The parental twist

Some books have to be read twice.

And some books shouldn’t be read once.

Though it’s only after you’ve read them that you find out which one is true for you and for that particular book!

There are all sorts of reasons for reading books twice. With ‘The Big Sleep’ by Raymond Chandler it’s to find out what the hell has gone on during the novel. I took it as the only English language book on a holiday to France. At the end of the holiday I was brown and I knew who dun it. Though that information has slipped out of my memory now, so perhaps I’ll have to read it again!

‘Catch-22’ you re-read because it is darkly funny, and laugh out loud funny every time you read it. ‘Winnie the Pooh’ has to be re-read because who can take in philosophy of such complexity at a first reading? ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a drug and sometimes you just have to give in to a benign habit. The best short stories by Saki, O. Henry and Maugham always delight no matter how many times you read them.

All of the above are classics read and reread by millions but there are personal favourites too, odd things that may not be to the popular taste but give an individual pleasure which is sometimes difficult to explain unless you are talking to yourself: ‘Old Saint Paul’s’ by William Harrison Ainsworth; The Book of Jonah; ‘The Age of Austerity’ edited by Michael Sissons; The Lion Book of Religious Verse and The National Curriculum.

Apart from the fact that one of those is not necessarily one of my favourites, let us continue and think about ‘Great Expectations’. A book well worth re-reading for all sorts of reasons but one in particular. I think that Dickens does have a real perception of what it means to be a child. When I read the novel when I was very young I had no problem in imagining a person like Miss Haversham living a few streets away from me in Cathays in Cardiff; I was able to sympathize with Pip’s horrified realization that he really wasin peril when Magwich told him that he wouldn’t even be safe if he pulled the bed clothes over his head! Reading the novel as an adult gives an entirely different perception. I’m glad that I have both readings.

For some reason I felt drawn to re-read ‘Father and Son’ by Edmund Gosse (1907). My paper copy is still locked away in storage, but I did have an electronic copy on my e-book reader.

My memory of this book was of an autobiographical account of an impossible childhood in the second half of the nineteenth century where the parents were members of a narrow bigoted religious sect (The Plymouth Brethren) and the poor boy had a horrendous childhood deprived of normal experiences and instead was chained to a microscope producing intricate drawings for his ‘scientist’ father.

This reading was very different. There was same suffocating horror as one imagined oneself growing up in that household, but this time as I read through I sensed a real attempt on Edmund Gosse’s part to emphasise the genuine passionate concern by his parents’ for his development. It was also easier as an adult to pick up the irony with which Edmund Gosse wrote, so the two newish perceptions made this a much more satisfying read.

Gosse also emphasises what a strange boy he must have appeared to others and what a prig he was. His pride at being admitted to the adult section in his religious group at the age of only ten is described in a less than spiritual way and his poking out his tongue at the youngsters who had not made it was disarmingly honest.

When the final break comes with his father it is described at first in measured terms but Edmund cannot keep the rancour out of his final assessment when he describes his father’s lack of compromise in his expectations for his son’s complete acceptance of the tenets of the sect with which he was associated.

It is a touching working out of a difficult childhood in a way in which is interesting, cathartic and compelling.

If it’s true.

The power of this ‘autobiography’ is essentially contained in its adherence to the facts which comprise the upbringing that Edmund describes.

In a book which I haven’t read, ‘Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse’ by Ann Thwaite is published by Faber, Thwaite questions the factual baisis of ‘Father and Son’. She quotes Henry James (a friend of Edmund Gosse) who once said that Edmund had “a genius for inaccuracy." She also quotes TH Huxley who said, "autobiographies are essentially works of fiction, whatever biographies may be."

This is not merely extra interesting information, it strikes at the heart of the book. If this is not autobiography but literature in the same way that ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Sons and Lovers’ combine autobiographical elements with a constructed story then my attitude will change in some sort of subtle way.

I will still like the book. Who cannot be drawn to a description of a family reading of the bible where Edmund says, “In our lighter moods, we turned to the ‘Book of Revelation!’” Or when describing his father’s relentless praying: “It might be said that he stromed the citadels of God’s grace, refusing to be baffled, urging his intercessions without mercy upon a Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive to his prayers or wearied by them.” I also like Edmund’s description of refusing to try and evangelize his friends by saying that he “let sleeping dogmas lie.”

Edmund wrote this autobiography twenty years after his father had died, and he obviously structured what he had to say by artistic manipulation and with the advantage of considerable hindsight. But for me this remains one of those books which define a certain approach to a life which illustrates the dilemma of the generational divide made worse by extremism and a sort of emotional tyranny.

And worth a re-read, perhaps after I have read Thwaite’s book!

What is that?

A silhouette by nature is insubstantial.

This was borne in on me by the tragedy which struck this lunchtime. My silhouette™ glasses have broken. This time is isn’t merely the attachment to the lens it’s the arm of the glasses themselves. Snapped!

Now the cost of these glasses has been on a par with the price of women (being above rubies) and I had a not unreasonable expectation that the metal sides of these spectacles should have been unbreakable. Alas! For the naive belief that advertisements are true! And for the even more naïf belief that living in another country would be no drawback to cheap repair and replacement!

I am now back to the heavy, irritating glasses with lenses looking like jam pot bottoms.

There is of course an alternative.

I gave up the wearing of contact lenses some time ago and, apart from a few isolated occasions, and for no apparent reason, I have worn glasses constantly. I could go back to contacts but as I am now not only short sighted but also long sighted there are problems with the choice of lens.

The history of my attempts, ably abetted by optician, to get used to a whole range of contact lenses which might be able to cope with this optical problem is a never ending story of failure.

I have tried bi-focal contact lenses; graded strength contact lenses; different material of contact lenses; different strength contact lenses. All failures.

The eventual ‘solution’ was to have one eye corrected for close work and the other eye corrected for distance. “Your brain,” I was told by the optician, “will learn to compensate and choose the appropriate eye for the appropriate job.” Not true.

I also have a series of half frame glasses which are supposed to be able to be used with the contact lenses to allow me to . . .

Alternatively I can go to Sitges and get the things repaired in double quick time. Life, I am afraid, is just too short to try and find the requisite combination of on-ball lenses and nose-adjacent lenses.

And reading is always something which tests the most careful arrangement of glasses, distance, lenses etc. Whereas wearing nothing in front of the eye is still the best for reading that I have found. Or is that merely an argument for indolence?

Those with perfect eyesight will never know the sheer time wasting irritation of faulty eyesight. Losing glasses; cleaning glasses; adjusting glasses; losing glasses again; rain on glasses; growing out of glasses; changing glasses; not quite seeing properly; glasses steaming up. And all the expense!

And don’t get me started on contact lenses. Try saying, “tiny fragment of grit” to a confirmed contact lens wearer and watch the reaction. The eye is a wonderful thing and will go into ‘automatic’ when it encounters a sharp foreign body: it causes the eye lids to close and tears to be produced to wash away the irritation. This is fine. Unless you have a contact lens on your eye in which case the automatic closing of the eyelids merely ensures that the sharp foreign body (did I mention ‘sharp’?) stays exactly where it hurts most.

There are advantages in an out of focus world of course: as a metaphor for the state of the planet; softening wrinkles; creating exciting abstract designs from unprepossessing blocks of flats and making driving just that little bit more challenging!

My Christmas tree looks spectacular, each light with its halo, courtesy of myopia.

And that comment about driving was only a joke. Honestly!

Aren't books real life?

A day of complete indulgence!

I don’t really know if it is a commendation or a condemnation of my essential character that this ‘indulgence’ has entailed a compulsive reading of the book I managed to wrest from the clutches of the post office yesterday, ‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ a Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films by David Thomson.

The problem (or pleasure) in reading about films is that the whole experience of watching them comes back to the reader, especially if the critic doing the writing is capable of encapsulating an evocative element of the work in his description or offering a revelatory fact to develop the perception of the film. And David Thomson is always capable of that!

