Write on!

 

 

How easy it is to let a few days slip by without putting finger to keyboard!

     As a person who actually enjoys writing, there must be something deeply sinister in an attitude that will wilfully lapse into indolence rather than do something that he enjoys.  Obviously, there are excuses, the first and foremost being courtesy.

     This weekend we had an old friend to stay, and we dutifully and willingly ate (and drank very little, sigh!) with her until she left on the train for the bus for home.  And we talked.

     There is something about talking with a friend that is intoxicating.  Everything, even the stupidest of small talk becomes imbued with significance when there is history to make even the most casual of comments chime with conversations past.

     It is as this point that I recollect a colleague who had had a fascinating life: world travel, a variety of jobs including working in an Adult Book Store, an easy and friendly approach – and yet his conversation, even (or especially) when talking about overtly interesting things, was boring in the extreme.  He was one of those people who, for reasons not entirely clear, drained interest from the content of his talk.

     I often tried to analyse just what it was that made him so oddly boring but, alas, I rarely found myself concentrating enough on what he was saying to give myself enough evidence to draw conclusions!

     And yet, I have had conversations, even whole evenings, of inconsequential chatter that was forgotten almost as soon as the evening was over, but whose warm memory of friendship and communality lingers longer.

     Is all of the preceding an extended excuse of inaction?  Probably.  And in justification, I am writing now.

 

 

 

 

Duolingo, the languages teaching app, is still exerting its siren-like grip over Toni and myself.  We have, wholeheartedly, bought into the idea, nay the concept, of progression “to the next league” as something which is self-evidently availing to good, even though our present position commanding the heights of our respective The Sapphire Leagues has brought us nothing apart from a number next to our names: the first three places on the list having a more elaborate number decoration than those lower down.

     As with any system, part of the learning process is working out how to play that system.

     The whole motivating process of the learning on this app is fuelled by the acquisition of points that give you your place on the list. 

     The points can be earned by successfully completing lessons and, as you progress within a lesson group you can gain crowns to show your position within that topic.  As you move from one level to another, you are given the opportunity (for 15 minutes) to gain double points for any lessons that you complete.  You can also buy your way into high paying (in points terms) exercises by using up some of your gems that you also earn as you progress.

     Some people manage to accrue thousands of points, and as the usual pay-out for a lesson completed is about 20ish, you either have to devote yourself all day to using the app or, you pay to buy the professional version of the app which gives you unlimited lives and free opportunities to the higher scoring exercises.

     If you have read up to this point, then you are either a devotee of Duolingo or you are an ‘outsider’ waiting to see what the pay-off of all this writing is.

 

 

 

If there is a conclusion that I can draw from all this, it is that the app is using tried and tested approaches to involve the user in the program in the hope that they either watch and respond to the adverts that litter the before and after of the lessons, but also feel frustration about the ‘free’ version because it is too limiting.  I can feel myself becoming more and more drawn to paying money for this ostensible ‘free’ app because I want to get rid of the adverts and I want to be able to make simple errors without losing a precious life.

     The app has encouraged me to do more work on my Spanish for a longer sustained period of time than mere physical lessons with a teacher have ever managed to get out of me!  In that sense, the ever-present phone and the easily reached app are providing a positive boost to my learning.

     And learning a foreign language, any foreign language, must be a good thing.

     But, exactly the same techniques with lives, points, hearts, animations, questions and responses, musical accompaniment, leagues, positions, congratulations etc etc etc can be used for much more pernicious reasons.

     Toni and I are working at our respective language courses for a chunk of time and are putting ourselves out for a position in a randomly constructed hierarchy of attainment, and we feel gratified by our placement within that arbitrary ranking.  We take the automatically generated congratulations and animated celebrations at our successes as something real and something to stimulate us to continue and to progress.

     We are gaining knowledge, and anything that gives me the impetus to make an effort has to be a good thing.  But it does make me look at the way that advertising is presented, and the same techniques are used in game playing and I’m sure in gambling.

     Just because you can sense that you are being manipulated, that does not protect you from manipulation.  In the Duolingo app I welcome the encouragement to participate and to progress and I am willing to accept the digital ‘payment’ the app supplies as something real to keep me at it.

     Even if I succumb and pay the monthly rate to upgrade my experience, I can still tell myself that it is a small price to pay to speak the language by which I am surrounded.

