Costly domestic fountains

 

A curtain of falling water is a most attractive feature to grace a garden – but when that feature is obviously leaking from the first-floor kitchen then its beauty is rather limited.

     Entry into said kitchen was also entry to a sizeable paddling pool, surrounded by electro domestic items that do not do well in standing water.  Displaying remarkable technical knowledge, I turned the water off at the mains and then, with even more technical ingenuity used the dust pan to scoop up the flood and deposit it in the sink.

     The problem was our water heater and, as this is gas fired, I always have an added element of fear when things go wrong with machines of this sort, so we turned it off.   

     Unfortunately, with the heater turned off and the water stopped so that it did not continue to pour out onto the work surface, we were then without any water at all, except that we had in bottles.  As it was the weekend (of course) the idea of getting anybody out without paying a king’s ransom to get them to the house, was unthinkable.

     A weekend without water, except for that in bottles.  We did discover that the outside garden tap was still operational and so Toni traipsed up and down stairs to bring water in buckets to use for essentials.  Cleaning one’s teeth and washing one’s face with water from a bottle of mineral water might have an air of the exclusive and indulgent about it, but it is practically, um, difficult.  And I prefer not to talk about the practicalities of the toilet!

     Monday was a day for phoning around and finding someone, anyone, to come to the house and work the technical magic to get the bloody thing operational again.  Hopes were raised, only to be dashed, but eventually we found someone who promised to come out the next morning.

     He came, he did his stuff and asked for 400 euros!  It is at this point that I should mention that our house is rented.  You would therefore be justified in asking why we were doing anything about something that was clearly the responsibility of the owners, and not, emphatically not, the concern of the tenants.  To ask such questions, merely shows hat you do not rent accommodation in this part of the world!

     God knows, Estate Agents do not have a good press, in these parts they are held in even less esteem than The Press and Politicians!  If you can imagine such a thing.  

   To say that our estate agents have been less than helpful is a woeful understatement – they are militantly unhelpful.  Anything that you might think would be the responsibility of the owners, here isn’t.  All they do is take the monthly rent and do virtually nothing to justify the rake off that they get.   

   In a twist to the usual tale, our estate agent is actually the owner of the house that we rent, but it is done via a Company that we are supposed to assume is an entirely different entity, but the owner of the estate agency is also the director of the company.  We find ourselves in an almost Dickensian situation where the poor estate agents tell us that they are hamstrung by the demands of the evil company – which they also own! 

     Even though we know about their machinations there is little that we can do about it.  The contract we signed indicated that we had responsibilities (a bloody sight more than the bloody estate agents) towards things like sinks, toilets, taps and the heater that one would usually assume is the responsibility of the owner.  Assumptions do not pay bills, and the 400 euros is gnawing away at my very being – that is 25% of the cost of buying a new heater!

     But, enough of moaning about legal thievery.  Let one story stand for the whole despicable lot of them.  When we first arrived in the house, we obviously checked things to make sure that we were getting what we were paying for.  In the kitchen we noticed that there were fitted kitchen cabinets, but, when you opened them the lack of shelves limited their usefulness.  When we told the agents that there were no shelves in the units, they simply shrugged their shoulders and did nothing!  Unbelievable, but an unbelievability that applies to many other stories about the callous disregard of estate agents in this part of the world.  400 euros!  The more I try not to think about it, the more I do.

We have just had a phone call from the company that sent the guy to fix our heater.  It appears that the guy got his figures wrong when he made out the bill for the VISA machine and transposed two figures, so that we have underpaid.  They want their extra money.  I wonder if they would have been so eager if the sums had worked out in their favour?  Doesn’t the parallel meaning of “Let the buyer beware” referring to the seller, obtain in this case?  I am sure that it does, but I don’t think that I am going to be the beneficiary of the mistake.  It somehow makes the paying of the money even more difficult to take!

At least the sun is shining and I have done a little light sunbathing.  We are both taking ‘Sol’ capsules, bought from one of the supermarkets, that are supposed to aid tanning.  The capsules contain carotin and copper and various vitamins and are quite cheap so we have decided to give a month’s worth a go.  They are not artificial tanners, but are supposed to ‘aid’ the process.  I have taken a picture of my skin against a sheet of white A4 typing paper and I will take another photo at the end of the test period.  I will have been out in the sun during this time, but the depth of tan will be the key to success.

