3 days in 1

 

SUNDAY 1^st October

 

Five years ago, to the day, we were in our local medical centre.  Not for any treatment, but rather for Toni to be able to cast his vote in the referendum about Catalan independence.  On that day, we made our way through crowds of people flocking around the doors of the medical centre and spilling onto the closed road in front.  We walked past police who were there, but not doing anything positive or negative, merely being there.

     The mood inside the centre was fairly febrile with the volunteers staffing the voting stations constantly looking around to see if the police were going to do anything more proactive.  The plastic, translucent, ballot boxes were guarded like precious jewels and were able to be whisked away at a moment’s notice if it seemed like they were in danger of being impounded by agents of the Spanish government.

     News about other polling stations filtered in throughout the day, where the peacefulness of our experience was not matched by the police violence and thuggery that took place in the name of Spanish democracy!

     The scenes of police aggression against people peacefully trying to cast a vote was shocking, and as more stories began to be told about the day, the anger was palpable.  The gleefully heavy-handed ‘policing’ ordered by the conservative PP (the most corrupt political party in western Europe) government in Spain, did irreparable harm to the reputation of the government and the country.  And the extended victimization of the leaders who took part by use of a highly questionable judicial procedure and blatantly partisan judges did nothing to repair the damage.

     North of the Pyrenees the ‘legal’ ‘justification’ for the prosecution and later condemnation of the leaders of the referendum and their consequent imprisonment was treated with astonished contempt, and all other European countries rejected the shaming demands by the Spanish Government for extradition of the self-exiled leaders of the referendum movement, political and social.

     In the five years since the referendum was held, where an overwhelming majority voted in favour of independence, most people would say that the political situation has worsened, and not just as far as the question of independence for Catalonia is concerned.

     The influence of Vox, the far-right party, has grown and there are areas of Spain where the far-right is in government, working with PP to ensure a right-wing majority, or with Vox forming the largest party in its own right.

     Of course, in Catalonia, PP and Vox are treated with the disgusted contempt that they so richly deserve, with their parliamentary representation being so small that they do not even have the numbers to form their own grouping within the Catalan parliament – but nationally, it does look as though the PP with the help of fascist scum like Vox and an equally contemptible right-wing party, the C’s, could have a majority in the next general election for the national parliament and oust the so-called “Socialists” that are in power at the moment.

     Although Catalonia does have a majority of independence representatives in the Catalan Parliament, the politicos have not declared independence and have worked with the national government to get the referendum leaders out of jail and have decided to proceed via negotiation rather than via confrontation.  Which sounds reasonable enough, until you start looking at the history of the conflicts between central government in Madrid and the government and people of Catalonia.

     The question of whether there is a majority in favour of independence in Catalonia is moot.  In Catalan parliamentary terms, the majority is clear; in terms of the general population of Catalonia, the figures are ambiguous.  To which the response might well be, “Then put the question to a vote!”  A vote that would be accepted by all sides in the argument.

     You have to understand that the “Unity of Spain” is a concept that is written into the Constitution, and some have suggested that any vote for independence by Catalonia would have to be open to the whole of the population of Spain!

     When I was seven or eight years old, my parents brought me to Spain from Cardiff, for my first foreign holiday, to Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava in Catalonia.  Dad took me to the building site that was the Sagrada Familia and explained to me what the church represented and said, “Catalonia is not Spain!” 

     It is perhaps significant that behind the Civic Buildings in the centre of Cardiff there is a memorial to the Welshmen who fought and died in The Spanish Civil War https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=spanish-civil-war-memorial-cardiff and some of those names are from the area where my father grew up, he would have known the families and, although too young to have fought in the Spanish Civil War, he was of an age to be a member of the armed forces in the Second World War.  The modern story of Spain and its fight against fascism, and especially the heroic struggle of the Republican forces centred in Barcelona against Franco was a story with personal links.  The miners of South Wales were stalwart supporters of the Republic, as were many other workers and intellectuals.  There is a residual affection for the national ambitions of Catalonia and a rejection of the subterfuge that has been used to belittle the valid arguments for statehood.

     But, as always, politics is the art of the possible, and in the complex games that politicians play, the simple questions become enmeshed in the rococo frills of self-interested definitions, so that impetus is lost.

     Catalan politicians make clear statements calling for independence, but their actions are more nuanced and ambiguous – but the rancour of unfinished business is likely to sour Catalan politics for some time to come.

 

 

MONDAY 2^nd October

 

There seems to be a direct correlation between my buying an uninteresting piece of domestic hardware via the Internet and then finding a cheaper version on sale in Aldi or Lidl almost immediately afterwards.  This has happened too often for it to be a mere coincidence, and I begin to suspect a major conspiracy.

