Bitter and Sweet

There comes a time in every thinking adult’s life when he looks around at the sources of public pleasure that he has and debates one of the pressing questions of life: how much would you be prepared to pay to keep kids out of where you are.

I am still being blessed in the local pool by my continuing to have an empty lane to swim in but, even with ear plugs and one’s head underwater the piercing screams of the under age cut through placidity and contentment and spoil the experience.

I have come to the conclusion that I would be prepared to pay double the membership cost of any club that strictly enforces any ban against children being found anywhere on the site of any organization of which I am a member.  Especially the swimming pool.

Even though I was in a separate lane a few children drifted from their watery enclosures like deadly jellyfish, their legs trailing like the poisonous filaments of that irritating sea creature, towards my solitary route – almost as if any disruption in the surface of the pool dragged them unerringly towards my scything progress from end to end.

In the end it was not the children who slowed me down but rather their besotted father who, to amuse his ADS kids lurked underwater like some grotesque octopus, limbs akimbo rising slowly to the surface and straddling the area between separated lanes, including the one I was in.  To such depths are adults driven to keep their offspring amused, ignoring the justified and necessary space which is a sacred right of those who actually swim in swimming pools!

And the torture is not confined to the pool itself.  Outside the leisure centre is a café with a delightful outdoor, tree shaded sitting area.  I sat there with my two-bag cup of tea and settled down to read my new Lucky Bag Kindle with the Kindle version of the Independent on it.  This laudable determination was almost frustrated by a small, but disproportionately loud child who refused to shut up.  Her female guardian did try and shush her a few times but her guardian’s general level of speaking was at a shout so it was perhaps easy to see why the smaller version was no objectionable.

During my cup of tea I thought that paying three times the membership fees to exclude the young would be a bargain.

However I am not stupid.  I know perfectly well that the place which has provided me with a free lane for my 20 minute intense swim is only there because of families, which are the mainstay of this organization, pay their fees and keep the place alive.  The links with schools and the number of groups of kids paying their money for summer activities actually allow me to enjoy the facilities without paying a fortune for them!  So reality informs prejudice!

My new watch (another part of the Retirement Lucky Bag) arrived this morning and became the first thing actually delivered by Amazon’s choice of Castelldefels delivery agent!

The watch is almost perfect having all the major attributes of an acceptable timepiece that I demand: numbers, day/date, sweep second hand, luminous, waterproof.  As an added advantage this Seiko watch is solar and therefore powered by the sun.  How I don’t know as there is no obvious “cell” but it means that the battery never need be changed.  The only cavilling objections are that the clear white face is a little small and the metal strap a little thin – but I am pleased and will see how it manages tonight and during the hours of darkness.  It certainly hasn’t stopped yet!

Tomorrow Toni’s mum’s respite comes to an end and we will be going to Terrassa for the celebration of a birthday in a particularly family-fiesta heavy period of the year.

Over the next few days the rest of my Lucky Bag should arrive – the last elements of which I am much looking forward to!

Something for me!

At last something from my Retirement Lucky Bag.  The delivery people in Castelldefels have kept up their unenviable record of never having actually managed to deliver anything they were supposed to actually to the house.  So, yet another visit to the town headquarters and the first part of my Lucky Bag: a Kindle.

Now, of course I do already have a Kindle, I had one almost as soon as they were announced – but that one is old and heavy, not like the svelte new version which is small and compact and light as a feather.

As soon as it was taken out of its elegant and economic container and powered up it recognized that I already had a Kindle and offered to download the content I already had in the other – which it did in double quick time.

It is a simple delight and Kindle deserve the success it has had, but a nagging doubt about the ethics of the whole affair does disturb.  Kindle has access to the whole of my library and can do what they like with it.  As they have shown in the past when it turned out that they did not actually have the right to sell one of Orwell’s novels and deleted it from Kindles around the world!  But I am too impressed by the sheer wonder of the thing to think too deeply about the wider implications – at the moment.

