Soup glorious soup!

Soup is such a trying dish.

Don’t misunderstand me, I like soup. True, in a restaurant one always has the vague feeling that the soup is the cheaper choice and the restaurateur laughs all the way to his bank account when he sees patrons happily drinking hot water that he can produce by the bucketful for a few cents. But it does taste good and on a winter’s day what is there better than nourishing, hot soup?

It is perhaps a reflection on the way that I was brought up that, from my experience, soup offers so many opportunities for the solecisms that terrified my mother.

So many things could and usually did go wrong. Soup is a watery, mine strewn plunge pool for the socially inept.

I was always sternly told, with a seriousness that I can still not really understand, that soup was always ‘eaten’ never ‘drunk.’

True, it was rarely offered in a cup when attending a formal meal, but I couldn’t help noticing that my favourite soups were quite clearly liquid with the ostensible eponymous vegetable or meat fibre having been reduced to a silky flowing consistency negating the necessity of chewing. Surely ‘drinking’ was the more obvious activity in its consumption. Such linguistic cavils were regarded as contumacy and were rejected as being merely mischievous.

More adventurous soups like minestrone with interesting bits in them which did necessitate some gentle chewing were seen as reinforcing the ‘eating’ aspect and showing the way for the more namby pamby soups which lacked the muscular viscosity of a true dish of food.

And this philosophical speculation was before you had picked up your spoon and started the socially hazardous process of eating the stuff!

The fact that the menu del dia in my corner restaurant offered soup as the only choice for the first course gave me ample opportunity to revisit my memories of the various prohibitions from my youth.

The restaurant provided baguette already cut into chunky slices. This precluded those lewd fellows of a baser sort from committing the ultimate crime of cutting their bread roll with a knife. I did this as a small child in a restaurant and my mother had the self control to wait until we got home before I was told to Never Do That Again. The knife by my plate I was told was there to allow me to spread butter on the roll which I would have broken in my hands. This was presented to me as one of the unalterable laws to question which would bring about the Fall of Humankind and bring lasting opprobrium on my poor self.

We still, you will note, have not tasted the soup.

The next obstacle was to find the soup spoon. In later years I was told that it was terribly lower middle class to have soup spoons at all (and fish knives and forks and pastry forks) and that dessert spoons were perfectly sufficient for soup – but the finer details of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’ always left me behind; the jam/conserve controversy confused me and I invariably chose the wrong one in polite society!

Finding the soup spoon (because we were lower middle class) was usually not a problem using the old ‘start from the outside and work in’ principle when it came to cutlery laid out for you.

The real problem with the spoon was how to hold it. Luckily this was not a problem for me as I was told very distinctly how to hold it in a ‘fountain pen’ grip. But not a grip, more of a light balance.

With broken bread and balanced spoon you were now ready to begin the process of eating the soup. Under no circumstances whatsoever and especially if alone, could you blow on the soup to cool it. It might after all be gazpaco or Vichyssoise and the social humiliation of cooling the already cold might well be considered irreparable.

Soup should be taken on to the spoon by drawing the spoon gently away from the diner. At no time should be metal of the spoon touch the sides of the bowl. If you were so inept as to make a scraping sound taking up the soup then you might as well go the whole hog and simply tip the dish into your open mouth!

As the soup approached your mouth the only acceptable way of eating the stuff was to sip from the side of the spoon. Sipping did not mean slurping. To slurp was to put yourself beyond the pale of civilized life. Putting the whole spoon in your mouth was the cultural equivalent of spitting and putting your feet on the table.

As the level of soup slowly decreased (assuming you had managed to master all the necessary techniques to allow your continued presence at the table) it was allowable for you gently to tip the dish away from yourself and gently spoon up the soup.

Any soup adhering to the bottom of the dish and refusing to acquiesce to the laws of gravity had to be regarded as lost as only the most sensitively adept diners were capable of making the nice calculations which allowed them to use the spoon to gather the remaining drops of soup without scraping.

Having finished the soup (and resisting the urge to lick the spoon clean) the said implement should be placed neatly on the plate on which the soup bowl had been placed. In the absence of a supporting plate then the spoon should be placed at right angles to the diner and slightly off centre if the soup plate is flat rimmed or parallel to the diner if the soup bowl is without flat rim.

The table napkin (never, ever, ever a ‘serviette’) may be used to dab (not wipe) the lips.

At no point is it acceptable to put your elbows on the table.

It’s all quite simple really.

And none of the diners I observed in my local restaurant adhered to those rules. I include myself.

But, obviously, I kept to the most important rules, the essential ones.

And ‘we’ all know which they are.

Magnum opus?

To say that my mammoth (only in terms of time expended) painting of Sitges is nearing completion does not mean that it is finished.

The damn thing greets me each morning as a mute, yet eloquent expression of my artistic ineptitude. And please, I have heard the oft repeated sigh of artists that what they aim for and what they achieve are far apart. At least their hopes and execution are in the same arena; mine are not even in the same galaxy.

The thinnest brush that I possess does not for me produce a thin line of paint. Whatever expectations I have for the colour mixing in which I indulge the results are always a mystifying surprise. Paint just doesn’t go where I want it to go.

Yesterday at lunch in a local restaurant I ate underneath a painting which depicted a river flowing beneath a rustic bridge. The painting was awful. The subject was clichéd; application of paint amateur; the colour unrealistic and garish; the composition formulaic and the whole conception facile and repulsive. It also showed more technical skill in its atrocious description of water that I can even begin to emulate.

I love the physicality of paint: the actual three dimensional presence on a canvas in the swirls of pigment. The tactile quality of Van Gogh appeals to me strongly in the almost sculpted effect that he achieves not only in his landscapes and flower paintings but also in his portraits. The social comment obvious in a painting like ‘The Potato Eaters’ is made more immediate by the almost child-like application of paint, intensifying the pathos of the scene by a grotesque cartoon-like quality.

I manage to achieve the ‘grotesque’ and ‘cartoon-like’ but miss out on the effect!

Whatever my inability I will soon have to cope with the double edged present of a LARGE canvass for my name day. I have decided to follow the cynical comment of O´Keefe who said that she chose flowers for her subject matter because, “I hate flowers. I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.” There is a wonderful Hockney painting which looks as though it was inspired by a Maplethorpe photograph which I think I might take as my inspiration. As I recall most of the painting is plainish background which I think I could make a case for being of a ‘Japanese simplicity and starkness.’

So I reckon an orchid from Lidl, numerous photographs and a fair dose of audacity and I’m away!

I still await my Christmas present of Photoshop Elements which I hope will allow me to get away with much more in my photography than I ever hope to in painting.

My stated aim is to produce a reasonable photograph of a breaking wave and, having seen what Ian (the professional photographer upstairs) can do with photographs of the tame ripples that we usually get on the shore I am determined to emulate him.

You will notice that the significant word ‘professional’ in the previous sentence has been completely ignored by my good self and that blindness has left me brimming with the shining self confidence that has learned nothing from painful forays into the world of acrylic art.

This morning was the first Spanish lesson of the new term. It took the form of a two hour conversation about the effects of majority and minority languages. Catalan is an ever present bone of linguistic contention for the Spanish and other foreigners (as Catalans would see their fellow citizens and outsiders) and it is worried at on a daily basis. Spanish is much more widely heard in Castelldefels because of the number of immigrants in the area. Many of them are Spanish speakers, but do not speak Catalan.

Employment in certain jobs in Catalonia is restricted to those who speak both Spanish and Catalan fluently and education for the very young is confined to Catalan. Spanish is sometimes given the same, but no greater status in schools as the teaching of English! Which is odd when only one of those languages is ‘Official.’

