Interesting reality!

To call the two brazen criminals Rato and Blesa (who used to head the Spanish bank, Bankia) scum is, quite frankly an insult to frothy filth.  

          One of these reptilian pieces of slime has managed to evade going to prison as he has been classed as a ‘no risk of flight’ sort of criminal who doesn’t need to be locked up.  I would like to see him walk down the Gran Via and the expression of hatred and contempt that he would find form ordinary citizens of this country would encourage him to go to prison for his own protection!  Neither Rato nor Blessa dare walk down any street in Spain openly because they would be attacked by the people they have impoverished as they have stolen shamelessly from the people in the bank that they plundered.

            I live in hope that the various criminals who have been identified and accused actually end up in the sort of prison that they deserve.  Actually, I consider the ‘sort of prison that they deserve’ to be a rough cell-less penitentiary in Louisiana filled with large, rough men looking for ‘bitches’ – but perhaps my liberal credentials are beginning to slip by saying that and I should say that it is only a joke in poor taste.  But I can’t.  May they rot.  And the whole of the politico-empressorio-bankio-klepto class of them!

            

          The use of ‘black’ credit cards for the movers and shakers of Bankia in which theft was institutionalised has become public knowledge and the criminals involved have had to appear in front of judges and their laughable defence is that they really didn’t know about the criminality of it all.  They thought that almost unlimited spending upon themselves was just another little legal perk for the ‘work’ that they were doing for the ‘bank’.  Of course no one believes this tissue thin ‘explanation’ of their apparent ‘ignorance’ but our corrupt government, which they all support of course, keeps bleating on about the ‘assumption of innocence’ as if they have even a passing belief in the value of law, except in the legal system that they have politicised.

           

¡Viva Podemos!

The weather today is the sort of grudging weather that is sulkily trying not to rain, but resenting every moment without moisture.  I had my cup of tea inside the café in the swimming pool rather than sit in the cold.  I know that it is the middle of February and what the hell do I expect, but yesterday was delightful and I was that level of warmth in winter that I have come to expect in this country!  Heliophilic lust has ever been one of my most pressing characteristics!

            I’m not sure what is happening to our plans for a holiday in Gran Canaria, they seem to be on some sort of uneasy hold at the moment, but I am eager for them to come to some sort of fulfilment so that the increasingly pasty state of my skin can be rectified!

I am steadily working my way through my latest box set of Decca Phase 4 re-mastered CDs by playing them in the car and the delights are many - with the exception of the single CD of Flamenco, obviously, which I have given away.  Verdi’s Requiem being played far too loudly and with my eyes streaming with tears makes the tedium of driving just that little bit more bearable!  Their version of The Carnival of the Animals has accompanying poems by Ogden Nash and at present I am listening to Rubenstein playing Chopin’s Nocturnes.  The cheap availability of music like this is one of the delights of the post vinyl age.

            I am not ignoring live music, as this evening I am excited about going to what looks like a fairly spectacular production of Norma – which I will review tomorrow.

I started another poem last night and got a fair way with it before, as usual, it ground its way to stasis and bed seems like a better alternative to wasting any more pencil lead.  I feel refreshed today and I will try and take it a little further and, who knows, I might even take it with me on the bus and work on it on the tedious journey to Barcelona.

The life cultural knows no rest!

My recent poems may be found at smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es

One lives in hope!

Up betimes.  Sun shining, tea almost drunk and ready to indulge my true passion of shopping.  Albeit, leavened with the simulacrum of culture.  I am waiting for Irene to come and collect her now framed paintings and then we are going to sally off to the wilds of Cornellá to find out if the stories of a cultural cinema are actually true.

            We have been regaled with stories of concerts, opera and ballet, all to be had in extreme comfort and partial, indeed palatial, exclusivity in the middle of a shopping centre.  I will delay approbation until the reality has shown itself to be something worthy of commendation.

            Lightly reading through the last two paragraphs I can’t help feeling that the vocabulary used is needlessly pretentious.  Obviously this is a function of my early rising when the bullshit filters are not yet fully functioning.  Normal service will be resumed when time has exerted its pull towards sense!

What I should be doing is settling down and getting the TMA finished, or at least started.  Most of the reading has been done, it is just a matter of getting all the ideas together into some coherent argument and putting them all down on the electronic paper and sending it off.