     Everyone 'knows' that one’s computer and mobile phone listen to us via voice and keystrokes.  How many times have we volubly prevaricated about cutting the grass or painting the bathroom ceiling with proper anti-mould paint, to find adverts for mowers, strimmers, paint brushes, paint, and those little trays for use with rollers suddenly making their way into the feeds for computer and phone?  And bafflingly, if you do succumb to the purchase of a lawn mower or strimmer, you are assailed by further adverts urging you to buy another one!  What sort of palatial establishments do Amazon, and their devilish associates think we live in, where a single mower is wildly inadequate for our vast lawns?  Why waste computing power on repeat adverts when the product has already been bought?  Such things are beyond the imagining of we mere consumers – perhaps Amazon has a computer-generated list of the things and the number of those things that we are supposed to possess according to their relentlessly capitalistic algorithms, and we are kicking against the weight of untold exabytes of computing power that tell the company what we should have, irrespective of how we mere flesh-carriers think our possessions should be ordered!

     I am sure that there is a sci-fi short story there somewhere - if it hasn’t already been written.

 

TUESDAY  3^rd October

 

Today is the opening performance in the new Opera Season in the Liceu – at least it is the opening concert in Torn A – the subscription series that I have – though I don’t think that this is the First Night.

     The walk from the car park on the Ramblas to the Liceu is getting more and more onerous for me, as I hobble along with my baston and pausing to look into the windows of shops full of tourist crap, as a way of spacing out the effort to get me there.

     I always dress down for the Opera, which is to say that I wear what I always wear, shorts and a t-shirt, unless the weather is really cool, in which case I make the concession to dressiness and sport a pair of jeans.  The weather at this stage of October is still fairly warm, and I type this with the doors to the balcony open to give a cooling breeze!

     The opera is Don Pasquale by Donizetti and, as usual, I have had recourse to my Amanda Holden edited copy of The Penguin Opera Guide to give me an edge as the absurdities of the piece, but it is a masterpiece of opera buffa, and a convincingly realistic narrative is not something that we should expect!

     And, at the end of the week, another (the second) of my Saturday afternoon (early evening) concerts in La Palau. 

     Culture reigns!

Our Lady of the Bright Economic Vision!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The daily temperature graph fluctuates, but its general direction is down.  Windows and doors are still open, but the cloud cover emphasises the cooler temperatures.  At least it is not raining, and I can keep congratulating myself that I am not in the UK.

     Our Prime Minister Without a Popular Mandate has, at last, come out of hiding and given a few interviews to the local media, she doesn’t seem ready to take on the nationals with the threat of the Today Programme on BBC4 a big no, no.

     The key element in what Truss said was that, in spite of virtually all reasonable economic punditry condemning her reckless gamble on the British Economy, she had to do “what I believe is right”!  So, if I understand her correctly, she didn’t need a budgetary forecast about what she was proposing because that would have been based on informed projections and facts by proven experts, whereas what she and her wrecking chancellor were about was more to do with self-justified "belief".

     So, the lying Northern girl who has misrepresented her early life of “grinding middle class poverty” and spread her lies about a “failing school” that somehow managed to get her into Oxford University, has now reinvented herself as some sort of mystic: Our Lady of the Bright Economic Vision. 

     I imagine her as a grotesque reworking of Bernini’s sculpture of The Agony of Saint Teresa, lying back clothed in her carefully selected High Street brands (to demonstrate her un-Rish¡ down-to-earthiness) framed by strips of the golden wallpaper of her disgraced predecessor torn from the wall, calculating eyes half-open (to note and take advantage of the main photographic chance as it presents itself) and waiting for the gilt arrow of the Angel of the 1% to pierce the space where her heart should be so that she can unleash foison on those that already have.

     We really shouldn’t be surprised, as it is the same “belief” that drove forward the absurdity of Brexit and that continues to power its demented defenders in the face of demonstrable disaster. Brexiteers actively and robustly excluded so-called experts (Britain, declared Goblin Gove, has “had enough of experts”) from any consideration of the merits in the discussion for deciding the most momentous question of the new millennium.  It wasn’t facts, demonstrable facts, that drove the argument, it was “belief” – and we have seen just how efficacious that has been in boosting the wealth and reputation of the nation!

    Of course, the most obvious problem with dealing with someone whose ideas are based on “belief” is that there is no argument that can win.  The ‘facts’ may line up against the point of view, but all the holder of it has to say is, “But, I believe differently” and what is there to say to that?

     Belief and prejudice are nearly related, and while I believe that facts may strengthen “belief” and give it a foundation in fact so that it is no longer a belief but something approaching a scientific fact amenable to the ‘scientific method’, I also believe that facts must eventually defeat prejudice – you will have noted that I have used the dreaded word “believe” myself!

     I suppose when you come down to it, the way that you think is governed by what you think society is, and what your response to humanity is. 

