It's only a thought!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig and crumbled goat’s cheese salad, followed by grilled vegetables with herbed oil, concluding with fresh fruit salad: an excellent and astonishingly healthy (for me) lunch in the restaurant of the Maritime Museum in Barcelona with my good friend Suzanne.

     This was the first time that we had seen each other since the summer, and we had the usual lively conversation where the food (excellent though it was) came a distant second to the words with which we surrounded ourselves!

     Out of all the things we talked about, the one which has stuck in my mind was related to a comment that Suzanne made as we bewailed the idiocy of so many people in the world who were simply behaving very badly.  The perennial question of course, is what is to be done to make the situation better?

 

     

 

 

 

 Suzanne’s suggestion was that some sort of international organization like The United Nations Organization should encourage people to come together and produce a list of “Ten books that everyone should read” and then actively encourage their dissemination and consumption.

     My initial reaction was to say, “Thus starts World War III!”  And I could imagine a Lincoln-like figure of authority coming up to Suzanne amid the rubble and wreckage of the World Book Armageddon and saying, “So, you’re the little lady who started this big war!”

 

 

 

     The major religions would probably consider their texts a shoe-in as the most important, so the Christian Bible, The Quran, The Talmud, The Vedas, texts from Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism and Sikhism – and you’ve almost used up the ten slots and you’ve left out religious texts from a significant number of other continents – to say nothing of other more fringe religions that would make a good case for the consideration of their ‘sacred’ texts.

     What about considering texts of socio-political importance like Animal Farm and Utopia and The Prince and Leviathan and . . . too many other books to consider.  Or texts about history, or art, or architecture, or music, or philosophy, or . . . so the list goes on.

     I can imagine the discussion.  And I can imagine more easily the discussion descending into rancour and outright violence.  So, just to simplify somewhat the problems surrounding any choice, let’s try and limit things, so that the macro problems of some sort of ‘absolute’ text to go into the World UNO Ten Selected Books, can be considered from a more domestic perspective.

     And that ‘perspective’ suggests another problem. 

     If I think about my personal choice of Ten Texts, then I would start from a background of English Literature and Literature in English.  If I push myself further, then my choice might become a little more pan-European, but my selection will still be limited to fairly conventional Great Literature and Great Thinkers, who are overwhelmingly Western, white, and dead.

     For the sake of attempting something that is within my range, instead of trying to cope with my upbringing, perspective, cultural background, ethnicity, class, etc. I will embrace what I have to work with and think about something that I can achieve and relate things directly to my read experience.

     I will think about the problem of the Global nature suggested by Suzanne’s thought and suggestion, by seeing how something would work by using my experience in the limited area of English Literature, and choose ten books that might fit the bill.

     I find that I am presented not with a range of opportunity, but with a disturbing number of questions about choice.

     Should I be thinking of a History of English Literature approach that starts with something like Beowulf, takes in Chaucer and goes on to Shakespeare as writers providing the first three texts?  But all three pose real problems: Beowulf is written in Early English; Chaucer writes in Middle English and Shakespeare writes in, well, Shakespearean English – none of which is easy to read if you are used to Modern English.

     So, should the choice of Ten Books be not on a strict historical approach but something more like a populist approach, something which more easily invites a reader in, rather than something that demands a certain amount of knowledge and sensitivity to time and place to gain a full understanding of the text?

     But, I feel that there might also be a “no pain, no gain” element inherent in the worth of a significant piece of literature (and I can feel the speech marks forming around many of the words that I have used in the sentence so far) so that if you don’t have to make an effort to understand or appreciate the quality of the writing and the thought behind it, then perhaps it is no more than entertainment, and is not something to be considered Great or even Worthwhile literature.

     So, I will further limit myself to books that are unintimidating, works that can be understood by an educated reader.  I know that ‘understood’ and ‘educated’ are words that demand some sort of definition, and perhaps the constant feeling that more explanation is necessary before a selection can be made is an indication of the difficulty of the whole project.

     But, let me stick to my limits of books in English Literature; reasonably accessible; in some ways of universal significance.

