Judgement!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retribution was swift.

     It took less than five minutes from a viciously casual remark to a teacher friend about to start school tomorrow, “When you go through the gates, I want you to know that there is a retired teacher smiling!” to trapping my little finger’s pad in the pre-swim shower button and producing a momentarily, intensely painful blood blister that my grandmother of unregenerate, pre-woke days, referred to as “a blackman’s pinch”!

     I can’t remember the last time that I had one of those, but it must have been in my distant youth, and I did now what I did then, and bit through the skin to allow the blood to escape.  So, I sat in the hydraulic chair (my ceremonial and arthrosis-friendly way into the pool) looking like some barely sated vampire.

     I judged, almost certainly wrongly, that the various chemicals in the pool (as opposed to the various substances in the pool that necessitate those chemicals) would be beneficial for my small wound and that, in any case, I knew that I had a bottle of TCP at home, so all would be medically well.  Eventually.

     I was much more worried by the recently discovered chocolate stains on the front of my shorts that I noticed only when I was getting changed.  And before minds whirl away on the wings of vile speculation, let me hasten to explain how they got there.

     Chocolate is one of the banned substances in my so-called diet, and I find it hard to remember when I last had a ‘real’ piece of that confectionary.  Everything is low fat and sugar free, and calorie reduced – and generally flavourless.  But a summer without ice cream is unthinkable, and so alternatives to the desired-forbidden have to be found.

     There are ice creams that proclaim themselves to be created with “No Added Sugar” and I have learned to be not too scrupulous in discovering exactly what that phrase might mean.  What I take it to mean is that the substances so described are ‘allowable’ for me to eat.  As with low-fat, sugar-free yogurt, you can enjoy such things as long as you do not, ever, eat the full-fat, sugar-filled, real alternatives.

     I still remember a period years ago when I had got used to the anaemic yogurts that were allegedly ‘healthy’ and I called into my parents, where my mother offered me an M&S “rich and creamy” yogurt to try.  Which I did, and almost fainted with the sheer pleasure and sensory overload that the deliciousness of “rich and creamy” was.  It was only with a supreme effort of will that I managed to stagger back to my home and NOT instantly throw away the cartoned crappiness that I had been suffering to enter my mouth and replace them all with “rich and creamy”.  But I resisted, though I never again (ever) ate a ‘healthy’ yogurt with anything less than resentment.  And I still do.

     Anyway, back to chocolate.  It is possible to kid yourself that 80% cocoa content is OK and that there is far less sugar in such things as the acme of real chocolate deliciousness (at least if you are British) of Cadbury Dairy Milk - the chocolate that had (has?) so little cocoa in it that it was deemed by the EU to be a mere ‘confection’ rather than actual chocolate! 

     But most of the chocolate that we eat is full of sugar, so given my diet, a big no-no – except there is some sort of brown covering which is able to be called chocolate and does not have the vast number of calories that usually accompany taste!

     We had discovered (and rejected) a whole range of chocolates (or ‘chocolates’) when we hit upon a whole series of ice creams in mini choc-ice form that seemed to combine the look of the real thing with about 40% of the ‘real’ taste – percentages we could live with!  And they were mini size!

     This discovery has kept us going through the summer with a taste of a traditional accompaniment to the heat.  What went wrong is that I didn’t read the packaging well enough.

 

 

 

 

     Yes, it has the equivocal banner, “No added sugars!” but what I hadn’t noticed was this particular box also had the words “Protein bar!” also inscribed.  Added goodness, one might think.  That’s as maybe, but what the ‘protein’ bit did was alter the consistency of the ice cream.

     Taking them out of the freezer they looked the same, but the differences became apparent when one took a bite.  The ‘chocolate’ (or whatever) looked and tasted the same, but the ice cream interior was hard and unyielding.  This meant that, when biting into the choc-ice the chocolate shattered and the ice cream interior remained unbroken, producing a welter of instantly melting stain makers and rebuffed teeth.

     Toni was all for throwing them away as unfit for purpose, but I was determined to thwart such ice-cream complexity and find a way to consume them.