This book is best read in conjunction with Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film – which is just as stimulatingly personal and provocative as ‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ I cannot recommend both too highly. Buy them! Read them!

I have read about films that I haven’t thought about in years and been stimulated to make fresh protestations that I really will attempt to find a copy of others that I have been trying to watch for years!

I have managed to drag myself away from the book to make my Christmas tree a little less tasteful.

The Christmas and Yuletide story is hardly a study in restraint what with stars, kings, heavenly choruses and half the working population of the area turning up – and that’s before you think about the pagan associations! I therefore think that a Christmas tree decked out with restraint and a harmonious eye to design is somehow contrary to the spirit of the season!

There is also the problem that I do not think that I could actually produce a tree which could stand in a shop window without comment. Go with what you do best: stylistic chaos!

The decoration of our little resort is spectacularly unimpressive with only two or three municipal messages shining above a few chosen streets. Some of the hotels and blocks of flats have attempted their own lighting by using the cheap and cheerful alternative of light ropes.

These ropes of flashing lights used to be the preserve of the rich but now they are the cheap alternative to design thought. Their use is unimaginative and the light lines look like childish scrawl in the darkness, but there isn’t much else so it will have to do.

Perhaps the streets will sprout more satisfactory illumination in the next week, though I think that El Crisis is being used as an easy excuse for a lack of municipal extravagance.

Hard times ahead!

Eat and Read

Fresh from my success in the production of vaguely recognizable Welsh Cakes I have been searching for ways to make the finished articles more appealing.

My cakes were round rather than having the appropriate fluted appearance. I have therefore searched the shops in Castelldefels for the appropriate cutter. The most likely shops to contain these invaluable accoutrements are the Chinese Bazaars without which I am convinced that the entire life of Spain would cease. They have become the ‘corner shops’ which contain all those items that you search for with increasing frustration in the more conventional shops of the town.

In this case these emporia failed to deliver. The best I could do in something approaching an ironmonger’s shop was to find a selection of mini ‘fun’ cutters which were not what I had in mind.

This was not, however, the point of my wandering through town. I was making my reluctant way to the Post Office to collect a new book which had failed to be delivered yesterday – in spite of the fact that I was in during the normal delivery times for the post.

The Post Office was its usual heaving self and when I got my ticket I was some twenty or so numbers behind the one being served at the time. There is a particular sort of depression which is only found while waiting interminably in a queue for some supercilious functionary to give you a parcel that THEY have failed to deliver!

I will not dwell on the horrors that I had to suffer stuck in that bloody place for over half an hour, I will merely say that the person who FINALLY served me was delightful and human. I have no idea how she managed to get a job in the modern Spanish counter postal service.

The most important element in the waiting game which is the post office was that the result of my delay was my possession of a new book. This is ‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ a Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films by David Thomson (Masterpieces, Oddities and Guilty Pleasures with just a few disasters.) David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film which is an encyclopaedic, academic and deeply personal book and a stimulating pleasure to read.

‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ is an equal pleasure which actually encourages Thomson to “meet the question frequently asked of anyone with a reputation for knowing about films. It’s ‘What should I see?’ So ‘Have You Seen . . . ?’ is a response to that uncertainty.’

It is a celebration of film which reaches back to “1885 and ranging across the world – the landmarks are here, the problem films, a few guilty pleasures, a few forlorn sacred cows, some surprises.” Just to illustrate the range the first film discussed is from 1948 ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’ while the last is Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’ from 1970. The films are given a page each and are listed in alphabetical order so that a sequential reading produces some very odd neighbours: ‘Claire’s Knee’ is next to ‘Cleopatra’; ‘The Big Sleep’ next to ‘The Birds’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange’ next to ‘Close Encounters of the third Kind’. It is not so much the incongruity as the imaginative stimulus of thinking of these juxtapositions that gives pleasure!

The description of the first film I looked up, ‘The Bitter Tea of General Yen’, was enthusiastic and revealing: the information that Capra (director) was trying to re-ignite a failed relationship with Stanwyck (leading lady) during the making of the film gives a very different reading of some of the action seen in the finished product and Thomson’s positive evaluation matches my own.

Further reading revealed a range of personal responses which ranged from enthusiastic agreement to astonished rejection. There are many, many films of which I have never heard. This is obviously a book which is going to repay an extended relationship.

I look forward to following up some of Thomson’s commendations.

The only difficulty is finding a DVD store with the requisite range!

But hope springs eternal.

Music and electronics don't mix!

I have lost three composers.

The latest edition of the BBC Music Magazine arrived today in its silver plastic bag to ensure that I got my CD safely. I rarely listen to a music centre any more so the disc is whisked off to the computer to be fed into iTunes so that it can be downloaded onto my ipod(s).

It says something for my galloping gadget getting that I have three ipods with a combined capacity of 300GB. There is a very good reason for my having all three machines but it takes more than the description in a blog to convince; you need to be present to be bowled over by my informed enthusiasm in person!

The disc was duly fed into the computer and the BBC being the BBC had already downloaded the track details to the great librarian in hyperspace so all I had to do was click a button and the whole process was automatic.

The only problem came when I tried to find where the music was in my collection. The three composers’ names failed to bring the pieces to the screen. The titles of the pieces all failed too. I then noticed that the relevant information was being sorted on the name of the orchestra and the number of the disc. I could find the individual tracks by typing in their names, but who knows individual names of the tracks of ‘Pohádka’ (?) or even from the rather better known ‘Mother Goose Suite’ or ‘The Love for Three Oranges’? And when I raised one track I couldn’t get the whole album to appear!

I realise that I am not usual in having the whole of my CD collection of over a thousand discs on my ipod. And the way in which the albums are listed follows the learning curve which I went through in getting them on the drive. Some pieces of music are merely listed by track number; others are written (inexplicably) in Chinese; yet others are ascribed to the leading composer on a compilation irrespective of the range of composers found on the disc. Others are so oddly arranged that I sometimes just set the ipod to play ‘tunes’ and am constantly amazed by the eclectic wealth of music that emerges from the ear pieces as pop abruptly changes to plainsong; sonatas to sixties trash; Sibelius segues to the Sex Pistols and Glass stumbles into Greig. Outsiders observing me quietly sitting reading listening to my ipod must assume I am subject to mild fits as I jerk convulsively at some particularly wide jump in musical idiom as one ‘tune’ changes to another.

As far as I can tell the music I have just loaded has gone into that musical limbo which must feature on most ipods which are not loaded with pre packaged electronic pop where the ipod’s inadequate labelling of tracks fails miserably to cope with the multi headings of the classical. To say nothing of the various spellings of Cyrillic names like Tchaikovsky!

I am sure that there are people out there who can text at the speed at which I can type who pity my lack of sophistication in the way that I approach my ipod. Those people who never have to read a handbook no matter how complex the electronic machinery they are called on to work, assume that the machine will do what they want it to as long as they ask in the right way. I, alas, cannot understand the grammar needed to arrange the language which might lead me to a question, let alone browbeat a machine by a multiplicity of key strikes.

But I do still have the disc. And I know that I have an old fashioned machine - like an ordinary computer - that will play it. I will not be defeated by the electronic black hole into which so much computerised information falls and which constitutes the majority of the memory space on most peoples’ computers.

Free the BBC 3!

I’m working on it.

Some of my work was appreciated this morning during the last Spanish lesson of the term. In a (generally) vain effort to get us to talk in Spanish the desks in this conventional class room have been arranged in a ‘U’ format so that we can see each other clearly. As I usually, well, invariably sit at one end of the ‘U’ I am subject to being taken first in any of the innovations of a linguistic nature that the teacher decides to inflict.

Today was the Day of the Welsh Cakes.

