Too big to ignore!

I have just finished reading Andrew Marr’s book on post-war Britain; I have read and enjoyed ‘Moby Dick; I have been to my first opera in the Liceau in Barcelona.

Why, you may ask, do I list these intellectually acceptable ‘achievements’? What is prompting me to be even more defensively cultural than I am normally?

There are many ways of gauging the academic worth of a person and, similarly there are many ways of revealing the feet of clay which can bring a carefully constructed persona crashing to humiliation.

Just consider: a friend once said that it was ‘amusing’ to take a bottle of Hirondelle to a party (He was wrong); another friend can recite word-for-word the lyrics of any ABBA song you care to mention; another likes mushy peas from poor quality chippies; yet another likes those luridly coloured cheap sweets in the shapes of bananas and other suggestive fruit; another can’t stand the music of Phillip Glass – and so it goes on. Perfectly acceptable people with the fatal flaw that can’t be passed off as post-Modernist irony. Something which cuts to the quick; something which simply altars your whole perception of a person.

Time to come clean. Time to bite the bullet and simply reveal the black spot before Blind Pugh comes a-tapping.

We (you see I am attempting to spread the blame) have now bought installed and viewed a 42” Plasma behemoth of a television!

Spanish television does not really have an equivalent of the BBC, so the defence of “I only watch quality drama, documentaries and the news” is less than convincing.

The ‘thing’ neatly and snugly fills a yawning chasm of a gap in the wall unit which is supposedly commodious enough to accommodate your normal television, hi-fi centre and DVD player side by side.

The first film that we watched was ‘Mars Attacks!” That, in itself, speaks volumes – though I have to admit that the cinemascope screen shape with the space above and below the picture was still large enough to enjoy the film, whereas with normal televisions the compression usually means squinting at action scenes which have squeezed themselves into a glittering miniature rather than being overwhelmed by a filmic experience. I suppose that I could insert here that I am looking forward to viewing some of my DVDs on the large screen so that I can pick up details which had simply passed me by on the smaller televisions that I have possessed in the past. But who would believe me?

Certainly not me!

Sitting on a balcony which looks out onto the Middle Sea; water which links me to all the great civilizations of the past and a number of truly revolting ones today; I can indulge myself with the knowledge that I now own one of the talismanic icons of the consumer society gone mad.

It does look good though.

Star gazing!

Is Venus the Morning Star or the Evening Star or both?

I only ask because, as a refugee from Barça TV eating my Spanish Omelette (which I have to say is the best that I have yet made) on the balcony the light in the sky is intriguing.

Perhaps I should explain that Barça TV is a TV channel dedicated to those who support Barcelona Football Club (¡Força Barça!) and they are, let me tell you, a forceful lot. One Catalan acquaintance of mine (guess who!) stoutly maintains that to support any other club is a form of national betrayal. If you have ever been to the Nou Camp stadium and ventured into the shop which is dedicated to Barça, then you will realise that it is possible to live a life wholly under the imprint of the Barça crest. I kid you not.

From the time that you get up and discard your Barça pyjamas and brush you teeth with your Barça toothbrush and later drink your Barça coffee from your Barça mug which is hurriedly stirred with your Barça spoon because your Barça watch tells you that you are running late . . . and so it continues. It reminds me of certain Welsh speakers in that citadel of English speaking life in Wales, Cardiff, who are able to lead a particularly Cymric life by selecting carefully and choosing selectively.

Anyway, one of the truly dreadful programmes on this channel is a ‘discussion’ forum where an impossibly tanned baldy wearing lurid jackets introduces ‘guests’ who have a sort of tag line and then proceed to shout down everyone else as they put forward their point of view. You must understand that all the guest do this simultaneously so the resulting cacophony (in Catalan) is truly unbearable. So, better the unmoving light in the sky, the acrobatic bats and the sound of the surf than the human chaos purporting to be entertainment!