I am obviously in favour of as many people as possible speaking the tongue of Shakespeare, Conrad, Dylan Thomas and me.

Since I have talked about Van Gogh, O’Keefe, Hockney and Maplethorpe in connection with my ‘art’ it only seems fair to drop a few other names to match my pretension in the world of the written word!

Where is my camera!

The Problem With Pasta

Life, as someone almost remarked, is too short to make ravioli.

It is invariably disappointing and the contents, whatever they purport to be, taste of nothing. I have glanced at recipe books and considered making ravioli and then dismissed it as being far too fiddly for far too little taste. Doctor Johnson’s sentiments about cucumber (with which I do not agree) could rightly be applied to the doughy disaster that ravioli so often becomes.

Having chosen the fresh pasta starter in my menu Del dia it was therefore with something approaching dismay that I saw the large crinkled envelopes languishing in some sort of orange sauce. They were filled with what I took to be my parents’ purgatory.

It was spinach.

As a child I eschewed all cooked leafy greens with the exception of the one leafy green neither of my parents could abide: spinach. They could have eaten this pasta with relish as it had no taste whatsoever of the fondly remembered vegetable.

I do not want you to get the idea that I was a picky child. All peas and beans (garden, processed, marrow, broad, runner and baked) were eaten by me with gusto. Indeed, those of you familiar with my enthusiastic attempts at culinary inventiveness will realise that this infantile approbation still beats on in the pulses that I will add in an instant to any concoction lacking what I consider a certain je ne sait quoi.

Luckily the addition of parmesan created a more than acceptable sauce when added to the savoury flavoured liquid surrounding the serrated squares so I was able to eat them with something approaching relish. Also they were served with the flair of Tachism as some unidentified form of oleaginous sauce had been artistically thrown on part of the rim of the dish giving the thing the look of a production from an avant garde potter chef from the 1950s.

And if any of you are still with me at this point I will stop writing like that. You see what happens when I read through a single almost perfect story by E F Benson! His style (or a pastiche of it) is very catching!

I am reading a collection of his short stores called, ‘The Countess of Lowndes Square’ and Benson has thoughtfully divided up his stories into categories so that his readers will be spared “a skipping hunt through pages in which they feel no personal interest.” The categories are Blackmailing Stories, General Stories, Spook Stories, Cat Stories and Crank Stories: an interesting exemplification of who Benson thinks his readers might be!

‘The Oriolists’ (one of his General Stories) concerns a group of people who invent a character to frustrate the vulgar ambitions of a society hostess. The concept is simple but the execution through Benson’s wicked prose is a delight, it catches the tone of social nicety that informs so many of Benson’s books. Social striving which oversteps the mark is his constant target but a target for which he shows far too much understanding of nuance to be an objective observer!

The finest expression of this ambiguity is seen in his Mapp and Lucia stories and if you haven’t read them then I urge you to do so. The unbelievable television series (which I still, having seen it, find faintly incredible) with the extraordinary combined acting talents of Nigel Hawthorne as Georgie Pillson; Prunella Scales as Miss Mapp and Geraldine McEwan as Lucia is a triumph of something that ought to be unfilmable. It is, or at least it should be still, available on video or DVD. Watch it. But the books are so much more even that a superlative television adaptation. Enjoy!

And the sun is shining!

Pulses are pests

Although I am getting know the little seasonal quirks of Catalonia, sometimes the details pass me by.

Today was Kings. Yesterday the three of them arrived in all reasonably sized towns and made their way in procession through the streets throwing sweets at the children who lined the route. Today I made my way from the warmth of sea side Castelldefels to the cold of Terrassa for lunch.

The lunch was delicious as usual but the important part was in the sweet. This comprised the traditional Roscón de Rey which is circular bread like cake with a hole in the middle. It is sliced across the centre and cream is spread between the two rings. The outside of the loaf/cake is decorated with crystallized fruit to stand for the jewels in the crowns of the wise men and the centre hole also contains a cardboard crown for the King of the meal.

This is where it gets interesting. Inside the cake are secreted a number of carefully wrapped objects and finding one is either quaint and interesting or expensive. The little objects we found in our Roscón included a tiny china duck, ditto tiger and ditto a disturbing oval faced girl. These are the interesting objects. There are two important ones to find: a king and a broad bean.

Finding the king means that you are king of the table and you are entitled to wear the crown. Though if you have a three year old child the chances of usurpation are 100% - though in this case the legitimate owner did eventually get a chance to wear the thing.

The tiny china broad bean is bad news. This little gift means that you are the person who will have to pay for the Roscón next year. I had not realized this and upon finding the king (a thoroughly repulsive and sinister looking little thing) in my chocolate cream I assumed that the gift would have to be mine. There was a general lightening of the atmosphere as soon as the broad bean was found and people helped themselves to seconds!

The meal was tainted for me by the weather conditions outside: it actually started snowing! The rest of the family were excited and wrapped up to go out and take photos of themselves with snow flakes on dark apparel.

I was thoroughly disgusted: the quid pro quo for my feet touching the earth of Catalonia was that the rest of my body would be bathed in almost continuous sunshine (at least during the daylight hours) and adverse weather conditions would be left behind me in Britain. I graciously allowed that snow could, if need be, virtually obliterate the Pyrenees but Castelldefels and immediate hinterland were to be kept warm.

I drove back through sleet, but my car thermometer rallied my spirits by slowly but positively rising as I neared the sea shore. The temperature in Castelldefels was double that in Terrassa – which sounds good but actually disguises the fact that Terrassa was a snowy, sleeting 2 degrees and Castelldefels was a torrid 4 degrees, but at least it was only raining here!

I have now completed the reading of E F Benson’s novel ‘Michael’. This is an odd little tome which concerns the progress of an unprepossessing member of the aristocracy who defies his father’s wishes and turns to a life in music. It was published in 1916 in the middle of the First World War and the action of the novel takes place before the start of the conflict and ends with a situation of mawkishly sentimental morality when the hero is invalided out after being wounded in the trenches.

The novel has little of the lightness of touch which makes the Mapp and Lucia novels by Benson as absolute delight to read and its seriousness grates because the narrative is so contrived. Two of the essential coincidences of the story are so astonishingly awful that you shudder as you read and as soon as War is declared you know what the second coincidence is going to be!

I know that life is full of the most impossible coincidences; things happen that no writer would have the bare faced gall to dare to put in a novel (unless he was Dickens of course) and hope to get away with it. If you want to hear totally unbelievable coincidence stories I suggest that you ask hard contact lens wearers to tell you tales of losing and finding lenses. I have heard stories about contact lenses that make Dickensian coincidence look as casual as F R Leavis after the gas attack. I have heard a few stories so fantastic that the only reason I have given them any credibility at all is because I have been telling them!

Benson is no Dickens, he isn’t even an F R Levis (though he is funnier) and his novel cannot sustain its intent after his manhandled plot. He does manage a few interesting character sketches and he does articulate a response to Britain’s state of unprepared ness at the start of the war and he illustrates the ethos that Britons liked to think that they were personifying in the struggle. ‘Michael’ is more of an historical curiosity than a literary gem.

One time the writing does come alive in when Benson is trying to express just how life affirming Michael’s use of music is and then Benson’s musical descriptions sound on the page. The other place in the novel which has a sinister effectiveness is when Michael is in the trenches: a hard, unpolished reality for a moment gives this novel gravitas before it slips into mere sentimentality. Still worth a read. But the Mapp and Lucia stories are a must!