     While I am regarding this as little more than a half-joke, Toni – with his proverbially white skin – has rather more invested in this experiment than I.  Perhaps all that the capsules do is focus the mind, and that directed thought will ensure exposure and therefore a tanned skin.  We will see- but as the price of the individual capsules is about 13 cents, not much is invested in the success!

 

Next week, Opera, La Boheme – something to hum and cry along with.  Our production in the Liceu (if it is the same as the one I saw last) is rather showy, but good fun.  I have two criteria for success for a production of this opera: firstly, I want to see people actually eating real food in the Café Momus scene; and, secondly, I have to cry at the end.  Usually this is a cast-iron delight, whatever the production (as long as the voices are half-way decent) and there has only been one true disaster of a performance in my experience where “Your tiny hand is frozen” aria was greeted with stony silence at the end!  I left before the first act had ended.  I expect much better on the 14^th of the month when I go to my isolated seat in the stalls.

     Last month the scheduled performance of Tannhauser had to be Covid-cancelled, so I have been having opera-deprivation symptoms and, let’s face it, La Boheme is something you can wallow in.

 

 

All this and more!

 

 

 

 

 

 

My choice of food for the birthday meal in the chosen restaurant was a ‘bocadillo classico’ of chorizo, morcilla (black pudding sausage) and cheese.  And it was tastily spicy, though a little dry, so I added mayonnaise.  The restaurant owner was delighted that I chose something so traditional and everyone else was horrified that I had chosen something so laden with cholesterol!  I have to admit, in spite of the hypocrisy of people questioning my choice while themselves have fatty alternatives, the roll was one of the tastiest that I have had for years.

     The delightfully indulgent theme was continued in the birthday cake that was a chocolate sponge with orange mousse cream, coated in chocolate with the topping of fresh fruit.  Utterly delicious!  The only restraint I showed was in my non-alcoholic beer – and that was purely on medical advice, and not, I hasten to add, in any way my free choice!

     The curfew has now ended, but we did not come back to Castelldefels much later than usual and, as I am now used to going to bed hours earlier than I used to, I was tired when we got home and soon went to bed.

 

There, the foregoing shows that I am capable of writing about something other than Covid and politics, though you will notice that the ‘curfew’ did manage to make an appearance.

 

Part of the fall-out from Toni’s birthday concerns his presents.  I bought him a pair of wireless ear buds to listen to the radio on his phone when he goes for his daily walk but you will be astonished to hear, they have not paired easily with the phone.

     I have yet to get a pair of wireless ear buds that have paired in the ‘automatic’ way that they should.  Much the same goes for smart watches seamlessly pairing with smartphones – ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, rather than anything remotely related to reality.  However, perseverance and a few fugitive tears usually manage to get the necessary results.

     As Toni is of the “why do I need the instructions?” generation, he is usually more intuitively sensitive to the petulant demands of electronic equipment than I, but at present he is claiming major mechanical failure to explain his almost complete lack of success in getting the ear buds to work.  I say ‘almost’ because he has got the ear buds to work, but not both at the same time.  The buds have not spoken or paired with each other – and I have nothing to suggest to resolve the situation.  Eventually, Toni will work out some sort of resolution, but at the moment he is frustrated and generally dismissive of the whole affair.  But it will nag at his technical reputation and he will get them working.  Probably.

The weather recently has not been wonderful; indeed the weather has not been sunnily acceptable for months.  I endured a lacklustre April on the assurance (an explicit assurance by Toni) that the misery of dull days would give way to a brilliantly sun-lit May.  And that has signally not happened.

 

And has still not happened and this is now some days later.  Although it is not raining, it has been trying hard to do so and generally unsettling the sunshine that should be pouring down on us.  But I have faith that the good sunny days are but days away.

 

I hate, have hated, and will always hate the wearing of glasses.  They put pressure in all the wrong facial places and steam up and slip and are generally hateful.  Since I was eighteen I have worn contact lenses, and, as I started wearing them in the hard-plastic era then those of my generation will know that the discomfort of glasses is as nothing to a speck of dust getting behind a lens.

     As I do a lot of reading and typing, it is generally better for me to wear neither glasses nor contact lenses for the best reading experience.  Typing is a little more difficult, but on the computer it is easy to increase the size of the type to accommodate my poor sight and then reduce it to normal size when printing.

     However, from time to time I get fed up with lenses and revert to glasses in spite of my antipathy, and for the last number of months I have worn my glasses.