The sunset today was one of irritatingly casual beauty. The sort of landscape that no photograph could really capture: the orange ochre afterglow of the sun with a sky ranging from near black to light purple with the curdy whiteness of breaking waves with their dull thump being a subdued soundtrack to one of natures throwaways.

Of course I could just be describing this to rub in the fact that I am by the sea, but Dianne has told me if I continue with that form of juvenile one-upmanship she will refuse to visit me again. So it really is because the sight was jaw droppingly beautiful. Honestly.

Talking of jaw dropping beauty (or perhaps not) I have paid my first visit to the opera in the Liceau in Barcelona.

The auditorium is ornate and gilded and conforms to what you expect from a traditional opera house. It has obviously had a fairly recent facelift and the stairs, lifts and facilities are new and impressive. Although I was at the back of the fourth level the seat was comfortable and I had sufficient leg room. And indeed a good view.

The surtitles were only in Catalan so I had to listen very carefully to the Italian and guess what the Catalan meant while desperately trying to remember the libretto from the CDs that I bought while in London. A stressful experience and one which was not always very successful. More homework needed for the next one.

This opera was ‘Andrea Chénier’ by Umberto Giordano – an opera that I had heard of but never seen before.

The setting of the opera is set on the eve of the French Revolution and ends with the last days of The Terror. On this promising background we are presented with the usual love triangle and tragic conclusion with accompanying melodrama but the director, Phillipe Arlaud, took some liberties with the text and tightened up the horror of the vicious effects of the French Revolution and produced some memorable (if derivative) tableaux.

For me the production lacked the taut and stringent direction of a thoroughly professional approach. The use of projection I thought facile and, at times, confusing. The costumes seemed to make a statement, white, drained of colour, perhaps indicating the vitiated condition of the complacent aristocracy under Louis. But this idea was not developed and the possibilities for the rest of the opera were not explored.

In the first part of the production the single most irritating feature was the ‘servants’ setting out the food, arranging the furniture and dancingly setting the posts and rope to delineate the area of the Aristos. They were fussy, unconvincing and shamefully capable of upstaging singers with important arias. They couldn’t dance or even move convincingly and their improvised (?) business looked more like a school production than a world class professional presentation: distracting and unnecessary.

The central feature of the set was a large revolve on which were angled flats which allowed the containment of action, a flow to another area and the setting up of new vistas. This was generally well used though there were times when it all seemed just a little breathless with cast members visibly rushing from one scene to another up stage.

The main roles were sung competently with the exception of the Comtessa de Coigny (Viorica Cortez) whose voice sounded forced and unpleasant. José Cura was a well sustained Andrea Chénier and was more than ably matched by a powerful presentation of Maddalena de Coigny by Danieta Dessi – they were a joy.

The minor roles were mainly character depictions but they were execrably sung and the poor quality acting did not compensate for the lack of musical pleasure.

The orchestral playing under the baton of Pinchas Steinberg was excellent; he drew out a performance of power and complexity with an effortless range of tonal textures.

But the production: the production essentially tried and failed.

It was a good idea to have a small child play with a model of the guillotine; it was a good idea to have a projection of plans to make a guillotine to cover a scene change and to indicate the start of The Terror; it was even an interesting idea to have a working schematic of a guillotine projected – but to speed up the chopping and then duplicate the chopping machines? That was crass and essentially funny.

The end of scene was accompanied by an angled flat sweeping across the stage to the sound track of a falling guillotine blade. This was fine once; but repeated was ludicrous.

I liked the more gritty interpretation of some part of the action in the second half. Madelon – a problematic figure at the best of times, presenting her fifteen year old grandson to be a solider when all the rest of her male relatives have died, is somewhat unsympathetic. In this production she presents her grandson to a largely indifferent Gérard who inspect the boy much as if he were a horse and takes him away, presumably to his slaughter. In the text Madelon asks for help where she is alone and it is generously provided by the bystanders; in this production she is alone and is left to wander. As the revolve turns it reveals Madelon staggering her way through serried slanted crosses (in a clear steal from ‘Oh What a Lovely War’!)

