Success?

This morning’s information on the OU site that the Assessment Section was down because it was ‘very busy’ indicated that the results of the module that I had taken were going to be released a day earlier than the target date.  And so they were.  So now I have another ‘qualification’ to add to the Castelldefel certificate that gave me a pass at A2 level for last year’s work.

Alas, paper qualifications in a language do not always tell the linguistic truth.  I now have two scraps of paper which seem to indicate that I have a proficiency in the language and, indeed I have been able to ‘speak’ my way through circumstances which have been testing: ranging from local government applications to getting the car sorted out in a local garage; from complaining about obscure prohibitions in an art gallery to finding and getting selections of books photocopied for a long essay in a Barcelona library.  In short, I have coped - though always at the expense of poor natives hearing their language mangled or, as I like to put it, “re-imagined” by my good self.

This situation cannot continue.  I have now been living in Catalonia for years and I should be near to fluent, and the real truth is that I am nowhere near that standard.

Next September will see me starting Spanish 3, an advanced course in Spanish in our local adult education centre and there will be, I’m afraid, no hiding place for inability.  My confident use of limited grammatical structures will be glaringly obvious and I will not be able to bluff my way through the series of tests and examinations that will beset me from early October onwards.

I am therefore attacking my reluctance to settle down to the hard work necessary for linguistic advancement on a few fronts.  I am going back over the work that I should have done as part of my OU course (which I have passed with flying colours, which goes to show what you can do when you are wise in the ways of the OU!) to try and reinforce what basic knowledge is lurking in my brain; I am also going over the work in the text book that we used in Castelldefels last academic year to point up what I am expected to know for the next academic year, and finally, I am working my way through “100 ejercicios” in writing and grammar designed for Year 6 Spanish Primary School pupils!  I am hoping that this three-pronged approach will lessen the humiliation in the first classes in the new year!

Some isolated things do stick.  For example I now know that the word “visón” (which in Spanish is pronounced like “bison” but with the emphasis on the second syllable) means mink.  So I can now translate the title of the Leonardo painting I always recommend to people visiting the Louvre, that in my view is much superior to the selfie-crowded Mona Lisa, and that hangs almost unnoticed just outside the crowded room in which The Picture is virtually un-viewable.  And, in case you were wondering, the Spanish word for “bison” is “bison” - but the emphasis is more on the first syllable.

I have also learned the words for a swift and a seagull, but they have not lodged in my brain as of yet.  For some reason the word for swift (the bird not the adjective) was not in my Spanish Diccionario Primaria Lengua española.  This is an excellent beginners’ dictionary which is entirely in Spanish and which I found in a rubbish bin in the centre of town and rescued.  I can only imagine that some disgruntled scholar was passing from Primaria to Secondaria and threw away the books.  It is in such good condition that I doubt that it was ever used, just dead weight in the bulky backpacks that adhere to kids’ backs.  Well, it is being used now - though I had to find the Spanish word “vencejo” in one of my many other dictionaries.

I knew that “vencejo” had to be the word for swift because I had found it in my “sopa de letras” as part of one of the exercises (number 1 of 100!) in my homework book and I was able to link it to the simple drawing.  In my Collins Dictionary and Grammar I was able to find the Spanish for swift from the English, but the Spanish word was not in the other section.  Odd, but I suppose decisions have to be made about words to be included, and I further suppose that it is much more likely that the adjective (rápido or veloz) will be used rather than the noun.

This is my life at the moment: trying to force into my easy-access memory words that I am unlikely ever to use, but which every schoolchild knows.  God help!

The Stain

Is fading!   

After only ten days it has lost its startling otherness and now looks like some passing shadow.  It is still there and I am confident (barring torrential downpours) that it will last at least another week or so, maybe more.  My determination to documents its degeneration has taken a knock with the reluctance of this program to accept my mobile phone photographs, but I shall persevere.  I have not studied the work of Ana Mendieta https://www.artsy.net/artist/ana-mendieta in my past art courses not to recognize and value the importance and significance of the transitory and gestural when I see it!

One spine among many

I have lost a book!