I am writing this in a delicious silence, broken only by the sound of the waves - and a passing plane if I have to be strictly honest. The neighbours above, below and sideward have all departed to lead their ‘other’ lives in the city, leaving us seaside folk to our littoral lives.

Even a cup of tea tastes better when the sound of silence is yourself.

So I’ll have one!

Changing times

“I’ll meet you in an hour in the Wedgwood Room in Howells.”

My trips to the centre of Cardiff with my mother with myself either as companion and baggage handler or forced driver and baggage handler were always sweetened by a period of liberty when I could wander from book shop to book shop losing myself in the printed word until nagging guilt brought me back to reality and the rendezvous point.

In those distant days the Wedgwood Room in Howells occupied the ground floor next to the entrance from the Hayes: a prime position whose location, I have been told by a store manager is determined by how much a department makes. Sometimes I would be early and I would wander around picking up plates and cut glass and being deeply shocked by the prices. But I think it was part of my mother’s master plan for my development that I should constantly have the image of decent glass and china in my mind when I made my own purchases in the future.

God knows that training has worked. It is only by a stern effort of will that I am able to ignore the blandishments of a well set out display of crockery in a shop and it takes an equal unnatural concentration not to turn over the plates and look at the makers mark when I go to someone else’s house. I have to content myself by looking at their books on display instead to work out just what they are like!

So my childhood was dominated by Wedgwood – not that we ate off it at home, but it remained a clear pointer for domestic rectitude if funds allowed. I bought my mother Jasper Ware for some of her birthdays and Christmas including, I remember, a tea cup. Drinking tea from that item was a most unpleasant experience and it remained as decoration rather than use. I varied the Jasper Ware with cut glass. My mother developed a taste for Seagers’ Australian sherry (which was, as I remember 7/6d a bottle – a price I have no intention of translating into modern money as it is far too depressing) and she used to drink her tipple from one of my cut glasses. Not that I think of it the cost of the glass could have bought a couple of gallons of the ‘sherry’!

I can see some of the survivors of that era glittering in the afternoon sun adding distinction to a shelf not far from where I am writing.

And now this essential piece of my childhood memory and adulthood snobbery has reached crisis point. Wedgwood and Waterford have called in the receivers!

The company that employed William Blake to produce engravings of pottery outlines for their catalogues; the company which considered the workers as people and whose founders were always motivated by a strong streak of philanthropy; the name that made Etruria famous; a Wedgwood marrying Darwin; the key name in the Potteries; history, culture, ideas and an iconic mark – and now in the hands of the receivers!

I can see now why we were forced to learn Tennyson:

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
(from Morte D’Arthur)

Another strut is knocked away supporting the tunnel into the past!

They will be saying next that The Profumo Affair didn’t happen and it was all as innocent as a game of tennis!

But I have a feeling that scandal will remain in my memory as one of the most interesting, confusing, mystifying, exciting and intriguing public displays of mendacity, prurience, unwholesome glee, hypocrisy and good old sex that a twelve year old boy could have wished for in his adolescent development!

Beats crockery anyway!

The good, the bad and the filmic!

Sometime, doesn’t it just seem that the world is striving simply to put you in your place?

I have, with total justification, been railing against the obstreperous jollifications of our neighbours with their drinking and smoking on the balcony and talking through their shameless activities at the top of their voices. Their unpardonable sin of having vocal children and yapping rat-dogs and allowing them to display their anti social inclinations has been intolerable.

Their loathsome progeny are old enough to drive and they have parked their car in the space that I use to back into to get out of the garage. The space filled, it is an infinitely more complex manoeuvre to get out of the bloody place. And believe you me parking spaces under Spanish flats make sardine tins look positively spacious.

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that were my mother to have lived in such a flat she would have sold her car within a couple of days! We are talking of a woman who, having made a wrong turning in the centre of Cardiff once drove to Penarth before she felt that she had enough room and confidence to turn around and come home to Rumney!

I have composed impromptu ditties (sung with gusto in the shower) about the neighbours' rat-dogs catching all the more popular diseases which would have meant their instant death, and I have thought longingly about that much misunderstood humanitarian Herod.

It was therefore with more than usual delight that I noticed that the noisy neighbours had taken in the seat covers off the balcony chairs. This is an invariable sign that they are quitting the place and returning to their normal habitation. In celebration of their departure I went out to hire a DVD and get some taramasalata.

I get my taramasalata from an Indian run Greek restaurant which serves Turkish food and each time I have bought it my request has created turmoil as they try and understand what it is I want. I have learned to ask for ‘red sauce of the fish’ (in Spanish of course) which works. My first request for ‘taramasalata’ resulted in total chaos!

I returned form my visit to the local shops with the latest Batman movie (of which more anon) my taramasalata and a warm feeling of anticipation of a quiet night with a good film and a bottle of wine. Rioja of course, and part of my Christmas present.

Imagine then my chagrin when returning to the flat after a foray for bread I found two pot plants lurking outside the door. My next door neighbours who were in the process of departing wished me a Happy New Year and the lady (who by this time was at the bottom of the stairs and virtually into the garage) informed me that she had left the two plants there and they did not like direct sunlight!

Through a clenched smile I wished her a Happy New Year and engaged in light chatter about the value of the pound these days.

How bad to do think I felt accepting these gracious gifts after all the bad thoughts that had accompanied their stay?

The answer to that question depends on how well you know me. Few people, with even a passing knowledge of my character, would assume that there would be a heavy weight of guilt. Those who know me better will merely wait to hear the reasons why not every a feather of blame should attach to my ignoble thoughts.

The poinsettia is a Christmas flower and not one associated with the New Year. The two flower pots were decorated with Christmas bows. The woman’s children had been staying with her. From those clues I deduce that she had been given the plants as a guilt offering from her children and she had palmed them off on me because she did not want to take them back to town with her. I was, therefore, nothing more than a convenient dust bin. I might also point out that today is a Sunday and the local florist is not open. Also, the pots are suspiciously light as if they had not been watered since they had been given as a gift and they are also surrounded by gold wrapping paper which has been gathered at the base of the plant stems which makes watering difficult.

A pretty convincing case I feel. And little enough reparation for the damage to my nerves as the communal chatter went on long into the night!

Alternatively I might be entirely wrong and I am theorising about a thoroughly generous, kind thought.

Anyway turning to the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight (2008) directed by Christopher Nolan and written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan. Yes, it is too long and yes, there are a few possible endings before the final one and yes, it is self indulgent – but what a superb film!

Let me get my itches of irritation out of the way first. It is impossible to watch the perfectly creditable performance of Sir Michael Caine as Alfred without thinking that all of his lines could have been delivered with more finesse and deeper meaning and style by Michael Gough. The second point was the crassness of the script which had Rachel say wistfully at the departing Harvey Dent something like, “We make our own luck.” This nullified the gentle audience knowledge that Harvey’s coin was double headed, we didn’t need it reinforced.

The most damming flaw in the story line is on the ferries. By now most people who are going to see the film have seen it so my spoiler here is going to have minimal effect. Does anyone seriously believe that having the opportunity to make the final choice between one boat full of decent citizens being saved and the boat full of criminals being saved that the people in both boats wouldn’t have been fighting over the right to blow the other up? Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing and other game shows have encouraged the population to vote for destruction, we are programmed to push the button!

However, forget all that. This is a wonderful film. Heath Ledger is compulsively watchable; Gary Oldman steals every scene he is in by his sheer professionalism; Christian Bale is content to take second place to the dictates of the narrative and all are bound together by a genuinely stimulating script. The bangs and flashes and gadgets are all as good as one would expect and are subordinated to the necessities of the story line.