     I have resorted to childhood (yet again) and the way that one sometimes ate Penguin biscuits, by nibbling away at the chocolate covering revealing the biscuit beneath.  This is only partially effective because such nibbling can, even with the most cautious canines, produce a catastrophic shedding of the chocolate coating that even the most nubile tongue is unable to deal with.  I have therefore resorted to the use of a bowl under my chin to catch any shards that my nibbling produces.  Ungainly, but effective.

     Luckily there are only a few more mini choc-ices of the protein variety left and I will be able to resort to the normal manner of eating these delights and not have the fear of staining.

     If I draw anything from this piece of writing it might be: always be kind to teachers, and always read the packaging. 

     Valuable life lessons!

Shades of the Prison House!

 

 

 

 

 

Swimming in my lane, trying to get used to the cut-off fins (the ones that ‘real’ swimmers use in swimming pools for reasons that elude me) I hear a voice from the next lane chant out a soulful, “One week!”  This was a teacher friend of mine counting down the days before she has to return to school.

     In this part of the world, at the start of term, there is a period when teachers are in school, and the kids are not.  A golden opportunity you would think for harassed members of the profession to get themselves and their classrooms sorted out; to check through class lists and timetables; check room allocation, and generally prepare themselves for the forthcoming fray.

     You might think that.  But if you do then the chances are that you have not taught in the Catalan or Spanish school system.  The Powers That Be consider time without kids to be the opportune time for meetings.  And more meetings.  And more.

     In my experience, and I have been to thousands of meetings, literally thousands – political, cultural, and educational, and what my mother would have described in a catch-all term of which she was very fond, “sundry”.  And I can truthfully say that the most soul destroying and quintessentially useless meetings that I have attended have been here in Catalonia.  I must make an honourable exception for Departmental meetings, but ‘whole school’ affairs have been viciously pointless.  And long.  Very long.

     In some educational administrative minds, The Meeting is an end in itself, and the content and participants’ response is secondary.  Even as I type I can begin to resurrect my feelings of almost homicidal hatred of the agenda-less meanders that took away hours of my life, without compensating me with anything even remotely educationally positive.

     A signal low point was a meeting on a Saturday morning (!) during which I was wearing my most pointedly casual clothes and throughout which I didn’t smile once.  Not once from the beginning of the pointless charade to the eventual will-sapped end. I spoke only when I was directly addressed, and my answers were clipped to the point of being marginally rude.  Not one smile.  And I left at the earliest point I could and went home, smouldering because the meeting had been (surprise!) pointless.

     But you are retired, I hear no one say.  You no longer go to meetings.  True.  I no longer go to meetings that I have to go to; I go to the meetings I choose to go to.

     The last meeting I went to was in our local city hall and was a gathering of individuals from the foreign communities, who had been invited by a general email to consider taking part.

     We gathered at the appointed time outside the City Hall and were ushered into the Council Chamber where we were seated, shown a short film, and then joined by the alcaldesa (the mayor) and encouraged to give our opinions about our city.  We were not a large group and we had widely differing proficiency in Spanish or Catalan, but we were listened to with courtesy and our points were considered and responded to.  At least verbally.

     One of the points that I made was about the state of the roads and especially those roads in the immediate vicinity of my house.  Some of the road surfaces are composed of what seems to be rafts of concrete and there has been some movement of these plates.  Round the corner from where I live one concrete plate in the road has risen so that there is a ledge lifted above the surface of the surrounding road.  As the ridge is so pronounced, it means that a car driven at a normal speed feels as though it is encountering a substantial step in the road with consequent jarring.  I had even taken a photograph of the ridge and was able to illustrate my point that the road was not only uncomfortable to drive on but also potentially dangerous. 

     I await further developments, and hope that it will not be the breaking of the axel of some unsuspecting car.

     To be fair I have not attempted any follow up and anyone who expects anything to be done in the month of August must be a very green newcomer to the country!

     The important thing is that a channel of communication has been opened with members of the foreign community and it is up to the individuals concerned in the initial meeting to make something of the opportunity offered by the City.

     We were not, in any way a representative grouping.  We had no mandate apart from our own interests.  We had an opportunity, and we were speaking directly to the political power brokers in our own area.

     We were listened to, and a group photograph was taken!  An overture has been made and it is up to us to find out if it can be taken further.