Given that I have thousands and thousands of books, you may think that not being able to get my hands on one specific volume is not that surprising.  Which it isn’t.  But what is shaming is that ever since we moved into our present home I have (constantly) made variously wild statements about getting my books organized.

The last time that my books had even the semblance of being part of a coherent system was when I was last living in the UK.  Ever since the move to Spain the books have had to fend for themselves.

I have made half-hearted efforts at establishing a system and there are scattered literary outposts of civilization through my stock - but a coherent and inclusive organizational method has collapsed under the perceived load of the necessary work to make it a reality.

Part of the problem is that my book collection is housed over three floors in a score or more of Billy Bookcases and miscellaneous shelving systems.  Books are double stacked on some shelves and there is therefore not the surplus shelf space to allow “mini collections” to be formed which could then, eventually be amalgamated into a more sensible system.

A complicating fact is my interest in art.  Not that there is anything wrong with the subject, in spite of it being the choice of brain-dead royals to get a degree, no, it is the format of so many art books that is the problem.  Most hardback books are of a size.  There are differences, but those differences can usually be contained on a normal sized shelf.  Many of my art books are large format books that generally require wider spacing to allow the volumes to fit.  Some of my art books are ‘pocket’ size very small publications, while others are extra large.  This means that art books connected to a single artist or a single art movement cannot reasonably be stacked together.  This means that, of necessity there will be various different groupings in place to make any sense of my holdings.

Professional libraries get around the problem of size by having an ‘outsize’ collection and boxes or portfolios containing very small publications.  I have attempted to implement part of this concept by having, for example, a box which contains my poetry notebooks; there is one bookcase which has a higher than usual shelf height at the bottom; my miscellaneous religious books are in one plastic box folder - but the system keeps falling down because of the lack of room.

Toni’s solution is of course to get rid of books.  I shuddered when typing that, because for me that is tantamount to blasphemy and sacrilege.  I think it is the word ‘rid’ that offends me.  After all, I did donate a whole slew of books to the Oxfam Bookshop in Cardiff before I left; donated many bags full of volumes to the library of the British School of Barcelona; have given away selected further volumes to friends - but I cannot bring myself to throw books away.

The problem is further complicated by being in Spain.  We have no real second-hand bookshop in Castelldefels, and even if we did my books are in English and are not of the sort of English that Spanish or Catalan speakers are looking for to improve their language skills.  I have old hardback editions of the CUP Shakespeare, that do not have the latest scholarship informing their editorial decisions, but the pages are good to turn and there is a feel to the paper that I enjoy.

And that is the reason that another of Toni’s suggestions of “Why not have a shelf of Kindles containing all the books you have” is not acceptable either.  I like books as physical objects in themselves.  I like the feel of them, I like the smell of the them and I like the look of them.  I know my way around the trusted books that I have.  They are in a way, a part of me.

Today, when I hear some well-known piece of Classical music, I can usually remember the record that I bought when I got to know it first.  I may not remember the orchestra and the conductor, but I remember the make of the LP and the picture on the front cover.  For some of my early recordings I can even remember what the inner sleeve was like, for example, my recording of the famous orchestral bits of Bizet had a crinkly plastic sleeve rather than the boring white cartridge paper, while my recording of La Création du Monde by Milhaud was jet black, sort of in keeping with the jazzy influence of the music.  Marble Arch, Heliodor, MFP and CFP are all iconic names that helped create my reasonably priced record collection.  Now, I have none.  Instead I have a series of virtually identical discs, kept for reasons of storage in zipped, black, books of plastic pockets.  I don’t want my books to be confined to a Kindle (though I have 5) or the hard disc of a computer (though I have an incomprehensible number of those too) I want my books to have covers and pages and textures and weight.

But they do take up room.  Our living room has one wall of bookcases from floor to ceiling; one bedroom is designated ‘The Library’ and has bookcases along the walls and four back to back as an island in the middle.  I am getting far too fat to squeeze through!  The ‘study’ on the third floor is a jumbled chaos of junk and shelves which contain odd books, papers, CDs (I must be the only person in the world who can point to CDs to cover the tracks on iPods, iPads, computers and the like), machinery (!), tables, chairs - well you get the picture, and I hope it works in words because I have no intention of taking a photograph to show just how squalid the self-imposed conditions in which I work actually are!

