I felt depressed throughout the interval dreading the treatment of the Bizet.

Sitting in the auditorium, however, allowed me time to appreciate the hall in which I was sitting. In artistic terms, the hall was the clear winner when set against the concert even if the design did have an element of the demented about it!

I have never been in a hall like it. Just to give you the slightest flavour of the total experience, I would like to mention the vertical elements supporting the marble hand rest of the main staircase. These vertical elements (the names for which I have forgotten) were thin twisted metal rods set in a coloured glass tube – like an extended jam jar! That, believe you me, was one of the more prosaic details to notice!

The proscenium arch was formed by a massive sculpture of a tree stage right and galloping horses stage left. The sculpture thrust itself into the auditorium and, indeed, where I was sitting on the second level there was a horse emerging from the wall with splayed hoofs just above my head and a narrow horse’s face looking down on me with some malevolence!

The back of the stage is a curved wall out of which sculpted maidens, looking like sinisterly attractive gargoyles, emerge from the glittering surface.

Everywhere you look is stained glass and ceramics. The place is the apotheosis of the ceramicist’s art and, because all the surfaces are so busy the interior is strangely claustrophobic.

The centre of the roof has the famous inverted stained glass dome which is impressive, but the rest of the roof is taken up with struts beams and tiles all gleaming with the high gloss of the ceramics’ glaze.

The roof naggingly reminded me of something which I only realised at the end of the performance when the lights came on again and the roof was thrown into relief. There is a great similarity between what I have seen of some aspects of Modernista art in Catalonia and in what I have seen from the same period in Finland. I wonder if any work has been done in comparing the Art Nouveau period in the two countries. I will leave that hanging!

I now have the programme for the concerts for the rest of the year and I will have to read with care the various ways in which you can buy tickets. They say that buying a rail ticket in Britain is a complex task – try buying a season ticket for the opera or orchestra anywhere in the world.

The complexities of those artistic institutions make British rail travel look like riding an escalator.

Wish me luck!

A Night of Horror!

There is little to be said for going it alone when visiting the video club.

Video choice is the most striking everyday example of the impossibility of consensus in the human species – even including the UNO! No matter how homogeneous the gathering you can imagine, it will be thrown into the sort of bitterly acrimonious cliques that make the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War look like The Cheltenham Conservative Ladies Immigration Discussion Group the moment you return with a Personal Choice Video. The sad thing is that we never learn from these experiences and live to walk the lonely furrow to the video rental store and find our personal Calvary yet again.

And why do we still refer to these places of torment as Video Stores: when was the last time that you took out a video? Popular nomenclature lags behind technology in that engaging way that it does so often. ‘The Hole in the Wall’ seems positively denigratory for the sophisticated money manufacturer beloved of all spent-out late-night topers. The uninitiated still ignorantly refer to mp3 when they should really be admiring their mp4s! How we laughed! What we need is a modern day Betjeman to rewrite ‘How to Get On in Society’ from a technoramuses’s point of view!

How might he have written?

Do use your portable phone dear,
While I fit the ipod’s new tape.
I paid for it all with some money,
‘Cos the credit card’s just for a jape.

Ah Sir John, thou shouldst be living at this hour, cynics have need of thee!

So, whatever the group of you has decided it will never be right. You have marched towards the store with the injunction for something ‘just-out-not-too-bloody-adventure-decent-thriller-drma-action-with-character’ sort of thing. You return with something which you are convinced ticks all the boxes and are shocked (yet again) to find out that you have satisfied no one. Whereas, of course, if you return with some historic, critically acclaimed, German masterpiece – you satisfy no one but yourself. The difference between the two is not in the end result but in the intention. Left to my own devices I would choose sci-fi and/or decent animation for my group choice. You should see how that goes down! The only thing to do is to take everyone with you to choose. This is no guarantee of satisfaction, but at least all the arguments are in the store and when at home the arguments increase in intensity and virulence you can always blame everyone else ‘because they were there.’

You would have thought that Toni and I could be fairly confident about our choices when the both of us go and choose.

How wrong you would be.

Yesterday evening was a case in point. After my point blank refusal to go to the DVD machine alone the two of us trooped to the machine and made our respective choices. Toni’s was Hostel II and mine was 300.

Hostel II (Eli Roth 2007 in Spain) was a sequel to, you’ve guessed it!

This is a thoroughly repulsive film which tries though half decent cinematography and witty writing to pass itself off as something other than a thoroughly repulsive film. But it doesn’t manage that and it remains a thoroughly repulsive film. It attempts to develop character to ensure that we actually care a little for the fate of the three American girls and are concerned about the character development of the two rich American would be killers. Enough is done along these lines to show that there is a better film waiting to be made which uses the basic idea of wealthy sickos paying for safe murder and being protected by their wealth and power from any recriminations.

As a metaphor the basic premise of the film could easily be extended to the effects of, for example, an unfeeling capitalistic society which regularly uses death of the helpless to bolster up the ideology. This is not the film which does it, but the hapless (soon to be decapitated) survivor at the beginning of the film points to the rich and powerful having links which protect their organization. His nightmare where the investigating police officer turns out to have the dog tattoo and is a member of the murder syndicate and therefore perfectly free to rip his heart out, could have been further developed into a real conspiracy which would have added to the real horror of the film.

As in most of the truly sick depictions of human mutilation this tries to redeem its intellectual credentials with knowing self mockery, subtle irony and over-the-top grisly shlock slapstick. This doesn’t work, it merely emphasises the confused and embarrassed direction of the film and essential leaves it callously directionless. The ending of the film is equally made up of embarrassment, awkwardness and a simpering desire to please.

Revolting and, as I might have mentioned, a thoroughly repulsive piece of work.

My choice was ‘300’ (Zack Snyder 2007) which was a film adaptation of the graphic novel by Frank Miller.

I came to this film with high hopes, especially in terms of the visual distinctiveness of the presentation. The efforts of Snyder to reproduce exactly some of the graphic novel’s visual effects seemed promising. The pushing of the Persians over the cliffs was uncannily like the equivalent portrayal in the novel. Elsewhere in the film the techniques used were not as successful with many of the scenes looking merely graphically stilted rather than visually exciting.

The portrayal of the characters was also odd. We can never really know what this band of 300 actually looked like as they went into battle, but I doubt that they looked like the more than usually buffed and oiled bunch of virtually naked guys looking as though they were about to enter a Mr Gay Sparta competition – one kept waiting for the house music to start so they could get on with their John Travolta impersonations to gain maximum marks from the judges.

The height of something or other was reached with the appearance of Xerxes himself looking like something from a Boy George nightmare. Wearing a glittering jockstrap, rather randomly placed chains and rings, painted eyebrows and little else he looked more as if he was about to make an entrance onto the stage of some rather seedy gay bar as the fetishist stripper than the emperor god of the known world. When, towards the end of the film, he was waiting for Leonidas to prostrate himself he was seated at the top of his own slave drawn ziggurat one leg nonchalantly crossed over the other as if he was waiting for his gin and tonic with a slice of lemon in a tall glass filled with ice to be placed on a little doily. It didn’t work for me.

For me the character of Leonidas wasn’t coherent: he veered from witty humorist to inhuman killing machine with a bewildering rapidity that the back story did not make more believable.

Essentially I thought the film was an uneasy amalgam of styles with wonderfully OTT battle scenes. The loppings, cuttings, decapitations, amputations, stabbings, crushing etc, etc. were as gory (if not more so) than the carnage in Hostel II but in ‘300’ they had more of a ‘normal’ context; they were objectified by being in slow motion and they were painted as fiction by the unnatural colouring of the film. The deaths were altogether easier to take because these killings were institutionalised as a national means to an end; whereas in Hostel II the killings were for personal perversion and the particularity made them much more revolting than the ‘everyday’ deaths in battle.