     If there is one thing that I believe in, it’s people, working and thinking together.  It is the community, whether it be of science, or economics, or the arts, or nations, or whatever grouping you like to use to define the mass, that determine what is true and what is right.   

     I pop my daily pills, not in the mere belief that they will do me good, but because the scientific community and the medical establishment have produced, checked, and authorized their use.

       Cult leaders can fleece their flocks by wielding ‘belief’ as an effective tool to part ‘believers’ from their wealth, but I expect more from my political leaders.

     And that last thought might well be a naïf belief.   

       But it is one I cling to.

Prevarication?

 

 

 

 

The weather cools further: this time I may have the French door open, but I do not have the small fan on.  By such things one measure the descent to the depths of autumn and on to winter!  I am also doing up my coat when I go for my second bike ride, rather than leaving it unzipped.

     On my bike ride to Gavà on the beach side paseo, I see more evidence of the removal of the last of the temporary chiringuitos, a true commercial indication of the changing of the seasons.  But, in spite of all these portents, the weather remains generally fine, and I have not had to take the car to my early morning swim, so far!

     Although my timing for my swim is exact, the time that I leave for my bike ride to Gavà differs, depending on whether I have written anything of consequence in my notebook, or if I am engaged in conversation with people in the café, but seemingly at whatever time I leave, there are the Unknown Regulars that I pass or am passed by.

     The start of Autumn sees the re-emergence of all the retired folk who have been nudged off their parts of the paseo by the summer visitors and the kids.  Now that the kids are (mostly) back in school there is a sort of spaciousness to the beach area which is being reclaimed by those of a certain age.  Some of them (us?) are defiant in their appearance and their actions, relentlessly throwing themselves into the cooling waters of the Med or parading along the paseo in temperature-ignoring wispy coverings and pretending that the summer is still with us.

     There are plenty of cyclists, many of whom are in Lycra and, at first glance, look to be common or garden wearers of that revealing material, but a more searching look shows that the costumes are holding the riders together rather than making them more aerodynamic!  But that is to be commended.  Just as TV series are now ‘colour blind’ when it comes to casting, so clothing is ‘body-blind’ – you wear what you want and the fit is what you decide it is, rather than having to make reference to some sort of unobtainable body-ideal that can only be achieved by self-inflicted starvation or torture in the gym!

     You can see where this is going.  It will end up with my justifying anything in a reductio ad absurdam that (in spite of the poor Latin) will allow me to feel smug!

     Enough!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I find that I am oppressed not by the number of books that I have, but rather their weight.  I have lived with ‘too many books’ since I was a kid, so that in my smallish bedroom I had to be careful when I awoke as the shelves on my bedside wall, actually stretched over the bed itself, so that I slid out of bed rather than rose from it!    

     There was never enough space and gradually every room in the house became, as my mother would phrase it, “infested” with books.

     The move from Cardiff to Catalonia was beset with problems because of the number of books that had to be housed (or flatted) and not all of my prized possessions made it onto new shelves in my new country, but an inordinate number of IKEA Billy Bookcases later and a substantial number of the books found a space.  Not that the space was coherent, as the moves from Cardiff, to storage, to flat, to releasing more storage, to house meant that an overall system was never really imposed on my books and in the various rooms of the house there are now what you could describe as “colonies” of like-minded books forming interesting islands of partial coherence but separate from an over-arching empire of classification.

     I must admit that I have got used to the disparate nature of my literary holdings and quite enjoy the serendipitous discovery of a long-lost volume tucked somewhere where it has not logical reason to be.  Some of the juxtapositioning of some of my books simply looks far too contrived to be aleatory, but I assure you that however pretentious the shelf might look to the outside eye, it is what it is by luck rather than intention!

     The problem that I am presently wrestling with is to do with the placement of new books.  In spite of the lack of available space, that has in no way hindered my purchase of new volumes that I “need”.  And sometimes “need” is augmented by “bargain” – in the sense of value for money.

      I try and tell myself that I have no problem in paying an inordinate amount of money for a decent seat in the Opera, but I would hesitate to pay the same amount of money for a book.  Even though books, I have to admit, have given me more (if different) pleasure than Opera.  I can pay a triple figure sum for a seat for a momentary experience, but not pay the same amount for something that can give lasting tangible pleasure.

     I am not the sort of person to pay vast sums of money for a first edition.  The first editions I have were bought because I bought the books when they came out first.  I do have a 1702 edition of Swift, but that was an unexpected gift and not something that I bought for myself.

     My problem was that Taschen Books had a sale.

     Taschen Books is an imprint that produces spectacularly impressive volumes as well as what you might call domestic books, but their key, or one of their USP is in producing books that are large, opulent, and very heavy.