We were all supposed to bring in something to eat which was characteristic of the way in which we celebrate Christmas. The Welsh Cakes prompted the teacher to start with me and cross question me (in Spanish) about the way in which we approach the festive time. This turned out to be more of a cross examination and to be far more extended than my vocabulary can stand. When I was asked to describe how to make the Welsh Cakes themselves and having to describe ‘bake stone’ I went, like Pooh Bear, “delicately to pieces!”

I was reminded of Clarrie who during the exchange visit between a German opera company and WNO who when taking a group around the buildings in the open air museum at St Fagans in Cardiff was asked what a circular, open sided, thatched structure was. Clarrie’s German translation was, “This is a circus of the male of the hen.” This was her take on ‘cockpit!’ My attempts to get the message across were certainly on a par with hers!

The important thing however was that the Welsh Cakes were well received. Other students brought in things which were also almost entirely composed of calories and more calories so that by the end of the lesson we were all suffering from various forms of sugar rush. It was probably just as well that we were not able to drink coffee as well as the double boost would probably have encouraged some of us to start teaching Spanish ourselves!

Luckily our little feat finished before anyone has over stepped the mark of linguistic limitations!

But it’s only a matter of time.

Party food!

A casual reading (or should I say ‘reading’) of a Catalan cook book has borne strange fruit today.

Reading a cookery book in English is akin to bluffing you way through a foreign language; not only for the number of terms in French with which our cookery is littered, but also for the unwritten assumptions of knowledge that link the steps from one point in a recipe to another.

Many times in a recipe I have stumbled against a hidden assumption that makes achieving the next step impossible – though guess work has sometimes produced interesting concoctions. And edible too!

The problems with cook books are exacerbated when the language is generally incomprehensible: even linking my little French and less Spanish doesn’t prepare one for the vocabulary of meat and veg. that is necessary for understanding even fairly simple lists of ingredients.

However, I stumbled my way through convincing myself that I had understood enough to evaluate the recipes and discard them. I had bought a tray of mushrooms earlier in the day and I was looking for a way to cook them with chicken.

Eventually I decided on a lemon marinade and using the mushrooms in a sort of paella base for the meat. Except, as I soon discovered, all the lemons had been thrown out as looking “not right” so the marinade was adjusted accordingly. In case anyone is wondering, that simply means that the marinade was made exactly as per recipe except for the lemons.

Lunch was a little late but the end result was more than palatable.

Of course this cooking was merely displacement activity for my proposed second attempt at Festive Welsh Cakes. I was hoping that success at the savoury would prompt activity in the sweet area.

I now deviated from the Carys recipe and amalgamated knowledge from other sites. The relative proportions of ingredients were subtly altered, new ones were added and I was ready for the off.

This time I kept the mixed flour and butter as ‘breadcrumbs’ and mixed full cane sugar with fruit and nuts. The resultant mixture when I added the egg looked and felt different and it reminded me immediately of the cakes of my mother and the treat of being allowed to scrape the bowl to get the last remaining remains of the mixture – which I loved!

The heat this time was reduced from ‘burning fiery furnace’ to merely ‘too hot to touch’. The resultant smell also reminded me compellingly of my mother’s kitchen and was welcome rather than yesterday’s acrid pungency and an open window.

The cooking process was leisurely, but I did manage to obtain the ‘caramel’ colour which is the sign of success rather than the . . . well, you can guess.

Tomorrow in my Spanish lesson they will be revealed as the typical cake without which no Welsh home could possibly celebrate the festive season! May I be forgiven!

Talking of food: I also have to eat humble pie. A couple of days ago I made a slighting and cynical reference to Barack Obama’s first volume of memoirs called ‘Dreams from my father.’ I now formally retract the main thrust of my cynicism and admit that the book is compelling.

What I was expecting was some sort of pompous pseudo religious screed linking hardship to fated progress and mealy mouthed platitudinous bunkum. Well, it wasn’t.

Obama’s style is intensely readable and he fashions his life into a satisfying narrative. He structures his experiences with all the urgency of a novel and uses the spaciousness of his prose to produce passages of descriptive beauty.

This is not a memoir of complacency based on rock sure faith; it is more a questioning of identity and a deeply uneasy relationship with religion.

Obama’s background is culturally diverse and he makes the most of the opportunities and frustrations that come with his family history. He is (as far as one can tell) open and disconcertingly frank about difficulties and tensions in his developing life, but he is always capable of making his discoveries something which has significance for all his readers.

At one point when his mother is relating the story of her first meeting with Obama’s father she laughs and Obama writes, “In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up – their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances.” A fine description of some sort of rite of passage that we surely all go through, though possibly not articulated quite as well!

Yes, this memoir is self indulgent and written by a young man. He sometimes strives just a little too hard to pin down the significance of some incidents and his via dolorosa is sometimes a little too wordy and fluent. But this is a fine book which presents a journey of discovery which I was delighted to follow.

From the evidence of this book we are going to have an intelligent, literate and questioning man in the White House. That can only be good.

Can’t it?

Welsh cakes are now a very real threat.

The day after tomorrow is the last lesson of my Spanish classes for this term. In a moment of cruel madness the teacher asked (to general self conscious silence) what we wanted to do on the last day. ¡Fiesta! (that dreaded word!) was brought up by one of the Russians and then elaborated into reality by the offer of real Russian turrón and accepted by an ever grateful teacher.

With painful memories of the primary school ‘Culture Week’ ever ready to inform my gloomy response it has been decided that each of us will bring to the next class something approaching a tasty seasonal comestible with a specific national flavour.

Put on the spot I had no real idea of anything specifically edible that was particularly associated with Wales and Christmas: at least nothing that I was prepared to make for the day after tomorrow!

Welsh cakes seemed like a feasible idea to me. I am prepared to bet that your typical Moroccan, Russian, Indian, Portuguese, Pakistani, French, Algerian and Italian (to give you some idea of the diversity in my class) will not know the seasonal appropriateness of Welsh cakes and will accept them with alacrity. I will also (to the fury of my Welsh speaking friends) throw in a few seasonal phrases in Welsh – they won’t know what has hit them.

There is but one problem.

I have never made a Welsh cake in my life. Eaten them, yes – but actually got my hands doughy, never.

As my recipe books mostly found themselves going to Oxfam I have had to rely on the internet for my guidance. I am going to have to use a frying pan as I have no bake stone, and even if I had I’m not sure that it would be appropriate athwart the radiant rings on an electric cooker anyway!

I am going to put my faith in something which purports to be a favourite recipe for Welsh cakes by Cerys Matthews. She adds a pinch of all spice and more of a mixture of dried fruit in her version. I have decided that the festive element of my Welsh cakes is going to be a fruit and nut mixture as purchased at great expense from Lidl. I might make a batch of the absolutely ordinary ones as well just to be on the safe side!

The ingredients are fairly basic which meant that I had none of them in the house.

Self raising flour is rare in this part of the world and I don’t know the word or words for it in Spanish. I had no raisins, sultanas, butter or caster sugar. I did have an egg! So I went shopping.

I did mean to get a cut out thingie and a rolling pin, but I forgot. Then I thought that it was not really important. A glass will cut out the cakes and a wine bottle can be used as a roller. I had bought three different types of sugar as not one of them looked like caster sugar. My logic is when you don’t have what you should have then a mixture of what you actually do have might do the job. I was, you might say, prepared.

So just setting out the scales and I would be away.

If I had scales. If I knew where they could be.

At least while looking for the scales I did find the plastic box that would do nicely to put the finished Welsh cakes in.

The scales were eventually found under the sink and cleaned up to look as though they might belong in a kitchen. They were cutting edge technology and I am sure that they would have been more than adequate to their task if the battery had been functional.

It was at that point that I decided to give my strenuous virtual cooking a rest, regroup and consider my options. The lack of battery is an almost insuperable barrier to my culinary expectations. Unless, of course, I find another one.