Similarly when Matthieu fails to gain contributions from the crowd, in the original text it is the silver tongue of Gérard that persuades the ladies to part with their gold; in this production it is the menacing bayonets of the soldiers pressing forward to extort the money. I like these touches, and if the same thought had been given to the rest of the production then it would not have been as roundly booed as it was!

The ending is also a problem. Our two lovers Chénier and Maddelena are together but only for so long as their last ride to the guillotine. This glorification of death together rather than life without is uncomfortable and the director has a nice (if disturbing) solution. As the lovers turn upstage singing their final ecstatic duet the entire cast has entered upstage and is walking towards them; as the lovers finish the entire cast fall dead, the lovers with them, littering the stage. The only people left alive are the children who pick up a flag and a gun and at the final moment of the opera are seen silhouetted gun, tricolour and fists raised.

It is an interestingly ambiguous picture. Does it represent the sacrifice that the older generation has made so that youth can go forward to a new life; or is it rather that the flag and the gun and the defiance are indications that The Terror will be continued though in another form. Look, as they say, at history.

I have just had a telephone call from Clarrie and been told off for criticising copying: how else do people learn! Fair point.

And, after all, I did enjoy the performance even if the production did not do justice to the music. And I though the boos were a little harsh – but I do look forward to the next opera which is Aida. I trust that the production will be challenging and shatter peoples expectations.

Perhaps I can have a boo then as well!

Saying goodbye!

Well, a long gap is a chance is see if anyone is reading any of this!

The first and most important reason for the lack of typing was because I was back in Britain. Not a happy visit. Ingrid, Clarrie’s mum, and a friend for umpteen years was seriously ill and died just five minutes before I saw her.

The only consolation I can take from the experience was that I was there when Clarrie needed me and I was able to help with the inevitable arrangements which have to be made.

I will miss Ingrid: her carefully timed telephone calls just a week before a half term to ensure a visit in the holiday period; her unbeatable potato salad; her introducing me to the mysteries of a good German poppy seed cake; her way of talking; her generosity; her sense of humour; her love. Some things are not to be found anywhere else and the combination of characteristics that made Ingrid who she was are not likely to be repeated. Except, of course, in memory where they can live on in a happy stasis. I think that the phrase that Clarrie thought up to summarise her mother, ‘Brave, loving and loved’ is an evocative and accurate one.

The service sheet which we drafted looked fantastic when it was finally printed (in full colour!) The front has a photo of Ingrid when she was a young girl of seven in German wearing an open smile and an unfeasibly large bow! The inside pages had a collage of Ingrid taken from photos through the years and her German identification documentation and papers when she first came to England. The back page had one of the last photos of Ingrid in hospital with Clarrie. The photo was taken by Mary and it although poignant in retrospect, it is actually not a harrowing image, but lively and jolly. And that’s how I am going to remember Ingrid.

The service in the Crematorium in Exeter was completely non-religious in nature and taken by me s a sort of MC! The main feature of the ‘service’ was Clarrie talking about her mum and reading an extract from a poem. The fact that she was able to stand up in front of people with the coffin of her mother beside her and give such a witty, touching and compelling talk says much for her strength of character.

The service was structured by music, ranging from Brahms to a piece of popular German folksy music called ‘Berliner Luft.’ I think it all worked and was a good tribute to Ingrid – the funeral director sitting at the back of the chapel certainly enjoyed it and was very complimentary when we finished!

I will miss her. On being five minutes late to see her mum, I said to Clarrie, “Your mother has been making me feel guilty for thirty years; why should she stop at the end?” We both laughed and that surely is the best way to remember and commemorate.

A purchase while in Britain. While walking down Regent’s Street I just happened to notice that the apple shop was open, so I popped in a bought one of the new ‘Classic’ 160GB ipods. I suppose that those two sentences while giving you the facts of the purchase do not actually tell you the intent that was behind the detour to that particular street.