 

     So, my choice of Ten Texts That Everyone Should Read are:

 

1     Animal Farm by George Orwell

2     Songs of Innocence and Experience                 by William Blake

3     Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad            

4    Great Expectations by Charles                           Dickens

5     Emma by Jane Austen

6     Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by               Lewis Carroll

7     Lord of the Flies by William Golding

8     A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

9     Rain and other stories by Somerset                 Maugham

10    Stalky and Co by Rudyard Kipling

 

I’ve just typed them, and I am already having second and third and fourth thoughts, and I think that this is something that I will come back to!

     But Suzanne’s comment has made me think, and, as these are only my first thoughts, perhaps it is only fair that I return to this concept another time!

 

 

 

 

Knees Up Mother Brown!

sticks,          

 

Well, I suppose it is something to be told that the x-rays of your knees are “the worst that I have seen” by your doctor, as the opening gambit in a conversation that stopped before the Pandemic made seeing actually speaking face to face with your doctor a thing of the past.  Welcome to the new future.

      

 

My knees have never really been my strong point and a few tumbles while dismounting from my bike, have made them a damn sight worse.

     I can walk unaided, but it is so much better with a stick – and my walking is strictly limited to that which is strictly necessary.  Which sometimes means that I don’t even reach the unambitious target (set by my smartwatch) of 3,000 steps a day.

     The process of my future care is now slotted into The System and that will grind its inexorable way forward, although given the pandemic, the number of untreated cases of wonky knees is probably in the tens of thousands, and the medical mills grind slow.

     My prescriptions have changed, but only to give me better pain killers, which the doctor has suggested I use with caution – which makes you wonder just what drug they are derived from!  I have done without pain killers up until now and I can stumble my way onwards without them.  Hopefully.

     A blood test has been set up for me and another appointment with the doctor to see exactly what is happening and then, who knows?

     There was a horror story of a guy in the UK who needed to have a back tooth taken out and who searched for an NHS dentist to do the job.  He couldn’t find one locally, and after some fifty phone calls to increasingly distant practitioners, he eventually found one who suggested that the earliest appointment he could have would be THREE YEARS DISTANT! 

     Perhaps this is one of those instant urban myths that flourish in straitened times, but I am sure that I read about it in the Guardian, and since I put all of my faith into the probity of that newspaper, it gives you a mighty pause for thought.

     I have to say that the medical treatment that I have had in Catalonia has been exemplary and my doctor has been essential to my well-being.  But there is only so much that a local health centre can do.  Operations on the knee are well outside their remit.

     It is at this point that I remember my father.  He too had problems with his knees, but his problems came after a career as a PE teacher and playing professional Rugby League.  I really have to hunt around to find reasons for my knee problems, and I don’t think that a few nasty tumbles from the bike explains everything.

     Dad was told that he would have to have an operation but, even in those days, there were waiting lists and he would have to go on being in pain, waiting for a bed to become available.

     In spite of his socialist beliefs, he eventually listened to his surgeon who told him, “If you have a private consultation with me, I will be able to recommend you to one of ‘my’ beds in the hospital and then the operation will be done on the National Health.”  My father paid the fifteen guineas for the consultation, with the surgeon, which was obviously just a form of words, he was given a bed and was operated on, basically by jumping the queue.  Dad was in pain, and he couldn’t walk.  The NHS should have been able to deal with his condition but, we do not live in an ideal world, and the fifteen guineas was money well spent.

     When I find out exactly what is wrong with my ‘disaster area’ knees and what the specialist suggests needs to be done about them, then I will have to look at the possibilities and what is going to work for me.

     So far, the Catalan health service has been brilliant and has fully justified my faith in it.  My knees might pose a problem that will need a little more than faith to sort them out.    We will see.

Oh shut up!

 

 

 

 

 

The sound of full-blast Heavy Metal music from my neighbour would thump its way through the walls of my semi-detached house once every couple of years.  How I wish that such a biannual interruption to my placid way of life could replace the almost pathological need for noise in this part of the world.

 

 

     Dogs are the bane of a quiet life.  As many of the places around us are flats, people have adapted their canine needs and usually plumped for those grotesque rat-dogs with bulbous eyes and spindly legs that they have reasoned by virtue of their shrunken size are more adapted to life within the confines of a flat.