Which I didn’t.

I’m Back From The Shops Part II – and now it’s serious.

I have bought a rolling pin. I also bought (at the same time) another figure for my Belen and a bicycle pump. Go figure!

I have mixed and kneaded and added and, apart from having too many raisins the mixture looks fine to me. According to Carys I should now leave the mixture in the fridge for half an hour then the Great Experiment with the frying pan. There doesn’t look to be very much mixture and I will have to feed up to about 15 students. I will need to get started on the second batch – though I might be persuaded to leave this feat until tomorrow.

I am trying to remember the last time that I used a rolling pin but I think that it was some time in the last millennium! Just after meat rationing had been withdrawn! Dear God!

Well, after eating one of my creations I can claim a modified success. They look OK, but I think that I cooked them a little too quickly. One lives and learns. I will produce the Christmas Special Welsh Cakes with a slightly different approach. I think.

I wonder if they will mature by Thursday.

Perhaps taking some jam might be a good idea. Some of those little individual ones in Lidl. The speed of the hand deceives the eye!

It’s all planned.

I hope the Russian turrón will take away the taste!

Christmas? Now?

In an unprecedented display of preparedness I have officially opened the Festive Season.

Having an enforced storage area in Bluespace means that I have the luxury of making a trip to somewhere other than the perilous heights of the attic to get all the carefully stored Christmas decorations. My storage space is in the middle of a purpose built depository in the middle of an Industrial Estate which was complete deserted today as it was a Bank Holiday. Deserted that is except for a lone slow cyclist who made me pause frustratingly just at the entrance to Bluespace.

As far as I could tell I was the only person in the place as I walked towards my little storage room. It is easy to get delusions of grandeur as you walk along the yellow door studded corridors as each corridor lights up before you as you enter it. One almost feels like giving a grandiloquent wave of the arms and saying ‘Fiat lux!’ as a new corner is turned – though you never know who might be coming round the corner as the same time as you, so silence is probably the best policy!

As I once had an allergic reaction to what was probably a dipped real Christmas tree, I have used the experience to justify having an artificial tree – though I have discovered that I also have an allergic reaction while trying to arrange the branches into something vaguely resembling a concept of the natural. I have, it must be admitted, been told that this is not an allergic reaction but merely lack of patience. Well, at least you don’t come out in an unsightly rash.

Setting up the Christmas tree was deceptively simple so I was prepared for the mare’s nest of interlocking (I use the word advisedly) wires of the various sets of lights that I have acquired.

As I had plenty of time and no distractions I determined to be reasonable and logical when it came to untwisting, unscrambling and disengaging the glittering mass which looked like a Disney cartoon version of the Sargasso Sea.

When that didn’t work I decided to limit my task by a system of elimination. I stopped trying to bring order to the self convoluting horror of the sets and settled only to disentangle those sets which were fully working. A single dark bulb and the whole set was discarded. When I say ‘discarded’ I do not of course mean that I threw it away. Oh no, that would be wasteful and make me merely part of the throw-away culture. So, the discarded sets were carefully left in their tangled state, put in a plastic bag and replaced in the ‘lights’ box. Where they will probably stay for the next twenty years; carefully tested every year to see if there is any change just as if light bulbs have a certain regenerative quality!

There is one great difference between lights from my youth and lights nowadays. The first set of ‘fairy’ lights we had as a family (or at least that I can remember) was a string of twelve multicoloured lights of a vaguely pear drop shape and they were linked in a circle. This meant that ‘one light out: all lights out’ so that you had to have a double faith when trying to find the blown bulb.

Sometimes it was just that one or more of the bulbs had unscrewed a little from their holders, so when darkness settled upon the tree the first line of attack was to tighten and trust to luck. That almost never worked, but like a British Men’s Champion at Wimbledon was always a fond hope.

The more common approach to restoring gaudy illumination is where faith came into the equation. You first needed to believe that you had one bulb which you ‘knew’ was OK. Using this working glass grail you had to go round the whole ring of lights replacing each in turn to find the dead one.

The second element of faith was believing that god would not be so cruel as to allow two bulbs to blow simultaneously.

One year tightening and replacing did not achieve the required result. The idea of replacing the lights did not even enter our heads: the lights were made by Pifco for goodness sake, with a picture of a threatening fairy of mature years on the box cover – they were the stuff of heirlooms and had to be made to work.

The answer lay in an old battery: one of those that I never see nowadays – a large thing with two (or was it one) flat flange of yellow metal poking out of the top. By placing the end of the bulb on one pit of metal and touching the flange on the screw part of the bulb it could be encouraged to emit a timid flickering gleam.

The bulbs were tested and the two (god can be cruel!) faulty bulbs were discarded with a certain amount of reluctance as these were two of the original bulbs whose colour was peeling off the glass and gave what we considered an interestingly sparkly effect to the lighting.

We then discovered that we did not have two replacements, and the corner shop (Mr Wilkins’) did not have any either.

An unlit tree is one thing; but a tree that cannot be lit is an abomination in the sight of the lord. I think that my little face must have spoken volumes as my dad disappeared in the Bonomini (don’t ask!) and returned with bulbs enough to light up the face of a doubting boy as well as the tree itself.

Having got the lights to work the next problem was always draping them around the tree, the circular construction of the set forcing you to lasso the tree to get the lights around it. This sometimes necessitated a flick of the wrist which, on one occasion, caused one bulb to hit the wall and explode.

The sets of lights I have are all modern. They are in a string. A string has an end so disentangling them has two fruitful approaches: the plug end and the ‘end’ end. This way means that when one approach becomes impossible you can retreat to the other end and work you way forwards and that end’s disentanglement usually means that when you start on the other end you . . . well, you get the idea. Keeps me sane anyway!

The other great difference is that new sets of lights have irreplaceable bulbs; not in terms of expense, it is merely that they are impossible to replace. They are therefore fully in step with the onward mark of consumerism: if one light doesn’t work then throw them all away.

I spurn such a shallow and dismissive approach and assure all shining lights on my tree that when their brilliance finally dims there is a black plastic bag in the light box waiting to receive them.

How green is that! (Rhetorical)

Seek and ye shall find!

Weekends are not normal.

In Great Britain we accept this with an easy nonchalance and look askance at those (foreigners) who believe that weekend shops should exist for customers rather than the true British way where they exist for . . . well, I’m not actually sure who they exist for in the Nation of Shopkeepers, but customers seem to come a very poor third or fourth, at best!

Shops (virtually all shops, not just the supermarkets) open until what we Brits regard as a ridiculously late hour in the evening. It means that I can get a fresh loaf of bread from our local bakery until 8.30 to 9.00 pm. As far as I am aware we have no 24 hour supermarkets and the large Carrefour hypermarket is closed on a Sunday, though the smaller one near us is open. Though not for the same hours as a weekday.

The vagaries of shop opening times was brought home to me again because I was trailing memories of the old country when I went to get some stamps and post two packages back to Britain. I have adjusted to the reality that stamps are available from the Tabac (the tobacconist) I no longer question this but merely regard it as a by product of totalitarianism. France has the same idiosyncrasy – in their case as a result of the later actions of the little Corsican.

Having consumed my home made lunch I made my way to the Tabac. This was closed. At five passed four in the afternoon. I mentally cursed myself and realised that I should have only ventured to get my stamps at five o’clock. The sign on the Tabac told me that the shop would be open at 4.30 pm to 8.00 pm. I returned home, but, foolishly I had not read the whole of the complicated arrangements for opening. On my return at 6.00 pm the shop was still closed. I then noticed the individual details for a Saturday. Rather like a pharmacy it told me that the shop I was outside would never open on a Saturday, but that another shop much further down the road would.

