The sun!

A lazy day, with my only concerted action being a swim followed by going for lunch!

The Device was a little more successful today; I entered the pool to the music of The Pet Shop Boys and left it to the music of Mike Oldfield – both of which I could hum along to!

The weather has been splendid although the wind has been brisk.  I have lost some of the ghastly pallor which is a sad function of working in school all day and having spiteful weekends which do not incorporate the fine weather of the working week!

The Third floor has been my retreat of choice for today as I am keenly aware that the holiday is ebbing away with only tomorrow and Tuesday left.

I have done virtually no work for school and there is still some that I have to do if my return to work is not going to be frantic!

While making a cup of tea I noticed three men, well one man, one kid and one youth going through the communal bin.  Our bins must be searched at least twice a day by individuals and groups.  One man comes around on a bike with a long hooked stick which he uses to prod around in the bin; another just seems to cast a cursory look over things and only takes larger items; another group come around in a van.  They seem to be organized and I would imagine that it is a full time job checking all the bins, which in our street are emptied each day at about 7.30 in the morning.

 I am sure that this activity is actually illegal because, as soon as the rubbish is put out it is technically the property of the local council.  I suppose that councils do make money out of the waste and that it is a sort of stealing, but I for one do not begrudge these people making a living out of this disgusting occupation.  As long as the rubbish goes I don’t much care how that is done!

It is surely a sign of the times that our rubbish is so thoroughly searched!  It may also be significant that the individuals and groups doing the scavenging do not look Spanish but rather Moroccan – and that opens up a whole other matter for discussion!  But perhaps I will leave that for another time!

Although I didn’t watch the game, I understand from the unalloyed glee from a certain person sitting on the sofa that Real Madrid have drawn their match and are now a mere 4 points ahead of the saintly Barça team with a Classico coming up in two matches.  All, as they say, to play for!  The hysteria in this household will grow and grow.

I have now finished watching the first season of “Torchwood” the “Dr Who” spin off concerned with a group trying to cope with various alien incursions set, beguilingly in the City of Cardiff.  Quite apart from the delight of recognizing various locations in the city, it does have a good group of actors playing the main roles and a more than decent script to play around with.  Although not all episodes are of equal strength and many are depressingly derivative in their main narrative impulse, they all have a particular flavour which keeps the interest.  At their best these episodes are both emotionally compelling and dramatically exciting.  The script and ideas work best when they are quirky and individualistic and I am delighted to note that there are two more seasons for me to watch.

I am a bit of a Johnny come lately to this series and therefore was completely bemused when I was in Cardiff ages ago to find a wall near the water in the Docks plastered with pictures and small votive offerings of plastic flowers which were all regretting Ianto’s death and asking for his return to the series.  As I had seen none of the series I had to rely on the Pauls to fill me in with the back-story to their extraordinary display of viewer affection.  Which they did, in bewildering detail.  At least I understand a little more now!

Tomorrow to Terrassa for Carles’ Name Day and a general eating of Barça themed cakes.

Blow, blow thou sunny wind!

The bedroom windows facing north always give a moment’s pause on waking as to whether the sun is actually shining.  It is only when I go into the bathroom and look at adjacent trees through the little window that I can tell whether or not it is a fine sunny day.

It was a fine sunny day.  Though, as it turned out, it was quite a windy one.  But to a man hardened on the cold sun beds of Gran Canaria it was as if it was summer!

Toni was indisposed and kept to his bed but I had a holiday to fill and so was not prepared to while away my precious holiday hours by doing nothing.  It was time, I decided, to try out the new music system for swimming.

It is now so long since I immersed myself in water for the purpose of arm and leg propulsion I did have a few doubts about my actual ability to move through that medium at all!

At least the swimming pool was open today and I found myself a bench on which to sit when once inside to prepare myself for the watery fray.  As I was just in shirt and shorts undressing was relatively uneventful but dressing in my full swimming gear was a much more complex operation.

Attaching the Device to the swimming goggles took minutes and then was finding of the bloody swim hat which is rotting away week by week.  Remembering to wear swim slippers was the next irritation followed by searching out the lock and key for the locker.  When everything was ready I marched into the pre-swim shower and worried about fitting the augmented goggles.

This was not easy.  The thing was too tight and it was difficult fitting it over the ears and making sure it actually fitted round the back of the head.  Eventually, clumsily and with growing panic about the length of time that I was standing by the side of the pool without entering the water, I eventually made an undignified splash and I was in.

I have to admit that my swimming to the sound of music was not an unqualified success.  It does work, and it works best with a sedate breaststroke; crawl tends to take the earpieces out of my ears.  It works more than it doesn’t, but it is very much a work in progress.

