Shitholes I have known

Before the small-handed orange fart had expressed himself so freely about black, foreign countries he despised, while shouting in a semi-private meeting about immigration, I suspect that a title to a blog like that above would have raised entirely different expectations of a more, ahem, fundamental nature than you are going to get here!

At least the world response to Trump’s extraordinary, foul mouthed tirade does not deal in euphemistic descriptions like ‘prejudiced’ but goes all out for the much more accurate description of ‘racist’.  The leader of the free world is a small minded, bigoted, racist.

God knows the bar for possible semi-presidential acceptable behaviour is set ground-huggingly low for the present occupant of the White House, but the reptilian Trump burrows ever deeper into the miasma formed by his base.

The sick fascination that I have for the antics of Trump leave me breathless with amazed disgust the more I read about him and the coterie of brazen opportunists with whom he has chosen to surround himself. 

I feel the same degree of contempt for Dianna, so-called Princess of Wales (I shuddered inwardly when I typed out the name) and more particularly for the unthinking adulation that she provoked merely by being alive during her fairly useless life as a potent symbol of an anti-democratic, hierarchical structure that continues to emphasise the fundamental un-egalitarian nature of British society.  I am not inhuman, and in her death I do recognize a real human tragedy for her family, but the outpouring of hysterical grief by sections of the British public and the rotting field of flowers that were left, were symbols of much that was, and still is, deeply wrong in a fractured society.

But what does shithole mean to me?

My examples are, probably, going to be unfair and prejudiced, but they are, oddly, based on fact.  But, as is the way with such things, based on facts that are old, or seen from a narrow personal set of experiences.

So, in chronological order.  My first example comes from a holiday in my youth.  We used to set off in the Ford Prefect, just the three of us, Mum, Dad and me, point the car east from Cardiff, go a bit north to see my aunt in Gloucester and then motor down to the South West of England and stay in B&Bs, eventually ending up in St Ives.

On one holiday on a wet and depressing Sunday we made the basic mistake of deciding to call in and experience the delights of Burnham-on-sea. 

Everywhere was closed.  No, not true, the sky was open and it was raining.  The sort of rain that is not heavy but which soaks you through in minutes.  And all we had was our basic summer (sic.) holiday wear of Pak-a-macs, those thin plastic coverings with undoable plastic buttons and with a distinctive smell when wet to protect us from the elements.

We wandered the shining streets walking past closed shops and cafes.  It was a ‘holiday resort’ with a beach.  But it was beach on the Bristol Channel and the Bristol Channel has the second largest tidal range in the world (after the Bay of Fundy in Canada) so when the tide goes out, it really does go out.  The sea becomes more of an image in the mind of god than a touchable reality, at least when seen from the road!

With a grey sky and drizzle the sand had taken on the colour of wet mud and to say it looked uninviting was something of a vicious understatement.  We veered from the bleak sea towards one of the few uninviting cafes that was open and had the sort of cup of tea that a badly treated condemned man might have had before his execution.

It was our intention to find somewhere to stay, but our enthusiasm was rapidly ebbing, much like the sea.  We followed a few groups of people and found ourselves outside an attraction.  A model railway exhibition.  We were so desperate that we went in and what I remember is not so much the railway layout but the faces of the people who, like us had found the only source of ‘fun’ that was to be had.

We left, fleeing further south in search of anything that wasn’t Burnham-on-sea.  And found it!

In future years, if any one of us wanted to give an example of true horror, we would speculate about those unfortunate who had decided (obviously based on ignorance) to splash out on an actual holiday, possibly lasting a week in Burnham-on-sea, or worse yet, a fortnight!

This image of Burnham is 60 years away and, as I have never gone back, I have no knowledge of what the place is actually like.  It may be an absolute delight for all I know, indeed I hope it is, but the image of ‘shithole’ will stay with me for ever and will be for ever linked to that sea side town.

My second choice of ‘shithole’ is Atlanta, Georgia.

This too is historical.  On the occasion of the marriage of Charles to Dianna in the summer of whenever it was, I was able to leave the nauseating sycophancy of much of the mesmerised population of Britain and wing my way to the US of A for a five week holiday!  Courtesy, I hasten to add, of my ever generous parents!