I think that ‘300’ will survive as a pointer towards better films which use the non-naturalistic style of the graphic novel to achieve their effects.

I look forward to watching them.

A fleeting visit!

I am now convinced that the powers that be have determined that I will not work at my chosen profession in Spain!

This time the teaching got nearer than the last time when the offer had to be withdrawn a few days before it was about to take place. Then it was because the teacher I was supposed to be replacing did not have to go to court as a witness. This time was different.

I actually managed to get inside the school, talk to the head, go on a tour of the school, speak to my colleagues, take a registration and start the first period. Then it stopped.

I was the victim of a difference in interpretation. The crossed wires and misread protocols meant that my stay in the school was limited by a disinclination to sign the cheque for my stay. My innate sense of parsimony ensured that I would not work for nothing (not that I was given that opportunity!) so the only alternative was a dignified retreat.

I am glad that I am in a position where I can look on this incident with semi detached humour rather than professional fury. In spite of this inauspicious start, I have not yet given up on this establishment as one which can offer possibilities in the future. When, presumably, the conflict in administration has been settled one way or another.

In these absurd circumstances it meant that I returned home before Toni (Holiday Boy!) was actually out of bed.

My attempts to get him out of bed by appealing to his better side to make a cup of tea for The Worker (i.e. my good self) achieved nothing. Life can be so unfair sometimes!

As we were now both free at the same time we decided to pay a visit to Terrassa before Toni’s mum set off on her holiday. Our arrival in Terrassa at any approximation of lunch time always prompts Toni’s mum into food production mode which was well received by the two of us.

I have made an executive decision to start preparations for Christmas. I am using the immanent arrival of Hadyn to precipitate concrete and visible representations of the festive season. And one of the elements of a traditional Catalan Christmas I find appealing is the domestic insistence on a crib.

This is not, of course, a purely Catalan tradition, but the general acceptance of something which is very much a minority taste in homes in Britain is intriguing.

Being in Terrassa allowed an exploration of the Chinese shop on the ground floor of the flats. This was a productive excursion and resulted in a collection of figures to start of my Christmas scene and a rough, but evocative stable setting to put them in. You have to understand that these crib scenes are not usually confined to the stable but take on a cartoon like extended narrative structure which takes in all aspects of the Christmas story. So you get the Holy Family, the Wise Men, the Angels, the Shepherds, the animals and a whole series of other working characters, including the notorious Catalan caganer character. These scenes take on almost a strip cartoon display as they are added to year after year with new figures developing the complexity of the story. I have, at least, started the process.

The next problems are the tree and the Christmas cards.

I will give these some thought – after all I do not have teaching to take my mind away from these concerns!

Reality?

It had to happen sooner or later!

Tomorrow I become a biology teacher for two days.

My qualifications for this post are based on a single year’s study; much drawing of single celled creatures and a drawing of a bird’s wing which actually got a “Very good!” comment from the teacher. As I remember it at the end of the year we had to make the sort of ‘art’ or ‘biology’ sort of choice. And I chose art so that was the end of my descriptive scientific education. I prefer not to talk about my career in ‘O’ level Chemistry.

To be fair this is golden opportunity to find out how the British School in Barcelona (Castelldefels actually) operates. It gives me an opportunity to meet the staff and pupils and, more importantly for them to meet me. Teaching (well, supply teaching) again!

Pause for thought and red pens!

Of course the real irony is that Toni has time off. He had to take his ‘holiday’ days this month and decided to take a few days into the weekend to give himself a five day holiday. Yesterday we thought about taking a flight to Malaga or Rome or Lisbon – but it was all too expensive. You have to bear in mind that we set ourselves an upper limit of fifty pounds for the return flights to wherever we were going and, on that basis, all the flights that we looked at for our impromptu holiday were outside our limits. But for our parsimony we would have been in the vicinity of the Vatican today and not able for me to take up the challenge of entering the portals of an education establishment for gain! This is a good thing isn’t it?

Toni asked if I felt nervous about going into a new school, with new people, in a different country and ‘teaching’ a subject which is not my own. Up to that point my mood had been more amusedly anticipatory than anything else. Toni’s comments though, convinced me to become much more concerned and tentative. It is one thing going to a new school confident in your ability in your chosen subject, it is quite another to be placed in a new situation and totally deskilled by being out of your professional educational context.

I can’t wait to experience it all: it’s almost like being transported back to your first job!

Apart from ‘The Call’ to duty the day has been uneventful though I was able to continue to scandalize polite society in Castelldefels by continuing to wear summer clothing, looking somewhat conspicuous amid the muffled and shrouded pedestrians protected against a cold that wasn’t there.

But enough of this, tomorrow, is very much another day.

Put not thy trust . . .

This morning I was forcibly reminded of that telling phrase in ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ about the “triple pillar of the world transformed into a strumpet's fool.”

Not you understand because it particularly apt to my situation at the time, but the vague idea of something major displaying signs of weakness was most appropriate.

Not everyone has the same set of priorities, of course, but everyone must surely agree that some things are self evidently essential, and without which life as we know it is not possible.

Again, not everyone (really?) has two standby ipods to leap into electronic action at the first sign of mechanical failure. Admittedly the standbys are merely 60 and 80GB respectively and added together they do not equal the so-called ‘Classic’ 160GB which is my ipod of choice.

Having purchased a few CDs over the past few weeks and downloaded them to my computer, I felt it was high time that they found their way onto my ipod. You can imagine my horror when the ipod failed to synchronize with the computer. Then failed again. And again.

You have to understand that my ipod is my first line of defence against the horrors of the television programme ‘¡Força Barça!’ which has to be heard to be believed. The format is to have six to eight people talking about Barça at the top of their voices all at the same time. In Catalan. It is the sort of torture which UNO sets up futile committees to discuss chaired by some corrupt prince from the interminable nepotistic royal Augean stable of Saudi. The ipod allows me the serenity of having waves of Romantic music (the most effective in drowning out combative voices) rather than the ranting of self appointed pundits.

My efforts to get the bloody ipod to synchronize eventually approached the Doomsday solution which was to reset the machine to the factory settings and lose all the content prior to replacing it all. I therefore wiped all the information from the ipod and started the process to replace it. It didn’t work. Unhelpful messages like “unknown error 55” (what about the other 54?) did not inspire confidence.

I now had an ipod with a capacity of 160GB with nothing on it and no way of getting stuff on it. It is at points like this that one starts thinking about where one put the guarantee; what does one do when one bought the ipod in Regent’s Street and I am now in Castelldefels – does the service guarantee carry over the ocean?

The situation called for drastic approaches; yet measured. From my many years of experience in dealing with a variety of computers I pooled my knowledge and applied my most technical solution.

I turned the computer on and off just one more time and hoped for the best.

And the best of course happened. Most of what was on my computer transferred itself to the ipod. Some of the tracks have magically multiplied and grown little red dots with exclamation marks inside them and are therefore so much dead space.

But it works and ‘¡Força Barça!’ can shout itself hoarse while I hum along with Holst.

Ahhhh!

I defy augury!

It’s now official; I am the last person in Catalonia still wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

This was confirmed in a short official ceremony when the mayor of Castelldefels complimented me on my contribution to the tourist effort by my determined efforts to persuade the rest of the world that Spain was still a hot sunny place to visit even in the depths of November by my staunchly continuing to wear the minimum number of clothes commensurate with common decency.

I am now conscious of the knowing looks that I am getting from native Catalans as they go about their lawful business. I feel like that hapless soldier in the TV sketch continuing to struggle in the jungle who didn’t understand the concept of the war being over! The summer isn’t over until my goose pimples say it is!