I have downloaded free extracts from two other books by Peter Watson whose work has mind-bendingly wide ranges of reference and he seems to write books for which the book he is writing is necessary to write the book itself.  If you see what I mean!  I think that I will delay the downloads until the colder and less sunny months of the year when I will be able to concentrate more.

My swim in the larger pool was just that bit harder because of my couple of days slippage from the daily effort but as if to encourage me, yet again I had a wide lane free to do my exercise!  This is getting weird as I am pushing what sort of swimming luck there is for this luxury of uninterrupted swimming space.  Long may it continue.

Today has been gloriously sunny, one of the hottest days of the year so far.  I only hope that this weather keeps up.

I have completed another summer task, but I haven’t started on the big ones yet.  When the weather breaks perhaps.

Worth it?

Don’t get me wrong, I like electrical stores: gleaming screens; metallic finishes; flashing blue lights; gadgets of all sorts – the uses of many of them beyond human understanding – lots and lots of stuff.  My idea of paradise.  But it all seems different when you are watching two guys working for two hours on a very expensive printer than stubbornly refused to do double-sided printing.  Which was the reason that it was bought.

Things were not helped by one of the men dropping a fairly important part of the machinery before we started, but nevertheless they ploughed on buoyed up by a stubborn belief that if the machine had a double-sided capability for one thing that I didn’t want then it would also have that capability for the thing that I did.

And they were right, eventually, though things were complicated because they were using Windows and I have a Mac.  The menu pages were and are different and I kept asking them to take me through from the beginning of the process to the end.  I left when they successfully (eventually) managed to produce a double-sided page – actually, as they had no documents to hand they printed out one of mine from my memory stick, my description of what happened in Hamlyn from the point of view of the Pied Piper!

Back home one of the first things that I did was to drop the part that was dropped in the store – luckily it still worked, as I found out when I experimented with clicking wildly at anything that showed its head in the menu page which bore no resemblance to anything that I had seen in store!

But it is now working – as it bloody well should giving how much it cost!

So today has been a little unbalanced with my ignoring the splendid weather and spending my time in an air-conditioned shop.

The afternoon was the beach.  There is a sea breeze which makes the heat tolerable, but we have been told that tomorrow the heat is going to be dangerously high so we will probably go to the beach at about four or five in the afternoon.

My swimming is getting steadily better, but I haven’t been to the “big” pool for a few days and swimming lengths in a smaller pool flatters one’s stamina and power – I need to come down to reality and make sure that I go for a good long swim tomorrow without the little boost of a push-off every 20 metres or so!

Nothing from my Amazon Retirement Lucky Bag has yet arrived.

Music al fresco

A whole Sibelius symphony was not something that I expected from the Southampton University Student Orchestra – but it was what we got, sitting in the evening sunshine and surrounded by skaters, cyclists and casual passers-by.  We also got Valse Triste, Masquarade, Nimrod, some odd Russians and finishing with a typical Catalan Sardana – which got the loudest and most enthusiastic response of the evening.

I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and it was a real treat to hear such music in the open air and virtually at the bottom of our street!

Evaluation of the performances must take into account that the performers were students, it was in the open air and there were many distractions ranging from explosions to one small irritating girl bounding a ball not quite in the same rhythm as the orchestra!

The strings were the weakest part of the ensemble with the first violins sounding less than convincing in some of the more exposed passages.  Though the rendition of Valse Triste was given a commanding performance where the quiet parts of the piece enforced attention in spite of the many distractions. The brass was unconfined and a little rangy in their approach while the woodwind were, in my view the most successful part of the orchestra.

Talking to the conductor at the end of the concert during which I managed to get the number of the Sibelius symphony wrong (unforgivable in a confirmed Sibelian like myself) he seemed genuinely grateful that a Briton had listened and taken time to express thanks.  Their appearance seemed to be almost whimsical as the orchestra travels abroad every year and decides sometimes on a vote where they will go.  The programme is then arranged with performances being fitted in where they could be.  It seems it was just luck that they figured in our local celebrations.  Lucky us.