When all my stuff was going into storage I spent some days (sic.) transferring all (sic.) my cd’s onto my computer. I was then able to transfer all the music onto an ipod. But, as the cd’s grew the ipod’s measly 30GB (remember my first computer had a storage capacity of 128K) was totally insufficient so I bought an 80GB ipod which was fine for the music but not for the podcasts that I had amassed. The computer made an executive decision to shear off the podcasts and concentrate on storing the music. But I wanted both music and podcasts – and, come to that photos and electronic books and calendars and . . . well you get the rather crazed and-tomorrow-the-world type of approach that I was developing.

It was therefore more in the nature of a medical palliative that the 160GB ipod was bought. It should be looked on more as counselling rather than unbelievable squandering of money on a third ipod. I don’t know anyone with three ipods apart from Apple Stores. Ah well, it’s the old story of cameras again. And no, I have little intention of telling you how many of those gadgets I posses. And anyway I sold some of them in Splott Market. Honestly.

And just to show that I have a studiously cultural side as well I have been reading and have been to the opera. Of which more anon.

There’s a threat!

It all depends on how you look!

How do you know that Spain is a matriarchal country?

The answer is, of course, to look at the dogs that the men folk are forced to take for walkies. Spanish women have found a foolproof way of neutering their other halves by making them take a repulsive selection of rat-dogs for public walks. I have seen men brazenly taking the sort of miniscule animals for walks which would not qualify even as hors d’oeuvres in the real world. [This comment courtesty of The New Yorker Dogs Cartoon Calendar]

But there they are, these sad men, clutching a thin, coloured strip of gaudy material masquerading as a lead which ends in some sort of scruffy piece of fluff which appears to strut along the street (its spindly little legs a blur as it trips over a matchstick) with all the assurance of a worthless nobody confident in the security of the mafia-like protection of the woman of the house.

I know that apartment living in the norm in Spain and that having a Great Dane the size of a medium sized horse can take up two and three quarter bedrooms in the strapped for space living that is modern Spain, but still, there are more acceptable alternatives than some sort of rodent whose only claim to doghood is its recognition by the dubious national Kennel Club.

Seeing these men put me in mind of Winston Smith in ‘1984’ paying a visit to the horrid café (whose name I have forgotten and I will not be able to find it because all my twentieth century novels are now in storage) after his mind and resolve have been broken – significantly by the sight of rats – listening to a song about betrayal. How poignant and how appropriate!

The only real dog, as I have told countless generations of pupils though the years, is a yellow Labrador bitch. I think you will agree that that statement needs no qualification or justification.

The room which used to contain my books (now languishing in the Catalan equivalent of Azkaban) is in the process of being turned into a computer room. My abortive attempts to turn it into a music room (Sic.) with electric piano and real (tattered) piano stool with my music stand from school together with my shrouded musical instrument (“I’ve never had to wrap a trombone before” Pickford’s employee, Rumney 2007.) were a decided failure and now we have a plain white IKEA (what did people in Barcelona do before this store was opened because they are all there every day now) table with four white IKEA legs. I did try and buy chrome adjustable legs but the woman serving me refused to sell them to me telling me that they were too expensive for the cost of the table top! I did as I was told.

Toni is now connecting all the machinery with the leads and wires that have survived the Great Throw Out which occurred a few weeks ago when leads for machinery that wore out years ago were jettisoned at the same time as hard-to-replace unique-to-the-machine leads because, basically, they all look the same to me and anyway I was in one of my rare iconoclastic moods which usually result in my replacing things at vast expense at the end of a short period of reflection!

Toni, however, does know what he is doing and doesn’t sob (like any normal person) at the spaghetti which passes power and information from piece of machine to machine. At the risk of sounding naïf (and now I come to think of it mendacious too) one hole looks very much like another – at least when it’s piercing the façade of some sort of computer and labelled with some sort of incomprehensible acronym, pseudonym or trade name that I am convinced is merely there to confuse the unwary.