So, getting my collection into something approaching a real collection would necessitate wholesale reordering of present arrangements and mean my constantly walking up and down three flights of stairs, adding books to precarious piles which cannot be placed where they should be because there isn’t really that little empty area that there is on a plastic puzzle where you have to move things around one square sliding away to make room for another.  I know that anything other than a gentle tinkering will result in chaos and misery.

Though, there again, having written about it all, I do no feel empowered to Do Something About It.  After all I did visit the ‘church on the hill’ above St Boi that I had been threatening to do for years.  And, with my cousin Dylan and with four aching knees to show for it, we did managed to get to the top and see the spectacular view.  If, the reasoning goes, I can do that, then a labour of love like handing all my books should be far easier.

Though the handling aspect has its own problems that I characterize as The Guinness Book of Records Syndrome.  It is a well-known fact that any previously specified piece of information to be searched for before picking up the Guinness Book of Records will not have been found by the time the book is put down.  However many other interesting facts, though irrelevant to the stated search parameters, will have been discovered. 

Books are meant to be opened not organized.  As many of them are old friends, it would be churlish to pick up a book and plonk it on a shelf without justifying its existence and opening it and reading some of it.  During some past instances of attempted organization I have read entire books (again) after picking them up.  With this approach, I would need a few lifetimes to get the job done.  But done it should be because, and here I go back to where I started, I would not be searching for the book that I cannot find, because I would have know where it was - and if it wasn’t there then it must be lost.

On the other hand, writing about organizing a large collection of books is so much more satisfying and a damn sight less taxing than actually doing it.

The Stain

There has been a short shower! 

Admittedly the rain was more of a momentary sun shower, but liquid did fall from the sky and that must have made a difference to The Stain.  I will take a ride and check on its progress and post the results here.

One gadget back, two wheels forward

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The bad news: my ‘new’ mobile phone, while not technically dead, will need €180 to get well again.  That is my definition of defunct.  A dead, very dead parrot!

The good news: my electric bike now has two working disc brakes and it only cost €20 to get it back to working condition.

It is the good news/bad news equilibrium that keeps the world stable.  As long as you ignore the idiocy of Brexit and the even deeper idiocy of 45 having been elected POTUS.

Enough already!

After a sunny, hazy, muggy, cloudy, humid, threatening start to the day, it has now turned into a 37C sort of day.  From where I type I can see my lounger on the terrace invitingly empty, but I spurn it as I would an etc etc and try and get beyond the displacement activity of this wordiness and get down to the real business of improving (sic.) my Spanish.  I do have a sort of plan to drag my linguistic ineptitude out of the inchoate grammarlessness of my usual Spanish speech forms into something resembling a backward Spanish child.  But it needs some work, work that I find a multitude of ways of avoiding.  But I console myself with the fact that I do, indeed, have a Plan.  The only thing I need to do now is work towards its implementation.  And as soon as I finish typing whatever it is that I might have to say, I will, I really will, get down to it.

Lunch (he said, changing the topic while still not doing the Spanish work that he has specifically said that he should be doing) was in my local swimming pool.  And was excellent - with the exception of the postre of sandia which was fairly dry and artificially sweet.  We have decided, Toni and I, that finding the perfect melon in a menu del dia is as difficult as finding reasonable arguments in favour of Brexit.  But, let it pass, let it pass.

I will make another attempt to show a photograph of The Stain.  I have attempted to send the photograph ‘by another way’ in the hope that the program will accept it.  I always, as ever, live in hope.

As the weather was so threatening (at least towards the west) I feared that The Stain might be washed away today, but I was able to point it out to Toni on the way to lunch and he was duly impressed and said that I should be fined for soiling the pavement.  I fear that Toni is woefully under-educated in the aleatory quality of The Artistic Moment and he fails to appreciate the liquid evanescence of Vinous Art!  Sad.