With a certain bloody mindedness I returned home and got the car and was henceforth a Man on a Mission. When Castelldefels began to peter out into solid rock I felt that I had probably overshot the shop. Turning around was not such an easy thing as you might imagine because Catalonia has the world’s highest concentration of ‘no right turn’ and ‘no left turn’ signs in the world.

There are far too many people and absolutely too many cars in each of the urbanisations that are sprinkled along the coast in Catalonia. The roads are usually too narrow to have parked cars on them (which of course does not mean that there are not parked cars there) and driving becomes, you might say, “challenging.”

As a way of making the four wheeled lunacy which passes for driving in this part of the world a little more tolerable, the local council has decided on a ‘traffic system’.

Once you are on this ‘traffic system’ you sometimes feel that the only explanation for the way that you are forced to drive through it is that the town traffic planner has used his ‘Big Fun Book of Mazes’ that he was given as a present by a parent hoping to keep him quiet for a few minutes as a guide to how to lay out the roads.

Often you can see where you want to go but it appears that all available approaches of an obvious nature are closed to you. So, leaving your destination behind you start searching for a more distant way of getting there. As you drive aimlessly, eventually turning randomly in the hope of serendipity getting you there, you sense the car following the pencilled route of a child, tongue firmly pressed into cheek, pencil grasped in fist as the indentation of the pencil point lurches from side to side looking for the elusive way through to the centre of the maze.

I had the sea on my left, the road was too narrow to do a U turn and all the turns to the right were forbidden. So I went to Sitges.

The coast road from Castelldefels to Sitges has the great advantage of being free, avoiding as it does the exorbitant charge of the way through the tunnels. The disadvantage is that it is composed of an inordinate number of hair-raising hair-pin bends with a sheer drop to the sea to swallow up any mistakes.

And it was dark. And I was followed by drivers who had obviously done this run since they were in kindergarten and were well able to take blind curves at 60 kph.

Well, they couldn’t because I was in front and I was doing more than the limit for the road as it was. To support me in my tackling of these automobile manoeuvres in the dark the car behind very kindly came within a few centimetres of the back of my car so that his full headlight could illuminate my way more fully. Wasn’t that kind!

I also needed diesel and I had convinced myself that the garage at the end of the coast road would allow me to kill two birds with one stone; though by the time that I arrived there I was thinking of using the stone for something else entirely.

I didn’t need to say a single word at the garage: the cashier spoke to me in English before I said anything. I replied staunchly in Spanish though she didn’t look convinced.

The Tabac in Sitges was indeed open but it didn’t have scales to weigh the packets so we guessed the amount necessary. I therefore apologise in advance if the recipients get the envelope over stamped with an amount to pay. In mitigation I have to tell them that there are philatelists who collect things like that – so they might be paying for something which will actually increase in value.

Sometimes I don’t even convince myself!

Two faced wind!

Our Lady of Ghisallo or the Madonna of Ghisallo is, as you probably know, the Patron Saint of Cycling.

I merely wondered what she was doing when I set off on my customary cycle to Gava. I know that being by the sea can cause all sorts of interesting climate anomalies but how is it that I had the wind in my face both going to Gava and coming back? Diametrically opposed directions yet the same unforgiving breeze acting as a brake.

Perhaps you are supposed to sacrifice to the Madonna of Ghisallo before you assemble the bike. If so, what? Light grade lubricating oil sprinkled on the sand? A heartfelt prayer for level ways and dead calm?

I am, it has to be said, an unenthusiastic cyclist. I like the idea of a folding bicycle (it is, after all, a gadget) rather than its reality. And the saddle is so uncomfortable. According to Hadyn this is a mere cavil and objections will diminish with application. “You will have to cycle on with gritted teeth,” to which the obvious reply is that I do not sit on my mouth!

And it was cold. The wind off the sea was capable of slicing through thin clothing, though the sight of complete lunatics indulging in para surfing (or whatever it’s called when wind surfing with a kite) made me feel more centred and more part of the human race – even perched on a bike with tiny wheels!

I have just finished reading Bill Bryson’s newish book ‘Shakespeare’ published by Harper Perennial ISBN 13 978 0 00 719790 3 as his contribution to the Eminent Lives series.

It’s a short book at only 200 pages and the read is enlivened at all times by the sense of humour which illuminates all of Bryson’s writing. He makes no great claims for the work being a work of scholarship but rather as an informed overview enhanced by his own perception and literary style.

The book reads like the novelization of a popular TV documentary with Bryson including the script of some of his interviews in the course of writing the book. If this book is worth reading (and it is) it is because one constantly hears the voice of a sceptical friend leading you effortlessly through the available information that we use to follow Shakespeare’s life.

Most of the time Bryson stresses just how little we actually know and how much has been assumed, guessed and fabricated to make the story we think we know. Bryson (of course) finds the right sort of comparison to illuminate our perception of the life by suggesting that Shakespeare is “a kind of literary equivalent of an electron – forever there and not there.”

My favourite part of this book comes towards the end when Bryson is talking about the intellectual background that Shakespeare had. “Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from ‘Cymbeline’, ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/ As chimney sweepers, come to dust,’ which takes on an additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper.”

Nuggets like that are worth the price of the book – especially as I bought the book by using up the final book tokens that had been given to me by Ingrid a couple of years ago. I’m not quite sure how, but that makes it all so much more valued!

The second book which I squandered book tokens on was ‘An Utterly Impartial History of Britain’ subtitled ‘or 2000 years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge’ by John O’Farrell ISBN 978 0 552 77396 6 published by Black Swan.

This is a hefty tome of a book which is done no service by the rather weak jokes on the back and the rather juvenile cover on the front.

It is in fact a history book. Real history: you can tell because it has got an index. You can also tell it’s serious because it incorporates more than the ‘two real dates’ which Sellar and Yeatman included in their classic comic history ‘1066 And All That.’

For me the best way to describe this book is that it is written as if your history teacher actually cared about history and really wanted you to enjoy the subject. The comic tone is extended throughout (though he does get a bit po-faced and serious at the end) and I did not find it grating or irritating. Indeed I laughed out loud at various points throughout this fairly long journey.

The book reads like a novel and has the same pace and interest. He manages to give a sort of narrative coherence to the events in British history without the patronising inclusiveness of something like a Disney wildlife film.

It also has to be said that there is also the element of self congratulation which powers this book; like ‘1066 And All That’ it does assume a fairly large knowledge of history for real enjoyment as many of his comments would be lost without the shared knowledge of more historical background than is in the book. And how is that a bad thing?

I recommend this book without reservation; a thoroughly enjoyable, informative and above all funny read!

And now, by way of penance I have ‘Dreams from my father’ by Barack Obama to read. The front cover of this has a photo of him with arms folded, shirt open against a background of layered clouds of threatening grey frowning slightly as if his daughter had just come home and introduced one of the more unregenerate members of the dreadful Palin clan as her new boyfriend. The lighting effects on his face actually suggest that he is looking at a sun rise or sun set: perhaps he was trying to do a updated Canute act and become a modern day Joshua trying to stop the sun. And perhaps I should just read the book rather than trying to prevaricate.

Ho hum! Here we go!

Although anything described as ‘Thoughtful, moving and brilliantly written’ (The Times) by anyone unscrupulous enough to have got himself elected President of the United States must be twisted in an extraordinarily depressing way.

Enough already! Read!

Why wait?

So much for restraint!

I think that it is because I have not yet put up the Christmas tree that I have felt totally justified in opening anything that I have been given for the festive season. And I have.

The opening of Christmas presents is an activity whose every gesture has a meaning. And one for me which has changed over time.

I take every opportunity to praise and recommend the book, “Age of Austerity” by Philip French, Michael Sissons which takes as its subject matter the history of post war Britain from 1945 to 1954. The end year is not an arbitrary one as it was only in 1954 that meat rationing ended in Britain! Therefore my early years were lived in a period in which shortages were more normal than plenty. It is also obvious that 1954 did not mean that the country was suddenly flowing with milk and honey!