     I am sure that they take up less room. But their moronic, high-pitched yaps belie their bonsai appearance with a ‘bark’ volume seemingly designed to cut through concrete.

     Here in Catalonia, as I am sure was true in other places that had a severe lockdown, we have the left-over ‘walking’ dogs.   

     At the time of the restrictions, we were not allowed to leave our homes unless it was to get essential provisions or to take a dog for short walk.  The rules were that the dog was not allowed to be walked more than a couple of hundred years from its home, but some people (don’t they always) bent the rules and used the dog as a passport to roam freely.  And a number of dogs were bought during the height of the pandemic (how?) specifically to allow access to a reasonable walk.

     Now, the dogs are not strictly needed, and their walks have become, not a freedom to be enjoyed, but a chore to be resentfully endured.  And they all bark.  Probably including some of the owners, too!

     But dogs are not the half of it.

     We are on a sometime main flight path for aircraft landing in the airport in Barcelona – although it is only when the wind is in certain directions that planes are directed to fly over the residential parts of Castelldefels and Gavà.  And if you believe that then you will believe anything.

     The pandemic gave us an unnatural piece of peace, with the number of flights severely restricted.  To be fair, while the noise from the aircraft is loud, you sort-of get used to it as just one of those things and, after a few seconds, the sound is gone.  As opposed to the bloody dog next door that has been left alone at home and has been barking for the whole of the bloody afternoon and who will not, in spite of screamed instructions to shut up, shut up.

     But the true horror has been house improvements, or complete makeovers.

     The house we live in is rented and, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing has been done structurally, aesthetically, horticulturally, electrically or any other damned word ending in -ly since they were built.  To give you some idea of the hands-off approach of the owners, basic things that you would expect the landlords to take care of like fixtures and fittings, including damage to sinks, toilets, etc, or for an even more glaring example the gas boiler for the heating and water – they wash their hands of entirely.  The ‘nothing to do with us guv’ approach reached its apotheosis in Catalan landlords!

     This also means that when one of our houses ceases to be for rent and is sold, as a couple have over the last couple of years, then the new owners look askance at the age of the decoration (avocado bathroom suite, anybody?) and realize that they will have to do some major refitting.  The electric system and wiring are not fit for purpose and woe betide anyone foolish enough to put the kettle and the microwave on at the same time!

     You get the idea.  Everything needs to be changed.  And for the last two years we have lived through two refits.

     One thing you should know about our houses is that we live in what is in British terms a terraced house, one of five three floor structures.  They are solidly built of concrete throughout, but it also means that if you hit a hammer on the wall in one of the ‘houses’ every single other house can hear it.

     Perhaps at this point I should add that all the floors are tiled, as well as the stairs, and there are lots of stairs – so taking up tiles from all the floors of all the rooms, all the stairs and from the walls of the kitchen and two bathrooms means a lot of work, a lot of very noisy work with jack hammers that make life one long nightmare.

     Changing the electricity means cutting into the walls to get out old wiring and put in new.  With hammers.

     Changing the kitchen is a whole symphony of noise in itself.  And then there is the cutting of the new tiles to fit.

     In a place that is being newly built, you expect noise, and it doesn’t really matter because the eventual residents are not there.  When you have a densely populated residential area with two households treating their houses as building sites, the result is total dissatisfaction and a resentment that is going to continue for as long as the neighbours live there!

    

 

Enough!

     Tomorrow the visit, the first visit for a couple of years, to the doctor to see if he can recommend something (anything) to make my knees more cooperative.

     The more I think about the visit, the less I expect from it.  I suppose to be realistic, the most I can hope for is a referral to a specialist to see if anything can be done inside the knee in a rather more professional way than my rather desperate application of oodles of fisiocrem™ to the outside!  I sincerely hope so, as I am getting tired of limping along using a growing collection of walking sticks, well, three – and I can justify the purchase of each of them as they fulfil different needs in the assisted walking arena.  So there!

