Cry Freedom!

Our first day of freedom and, I am not joking, without You-Know-Who there is a different and more tranquil feel to our place of habitation.  Long may it continue.  At least one hopes for the bulk of the next ten months!

They are gone.  Enough about they already!

Yet again for the bulk of my time in the pool I was the only one breaking the waters.  And, as opposed to yesterday I (I) was the fastest in the pool today.  I obviously have to get used to the timetable which I can now, in my fashionably retired way, follow. 

I need to ensure that I am swimming when those who are fully retired are swimming and not in the odd periods in the day when toilers in the chains of employment are able to slip their restraints and dive into the water and rip my self respect from my flailing limbs.

I also seem to coincide with vast numbers of students from the school next door to the leisure centre who take up the majority of the outside seating for the duration of their school breaks.  This is now the major disadvantage of the leisure centre: it is virtually impossible to go there without having clear visual and moving reminders of school. 

The new playground runs the length of the leisure centre main building and whatever time I go there it appears to be one class or another’s turn to wander about in school uniform and able by their mere presence to strike at the very heart of a truly retired person!

Today has been a really fine day and I am hoping for many more during the autumn and winter months.  All I ask is that the weather is fine enough for me to sit outside on the Third Floor so that I can work in the open rather than in the rather cramped quarters of the Tea Room!

My new course material has now been “in transit” for a week and I am expecting it at any time, while at the same time dreading that the Spanish Post Office has lost it again.  I will leave the requisite ten days and then contact the OU at once; better to have two sets of material than to have none at the start of the course.

I have dipped into the forum for my new course and have sampled the barely controlled hysteria which seems to be the default setting for those souls brave enough to tempt the Muses and attempt Creative Writing!  One of the keys for success in the OU is the composition of the group of students that you are landed with in your tutor group.  If you are lucky then you will find people on your wavelength and others who are able to push you forward.

The last two courses have been with students who are in Europe and most of them are not British.  I am not sure what difference this is going to make with Creative Writing.  Some of the non-British students have incredible fluency in English, but I am not sure that they will be considering Creative Writing as the next stage in their studies.

It will be very interesting to see who else is taking this course.  We, in Europe, are linked with the North of England in the tutor group as a whole and so I expect that the majority of people taking the course will be from there rather than in Europe.  As this is a second level course there will be a higher level of entry so that may limit the numbers of people taking the course around me.  We shall, as we say, see.

My essay still has not come back and its delay (she does have another two days before the limit of the OU is broken!) is irritating, I find it difficult to get deeply into my revision with the outstanding piece of work unresolved.  Still, everything should be sorted by the end of the week.

On Thursday I am touching base with an ex-colleague for an evening chat – and I should also be doing my revision for the start of the Opera season which also starts next month.

All to do!

Gone!

Day 0 + 7  DD!

In spite of real fear that they might stay, our hated neighbours went through their usual rituals of closure for the house and they finally departed for another year this evening.

To celebrate I made a jug of the Cava and lemon sorbet mixture that we first had in Irene’s barbecue.  Its deliciousness is tempered by the “headache effect” that comes with it when consumed with too much eagerness.  And it is so good that not to gulp it down seems to unreasonably limit the fun of drinking it in the first place.

Having said that I, even I, didn’t manage a second glass.  Well, not all of a second glass anyway.  Toni sufficed with his usual sip and we felt that we had done our duty by the despised departed.  And, in a truly appropriate example of the pathetic fallacy the rain is lashing down – a ritual washing of the area to cleanse it of the late baleful presence!

One of the delights is that I am able to sit near an open window and not have the smoke from the countless fags of the neighbour blowing into it as she sits at the open window in her house willing the noxious stream towards us.  Or that may just be my paranoia speaking.  Though I don’t think so.

Anyway they are gone and the whole atmosphere will improve.  Unfortunately their departure also signals the departure of the summer - which is a time of sadness to put against the delight of the flight to the city of our unwelcome irritants.

My lunchtime swim was again taken in glorious isolation in water that was less than warm.  The music vibrating through my bones continues to delight – more, it has to be said from the grotesquely unlikely juxtapositions that come from using the “random” setting which plucks tracks from the full memory of the device and plonks them in an order that has to be heard to be believed, than from the individual quality of the tracks themselves.

It can sometimes be a little perilous as, once or twice, I have laughed at the sheer oddness of the music that I am listening to – and that is not the cleverest thing to do with your head under water!

I am now addicted to wearing my music in the pool and am considering buying a second device to make sure that my swimming is uninterrupted.  The life of these devices is limited and however much the individual manufacturers try and convince you, the watertight ability of anything which is also supposed to produce music is less perfect that they would have you believe.  Unfortunately the Finis Neptune is not cheap so buying a second one is not some sort of casual gesture.

Tomorrow revision continues with my burrowing more and more deeply into the function, meaning and significance of relics.

Always waiting!

Day 0 + 6  [DD -1]

Today and tomorrow will be like the Ides of March for us.  Every small sound and every movement of our next-door neighbours will be garnered and analysed to provide incontrovertible proof that the Great Migration back to the City has begun.