            Although the assignment covers a long (in picture terms) period of time the actual writing is quite bitty.  We have to respond to two pieces of theoretical writing and write a discursive essay linking our thoughts to three specified artists.  This means that there is a fairly clear focus and direction and gives us the opportunity to limit what we can say from the morass (and I use the word advisedly) of writing and artistic production that litters the period about which we are supposed to be concerned.

            I would much rather be continuing my research for the project that we finish the course with, but that is simmering along in a semi-satisfactory way and that will have to do for now.  There is a real chance that everything will work out really well – and if it doesn’t I have formulated a Plan B which will work with the stuff that I have gathered so far.  So, I consider myself relatively academically safe.

As part of Toni’s new blog (catalunyaaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es) I have dug out a ‘real’ camera for us to use to photograph the food.  Amazingly I was able to find the battery charger for my Canon G9 and so this Old Faithful has been pressed into service.  I know that I can use my iPhone, but one doesn’t get the sense of achievement in the taking of a photograph with a phone that one does with a proper camera with a viewfinder.  I have always got on well with the G9 and, although I have a more sophisticated and newer Canon, I always feel drawn to the G9.

            Finding an SD card was also an opportunity to indulge in memory as I flicked through the images that were on the card I chose.  Some of those go back to The Worst School in the World and pictures of the Carnival.  These pictures show that the SD card has been moved around a bit as some of the more ‘artistic’ shots were obviously taken on another camera which offers in-camera alteration of images – and eats up battery as it makes them.  And I have recently re-discovered the camera that does this too.  Though I cannot remember the last time that I used the machine for anything.

Talking of excess: I am bringing some sense of order to the (what is the collective noun for watches?  A time of watches?  A tick?  A passing?) quite surprising number of watches that I have amassed.  I have recently purchased a 12-watch display case.  And am considering buying another.  Which tells you something!

            Very few of these watching are actually working, and replacing the batteries is all of them is dauntingly expensive as well as potentially frustrating as I find out that each one of them takes a different and potentially more exotic battery than the last and there is a limit to the amount of footfall I want to experience just to see hands moving slowly in a case.

            If I am truthful, there are relatively few watches that I actually wear.  Though that doesn’t mean that I will not buy further watches in the future.  Usefulness has never been a prerequisite in my purchasing plans!

            At the moment I am wearing my Casio ‘Edifice’ which does all the usual things is charged by movement and the sun and is radio controlled from some station in Britain or Germany and changes to the absolutely accurate time at some ungodly hour in the morning.  I have never actually witness this alteration and I am assured that it happens.  It is a chunky watch, but satisfyingly chunky rather than too large.  It is one of these hybrid types of watch with analogue and digital details.  I like it, and it is a good watch to use in conjunction with my Pebble and my Kenneth Cole.  The former has the best watch face for my needs that I have every come across: a retro flip clock look which gives you information in large format.  The latter is a more elegant skeleton watch, with the actual watch being a circle in the centre and spokes radiating from the hour marks with the band between the watch and the outer case being transparent.  I liked it as soon as I saw it.  And that, of course, was merely a heartbeat away from buying.

            Given the watches I now possess, there has to be something really special (or vulgar!) about any possible addition to the collection.  I am always drawn to watches in shops, so there is always a real possibility of my finding something to irritate Toni with!

Irene is now late, but I am beginning to wonder if she said 10.30 rather than 10.  Doesn’t make much difference and it has given me the opportunity to write.

            My notebook is filling up and I am beginning to worry about the fact that there are unwritten poems.  On the other hand I am also pleased that some of those unwritten poems are for my next but one book!  ‘Flesh Can Be Bright’ is filling up nicely and I am confident about my bits.  I still worry about the translations and the drawings, but this week I am going to start getting in touch with my collaborators and find out what, if anything, has been done!

The shopping was not, I have to admit, a total success.  The membership cards for the cultural films were not available until the place opened in the afternoon – and we were disinclined to wait.  The tea shop, no, yet another tea shop failed to provide me with the Earl Grey roja that I crave.  The Internet calls.  The purchase of a sofa bed for Irene from IKEA was also a fraught affair.  The purchase, with attendant waiting was accomplished but the cost of delivery and construction was a staggering €188!  A €79 delivery charge and a whopping €109 for the construction of a sofa bed that we had thought was included in the price.  I would like to know how IKEA sleeps at night with such a totally unreasonable charge.