I also have to admit that I am a little self conscious about swimming while having a pink mp3 player with a flashing blue light attached to the back of my head.  But is worth it to listen to the selection of 80s classics that Toni has put on the machine!  There were even two Mecano tracks to help me on my way.

My first note left for Toni about my going swimming was unread when I cam back and so I decided to go and check out the new swimming pool that was supposed to have been established near the British School of Barcelona.  It exists, but it has not yet been given all its certificates by the authorities so it cannot be used.  I was show it via another building through two sets of windows.  I joined the sports centre and was given the first moth as a gift as the swimming pool was not ready.  I have no intention of using the Torquemada like machines in the gym, but I am tempted by the Padel courts.  An explanation of this game will have to wait for another day.  I now have two cards for competing swimming pools.  I have been told that the new swimming pool may become available over the next two weeks.

The new swimming pool is, I think, an excellent investment for me as it is on the way home from school and is within minutes of the house.  I could even think about going there on my bike – though that may be a ride too far!

My second note to Toni was also unread on my return and I discovered him languishing in bed, thoroughly unwell and refusing food and drink.

This lasted throughout the day but he was able to eat something I brought back from our favourite fast food place after an evening chat with Irene where we talked of great plans for the future.  As we always do.

Tomorrow, Easter Sunday – which means that there will only be a few days of the holiday left.  I really should do some school work, but the work I want to do is so time heavy that I cannot bring myself even to start doing it.  Such is life.

But there is an absolute minimum that I need to do.  Probably.  We shall see.

Some sun at last!

A day of clouds but not of rain. 

I found myself watching for the little patches of blue hoping that the sun would link up with one of them and shine on me!  It reminded me of my Christmases in Gran Canaria, stretched out on a sun bed in uncertain warmth but staying there because each minute was expensive and each fragment of sunshine had to be used to get to the required shade of brown sufficient to infuriate the pale stay-at-homes in Cardiff when they saw me at the start of term in January!

With such a short break at Easter in this country every day is equally important and with the rain and cloud I am getting quite panicky as the holiday drains away.  Still, there is the “gained Sunday” to look forward to as we do not start the summer term until Wednesday of next week.  And that means that I will have missed eleven lessons and a lunch-time duty which make up my Monday and Tuesday: result!  It also means a short week until the weekend.  But there is a price to pay.

Guess what we will be thinking about instantly on our return – examinations! 

I sometimes think that what we teach is totally irrelevant as long as we can divide it up into examinable chunks.  We have to get two complete sets of exams in before the end of term so that we can also have our last tranche of pointlessly long meetings and, then, O Joy, the longed for summer holidays – even if our “extra” pay is going to be ravaged by the rapacious government taking 3% of our total annual salary out of the money.  Bastards!

Thinking further about the Goya exhibition I saw yesterday, I find several responses vying for attention in my memory.  The first was amazement at the quality of exhibits and the number of iconic paintings which are now in Barcelona – albeit only until the last week of June.  The second goes to the centre of one of my problems with the paintings of Goya his use of painterly technique.

The series of cartoons for the royal tapestries are of various scenes of folk around Madrid.  “The Parasol” for example is a striking arrangement but the quality of the painting seems to be reminiscent of theatrical scene painting rather than the brush of a master.  His trees are particularly vapid looking more like a green cross section of a sponge than of any leafy matter!

The portraits were striking.  A couple of studies (?) of the King and a prince were amazingly sensitive with a real sense of the personality of the sitter being caringly brought out through the application of paint.  This portrait of the king as an elderly man is warm and generous and not the searing portrayal of him in the famous group portrait dominated by the King’s mother.  I have seen Goya portraits of the princes too which make them seem like ungainly toys, but this portrait of a prince is also of a boy and was touching, even loving.  With paintings like these it is easy to see why Goya was respected and admired by the royal family which in other paintings he seems to paint with a restrained savagery that you would not pay to have created!

The etchings are the etchings: they define a whole sphere of human inhumanity and they are timeless.  May favourite this time was the one from La Tauromaquia where the rampaging bull with a human impaled on its horns is caught at the far right of the picture which in the pens below the humans panic.  It is an eerie drawing with a surrealistic (perhaps too easy a word to use with this artist) sense of emptiness with the bull on a visual plane that takes the viewer a while to work out.  A wonderful work.

The madness and the irrational in Goya’s work attract me the most.  The Disasters speak for themselves but even the playfully disturbing compel attention.

This exhibition has a full title of “Goya – Lights and Shadows” and from the 90 or so works this can be taken literally and figuratively, and both aspects are a delight to follow through a career in which the personality of the painter is one which encourages and challenges.

