The little rituals of life

No matter how early I make it to the pool for its opening, my little friend with his cigarette is there before me and trips off to the pool from the changing room to bag his accustomed end lane.  It is a wise choice because the last lane is rarely doubled swum so to speak.  If you are in it then the people who come after you choose one of the other lanes.  I had to make do with lane 4, a good choice this morning as I had it to myself, and I was able to pace myself against my little friend.

     MLF can swim crawl, and he swims the first length using this stroke, but his succeeding lengths are steady breaststroke – steady, but relatively slow.  My pacing him therefore is lapping him.  I set myself to lap him ten times before he leaves the pool.  When he leaves the pool, it is time for me to do my ‘endgame’: six lengths, of which the last two are, respectively, an assessment lane as to how I think I have swum, and during the last length I try and estimate my total distance.  My aim is to complete 1,500 m and it usually takes me about 40-45 minutes.  If at the end of my last six lengths I have completed my fifteen hundred (my smartwatch tells me exactly) then I do one length as quickly as I can and then a leisurely length of sedate breaststroke.  I then have a series of stretching and cool down exercises at the far end of the pool and my last length is a high stepping walk to a final series of twenty knee bends and out.

     Usually I go to the pool café when I have completed my swim, but today was one of the two days when I have an early class in Catalan.   

     Today’s lesson was taken up with the searing film of a young girl’s experience of growing up in Afghanistan as the school contribution to activity associated with the Week of the Woman.

     The film was called Osama and it produced one of those experiences that leave you feeling weak with impotent fury about how humans treat each other.  Admittedly the Taliban does not have a very positive public image and most of us feel an instinctive revulsion against the whole ethos of what the Taliban stands for.  Like Apartheid in South Africa, the Taliban is something that can be rejected with something approaching complacency as their attitudes towards women are simply totally wrong.  No excuses, wrong!  To say nothing of their attitudes to culture and expression.

     Because the subject matter of the film is so appalling and so transfixing, it is difficult to evaluate the film as a film.  There were shots of great beauty and the director was not afraid to extend some shots and consciously dwell on squalor artistically viewed – but the story of a family of women forced to dress the child as a boy to allow them to go outside after the Taliban refused to let women work and be outside of their homes without the presence of a man or boy is gripping.

     There is a meeting next week in school that I may attend which builds on the momentum from the film - but it depends on how the Catalan revision is going!  The meeting, after all, will be in Spanish – which is not in the test!

First into the pool this morning (i.e. the day after the opening paragraphs) and safely within the untouchable watery embrace of lane number 5!  And I kept it until the end of my swim: alone, inviolate!  And as a bonus, during my after-swim tea (outside, though the weather was at the limit of outsidedness) I thought of a word that I had searched for in vain last night when I was doing more work on the memory poem: validation.  And that can be used easily in phrases to lessen its awkwardness.  Each small step towards completion is gratefully accepted.

     

     Today a lunch date with Irene and the opportunity for more cups of tea and word in conversation.

         

     My revision for Catalan has taken a backward step because the set of vocabulary cards that I wrote have disappeared and I am loath to make another set.  A clear case of prevarication – and the exam is now five clear days away!  O god! O Montreal!

     And now to go upstairs and do some real Catalan work.  And hope, against hope that it will result in some sort of residence in my memory.

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!