I flew over with Pan Am and my internal flights were with Eastern Airways and there were lots of them, because I could write my own tickets – it was that sort of open option, and believe you me, I winged my way over the face of the US, surviving on complementary milk and airline meals.  The hub for Eastern Airways was Atlanta and I went there a lot, sometimes staying over.  So my vision of Atlanta is the airport and one grotty pseudo Youth Hostel.

You may say that to judge an entire city on such flimsy and unrepresentative evidence is entirely unfair.  And I would agree.  But I still feel an instinctive repulsion whenever I hear Atlanta mentioned.

Atlanta airport is the world’s busiest or with the most flights or something, but it is big and sprawling.  My experience of the place was Kafkaesque, with the highlight of my disorientation being ‘The Eastern Airways Shortcut’ between two terminals which turned out to be a completely deserted series of corridors with the occasional picture to make the experience even more surreal.  That particular airport was one where reality seemed to be flexible and I resented every second I stayed there.

The automatic electric trainway between terminals was another story entirely, and on one visit to the airport the automatic recorded announcements failed, only to be replaced with a soulless Darlek-voice version, that somehow seemed to be more than fitting!  There is more, but it depresses me just to think of it!

My last example is a private school in which I worked.  My teaching colleagues were excellent.  The buildings were modern.  The kids were responsive.  The owner was a complete, utter and definitive bitch.  With no teaching qualifications.  Her maleficent, corrosive, vicious ineptitude turned what could have been a mutually enriching educational experience into a constant battle for normality. 

There is a happy ending for this shithole, as her grasping, deadly hold has been broken and what was a institution not-fit-for-purpose has now become a real school.

And I like to think that the same goes/has gone for Burnham-on-sea and Atlanta.

I am, after all, an optimist.

I think.

Lost!

Sometimes a harsh reality can break through the façade of domestic tranquillity.

 

It did tonight.

We had both just suffered through an evening meal of such unrelenting austerity that a cup of tea or coffee appeared to be an absolute luxury.  I was shuddering my way through the tales of terror that make up the stories in The Guardian nowadays, lurching in despair from the lunacy of 45, through the on-going self-harm of Brexit, via the laughable ideas of democracy and justice in Spain to various natural and man made disasters, when the front gate intercom buzzed into life.

We do not usually have unannounced visitors at night time so picking up the intercom to answer is usually tinged with concern.

It was our next-door neighbour who had found a small girl wandering the streets, lost and without a parent.  She wanted to know if anyone spoke Russian, as the little girl appeared not to speak anything else.  We could only offer Spanish, Catalan and English, with a smattering of French.  No use!

But after, regretfully putting down the phone, I thought of the large detached house opposite, which has, in the past been occupied by Russian speakers, so I slipped on my coat and went down to the street.

Our next-door neighbour was walking along with a very small child taking one hand and carrying a small scooter in the other.  She was accompanied by another neighbour from a few doors down with whom we had yet to speak.  The little girl was distressed and close to tears but she was comforted by my next-door neighbour with motherly hugs.

Obviously the police had to be informed, but my suggestion of trying to get someone from the big house on the corner to speak to the kid was taken up and, as I had seen lights there from our kitchen window which is at first floor level, I knew that there were people at home.

We buzzed through and we were greeted with an entire family exiting and our discovery that the kid did speak Russian and so did they, but they did not know who she was.  The son of the household was obviously asked if he recognized her and he replied in the negative.

Although the Russian family offered to take the girl in and contact the authorities, I felt that as the police had already been called, it was important to wait for them and a neighbour went to the outside of our houses and eventually brought the police back.

It then appeared that the police knew where the mother was and that the kid had wandered off and managed to put ten blocks between her mother and herself before she was taken into protective care by my neighbour.  Neighbour and girl were asked into the police car and with much happiness and thanking on all sides, they slipped away into the darkness.

Throughout this incident, I kept thinking how my own mother would have reacted.  And then stopped myself because it was too distressing to contemplate.  Even in its hypothetical state and allowing for the fact that my mother is no longer around to be concerned.