For me a machine is there to have its button pressed and work. If it needs me to do anything else then it should have a small screen with clear instruction about what to do next which do not include having degree level knowledge to double guess some ambiguous direction which, wrongly executed, will result in the total destruction of information and/or machine.

As you will no doubt appreciate that last bitter comment is based on first hand experience of trying to assemble ANY do-it-yourself wardrobe and trying to install a router for the internet. The latter will INEVITABLY lead to your having an extended conversation with the ‘help’ line situated (if you are lucky) as near as China or (if you are an ordinary punter) with someone or something in the Horse Head Nebula to whom the concept of language is alien and unnecessary.

Toni has been, I now notice, strangely quite for the last hour or so since he told me that the system “was working, but” I have been in a lot of situations where that phrase actually only means “but” or to be more precise “not” and I am more than prepared to let the silence extend itself until I hear the altogether more encouraging “Well, that was really difficult but” which actually means “only I could have done this” which means “it’s working.”

It might be a long night!

Rediscovering Remaning Books

The books are gone!

The locking of my precious volumes in a cramped lockup in Bluespace is on a par with the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

On the positive side I have now started ‘housekeeping’ the books which have survived the Entombment of the Tomes and I have delighted in the serendipitous juxtapositioning that my rather desperate shelving of the books I deemed ‘essential’ has produced. All the books were packed in a certain order and labelled, but the order and the labelling was not specific enough to ensure that the unpacking was a simple matter of putting books on shelves.

My favourites so far have included the following trios. ‘The New Republic’; ‘’Love Stories’ and ‘Taboo’ – which sound like the short pitch of a hopeful script writer to a move mogul. ‘The Devil in Legend and Literature’; ‘The Private Life of Plants’ and ‘The Faber Book of Pop’ which variety says something for what I regard as essential. And a final trio which is worthy of the old system of classification in the British Library which was determined by its location on a shelf and not by genre: ‘Early German Paintings 1350-1550’; ‘Spanish Verb Tenses’ and ‘Movie Classics’ – who said Renaissance Man was dead!

I expect to rediscover old friends and make some discoveries as I look at my depleted stock of reading material. The old order and placement of the books has been changed and a new way of seeing (Note: I haven’t seen the Berger book yet, I hope it’s not in store!) will give prominence to dusty volumes that have been overshadowed by brasher neighbours.

I have also left some space so that other books can be accommodated to cope with what I call ‘Literary Accretion’ - that process where a collection of books, without fuss and with circumspect poise, aggregates other volumes to itself so that one’s library grows with one hardly knowing how. Like Topsy, when you go over a certain critical number of books, they “just grow’d”.

I am beginning to understand the Spanish (or at least the Catalan) way of driving.

To the uninitiated (or British) the quality of driving in Catalonia, especially on motorways, is casually appalling. The lack of consideration; the overtaking on the inside; the kamikaze motorcyclists; the lack of indication; the suicidal approach to roundabouts; the speed; the lack of lane discipline; the driving too close; the parking – it goes on and on.

Yet if you listen to a typical road you will hear nothing more than the sound of the vehicles: no one uses their horn to signify horrified displeasure at the antics of their fellow drivers.

Why?

The answer is quite simple, though it has taken me some time to work it out. The driving is not a surprise to anyone; it’s what they expect and what they do themselves; it’s normal – so why pretend it’s abnormal by sounding your horn? Just carry on, ‘cos you’ll be doing it yourself before the end of your drive!

Never has my version of Zen been necessary to contend with Catalan drivers. Relax! Calm! Breathe!

And it works! I have stopped shouting at completely oblivious criminal drivers and I am trying hard not to become one of their benighted number.

I just rejoice in the fact that my use of the indicator lights (which I understand are fitted as standard in all Catalan cars) must mystify and delight my fellow road users!

I am making tentative approaches towards possible employers but I warm them all now: any rebuffs (real or imagined) and I shall retreat to the beach to top up my tan and eschew the world of work and read.

You have been warmed, sorry, warned!

Just a day in the life of . . .