The Stain has now survived since Sunday afternoon and what should follow is a photograph of the artwork itself.  If it doesn’t appear then I maintain that its very non-appearance is actually part of the artistic experience itself and the fact that you have to take my work for its existence is an essential element in its putative presence.  If I do manage to get the photograph at the end of this paragraph then I will think of another equally pseud rationalisation to justify its accession to the Pantheon of Significant Art.

By the way, the happiest that I ever saw Bryn Richards, my art teacher in the Cardiff High School for Boys when it was in the Newport Road was when part of a review of some artistic event or other was quoted in Pseuds’ Corner in Private Eye.  Accolade indeed!

Right, now for the photograph.

Well, success of a sort the photograph is on this blog, but not where I want it to be.  But, see above, which you probably already have - and there it is!

I left a space for the evidence.  If it is not there, so.  If it is, so.  It does exist, and furthermore it lingers.

Mine own, and not mine own!

You know that you must be old when your ophthalmic doctor smiles at you and says (in Spanish I might add) “You have the eyes of a forty-year-old!” - and you take it as a charming compliment!

This is all a function of the gauzy, torn fairy wing that drifts across the sight in my left eye form time to time.  On a regular basis.  Not one to panic, I immediately assumed that it was a fatal portent of some sort of disease that, almost as soon as it is diagnosed, means death.

As it happened, the doctor was disturbingly soothing, and took rather too many pains to emphasise just now normal and un-worrying having floating wing tips in front of your eyes was.  In the midst of this she also let slip that I have “the very smallest” of cataracts, the very same cataracts, indeed, that her eighty-two year old mother had and “nothing came of them”.  I did notice the past tense in this conversation but preferred to assume that it was a reference to the fugitive cataracts rather than the state of her mother.

I now have two print outs from the retinal scan and the ultrasound scan and have a printed reminded to go back to her in a year.  I always find it refreshing when concern is 365 days away.  I will now assume that all is well with the world and that the wings will actually flutter away “by themselves”.  There is, after all, no delusion like self-delusion - and having typed that, it doesn’t mean that I will consider it as anything more than a play on words, and certainly not something that deserves further investigation.

Which is more than I can say for the stubborn non-acceptance of my perfectly good photograph of The Stain.  I really do refuse to be beaten and will take my steam camera (of happy memory) with me on my next foray and take another snap.

And that will be on my old bike.  The new (five levels of assistance) electric bike is minus a brake.  I have fancy disc brakes, and the disc on the back wheel is what can only be described as floppy.  And application of the brake makes no difference to the speed.  Which is disturbing.

I took the bike to the bike shop that I now use (based on the expert, quick and cheap sorting out of the wobbly wheel on my other bike) and expected the brake to be readjusted in a humiliatingly short time while I looked on open mouthed with wonder at technical wizardry.  No way!  I was told to leave the bike there as it would have to be de-assembled and then re-assembled and he had a lot of work on hand.

As I had come by bike, assuming that five minutes and a pitying look would just about wrap up the problem, I was faced with another.  If I left the bike there I would have to walk back (No!) go by bus (No! No!) or take a taxi (No! No! No!)  So I thought that I would take advantage of the bike’s ability to fold up and bring it to the shop by car.

I went home.  Eventually collapsed the bike, which is never as easy as they make it appear in the little video on the website for the bike, and even more eventually got it into the back of the car.

Once in Castelldefels town, I took the bike out of the car, un-collapsed it, which is never as easy as they make it appear in the little video on the website for the bike, and rode it triumphantly the few blocks to the shop.  Where it has been left to get better.

I returned home via the swimming pool; did my metric mile; drank my tea; wrote my notes and got home to find Toni in a state of decision about the bedroom.

As we live near the sea there is always a tendency for damp to occur, and the ceiling near the tall window doors in the bedroom is a prime growing spot.  We have anti-mould paint and that, I was told, was going to be applied as it was obviously a contributory factor in Toni’s on-going bad throat scenario.

Luckily I had the ophthalmic doctor’s (is that tautology?) appointment and so, as is always the best with partners, one could get on without the ‘help’ of the other.