            At least I was able to give Irene back her watch which had had the screws filed so they didn’t protrude and snag in clothes any more.  A much more reasonable cost of €5 from El Corte Inglés in the centre of Barcelona!  And we had an excellent lunch with Toni able to add another restaurant to his rapidly growing blog at catalunyaaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es with a selection of photographs of virtually everything we saw and ate.  Excellent value

Tomorrow Opera and Norma.  Tunes galore!

Noise!

 

I’m not totally convinced that tumble-drying footwear is necessarily the most sensible thing to do.  At the moment the kitchen sounds as though there is on-going demolition but at least the noise is some form of payback for the unutterably odiously noisy dogs owned by the neighbours.  I do hope that the rumblings are destroying the tranquillity of their Sunday in the same way that the barking of their curs both wakes and irritates us.

            I have found that the hypersonic dog scarers work better on cats.  Or at least one particular cat who scarpered instantly the scarer was aimed at it.  One of his fellow intrusive felines did nothing but look at me as I pressed the button on the damn thing ever more fiercely.  And there is never a water pistol to hand when you need one!  Though there is a selection of them at the foot of the stairs.  And believe me they are used with the accuracy which comes with constant use and hatred.

            Meanwhile, the jostling shoes have forced open the door of the dryer and turned it off.  That should tell us something, but I have merely shut the door and repressed the button.  After all, I would rather wait for my sandals to be dried, rather than walking in any of my other shoes and crippling myself.  It is true that I am so used to wearing sandals nowadays that wearing sports shoes or leather shoes means that I suffer.  I have become an elegant hippy; would that I were capable of growing a ponytail, but alas those hirsute days are long fallen away, along with the hair.  And not, I hasten to add that I would ever in my most remote and interesting nightmares have ever grown a ponytail!

Today is one of those dull Sundays when any coherent action seems surplus to requirements.  One of those days when initiative is drained away with the light and sitting doing nothing seems like a positive and vibrant alternative.  As I am still waiting for my sandals to dry (see above) I am trapped in my more than comfortable recliner and the most elaborate potential plan of action that I can envisage is whether or not to have another cup of tea.

            And there, with tea, is another potential crisis.  The Most Expensive Tea Shop in the World, here in Castelldefels has treated me in what I can only describe as a shabby manner.  I discovered said shop and found out that hidden among the tins of excellent coffee where tins of superb tea.  I was able to replenish my stocks of Earl Grey and made the exciting discovery of a super-charged form of Earl Grey called Earl Grey Rojo.  The scent of this tea, after the tin had been shaken and then opened to give you the full effect of the released aroma was intoxicating.  I bought some at once.  Had counselling to cope with the price and became firmly addicted.  And now, just when I have entered the ‘full addict’ stage, they have stopped selling it.  And the new shop near the central car park which I, personally, have forced to buy in Earl Grey tea just for me, has failed to find the ‘hard stuff’ and only stock the black Earl Grey – a form of Earl Grey that I consider the methadone equivalent to the hard stuff heroin quality of the Earl Grey rojo.  I also failed to find the rojo in Barcelona the last time I went there and went to a very poncey teashop.  I begin to despair and will have to turn to the dark Internet to feed my habit!

            I do hope that the government does not have internet crawlers that are programmed to respond to key words and track the user, as I fear that I have used enough hard drug terminology in the previous paragraph to get the little electronic creatures tingling with excitement.  Well, that’s one way to increase readership I suppose.  Easier than improving the writing!

Toni is eager for lunch as, on a Sunday, our meal comes from a pollo de last restaurant which is run by the husband of an ex-colleague of mine.  I am instructed to take a picture of the outside and then Toni will add it to his growing list of places to eat in Castelldefels.  I think he has most of next week sorted out as he steadily makes his way to double figures in his recommendations.

            If we go on our long threatened holiday to Gran Canaria he can add an international flavour to his blog by having a second on the place where we eat there.  Though he is not keen and rather despises Canarian food and discards it utterly!

Although I am steadily reading fair quality trash on my Kindle I realise that most of my reading over the past few months has been in art books.  Some of them have been outstanding and I will start to review them here.  But today is too lazy a day to start so the first will have to be on Monday.

            Though thinking about it Monday is going to be taken up with visiting various places with Irene.  But, as I have mentioned elsewhere, writing ‘intentions’ is the first stage to their actual completion in real life.  So I will take my thoughts and rely on the persuasive power of the written word to ensure my fingers work their magic tomorrow.