We have not really considered the consequences of their staying any longer than Sunday.  If they are still here next week then our only recourse will be to apply to the United Nations to get their behaviour recognized as “cruel and unnatural” and therefore be considered officially as torture.  I would anticipate getting the Consul in Barcelona involved first then via our Embassy in Madrid bringing the full weight of the British Government to put our case to the Security Council and then presumably tactical air strikes from the USA (with the help of France nowadays!) to put us our of our misery.

Talking of the United Nations, I was gratified to see that United Nations Day this year is the date for a General Strike in support of Education here in Catalonia!  As that date, of the 24^th of October, is also the celebration of a much more important event I find the synergy of the two occasions converging as something which is too good an opportunity to miss.  I do hope that there is some way for the Birthday Boy to give his support to such a significant event.  A birthday to remember. 

And that reminds me, my little red flags of the CCOO which have been proudly stuck in flowerpots in the garden have pinkified and disintegrated so I will need new ones to show my affiliation and support!

Next week should see the arrival of the learning material for the next OU course arrives.  And if it doesn’t then I am going to the post office here to make enquiries as their past history is not very convincing on the actual delivery of any parcels entrusted to their tender care.

I am still waiting for the mark for the last essay.  Our poor tutor has had a complete technological deprivation as the Wi-Fi and telephone service in her remote location collapsed and without computer access the whole of the OU tutor system fails. 

As she is a rapid marker she rarely takes up the allotted “ten working days” to get the work done but she has asked us to be patient this time.  As usual I have worked out that she doesn’t actually need to get the work back until the 18^th of September, but I do hope it is sooner as there is a sense of limbo which comes when you are waiting for the last piece to be tidied up and it is a nagging distraction to getting settled down to make the next concentrated effort.

Toni is now getting back to his studies as his course has now started again and he will have an examination some time in December of January.  At least mine will be out of the way some twelve weeks before his – though I have another one looming in the summer of next year and five or six tutor marked assignments to complete before then.  And all of it self-inflicted!  Ah, the masochism of learning!

Disaster!

OK, it’s my fault . . . but . . .

Through an oversight I left my iPhone on a table on the terrace of the third floor.  And it rained.  Luckily I left the phone on a table that was partially sheltered from the storms but a “few” drops of rain did get to the iconic surface of the machine.

I dried it and hoped fore the best and, lo and behold, it worked.  For a while.  This morning I unplugged the thing and it had not taken its charge.  And now it is just an inert block of well-designed metal and glass.

We are about to go out to lunch and I have left it plugged in in the hope that . . . in the hope . . . in the . . . in . . .

And another thing. 

I find it deeply suspicious that my phone should give up the ghost at precisely the moment that Apple has announced a new iPhone 5S.  Suspicious and fatal!

However, for this lunchtime I will live in hope and pray that my phone recovers and that all things may be well.

Please.

But they weren’t.

The phone was taken out of its enclosing battery case and plugged in with the official plug and lead.  And nothing.

So admitting defeat I came downstairs and demonstrated to Toni how it wasn’t accepting its charge.  When it did.  Why do things behave like that.  At least I hadn’t admitted the putative disaster and so it just seemed like a slight glitch, obviously the fault of a power adaptor upstairs.

So that happy event has saved me a few hundred euros!  Thank god for inconsistency!

Still waiting!

Day 0 + 5

Again alone in the pool.  Well, guards and odds and sods, but no one else parting the waters.  Delightful.  It didn’t last and I soon found myself the slowest of the swimmers – apart that it is from an old duffer who did a version of the vertical dogpaddle that becomes the stroke of choice for those of a certain age.

I remember the times when I set myself a couple of lengths to lap a swimmer to my left or right, and now I fear that I am that lapee rather than a lapper!  Times change and they were both much, much younger than me.  Why weren’t they respectively in school and work!

I am swimming for longer – I think to justify the amount of time I spend afterwards drinking my “tea” and playing Candy Crush on my mobile phone.  I have discovered the way to play the game and that is to play it until the clearances are clearly impossible without resorting to payment and then get rid of the game from the device.  My iPad is now Candy Crush free and my mobile phone is rapidly going that way.

The sun shone again today and it was even warm enough to stretch out on the third floor – which I did.  It is getting cooler though, even I have to admit this - and autumn is in the air!

I will, however deny reality for as long as possible and my wearing of shorts and sandals will continue until the hairs on my legs freeze and my toe nails go blue.  And I will drink café con hielo until summer.

It now turns out that the alcalde (mayor) of Madrid was coached for her embarrassing speech in English to the International Olympic Committee for months before she gave it and the writing and coaching cost nearly a million euros!  I find this almost impossible to believe, except of course, I am in Spain where things like this are absolute normality and are usually lost in the tsunami of corruption which is expected. 

But things are being looked at in a little more detail thanks to the spotlight of the crisis, so the writhing, grasping and blatant theft which is daily highlighted by a growingly exasperated press must lead them to be wondering what more they have to do to get this bunch of self-seekers to pack their bags and go where they belong – behind bars.

The corruption stretches “up” to the royal family which, with the traditional greed of the very rich has show itself to be rooting around in exactly the same way as the lowest forms of political life.

Tomorrow lunch with Irene and more revision and tidying and, who knows, a little bit of sunshine too.