     I started this writing by concentrating on futility: the system grinding on, pointless and empty actions limiting expression. 

     But I end this piece with a new determination to make the channel of communication with the movers and shakers in my adopted city one that works for me and one that even might Get Something Done! 

     There is no point in being near levers if you don’t pull one or two occasionally and see what happens.

 

The Cynical Long Game

 

 

 

 

 

There is a J G Ballad short story entitled, “The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race” that you can read here:

https://evergreenreview.com/read/the-assassination-of-john-fitzgerald-kennedy-considered-as-a-downhill-motor-race/

where the title is perhaps more powerful than the actual story itself.  The rivalry between Johnson and Kennedy was well known and the reframing of the assassination as a race with winners (Johnson) and losers (Kennedy) is one that resonates.

 

   

 

 

That title and the competition that it suggests came back to me when I was momentarily able to supress the frothing fury and disgust that have been my overriding passions as I have been following the Surrealistic circus of None Of The Above trying to get 0.03% of the voting population to elect one or other of the wasters to be Prime Minister of a real country.

     Truss, with the characteristic malevolent disregard for conventional politics has gone all out for the Neanderthal Home Counties Conservative Vote and has thrown what The Guardian has described as “red-meat right-wing policies” to the ravening hordes of ageing, white, comfortable, English Conservatives who are going to elect her.  Her complete lack of effort to try and include the concerns of the rest of the country in her unseemly scramble for power have not held her back from assuming the mantle of The Unicorn and floating ill thought-out and plain wrong “solutions” that, while not working in what might be termed the real world, have all too much “reality” in the closed, petty world of her Conservative electorate. 

     She has shown no shame in pandering to the lowest possible denominator and has misled and downright lied to get her twisted message across.  Her only concern is power and its acquisition; all else is subsidiary.  And, let’s be fair, don’t knock it, it’s working.  Short of (I won’t say a miracle, because “Rish¡” is just as vile and unpalatable) a huge surprise, the shallow, cosplaying, Thatcher-lite cypher is going to be elected to head the Conservative Party and thus be the Prime Minister.

     Both sections of None Of The Above have been playing this election as a game.  Given the probable outcome you could say that Truss has been the more adroit politician but (ironically) at the expense of her wider political credibility.

     Rish¡ has in my view accepted that he is going to lose, but has decided to play the longer game by attacking Truss and her policies in a fairly trenchant way so that he can be seen as “the voice of reason” (or something!) when Truss assumes power and shows herself and her policies totally incapable of dealing with any and all of the problems facing her and her terrifying possible cabinet of the undead. 

      Sunak (I can’t stand his twee logo) is obviously prepared to wait for disaster (Please God!) in the next general election and then to shuffle modestly into the limelight and accept the heavy mantle of defeat by pushing Truss into the wilderness and leading the party forward in yet another “delete all and insert” periods pretending that the last years had nothing at all to do with him and that he is untouched by the crass failure of Truss because, look, he had warned about it all from the start!

     If a week is a long time in politics, then a couple of years (perhaps on the back benches) look like eons – but Sunak, with his untold millions, will be able to orchestrate his position, and build up his support so that by the time the electoral defeat (Please God!) has sunk in, he will be seen as the natural leader to guide the shaken party towards electability once again.

     Sunk has, sort of, made it clear that he would find it difficult to serve in a government led by Truss, but, out of power and out of the cabinet, it is very difficult to maintain a power base on the back benches without appearing to be disloyal.  And disloyalty is something the party cannot stand – unless, of course, you are dealing with a person who has always been serially disloyal, like Johnson - when Sunak’s resignation is seen as a “stab in the back” of a person that the 0,03% would still probably like to be “leading” them.

     Sunak is playing a dangerous personal game, dangerous in the sense that he could condemn himself to marginality in politics, and I’m not sure, having had a taste of power, that he would be prepared to sideline himself for years in the hope of eventual returns.

     What I sincerely hope is that the Conservative Party rips itself to pieces. 

     I am sick and tired of hearing that the Conservative Party is the most successfully resilient in Europe as it constantly re-invents itself to make itself appear to be electable time after time – while ruthlessly pursuing policies that keep the status quo and its wealthy supporters happy.  If only we could have a socialist government that acted with the same passion for the workers of the country rather than the less-than-1%ers!