Only a heartless bastard would describe a day where he lazed about in the sun, swam in the sea and had an excellent and cheap meal at lunch time when his erstwhile colleagues are trudging their weary way to the depressing portals of an overcrowded institute of learning.

So I won’t.

Instead I would like to bewail the immanent loss of quantities of my library which will not fit into a three bedroom flat without converting it to a single bedroom establishment. I do not find the lack of sleeping accommodation as disturbing as the sending of old friends into the obscurity of the small space which will be my ‘room’ in Bluespace – the storage company.

Tomorrow the Men will arrive to wrench most of my books out of my life.

I have elsewhere explained that I do have the use of newly constructed IKEA (‘Billy’) bookcases complete with their white glass doors which do, I suppose, contain more books than most people have in their houses. But for me every book there and available for handling merely emphasises that there are at least ten others that could be there as well.

I have no novels from the twentieth century; none from the eighteenth century; only Shakespeare (and only collected plays) from the seventeenth century; virtually nothing from earlier years – not even my Robinson Chaucer; the nineteenth century is represented by ‘Moby Dick’ and a few short stories – I cannot go on, the lost texts are just too painful to think of (and I can think of them shelf by shelf where they used to be with no trouble whatsoever.)

This is a storage space that I can visit 24/7 – but the space is so small that to fit everything in it is essential to stack ‘em high and that means that I will not be able to get to them. I foresee an eternity of frustration until our lottery numbers come up.

But we will have an extra bedroom when the books are gone (sob!) and that means that we will be able to have people to stay in relative comfort.

I hope they bring books!

The sweet taste of taste!

You learn through pain.

When we first arrived in Castelldefels there was a brief period of true while the mosquitoes lulled me into a false sense of security, encouraging me to sleep with the windows and doors open to allow the cool fresh breeze to lull me to sleep. Truce over the malignant insects attacked with military precision and without mercy (until they discovered that Toni was meat more tender and delectable.) The unsightly and deliriously itchy welts had to be treated and so I searched for a pharmacy. During my peregrinations I passed a Hotel which looked to have an interesting menu Del dia.

Today I tried the food and the pain of the bites was forgotten (if unforgiven) by the excellence of the very reasonably priced meal. I know I had promised to stop gloating about the cost and the quality of food available in Castelldefels, but I thought that the Hotel Neptuno deserved a mention – and a fish and vegetable tempura is not something you see on the average Catalan menu. Yum!

I have at last made the connection between the number of young men hobbling around on crutches or supporting fractured limbs: the bloody motorcyclists! Considering they are on two wheels and rely on centrifugal force or whatever for their stability (a stability which just a touch by a car can destroy with catastrophic results) they dart about the road with the impunity of Challenger tank drivers. At one point today I seriously thought that one motorcyclist was going to attempt a sort of wall-of-death overtaking manoeuvre on the concrete dividing wall in the central reservation, but he contented himself with a double inside lane overtake with a little jink to avoid certain death by the thundering oncoming traffic. And they only wear shorts and t-shirts so when they have an accident their final appearance when momentum has finally slowed them down must leave them looking like medieval saints who have just been flayed by an opposing sect venting their justified anger on an apostate.

The statistics for injury and death for Spanish cyclists must be horrific – but Spain must also be a Mecca for plastic surgeons who want to practise their skin replacement techniques before setting up in private practice. [Have I got those who words the right way around?]

I continue to be astonished by the inconsiderate driving I encounter every day. Let me put my keys on the table and state I do not enjoy driving and I do not rate my driving skills as being anything other than adequate, but I do recognise that there are other road users in the cars around me.

This seems to be anathema in the Spanish driving theology which places the driver in his car at the centre of the universe, and around him all other drivers revolve. This would, of course, be entirely unobjectionable if it was in any way true, but, as the increasingly strident road safety advertisements on television would seem to indicate. Putting on an indicator does not create an impenetrable barrier around you; glancing at an oncoming car doesn’t stop its progress; blocking a narrow road actually does impede other road users; overtaking on the inside is demonstrably dangerous and ignoring things does not make them go away.