There are moments of real emotion, or at least an emotional response from a man whose mother used to cry at Andrex toilet roll commercials!

An evening with a decent bottle of wine, Cune, Rioja, 2004, Crianza; a decent film and the departure of noisy neighbours.

Bliss!

No waves!

The sea was dead calm today.

A rather unsettling effect making the whole scene from the balcony look rather like a colour drained painting. A single pedestrian walking along the unfinished promenade looked out of place, rather like one of those cut out animated figures that Terry Gilliam in Monty Python made come to life as they passed over some sort of static background.

The sand has also changed tone, though trying to tie down a precise designation, let alone stating the refinement of a shade is beyond me, I take refuge in Robert Graves’ poem ‘Welsh Incident’ where they were described as ‘mostly nameless colours’ but ‘colours you would like to see.’ I don’t know how Ceri does it – this matching of colours.

My attempts are spectacular failures, probably because I mix colours like a demented cook forever adding herbs and spices on the basis of a single taste. I start off trying to get a particular shade of green. Green I can do: blue and yellow. It is not the right green so I add more blue. That doesn’t work so I add a bit of black. This is a disaster so I add more yellow. Then a tiny squeeze of white. I now have a vast quantity of paint mixed, but not the right colour. I make the disastrous decision that the green I want has a little bit of brown in it. So I add red. I add too much. The colour is no longer green. So I add a soupcon of blue and yellow to bring it back to life. But the proportions are wrong so I add green from a tube of green and . . . you see where this is leading. Eventually my paint is transformed into that muddy sludge that plasticine becomes when you mix all the separate colours of the stuff together.

I have just checked up on the spelling of plasticine and found a little video on how to make your own! This is at http://www.metacafe.com/watch/802582/home_plasticine/ it looks simple and good fun. Perhaps I could make enough plasticine (Word keeps underlining this spelling but it is the correct one) and construct a three dimensional version of the view of Sitges that I have bound myself to paint. It could hardly be more difficult.

I have decided that Ceri obviously manages to produce his tempera paintings by witchcraft – it is the only logical explanation. And he adds another level of difficulty by painting in tempera which means that he makes his own colours by using pure pigment and then adding egg to them. The egg is absolutely essential, but I reckon that it is some sort of small domestic sacrifice to placate the gods of the muddy colour to which all paint mixing tends and which allows Ceri to produce the glowing and accurate colours which he uses and defy the gods which then take out all their frustrations on my desperate attempts to be artistic!

Today I added a sort of wash of light purple for a distant headland in my painting. It didn’t come out like that when I added it to the canvas but, thank god with acrylic you can always paint over. There are more layers of paint on some parts of my barely started canvas than there are in a Nigerian pyramid selling scam.

My head however is bloody but unbowed and you can get paint out from underneath the fingernails with a plastic collar stiffener which suddenly turned up on the floor of the kitchen looking like a very, very small flat white vacuum flask or tiny name spikes for miniscule plants. One would be forgiven for asking why a plastic collar stiffener needs a simile when it is what it is. But how many people these days have ever seen one of these things?

I can remember that I used to have them in all my school shirts and it was yet another chore remembering to take the things out before they were washed because the heat of the wash did terrible things to them if they were left in. I am not 100% sure where this thing came from and it is a little unsettling. It is as if a portal in the space/time continuum has opened and popped one of those things in front of me as a little recherche du temps perdu!

I shall however continue with the painting. It is an essential part of the general level of excitement in my life that I can sit here and speculate about what small space of the canvas will be covered with the next inappropriate colour tomorrow. Other people have jobs.

Which is where the New Year comes in. In a couple of weeks time I will be off to Barcelona again to have a ‘chat’ with a school to see if I might ‘do’ for any future job that might come up.

One of the chores that I will have to complete before I go is to dig out a copy of my CV the style and literary imagination of which makes Lord of the Rings read like an episode of The Archers. It is therefore pretty important that I refresh my memory of precisely what I dredged up from the vaults of my past to entice unsuspecting managers to aspire to have my lofty accomplishments illuminate their place of learning.

My CV is rather like Oscar’s description of a diary in The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘One should always have something sensational to read on the train!’ My having read it should preclude the start of surprise on hearing some well crafted extract from that document read by a stranger!

Short fiction at its best!

Christmas begone!

There is something about a grey day with gently falling rain with the horizon smudged into the sky which makes the gaudy stridency of a Christmas tree look woefully out of place.

In an instant, for me, Christmas was over - and the sooner the Christmas decorations were consigned to their respective boxes and returned to join the durance vile of my books in their cell in Bluspace the better.

Unpicking the baubles from a Christmas tree has much in common with Spanish officialdom: it’s going to take much longer than you think. Armed with this depressing truth it is possible to numb the active parts of the brain that would begin to convince you that existential despair is Christmas tree shaped!

All the decorations from the tree were collected. And when I say ‘all’ that is exactly what I mean. Never before in my experience have I placed all the balls in the box and started to dismantle the tree without finding the Last Bloody Bauble. This time complete! Even the disentangling of the sets of lights was less nerve jangling than usual.

I would not like to think that being fewer than two years from official retirement that I am finally reaching some sort of contented view of the world which puts ‘lights untangling’ in their ‘proper place’ as something ‘unworthy of regard’ something ‘trivial’ and ‘not worthy of concern.’ I am not sure that I want to live in a world which takes such things with what I regard as criminal levity.

It would only be a step further and such things as wearing baseball caps backwards; rap ‘music’; able bodied people parking in disabled spaces; Conservatives; electronic versions of Beethoven’s 9th as a ring tone on mobile phones; That Woman; tripe; Big Brother and the renaming of Marathon bars – all of these will be regarded with a wry chuckle and a gentle lifting of the shoulders and the eyebrows. That attitude is pernicious. All the things listed are inherently evil and must be extirpated, terminated with extreme prejudice. At least.

That’s better, back to normal now.

The packing up of the decorations did have one mishap. A creature from my Belen fell to the tiled floor and two ears shot in different directions. My damaged stable creature: certainly a quadruped, possibly a ruminant, shaggy coat but uncloven hoofs – goat, donkey, horse – who knows, now had two white patches either side of its head. A deft use of my black CD marker pen and, while certainly earless, it looks whole. And that, after all, is the point.

The most thankless task in de-Christmassing the house is putting the Christmas tree back in the box from which it undoubtedly came. I think most people will agree with me that most Christmas tree boxes shrink over time so the failure to restore the tree to its hibernating space is understandable. However much you squeeze the branches back against the trunk of your (Chinese made) tree it never regains its sveltness that it had lying in its narrow virgin coffin. Once out of the box I seriously believe that the tree imbibes some of the electricity wreathed around it, changes it into a static charge and plumps itself out.

I have to count it a success that I managed to ‘close’ the lid of the Christmas tree box with the aid of only eleven strips of sellotape. I think that you will have to agree: a triumph!

The trip to the imprisoned volumes, coldly stacked in their cardboard boxes in Bluespace is always a frustrating experience only enlivened by my apprehension that I am the only legitimate person in the storage facility. I often wonder what would be found if the police went in there one day and forced open all the little and large storage spaces! Going on the look of the people I have seen there my mind irresistibly wanders back to that scene in the lock up in Silence of the Lambs – but perhaps I merely have an over active imagination. Possibly.

The shops in this area are packed with families buying presents for their kids. We are now in the lead up to Kings when every child will demand more presents and every town of reasonable size will have a grand procession the highlight of which will be each one of the Three Wise Men whose task it is to throw handfuls of sweets from the sacks of the stuff which surround them on their floats to the children who line the route of the procession.