The personalising of the flat continues apace now that we have been given an incentive with the removal of the owner’s detritus. The computer room (or Music Room as I would have it) {or third bedroom as it might have to be} is now beginning to take shape.

The tidying up of the living room incidentally decanted some of the extraneous furnishings into the computer/music/bedroom thus transferring the chaos to another room. As we can shut the door on this room, it could also be out of mind, but Toni is not like that and his active mind worked out a way in which we would be able to utilize the chaos and make it appear intentional and productive.

A futile visit to IKEA on Sunday (when will we ever get the opening times right?) merely delayed the delights of a visit today to get the necessary item to transform the room.

As is usual with IKEA the obvious is not always on sale in the form in which you wish it to be. Having assumed the existence of the shelf that would make everything fine, it was a bit of a blow to find out that it didn’t actually exist in the catalogue. In extremis I even launched out into a spectacularly optimistic harangue in Spanish to try and get what I wanted. This resulted in my being directed to the ‘Returns’ section in the hope that I could get a bargain. This was explained in vigorous Spanish by the lady assistant who accompanied her discourse with gestures, culminating in a knowing smile, a raised eyebrow and an index finger knowingly pulling down the lower lid of her left eye. I felt full involved in some sort of complicity, though about what I wasn’t entirely sure. Anyway there was nothing in the cheap section (gosh!) and so full price again!

As usual in IKEA I was seduced by the seemingly excellent value of the food on offer. As it was lunch time (isn’t it always) I thought that I could try their rice with salmon and chicken (or paella as the Spanish know it) for a small amount of money.

Why, when you think about it, should you assume that a furnishing shop would have any expertise in catering? Well, take it from me; it doesn’t. The taste of the food was vaguely institutional and definitely not Catalan. The best that I can get to the subtle (yet insistent) undertones in the flavour is to suggest that you try and recall the smell of an IKEA cupboard when you have just unpacked it – and that’s what it tasted like. Almost as if they had been storing their food supplies with the rest of the merchandise, and they had just taken it off the rack in the warehouse.

The sweet was apple tart which was not frozen but retained enough frostiness to make the teeth tingle with that fear of brittleness that makes chewing a hazardous occupation.

The coffee was fine.

Now, what was originally on the floor in the computer/music/bedroom is now largely half way up the wall on a new freestanding shelf supported by elements of the rest of the stuff on the floor. If you see what I mean.

Well, it works for us.

Which way is north?

Reading through a descriptive atlas can be a dispiriting experience.

Pointing out the exact location of Cape Cod and Provincetown to a frankly sceptical Toni started one of those delightfully aimless rambles which are a characteristic of my approach to reference books. That quintessentially Old Money Eastern part of the States having been located Toni’s interest flagged but my compulsive page turning highlighted (to me) fascinating elements in the maps: unexplained ‘white bits’ on a map showing part of southern Russia; names from British colonial history popping up in the ‘wrong’ countries; inexplicable and frankly unbelievable ‘correct’ spellings of familiar places; cities of many millions of people which I have never heard of; massive rivers emerging from nowhere and going to another nowhere; an unfamiliar Europe because the book was published ten years ago.

But the most telling aspect of this atlas was in the opening pages when, for each continent, its constituent countries were listed in alphabetical order with a very short description with a colour representation of the flag and some factual information. The description of the United Kingdom was a fairly neutral and factual listing of the home countries and the islands and an assertion of the industrial base of the country. A rather boring ‘assessment’ of the place.

A very different story emerges if you read through the listing of countries under the heading of the continent of Africa. ‘Story’ is an appropriate word because all the elements of high literature are present in microcosm in the descriptions. Deprivation, misery, murder, corruption, political chicanery, colonial exploitation, dictatorship, war, exasperation and despair characterised the lot. A neutral description would have been an expression of unexampled success! Where the land was harsh and unyielding there was human misery; where the ground was fertile and rich there was political repression; where there were abundant natural resources vested interests squandered them – in all respects Africa seems a failed continent.

It is easy to sustain this vision.

Given the recent crisis in Chad with Spanish television giving vivid depictions of the plight of the air crew of the controversial flight it was easy to select shots which included dust, dirt and broken windows to emphasise the poverty of the nation holding these frightened Europeans.

A particularly telling detail was the locating shot of the International Airport with its almost artfully picturesque lopsided letter in the welcoming sign on the airport terminal. Air travel demands a high degree of technological competence with each receiving airport needing to command a sophisticated array of highly specialised equipment; if they can’t even get the sign on the terminal right, we think, how the hell are they getting the plane into land?

Like so much on television (all on television?) you have to read the sub text; with any western dealings with Africa it is essential. Anything which breaks our stereotype of abject failure for that continent seems to be hard for us to take. Africa has been dismissed as the black hole of charity where, in the popular conception, only a tiny faction of the aid given actually gets to those who need the help.

I await with interest the stories of those who were detained in Chad. I am sure that Spain does not like to be beholding to France, especially a France governed by a budding autocrat like Sarkozy who storms into a past colonial possession, shakes a few hands, extricates the whites and leaves.

Spain is at present involved in a diplomatic ‘crisis’ with the President of Venezuela who, at a meeting of Hispanophone nations indulged in a slanging match with the President of Spain and, shockingly, the king. This incident is the latest in the series of publicity generating escapades of President Chávez who seems to be more and more convinced of the truth of his unpleasant cult of the personality which characterises his rule in Venezuela. What at one time seemed a refreshing change from the ruling elites who had dominated politics when Chávez as a native American Indian took over the presidency now looks more like oil funded ignorant boorishness.

To compare the last president of Spain with Hitler is ridiculous in terms of fact and a grotesque insult to the millions who died and suffered as a result of the perverted ideology of the National Socialists.

What I find more interesting in this debacle is the position of the king. I cannot believe that the powers that be in Madrid thought that a gathering of the various ruffians who make up the power cliques in South America would be anything other than a highly political meeting with highly honed personalities on display. In the meeting the president was sitting next to the king that raises the question of who is the head of state. It is also, surely, not the king’s position to reply to abuse, even public abuse from a president. This opens some difficult political questions for Spain.

It is unthinkable that the Prime Minister and the Queen would have been in such close proximity in what was clearly a political meeting; and equally unthinkable that the Queen would have replied to the ill considered ranting of a rapidly developing megalomaniac. After all she acquiesced in the gratuitous posturing that went with the state visit of that bastard Ceausescu as he rode in an open carriage with the Queen down The Mall. And, if my memory serves me right wasn’t he made a Knight of the Garter as well?

Meetings of the Commonwealth are equally difficult, especially when spectacularly failing to deal with another megalomaniac like Mugabe, but I’m sure that the Queen would be protected from the gratuitous insults of an oil rich bully who sees himself as the jolly leader of the world’s oppressed.

I suppose that we have to be grateful that he didn’t insult in song!

Go to the ant thou sluggard!

A lazy day with an excellent lunch.

There is still enough of the Protestant work ethic left in me for vague feelings of guilt to emerge with greater intensity for every minute after 9.30am that I stay in bed in the morning. Suffice to say that I should have crippled for the rest of the day with all consuming anguish after the self indulgent display of prone passivity.

But I wasn’t.

Instead I had a little jaunt to Gava to the shop that acts as a magnet for my gadget longings to see if I could find an internet radio. I remember seeing one for about eighty quid in PC World many moons ago and thinking that it was ‘a good idea’ but not quite good enough to justify the outlay of good folding stuff. And the design wasn’t flashy enough to persuade by unsubtle flashing lights and shiny metallic trim.