This is a real treat and I must return – and perhaps reconsider my rejection of the idea of buying the vastly expensive catalogue.

The Delacroix exhibition (a few steps through the rain to the other large exhibition hall) was a less challenging experience but perhaps more uplifting.  I can’t say that I cam away with a different view of the painter but I did enjoy the sketches for paintings that were on display.  My favourite was a study for one of the Arabs on horses attacked by lions series and this sketch was quasi-abstract, a whirlpool of splashes of colour with the faintest outlines of clues which indicated the representational limits of a conflict of speed, colour, line and power.  It was a glorious canvas, and one I would quite cheerfully have walked off with!

Again this is an exhibition to revisit – though this one finishes in the third week of May so I mustn’t relax and tell myself that I have plenty of time otherwise (like exhibitions in the past) I will have to be content with a single visit.

I finally made an attempt to go and have a swim and was frustrated by the fact that the pool was closed, it being Good Friday.  I am tempted to go into town and watch the foreigners (the Spanish) labour through the streets carrying their idols on heavy rafts of carved wood, but I am not sure that I can be bothered especially as every fibre in my Anglican-Atheist being rebels at the idolatry of it all!

Four more days of the holiday left.

A good day despite the rain!

Two superb world-class exhibitions in one day!

The Goya exhibition to celebrate ten years of existence of Caixa Forum and the exhibition centre in Barcelona.  Brilliant paintings that I didn’t expect to see there.  Yes, there were the usual etchings but The Clothed Maja portraits and other paintings that must have left serious gaps in many collections.  Cartoons for the tapestries; “Black” paintings.  It was a joy to wander round.

The Delacroix was equally unexpected with major canvasses on show.

The only downside was the price of the catalogue for each exhibition, which I considered exorbitant.

Lunch was with Suzanne and pica-pica and delicious.

Rain!

Today I woke up to the sound of rain.  The weather forecast was accurate, god rot it!  The sound of the rain also reminded me that I had not brought in the sun bed cushion which is now having a well-deserved wash courtesy of the climatic conditions.

Looking at the forecast I see that it will be the weekend before it has a chance to dry out!  What a holiday!

Braving the elements we went out for lunch seeking for a different restaurant from our usual clutch of dependable eating-places.  We went down to the other end of Castelldefels and, after finding (yet again) that one small restaurant on the sea front that we liked was closed for logistical reasons that we have never managed to formalize into any coherent timetable for opening, we decided to range further afield.

Toni’s eagle eye spotted a place offering an €11 menu del dia and after a cursory (on my part) and extended (on Toni’s part) view of the menu went in.  This was Restaurante El Mastil, Paseo Maritimo, 299 bis, Castelldefels.

We were guided to a part of the large premises which had a view of the sea and sat next to the large windows.

The view was, it has to be admitted, somewhat bleak: the sea a forbidding grey; the sand damp and dun; the beach totally deserted – and rain sporadically spitting into the pool which had formed under the plastic kids' slide blocking part of the vista of the Med.

It reminded me of nothing so much as sitting by the unforgiving sea of my childhood and watching my parents have a cup of tea from a battered tin teapot (or was it aluminium?) that was a highpoint of the culinary offerings in Barry Island from the café on the front. 

What really captured my attention more was the sodden sand, thinking to myself that damp sand held together better than dry and that this time I really could build a bastion that would withstand the incoming tide. 

And the sea.  On damp days, and so many holidays seemed to be damp, the sea was a brown smudge in the distance which at least game one more time to build.  Swimming was never a pressing temptation until the castle walls were breached and there was nothing left to lose!

Let me not give the wrong impression.  I loved going to Barry Island.  We would load up the Bon-mini (don’t ask) with my parents in the front and me in the boot (don’t ask, but not as cruel as it sounds!) and off we would tootle and not worry about the steep hill to get onto the A48 towards home until the end of the day!

We would park on the cliff top (before Butlin's took over the ground) and I would scamper down over the rocks to the virgin sand and start digging.  Bliss!  But damp sand, grey skies, grey-green sea, rain in the wind and coldness sum up a typical British day by the seaside and that was the view I had from the restaurant window.  I could have been at home!

The “dish of the day” which headed the list of first course choices turned out to be Russian salad which we both like and so we both ordered it.  When it arrived it was set into two artfully arranged squares with small piles of shredded carrot and corn while the whole edifice was surrounded by a swirl of balsamic vinegar.