Watch me, and follow me carefully

 

 

 

 

 

 

I may have done teacher training for Further Education and taught for the whole of my career in Britain in Secondary Education, but there is a part of me that thinks that I would have been more satisfied in Primary.

     I don’t mean the Primary Education of today with restrictions on what an individual teacher can teach and with assessment testing at every whipstitch, but rather in the more ample days when teachers had the latitude to gain objectives by using their individual initiative in the classroom and creating learning opportunities with paper, scissors, glue, and other materials.

     There is something magical in standing up in front of a class with a sheet of plain A4 paper and saying, “I want you to start folding your sheet of paper like this.”  The hands-on experience of something as mundane as folding a piece of paper and, sometimes tearing bits off, always engaged pupils – and gave them a sense of satisfaction if they actually managed to follow the instructions!

     My greatest achievement in paper folding and sticking in Secondary School was, in one double period, getting the class to write a short script with a couple of scene changes and then create a miniature stage, complete with proscenium arch with flying scenery and paper puppets to act out the script.

     At the end of the double-period I was a frenetic, gibbering wreck and the kids were hysterical, but we got it all done and there was a real sense of achievement.  What the kids were like going on to their next lessons I didn’t have the energy with which to speculate, but I wouldn’t have liked to be teaching them!

     These exhausting memories came back when I was trying to complete a fairly simple task, where the thinking bits had already been done and all that was required was for the ideas to be worked out with the programs and the materials that I had to hand.

     And one of those tools was Word.  In all its glory.

 

 

 

     As someone who learned to type on a ‘real’ typewriter (and has a certificate to prove it!) the ease with which Word does what it took me hours to painstakingly work out makes many of the skills that I learned completely redundant.

     The example of the centred menu comes to mind.  Today, with a program like Word, all you have to do is type out the items in the menu, highlight, and click centre, and it’s done.  It was not like that in the Old Days.  Just take the title: M E N U

     The word ‘menu’ has four letters, in the example above I have added a space between the letters making a total of seven key strikes.  Knowing the total number of keystrokes in an A4 sheet of paper, you subtracted your 7 key strikes from the total and then divided the remainder by two to get the number of spaces that you would have to leave to get the word MENU exactly centred on the page.  The space bar of the typewriter could be depressed and held down which moved the carriage of the machine forward a half-space, so that the spaces could accommodate and half-space when the sums were done!

     I am delighted that such labour is now behind us, and Word offers so much more.  Not, of course that the normal user of the program understands or even guesses at just how much power there is in the program.

     As I keep saying, I use my highly sophisticated computer as a glorified typewriter and am constantly grateful that I do not have to use Tippex (in liquid or sheet form) to correct my mistakes.  Indeed, the program usefully corrects things it decides are typos as you go along and then there is the click on ‘Editor’ which lists errors it has found and offers you the chance to do something about them.

     Typewriter keys could not be changed, you were stuck with the typeface that the keys had.  No choice.  Now, only your imagination and the depth of your pocket limit the typefaces that you have at your fingertips.

     But, for me, the problems start when I start to use the power of the program and go beyond the glorified typewriter status that my machine usually has.

     The challenge that I had was to have things going in different directions rather than sticking to the usual top to bottom, left to right order of things.  And I was trying something new.

     Now, after years of Toni saying the same thing when I start moaning about how to do something, “Go on YouTube and ask!” I have finally found that what he has been saying has some merit and somewhere on YouTube, as long as you ask the right questions, you will find that some saddo or other has gone to the trouble of making a semi-coherent film giving you some pointers towards an answer to your problem.

     My problems are usually, not that I am using Word, after all, who doesn’t? 

     My problems come when I realise that I have been looking at an explanation that doesn’t cover the fact that I am not using a Windows machine, I am using a Mac, and there are and always have been subtle differences, but differences big enough to cause almost complete nervous collapse as you try and work out why the simple instructions do not work for you.

     Eventually, I find a way – or rather I find the set of instructions that go with my Mac and with the version of Word that I am using.  But time has passed, and I know that the next time that I try and do something similar, I will have forgotten a simple but essential step that gives success.

     But that is part of the price you pay for not having to count up spaces to centre a heading.  And, on balance it’s a price worth paying.