            We shall see.  As always.

Writing and the tranquil mind

At least the ‘Frustration’ poem now has a solid draft.  Concerted effort, achieved by ignoring the blandishments of pop ups and the ever present danger of being sucked into the unending visual carnival of YouTube delights last night, meant that the pages of agonized scrawl became something coherent.  At least to me.  You can try your hand at making head or tail of it at smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es – and don’t take the beginning of that sentence as a defining reflection of the sort of English of which I am capable and which I put into my poems!  Usually.

            I have the notes, in my little red book, for an extended poem to be written in linked parts and I might get down to that over the weekend and see what I can make of it.  It will end up being a sort of collection of reflections over a few days; a sort of series of selective diary entries.  Worth failing at, at worst, and putting with the other ‘work in progress’ which may be brought back to life by later inspiration.

            There is something about writing down intentions that does make them slightly more real.  I have few illusions about my capabilities when it comes to application if I am not totally engaged and sometimes the picture of Homer Simpson skipping after butterflies is one which I find strangely attractive, but the satisfying rush that one gets when a poem has reached the AD (acceptable draft) level is hard to beat.  I wonder when poems are, or can ever be, finished?  Each read-through can point up places where you sense a certain uneasiness, and I have had the supreme satisfaction of deliberating about some poem or other and then, after cogitation changing a comma to a semi-colon.  And in true Romantic Poet fashion, collapsed in nervous exhaustion after such an effort!

            I re-read ‘Existential bus stop’ (also in smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es) and had the delightful experience of reading it as thought it was by someone else.  This happens sometimes and that sort of forgetful authorship can give the reader a greater sense of understanding of what is written.  There are connections and suggestions that I read into the poem that I am sure (I should know!) that I didn’t have when I wrote it.  This doesn’t happen with all my poems, but when it does it is like a refutation of the old saw that there is no such thing as a free lunch!

Next week I have to break the back of the next TMA for the OU course.  Frankly, I will be glad when this piece of work is out of the way and I will be able to concentrate on the EMA and the continuing search for the paintings of Alvaro Guevara.  I am well into this piece of work and there is a possibility that my essay may feature in an exhibition devoted to the artist in Leeds.  That is something that I hope that I will be able to make happen and will be an especially pleasing end to the course.

            But, as I said somewhere above, the writing down of intentions is the first stage in making them a reality, or at least what the intentions are supposed to achieve.  All the thoughts are partially in place; it’s just the ordering of them and presenting them in coherent sentences that is required.  And of course all the irritatingly fiddly academic bits which take the real time.  Reading through the comments on the internet forums that we have, I think that more time, effort and heartache is expended on the production of bibliographies than on the actual writing of the body of essays themselves.  I’m sure that it is good for the soul.  Though I am not sure that it is actually very good for anything else!

The second entry on Toni’s blog is about to be attempted as he attempts to bring his entries up by 100%.  Another decent restaurant and another excellent meal at a more than reasonable cost.  Toni has almost decided to develop his acclamation for good meals into informed approbation – leaving himself enough wriggle room to make helpful suggestions.  A fairly simple one in the restaurant that we have just patronised is to provide the items on the menu del dia on a printed sheet menu – not a difficult suggestion to take on board I think!  See what you think about Toni’s blog in its early stages on catalunyaaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es and don’t forget to leave a comment.  And I don’t care if you haven’t been to the restaurant that he has written about, comment on the methodology!

Meanwhile, in the real world (!) I have to go upstairs and get down to work on the poetic series I wrote about a few paragraphs ago.  But you have to understand those were written before lunch and it’s now clearly in the afternoon.

It is now even later.  A draft of the new poem is now in smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es and is at least something to work on.  I was amazed at how easily this poem came compared with the work that had to be put in for ‘Frustration’ – it remains to be seen how far either of these remains in the state in which they are written in the blog.  But then looking for changes is one of the reasons for buying the book.

Toni has now completed his second entry for his blog, and he has suggested using the blog to record our experiences when we next do the ruta de tapa in Castelldefels.  This is an excellent suggestion and will give a more lasting memory for our various excursions into the further reaches of places to eat in Castelldefels.

            Meanwhile, I will continue to digest my excellent lunch (see Toni’s blog) and prepare to finish the TMA for next week.