Swimming while Rome burns!

     

Although I am still getting up in the dark, the light is appreciably sooner in making its appearance than it has done recently.  We are at the stage where you can kid yourself that summer is just around the corner.  Though I have to admit that I sat inside the café to have my post-swim cup of tea rather than sitting on a damp chair in the cold outside, no matter than a weak sun was doing its best to spread a little cheeriness.

     I’d also forgotten my notebook, and further forgot to ask at reception for a sheet of A4 so that I could write out my fugitive thoughts before they seeped away.  I was reduced to ripping off the back cover of a real estate advertisers’ booklet to use instead.  To be fair to me, the reason that I didn’t have my trusty notebook in my pocket was because I was working on a poem last night and using my (almost) indecipherable scrawl to encourage me to work on the ideas that I had.  I’ve now started the poem twice and I am not even remotely satisfied with the direction that it is going in.  This is par for the course and I confidently expect that later today I will find a more satisfactory format to try and tease out a satisfactory structure!

     And while I am on a ‘fair to me’ jaunt, I am happy to say that I have actually done my homework for Catalan and a bit of revision too.  Our teaching this year has been somewhat fractured with an array of teachers and, while our main teacher has attempted to keep things together, there are gaps in our sacred texts where they have not been filled in.  We are now in the process of going back to horribly grammatical lacunae and pencilling in our responses.  Luckily, one of the books has the ‘answers’ in the back, so that you are able to check your answers and make suitable adjustments. 

     This is not cheating; this is just practical.  Catalan has rules, but it also has exceptions and, unless you know those exceptions then you are going to make mistakes, and, if we are on our own for some of the time, we have to get our accurate information from somewhere. 

     Some of our exercises are structured on the same principles of the maths exercises that I remember with fear and dread from my O Level torture: rule – example – another example following the rule – then, all hell breaks loose and you are on your own!  And Catalan has accents which go in all directions on any unsuspecting vowel, and it has the funny C and a double L with a floating full stop. 

     Unfortunately, our next examination will take note of where and how one adds the accents and This Time It Is Important.  So, we have been given a vocabulary list riven with accents and we will have to learn them.  Or rather I should have phrased it, “should have learned them by now” as the examination is a week tomorrow!  I have always found it amazing just how much one can cram into the last few days with fear fuelling one’s ability!  At least I hope that is still the case for me.

The house next door is being fully (and I emphasise the word ‘fully’) renovated and, for the last three months we have been subject to hundreds of thousands of hammer blows to the fabric of the house.  As we live in conjoined dwellings, a blow to a wall in one is a blow to the wall in all.  Given the number of blows that we have experienced, I cannot believe that there is a single square millimetre of the next door flat (floors, ceilings and walls) that have not been battered – and each one of those blows echoes through our house.  At times the sound has been unbearable with the vibrations having a physicality that stops thought.  And they are at it seven days a week, all day, and sometimes well into the evening.

     It is difficult to know what to do.  Renovation, when you are removing floor tiles, wall tiles, replacing the electrics, adding air con, restructuring, it all takes effort and a great deal of noise – but that is what renovation is, mess and noise.  It would have been nice if the neighbours who own the house (they are not here for the renovation, only the workmen are there) had had the common courtesy to let us know that our lives were going to be a daily misery for months before they put the first hammer to the first wall.  But that didn’t happen.  So there.

     Given the amount of noise and the dislocation that it provokes, I had occasion to look up the word for ‘nightmare’ in Spanish so that I could throw it into conversation to explain how we have felt about the sheer noise.  The Spanish word for ‘nightmare’ is pesadilla (pes-ah-dee-ah) while the Catalan word for it is malson.  I don’t know which one I prefer.  I do like the ‘mal’ part of the Catalan, but the workers and the neighbours speak Spanish not Catalan so malson will be lost on them.  Oh, and by the way don’t be taken in by the seemingly effortless transition between the two languages; it’s all theoretical not ingrained!

     I am praying that the major construction work is over and that the most that we will be subject to in the coming months is the altogether quieter application of paint on plaster!  Though, by that time the family will be in residence and we will have to see how they behave.  We got used to have people free dwellings on either side of us, so anything is going to be more negative than that.  And then in the summer the neighbours on the other side of us return for the holiday period.  So it goes.

Coronavirus in Spain appears to be taking a stronger hold.  Catalonia appears to have the second greatest concentration of cases in Spain, but the total numbers are still relatively small, but there is always a possibility of an exponential increase.  More and more news of prohibitions is getting on to the television.  Nothing has much of an effect on us yet, but the measures taken in Italy are an indication of what can happen in a very short period of time, and certainly the constantly repeated information that we are getting via the media seems to be preparing us for a real disruption to our normal way of life.

     The sun has reappeared, the wind has dropped and all is momentarily well with the world!

Take it easy!