To get to my appointment I went on my old bike.  As I have ruthlessly ignored the machine that I previously regarded as the Bentley of Bikes, I sprayed oil indiscriminatingly in all mechanical directions in the hope that some of them would prevent screeching metal fatigue on my journey.

I had been using my ‘old’ bike for years and, possibly because of the strange upside-down ‘S’ shape as the main bit holding the wheels together, I can’t ride it hands free - but I do find it comfortable.  Imagine my horror as I mounted the thing for the first time for weeks and found it entirely foreign and strange.

My posture was different, the handlebars were a different height, and my centre of gravity had been displaced.  I felt as if I had never been on the bike before!

Within a few hundred yards, the sense of otherness between the bike and me had gone and I was back where I used to be.  I have never gone from foreign to native in such a short period of time.  Though I wonder about how I am going to adapt to the return of the other bike tomorrow.  Perhaps I might beat my own new assimilation record.

And it was hard work.  I now see that I have become well used to the judicious touch on the little throttle handle for a small but welcome boost in circumstances when brute foot power would have needed to have been applied.  Slight gradients became irritating and the wind took back its vindictive quality.  I have been vitiated by the cloying and debauched pleasures of Five Levels of Assistance - which sounds like a good title for a book.

The dregs linger!

The stain is still there.

I have to say I think it looks quite artistic.  Given my interest in what might loosely be called Modern Art, it is amazing how many isms, movements, happenings, installations, genres, and categories my gestural wine-inspired-broken-bottled artwork fits.  I am mostly impressed that it seems to have certain anthropomorphic elements, and I feel that in its lightly silhouetted form there is a certain reference to Michelangelo’s sculptural Dying Slave series or even elements of a Pieta.  Bear in mind when you look at this stain/artwork that it is on a pavement, and it is only the fact that I have rotated the image that makes it appear as though it is on a wall.  I would emphasise that The Stain is a result of an accident and not my hurling the bottle at some wall in an excess of snobbery at the quality of the wine!

It has now survived one whole day.  Normally, in July, here in Catalonia, I would be fairly confident that it could survive the whole summer, but this month, so far,  has been a trifle frisky as far as the weather is concerned.  I mean it is sunny at the moment, but we have had pesky clouds filtering and dulling the normal direct sunlight that we have come to expect from summer months.  Still, even with the element of unpredictability, I think that my work will adorn the pavement for some time to come!

-o0O0o-

Even after all the time that I have spent in Catalonia, I am still confused by house numbers.  The lack of discernable logic in that you would expect from numbering, that is, as part of its essential nature, sequential, is often lacking in this part of the world.  Even the even numbers on one side or the road and odd on the other is not always strictly adhered to and expecting 14 to be opposite 13 is very often something of a long shot in some parts of the town.

So really I only have myself to blame for trying to go to a ‘Medical Centre’ in a block of private flats.  In my defence the flats did have the number that I was looking for and there was no indication of anything else that would fit.  So I attempted to get in.

This was a problem as none of the buzzers had a number remotely like the ‘door’ number I had been given for my open appointment for a retina scan.  Eventually, a Little Old Lady emerged as a result (I assumed) of my knocking.  I was wrong, and it was merely a coincidence that she emerged when she did.  However, I marched in and found myself confronted by another locked door.  The Little Old Lady had, by this time exited the building and I was left wondering what my next step was going to be.  While I was pondering the Little Old Lady reappeared and was clutching a ring of keys.  She then, ineffectually, tried to open the inner door and eventually gave the keys to me.  I opened it at once, to her delight and I went through and the Little Old Lady immediately disappeared again.

Up some rather dim and foreboding stairs to a series of doors that were numbered up to 5.  Not 9 - that was the door that I was looking for.  Further exploration to higher floors revealed that the layout and numbering was exactly the same.  No 9.

Having found a light switch, which merely helped to illuminate the lack of the requisite door, I stumbled my way down the stairs (the light having gone off) and decided to exit and explore.

Where, of course, I found that a completely separate building next to the block of flats had a humiliatingly large sign telling me that the medical facility I needed was the one that I had ignored in favour of the unprepossessing domestic door that I had chosen as the appropriate entrance to my destination.