     And I am far to digital savvy to be seduced by tempting pixels.  Aren’t I?

     When I started typing this, I was First in my League.  I am fighting the temptation to check on my position now to find out if I need to a bit of emergency lessoning to restore my pre-eminence.

     In fact, I can’t check immediately, because my phone is downstairs recharging after all the use that I have made of it today.  But I do want to check!

     The app is working!

Eat in Style!

 

 

The Christmas Meal conundrum has been solved.  We are going to eat in the middle of an Industrial Park!

     This is not quite so depressing as it sounds.  While my first statement is basically true and we are indeed going to be in an Industrial Area, the part we will be eating in is actually the site of a converted eleventh century hermitage, complete with outdoor crucifix, set in its own gardens with extensive foliage botting out the Industrial Units with which we will be surrounded.

     We have already sampled the culinary delights of the place, by going for a menu del dia yesterday, by way of evaluation.  Delicious meals were had by all, and we are much more jocose about the offerings on Christmas Day.  We have to choose a main course (the first course is a selection of shared tapas-like starters) and turkey does not figure at all – I am delighted to say.

     I rejoice in the opportunity to go to a restaurant for Christmas Meal as it means that no one in the family has to prepare the food and absolutely no one has to do the washing up afterwards!  And the price is not extortionate at all.

     To be strictly fair, although we had the menu del dia in the converted hermitage complete with stone floors and rough wooden beams, the Christmas Meal is going to be held in a rather more modern structure in the grounds that is obviously used for weddings and functions – we will however have views of the more architecturally interesting building while we eat in our more functional space.

     This is not the first time that I have been introduced to a hidden oasis of good food in something architecturally interesting as a while back Suzanne and I had a lunch in Barcelona in an unprepossessing part of the outskirts of the city, but the building cwtched away from the vulgarity of the main road was an absolute delight of semi-open air (it wasn’t winter!) with greenery and soft lighting and lovely (if expensive) food.

     Part of the joy of eating out is being surprised by quality – be it food, building or service.  Tasty memories!

     Although there will be a number of us eating, our party of eighteen is just one of many, I am hoping that the quality of the menu del dia will be strongly reflected in what we have to eat on The Day.

     After Christmas Day, the next problem is My Name Day, which is on the 26^th of December.  I think it would be presumptuous to urge everyone to go out for an equally expensive meal on the succeeding day to the excesses of the 25^th and, as the Name Day Person is supposed to pay for the meal for the family, I have no intention of spending hundreds of euros myself.  But the problem is where and with whom are we going to eat?

    As with all problems of this sort, it will be the payment of some of the cost of the final meal that will satisfy all!  I hope!

     Last Christmas didn’t really exist in any way linked to how the Day had been celebrated before.  This time round things are supposed to be a touch more normal.

     But, having said that, new rules have been announced that will require a Covid Vaccination Passport of some sort to be shown for entry into gyms, restaurants, bars etc.  If my understanding is correct this will be introduced from tonight and so tomorrow, I will have to show my vaccination information before I can have my swim.  I have had no information from my pool, and they are usually quick to keep us informed about the latest restrictions.  So, we will have to see what happens.

     I don’t want to travel into the Conspiracy Theorists territory, but I do worry about how much we are not being told about the full potential for disaster in this Pandemic.

     I have had my flu jab and my booster shot and so I am as protected as I reasonably can be, but the news that kids are now going to be vaccinated seems to indicate that we are nowhere near the end of this pandemic.

     And Christmas may pose problems, but the implications of people gathering together is something else.  I am wholeheartedly in support of passports and an insistence on the wearing of masks in all crowded places, but the stirrings of unrest about the ‘imposition’ of rules and regulations and the ‘taking away’ of individual freedom, are things that are going to make any easy resolution impossible.

 

Today my early morning swim was truncated because I had to go for a blood test – which meant queueing up (partly in the rain) while each health card was individually taken away, a sheet for the blood test results generated, and patients allowed in to wait their turn.

     It was all done relatively quickly, and it was certainly relatively painless, with only two test tubes of blood samples taken from me.  The interesting thing was when I attempted to make an appointment to have feedback on the results.

     I was not allowed to make an actual appointment, instead I was told that the doctor would contact me by phone on a particular day, “So keep the volume turned up!”

     Is this going to be the new normal?  No face-to-face appointments, with telephone links filling in.