With my Spanish it is not certain what I asked for in the shop and the voluble response that I had from the young assistant could have meant anything, but I took what he said to mean that they didn’t have one. Eventually!

10% of a conversation is often not enough to go on. Not even for someone who watched The Magic Roundabout with unvarying fascination and admired Eric Thompson’s convincing narration based only on what he saw rather than any sort of accurate translation from the French. His versions made perfect sense to me and I have always used his imaginative approach to foreign languages to ‘get by.’ I should imagine that I have often got the sense entirely wrong and have gone off in my own sweet way filled with the percentage of misunderstandings which keep us sane.

Every teacher knows that the simplest instruction given to any normal class if only said only once will be misinterpreted by at least half of the pupils there. Teachers have to follow the code outlined in the Hunting of the Snark, “What I tell you three times is true” Repetition is the key means of communication, yet most of the time we only say important, complicated things once and are constantly surprised at not being understood. How many times can we echo the sentiments found in T S Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ – “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.”

But never let it be said that I didn’t revel in happy ignorance. I never fail to convince myself that I have understood enough to justify a warm sense of my own perspicacity in surviving in a foreign language. It’s a good thing that one cannot rerun one’s life and listen to one’s mistakes, not only linguistic but also in terms of perception! That’s one’s friends are for!

If the morning was lazy and the afternoon somnolent, then the evening brought on a spurt of activity as a rearrangement which should have happened a few months ago was finally achieved.

I have noted before that the placing of books, glasses and miscellaneous items when moving house if they are positioned in their new places in the hectic hours of the actual move tend to stay in their randomly chosen positions for at least six months. Rearrangement of non vital aspects of a new life usually has a fairly low priority.

I suppose that having moved into the flat in July I am still a few weeks ahead of schedule when I relate that I have now achieved a personal harmony in the setting out of the more visible glasses in the living room. The rather untidy display of DVDs has been rationalised by the purchase of a very imposing pseudo-suede clad book which has facilitated the throwing of an entire black bag full of redundant plastic cases leaving only Toni’s cases which encompass an eclectic selection ranging from U2, through a promotional film of Terrassa to ‘Finding Nemo’ also including what is probably one of Toni’s favourite films, ‘La Vida es Bella.’

More importantly Toni has rearranged the writhing mass of wiring and established the hifi in a more satisfactory place; wired up the auxiliary loudspeakers, connected the video and generally sorted out the electronic chaos which characterised the television end of the living room. Civilized living creeps on apace!

The lurking threat of tomorrow is to “clean the whole house.” I’m not absolutely sure what this entails when applied to a flat ‘I sincerely hope that this does not mean that we have to follow our footsteps down into the street cleaning as we go. I fail to see myself as a housewife from the nineteen twenties in the valleys assiduously scrubbing the pavement to a pristine whiteness so that the neighbours won’t talk!

I would rather revert to type and keep coal in the bath!

Space!

We have gained a cupboard.

When you take a furnished flat you take someone else’s choice in all sorts of things that you hadn’t previously thought were anything other than your own.

Knives and forks and pans and sheets and cushions and small televisions and plates and glasses and paintings and ornaments other things that you just don’t want at second hand! And large things like tables and chairs and coffee tables and clothes dryers of the metal framework sort. And a microwave.

We managed to fit most of this into one cupboard which we can ill afford to write off. And today the landlord came and took it all away! It’s like being given a present of an extra room. I am just waiting for the arguments to start about how we use it!

Another step has been taken in the sluggish quest to find gainful employment.

Having been frustrated in my attempt to teach the young I have made a first real contact with the British School in Barcelona in order to try and teach the older.

The school has a two form entry – rather different from the entry of Llanishen High School! The English Department comprises three members of staff and they are at full strength. The only possibility in the short term is supply work of some sort, so I will wait and see what happens.

I have also answered a summons to Gava (the administrative soul of this area) as there appears to be an offer of a few hours work in a language school. I left my telephone number and they are supposed to be contacting me but nothing yet. Meanwhile, I wait for the call and do a little light sunbathing.

It’s a hard old life.

Not all fruit is sweet

It is surely no accident that popular imagination has depicted the fruit of the tree of knowledge as an apple. The apple haunts art and literature through the ages from Adam and Eve via William Tell to Snow White and the Beatles failed enterprise.

The serpent too takes many forms in pictorial representations from a fairly realistic reptile to a grotesque amalgam of snake tail added to a female (of course, art was a male preserve) top.

In the twenty-first century it would be sad reflection of our ability to re-envision the iconic past in a new and exciting way if we were not able to unveil a new and even more seductive temptation to encourage the further fall (if that were even remotely possible) of Man. I use the term ‘Man’ advisedly because the New Apple that I am thinking of would probably be less effective with Woman.

It happened while looking for ‘The Name of the Rose’ for Toni who has managed to catch only snatches of the film over a period of time stretching from his military service to the present day. He now has the idea in his head of watching the film all the way through and is even prepared to buy the film (“Only if it’s cheap!”) to satisfy this longing. As he must know, a Shopping Quest is something which I relish, giving me the opportunity to scour shops on the off chance that the goal may be hidden behind a discouraging shelf. After all, anyone can find a DVD in a DVD shop: it takes a certain amount of imagination to find the requisite item in an unlikely location. Which is why I never write off a shop as totally uninteresting: there are always possibilities.

Sometimes, of course, you can use The Quest to indulge yourself. It is, after all, more than probable that the DVD will be on the shelves in a place like MediaMarkt which is also full of interesting gadgets of the electrical sort. So, with a sense of selfless generosity I forced myself to go to MediaMarkt before I picked up Toni from work.

It says little for my much vaunted martyr complex (Stephen by name; Stephen by nature etc) that I did not move immediately to the DVDs but instead found myself irresistibly drawn to the handheld computers.

And there it was! An inert, dark rectangle – almost, but not quite featureless. And that of course made it interesting. One remembers the description of the space craft in ‘The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Universe’ with the black control panel on which black lights lit up in black! Such is sophistication!

What I was looking at was of course my electronic apple: an actual, real, in the metallic flesh iphone!

The only thing which stopped me from buying it at once was that it wasn’t for sale. When I asked (Oh yes I asked!) I was told that they had no idea of the price; no idea of what versions would be available in Spain; no real idea when it would be available – though possibly in March!

That is five months. At least one hundred and fifty days. Lots of hours and even more lots of minutes, and don’t get me started on the number of nano seconds. It’s a long time. The world’s most desirable gadget and I can’t get my hands on it.

My only hope is that the reviews from Britain and Germany (they get it this month) are bad. Very bad.

Please!

Always another page

Catalonia is the one country in the world where I can celebrate St George’s Day with a clear conscience and no feeling of disloyalty to Wales!

This United Nation’s Day only produced two books, only one of which was a novel (and neither, I might add, on United Nations Day itself!)

The Time Out guide to films is a mammoth tome with a suitably encyclopaedic inclusiveness. It is one of those books which I find addictive. I start off with a restricted intention of looking up just a few of my favourite films. The films I like range across the critical divide from generally accepted classic films through interesting but opinion dividing films and ending in my choice and I’ll stand by them films. Perhaps that range can be exemplified by ‘Citizen Kane’, ‘The Bitter Tea of General Yen’ and ‘High Anxiety.’ A nicely mixed bunch!

That was one of the books (Thank you Pauls!) and the other was from The Family and was, according to them, the only book in English in El Corte Inglés and was a novel by Ken Follett. This was another massive volume of over a thousand pages and it had a suitably epic sweep following the lives of different families in England in the Middle Ages. Centred on the fictional Cathedral and Priory town of Kingsbridge, it traced the developing municipal and commercial identity of the town as it attempted to come to terms with living with a powerful Prior whose ideas were often at odds with those of the tradespeople. The action of the novel concentrated on the lives of four children who, at the beginning of the novel are confronted with the bloody reality of living in the fourteenth century.