     I look forward to the political future of my country with absolute dread.  I have no confidence that my country (including the unemployed, the disabled, the low paid, the sick, the old and all the other groups that are marginalized in some way or other, the arts, culture, education, the Health Service etc etc etc) will be better with a Truss government. 

     The wrecking ball of the right wing is swinging, ready to destroy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     I am fond, almost on a daily basis, of bringing up the picture of Goya’s etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – but with the alien throwback Redwood poised to enter government at least one of those monsters can be given a recognizable face.  The only way is down!

 

 

From Death to Patatas Bravas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How do you like your eggs scrambled?  An easy question, but the answers are always revealing.  At least to me.  I am dismissing, because, yes, of course, those who do not like eggs.  I know that such people exist.  Just as I know that there are people who do not like cheese.  Knowing is not the same as believing.  What beggared lives these people must lead!  Anyway, back to scrambled eggs.

     The right answer to the question is, of course, that you like them moist but not runny, so that they can be dolloped on freshly made bread that has been slathered with butter and devoured with utter relish and a twist of freshly ground pepper.

     There are those who bring health matters into play and aver that scrambled eggs have to be “well cooked” so that the egg is reduced to a sort of rubble that bounces if you drop it.  This is not the “right answer” (see above) but any scrambled egg is better than no scrambled egg, so it still has my vote.

 

 

 

     In a modern novel that I read and whose title and author I have not been able to recall, there was a stand-out passage that stated that the egg was proof of the existence of god, in so far as that there were so many ways (and all of them delicious) to cook the things that there had to be some sort of divinity behind their existence.  I, much later, was in a bookshop and idly picked up a Dictionary of Modern Quotations and found exactly the paragraph that had struck me on my first reading!  Stupidly (and most uncharacteristically) I did not immediately buy the book and the reference has since been lost to me.  If any reader is able to fill in the author and title I would be immensely grateful and somewhat relieved!

     The method of making scrambled eggs is simplicity itself, but the ‘acceptable’ end result is far more problematical.

     Which brings us to Death.  It has been reasonably said that Death is the Great Simplification.  At least for the dead, if not for the surviving living.  But philosophical questions about what death or Death does or doesn’t actually do were not what was on my mind when the title of this piece came to me.

     I was thinking about an ex-college who is dead, and dead before his time – if that actually means anything nowadays.  I was getting changed after my swim and something about the changing room brought back a memory of him.  He was a sporty person and, although that is not how I would ever characterise myself, we did play sport together, usually squash (in which his superior hand-eye coordination and fitness usually beat me) and badminton (in which my superior knowledge of the rules and basic tactics beat him) and I had also seen him play other sports, as well as a never-to-be-forgotten water skiing (and beer drinking) outing.  He was active, always doing, up for anything.  And now he’s dead and the whole concept doesn’t sit well with my memories of him.

     Just after I was informed of his death, I wrote to his widow expressing my condolences, but in the immediate aftermath of loss, words in a letter are not read by the bereaved much more than appreciation that the writer has said something to show that they share the loss.

     Time has passed and the jolt of memory that I had made me think of writing again.  A simple act of community, of fellow feeling.  Or not.  Whatever I thought that I was doing, would it necessarily be seen in the same way by the person who had lost the most?  Would my letter be received as comfort or as a re-opening of wounds?  A simple impulse could be anything but.

     My mind is like a kaleidoscope, but without the symmetry that the mirror at 45° that makes the pretty patterns, it is lots of little disparate pieces of information and opinion forming an almost-picture, but nevertheless one that satisfies me.

     I have (I know) actually read books like Zadig, The Voyage to the End of the Night and The Red Room and I have zero memory of them.  Presumably in some distant and rarely visited section of my mind, some vestige of the effort I put into turning the pages (it was that long ago!) must still exist.  The first of these must be where I first heard the word Serendipity, though in my mind it is more linked to Horace Walpole than Voltaire and I have vague recollections of reading a version of The Three Princes of Serendip – my point is, that my mind exists on half forgotten (sometimes fully forgotten) snippets from here and there sometimes linking up in fortuitous correspondences.  Or not.  You could say that my mind wanders rather than links and that the line of ‘reasoning’ is tenuous, but satisfying.  At least to me.