     I know that in the UK there are plans to make telephone appointments, just that.  Your doctor will be available at the end of a line.  Given the number of ailments that have been supressed by patients during the pandemic, perhaps it is to be expected that medical staff are going to be under real pressure now that things appear to be loosening up.

     I think it is something to be concerned about.

 

 

I have been basking in the pleasure of a considerate gesture.   

     A lady who swims in the early morning with us is not well and she is confined to bed.  I was able to send her an sqb original card, and I included the famous quotation from The Three Musketeers, that she had used herself.  She was delighted with it and had the swimming pool give me her telephone number to express her thanks.

     As anyone learning a language will tell you, telephone calls in ‘foreign’ are taxing.  With my level of fluency in conversational Spanish, they are disaster areas.   

     Luckily, what was looked for in the telephone conversation that I eventually built up enough courage to make, was more conviviality and contact.  Her pleasure came over, as I stumbled my way through the requisite pleasantries.  It was good to speak to her and even better to know that in some small way my tiny gesture had helped.

     Soon may she reclaim her lane!

 

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow Irene arrives for a short stay.  As I have said before, friends who have moved away, or from whom you have moved, are missed – and oddly, they are missed even more after a meeting.  Their presence emphasises their absence!  But I am looking forward to drinking tea and chatting.  Those I do well!

Cold days, cool thoughts

 

 

It’s cold and wet and blustery and dark.  A thoroughly depressing day but, as I sulked my way upstairs, I looked through a window and noticed the two dogs who live in the flats opposite us, sitting together at the top of a flight of steps, just inside the overhang of the building watching the weather with patient indefatigability.

     Dogs, especially large dogs seem to be good at patience.  Rat dogs are of course more known for their insistent irritability and hyper-sensitivity, and one barely counts them (and that is my being kind) as dogs at all.  No.  But smaller dogs with a touch of Collie in them are more than acceptable and accepting. 

     Take, for example, the dog in the restaurant we went to on Sunday (isn’t it usually ONLY guide dogs that are allowed into restaurants? But let it pass, let it pass) where the dog (some sort of Collie cross) settled down almost immediately, finding himself a place between his owner’s foot and the window, and there he stayed for the course of the meal sustained only by a few pats and a scrap or two and a water bowl provided by the staff in the restaurant.

     Far be it from me to draw a parallel between a young dog and a young human, but the difference in acceptable behaviour by the latter compared with the former when grown-ups are around in a social public situation is telling!

     I should however take some guidance from the dogs opposite where their patience in this instance (usually they are yappy buggers) is to be commended, and indeed emulated.

     I half-joke with my Catalan friends that my ‘contract’ with the Generalitat in Catalonia stipulates sun for 365 days a year, and that I have an undoubted right to a refund for every shitty day I have to experience here!

     Although the weather can be bad here in Catalonia, indeed as I type the rain is lashing down outside and we have had overly dramatic thunder and lightning, usually every day will give you a moment of sunshine to see you through the bad weather interludes.  Today for example, although the morning was cold and cloudy, there was also some hazy sunshine – not enough to tempt me to sit outside with the smokers to have my cup of tea after my early morning swim, but still, sunshine.

     It didn’t last and after lunch the rain set in and hasn’t stopped.  Yet.  But I preserve my composure by putting total faith into the quick return of scraps of sunshine to keep me sane.

 

 

 

The saga of The Christmas Lunch has now developed a further chapter as another, and who knows even better, location has been found and we are going up to Terrassa tomorrow to give the menu del dia a try. 

     My most pressing concern is not the food, but the parking.  With my knees in their present condition, each step is something to take into careful consideration.  And there are lots of quite steep hills in Terrassa as well, and while going up slopes is bearable, the going down (even slight) slopes is not.

     Whatever we think about the quality of the food tomorrow, a table for the Christmas Lunch has been booked at the restaurant and so we are hoping and praying for the best.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Duolingo app continues to dominate our lives, and some of Toni’s hysteria (what else would you call the decision to take up Navajo in the expectation of earning simple points to add to his total) has rubbed off on me and forced me to make a doggedly determined assault on the points total of the people in front of me. 

     The end result of that is that my index finger of my right hand is rapidly growing a callous with the screen-jabbing finger writing I have had to do to amass the points to ensure my ‘safety’ in the top ten to guarantee my progress through to the Sapphire League!