Basically this is a novel of politics and power struggles, stripped of the medieval background the basic plot could be transposed to any century: creative artist frustrated by small minded bigotry; career woman weighing options; sadistic bully protected by class interests; working class woman makes good in spite of overwhelming difficulties – all mixed with an assortment of colourful characters easy to identify and compartmentalise.

Compared with the Ellis Peters novels of Brother Cadfael this extended narrative lacks the concentrated tension of a murder mystery and it also lacks Peters` easy and unforced familiarity with the historical period. The power of the Church is emphasised in ‘World Without End’ but not the theology behind it which made ‘The Name of the Rose’ such an interesting read, but rather as the power base for a great deal of politicking.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and would welcome reading the novel to which this is the sequel, ‘The Pillars of the World’- which at the moment is swamping the supermarket shelves in its Spanish paperback version.

I think that my biggest reservation about the quality of this novel is in the dialogue. Follett spells things out: he rarely leaves things for the reader to do. All his characters are articulate (unfeasibly articulate in some instances) about their motivations and the motivations of others. A participant in this story might be a thug but he soon develops a perception well out of keeping with his ostensible character. It does, of course, make it easier to follow and is perhaps a key factor in the success of this sort of writing and allows a reader to follow such an epic tale.

Roll on another thousand pages! And Saint George’s Day, which in Catalonia, is the day for the giving of books as presents.

At last a civilized country!

Open your eyes!

The visit of my cousin Judith to Barcelona was a case of “not only but also” in the best sense.

It has been quite a time since we last met and so it was both a pleasure and something of an irony that we finally came back together in a foreign country.

I relied on my in car navigator to get me to Judith’s hotel and it did – in a way. I have noticed that The Voice That Must Be Obeyed has a tendency to say things like, “Drive 50 yards to destination” and “Arriving at destination.” You have to take on faith the fact that you are there because there is nothing clearly visible in the surroundings to indicate that you have actually arrived at the place where you want to be.

In Spain, especially in a popular part of a large city like Barcelona there is nowhere to park and housing development fills every available space. In cases like this your destination may be hidden behind a block of flats and a strip of shops and not be immediately visible from the road, and certainly not from a moving car when you are seeing the place for the first time. Pausing to take stock of your situation is clearly out of the question when you are being followed extremely closely by drivers whose passionate intensity to get to a destination can only be justified by having their cars filled with pregnant persons about to give birth.

All of that was to explain why I missed my destination a few times before I finally got there.

In Barcelona “missing your destination” is a real threat. Once a place is passed you will find all sorts of obstacles in your way to getting back there. Because of the suicidal and homicidal intensity of traffic doing a u-turn is equivalent to falling on your sword. The numbers of ‘no entry’ or ‘no right turn’ or indeed ‘no left turn’ signs constantly frustrate any attempt to circle back on yourself without returning to your original destination and starting again. If you are able, through a combination of good luck, the grace of god and devil-may-care driving to find again your destination then you will inevitably be looking at it like Moses viewing the Promised Land: visible, but out of reach, usually the wrong way up a one way road.

Through a mixture of blind faith, appallingly inconsiderate driving on my part and sheer luck I did managed to approach my “destination” again from the other side of the road and lo! the different perspective revealed the hitherto hidden riches of the hotel. Parking the car was another story which I am not strong enough to relate at the present time.

Suffice to say I found my cousin who was surprised at my promptitude (as indeed was I) and we immediately made plans for lunch.

The hotel was near Camp Nou so we decided to throw caution to the winds and take a taxi to the centre and find somewhere nice to eat in the Old Town.

Our eventual choice was a busy looking restaurant in a square which was marked by a rather random looking assortment of subterranean classical rubble protected from the elements by a sheet of glass. We took our seats on a wooden terrace to watch the world go by and waited for the menus.

We had made a fundamental mistake. We were hoping for the menu del dia and we did not realise that the choice of the cheaper menus did not entitle us to an outside seat. When disabused of our assumption we moved inside and sat down. We did not realise that the choice of the cheaper menu did not entitle us to an inside seat in the spacious interior of the restaurant. We were ushered to a cramped area in the back of the restaurant and, at last, we were able to consider our choices of food.

It has to be said that we didn’t consider much as we talked constantly and had to be prompted a few times before we finally managed to give coherent instructions to the waiter.

The meal was average, though good value for money – though the thick black sauce which covered the hake had only to be tasted to be instantly rejected!

Our next foray after lunch was one of the reasons that visitors to your home city are worth their weight in gold. As Judith had said that she had attended some evening classes in the history of art I thought that a short visit to the Museu National d’Art de Catalunya would be a good choice. This decision was based on a previous visit to the cultural sights of Barcelona when, armed with a Culture Card I went through the museums like a dose of salts. The Museu National d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) while being very impressive had very few of the sorts of paintings that I actually wanted to see. Ignoring all the Romanesque and Classical stuff (!) the ‘interesting’ art only amounted to a couple of rooms. This, I thought, would be ideal for a short visit.

Well, I was wrong – in a good sense!

The museum building was constructed for the 1929 exhibition and is grandiose and impressive, but inside they have created an excitingly modern space working with the original elements of the building but developing them into dynamic areas which complement the art.

We were both astonished at the scale of the building and the unexpected vistas that it afforded. I had also underestimated the range and quality of the art on display. It appears that Judith and I both play the same game in art galleries – ‘Which one would you take home with you?’ For me, the most impressive painting was a small ‘Portrait of a negro’ by Flink (?) more information will have to be collected from the gallery itself as there is no illustration of information in the gallery guide (in Spanish, blame Judith!) which I bought at the end of our visit.

Taking Judith there has opened my eyes to what a treasure we have in Barcelona in this museum. When (if?) the trains start running normally, I will return! I must warn Hadyn now that this museum is going to be one of the stops on his cultural itinerary when he visits in December.

He has been warned!

And on your right . . .

Days slip by and palsied fingers touch not the inviting keys of the computer.

I used the adjective advisedly because I have succumbed to the illness that smote Toni, aggravated it must be admitted by an excess of good food and bad liquor. The good food was perhaps a little of an overstatement as I am convinced that the quality of the food in the restaurant that we had was more than a mere contributory factor.

But, but but. The past days have been enlivened by the arrival of a quartet of friends, whose arrival emphasised their loss in a strange sort of way. This is a paradoxical arrangement that I’m sure will become clearer to me and will be well known already to those who live abroad.

Alison and Bryn had a fairly clear idea of the bones of what they wanted to do, though their ability to pack in as much as they would have liked was severely restricted by the dead hand of RENFE and the total disruption of the entire traffic system in our part of the Barcelona area. What was a short, efficient train ride into the centre of the city became something reminiscent of the worst excesses of the M25 – and we all know what that abomination (my favourite word of the moment) led to!
In spite of the machinations, the continuing machinations I should say, of RENFE and its entire works all five of us – Alison, Bryn, Paul 1 and Paul Squared – were able to pack into my car and set off for the city. Alison and Bryn set off for a little light shopping and a Gaudi house while the Pauls and I settled for the long, slow frustration of a City Tour.
I wonder if there is any decent city in the world (or at least in Europe) in which it is possible to take a City Tour without feeling that the sights run a poor second to the frustrations. Traffic in most cities now ensures that the speed of transportation is now lagging behind what it might have been in the days of the horse and cart. Add to those traffic light systems which seem entirely designed to restrict rather than facilitate traffic flow; unattended building works spilling into roads; road repairs without any repairers but with maximum inconvenience; tunnel sighted drivers and suicidal pedestrians –and you have the perfect mix for an agonizingly pedestrian (adjective and metaphor) tour. I think this is why Walking Tours have now become so popular in cities: it allows people to move at a real and acceptable speed, a speed indeed which is usually faster than the stationary traffic forming the metallic barrier to the walkways that the speedy pedestrians inhabit!