Each child is armed (I used the word advisedly) with a substantial bag to collect the swag. The whole family is pressed into service to ensure that the child’s container is filled. This is not an easy task, as Paul Squared reminded me on the telephone this evening, “Those sweets hurt!” Certainly some of the distribution of candies seems to be more ballistic than beneficent. Rather strained alliteration there, but some of those sweets are aimed rather than distributed!

The free e-book library has now introduced me to Arthur Morrison an author who was famous in the nineteenth century and noted for his detective stories with his rather engaging detective, Martin Hewitt. I must admit that I had heard of (if not read) the novel for which he is best known, A Child of the Jago (1896) and, if the site offers a free copy I will read it.

I am enjoying the detective stories. They all seem to be variations on the ‘locked room’ type presenting the reader with apparantely impossible problems with easy logical solutions which are explained in detail by a very helpful Martin Hewitt. Morrison consciously plays against the prototype of Sherlock Holmes and Watson by making his detective a little more human and allowing the Watson character to point out at one point that he should be asking Hewitt a question to allow him to display his amazing powers of deduction! These stories are facile in the best sense and easy reading for a damp day.

Meanwhile the ‘painting’ awaits its next step. Tomorrow definitely.

Something.

Here we go again!

Driving up to Terrassa for the New Year Meal the entire population of Catalonia seemed to be on the roads. My carefully chosen leaving time which was guaranteed to ensure my arrival in good time seemed to be little optimistic as the traffic began to pile up – but the delay merely meant that my arrival was exact with no lee way!

The meal this year comprised Basque style tapas with my favourite of salmon, mayonnaise, caviar made into mini Swiss rolls – delightful!

The ritual of eating the twelve grapes of luck (las uvas de suerte) one for each chime of the bell at midnight was completed with the barely suppressed panic that eating pieces of food at timed intervals brings! And I did it twice. The first time with the whole family and the second an hour later. This repeat performance was because the Canary Islands (counted as part of Spain) are in the same time zone as Great Britain, so I was able to wish everyone ‘Happy New Year!’ in English and have attempts of varying convincingness returned to me!

The trip back to Castelldefels (after half a glass of red wine and half a glass of Cava) should have been disturbing given the expected behaviour of drivers returning to their homes after New Year celebrations.

In fact the fog that I encountered just outside Terrassa (first time I’ve used my fog lights since I’ve been in this country) was the most worrying aspect of the driving. With a few idiotic exceptions the driving was punctiliously correct - this makes me assume that I was one of the few drivers below the alcohol limits!

Being cynical I assume that the only thing which forces Catalans to drive within the legal speed limit, showing due care and consideration for other road users is fear of being stopped by the police (as if they are ever out of the bars themselves!) and being breathalysed. Perhaps I do them an injustice!

I’ve now had time to think about the production of the opera I saw the day before yesterday.

Latecomers and the coughing codger behind me limited by appreciation of the overture of Simon Boccanegra at the Liceu and the ‘conversational’ opening of the opera did not encourage an emotional involvement.

In this production the scenery (Carl Fillion) was stark with giant hydraulic flats to give a sense of scale and majesty to this tale of power and intrigue in fourteenth century Genoa – though updated to some indeterminate period in the nineteenth century in this production.

For me it took the opening of the first act after the Prologue for the production to come alive musically. The music for the first sight of Amelia Grimaldi (aka Maria Boccanegra) sung by Krassimira Stiyanova is astonishing: urgent, modern and captivating and, in spite of the longing to go to the loo I was carried along by the musical power of the piece thereafter.

I felt and feel that the production was notably undersung and few of the singers made me feel totally comfortable with their performances. Pietro (Pavel Kudinov) had no projection at all and should not have been singing. Anthony Michaels-Moore as Boccanegra grew on me as did his nemesis Paolo Albani (Marco Vratogna) but the level of acting was dire and it detracted from the voices. There was, for me, a distinct feeling that this production had been under rehearsed.

The movement of bodies on stage was effective and, in the crowd scenes the director José Luis Gómez showed competence sometimes producing striking stage pictures but there was little in this production to bring it above the level of a far fetched melodrama.

In spite of these substantial objections I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this production and at times I was genuinely moved. The reconciliation of Simon and Maria was amazingly successful and highly emotional. The cursing scene was effective and for once the cringing overacting seemed appropriate as the flats came together to focus attention on the internal torment of the evil Paolo.

Musically the production was a success and the musical director Paolo Carignani is to be commended for his conducting of the orchestra. As always the quality of the Orquestra Simfónica and the Cor de Gran Teatre Del Liceu were excellent.

The melodramatic nature of the piece does make direction difficult, but this story deals with nature of political power and the compromises that are necessary and the inevitable corruption that attends political and personal mendacity. The music is glorious and could have been used to give credibility to the frankly unlikely narrative. The director lacked the necessary hard edge to point up the politics in this very politically based opera.

The last scene of the opera has the major players contained in a sort of stage box of flats while the machinery which supports the flats is clearly seen (and illuminated) extreme stage left and right. I thought that some attempt at political comment was going to be made using the idea that the power struggles were contained in a glittering artificial box while the real struggle of the people went on outside and supported the indulgence of those who played at power etc. But it seemed just an opportunity for the effective grouping of people for the final big scene.

A production of lost opportunities.

If Verdi’s music achieves a level of unique sublimity surely anyone can write like P G Wodehouse.

All you have to do is have a superior butler; a rich chump as an employer; a circle of feckless, idle friends and a paper thin plot. Liberally sprinkle words and phrases like “don’t you know” and “Rather!” and “what, what, what!” throughout and the job is done.

At least that is the impression that you get when you read his seemingly facile writing.

But try writing something like it yourself and all you get is empty parody – and you discover that that there was substance somewhere in that apparently frothy writing.

Read Wodehouse’s early works (as I now have courtesy of free e-book downloads from ‘Classic’ internet sites) and you will find true apprentice pieces where the iconic solidity of the best ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ stories is seen in its more jellied form – a wobbly try out for the later classics.

The early stuff is mostly style and pose – not a confident voice and certainly containing little of the Sakiesque aphorisms that glitter like very English rhinestones in a narrative so contrived that it makes the miracle of the loaves and fishes look like a Tesco special offer!

But as someone once said, “There are two types of Wodehouse reader: those who adore him and those who haven’t read him yet.”

Who am I to disagree!

Oh yes, and Happy New Year!

Lost in the City

An old technique came into play yesterday when I found myself wandering around the Gothic part of Barcelona and having very little idea of where I was. I am very much a city boy and feel much more affinity for streets and buildings than for the much vaunted grandeur of Nature with a capital N.

Each new capital I visited on holiday would see me at some point happily wandering about with no idea whatsoever where I was. Eventually you would come across something which was familiar from the guide book – or not. At that point the ability to speak English gave access to the locals who were usually able to speak some form of it as the local lingua franca. That includes cities in the United States where, I have to admit that European foreigners’ grasp of spoken English was sometimes rather more understandable than some of the cities in the states that I visited!

Yesterday was my opera day and, given the absurd traffic jams that can be found each day on the Ronda Littoral I left giving myself almost three hours to travel the 18 km to the city. The traffic, though heavy was moving and I found myself in the city with a couple of hours to wait before the start of the performance.

A couple of hours allows you to do a number of things: have a menu del dia; visit gadget shops; pay your respects to El Corte Inglés; watch foreigners walk up and down the Ramblas; have coffee virtually anywhere or sit in the café of the Liceu and read my e-book reader.

I decided to find the small circular battery necessary to run my ipod remote. The first camera shop I entered (usually a safe source of these timid little power sources) elicited a whole string of instructions for finding the ‘right’ shop. Which I foolishly followed. And found no shop at the given address.