Ceri, Dianne and Gwen have set themselves a punishing schedule for their visit to Barcelona and Catalonia. Gwen is an unrelenting shopper and takes a wholly professional approach to this essential function of humankind. Our local shopping centre came up trumps for her when a jacket seen in the Barcelona Zara but not in the right size was hanging vulnerably on a hanger ripe for plucking in Anec Blau. One up for Castelldefels!

Tomorrow Sitges and shops anew!

Holidays don't have to be fun you know!

Holidays are not for the weak.

Dianne, Gwen and Ceri found that out today. Having got up at three in the morning to catch the early flight to Barcelona from Bristol they were ill prepared for the ‘eventful’ and lengthy drive, relying on the somewhat generalised information provided by my direction finder extending their day into the realms of the hallucinogenic.

We managed to find the approximate position of their flat; but finding the exact location and being able to drive there (accommodating the various ‘no right’ and ‘no left’ turns) was something else.

A casual turn down an available road resulted in a long diversion, any left turn being inhibited by a sacrosanct tram way over which one could not pass: we were half way to a Gaudi masterpiece before an extensive roundabout gave us an opportunity to return to an approximation of our previous position.

Driving in strange cities is such fun! The way back to Castelldefels was equal enjoyment. And yes, I am being ironic.

It’s strange welcoming close friends of years’ standing to a foreign country which is now your home. There is the ease of long familiarity based on shared experience and knowledge but there should also be a comfortable sense of future continuity: the assurance that this conversation is part of a quotidian series – but it isn’t. It is an essential part of a limited series of face-to-face encounters that will have to suffice to give flesh to the more impersonal distance of a telephone call that will be the future of the immediate contact. Knowing that someone is only ten minutes away allows distance and infrequency; being a thousand miles away is a gulf which underlines all electronic contact.

I love having them in Barcelona, but nearness also emphasises distance. Emotional paradoxes are only interesting when they don’t touch you personally; when they do they are more frustrating than stimulating.

However, there is much to enjoy before they depart next weekend.

I only hope the weather is good enough to carry their resentment of my continued ‘holiday in the sun’ back to a damp Wales.

They are my ambassadors of despair – in the nicest possible way of course!

Poor old me!

“I’ve been defrauded!”

How Count Prus’ words ring in my ears after having a meal in La Gran Cantonada. Admittedly the Count was taking about Elena Macropolus not giving him a sort of sensual pleasure that was outside the remit of the chef in the Castelldefels’ restaurant – but still, the price of almost 30€ for the meal that I had was not quite what I have come to expect from this town.

2.40€ for unsolicited bread; 19€ for a perfectly acceptable but unremarkable rape a la plancha; an an astonishing 10€ for what ‘Champers’ in Cardiff called ‘sea food salad.’ Yes, there was a little more ‘sea food’ than you’d expect to get in Champers, but some of that ‘sea food’ was in the form of crab sticks – the euphemistic name given to the chunks of luridly coloured and totally manufactured fish surrogate that masquerades as natural produce of the ocean!

Talking of misery; the ‘putting away’ of my books draws ever nearer. Today to El Prat and Bluespace which is a very impressive depository with locked spaces and closed circuit camera and code numbers and high prices.

I have hired a ‘box’ and on Monday I will have a phone call to let me know the cost of getting some muscle to cart all the stuff off. I have decided, as a point of self defensive principal that I am not going to do the donkey work. Simply moving the stuff a few feet when trying to find the computer resulted in almost complete prostration, and I do not intend to traipse up and down flights of stairs for the sake of a few (or even many) euros.

There is still time for me to make a few last minute changes to the selection of books which I have to hand; but the sheer physical effort of entering the small bedroom and trying to manipulate the Rubik’s Cube environment that comprises boxes of books in a small cramped space is more than I can contemplate with equanimity. But I might try: finding my books of short stories would make it all worth while.

I think. I’ll sleep on it!