     I had to visit the optician because of the ill fit of the glasses – to be absolutely fair, this was probably because I have left them on my leg (!) while reading and it is inevitable that some pressure damage will result from complete lack of care.

     Although my optician does such running repairs for nothing, he was obviously missing my injection of cash that the wearing of daily contact lenses brought him from me on a regular basis.  In a discussion about why I wasn’t wearing my lenses, I pointed out that I need varifocal lenses in my glasses to cope with my long and short sightedness.  He was not fazed and said that a new type of varifocal lens was available if I would care to try it.  Never one to reject the spending of money (free trial is never really ‘free’, even I know that) I agreed to give them a go.

     Now, I did go through a period when my optician in Cardiff tried to change my lenses to something more suited to my variable sight. 

     One of the failed experiments was to make each of my eyes do a different job: the left was for reading and the right was for distance.  Or possibly the other way around.  Whatever.  I was told that my brain would sort out the conflicting information and would ‘choose’ the appropriate eye for the task.  It didn’t.

     I also had a bi-focal lens to try too.  That failed entirely as I couldn’t see well at distances and reading was a total disaster.

     So, my agreement to try the lenses has failure built into the experience.  To make matters much, much worse, the lenses were monthly wear rather than the daily wear that I had become used to.

     I have to admit that I never, truly, looked after my lenses properly, so a daily lens that you could insert in the morning and throw away at night seemed ideal for me, and they were soft and easy on the eye too.

     It has only been a few days with the new lenses and I have to admit that I am impressed.  So far.  I have not seen a lens through its life yet, so judgement must be reserved, but they are comfortable and although my sight is not perfect, it does allow me to read, type and see with some clarity.

     People with poor eyesight are prepared to put up with a lot.  You only have to look at the outer surface of a confirmed glasses wearer and note the number of smears, splodges and specks of dirt to be impressed by how many obstructions to clear sight we are able to take in our stride.

     The privations of contact lens wearers are usually epic.  A contact lens wearer will have harrowing stories of pain, loss and miracle that will make non-contact lens wearers doubt their probity, but all those stories are true!  We wear our tales as badges of endurance under tiny bits of plastic!

     It is far too soon to accept these new lenses as anything other than a promising experiment, but it is only when you have experienced the gradual increasing loss of sight through the years, that you will be able to understand the amount of blind (ha!) faith that lens wearers put in each innovation to make their sight sharper.

     My optician assures me that I am now wearing the very latest technology and that the improvements of the lenses from similar ones of only a year ago are remarkable.  Who am I to say?  But I hope he’s right and I further hope that the continuing streams of money that I pay will be justified in clear sight.

 

One side effect of not wearing glasses means that I can wear other glasses.  This is to do with my bike riding.

     Unprotected eyes, even at my gentle speeds, means that all sorts of detritus come smashing onto the eyeball.  Wearing glasses acts as a shield for the various irritations, especially tiny insects, that generally interfere with smooth riding.  So bike glasses were needed.  Which I have.  Somewhere.

      The Royal Hunt of the Eye Protectors eventually unearthed (not literally) some goggles that I had bought on Kickstarter.  The USB of these was they had a Bluetooth connection to my mobile phone and used bone conduction behind the ear to allow sound to come through, but still allowing ambient sounds to flow into unobstructed ears.  As far as my understanding of the traffic rules is concerned, in-ear buds are banned when you are cycling, but bone conduction variants are possibly allowed.  Certainly.  I think.

     I have used them once and listened to a fairly hard-hitting interview on the Today Programme (Radio 4) with a British Conservative minister trying to justify the absurd illogicality of the Covid rules regarding a worrying outbreak of the Indian Variant of Covid and allowing a crowd into a football stadium.  An embarrassing melange of words from the hapless minister did not hide the paucity of thought behind the non-policy of criminally culpable Conservatives.  So the glasses worked.  Frighteningly well.

     The battery life on the glasses is allegedly 6 hours, and other reviews have said that they hold their charge well.

     The only down side was the necessity of changing the visor from a muddy brown to a professional looking blue.  It was not a task that we (it took two of us) will repeat: the visor that is there now stays there.  For ever.  And I am inclined to write a scathing comment on the YouTube film of one reviewer who said, “Changing the lens is easy” and then DID NOT DEMONSTRATE how to do it, merely giving a vague indication of “pinching here and the lens will pop out” – lies and deceit!  However it is done and it adds a touch of professionalism to my altogether sit-up-and-beg style of stolid cycling.