Door 9 found.  No response.  The gum-chewing receptionist that I had been told to ignore told me to wait, which I did for a very short period of time before I was whisked out of a crowded waiting room and into a machine-stuffed consulting room.

I think that the only difference with this retina scan from others that I have had with an ordinary optician was this one was lined to a computer.  Ditto the ultra sound scan of my eyes that I had.  Although this one was accompanied by smearing my eyelids with some sort of cream and then moving a scanner pressing onto the skin of my lids.  In no way was it painful, but in no way was it pleasant either.

I know have to wait until tomorrow for the full results of the scans, but the doctor was able to reassure me that things looked normal.  Which of course begs the question of why a small piece of translucent gauze seems to sweep its way across my eye from time to time.  Research (i.e. putting a phrase into Google) revealed that what I am suffering from is a part of ageing, especially of those with short sight.  The advice and treatment seemed to be of the “get used to it” approach because all of the surgical interventions seemed almost barbarically horrific.  But as I have been more-or-less irritated with my eyes and my eyesight for the last sixty years of my life, I am sure it is something I can get used to living with.  And anyway the relief at finding out that it is nothing more than normal-ish ageing is reward enough to be going on with for the moment!

-o0O0o-

As today is Tuesday, it is The Card Place for lunch.  The Card Place is of course notable for having nothing to do with cards, the designation is merely a reference to the long and distant past when the restaurant was under a different owner.  Nowadays each Tuesday is our opportunity to recognize the quality and value of the food that we invariably get there!  The name of the restaurant is Restaurante Els Fogons de L’Avia, Carrer Antic Camí Ral de València, 38, 08860 here in Castelldefels.  In our opinion this is the best value for money in town and well worth trying.  An extra inducement for my patronage is that I get a personally mixed sauce to accompany my meal whose spiciness is well beyond the normal Spanish range of acceptability.  It is the sort of spicy sauce that augments the food without hiding it in pain!  Delicious!

-o0O0o-

Still no final result from my Open University Spanish course.  The release date for the results is the 19^th of July, so still a week officially, but the results usually get to use before the stated date.  I keep checking my emails!

-o0O0o-

Meanwhile, if you want to enter my little competition to guess the date by which The Stain will have disappeared from the footpath over the motorway, do contact me with your estimate and your email address.  There will be a prize for the person nearest!

An Interesting Stain!

I blame the bread.

And not, of course, myself. 

The basic ‘problem’ is the new bike.

I have now generally adapted (with relief) to the fact that my newish bike is electric when you need it to be.  In keeping with the tarnished Puritan work ethic that I like to think that I possess, it is still very much a bike.  A bike, admittedly, with five levels of ‘power assist’ - and indeed a throttle that can make the bike move without the use of foot power.  But, basically, it is a pedal bike with a little boost when you need it.

It is also collapsible, or perhaps I should say that it is ‘foldable’, the previous word have far too many negative connotations.  Foldable and with back and rear suspension.  Although those two attributes seem unrelated, they have a very real effect on how you accessorize the bike.  In means in effect/affect [I really must work out once and for all which one of those is correct] that there are no real areas of ‘free’ metal to attach things.  Like a basket.  Or even one of those back wheel spring-loaded clamps. 

The handlebars of the bike are full.  The bits that are not the grips have brakes, gears, an electronic thingy and a bell - and even the small bell that I bought had to be changed for another because there was not enough room on my handlebars to ring it!  The front light has had to be attached upside down as that was the only way to get it on a very crowded tube of metal!  So, no basket, no clamp.

That lack was, of course, a shopping opportunity as I had to replace my sports bag with a sports backpack.  Decathlon (bless them) produce something which is almost perfect for swimming with a section for shoes; two main compartments; one front flat pocket, and two side pockets: all securely zipped. 

There is even a little transparent plastic case inside the main compartment for bits and pieces and creams and unguents.

So, my traditional meal of chicken on Sunday from my friends take away in Castelldefels all packs into the backpack - and when you realise that our Sunday lunch usually comprises an entire chicken in container; sort-of roast potatoes; aioli; six croquettes; a couple of salads and a bottle of wine, you will realise how much a mere backpack has to take.  I have done this trip a few times and there is generally no problem.  The backpack is heavy and, packed as it is, it usually rides fairly high on my back, but the levels of assistance on my bike make the extra load nugatory.