On my advice the Boys decided to take the Red Route bus ride which took us to the Casa Milla, Sagrada Familla and Camp Nou inter alia.

The more I see of Barcelona the more I am convinced of what a handsome city it is. So many buildings are not only interesting in their general shape but are also fascinating in the detail of their construction and ornamentation. It is said that Barcelona has the largest (and Catalans would fairly maintain, the finest) collection of Modernista buildings in Europe. I never fail to be amused by the irony of the British calling the Modernista movement Art Nouveau while the French call it Le Style Moderne. It is almost like admitting that since we Brits have not excelled in the plastic arts since the heyday of eighteenth and nineteenth century water colourists, so we don’t really have the right to give an English name to a movement in painting or architecture. Though thinking about it, didn’t Fry coin the name Post Impressionist for the London exhibition? There again, the term ‘post’ is hardly of English derivation and the term ‘Impressionist’ was used as an referential insult by a French newspaper critic about one of Monet’s paintings.

Enough!

The Boys were vaguely interested in everything they saw, but certainly did not evince the appropriate quantity of awe and respect for what they were viewing. They remained staunchly unimpressed by one of the great public spaces in the world in Parc Guell and they were bemused to the point of indifference by the Casa Milla.

They were impressed however by the strength of the sun.

For the first time for a long time I was able to view the Sagrada Familla from a closer viewpoint to that which I am usually accustomed. My difficulties with the building remain.

What from a distance looks imposing, strange and organic when seen close to resolves itself into its disparate parts. I think that the sculptures on the Passion façade are a grotesque, insulting and disastrous encrustation. The splayed pillars, which on Gaudi’s early drawings looked revolutionary now look gaudily commercial and cheap giving a tent like appearance to the entrance, with stones looking more like guy ropes than structural supports. The ‘Gothic’ windows look too much like their distant ancestors to be original and not well enough finished to be acceptable: it’s almost like a childish representation translated into stone and glass.

The towers still impress and the use of ceramics seems to me to be masterly. I still maintain that this is a building to be seen at a distance and, at a distance it ranks with the Kaufmann House and Ely Cathedral as one of my favourite buildings.

Our evening meal, this time taking in Toni who was back from work early, was one with poor results – hence my illness and my failure to take Alison and Bryn to the airport and to take the Pauls on a jaunt to Sitges.

Such an ending to a visit demands a return to make amends.

I will keep the beds aired!

Cheers!

I have now seen the ultimate height of idiocy in Spanish driving.

While driving at night in Castelldefels coming up to a busy roundabout, I noticed a car stopped on the roundabout – not on the pavement side of the road, but next to the roundabout. Then the reverse lights went on and the woman (sorry!) driving the car reversed back to a turning that she had missed!

It is a little worrying that the principle of circularity inherent in a roundabout had been lost on a qualified driver on the roads of Castelldefels!

An incident like that puts the everyday criminality of driving on the roads of Spain into some sort of context.

You can see the reckless overtaking and undertaking (I am aware of irony in that word); the speeding and the moving from lane to lane like a jinxed horse; the assumptions of rights of way with imperial disregard for other road users – you can see all these as a sort of heightened form of driving. It’s like speed driving: no not the use of velocity, the use of the drug.

Spanish drivers are considerate – as long as you play by their rules. It’s like R D Laing’s descriptions of the insane in ‘The Divided Self’: if you enter the world of the disturbed person then you will find that there is a logic and even ‘sense’ in the way that their universe is ordered. It’s just not the one that the majority of the population find to be real. The only difference between the insane in ‘The Divided Self’ and Spanish drivers on the roads of Catalonia is that the Spanish drivers are the majority and a timid look/indicate/manoeuvre British driver seems to be from another world.

I do not want to give the impression that I am god’s gift to advanced driving. I loathe driving and regard it only as a convenient means to get to a necessary destination.

I like arriving not travelling.

I am by no means impeccable in my driving skills and I realise that I have a nasty tendency to drive too fast. But I do manage the basics like always wearing a safety belt; using my mirror; indicating and showing at least some degree of consideration towards other road users.

To survive on Spanish roads, at least those in the vicinity of the city of Barcelona, you have to enter the world of the Spanish driver. I suppose if I was to continue the analogy with the delusional patients in ‘The Divided Self’ you have to believe that you are surrounded by multiple mobile Napoleons, all with the imperial right to do as they please and you must be a Napoleon as well. And believe in it too!

On a more pleasant note Alison and Bryn have arrived. They emerged from the arrivals gate in Barcelona airport confident in the knowledge that the information that I had given them about the convenience of Castelldefels as a centre for their stay in the Barcelona area was based on up to the moment first hand experience.

Of course, when they arrived and before they got into my car I was able to disabuse them of these comfortable assertions. What they actually found was a situation where the rail link between Castelldefels and Barcelona was broken because of the seemingly criminal incompetence of RENFE; the road system in something approaching chaos because of the construction work for the new terminal for Barcelona Airport; traffic congestion on an epic scale because of ham fisted attempts to ‘ease the problems’ and last, but not least, the closure of roads in Castelldefels because of the Marathon of the Mediterranean on the day that they both wanted to go to Barcelona.

Very unreasonably, I thought, they blamed me!

Earlier in the day I had my delayed celebration of United Nations Day with Toni’s family and, very pleasingly, by Caroline. I had a more than satisfactory haul of gifts and it was especially good that the extended family were able to see the flat.

Once again I was astonished by the way in which Catalans drink. OK, there were a few drivers and they are discounted, but the ones that were left leave a normal British person bemused at the lack of involvement with the liquid intoxicants which lubricate the vast majority of festive occasions in the Old Country.

I had bought red wine, white wine, Cava, two types of beer, fruit juice and various forms of fizzy drink. Three people asked for water; two people drank fruit flavoured fizzy drinks; one person (she knows who she is!) drank Coke Zero; two people drank nothing; I poured the drinks. And two people, just two, drank canned beer. The two people with beer, eventually, after much persuasion managed a second can during the afternoon!

I had made a martyr-like renunciation of alcohol because I was picking up Alison and Bryn later in the evening. This gesture lost all its value by the almost complete lack of alcohol consumption by my guests. What, I ask you, is the point of grand gestures of abstinence if no one around you is indulging in animal like excess? You don’t gain many points if you are, daringly, acting just like everyone else!

The arrival of Alison and Bryn in the flat (with Toni hors de combat on his bed of illness in the bedroom and therefore neatly eliminating the only moderating influence) changed my drinking habit for the day.

The now traditional bottle of ‘Ne Plus Ultra’ Cava and a few bottles of El Corto went down very nicely thank you. We eventually remembered that I had prepared comestible refreshments which, once consumed, obviously allowed the consumption of a little more excellent Rioja. And then a little more. And then, probably, too much.

Ah how British it all was!

You are too late!

First things first: let me wish you all a happy and prosperous United Nations Day FOR YESTERDAY!

Yes, if you were planning to celebrate United Nations Day on the 24th of October(perhaps by sending a card or giving a present to anyone you might be acquainted with who has a connection with this auspicious day) you’ve missed it.