My parents told me that I had to be watched at all times when I was smaller as, given any opportunity, I would be away like (as my father used to say confusingly) “a long dog”! 

My crawling ability was legendary and my mother told me that I had to be “attached” to the sides of my crib to keep me in it.  This didn’t always work, as on one occasion I was found to be out of the crib, crawling along with a side still attached to me.

As soon as I could walk I was put in reins in a desperate attempt to keep me in the same locality as my parents, but again, my mother said that letting the reins slip from her hands or putting them down for a moment to pick up and examine some article she needed to buy in a shop was an opportunity for escape that I never rejected.

The only time that I can recall that I “escaped” by mistake was when I was too small to see over the counters in M&S.  As a six foot adult I find it difficult to think back to a time when I was so small, but I know I was because my early memories of M&S were of the wood veneer of the sides of the counters, of nothing interesting to see, and of light in the store that was far too bright.  On one occasion I was standing next to my father and when his trousers moved so did I.  I must have been in a mood of mildly sullen obedience as I traipsed around with nothing more than featureless material to keep my attention.  Eventually I got bored with this textured landscape and looked upwards towards my Dad’s face.  And it wasn’t him.  I had been following a strange man’s trousers!

I can still remember the bemusement I felt, but not how quickly the situation was remedied.  Knowing my mother, and her constant observation and monitoring of my potential fugitive propensities, it must only have been seconds.  But seconds are not what the event felt like.  I can remember no panic.  Which is interesting.

When I was a small child in the 1950s in Cathays in Cardiff, I was allowed to play out on the road with my friends - and this, remember, was with a mother who was close to paranoid (no, make that clearly paranoid) about my safety.  But I was allowed to play, and nothing much happened to me apart from the usually scratches and cuts.  There were also very few cars around then and the streets were generally empty.

I could be playing streets away from home, but I was trained to listen for my father’s distinctive whistle and reappear in double quick time.  Which I did, sometimes disappearing from a friend’s house in mid-sentence at the sound of the whistle!  

When we had a dog, the same whistle was used for her, but I have to say that I was much more responsive than she ever was.  Well, she was a pedigree Labrador!  And everyone knows what they are like!

So, the small girl is now reunited with her mother.  How will the kid think about this experience in the future?  As an interestingly confused experience with a group of people she saw once, with police and people speaking different languages, something to think back on and giggle?  Or something altogether more serious: something that threatened her worldview that showed her just how fragile what she thought she knew was?  Who knows?  Nothing happened, but what might have happened is too awful to contemplate.

And what of the mother?  As I’ve said, thinking of my mother sends shivers of horror down my spine.  I know that my mother would, instantly, have thought the worst and suffered indescribably until my return, and then she would have blamed herself and . . . well, you get the idea.  The delight of reunion would have been overshadowed by the dark imaginings of what might have been.

But let’s be positive.  The girl is safe and has been returned. 

And who knows what memory will make of what has been?

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Reality Dawns. Again.

It used to be that ‘The Big C’ was the boogieman of illnesses but something else has taken its place for we non-smokers, but indulgent eaters.

I blame the quality of food in Catalonia for the fact, and it is a heavy one, that I need to lose weight.  Again.  My weight loss the last time was prompted (a euphemism if ever I heard one) by the results of a blood test and an out-and-out warning from my doctor.  Now that warning has been uttered to Toni and I am scurrying along in the penumbra of fear from that threat.

The warning was stark.  Lose weight or be set down as a Type 2 Diabetes patient with the consequent repercussions on life style and the lifetime taking of medication intravenously.

So, this lunchtime, the condemned man (he has until the end of the month to get the asterisks off his blood test results) ate anything but a hearty meal: salad, fish fillet, followed by nothing but a cup of coffee with saccharine!  As his blood-sugar level is too high he has been told to stay off fruit as an in-between-meals filler and instead drink some sort of tea, the name of which he has, in self defence, already forgotten.  Now, everything is going to be checked for sugar and I fear that we are going to find that sugar is second only to salt in its omnipresence in food, both prepared and natural.  We will probably both end up on a diet of water!