     In the on-line sale I bought a number of these books which, when they were delivered, it was impossible to carry them all upstairs at the same time.  It is also difficult to hold them and if you rest them on your knees, they crush them.  They are ‘table’ books and, when they are opened up, they need a big table to accommodate them.

     At the moment they form an arty looking pile by the side of my chair, looking almost like a stage prop of a pile of large books.  The trouble is that I have nowhere to put them.

     A set of my large art books are in an extra open section that I have attached to the top of a whole series of Billy Bookcases.  But these books are too big to fit into those oversized shelves and anyway, the idea of reaching up and bringing one of them down to reader level without doing irreparable harm to yourself, or at least breaking an arm or a hand is not to be considered.

     Their weight is too great when they are put on any domestic normal shelf for it to survive.  They have to be put at the base of the bookcase, but it means taking out two shelves to fit them in – and I simply do not have the room to rearrange without (perish the thought) actually getting rid of some of my books.

     So, they sit there at the moment, like a monument, waiting for life to rearrange itself so that they can be enjoyed.

     I have spent my life, giving preference to books, and I am girding my literary loins to Find A Solution.

     The books will win.  They always win!

 

Ways of speaking, ways of thinking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a decent early morning swim, a nicely surrealistic accompaniment to my post-swim cup of tea by sighting a man with a parrot on a collar and lead, arriving to have a coffee (the man and his lady companion, not the parrot) at an adjacent table.  The white parrot (cockatoo?) alternated his perch from the man’s shoulder to the top of a free chair, but was generally unobtrusive, and certainly quiet, though constantly disconcerting. 

     I think it was the collar and lead that discomforted the most but was not enough to distract me from answering Carles’ questions about English Usage, with which he assaults me most days.

     Yesterday, he wanted to know about expressions of surprise and, knowing his predilection for the archaic (he uses “spiffing” with relish!) I offered him “Goodness gracious me!” as something suitably outré in modern use!  He had forgotten it by today, though after a Herculean effort of memory he dredged up the “gracious me” part.  I wonder if it will make it to his RAM tomorrow!

     Today’s Word of the Day was “spoil” and its use with regard to children (specifically his grandchildren) and to things in general. 

     I enjoy our little chats because it keeps me in touch with my teaching side and, while I do not think that I have the same agility with explanations that I had when I was in the classroom, it does make me think to try and find the way to explain things that to a native English speaker need no explanation.

     I hasten to add that these little forays into education do not, even in the slightest, make me regret my “retired” status from the teaching profession. 

     Teachers have my admiration and sympathy, but not my emulation!

 

The weather is certainly on the change.  I have not only started wearing a short jacket when I set off in the early morning on my bike to the pool, but also when I go on my extended bike ride to the end of the Gavà Paseo after my swim.  The days of a t-shirt being adequate for both are now gone, as indeed are the nights without a sheet and with an open French door.

     Although somewhat overcast, there are intervals of sunshine, and I am still using a small electric fan to keep cool in my chaotic squalor on the third floor.  There are still times in the mid afternoon when the big fans are needed, but the weather is decidedly “fresher” which is our euphemism for colder.

     As with the UK, though not in such a squalidly chaotic way, Spain is dreading the winter with the increases in power and prices generally.  Although the winter is cold, it is not as bitter as the UK, though central heating and blankets with a couple of eiderdowns are necessary to get through the colder snaps.

     Castelldefels is a rich little town with a selection of Russian oligarchs and Barça players living here in multi-million-euro houses (as well, of course, as we, the genteel poor-ish) so the fear of what the winter can bring is somewhat modified by the fact that many here are well able to compensate for the hike in prices and still smile.  But, like any sizeable town, you need an army of lower paid people to keep the place running – and how are they going to survive?

     As part of my forced awareness, I am determined to find out how and what the council is planning to mitigate some of the deleterious effects of the coming financial hardship.

     From time to time, we have volunteers stationed at the check-outs of our local supermarkets asking for donations for Food Banks.  I have no idea where these are situated in our town, and I also don’t know how they are funded.  But I am going to find out.  And Do Something.

     With my not-fit-for-purpose knees there is a limit to what unskilled help I can give, but there must be something that I can do.  I am aware that, though I might “preach poverty” I am comfortably well off compared to many given my status as a Baby Boomer who got born at the right time for virtually everything!  So, even if we have to make some cutbacks in our expenditure to cover exorbitant fuel bills, there will still be something left over to help those who are really having to make the decision between buying food and staying warm.

     I suppose that I am writing this down as a way of forcing myself to do something more than just ruminate.  For example, I am sure that my pool would be more than prepared to collect food for the Food Banks, they have done it before, and perhaps they might be prepared to do it on a more regular basis during the winter months. 

     Before I ask anything of institutions and myself, I have to find out just how these things are organized in Castelldefels and then take it from there.

     Responsibility begins at home, and my home is here.