Presents in my youth were not as lavish in content or number as they are today, though I would not like to give an impression that I had a deprived childhood: I was trained early in Delayed Gratification which meant that if I asked for something I did not get it at once, but it often appeared at a later date when I could “appreciate it more!”

It was still possible for parents to give their offspring presents which were second hand in my early years and I felt nothing but amazed delight at the (bulky) tape recorder that I had one Christmas. It might have been (in that irritating weasel phrase) ‘pre owned’ but it was accepted with grateful alacrity and cherished for years afterwards.

Wrapping paper was always seen as an extravagance and, according to the information in one of the cottages in St Fagan’s Welsh Folk Museum, wrapping presents was only common after the 1920s otherwise presents were left unwrapped under the Christmas tree.

Wrapping paper I was told should always be unwrapped carefully so that it could be reused. I always attempted to do this as a child; but it is a form of mental cruelty to extend the principle of Delayed Gratification to the painstaking unwrapping of the present itself, forcing the child into an attitude of unnatural care when it all it wants to do is rip, rend and tear! And the sellotape always made un-ripped wrapping impossible for me!

Packaging was always something of a problem for me. If something was presented in a fitted box then removing and using the object which was the present was always a slightly irresponsible action for me.

There was also the “that will keep nicely” approach. This was yet another variation on the theme of Delayed Gratification which also utilized the “don’t use it all at once” method. This is best explained by example: Reeves coloured pencils.

One birthday I was given a blue cardboard flip top box of 24 coloured pencils made by Messrs Reeves. When you flipped the top there, in all their sharp pointedness in a dizzying array of colours were the pencils. I can still re-texture my delight (I always had a weakness bordering on penchant for stationery in all its forms) of that first sight.

It was quite permissible to take the pencils out of their box and read their exotic names printed in gold on the side of each pencil. What was not permissible or possible was to use them. To use them would be to blunt them. To sharpen one of them would diminish its size and therefore the regimented array of pristine points would be lost. What could I possible hope to draw or colour which could justify the destruction of newness and happy possibility?

The result was that they were kept for gloating rather than use and their particular penciloid function was lost in neurotic hoarding.

The same thing occurred with little notebooks or the section headed ‘Notes’ in a book. How could one write in these places when one didn’t know if something in the future would outrank what one was about to write in the present. Better by far to “keep it nicely.” The result was, of course, that I gradually accumulated various items whose use (when questioned about it by generous relatives) had to be elided into the nicely ambiguous phrase, “I liked it very much,” which implied use without stating it directly.

It has taken me half a century to open things at once and start using them. It has taken me even longer to dispose of boxes (even if they are plush and “something can be made of them”) so that there is no hiding place in its original home for any gift.

Which is why I am typing this while listening to Radio 4 on wireless headphones from a machine in the kitchen

while smelling faintly of Cerruti 1881‘Black’ for men.


Thank you Ceri and Dianne and Paul and Paul!

And Merry Christmas!

It passes the time!

Back in Catalonia I can hardly believe that only five days have gone by since I was last here!

The party on Friday evening in Rumney brought together some of my closest friends, some of whom I had not seen for some time. It is amazing how quickly one slips back into remembered relationships with the familiar quips and coded language; the re-establishment of personal frontiers and their dissolution; the easy juxtaposition of face and voice all combining to provide a truly comfortable environment.

That last paragraph should have ended with some sort of easy throwaway line like, “And the drink helped too!” But that was not the case on that particular night, because as sure as Saturday followed Friday, I had to be in Gloucestershire the next day for Aunt Bet’s 90th birthday lunch.

So it was with a disturbingly clear eyed vision (that I alone possessed in the household in which I was staying) with which I contemplated the journey into deepest darkest England.

Armed only with a borrowed Tom-Tom and fortified by the slurred felicitations from the hollowed eyed denizens I was leaving for the day I set out on the A48.

Time shifted unsettlingly quickly and I began to wonder if I would make the start of the festivities for the 12.30 start. The majority of the journey was via motorway cutting through misty countryside. As soon as I left the safety of the M5 (!) I found myself following a convoluted route though almost ludicrously picturesque calendar photograph material which was the “Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness™” memory storage of many English ex-pats.

I, however, was Welsh and so such things passed me by because of my inbuilt cultural inability to appreciate The Other when trying to get to a strange location with time running out.

The Tom-Tom got me to the village in which the lunch was being held and a couple of friendly natives encouraged me to take the final leg to the Country Hotel itself.

The Grand Gathering of the Clans brought together disparate members of the family who had not seen each other for some time. The setting was gracious and the view would have been magnificent if the mist had dissipated itself but it didn’t and so we had to make to with conviviality and conversation! The ‘catching up’ was only interrupted by a speech by me and a gracious response by my aunt who appended to her thanks the gratuitous statement that “she deserved it!” How true.

Although the raison d’etre for the gathering was the birthday of my Aunt it also gave me an opportunity to collect my bling.

My mother’s engagement rings (don’t ask about the plurality of that piece of jewellery; the memory is too painful!) had been taken by my resourceful and talented cousin and fabricated into a fabulous pair of cuff links. On a small tablet of gold each differently sized diamond is set off-centre to create an elegant and stunning piece of jewellery. I can wear them with impunity of course, because no one is going to believe that they are real. But, as I explained to one of my friends, as long as I know that they are real – that is enough! And one can only pity those so beggared in their experience that they cannot tell precious stones from bits of glass!

The journey back to Cardiff after the birthday was notable for my inability fully to demist the windscreen; the complete lack of lighting on convoluted, narrow country roads – and the ‘considerate’ driving of the Barbour coated, green welly wearing wallys that roared up to within inches of the back of my car and then hurled themselves and their vehicles into total darkness and blind corners to overtake me. I speculate about the sartorial details of the drivers as it was pitch black, but I’m prepared to bet!

I have never been so glad to see a motorway!

I’m not sure where the world was going on a Saturday night but most of it seemed to be concentrated on the motorways which took me back to Cardiff.

I am reminded of the battle of wits that characterized the verbal conflicts between the painter Whistler and the writer Wilde. I always thought that their meetings were the living equivalent of two of the more arrogant masters of the epigram to be found in the pages of ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray.’ It was the sad loss of a respectfully held illusion to find out that often Whistler and Wilde resorted to good, old fashioned abuse rather than the intellectual restraint of repartee.

Our small dinner party on that Saturday night liked to think of itself as scintillating with the clash of highly honed rapier comment but the Neanderthal club was also much in evidence. The meal, cooked by Paul Squared was exceptional with delicate soup and meat falling from the bone, but when I also tell you that four glasses were broken in the course of that evening (and not from impromptu coloratura opera arias) that the true state of festivities can be gauged! A very pleasant time was had by all!

Sunday saw (some of) us venture forth to Saint Fagan’s and the Welsh Folk Museum. Having moved away from Cardiff I realise more clearly now that Saint Fagan’s is a remarkable cultural resource. The range of reconstructed buildings and the setting in which they are shown to advantage is extraordinary.

Our specific visit was to see the completed church was had been transported stone by stone to Cardiff from West Wales. The church as been restored to its full early Roman Catholic glory complete with painted rood screen and medieval wall paintings. Although the building is open for visitors it is still in the course of completion and another group of painters is scheduled to come back to the church to continue painting the walls with the ‘visual books’ which were an essential part of the instruction of the people in times past.

As is always the case with Saint Fagans there is work in progress which means that a return visit is essential!

As a special treat on our return we had an Indian take-away which emphasised that I make do with second best in the small restaurant near the Liceu in Barcelona!

As a further even more special treat I was invited to experience the true uplifting wonder that is ‘Mama Mia!’

It was fairly obvious after the opening minutes (by which time I was horizontal with horror and biting the cushion) that my friends were more interested in enjoying my reactions than looking forward to the joy of watching the ‘film’ again.