And it had no taste.  One has to remember that the defining ingredient in a Russian salad for Brits is missing in Spain: no beetroot.  Instead it is a sort of potato, egg and tuna salad with mayonnaise.  In this version the potato was that regular cube sort which suggested that the ingredients had been bought frozen and then assembled later.  No tuna, precious little egg and, as I said, no taste.

Toni’s second course was butifarra.  As Toni has not bee entirely well recently with a form of stomach upset he invited me to try a piece of it as it did not seem entirely right to him and I think he wanted me to share any future gastric illness that he might have rather than to get my expert cooking judgement!

Toni left it unfinished.  As he left his salad unfinished.

My second course was eggs in the style of Manchego.  Neither of us had any idea was this might be and I waited in pleasurable anticipation – after all, as long as it wasn’t tripe I was going to eat it.

Well, the exotically named dish turned out to be fried eggs with chips.  The only “exotic” part of the dish was that three cloves of unpeeled garlic had been fried with the eggs!  What culinary daring!

This was, without a shadow of doubt, as Toni stated, “the worst menu del dia we have had in Castelldefels”.

We skipped the choice of desserts and took the coffee option instead and left as soon as was decently possible.  A dispiriting experience and one that we will not be in a hurry to repeat.

On a more positive note I am reading sci-fi downloads on my I-pad with a passion that suggest that they are all suddenly going to evaporate and disappear in a puff of electronic impulses.  China is figuring more and more in the fantastic suggestions about how the near future is going to develop.

The most rewarding and stimulating book in this genre that I have read recently is by Cory Doctorow called FTW or “For the Win”.  This centres on computer games and how their real life implications work.  The collecting of virtual gold becomes something which “gold farmers” or packs of young games addicts accumulating the “gold” which they manage to convert into real money as other players in the game need this “precious” metal to “buy” advantages for themselves to boost their game status.  Doctorow describes brokers, bosses, big business and all the trappings of large-scale international finance – but all based in things called The Mushroom Kingdom or some impossibly pronounced Teutonic mythic rubbish.  I particularly liked a reference to a Vorpal Sword as a weapon of massive power in one of the games!

Its real power comes from the fact that Doctorow is able to describe the big power play of firms and countries as they stamp from a great height on poor and powerless workers.  It also raises hope that the Internet is also a way of uniting the powerless and creating a worldwide community which has never been so well informed and turning groups of isolated workers into a powerful Union of the connected.  A stimulating read.

The rest of my reading has been of derivative and enjoyable rubbish where the fun is working out which literary antecedent or fairy story has played the greatest part in the narrative “creation”.  I’m loving it!

Tomorrow real culture and the sight of some of the productions of the person I consider to be Spain’s greatest painter, Goya.  Not a very controversial choice perhaps, with Picasso his only real rival.  And Velasquez.  I have to admit that I like Goya’s darker paintings (or “black” paintings as he termed them) and his portraits of the talentless trash that ruled Spain at his time.  And of course, the dog buried in sand.

As we are in Barcelona we do not get the top grade exhibitions (they go to Madrid) so I expect that this Goya exhibition will be heavier on the etchings of The Disasters of War than of oil paintings.  But we will see.

I want my money back!

I have now made the made the ultimate mistake of looking at the weather forecast for the holiday week.  Unrelieved gloom with cloud and rain throughout.  Only at the end of the holiday is there a little glimpse of warmer weather.  Some irony is too hard to bear!

But I have made as much as I could out of today, greedily taking in as many of the rays as is humanly possible from the Third Floor and the garden.  I have done my good deeds by getting the lunch and cleaning the car – who can ask for more!

It is hard to believe that the flawless evening skies are going to degenerate into rain sodden horror.  But that is what the weather forecast threatens and I am in the right frame of mind to believe it!

More than ever I hate dogs – or at least their barking.  Quite apart from the obnoxious curs next door, today was made notable by the monotonous, squeaky yapping of some rat-dog in the flats to our left.  Dog owners, generally speaking, do not have the consideration of a dead slug.  Dead slugs (or even live ones) after all do not leave mounds of shit on pavements and they are certainly not raucous in any way shape or form.  Whereas the debased and etiolated dog derivatives that people in this area parade at the end of a string are an insult to canine kind and the mutants take every opportunity to bewail their disgusting in-bred state. 

And that’s just the people!

At the moment it is dark.  A Sunday evening.  And it’s wonderful.

To understand why, you have to be a teacher.  Sunday evenings are technically part of the weekend but for teachers the pleasure is poisoned by the thought of the morrow when the hapless educators have to return to their toil. 

Consequently a Sunday without the misery of a teaching day following is a gained day and a delightful night!

Tomorrow, tasks and writing.  This evening, praying that the weather forecast is wrong!