Today, as if to complement the cultural feast last night, my tickets for the operas in the Liceu for next season have arrived.  I think.  I am still not convinced that I have bought anything as the Catalan for the experience ha been impenetrable.  Somewhere else I will have to phone up and discover what, if anything, I have got confirmed for next season.

Having gone out to get replacements cartridges for my printer I came back with a new one which seemed to offer exactly what I wanted in a printer.

Perhaps inevitably I think I am disappointed.  One of the essential features for me was the ability of the machine to do double sided printing automatically.  This is doesn’t seem to do in spite of the assistant in the shop having hunted through the Internet to find out if it could.  The only double-sided printing that I can find is double sided copying from two originals which is not what I had in mind when I bought it.  Tomorrow I will go back to the shop with the instructions booklet and ask him to show me where double-sided printing of documents can be done.  Then I will take the whole machine back.  Sigh!

Today has been a blazingly hot day with only the brisk wind making it bearable.  I can live with that.

This evening I met Irene and we discussed the future and have given each other a series of research projects to get started on.  Our plans, as always, are far-reaching and enthusiastic – how realistic they are we will have to wait for our conclusions to be drawn from what we find out.  I remain optimistic.  As ever.

I retire to my bed eager for the contents of my Retirement Lucky Bag to start arriving!

Swim for life!

A Proustain moment has been reached in my swimming.

Today, Sunday, I swam for the whole of my allotted time using a vigorous overarm movement and was not totally exhausted at the end of it.  When was the last time that I did that?  Remembrance of times past indeed!

I put part of this new/old approach to exercise down to my new sandals.  My old ones have been worn down to the soles so that it is now like walking on marble, a hard joint-jolting experience.  The cheap shop in Castelldefels provided nothing of any use for a replacement, so we went to El Corte Ingles for a more expensive solution.

The ones I ended up with are indeed reassuringly expensive and are the next best thing to a gadget I could find.  These are Skechers “Shape-ups” which are designed with a sole which deliberately unbalances you forcing you, in theory, to adopt the correct heel-to-toe approach to walking. 

There are all sorts of other claims for these sandals all of which have the all-important word “may” inserted carefully before any assertion of positive results!  But they do feel better and, after an extended walk yesterday evening to see the fireworks I have to say that my knees do not feel as if the regulation amount of powdered glass has been forced into the joints this morning!  You never know, it “may” be that they do exactly what they tentatively claim on the box!

Needless to say I did not take what I consider to be an adequate photograph yesterday and will have to see what one part of my Retirement Lucky Bag can offer to help my technique when it arrives!

So far three weeks of the summer holiday have gone and I have completed precisely one of the summer tasks that I set myself.  At this rate I will be well into next year before they are all complete.  Just as well that I do not have to go back to school in September!  Always a reassuring thought!

As part of the celebrations of the “Festes del Mar” in Castelldefels, Toni’s Mum and I went to a concert in the Església del Carme, Can Bou this evening.  We cut it very fine and arrived late but luckily Spanish tardiness worked in our favour and we were just in time for the start.

The church is a modern affair with three spike protuberances poking out of the roof.  The interior space is in the form of a truncated triangle with the statue of the Virgin occupying the cut off bit.

This particular Mary is voluminously dressed and is sitting on a golden chair and looking a bit like Catherine the Great sitting on one of her “special” thrones and adopting a haughty look to cover what is going on down below!  Her face betrays not a hint of the Semitic and I have to say that if the Mother of Christ looked anything like the self satisfied over dressed WASP bourgeois in that church she must have created a great deal of gossip in a few BC Israel well before Joseph was tempted “privilly to put her away.”

Anyway, idols apart, the space was not very welcoming and the acoustic was unsympathetic to put it mildly.

The first part of the concert was taken by the Agrupament Musical Sant Josep Obrer de Sant Boi and the programme comprised a variety of pieces arranged for wind band.  The playing was enthusiastic rather than subtle and was certainly not helped by the acoustic.  It was like listening to the music through industrial cavity insulation.  But enjoyable nevertheless.