     My enthusiasm is bound to wane soon, but until it does, I am gaining by going over yet again those points in the acquisition of a language that I have already gone through many times before. 

     Some day they will stick.  Please!

Speak out!

 

I think that Toni and I are both now officially addicts to Duolingo, the language learning app.  Not content with Italian and French as his chosen languages, he branched out today on a series of lessons in German.

     I am sticking, one might say severely sticking, to ‘only Spanish’ in an increasingly desperate attempt to get the rudiments of the language to stick, somewhere, in my brain.  Considering that I am a retired language teacher, English admittedly and usually Literature, but a language none the less, it is astonishing how little I have assimilated of either of the languages from the multitudes of native speakers who surround me.

     Don’t get me wrong.  I can find my way around and usually I am able to talk and bluff my way through most situations ranging from official business with the city hall and the notorious Iberian paper-pushers that inhabit them, to getting my car seen to by technicians who defiantly do not speak English.

     Still, my fluency in English is a constant accusation against my enforced Trappist approach to general conversation in Spanish.  Somehow or other Spanish is simply not ‘taking’ with me, and it is constantly frustrating.  There is only so much that a slight smile and a depreciating hand gesture can convey: communication needs words placed in a firm grammatical structure.  And that is something that I am still working on.

     Though, come to think of it, although I have been to Spanish (and indeed Catalan) lessons, there are still basic piece of linguistic information that slips through my brain with the accomplished ease of a Johnsonian lie.  I have not been truly serious about learning the language, and perhaps Duolingo is the sort of mechanical relentlessly repetitive emphasis on the essentials is the thing that I need to get me truly started (after all of my time in Catalonia) in acquiring proficiency in a foreign tongue.

     Both of us are well and truly caught up in the striving towards the next level and competing against named but unknown people arbitrarily placed with us in our respective leagues.

     Absurd that it might be, I was inordinately proud to have come first in the 'starting' Bronze league and to have been promoted to the Silver league where, coming in the top three I was then promoted to the Gold league.  Apart from being told that such progress is found in a fraction of the percentage of learners in the app there do not appear to be any tangible gains from such exertions, except for the kudos of being at the top.  But, by golly, Toni and I are putting in the lesson time to gain points so that we can stay in the upper reaches of our respective leagues.  So, however futile the status, there is a real gain in the amount of time put into the hard slog of repetitious learning.

     It is far too soon to know if we are going to keep the effort up.  But I have to admit that I have done more work on my Spanish over the past ten days that I have done in the past embarrassingly large number of months!

     We are both still very much in the present tense of our languages, and I like to think that I am capable of attempting past and future tenses in Spanish if the mood takes me, but there is a sort of grounded satisfaction in regressing to simplicity and convincing yourself that ‘this time things are being done thoroughly’ and ‘every little helps’ and ‘anything is better than nothing’ so that in Ruskin’s words I will be able to see whether my efforts are ‘availing to good’ – whatever that means

 

The Saga of The Christmas Meal continues, with The Family finding out that many of the suggestions that they have come up with are all fully booked!  To the surprise of no one.  However, in spite of it being late (far too late) to find anywhere decent, we (or rather they) have found a place which has dropped like Manna from Heaven, or via a cancellation and another venue has been found.

     This Wednesday, we two are going up to Terrassa to have a menu del dia to find out the worth of the place, but in late November, we do not have the luxury of being able to be picky about the place that we finally decide on.  And what can one really judge from a normal menu del dia compared with what they might offer for a significant meal like the Christmas Repast.  Still, I maintain my rigid optimism and look forward to being pleasantly surprised next week.

Next week is also my blood test as part of the preparatory work for Doing Something About My Knees.  I am not sure how much further forward knowing about the composition of my blood will advance repairing the bone of the knees, but I await medical enlightenment, that might come the week after next.

     Since Christmas is horrifyingly near, it is obvious that nothing of any import will happen until the New Year and my hobbling will have to suffice until more specific descriptions of what can be done and how long it might take.  Something, neither the waiting nor the actualité, that I consider with anything approaching equanimity.

     But, there again, all personal conflict has to be seen as grist to my literary mill.

     If nothing is done, I shall write.    

   And if something is done, I shall write.   

     Hardship is a double-edged sword to someone who writes!   

And I’m not sure that that image works.  And I do know that I don’t care.