And if you know me you also know when United Nations Day is, so ignorance is no excuse

No, this is not a case of let’s-look-at-the-calendar-and-find-what’s-on-yesterday; this is a genuine wish to celebrate a day which focuses attention on the nearest this sad world has come to finding a forum to discuss ways of addressing the putrescent sores of criminal ineptitude which disfigure the body politic of the globe.

What can one say about an organization which regularly hosts gatherings which include the criminally insane, the exultantly megalomaniac, the murdering dictatorial, the self righteously bigoted, the strutting poseur, the smugly self delusional, the corrupted, the corrupting and the lost?

Well; it’s the best we’ve got and represents the most effective (!) gathering for tempering the excesses of men (let’s face it, it’s usually the males) who try to indulge their lusty power dreams without the tedious restraint of an enfranchised population to restrain their excesses.

It’s easy to be cynical when you hear the public proclamations of decency and freedom from our representative in the United Nations and realise that he speaks while the pernicious cancer which is, for example, the relationship HMG has with the repressive (but oil rich) regime of Saudi Arabia is eating away at our credibility.

It is difficult to be upbeat when you see African nations uniting to defend the murderous dictatorship of Mugabe. It is difficult not to feel impotent rage when countries like Burma and the Sudan continue to ignore the posturing of world opinion.

But surely Churchill’s faint praise of democracy must also be applied to this virtually toothless successor to The League of Nations. “It has been said,” Churchill declaimed in a speech to the House of Commons, “that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms which have been tried from time to time.” Just substitute UNO for Democracy. And I’ve just realised what a terrible irony there is in that last sentence!

You may be wondering why it is that I feel so strongly about an organization which virtually every country in the world has condemned with contempt at some time or other. Yet I have celebrated this day throughout my life. When I was younger with the able assistance of my parents and, when I was older, with the able assistance of copious amounts of alcohol.

I will leave it to the more astute reader to work out the significance of this day for me and leave him with a picture of me sitting at my table, tapping out a short tattoo with my elegantly manicured finger nails and looking archly at the empty post box!

Robert is now back in Syria. It was his intention (and he managed it) to go to school today. This is not in itself remarkable, but when you consider that his travelling time from Barcelona to Damascus via Milan and then a five hour coach drive to his home will bring him home, looking at the clock, just in time for work –then I think this intention reaches into the realms of the heroic.

One does wonder, however, what the quality of his teaching was like after a day and a half of constant travelling. Exhaustion lowers defences and the barrier between thought and expression becomes as loose as an email! I am sure that an astute and observant student, listening with analytical attention to Robert’s utterances will have gained more insight into his character on this one day of physical depletion than during twenty weeks of perky conscientious teaching!

The alternative approach to exhaustion, of course, is one that I adopted after a particularly stressful journey back from Çinarcic in Turkey via Bucharest and Geneva. During this epic voyage (which seemed to span several lifetimes rather than the mere forty hours that it took) I utilized a fair variety of modes of transport including car, boat, lift, taxi, escalator, bus, foot, train and plane. At the end of my trip I found that I could lapse into a coma-like sleep at a moment’s notice jerking into hyper-hysterical attention for the briefest moments necessary for the maintenance of human existence and resuming my catalepsy, like a comfortable bed, at will.

As long as Robert was able to comatize himself with his eyes wide open, I am sure he will have survived the day. Perhaps he utilized his new ipod and plugged himself into one of the educational podcasts that I put on his machine and allowed the electronic impulses to flow into his tired brain and out through his mouth.

I only hope that he didn’t choose one of the more profane podcasts which also figure on the extensive list of freebies that I downloaded!

Forestalling elegant excess

One of the many things that I despise about Windows is that it makes executive decisions without reference to the poor user who has paid out good folding money for computer and programs that work in ways known only to God and Bill Gates. I never know if that juxtaposition is an example of oxymoron or tautology.

This time the program suggested that every word that I was using was incorrectly spelled and emphasised this by underlining each word so I could make my adjustments. As my spelling can sometimes exhibit wayward propensities, my confidence can be knocked by the merest wisp of a suggestion of doubt about my orthography. Having the whole of my typing dissed by the puissant omniscience of Microsoft Word was daunting to say the least.

The underlining of a word like ‘forestalling’ suddenly makes you think that you must have it wrong. After all, you reason to yourself, have I ever actually written the word before? When I last read it (how long ago was that?) did it have a different spelling from the instinctive one that I used? You then try other spellings, all of which look wrong. Then, after a while, all the alternative spellings start to look right. Then you think to yourself, well, I have a wide vocabulary, I’ll use another word. Then even your simpler alternative words are underlined. You begin to doubt your ability to communicate. Your world is falling apart.

Then salvation reveals itself.

The program has decided, unilaterally, to use a Spanish dictionary instead of the English one and, most cunningly, doesn’t let you know that it has changed and is now reading all your English words as poor spellings of Spanish ones!

I remember one person writing about the recent developments in cars and computers and comparing them. He said that if cars had developed at the same rate as computers and kept pace in terms of price as well, then today you would be able to buy the equivalent of a Rolls Royce for the price of a bicycle but that it would also stand a reasonable chance of exploding for no apparent reason.

Someone else wrote that if cars were sold with the same number of fundamental faults that quite ordinary programs have when released for general sale, the car manufacturers would never be out of the courts being sued for gross negligence.

Anyway I eventually noticed a few words at the bottom of the screen which indicated Spanish rather than English as the dictionary of choice (which explained all the underlined words) and I was able to double tap and get back to normal.

But still the nagging question of how it changed disturbs me. If that can change, what else is going on that I do not know about? Who or what is operating my machine? This is not a rant of a conspiracy theorist but the reasoned thoughts of someone who has known too many inconsistencies, faults, failures, inexplicable shifts in programs and momentary glitches for comfort.

Lunch today with Caroline and the usual conversational peregrinations through a variety of topics: easy talk at its leisurely best. I look forward to our next in a fortnight’s time.

Caroline displayed a tendency which she herself described as ‘Luddite’ about computers. This gave me the opportunity to wax lyrical about yet another Achilles’ heel: my infatuation with machines electrical. It turns out that Caroline’s computer is not performing at its best and it further turns out that Caroline has not been housekeeping and god alone knows what is lurking on her computer. Being the helpful sort of person that I am I immediately said that I had gone through a recent searing experience when my computer developed an illness which seemed to indicate that all the information (When did YOU last backup your files?) that I had stored on it would be lost. It took a few days but a saviour appeared and managed to save most of it and restore the operating system so that it, well, operated. I also said that I would try and find the card which I knew I had and send her the information about this professional electronic Samaritan.

This is almost always a disaster. It is a lose/lose situation: you won’t find the card and will feel bad with yourself and your lack of organizational effectiveness; you will feel bad about building up the hope of a friend only to have to dash the expectations by sad incompetence.

It was therefore with something approaching despair that I started the via dolorosa of drawer to cupboard to shelf to ledge to table in the vain hope of finding a small sliver of cardboard with the all important number on it. I should at this point emphasise that my PDA (palm top computer) has a faulty battery and it has proved to be impossible to replace it in this part of Spain. That would have been where I would have stored the address in the old days. These days meant that I had to find the original card or give it up as a bad job.

As in all the most clichéd stories I did find it in the last drawer of the last chest of drawers which was the last place in which it could be.

As in all the most clichéd stories I did also find two things that I have been looking for in a fairly desultory fashion for the last week.

All things work together for good in this best of all possible worlds!

I must now go and cultivate my garden.

Oh yes, before I forget, the title of this piece relates to the present that Toni gave me; but that is for another time and another place

Keep taking the tablets

Incipient colds are lurking at the edges of our physical health.

Toni looks a little groggy and has taken some efficient looking powders to combat the messy effects of our antisocial seasonal afflictions.