The second part of the concert was taken by the Assocìació Musical de Castelldefels and was of altogether a higher quality.  For the first time in my life I heard the Intermezzo from the second L’Arlésienne Suite scored for wind band and accordion!  A remarkably effective sound was produced and the enthusiasm of the home audience for the piece was markedly louder than for the Sant Boi opposition!

The concert ended with the combination of forces and the playing of Sardanas – the music for the national dance of Catalonia.  The evening ended with a spirited rendition of the “Himne de Castelldefels” – something I did not know existed.  Toni’s mum was not pleased as Terrassa does not have a hymn of its own.  Hah!

This is the final verse of this incomparable song:

Castelldefels, el meu poble,

On tothom conviu en pau.

La gent som diversa,

Some germans a l’Univers

Castelldefels, terra meva,

Sempre vas dins del meu cor.

De Catalunya som

I del poble de la flor del margalló

CASTELLDEFELS!

I am not going to translate it.

We both felt that Toni had missed out in not attending such a jolly gathering and hearing such an enthusiastic affirmation of the reasons for living where we do!

Today, Monday, is the Santa of Carmen so we have just returned from Our restaurant after eating a mariscada giving us sufficient energy to try and get to the orchestral concert this evening played by the world famous Southampton University Student Symphony Orchestra.  If it is half as good as the rollicking concert we went to on Sunday evening it will be well worth the effort of attending!

I wait to be wowed!

How little times change!

It is clearly unfair to use experience in a single firm dating back some forty years to start pontificating about a present situation.  That, however, will not stop me.

I am relieved that the build up to the opening of the Olympic Games has taken a more traditional form with disaster looming in the shape of the breath-taking incompetence of G4S with regards to the provision of security personnel for the Games.

I do not take the exponentially increasing cost of the Games as anything other than totally normal but at this point, with a couple of weeks to go we are usually being regaled with stories of half-built venues; inadequate competitor accommodation and traffic chaos.  I have been denied most of these traditional horror stories as venues have been built with an indecent amount of time left for them to be tried out.  But that was then and this is now.

A bridge over the M4 dating back to the sixties has developed cracks and is being repaired with “no guarantee” that the closure of lanes between Heathrow and London will be over by Monday when the bulk of athletes arrive.  At an airport where the queues to pass immigration are things of legend.  But the G4S scandal is the cherry on the top of the cake of institutional corruption.

When I was still in school I worked for a firm which demanded that I sign a document which made the official secrets act look like a model of liberality.  I was to reveal nothing about anything while I was working for them and especially after I left. 

So all I can say is that the firm was to do with Security and they were then regarded as part of the core of the industry.  And after seeing how they approached security (I would not have trusted them to deliver a dead slug safely to its destination) I was not surprised that they demanded workers sign a non-disclosure agreement.

However the chances of such an organization still having the paper that I signed is so remote as to be inconceivable, given the slapdash attitude towards security that I witnessed there.

It is therefore not even with a smidgen of surprise that I learned of the crass incompetence of G4S.  Could this be a descendant of the Group 4 organization which was treated with contempt even by the bunch of chancers that I worked for?  God help!  It seems that not much has changed in the decades since I worked for such a bunch of money seeking, tight-fisted, incompetent wasters.

I hope, but do not expect, the government to claim swingeing compensation for this woeful lack of ability to deliver what they have been paid two hundred and thirty million quid to do!

But I do wish the Games well – even though I am shuddering at the thought of the Opening Ceremony and starting to worry now about our winning the single gold that would ensure that we don’t join a Canadian city as being the only host nation not to win a single gold.  And there is the question of the First Day Covers.

The Post Office has stated that each gold won by Britain will be marked by the issue of a special stamp the day after.  I have already authorized the Philatelic Bureau to send me a cover for each gold won.  In the last Olympics I understand we won 19.  That is a lot of first day covers!  I hope!  You see, no matter how sad you think I am, I am indeed sadder!

Toni’s mother continues to cook and we had a delightful Vichyssoise today with Toni sticking to augmented potato salad instead – I think it was the cheese in the mix that he objected to; he missed out on a delicious hot soup.