I dutifully got up at my accustomed time of 6.30 am, responding to the intense irritation of the ‘music’ of my phone alarm, sat on the edge of the bed, then had a pee (in the bathroom!) and promptly returned to bed.  Sometimes, you have to do what you want rather than what you think that you should do.  It makes you a better person.  I think.

     And even if it doesn’t, I am not going to beat myself up about missing an early morning swim once in a while.  It does mean that I get the Guardian Quick Crossword done and dusted and have a leisurely cup of tea and am able to face the rest of the world with something approaching equanimity – even if lacking the smug self-satisfaction than early morning exercise gives you.

     The ostensible reason for my indolence was to give myself more time to study for the Catalan examination that is going to take place on the 13^th of this month.  Given the format of the exam, and the extensive explanation about the content that we have been given, there is a reasonable chance of actually passing it.  But and this is where the rejection of swimming comes in, only if the time gained is actually used in revision (or something nearer to learning in my case) and the hard slog on forcing foreign words to at least have a temporary residence in my memory.  As far as I can work out the major emphasis in this exam is on the ability of, we candidates to demonstrate that we have retained the accurate orthography of the more cunningly accented words in Catalan.  The area we have to consider is one which is limited, but the use of the correct accents will be a crucial factor in gaining marks.  This means that the old look-cover-write-check technique needs to come into play.  Repeatedly.

     As it happens, I am still much more drawn to working on the pages of notes that I have for my latest poem, than I am for the hard slog of learning.  I know that one should never reject opportunities for learning, especially after the ‘official’ period of education has passed!  But it is much harder to force new information into my brain than it ever used to be.

     And yet.  Take this morning.  I was checking through my emails and I noted that Academia.edu site had suggested an art history paper that I might have found interesting.  This paper turned out to be part of a substantial book which offered a more than readable overview of a section of art history.  The extract on Cezanne got me interested and I jumped my way through to Chicago skyscrapers and the honorary Welshman Frank Lloyd Wright and then onto Picasso and abstraction and at that point I realized that I was in the grip of the you-may-as-we—finish-it syndrome and so I stopped.  Ostensibly to check on the publishing details of the book which were somewhat vague on the site.  This got me into the Baltimore Museum of Art and I was starting to flick through the site when I realized (again) that I was being taken further and further from what I had started out doing when I opened the computer.

     The point of that last paragraph (in case you were wondering) was to illustrate not only the ease with which I get side-tracked, but also the fact that I was gleefully hoovering up small facts about the artists and movements that I was reading about.  I am conversant enough with mainstream western modern art history that passing comments about how Seurat got the colour theory wrong, or than curtain walls allowed skyscrapers to have more glass, or that Synthetic Cubism literally emphasised the presentation of painterly element on the canvas, almost like a dish – that fascinated me.  Ever the snapper up of unconsidered trifles (is that quotation accurate?) I felt the drug-like pull of the writing, and I thought that I could buy the book (the very substantial book) from which the writing was taken.  But, so far, I have been unable to find it.  But I will.

It is one of those books (should it actually exist) that always seem to me to need to exist before it can be written.  The range and depth of knowledge it contains is the sort of book that would have been consulted to write it – if you see what I mean!  I have a History of Art book by Meyers (I think, I’m too laze to get up and look for it to make sure) that thoroughly intimidated me when I was younger because of its ease of flow from earliest times to the present.  You can’t be interested or know about it all.  Surely!

     It takes a while before you realize just how much of scholarship is built on the work of others: synthesis is what keeps you sane!  Over the past few years I have found, when searching for some fairly obscure information that, certainly on line, you find that there is often a core of Ur-information that has been ruthlessly plagiarised (without attribution) as the basis for what appears to be original research.  And, very often, searching backwards, you often find that confident assertions of fact are based on the flimsiest of factual evidence: suggestion develops into statement.  How often have I wished that there were footnotes so that I could find out just what the quality of evidence for the assertion had!  But even with what appears to be scholarly footnotes, you often find that ‘evidence’ is ‘personal’ book based and not on primary sources.

     In the Open University students are encouraged not to cite Wikipedia as it is not a ‘clean’ source of information, because it is able to be edited without the care that academy demands.  We OU students still use it of course, it is far too useful to ignore, but we look for another source to cite to give credibility.  This has meant that for one of my references for a particularly useful comments by Sir Laurence Olivier, I cited (in the correct manner!) a dubious website that I found.  That reference went through my tutor on the nod, but a Wikipedia citation would have been frowned upon.

     But, lurching back to what I was taking about some time ago, the book seems to me to be something worth looking for.  I have a possible author’s name, I know that it is connected with the Baltimore Museum of Art, and I suspect that it is also linked to The Cone Collection in the same institution.  So, you can rest assured, that when I should be learning and revising my Catalan vocabulary, I will be searching for yet another art history book to add to my collection!

Wish me luck!