To be fair, this is only Day 1 of the New Regime, and I am hoping that sense, compromise and sheer indolence and tiredness might make the road to an asterisk-free life a little less bumpy.

My own situation is barely better than his.  I weighed myself this morning and discovered to my horror that I am some 16 kilograms over my ideal (or skeletal) weight.  If I actually lost that amount of weight I would look gaunt to the point of concern, so I have decided that a more reasonably horrific target is 10 kilograms.  That is a lot.  But there are ways.

At lunch today I had cool, still, H₂O to accompany my food.  Gone was the red wine and Casera that is my usual tipple.  Water.  Pure and simple.  And, I have decided, this is not just for today, but rather for the number of todays it takes to get me down to my ‘target’ weight.  I have made an executive decision to make an exception for Cava Brut.  The grounds for this exception are that Cava is a white, and therefore less calorie challenged drink; and also that the Brut nature of the Cava I drink means that it has even fewer calories than the other types.  I can therefore drink toasts with a clear conscience.

I am also cutting down on nuts.  One of my friends told me that when she was slimming she ate nuts: she allowed herself half a walnut every other day.  This is not, I have to tell you, how I eat nuts.  I take the generally accepted ‘healthy’ and ‘protein’ aspects of them and let that cover the fact that my consumption is markedly more than half a nut every other day!  That will stop.  Nuts and dried fruit will be added to the all-bran/Special K mixture that comprises my breakfast cereal.  And that’s it.  Honestly!

As I do not eat that much chocolate I am not too disturbed by its prohibition.  Added to that is the fact that I went into the fridge and threw out any chocolate I could find, just to give my self-restraint that extra edge of protection.  And I now quicken my step when the excellent selection of chocolate in supermarkets is near.

Bread is not too much of a problem either.  I love bread, but I can resist and I have restricted myself to pre-packaged 99 calorie multi-grain ‘bread’ that I pretend is good for me.  Whenever I feel like complaining, I merely have to remember one of my mother’s diet Energen Rolls (?) a form of what I could only describe as what ‘whipped bread’ might have tasted like.  That actually tasted like nothing at all, and offensively so as well!  At least my ‘bread’ is better than those were.

My problems are rice and pasta, and indeed potatoes – and any other form of carbohydrate that you care to mention.  I have been told on a previous occasion that these forbidden pleasure could be allowed as long as they form no more than a third of the plate, to which I respond by saying how high can you build?  To which the response was that I wasn’t thinking along the right lines and that suggestions have to be followed within the spirit of the advice as well as the word.  That doesn’t get you the calories you need, he whimpered quietly to himself.

Anyway the meal austerity has started and we are both thoroughly miserable.  Which is a bad way to start because I have also been told that no eating programme is going to work that does not have your enthusiasm behind it. 

That might well be true up to a point, but having fear as a driving force behind the need to lose weight is also a strong incentive and it might well do.

I will keep you informed about my weight loss or (tell it not in Gath) gain.  This is my desperate attempt to engage a wider observation of my efforts in order to ensure success.

I hope!

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Here we go again!

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Back to school after the holidays!

That statement is both true and misleading. 

It’s true that I did go to ‘school’, or rather a place of education for those beyond the normal years of childhood - which is another way of saying that I am getting Spanish lessons in an Adult Education Centre, though it also appears to have near school age pupils too.  Confusingly.  However, there I go, which brings me to the misleading part.  My present day schooling is only twice a week for two hours - rather different from my previous experience as pupil or teacher!

I might add that the level of Spanish that I am supposed to be doing means that four hours a week is more than enough for my brain to take in.

In a direct proof of the existence of the ‘hand of god’ element in my life, I somehow managed to pass last year’s course and that ‘success’ was used as a direct threat-and-proof by my teacher, so I reluctantly signed on for the higher level course this year.

My horror has been compounded week-on week by the explosion of fiendish verb tenses to which we have been introduced and which stubbornly refuse to stay in my memory.  Of course, mere lack of knowledge does not stop my chattering away in class, ignoring the greying, haggard faces that have to make sense of my enthusiastic but ungrammatical exposition in Spanish!  But there will come a time when surface loquacity will have to pass an exam, a written exam, and smiling-faced gibbering in roughly approximate Spanish will not be enough - or even acceptable.

