Back to the rains!

There is nothing more chilling than the pilot of the plane that you are in telling you in a chatty conversational sort of way that the fog on the runway at Bristol was at the top end of the tolerances that the aircraft could manage and that there was a distinct possibility of being diverted to another airport.

The dull thudding noise that followed this announcement was the sound of my head hitting the seat in front as I contemplated with horror the possibility of all my plans going awry and slumped forward in despair.

In the event we landed safely (if a little bumpily) and we were soon out into the fog shrouded, drizzle soaked delights of Bristol Airport.

For once we did not have the epic walk to passport control as the plane thoughtfully parked itself directly outside the door down the stairs to what was usually a packed cattle pen of disgruntled travellers waiting for the stony faced official to let them in.  Not this time!  Straight through!

Even the car was upgraded as direct compensation for the atrocious weather conditions!

The drizzle became driving rain as I was indeed driving and thus my welcome back to the old country was complete.

On the positive side, tickets were available for the concert in Saint David’s Hall and so, after a reviving glass of wine with the Pauls I set off into the murky depths of town to join the throngs who were already there waiting to watch Wales being defeated at rugby by Samoa.

Oblivious to the impending sporting disaster the extra people in town meant that parking in John Lewis was a little more drawn out and I got to the Hall as the concert was starting and therefore could not be allowed in until the first item on the programme (Masonic Funeral Music by Mozart K477/K479A) I was allowed to stand at the back until the item ended and then I took my rather fine seat.

Looking around at the audience there were many faces that I recognized from previous visits, though I have to admit that the faces were more creased and the hair a little sparser!

Hans Werner Henze’s “Movements from the Requiem” followed with the selection being the Introitus, Agnus Dei and Sanctus.  I don’t know if I am getting older and more liberal in my approach to modern music, but I found the music delicate and lyrical with the two soloists Simon Phillippo (piano) and Dean Wright (trumpet) playing the part of voices in this wordless piece of music.  Splendid performances all round with the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera playing the taxing music with ease and style.

The main part of the concert was a performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor, K626 when the orchestra was joined by the Chorus of Welsh National Opera for a spirited rendition of the music.  The Rex Tremendae sent shivers down my spine and I remembered how much I enjoyed live orchestra musical performances.  I really must make more effort to go to more concerts in Barcelona, in spite of the difficulties of travel and the extra expense involved.

In the interval Mike and Lyn hove into view and a pleasingly esoteric conversation ensued.  I was tempted to reply in the affirmative when asked if I had come to Wales specifically for the night’s performance, as it had the right ring of pretention to it, but truth won out in the end and I admitted that it was for the celebration of a birthday that I was there.

The exhibition in the foyer contained some of Ceri’s paintings: one dramatic painting of an almost geometric cliff whose placing in the exhibition meant that it had impact even at a distance going up the stairs, and another smaller “Dutch” landscape.  I didn’t really have time to do justice to the paintings, but I will return – and this time remember to have lunch under St David’s Hall and not in the disappointing carvery restaurant of the Hall itself.

My return to Rumney allowed me to join the end of Friday Night Club and my eventual falling into bed reminded me that I no longer have my “British” capacity for taking drink!

Today, Saturday, is the day of the party and we still haven’t bought Louise her present.

Alas!  It is now Monday and I have lapsed, yet again, from the straight and narrow of typing every day.  Time to make up.

The party was a great success and the present worked too.

Louise needed Champagne (or as we say in Catalonia, Cava) glasses.  We therefore decided, in a spirit of mischievous jollity to buy some cheap glasses in the “What!” shop and purchase others of finer quality so that we could present her with the first as her ostensible present and then shock her with the quality of the second lot.

Finding cheap glasses of the sort I had in mind was not quite as easy as we had thought and finding decent ones in the time that we had available for the purchase was even more difficult.  Eventually, the cheap glasses bought, we searched for the better ones.  And didn’t find them.  The traffic by this point was so atrocious that the thought of going into town was a daunting one and I could feel desperation begin to scratch at my nerves.

We succeeded however in finding a modern, hand-made glass with a solid stumpy stem which turned out to absolutely perfect for Louise to hold.  They looked so good, in fact that I handed over the present to her with a certain degree of reluctance as I thought that they would look good in Castelldefels!

As we bought the last of the supply in the shop where we eventually found them, there is no possibility of my being able to take a supply home with me.  Greater selflessness has any glass aficionado than to see prime examples of the glassmakers’ art go to another!

In spite of alcoholic exhaustion from the excesses of Mozart and the Friday Night Club which meant that we three were not at our sparkling best at 5.30 pm on the Saturday, we did manage to be the Last To Go from the drinks party after the birthday party and we finally (well, I finally) fell into bed at about 2.30 am on Sunday morning.

My drink intake however was moderate in comparison with certain others and I was able to face the world after a few hours sleep with something other than fatalistic resignation.