Tonight as part of the celebrations of Santa Carmen del Mar there are fireworks so yet another attempt on my part to try and capture one decent photo of an exploding structured piece of gunpowder!  I never give up.

Monday is Carmen’s Santo and we are planning to have a mariscada; timing is the problem as there is a concert by Southampton University Student Orchestra which includes Finlandia, Vltava, The Sabre Dance and Land of Hope and Glory – or perhaps I am being unduly snobbish in assuming a popularist programme just from reading the list of composers.  We shall see.

I have now sent off to Amazon (Spain and UK) for the contents of my Retirement Lucky Bag.  Which I surely deserve to enjoy before the austerity days of September hit!

Although, there again, September is the date when we are going to the restaurant in Girona which is one of the best in the world, so it is austerity with a twist!

Everyone has to adjust to poverty in his own way.

The old concern!

It must be admitted by the most hopelessly prejudiced observer of what is correct and appropriate that every up-and-down swimmer has rights.  They, OK I, swim from one end of the swimming pool to the other taking up but a small proportion of the total pool area and that small proportion is taken in an easily predictable way.

Nevertheless this small imposition remains something that mere paddlers, especially those of stunted years, find impossible to take on board as they frivolously splash their way around the pool.

Children are, therefore “fair game” and, over the years, once I have ploughed out my furrow in the pool, I take no prisoners.

When the “swimmers’ lane” is a narrow length of water clearly delineated by float lines children enter it at their peril.  One particularly pernicious inadequately parentally supervised little boy thought it a good wheeze to swim against one of the restraining lines of floats thereby reducing the narrow width even further and causing a potentially serious accident as a strong swimmer producing a semi-professional crawl, OK me.  It wasn’t serious but it was irritating and I used the traditional aggressive technique of choice in these situations and adopted a space-filling breaststroke.

The most effective aspect of this anti-invader stroke is the leg kick, with the emphasis on the “kick” part.  I have recently cut my nails so the “slicing” part of the arm action was unfortunately lessened.  He got the message.

A small girl who I bumped into at the other end (entirely her parents’ fault) was more frightened by my apology (instinctive rather than heartfelt) rather than the collision.

Otherwise I have had a lane to swim in each time that I have gone to the pool which is in itself remarkable.  Long may it continue!

Sound, always sound!

One thing about the back of beyond in Normandy and a well-insulated and double glazed hotel in a remote suburb of Paris is the lack of noise.  By God I realize the difference now that I am back home!

The day begins with the Dogwoman next door taking one of her brood for a walk and thus provoking one of the others to bark in the monotonous threnody of loss that marks her departure – and which tell us that it is time to think about getting up.  Which we don’t of course, it being holiday and everything and so we endure the heartfelt howls of loss and then wait in tense expectation if the bloody animal suddenly shuts up, and then there is relief mixed with exasperation when it starts again.

We then have a neighbour opening and closing his gate which can only be done by slamming the thing and letting it vibrate metallically and loudly – and which of course stimulates the dog to an ecstasy of barking.

When this dies down we then have to endure our shouty neighbour on the other side of the road driving the white van over a strategically placed piece of metal so that it make a hollow ringing sound which is louder than anything that has gone before.

And then, if you are lucky, the planes start.

Then normal life starts and cars, vans and lorries pass.

As soon as we are up we move to the other side of the house and are within earshot of the swimming pool.  There are now four or five phases of noise.  The first is the French.  This comprises two ineffectual parents and two repulsive children the youngest of whom after shrieking for the first ten minutes or so then starts bawling.

This is then followed by the basso profundo of a grandfather calling his errant grandson to order.  Constantly.  He (the child) then starts crying too.

A recent new level of sound has recently been reached by the addition to our motley crew of a horde of Indian lads who yell their way around the pool and dive bomb the water and then spend the next few hours trying to push each other in.  At this point the discordant symphony of sound has reached the sort of intensity where it can only be dealt with by joining it.