This year, I have therefore decided, will be the Year of the Verb (YOTV) [And you could read that acronym in Spanish as ‘I Television’, he typed irrelevantly] and I have therefore been vaguely busy in trying to rationalise my learning.

I purchased (and have very rarely used) a sort of book/bible called, imaginatively, “501 Spanish Verbs” that, unsurprisingly contains 501 Spanish Verbs fully conjugated!  Who would have thought!  But wait, that is not all.  There is much, much more - none of which you would find remotely interesting unless you are engaged in the study of the language.  If you are, then this book is indispensable.  Truly.

And it is going to be the key to my groping way towards Spanish verbal acceptability.  The idea is to photocopy part of the introduction that gives a clear and understandable guide to The Seven Simple Tenses and The Seven Not So Simple (Compound) Tenses with a Mood (Imperative) and use these pages as my Daily Readings.  In this way, I am fondly hoping that mere looking will allow the grammatical delights to seep their ways into my brain and become something that I can actually use with something approaching proficiency.

This introduction also tempts with a glimpse of the forbidden pleasures of The Future Subjunctive and the Future Perfect Subjunctive. It says, “The future subjunctive and the future perfect subjunctive exist in Spanish, but there are rarely used” and that is a good enough excuse to ignore them completely, even if I actually knew what they were!

All displaced persons keep referencing their distant homes, and all I want to be able to do is say, with confidence, in Spanish: “When I was living in Cardiff” or “When I used to play badminton in the Eastern Leisure Centre” or “Having been educated in Swansea University” or “I am thinking about taking another course in the Open University in the next few years” or simply “When I was younger” etc.  As well as dreaming about saying, in Spanish something like, “If I had known what it would have been like, I possibly might have” etc.  As it is at the moment, I attempt sophisticated verb tenses but end up sounding like a Tarzan figure whom choses random parts of a grammar primer and hopes for the best.  Which is something!

This morning’s lesson played to my strengths.  It started late, didn’t have any new grammar or vocabulary and all of it comprises various students speaking and responding!  The two hours sped by, and the most concerning element in the lesson was worrying about whether the battery pack on my electric bike would last for the homeward journey.

As it happens it did and the pack is now safely recharged and ready for insertion to get me to my swim tomorrow.

One thing that I note is that I used the term ‘worrying’ about whether the battery would last.  Basically, it doesn’t matter.  Without a working battery, my electric bike is, well, a bike.  It has seven gears and you pedal.  It’s a bike!  It works with sheer leg power.  But the electric bike is like the dishwasher.  I am tempted to let that last sentence stand alone and not give an explanation, rather in the Lewis Carroll “Why is a raven like a writing desk” (or vice versa) but that would be pointlessly cruel.

A number of times I have started the dishwasher and then found a cup or plate that should have been included.  Now, you have to stay with me here, as I did not discover that you could open up the dishwasher and insert something part way through the cycle.  And that knowledge was based on the very first dishwasher I owned where I assumed that breaking the cycle would not pose a problem, and flooded the kitchen!  I know that with water saving and eco-cycles the amount of water used is minimal, but that is not the point.  I would see the lone cup and think, “Damn!  If I had found that a few minutes earlier it could have gone in the wash and now it will just have to wait for the next load.”  What I didn’t think was, “Oh well, I’ll wash it in the sink and dry it with the tea towel.”

As a bike without a battery is still a bike, so a cup can be washed by hand rather than by a machine.

Then I started thinking of other statements that I know that I have made at some point or other whose link to reality is sometimes questionable:

“The hoover is not fully charged, I can’t clean.”

“I’m not going to the shops because it’s raining.”

“I didn't contact you because I mislaid my mobile phone."

"I am wearing this shirt because I do not have any others."

"I bought it because I needed it."

"We have nothing in the house to eat."

"You can never own too many tea spoons."

And I think I better stop there as perhaps I am giving too much away!

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If you would like to read drafts of my recent poems please go to smrnewpoems.blogspot.com