Lunch was an excellent lamb dinner cooked by Paul Squared and my dish came with the gravy already added as Paul was determined not to allow me to forego the pleasure.  My attitude to gravy is one which Paul does not understand.  I like gravy, but decide not to have any with my meal.  If given gravy I eat it with gusto and relish but that does not mean that the next time that I am offered this delight that I am going to want it.  As I like gravy, Paul finds my attitude perplexing and downright stupid.  Even I find it a little contradictory, but it makes more sense to me that to others!

Now it is Monday and the skies have opened and it is pouring with rain with skies of that sort of infinite greyness that suggest that the sun has never and will never shine.

Ah well, this is the weather that everyone thinks is traditional in Wales.  And who am I to buck tradition.

Off to Uncle Eric!

A small thing but our own!

I know that, by now I should have grown out of such things but one just goes into overdrive when the cultural status of one’s country is called into question.

It all started with the Electric Submarine – not, as you might think some late sixties early seventies pop group but the actual thing itself.  It turns out, and I am compelled to accept it as some sort of truth, that it might be that the first fully electric submarine might possibly have some degree of Catalan involvement in its production.  I have had this thrown in my face for so long that I was finally goaded to look up a list of Great British Inventions and so began the long trading of one national invention against another.

In what was a remarkable piece of information for me I actually exacerbated the discussion by finding a web site which actually suggested that one of the most famous inventions of the Spanish was Coca-Cola!

You will have to look at the “right” web sites for confirmation, but the one that I looked at (About.com) also included the beret, table football, fish and chips, the mop, sherry, the acoustic guitar and chess!

After this onslaught I was forced to bring in the Big Guns of British inventions where the invention of the postage stamp was one of the more trivial brainwaves when taking radar, the jet engine and the locomotive into consideration – not counting what one site claimed at the greatest British invention, namely The United States of America!

Toni, thereupon changed tack and started to claim Catalan inventions and demanded to know what Wales had given the world.

It turns out that our greatest single invention was the equals sign.

Although I could (and did) point out to Toni that, without the invention of that particular mathematical point the computer on which he was typing would not exist – he seemed particularly unimpressed!

Greater research is needed!

No packing has been done, but Toni’s zest for organization has reached new heights in the reordering of what used to be the chaos of the Third Floor.

My loose CDs are now securely packed into more professional looking cases with even room for expansion!

A structure has been created for my laptop to act as a sort of screen for my studies and I have been forced (forced!) to buy a new wireless keyboard (with integrated touch pad) to make the new sophisticated set up work.  God alone knows what new excesses of reorganization will have been put into effect by the time I get back to Castelldefels after my time in the UK!

After the last few days it is just as well that I am ahead of the official schedule as the variety of trips that we have made to the various shops selling things like door handles, wood, drawers, CD holders and things of that sort have been almost without number.  And have certainly taken up time.

On the positive side the house is getting back into some sort of state of reasonable repair as all the niggling jobs are steadily getting done – though at what cost!  Not necessarily in terms of cash but certain when the amount of time spent on the most trivial of tasks is counted up.

I look on all of it as displacement activity to stop my packing.

Which must be done by Thursday evening because the flight to Bristol is at a reasonably early hour.

The grey suit will have to be packed yet again!  It is truly having something of an outing this year!

Books are never unwanted!

There are six bags filled with my books waiting to be taken to the school in which I was teaching last week.  Each one represents a chunk of my life and is filled with books that I should not be getting rid of.  Even if the books are going to a place where there is a real likelihood that they will be useful and be used.  It is still difficult to give away something that has been part of your life for so long.

The truly worrying thing is that, even though I have now filled more than ten big supermarket shopping bags with books it appears to have made little impression on the overcrowding of my shelves!  My now pathetic belief that I would be able to get rid of sufficient books to have a single line of them on the shelves now seems like an impossible dream!

I feel like the Angel of Death as my pitiless eye roams across each line of books on each vulnerable shelf seeking the victims for the bags.  As I have said the urgent necessity to winnow because of lack of room is convincing but the pain is still real!

What is far more disturbing is that after the next batch of books I am sure that the school will be grateful but panicky that I might actually be preparing to give them even more and they will be desperately sorry but they will not be able to accept a single book extra!

Still, the action that I have taken so far encourages me to carry on and take advantage of the impetus of my clearing urge and be more ruthless.

At the moment many of my books are hidden through chaos and the dispersion of similar volumes throughout my collection.  My holdings of Evelyn Waugh seem to have gone on their own personal diaspora and turn up next to the oddest volumes which have nothing to do with twentieth century literature whatsoever.  But at least I have now discovered more of them in their disparate locations than have come together since they were all on their shelves in Kennerleigh Road in Cardiff!