Swimming with earplugs and under water only the most piercing of childish shouts can penetrate!  Tranquillity!

Another day of cloudy skies in the morning and bright sunshine in the afternoon.  Suits me.

I have started the tasks of the summer and spoken to someone in Cardiff about my finances.  He was patience itself in trying to get me back onto the website that catalogues the mismanagement of my funds since I put them there five years ago.  The only people who have done well out of my savings are the fund managers.  The Investment Bankers.  The people who have done their best to destroy the western banking system.  The bastards as they are know to the rest of us.

However, their Internet voice in Cardiff was courtesy itself and turned out to be a member of an old ice cream making family in Cardiff, now long gone.  I have a good mind to contact the organization and give the guy the credit he deserves.  It is little enough that one has reason to be thankful for an anonymous voice on the so-called help lines!  One should celebrate true help when one finds it!

At least my savings still exist even if the “steady if unspectacular growth” is hardly a feature of my so-called investment.

Ah well, these things test and improve character.  Probably.

Back home!

The lack of egg for breakfast was given a further twist when one of the unsympathetic kitchen workers actually went out of her way to show me the recently arrived cardboard box filled with microwaveable ersatz egg – and then did nothing with them.  Ah Paris in July!

I read my catalogue for the Marmottan Monet Museum rather than pack and so Irene’s knock at the door galvanized me into action and everything was piled into suitcases and we were read to make our way to the airport.

Irene hates everything to do with airports and flying and therefore, in a way in which is understandingly perverse, she demands that we arrive in the concourse at a time which to me seems unbearably early.

Our plane was scheduled to fly at 6.30 pm and we set off at midday when we left the hotel!

Admittedly our airport CD Gaulle (as the GPS called it) was at the other end of the city from where we were staying but it should have taken us no more than 40 minutes to get there on the outer circular road.

Which we could not get on as the entrance had been blocked off.  The GPS tried to get us back to the blocked entry with a determination which even seemed to express itself in a certain exasperation in her perfectly modulated voice as I ignored her “recalculation” attempts to redirect.  Eventually we managed to find another entry and joined the very heavy lunchtime traffic going around the city.

At least we were not going the other way, because the drivers there weren’t going anywhere as we passed kilometre after kilometre of static traffic.  For Irene, the traffic jam on the opposite side of the road justified our early start because that “could have been us!”

To facilitate our return I had, rather intelligently I thought, marked our starting point when we hired the car as one of the “favourites” on the GPS.  This brought us to the airport with relatively few problems except we needed to top up the petrol to avoid being penalized.  Finding the airport petrol station was difficult but once found we had to get back to the drop off point.  One missed turning and suddenly we were directed another 9 kilometres to turn around!

It seemed as if we would have to fill up again to ensure that the pointer was still at the full point of the dial.  It was particularly galling that to turn around we had to leave the motorway and pay a toll and then pay another toll at the other end of the roundabout to get back on to the motorway!

We finally made it back to the airport and the drop off point for the car by ignoring the advice of the GPS and going on signs and intelligence to get us there.

The walk to our terminal from the drop off point was absurdly long and it felt as though we had been condemned to another version of Jean Paul Sartre’s existential vision of damnation where hell certainly was other people. 

To pass the hours of time before the check in opened we decided to have lunch.  A three-course lunch was €25: poached eggs with chopped chives and mayonnaise and salad; braised salmon with tarragon sauce and basmati rice – and the highlight of the meal a raspberry tart with cream.  For an airport, the meal was good; for a restaurant only the tart would have been truly acceptable.

The flight was entirely without incident with the exception of my finding a free seat over the wing with consequent legroom for the journey.

We arrived back in Barcelona to floods of sunshine which have been abruptly cut off this morning by sullen skies.  I hold fast to my belief that Spanish weather does not deny sunshine for an entire day to the faithful.

Now, off to Terrassa to pick up Toni and his mother to bring them down to the positively Parisian gloom of Castelldefels.

But it is a Tuesday and I am on holiday.  So who cares?