I was now well off the Ramblas and into the maze of narrow streets which constitute the Gothic Quarter of the city. And they were filled with small shops of the sort which have usually been driven away from city centres in Britain by the power and ubiquity of the chains which make so many of our cities seem so distressingly similar.

As I walked on I ‘sort of’ knew where I was and (albeit unexpectedly) when I recognized Santa Maria del Mar I went in. This is by far my favourite church in Barcelona. Its stripped interior (courtesy of fully justified iconoclasm as punishment for the Church supporting the Nationalists during the Civil War) and fantastic sense of space with soaring columns and large windows is exhilarating. The gruesome cell-like side chapels which blight so many Roman churches are here little more than spacious niches whose shallow sides soon give way to an open clerestory.

The apse has a colonnade of open columns reaching to the roof through which the ambulatory is clearly visible. To my mind this church looks like something which could have been designed by Peter Brooke – it has his ‘nothing up my sleeve’ approach to dramatic effects. What you see is what you get: a space which impresses because it is so ‘open’ in more than one sense of the word!

Back out into the street and still plenty of time for wandering and straying. An art shop here, a gadget shop there. Yes, I finally did find somewhere to buy the batteries. And then the highlight of my peregrinations.

Book shops always keep me happy, but this one had a selection of art books in the window which virtually forced me to go in. The interior comprises floor to high ceiling bookshelves and piles of books everywhere. The counter gave narrow access to the rest of the shop and sitting at the counter, almost lost behind drifts of books was a kindly looking old man who smiled a welcome. I was encouraged to enquire about books on Catalan art.

A younger man who I had taken to be a customer looking at shelves of books next to the counter turned out to be the owner’s son and both of them set about finding books for me to peruse.

My time there was an absolute delight with fresh books being offered for my inspection while the Old Man kept up an informed discussion about Catalan artists and bringing other books by artists that he simply liked and thought I might be interested by.

His son disappeared and eventually returned with a weighty tome which described Catalan art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its price was also hefty at €100 but it was obviously the definitive book for the subject. They made sympathetic sounds about the price and produced other monographs on individual Catalan artists at more moderate prices, including an excellent book reasonably priced on Fortuny which only the inconvenience of dragging it around in the Liceu prevented my purchasing.

Eventually I left the shop, the Llibreria Sant Jordi located at Carrer Ferran, 41, having purchased nothing but having been treated properly by a couple of booksellers who knew and cared about their stock. A delight of a place!

That wallowing in delight had however taken up a considerable amount of time and I had a brisk walk to get to the Liceu on time. A brisk walk made even more brisk by the fact that I resolutely started off in the wrong direction and found myself further away from my destination than was good given the limited minutes available until the start of the performance.

I swallowed my pride and asked for directions and eventually reached the Liceu with minutes to spare. My the time I took my seat I was dripping with sweat in spite of the cold and had to fan myself with the programme to regain my composure.

I am glad to say that as the overture started soon after I took my seat I was able to tut-tut with the others as a few stragglers were even later than I – and the only reason that they were allowed to get to their seats was that they were at the end of rows.

So there I was, sweating gently, beginning to breathe normally and regretting the fact that I had not had time to go to the loo. Behind me an old man started his low level grumbling cough which he kept up throughout the whole of the performance. The man directly in front of me was obviously someone of my height because he partially obstructed my view of the stage. A series of instances guaranteed to lessen the appropriate critical artistic faculties necessary to appreciate fully an opera.

And my review can wait for another time!

Culture all around please!

The last opera of the year beckons.

The last musical offering of the year for me is ‘Simon Boccanegra’ by Verdi. The plot has all the subtlety of a Revenge Tragedy with death off stage to start, mutiny, plotting, poison, lost children, reconciliation and death on stage to end - but with no ghost! The last production that I saw was with Welsh National Opera and of it I remember nothing, nothing at all! I don’t really know the music so this is all going to be new for me - and I haven’t done my homework and listened to a recording. That at least shows how the crisis is biting: last year I bought CDs of most of the operas I wasn’t able to whistle!

I have at least read the synopsis so the musical posturing can at least be placed in some sort of context. I have not been able to find a libretto in English on the web so that I will be relying on the little LED screen on the seat in front of me to relay the English version of what is being sung on stage. In the Liceu the only surtitles are in Catalan.

On the other artistic front I have squared up the photo of Sitges which is to be the basis for my next painting and I have produced a pencil version which does not look convincing and therefore bodes ill for the next stage when colour is added.

The great thing about the picturesque view of Sitges is that as long as you have a silhouette of the tower of a church next to a filigree bell tower next to a bent palm tree you have encapsulated the most photographed and most easily recognized part of the town.

I am relying on these iconic pieces of architecture and nature giving a clue to the most obtuse of viewers of my finished work. I shall steel myself to hear, “Oh, is it supposed to be Sitges?” and I will have to take that faint praise as some sort of triumph!

The acrylic paints that I am using are much more watery than I expected: I like impasto and feel denied a tactile pleasure by the thin consistency of the medium. I am sure that there is something you can mix with the colour to make it spikier. I did notice in one of the books that I bought for Christmas for my ‘rival’ that it suggested that you could mix the paint with all sorts of interesting things to give different textures. One example was paint mixed with rice and the other with flour! I don’t know what effect the water content of the paints has on those hydrophilic materials. I wonder if you can use sugar; that would give an interesting look to the paint! This is another example of my running before I have even learned the definition of direction!

The next stage in my masterwork is to block out areas in the main colour and then when the thing is dry begin to work on more precise delineation. The theory is there, it is just the ineptitude which takes over when I hold a brush in my hand. Still, fun is fun and it will all last until the last of the Lidl canvases is used up!

I can always punish my presumption later by visiting MNAC and wandering through galleries with my favourite Catalan art and as a friend of MNAC it will cost me nothing. Nothing that is, if I can resist the lure of the restaurant with the staggering views over Barcelona and the gratifyingly pretentious menu!

Enough of writing there is tidying up and painting to do!

Banking delight!

I always give my victims fair warning.

I ask, “Do you speak English,” and if the answer is in the negative then frankly Jonnie Foreigner only has himself to blame if he is then subjected to the whole force of my enthusiastic Spanish.

The major trouble is that the conversations that I get involved with never seem to be covered by the average phrase book or Spanish lesson. My visit to the bank was a case in point.

As is generally accepted BBVA is the worst and most graspingly unhelpful and avaricious bank in the known universe and it therefore takes a considerable incentive to get me past its hated portals. The recent little domestic difficulty with the pound was such a case.

A Matt cartoon in the Daily Telegraph shows a TV newscaster reporting, “For the first time the pound reached parity with a chocolate coin covered in foil,” which, when you are in the euro zone is not so far from the truth! In effect, the recent troubles have worked out to mean a 40% increase in the cost of living for me when the value of the pound has plummeted to the lower reaches of the Marianas Trench! A visit to the bank manager was called for to ensure the smooth flow of money from the benighted shores of bankrupt Britain to what is now the reassuringly expensive Costas.

As BBVA adopts the world wide courtesy of all banks in providing too few counter clerks I took along my trusty e-book to while away the interminable chunks of time it takes to be seen to in any financial institution. Because of the ever present reality of armed rebellion against BBVA my branch has taken the typically cowardly precaution of installing an electronic cubicle door which only allows one person into the bloody place at a time.