Leaving aside the spectacularly awful singing and a script which makes ‘Titanic’ appear as though it were written by Wittgenstein; it’s the filmic direction which is most glaringly obvious by its omission. There are so many lost opportunities in this film which should have given some sort of evidence that the director had at least glanced at any great musicals from the past. But no we were presented with inept build up to song and disappointment. Awful!

Monday was visiting all the shops that I miss living in Spain. Matalan (which has a mythic reputation in Terrassa) provided a book, ‘The Funniest Thing You Never Said’ edited by Rosemarie Jarski. Ebury Press, ISBN 978 0 091 8966 6. This is the sort of volume that, having read a few pages you make a resolution that you are going to use some of the more amusing quotations in your next conversation in an apt and sophisticated way. And you don’t. It has all the dangerous addictive qualities of the Guinness Book of Records (which is in 3D this year!) as the quotations are grouped in sections and you can kid yourself that reading a section is like reading a chapter!

I am not sure about the accuracy. The famous Mel Brooks quotation about the difference between comedy and tragedy is destroyed by using the wrong personal pronoun. The correct version is, “Tragedy is when I have a hangnail. Comedy is when you accidentally walk into an open sewer and die.” Change the ‘you’ to an ‘I’ as this book quotes it and the essential element of black comedy is lost. But a book well worth buying all the same and chuckling your way through.

Mac Arthur and Glen as my Catalan friend calls the retail outlet just outside Bridgend produced not only a few excellent bargains but also the unexpected sight of a past pupil (and now real concert going human being) whose first words to me were, “You shouldn’t be here!” And I thought that we were all members of a united Europe!

Returning to Cardiff in my woefully underpowered black Matiz Chevrolet I called in to visit my aunt Micky and my cousin Louise and had a cup of tea with conversation augmented by a purely gratuitous piece of cream cake!

My next visit was to my Uncle Frank who had been tardy in replying to my telephone calls from Spain. There were lights on in the living room when I pulled into the pavement but a strange face greeted my ring of the doorbell.

The news that he had gone into a residential home was not surprising as he had been getting steadily frailer but at least I had a phone number to call for more information.

The information that I got was not what I wanted to hear: he had died on Saturday when I was telling my Aunt Bet in her birthday party that I was going to call on him and check up on him. If one can use the word serendipitous for such a sad event then I learned that his daughter and son in law were going to be in Cardiff the next day and that I could give them a hand in clearing out the room which Uncle Frank had occupied in the residential home.

I only had time for a quick shower before I headed out for dinner with Ceri and Dianne. Here too time has brought two more creatures into the realm of the fully human as their two children can no longer be usefully designated by such an ageist term!

We had a beautiful meal of chowder, lamb and lemon tart (though on separate plates) accompanied by a progressively freer reminiscence of past unintentionally hilarious trips and holidays with the ‘kids’ taking notes for future blackmailing opportunities!

As I was ferried to and from this dinner I was able to indulge my penchant for red wine. I eventually left with a feeling of well being and a large Christmas present gaudily wrapped with golden cord. What larks!

I returned to a dark house as my hosts had retired for the night.

The next morning I was able to meet up with Margaret and help with the somewhat depressing clearing of personal possessions from the room in the home. The room and the general appearance of the home itself were luxurious and it was far nearer in appearance and ‘feel’ to an hotel than to a typical home for the elderly. Margaret had phoned me when her father died, but had no reply from my number as I was in Cardiff at the time!

As the room emptied with our discovery that cars can take an extraordinary number of miscellaneous possessions when they are fitting together into a complex three dimensional jigsaw, Margaret and I had lunch at one restaurant that her father had loved.

As we entered the waitress asked how Frank was and was shocked by the news of his death. We had his favourite meal of garlic king prawns followed by lasagne.

I’m afraid that the waitress must have been at least disconcerted to listen to our raucous conversation as we remembered the positive and idiosyncratic life which had just ended.

When I had written my letter of condolence to Margaret I found the words flowing; there was no dearth of detail to cherish to illustrate a life which was vital and fascinating. I shall miss him.

A remembered chore meant that I had to call into PC World to try and return a non functioning digital camera. When I arrived at the store all was in darkness: the power had failed and so too had the emergency generator. There were groups of desperate people outside these dens of blackness with the hollow eyed look of junkies denied their electronic fix. As if on cue, Dave (a past colleague now working at the store) then appeared took my camera and my email off my hands and with airy expressions of compassion and professionalism said that he would sort it out.

Back in Rumney and preparations for yet another meal!

My last meal in GB was in a newish Kurdish restaurant with the added incentive that it was possible to ‘bring your own’ bottle and so avoid the criminal mark up that British restaurants add to the wine that they provide and find so essential to their financial survival.

As we were about to start our meal three ladies appeared of whom I knew two. I was hardly surprised as the whole of my holiday had been a succession of fortuitous moments and chance meetings.

The meal itself was tasty without being fully satisfied. The amount of stodge we accumulated in the form of flat bread, garlic bread and rice was truly astonishing! Lamb seemed to be the basis of virtually everything (including I suspect the ice cream) and it had a taste which suggested that it was spiced ruthlessly to accentuate that taste, though the spices never came up to the level of piquant. I’m glad I tried it, but I would not rush back.

And so to bed.

This morning I rose at the same time as Paul and clutching one of their cases (my accumulated ‘things’ meant that flying with hand luggage only was an impossibility) and two superb baguettes made by Paul Squared I braved the usual traffic jams by which that apology for a city Newport is so justly condemned.

Morning traffic meant that a boring drive was enlivened by the ever present fear of missing the plane.

As usual fears were unnecessary and from the moment of handing back the keys of the hire car everything went like clockwork.

Oddly I sat next to the same hogger of the ‘front seat for the leg room’ as when I came over to Bristol on Friday! His working week must be soul destroying!

Once back in Catalonia and back to the language. I was told an involved story by my taxi driver of his being attacked with a knife in the shoulder after he had taken a man on a long drive to a town near the French border. This man turned out to have been wanted by Interpol and he was the sort of scum who trafficked in abducting young girls and then forcing them to work as prostitutes. I was quite proud that I managed to keep up my end in what you have to admit was quite a challenging conversation in a foreign language! I think that somewhere along the line I lost the morality in the linguistics!

I have now done two washes and put away the bits and pieces of my little jaunt. Although the afternoon was warm and sunny the temperature became quite challenging when the sun went down.

I have given in and, for the first time this year, I have turned on the central heating.

Roll on the summer!

Home thoughts from abroad

While tidying up before leaving the flat for my epic voyage to Britain for Aunt Bet’s birthday, I found one tiny silver star on the bottom of the wastepaper basket in the office.

It shows the state that I have reached after the horror of packing my case that I immediately thought what a poignant symbol that was. Until I began to think about what precisely I thought it might be a symbol of! Getting bogged down in the specifics of analysis then showed up how specious my initial enthusiasm was.

It was one of those occasions that usually elicits the expression, “That’s interesting!” which then usually prompts the response, “What is?” to which of course the truthful answer is, “Well, nothing really.”

I take this to be the same sort of thing that one sometimes sees in animals, especially dogs, when they stiffen and stare meaningfully at nothing at all for a few moments and then carry on with their canine lives.

I’m thinking of these things now because I will soon be in an airport waiting lounge. And incidentally I hate the word lounge used in connection with any resting place in an airport. Every seat is designed on the same principle of the old Work Houses. Just as the Work House was designed to be marginally worse than the worst employment you could find outside the institution and entry was the last resort, so with seating in airports. It is designed to be marginally worse than anything else you can find to do in the god forsaken places. Wandering through shops; going to an over priced restaurant; finding a new arrivals and departures board to look at – anything is better than sitting on those chairs.