The more I think of the number of volumes that I have taken out and their slight impact on my total holdings, the more extraordinary my book collection becomes.  I think that “Out with some of the old and in with a lot of the new” will have to be my slogan for the next few weeks.  Even if the school pleads respite from my insistent generosity, I think that I will have to find an alternative victim for the unwanted (how grotesque a word that seems) volumes to allow some semblance of order to return to the battle of the books in my library.

And life goes on.  The OU occupies a pleasing amount of space in my concerns, though if I am absolutely truthful I cannot say that I have been charting new intellectual territories, rather paddling gratefully in mildly interesting shallows.  I fear this may be the lull before the storm as there is the Dreaded Wiki to be produced.

As far as I can work out the Wiki is simply a web page that has to be produced by a group of distance learners over a period of time and then, when it is completed we have, individually, to write a “reflection” on the project.  I though that the whole point of distance learning was that one did everything by oneself.  I am not sure that I wholeheartedly approve of this collaborative malarkey.  I am sure that the Grocer of Grantham would not approve.  If she is still capable of making these sorts of value decisions.

The wholesale “Doing” of the house continues apace with Toni in an especially manic mood.  He can put up with only just so much disorder and then there is a reaction to match the scale, say, of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia to “put things right.”

The Third Floor has been transformed from a sinister labyrinth of four-dimensional material chaos into a pleasant working space with tearoom.  How this has happened I have no real idea, but I do know that I have been involved in its transformation and my exhaustion is plain proof of that!

One of my parts in this clean up has been to get some order into the hundreds of CDs that have not been put away.  I hade the almost fatal mistake of buying various CD holders from the Chinese shops on the grounds that I wasn’t going to throw money away on the over-priced main store versions.  But throw away money I did, as the quality of the ones that I bought was no poor that I have had to buy more expensive alternatives.  Ah well, if nothing else I have had sort-of fun in sorting through CDs that I had forgotten that I possessed!

The “fun” part had well and truly gone after an hour or so, but it took a damn sight longer than that to get some sort of order into the shop worth of discs that I had to sort out.

I am rather pleased by the final result.  A row of rather severe black cases at the top of each the carrying strap flopping outwards give a look of an ancient chained library – a touch of class I feel.  The gaudy Chinese rubbish has been jettisoned!

There is nothing more poignant than buying two prong foreign plugs to replace the good old stalwart rugged three pin “correct” plugs on machines bought in the UK to demonstrate one’s acceptance of a new country.  Cutting the lead to put on a different plug is a statement about staying!

Tomorrow, another visit to the employment office after my little stint in school.  Even though the authorities know perfectly well what you have been doing, they like to see you personally so that they can give you photocopied and stamped pieces of paper.

In a rather more pressing sense I am acutely aware that I am supposed to be going to the UK on Friday and I haven’t even worked out which case to take, let alone packing anything.

Situation normal.

This and that

A strangely empty day, punctuated by jolly telephone conversations with friends.  When you are a long way away from some of your friends it is odd how the telephone creates an equality of perceived proximity: talking to the UK and to a small village just outside Castelldefels were just the same.  All helped of course by the fact that I was talking in English to both!

I got up relatively early because my internal clock is now in a sate of flux because my normal waking up time has had to be adjusted again and again as my circumstances changed.  The last week or so working in a school that was substantially nearer than my usual place of work meant that I could get up earlier as well. 

But my body clock is attuned to getting up at 6.30 am and the luxury of an extra half hour in bed meant that everything felt wrong by the time I was having my shower. 

And now glorious release!

After what felt like a wickedly self-indulgent lie in, but was actually only 8 am, I got up.

And started my OU work.  Thanks to my efforts when I was stuck in front of the kids I am now in advance of the proposed timetable by a couple of weeks and so am beginning to worry about the first tutor marked assignment that we have to complete.

This assignment is the construction of a Wiki which has to be written by a group of we students on line, working together and producing an explanation of the concept of “authority” found in a choice of designated texts and explain our analysis for a group of students in another arts course.  This is not something to which I am looking forward, but other students have written that they found this a very interesting piece of work.  I remain to be convinced!

The work of going through my books and deciding which ones make the growing number of bags of rejects that will make their way to the school that I have just left is soul destroying.  As I put each one on the pile to be given I can remember buying each and for many of them where I bought them.  But reality is a hard taskmaster and I know that I have not cut down very much on my buying of books and there is a limited space available and something has to give.

I have decided to release my critical books unless they have a value as literature as well.  Fun books which I read through and kept and now going.  Frivolous books which years ago I found mildly amusing have been stacked ready for redistribution.  An agéd atlas is staring mournfully at me as I type, topping off a bag of soon to be displaced books.  I am giving away a tome version of my life.  But to make way to the new - that is the concept I use to make it possible.

Tomorrow more bags and the slaughter of innocents continue!

And it will be good to see the books which at present are hidden behind the front row of books on the shelf.  And furthermore I might even be tempted to do what I should have done years ago: sort the books out!