The bread however, complicates.

We usually, no invariably, have a baguette and that is too tall to fit into the backpack, and while it is aesthetically satisfying to have a loaf of bread poking out of a handy pocket, it is not practical, and the pocket is not deep enough to secure it.  My solution is to break the bread in the middle and fit the broken parts in their paper case and but them in the flatter part of the backpack at the back.

This time, however, things did not fit.  I was never addicted to Tetris and so three dimensional jigsaw type problems leave me floundering.  I packed all the food into the pack, but it was not an easy fit and I had to take things out and repack them.  Eventually everything almost fitted with only a pastry protrusion of paper covered bread poking past the zip.  That, I thought to myself, is not going to matter.

Proverbs usually work best as principles rather than direct situation-specific instructions.  “A stitch in time,” we’re told, “saves nine.”  I know that this is true as I have ignored potential unravellings and paid the price.  Although thread, cloth and stitches comprise the environment of the proverb, I should have transferred the idea to my zipped backpack.

The tip of the protruding bread had a zip on either side of it.  The opening was only a few zip teeth wide but . . . well I suppose you can guess the rest.  The cycle lane from Castelldefels to the beach via the outside of the Olympic Canal is bumpy.  Even with suspension (back and front) each judder was transferred to my back and each jog opened a few more zip teeth.

The final disaster happened as I left the cycle lane to go onto the bridge that takes the road over the motorway.  Suddenly I was a great deal lighter and I was making my lighter way leaving behind me half the meal.  There is a particular quality of sound when a bottle breaks on concrete, inside a plastic bag and hemmed in with plastic containers.  Not a good sound.

I stopped and for a moment surveyed the carnage.  The explosion of cheap red wine with interesting shards of glass that had escaped the bag (presumably the neck of the bottle) together with assorted foodstuffs made a grotesque (and expensive) action art street canvas.

I kicked some of the glass into the gutter.  Picked up the dripping plastic bag, add the unsalvageable bits and made a sorry sight as I shamelessly used the throttle to get me up the hill and down the other side where I knew there was a street rubbish bin.

Amazingly, I didn’t get a drop of the dripping wine onto my clothing and I managed to put the shards safely in the bin.

I have taken a photo of the stain.   

Not because I think it might do as a front cover for my next book, whose title “The eloquence of broken things” encourages the positive use of disaster, but because I wonder just how long it will last.  In the UK, as I recall, it would not be many days (irrespective of season) before a friendly torment would obliterate the vinous remains, and the shadow would be a thing or mobile phone memory and not reality.

In Spain I am counting the days.  Already 24 hours (and more) have passed and The Stain is still there.  Would anyone like to open a book on how long they think the stain will survive?  Please leave your estimates (with email address) and I will give a small prize to the one who is closest!  In the interests of fairness, and because I live here and am wise in the ways of the weather in this part of Catalonia, I will not take part in this contest myself!

Good luck!

Rain, sun and lunch!

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YESTERDAY

 

Each time I took a breath going upwards towards the school end of my local pool I noticed the sky.  At first it was a light lilac, then it went to a grubby bluey-grey and finally it took on the appearance of the sort of sky that they use as a backdrop for those dystopian, Armageddon-like total disaster movies that at least take your mind away from what the 45^th POTUS might or might not be doing.  Then the first fat drops of rain began to fall.

It’s an odd experience swimming in the rain.  I am always amused by a shower of rain on the beach: there is instant evacuation as if the liquid that is falling (and in which of course they have been bathing) has suddenly taken on corrosive acidic properties and precautions must be taken.  Given where we live, fairly near a very large city and on the flight path of a busy airport, I would not be at all surprised to find out that our rain is anything but Ph. neutral - but generally all we worry about is getting wet.  Even when getting wet is something that we had been doing a few minutes previously.