I waited patiently for the inner door to open allowing the person in front of me to enter the bank and for that door to close before the outer door would open for me. I entered the glass prison and an electronic voice told me to get rid of the metal I was carrying. I had to get out of the prison and go to the pathetically few lockers that BBVA provides for any customer stupid enough to attempt to enter their sacred premises by daring to bring guns, flame throwers, bazookas or e-books with them.

Amazingly, and for the first time in my experience, a locker was actually free so my delay was only momentary. I finally entered to find the queue for service stretching the entire length of the bank and surprise, surprise only one bank clerk working.

I however needed to join another queue to see some sort of manager. This was shorter but equally slow moving. And I didn’t have my e-book and so could only join in the rest of the cattle sighing gently and looking with unmixed hatred at everyone around us.

An entire family of what looked like three generations had chosen this particular day to open accounts at this god forsaken bank. When something as momentous as this occurs then the photocopying machines go into overdrive and applicants develop writers cramp by initialling and signing every dun coloured sheet which is put in front of them and then jubilantly stapled together to form the basis of ‘a file’ the most comforting building block of security for any governmental or institutional organization in Spain.

I now watch this tedious process with brain dead eyes because at least I now know what to expect and the active part of my brain tried to work out what I might have to say if the person who was going to deal with me spoke no English.

The person who was going to deal with me spoke no English.

My Spanish is rather like an unimaginative composer from the time of Joseph Haydn – the musical ideas are few but rearranged can give the impression of variety. So with my limited vocabulary; I may not have the precise words but my grasp of round about ways of expression would now make me a shoe-in for a high position in the Circumlocution Office in ‘Bleak House’!

As interviews with bank managers go this went well and there seemed to be no problems and everything would be sorted out. I only hope that what I meant is what she understood! Time, as they say, will certainly tell in this case.

The weather continues thoroughly grey and depressing, apart of course from the waves – which is more than can be said for my representation of the meeting of water and sand courtesy of acrylic paint. I am sure that my attempt at church, beach and bay in Stiges will be more successful. It could hardly be worse.

Leaving aside my almost complete lack of technical skill I thoroughly enjoy the untutored frenzy which characterises my painting style. My choice of brushes is largely governed by their appearance and how nice the bristles feel on the finger. While my application of paint looks towards Bratby - but without his subtlety! My rudimentary knowledge of the colour circle means that my attempts to produce colour matches are restricted by my ineptitude augmented by my slight colour blindness. All in all I think I have the makings of a good all round conceptual modern artist!

Perhaps I should saw the canvases I produce in half and soak them in formaldehyde for that up-to-the-moment look!

Buy now before they get too expensive!

Careless talk costs lives!

Hell is other people.

How true Sartre's words are when you live in a flat.

We have been spoilt by our rich neighbours who are able to own a highly expensive residence by the sea and only use it for a few weeks during high days and holidays. The end result is that our neighbours to the right and left are generally absent. Below is generally quiet and above, apart from some forays in high heels on tile floors is generally quiet too.

It was something approaching total horror that I realised by various grinding sounds that our neighbours on the right had turned up. With family and dogs. In spite of the inclement weather they have packed the balcony which is at right angles to our own with their cigarette smoke and conversation.

That last word has a different meaning in Catalonia than it does in Britain. Discussion programmes on what is laughingly called Spanish Television consist of a group of people all speaking at once at gradually increasing volumes to capture the conversation. This technique is transferred to the home and balcony in what I take to be a gesture of general inclusion – because you sure as hell cannot escape the continuous noise of a family happily shouting together and pretending it is conversation. When you add yappy little rat dogs to the mix the sonic melange is something which makes you wish for a soothing flame thrower.

In an effort to combat the campaign of intrusive conversation from my garrulous neighbours I have started to paint a landscape, put the ipod player on loud and even lowered the metal shutters on the French windows – and still their piercing voices intrude through what W H Auden called ‘the frontier to my person.’

Ah for my dear departed neighbour in Rumney the only sound of whose existence was the rumble of Heavy Metal Music briefly once every two or three years! How different from the home life of flat dwellers in sea side Catalonia.

Having had my little rant, they have now retreated into their flat and left me in relative silence. I will even raise the shutters and snatch the last few minutes of the evening sunset and watch the eerie effect of low flying aircrafts’ searchlights catch the underside of the clouds. And have a cup of tea to settle my chatter torn nerves.

After living in a house, even if it is a semi, it is difficult to get readjusted to the flexibility that has to exist when you live in a flat. In objective terms I know that I am relatively lucky in that some of the flats are so rarely used. But we only children must be allowed our personal space selfishness – and anyway the view of the sea more than compensates for the human bustle of fellow dwellers.

The Daisy Ashford book of ‘The Young Visiters’ having been chuckled through courtesy of http://manybooks.net/authors.php a site I recommend for similarly mean e-book readers as containing a positive cornucopia of books for free download. There are lots of them there, but not always the ones you want.

For example, I had decided that I would like to re-read two books by Ruskin: ‘The Seven Lamps of Architecture’ and ‘Unto This Last’ – both are well out of copyright and I would have thought readily available for free download. Wrong. Although there is an impressive selection of Ruskin’s works available on the site, it only scratches the surface of the quantity of books and monographs that Ruskin churned out in his extremely productive career. So it turns out that while free site will offer you seeming riches, the actual nuggets of gold are often frustratingly out of reach. I am sure that a more confident and competent user of the internet than I will aver that the books I need are out there, and for nothing, it’s just that I haven’t framed my enquiry in the most effective way.

I shall take that as a challenge and I hereby vow to find the two elusive Ruskin volumes somewhere in the computers of the English speaking world. And for nothing.

Meanwhile, what I am actually reading at the moment is some distance away from the social and artistic philosophy of Ruskin. I am reading (with pleasure I might add) ‘The Chessmen of Mars’ by Edgar Rice Burroughs – the author better known for his ‘Tarzan’ books.

These books are either camp and irresistible or gauche and contemptible – or, more likely, all of those at the same time! It has incomparable passages like,
“Yes, Tara of Helium, the come,” replied the slave. “I have seen Kantos Kan, Overlord of the Navy, and Prince Soran of Ptarth, and Djor Kantos, son of Kantos Kan,” she shot a roguish glance at her mistress as she mentioned Djor Kantos’ name.

The inhabitants of Mars are indeed red skinned (apart from the baddies who are green) and their muscular and beautiful bodies “otherwise naked trapped with a jewel-encrusted harness’ seem to cater to a popular need for low level porn!

The language is faux archaic littered with phrases like, “while thus profitably employed’ and ‘thus always is royalty announced’ and ‘thus it is’ and so on. Personally I find it delightful and am totally enchanted by obtrusive narrative devices which give exotic information like, “Your ancient history has doubtless told that that Gathol was built upon an island in Throxeus, mightiest of the five oceans of old Barsoom.” This is pulp fiction at its best!

But not quite enthralling enough to drive into silence other people’s noise!

Tomorrow a time to reassess the financial implications of the fall of the pound and an essential trip to the most hated bank in Europe: BBVA.

Needs must when the Devil drives!

The Undergrowth of Books

I think that I am the only person I know who has read ‘The Red House Mystery’ by A A Milne. A detective story by the author of 'Winnie-the-Pooh.'

When you are as mean as I am when it comes to paying for e-books then you must be satisfied with the less frequented pathways of out of copyright literature. Some of the books which I have now read in electronic form by P G Wodehouse I have never heard of. ‘The Politeness of Princes’ and ‘The Pothunters’ read like hack works by an author who had been impressed by ‘Stalky and Co’ by Kipling – but they remain interesting as forerunners of Wodehouse’s mature style. At least that is what I am telling myself as I read through more obscure examples of Great Writers’ work!