As I am still defiantly maintaining a summer wardrobe and stoutly affirming that the ‘summery’ temperatures encourage a beach orientated existence.

Given that the legendary Robert has stayed with us for a night, it was essential that he experience the delights of living by the sea and take at least a nominal plunge into the sea.

We had talked well into the night and it was good to be able to make pretentious conversazione with someone who regarded it as normal! God, when I think back to the talks we had in university, if any of them had been recorded we would have been put away!

Actually now I come to think about it, I did once record a conversation in college. As a joke, when I was preparing a meal and dismembering a frozen chicken with a largely ineffectual carving knife I turned on the cassette recorder (ah, such simple technology) to see how the conversation would develop. I set myself the task of initiating the interchanges with the intention of stimulating my companions to linguistic displays which could be the source of innocent merriment later. But after a few minutes I forgot that we were being recorded.

The ensuring tape, when we finally got to listen to it shocked us by the deeply infantile nature of most of the utterances and the general mood of surrealistically Pinteresque normality of our gnomic mode of communication. One member of the trio recorded took an unhealthy interest in the whole affair and used to borrow the cassette and listen to it in his room. As he was by far the most academic of us one can only wonder what intellectual substance he found in such an inconsequential load of chatter.

I suppose that the sad thing was that we generally thought that we were having conversations of the most profound nature where we were touching the very substance of philosophy itself. Out time would have been much better spent if we hadn’t subscribed to such illusions; but it would have been immeasurably duller!

Robert and my conversations were much more prosaic, but just as enjoyable.

It is also gratifying to find out that my one real skill has not deserted me.

I have always prided myself on being a dependable catalyst for encouraging other people to spend money.

Robert put up a token resistance to buying a 160GB ipod but by the time he was deposited in Barcelona airport to try and discover just which terminal he should have been waiting in for his flight to Syria he was the proud possessor of a gleaming black mp3 machine of Apple manufacture with a remarkably eclectic and stimulating collection of musical tracks!

I will be interested to her what sort of musical Odyssey he makes through my collection of idiosyncratic classics interspersed with oddities that have limited popular appeal. How can I forget going to an ENO performance of ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ (one of personal favourites) and turning to the lady on m left at the end of the performance and saying breathlessly, “Wasn’t that wonderful!” To which she replied, “No!”

I sometimes plough a lonely furrow!

The Music Plays On and On and On

Why do so many programmes on Spanish television have low level background music?

Some news programmes have wildly inappropriate music playing under even quite serious news stories at a volume which impinges on the consciousness without adding anything to the viewing pleasure.

Sometimes you ignore the crying interviewees as they tearfully relate some horrific experience and concentrate instead on the music playing behind their soul baring words and realise that some trite piece of American superficiality is the background music to human tragedy. It is vulgar and deeply irritating as the ‘name that tune’ approach to serious news reporting detracts from the message.

It is not only news programmes that adopt this musical affectation, but also sports programmes. I have just ‘watched’ a Catalan sports programme.

Perhaps I should define what I mean by ‘watched’ when we are talking about a programme on a subject about which I have minimal interest in a language I don’t understand. If you are the sort of person who can speak fluent Spanish, are conversant in French and remember, in detail, all those Latin lessons from school (sic.) then Catalan should be a language which has sufficient linguistic links to what you know to encourage you to believe that you have a fairly good idea about what is going on.

I, however, am not one of that polyglot number and so, like Shakespeare (though substituting French and Spanish for Latin and Greek) I stumble my way though watching by the ‘one in twenty words at best’ approach to foreign communication. The fact that it is television also allows you the luxury of attempting to read body language and facial gesture into the general communication mix. This, often, does not help you gain the actual meaning of what is going on but, like the British version of ‘The Magic Roundabout’ you substitute your own story to the pictures that you see.

My other approach to language is based on extensive reading of ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ – as indeed is much of my philosophy of life. I would refer the curious to an incident in one of the books where Pooh is visiting Owl and has to listen to his lofty conversation. Pooh being a bear of little brain whom long words bother, has slipped into automatic mode and is responding to Owl’s monologue with a random selection of ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

I have refined this technique over years of trying to bluff my way through various countries using their languages by limiting my random, though encouraging responses to the affirmative. This usually encourages the speaker in foreign tongues to believe that I am fluent in that particular language. This is all well and good and ‘hands across the sea’ stuff, but it all falls into ashes and despair when the foreign conversationalist demands something more than a monosyllable as a response. Encouraging smiles, raised eyebrows and a general demeanour of hearty acquiescence, which is my equivalent to the required sentences has got me into all sorts of interesting scrapes in the past!

So the fact that the programme I was attempting to watch was a sports programme; that it centred its interest on football; that it was a discussion programme; that it was in Catalan all meant that this was something which on my Interest-ometer registered negative results. But the one thing which did prod my jaded resentment into some sort of apathetic notice was the music droning on in the background.

The programmes choice was a tuneless, meanderingly inconsequential piece of instantly forgettable jazz. Once again the music was too low to have character, but too loud to be ignored. Its effect was akin to the results you get when you wipe your glasses with a balm infused tissue. When you next look out onto the world your vision is impeded by a gauze-like veil which softens and smudges your view. The same is true with the music behind programmes.

I feel that I am as one with the immortal words of Mr Growser from Toytown (if that allusion has to be explained, and if you are not already humming the theme tune, then you should be grateful for your youth!) “It’s disgraceful! It ought not to be allowed!”

Alas, I allow that phrase to slip more and more easily to my lips nowadays.

Thank goodness!

Free and easy

There is a naked man on the beach.

In Spain this does not usually constitute news as there are many nude beaches along the coasts, but I was not aware that the beach in front of our flat had this designation. There are not many people on the beach today, though the sun is shining and the skies are clear blue. Is the lone man a dedicated naturist making a bare statement seeking to liberate the beach or is he a daftie who forgot his bathing costume and disports himself defiantly?

Who knows; who cares?

The continuing story of my medical treatment has now reached the stage, as I have previously mentioned, of getting my medication. Given my problems with the medical centre this is a major break though, though the problems do not stop there.

A simple duplication of my British medication is impossible because of “different protocols” so one tablet is now two; one brand name has given way to another; one dose has been doubled and one prescription seemed entirely different and didn’t have the active ingredient anywhere on the box or on the paper inside. After a few phone calls and one phone call back from the doctor I was advised to visit the surgery and make an appointment to see him. Thus, the first of my visits to the medical centre today. The second to see the doctor revealed that the medication I had been given was indeed the wrong one. Thus, back to the pharmacy where confusion reigned. I did get a replacement box, but the shop assistant actually tried to charge me for it! I refused to pay holding up the other box and muttering “incorecto!” like a sort of incantation to get my way. Eventually, after giving my telephone number, I was allowed to leave with my appropriate pills and later had an almost completely unintelligible telephone conversation with the lady in the pharmacy (I understood that much) which I have decided meant that she was accepting the cost of he wrong medication to compensate he for the price of the right one. Well, she has my telephone number and she can always make another attempt to get me to do something other than nothing! And anyway Toni might be home then.

I suppose that there is a law which states that how ever much time you appear to have available to complete a series of tasks they will all, inevitably, gravitate towards one particular time slot for their actual completion. So tomorrow, along with other less pressing requirements, now has Toni’s arrival in Barcelona airport together with the courier arriving at the flat with the precious Barça tickets while the rubbish needs to be taken to the bins.

A second law states that if to complete one task you leave the centre of operations then, inevitably, all the other tasks will require your immediate presence in the centre – In which you are not, if you see what I mean.

I look forward to a fraught fugitive time.