But rain in an official swimming pool is different.  There is a different quality to drops of falling rain on skin to the splash of a passing swimmer.  And anyway, experiencing rain in a commercial swimming pool is a limited pleasure because Health and Safety regulations indicate that rain will affect the safety mixture in the water and consequently, as with our pool, the roof has to be closed.

As our Russian-doll roof structure began its slow progress enclosing the pool, we were able to go from outside and the rain, to inside and the gloom in a single length.  Luckily I had virtually finished my swim when the shower ended, and by that time the moveable structure had just aligned itself with the exit and so I was able to move seamlessly to my shower and my eventual cup of tea.

I dried off the water on my café chair with my towel and was quite happily imbibing in the threatening gloom when it started to rain again.  The cloud cover look as though it would quite easily be able to sustain  showers and downpours for the foreseeable future so I gave in to Nature and moved to a giant parasol (what irony!) protected table and sulked notes into my trusty jottings book.

But this is Spain.  A visit to the Birthday Girl in Terrassa and by the time we came back the sun was out and, even with odd clouds, all was well with the world and sunbathing was a possibility.

And that is what I love about living here: we do not have the sort of spiteful weather that cursed my life in the UK.  The sort of threatening clouds that I swam under in the morning could easily have accompanied my exercise for the next fortnight in Britain - but in Spain it is an isolated day when you do not get at least a sight of sunshine during it!  Yes, Spain, and Catalonia are not as green as Britain.  You have to go to a region like Galicia in the north west of the country for the lush greenness that Brits might recognize.  But I am content with a certain degree of aridity and the sight of the sun.

TODAY

 

I was beset with a lingering malaise of indolence and so decided (because I can) not to go for my swim today.  I suppose the idea was that I had thought that preparing, going, swimming, changing and tea drinking took up such a disproportionate amount of my time, I wanted to get settled into some sort of academic activity without the distraction of swimming to act as displacement activity.  Needless to say such laudable motivations did not translate into actuality and what I actually did was have a cup of tea, do the Guardian quick crossword and read further information about the Antikythera mechanism.

I think that there are two approaches to the acquisition of knowledge not previously known: the first, is one of sheer delight in discovering new areas of understanding that were previously blank; the second is a deep sense of shame that one didn’t know about it previously.

The Antikythera (I love the sound of the word anti-kith-ar-ee-ah, it is the sort of word you can roll around your mouth) Mechanism, falls securely into the second category.

An account of what the ancient shipwreck offered historians may be found here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/decoding-antikythera-mechanism-first-computer-180953979/ and you can tell that I have been doing courses in the Open University because I did not give you a Wikipedia entry first!

This ancient shipwreck has been described as the most astonishing archaeological discovery of the twentieth century, or indeed of the twenty-first century - the discovery of what might truly be called the mechanism of the first computer ever discovered, dating from some two thousand years ago!

And I had never heard of it!

I am not saying that I am the datum point of common knowledge, but surely something this astonishing and revolutionary should have impinged on my rag-bag accretion of general knowledge at some time since its discover in the early 1900s?

 

With the discovery of early ‘technology’ I am always reminded of the invention of the first voice recorder.  The mechanism and the raw materials and the whole technology while put together for the first time in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, were actually available in Classical times!  A way of recording the voice could have been available during the time of Christ, and we could have heard the last words from the cross or the text of the sermon on the mount as they were spoken.  But the machine was not invented and we didn’t.

The sophistication of the Antikythera Mechanism was around over a millennium before its next iteration!

And I knew nothing about it!  What shame!

 

It is at times like this that I am reminded of my first reading of Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years, where a revolutionary world view disrupts conventional acceptance.  This book is constantly revelatory and, rather like one of my tutors in university, constantly says things that you should have thought previously!  The sort of things that are blindingly obvious as soon as they have been articulated, but you need their help to get there!  Diamond’s book (as indeed are the works of M Wynn Thomas https://www.swan.ac.uk/crew/staff/professormwynnthomas/  are wholeheartedly recommended.

And now I shall echo Osvald’s plea, “Mother give me the sun!” - though, I am glad to say in rather different circumstances, and I will only retire to a sun lounger rather than the murderous ministrations of a mother!