I now have over three hundred books (varying in length from single short stories to the entire Bible) lurking in the memory of my e-book and I still haven’t got over the sheer magic of the thing: a single slim book containing an entire library!

If only the grasping publishers would moderate their extortionate prices for copyright books I would be truly satisfied. I find it astonishing to think that there are some instances where the electronic form of the book is MORE expensive than the paper copy! The economics behind that sort of greed has more in keeping with the grasping avariciousness of the venomous Sheriff of Nottingham than the Venerable Bede.

Whatever the effectiveness (or indeed the appropriateness) of that bitter comparison, it is perhaps significant that my e-book probably holds roughly the same number of volumes that Bede had in the library in the Monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow when he produced his books. It is also worth pointing out that the library at Wearmouth-Jarrow was probably one of the biggest in England at the time. If I push the historical point even more then I could say that all the books that Bede was able to consult are probably available free from websites around the globe as electronic downloads. Never has the literary knowledge of the world been so freely available to so many people . . . and I’m not sure of where I am going in this digression. Though it is noticeable that the number of Ecclesiastical Histories of the English Peoples (or equivalent) coming out of Northumbria has been a little thin on the ground during the last millennium despite the availability of books and the access to them!

Talking of Northumbria we actually had a mild hailstorm today. We also had sunshine and rain and cloud. Taken together it could be said to be more reminiscent of a British day during which you get a selection of the seasons rather than the steady expectation of consistent weather that we generally get in Catalonia.

As always with slightly rougher weather, the appearance of the sea becomes much more interesting with our stunted domestic waves actually acquiring some height and the wind whipping off the foam to make the curving waves beautiful to look at but devilishly difficult to photograph.

Ian, the professional photographer living diagonally above us, showed me a fine photo of a breaking wave taken from our very own seashore and in reply to my plaintive moan that I have never managed to take a picture like that, he patiently explained that what I was looking at was a cunningly composed composite of five separate photographs including one photo reversed to form the end of the beautifully curling wave! I have now sent off for a truncated version of the program that he used to produce such results and I hope soon to start dabbling in the forbidden arts of twisting photographic reality to my own dark ends.

I will end with my invaluable e-book and recommend (for those who have not yet read it) a delight of a book called ‘The Young Visiters’ by Daisy Ashford. This is a book written by a nine year old which lay undiscovered for years and then was published with Daisy Ashford’s own punctuation and spelling. It is an artlessly cunning construction which uses the authentic naivety of Daisy with what now reads as a clever illumination and critique of society in the late nineteenth century. It is very funny. I was first given a copy of this wonderful book by Aunt Betty and read it with delight and disbelief. It is the story of a Mr Salteena and his attempts to become a gentleman. When the book was first published with a foreword by J M Barrie it was an astonishing success and was later alleged to have been a sort of literary joke produced by an adult author pretending to write down to a child’s level. Indeed some of the observations in the book seem a little arch and knowing to be those of a young girl, but the authenticity of Daisy Ashford’s work has never been in doubt.

If you have read and enjoyed ‘The Diary of a Nobody’ or ‘Three Men on a Boat’ then you will appreciate ‘The Young Visiters’ although it is nothing like the first two books mentioned. Everyone has their own favourite quotations from the book, starting with the opening, “Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking people to stay with him.” This opening leads to more piquant extracts like, “Then he sat down and eat the egg which Ethel had so kindly laid for him” and this revealing extract from Mr Salteena’s letter to Bernard Clark (“a rarther presumshious man”), “I am fond of digging in the garden and I am parshial to ladies if they are nice I suppose it is in my nature.” Or perhaps Ethel’s conversational observation to her host, “I shall put some red ruge on my face said Ethel because I am very pale owing to the drains in this house.” Each of Daisy’s chapters was written in one continuous paragraph and there were no speech marks, but every page has gems of expression and delights in spelling.

And you can download it for free. It is worth doing so for no other reason than it drives Microsoft Word wild trying to make sense of it all!

Ah joy!

Give and Take

Christmas is a time for counting the cost.

I don’t mean in purely mercenary terms in the sort of ‘double entry’ accounting that some people adopt at this time of Christian cheer, as presents are weighed in the balance with what you have given and found wanting. Either way is an embarrassment. No, what I am talking about is the appropriateness of the gifts.

A disturbing number of people gave me booze – though let me assure all of my generous givers that every precious drop is dear to me and will be savoured with absolute relish. I suppose that it is easier to give a bottle of something than double guess what my voracious reading will have left for the unwary buyer to choose.

I would like to concentrate on two. The first is a pair of wi-fi headphones which allow me to wander through the flat and out onto the balcony cosily protected from the foreign environment by the domestic comfort of Radio 4 where ere I go. It gives me pleasure and allows me to forget doctor’s appointments as a sink deeper and deeper into the afternoon play. The headphones also allow me to peregrinate with the appropriate volume of a Bruckner symphony playing inside my head. To those who opine that this could also be done with an ipod I would reply that there is a distinct difference in the quality of sound and for meaty orchestral works the expansiveness of ear covering phones and somehow more appropriate than a small insert in the ear!

The second present was not one that I was given for Christmas but one on my Name Day, the Day of my Saint which is, of course, today! Catalonia takes such things with a great deal more seriousness than we do in the protestant north.

Some presents have that ‘I wouldn’t have thought of it for myself but now that you’ve given it to me it is just right’ quality. This was one of those.

The festively wrapped box that I was handed was too flat to contain a 75cl bottle of anything and when I held it I found it to be too heavy to contain a book. There were ‘bits’ I could feel bumping around, but they did not have the quality of miniature bottles of anything and they certainly were not chocolates.

It was therefore with a certain amount of interested trepidation (as I was unwrapping this in the face of the whole family) that I started ripping the paper away.

It was a chess set.

Not on the face of it something to raise more than a polite 'thank you.' Bear in mind that in the fairly recent past I have been humiliated at this game by eight year olds. It wasn’t the game that provoked my unstinted expressions of gratitude it was rather the figures themselves.

They were all modelled on The Simpsons™ It only seems fair to include the ™ mark as sign of my breathless admiration for the ruthless marketing campaign which has seen this yellow family appear on everything that has a space large enough for the logo and the reproduction of a member of the family. The figures are lovingly crafted from machine moulded plastic but the set is worth it for seeing Marge and Homer and Queen and King. Bart as the Bishop and Lisa as the Castle provoke metaphorical speculation which is as satisfying as it is futile. The whole set is a delight and I even won my first game!

For the first time in three years I was well enough to eat my Christmas meal. The last two years have been sorry stories of wasted culinary opportunities while I lay languishing on a figurative bed of pain. It was actually a bed of oblivion as I waited for the obnoxious bugs to begone. It is now obvious that I have met and assimilated the germs that are native to the region and they now accept me as one of their own.

The restaurant meal was, needless to say, delicious – though it did pass through my mind that the thirty five quid that I would have paid for the meal in the old days when one euro was worth 70p had now risen to a more substantial fifty quid. The parity of euro and pound sterling is a financial disaster for those of us who have all their savings locked in a worthless currency in the Old Country! I know that what I should be doing is taking a deep breath and be telling myself to think of the long term.

Unfortunately the short term is here and now and the juggernaut of expense goes on rolling. The only thing that I resent is that the grease for the wheels of that massive cart are not being oiled by the crushed bodies of the wastrel bankers who precipitated the crisis!

There is one more opera left before the end of the year and so I am going to take every opportunity to listen again to the work so that I can take a more appreciative approach when I sit in my expensive seat working out just how much each minute of my entertainment is costing with the currency parity.

It will give extra spice to my critique!