After all the chairs are specifically designed so that you cannot relax in them. Relaxation might mean sleep and sleep means missed announcements and delayed planes. It is good to see that Victorian Values are upheld in our modern airports!

The full horror of the spiritual stasis which entombment in airports demands has been lessened for me by the excellent procedure of ‘booking in on line.’ EasyJet allow you to do this and it means that you only have to be there some 40 minutes before departure. I am far too paranoid to test this to the precise limits but it does give one extra time to rest at home in seating which allows one to relax.

It is also a long time since I have driven on the correct side of the road. Foreigners, as you know, must have had a very different sword technique in the past – or possibly have been mainly left handed. It is a known fact that we drive on the left to allow the right hand to draw a sword and attack any importunate person advancing in the opposite direction with antagonistic propensities. Why did not Johnnie Foreigner understand this?

In some ways I take the form of driving that is second nature to a Spaniard (i.e. dizzyingly suicidal and homicidal) to be an attempt to break the unnatural restraint of driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road and their appalling road sense is actually displacement activity as their inner ‘Briton’ tries to bring them to the ‘right’ (i.e. left) side of the road.

Why, you might ask, do Britons not also exhibit the same dreadful tendencies of the Spanish? Ah, it is, of course the famed sense of British fairness and tolerance which enables the British driver on the Continent to follow the norms of the country while realising with warm condescension that it will only be a matter of time before they learn the error of their ways!

So, almost time to go.

I only hope that the telephone conversation that I had with the taxi firm actually results in a taxi arriving at the time that I stated. There did seem to be an element of confusion about the time as I took the word ‘mediodia’ to be an exact translation of ‘mid day’ but she asked what time mid day. I gave a 24 hour clock answer which seemed to satisfy her.

At the moment I am calm. If half past twelve arrives and there is no taxi that calm will dissipate in a second.

But I live in hope – there is no other way!

Suit wearing is dangerous!

Last night was the very last time that I will ever wear a suit and tie late at night in Barcelona.

After a fairly stolid performance of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ in the Liceu I felt that I deserved a little something to spice up my jaded cultural appetite. Barcelona offers a multitude of experiences which are not readily available in Castelldefels including one omission from our little town which is inexcusable – Indian food!

I was the only customer in the Indian Restaurant near the opera house so my meal was delivered with dispatch so that I was in and out in about twenty minutes and back on The Ramblas.

Operas in the Liceu start at 8.00 pm so with the normal length of the opera means that you are rarely out of the theatre before midnight. The Ramblas after midnight is more like something directed by Tim Burton – but without his underlying sense of the positive. You get all the dark, sleazy, drunken horror without the promise of redemption that Burton usually provides.

I had dressed up to fit in with the rest of the patrons in the theatre – especially in the seats which I now use. I have trained myself not to look at the price I paid which is printed on the front of every ticket! So I was wearing a suit with a white shirt and repressed tie. I rarely do the tie up fully and the wearing of the jacket was sufficient to counteract the temperature.

My great mistake was not walking on the central part of The Ramblas but on one of the narrow pavements which run down either side of the narrow roads which flank this key tourist venue of the city. My lesser mistake was slightly missing my footing on the irregular curb after crossing one of the small roads off The Ramblas.

That slight stumble was in front of a group of girls wearing tightly fitting clothing and looking at male passers by with calculating eyes. My theatrical miss step provoked a laugh from one of them and some sort of muttered comment but I pressed gamely on only to find myself outflanked by the same girls.

Think for a moment about what they saw: a man in a suit; tie undone; not wearing a coat; out after midnight and stumbling. An easy mark!

I must admit that years of watching BBC Wildlife programmes came back to me in a rush: especially the ones which showed sharks circling their prey or hyenas marking out the weakest animal who cannot keep up with the pack! Also what happened to their prey came back in vivid detail!

The girl who laughed stood in front of me while one of her (substantial) friends stood on my right and a couple of others on my left. I was trapped! And before anyone even thinks about making any sort of sexist comment I might add that they looked like the sort of people you would not want to meet in the dark. And it was after midnight!

The ‘conversation’ we had sounded like something from a hastily written pornographic novel. Not my conversation, you understand, it was more of a double hander hard core expression of physical possibilities from the two girls. I was merely thinking of my wallet and my e-book reader which was poking out of one pocket – and hoping that both would still be mine after this encounter.

My way forward was blocked by prying hands and substantial bodies trying to do things that did not fit in with my idea of a good night out. So I went sideways with alacrity and a thumping heart and gained the relative safety of the middle part of The Ramblas.

The lusty girls did not follow. They didn’t follow because the middle part of The Ramblas was obviously the beat of another group of girls, so (fully paranoid) I fled. Reaching the narrow pavement on the other side of The Ramblas I was then accosted by yet another girl who emerged from the shadows muttering honeyed words in English. There are distinct disadvantages to looking so obviously not a part of the indigenous population!

By the time I reached the car park in the lower part of The Ramblas (after studiously looking at the pavement rather than at any human passer by) I was glad to get into the relative safety of my car!

What had drawn me to this den of iniquity in the first place was the performance of ‘La Nozze di Figaro’ in the Gran Teatre del Liceu.

They actually managed to make ‘Figaro’ boring! The preliminary talk (in Catalan) suggested that this was a fairly faithful production – it would have been fairer to say that it was a fairly unimaginative production.

The singing in the first two acts was indifferent apart from the beautifully modulated voice of Cherubino (Sophie Koch) and the exuberant precision of Antonio (Valeriano). Figaro (Kyte Ketelsen) had great stage presence and was full of energy but he was not consistently dramatic through the whole of his musical range. The Countess (Emma Bell) came into her own with her solo in Act II and gradually became a compelling singer and her husband the Count (Ludovic Tézier) grew in his role as well. Susanna (Ofèlia Sala) was lively, dramatically intelligent and musically charming. The rest of the featured singers were adequate but forgettable.

The Orquestra Simfonica conducted by Antoni Ros-Marbà was excellent and the chorus did was it should.

The great crime in this production was the staging. The action of the piece was updated to the 1920s or later and virtually nothing was made of this artistic decision. The Count entering carrying a tennis racket can hardly be classed as interesting invention. The costumes fitted the staging but, so what? What was the point? Why not do it in ‘costume’ and simply have the singers adopt stage stances and have done with it?

By the end of the first half I was seriously cutting my losses and going home. At one point the Countess stood in her shimmering sheath of silk with one hand on the stage piano and sang as if she were in a recital! Why bother to go to the expense of a co-production with WNO with highly expensive mechanised sliding flats if all you are going to do is sing?

‘Figaro’ is hardly a bundle of laughs as an opera. This is a musical exploration of determined and serial infidelity; of callous scheming and a sparkling illustration of the sad and vicious frailties of the human condition. The opera begs for an inventive production to bring out the high almost tragic themes which underpin the action while ensuring that the humour is preserved intact. ‘Steptoe and Son’ is a perfect example of how ludicrous comedy can be a heartbeat away from tragedy. That is the sort of programme which could have been the inspiration for a production. Though I’m not sure about setting ‘Figaro’ in a junk yard!

The second half (I did go back and delayed my meal) was a little more inventive and the scene of Figaro in the garden with a flown ball which he addressed when berating women was an indication of what might have been. Although incongruous the ball was used by him as a pendulum and therefore a powerful image of the condition of marriage as he saw it and then later the ball was unhooked from its wire and used by Figaro to perform a series of juggling tricks which again fitted his mood perfectly.

The noisily moving screens used for the garden background were also interesting. I liked the idea of a sort of Rorschach ink blot design coupled with faces as the central idea for these screens and I liked their movement. But these ideas were pitifully scarce and little or nothing was made of the setting.

There may be an interesting production of ‘Figaro’ setting it in the 1920s but this one isn’t it.

All that and sexual harassment too!

Never a dull life!

And tomorrow GB!