 

Talking of which, where is my new bike?

     I had been warned that its delivery would take about 32 working days (an oddly specific number) but the bike seems to be stubbornly stuck in Poland after having been sent by train (is that likely?) from Hong Kong.  It is now getting to the stage of contacting my contact in the company and asking plaintive questions.

     Oddly enough, the reason for purchasing the new bike has become less moot.  I was having difficulty in dismounting from the vehicle and decided that I needed a ‘walk through’ version to accommodate my lessening agility.  However, I have developed ways of getting on and off the bike that suit my needs.  Furtherly however, I think that the new bike will be short-term-future-proofed.  Or that is what I am telling myself to justify the expense.  As the money has already been paid, it is just a matter of wanting to get my hands on what is mine already.

     I will try the web site again and perhaps things (including my bike) will have moved on.

    I live in hope!

  

 

The slippery eel waddles away!

 

Try as I might, I find myself unable to resist trawling the Guardian for news about the charlatan who is masquerading as the First Lord of the Treasury in the United (ha!) Kingdom.

     As I have made abundantly clear to anyone who will listen to me, I am prepared to pay ready money to anybody who takes the clown to court and presses charges of Corporate Manslaughter against him and his motley crew of degenerate inadequates who make up the Cabinet.

As an integral part of the evidence against the idiot, it would be good to have the crushing conclusions of an independent commission of some sort to bring into court.       The dolt has said that the process of looking into the National Disaster of Covid Unpreparedness will start during this session of Parliament.  And the gibbering loon has further been on the radio and through the usual morass of gibberish he has intimated that the process will actually start in the Spring of next year.  The World At One on BBC Radio 4 managed to find an expert who said that, given the wide-ranging nature of the inquiry it would be unlikely that the final report would be issued for a couple of years.  So, the final report will likely be published, if the corrupt money hoover actually is forced to do so, in 2024/5!  And, of course, as the commission or inquiry or whatever takes its course, the shock-haired charlatan will regard the whole question as ‘parked’ and when the report is finally issued, the nepotistic ethics vacuum will regard the whole question as “past history” – just as he has successfully managed to evade responsibility for the actions of previous Conservative governments over the last decade of which he has been part.

     I am horrified to think that he might actually get away with it – just as he has all the other misdemeanours that have littered his so-called career, both political and personal.

     The results of the council elections show that as long as you keep a straight, or in his case an “engagingly” twinkly eyed face, the electorate will swallow any old rubbish and will, in their droves act like virus voting for vaccine – a truly bad analogy as there the ‘bad’ will be destroyed by their own ignorance . . . oh, wait a minute, the so-called Red Wall voting because they believe the proven liar’s assurances; because they believe that Conservatives actually care for anything north of Watford – perhaps the analogy holds!

     Although I think that politics in England (I stress ‘England’) are rapidly approaching a Through the Looking Glass unreality as logic is divorced from proven actuality, there is always the good old US of A, to show that things could be even worse.  Republicans in Red States are behaving like unsupervised spoilt children wreaking havoc on other children’s sandcastles, except real people are being hurt by the Republicans denial of truth, and the baleful influence of the Floridian Oz is making the Republican Party simply not serious enough to take on the mantle of government.

     Any self-respecting Conservative will (or should) find it impossible to continue supporting a party motivated by a demonstrable lie.  The purging of the party to ensure that all elected party officials are True Believers in the coup inspiring and voter denying Trump means that the choice that Conservative have to make is clear.  If they do not make it, then they will be tainted by association and should be called out and condemned.

     The acceptance and adoption of “illegality” by the British Conservatives in their attempts to preserve power is not something that should comfort democrats (with a small ‘d’) in Britain.  Just as I passionately believe (based on past proof) that the NHS is NOT SAFE in Conservative hands, so I equally passionately believe that the present bunch of unprincipled Conservatives have not and will not be bound by common decency and they will use all the power of their positions to twist, distort and subvert norms and institutions to keep the party in power.

     I think that we are at a pivotal point in the history of the UK: the structure of the country is fracturing and we have a government that essentially couldn’t care less about anywhere other than England.  The small-minded nationalism and the very large lies which fostered the disaster of Brexit are going to be used to justified to change and wreck what we thought might have been solid.  The next few years are going to be a very rough ride!

 

Meanwhile, off to Terrassa for another birthday in the festive orgy of commemoration that is the first part of May!