     So, we finally get to patatas bravas (literally, savage or wild potatoes) form my pondering on the propriety of writing a further letter to a bereaved friend.  The simplicity of the action is replete with complexity.

     Like patatas bravas.  Patatas bravas is a staple tapa, and most restaurants have a version of it.  It is a simple dish: fried potatoes, topped with a spicy mayonnaise sauce.  Anyone can make it: fry your potatoes, add a dash of tomato ketchup and Tabasco to your mayonnaise and you are away.  Except what you actually get served as patatas bravas will be as various as the restaurants that serve them.  A simple dish that few can agree on.  Complexity, and sometimes-delicious complexity, writ large!

     I suppose it is a truism that the simple things are always difficult to get right.  I was told that when Ghandi was staying in London, all he required was a place where he could do his spinning, sitting cross legged at his basic loom wearing the loin cloth that became one of his most recognizable attributes.  When one person remarked to a member of Ghandi’s staff how touching such simplicity was, the man replied, “Do you have any idea how expensive such simplicity is to create here in Central London?”

     Exactly.

     Simplicity is a concept like any other.  Defining it is the problem!

     And have I decided to do the simple action than produced all this thought.  Not really.  But there again, I haven’t decided against it either.  I just jiggle the kaleidoscope a little more and see what happens.

The Point Of It All

 

 

 

 

“Is it important that I can’t swim?”

     In the scheme of the things, the answer to that question could be along the lines that swimming is a vital physical ability and a more then useful life skill.  But when you have joined a day excursion cruise whose sole purpose is to go skin diving with an aqualung then the question becomes more an indication of insanity.

     In a way, I can understand the woman’s thought processes.  After all, swimming is a conscious process of propelling yourself though a foreign medium while attempting not to drown and finding a syncopated way to breathe in air to survive, whereas with an aqualung, breathing is done for you with your own air supply therefore swimming doesn’t really matter. 

     Yes.  I’m not convinced by that either.  And the woman was wearing an aqualung and in the water before she vouchsafed the information about her lack of swimming ability!

     This was in Ibiza, I think, or possibly not, but it was with a large group of people and our individual swims (if you could call them that) were limited, to put it mildly.

     Our ‘training’ for our swim was minimal and the distance under the water was as limited as the length of time that we were submerged, but there was that moment when you were under water, and you could breathe.  That moment of delicious panic when something that was counter intuitive actually happened.  It was a glorious moment and one that I wanted to repeat, but with the number of people waiting for their ‘turn’ (and, to be fair, the fairly small amount of money that we had paid for the cruise, swim and drink) that wasn’t going to happen.

     It was during a later holiday when the lure of the aqualung got to me and I had two lessons, the second one an ‘individual’ dive, where my instructor was behind me allowing me to swim on ‘alone’ giving the illusion that I was by myself.

     In the first dive I was so excited that I used up all my oxygen in a very short time, but in the second swim I was more measured and I was able to dive down to a wreck and explore – and disturb an octopus!  My instructor’s partner was annoyed by the time we finally emerged form the water and made it back to the shore office, as I had apparently had a lesson well beyond the allotted time.

     The warm waters of the Med and the clarity of the water encourage easy and interesting swims, so I didn’t continue the process when I returned to the colder and murkier waters of the Bristol Channel.

     Given the fact that I have never, ever stopped swimming during my life, the development of my interest in aqualung swimming might have been something of a natural development, but it never appealed beyond a holiday jaunt and it is not something that interests me now even though I am living by the Med.

     I think that the beauty of swimming is that it really needs so little: a bathing costume (or not!) swimming goggles and a body of water in which to disport.

     I know that some people nowadays come to the pool with a whole bag full of equipment for hands, feet, eyes and head, as well as floats and polystyrene of all shapes and sizes AND a bottle of water – which always strikes me as a trifle ironic – but, basically swimming is a simple sport, in so far as what you actually need to participate is so minimal.

     Skin diving, and especially aqualung use is much fussier and needs much more preparation and, let’s face it, when an activity like swimming is pared down to its essentials, like a normal swim, then the answer to the lady’s question at the start of this piece is, “Yes, because that is the whole point!”