Films don't always help.

What sort of dentist actually starts a conversation about The Marathon Man while you, the patient, are in the dentist’s chair?

I suppose it argues a great deal about the dentist’s confidence in his own ‘chair-side’ manner that he assumes that the patient will not leap for freedom screaming for help as he remembers the terrifying deliberation of Lord Olivier as he sets about his grisly work with the drill!

But this guy had rowed at Henley – there was a picture on the surgery wall. Surely no one as pukka as a Henley chap could possibly do anything as nasty as a Nazi with a predilection for diamonds. To be frank, you wouldn’t have thought, given the prices that dentists charge that they would have any difficulty at all in getting as many bloody diamonds as they pleased when they pleased.

This was a private dental clinic. I was seen on time; every stage of the procedure was explained to me and, as far as I can tell he did a good job. His English (he was Dutch) was good enough to encourage you to be expansive, and then to realise that it wasn’t quite as fluent as that. It is astonishing how colloquial normal English speech is, especially when you are sensitised to its nuances considering the partner in your conversation is talking with pointed instruments in his hand!

His most interesting comment came after my non committal response to his question about the level of pain he was inflicting. “Well,” he said, “seeing the dentist is not often a pleasurable experience.” Short of his doing my teeth and then handing me a winning lottery ticket, I don’t really see how it can ever, ever, ever be a pleasurable experience. However charming and explanatory a dentist might be.

Talking of films we have just watched “Regreso al infierno” which is the Spanish version of (I imagine) “Return to Hell” [I was wrong the English title is ‘Home of the Brave’ - director Irwin Winkler, USA, 2006 - which, after seeing the film I am not convinced is an intentionally ironic take on the American National Anthem] a meretricious story of four service people returning from a stint in the Iraq war.

This mundane story of harrowing personal experience after the life changing trauma of participation in a war adds nothing in terms of perception to what is already on film. It uses the contemporary frame work of a continuing war to cover the lack of development in the narrative which describes the reactions of the different characters. Its answers are simplistic and fundamentally unsatisfying, with loose ends being waved in front of our faces before being neatly tied into a big yellow ribbon bow (quite literally towards the end of the film.) The actual end of the film has a quotation from Machiavelli which, while appropriate for a description of war, is wildly out of the class of this slight film.

A thoroughly turgid experience and Samuel L. Jackson should be ashamed of himself for not rejecting this script on a first reading. A waste of an interesting actor.

Yesterday evening developed into a clear, bright night with a gibbous moon (not often you get the chance to use an adjective like that) casting a light so bright on the sea that it made it look like a poorly painted amateur oil painting. We are both getting quite lyrical about the changing appearance of the sea which, truly, presents a different arrangements of colour and texture each day.

Some days, especially in the afternoons, with the right combination of the angle of the sun and the corrugations of the waves the whole sea looks like a vast swathe of material from one of Miss Bassey's more glittering frocks. One day, early in the morning, there was an overcast sky and a slight sea mist which melded sand, sea and sky into one ethereal wall of colour-drained grey and ochre and out of which it would have been entirely appropriate for some tawdry pirate ship to venture onto the beach.

Most of the time it is picture book blue, which is fine with me!

Blue = sun.

That's all I ask.

Primal Terror!

Literature is littered with authors’ attempts to find the authentic voice of their childhoods.

I have discovered that finding that voice is a relatively simple process if your life follows the following path:

1 Retire
2 Move to a foreign country
3 Relax and enjoy the sun
4 Break a tooth

Suddenly the idea of a stranger (a foreign stranger) poking about in your mouth with pointed instruments of pain returns you instantly to quivering infancy. Even foreign doctors do not inspire such fear because they are not so, you might say, instantly intrusive – and most of the time you self medicate: you are the one to take the pills or drink the potions. But the dentist is there and at you in a trice. The only thing needed to make a dentist’s chair a perfect instrument of torture would be restraining straps for the wrists and feet!

But let not my mind dwell on such things (even though the appointment is but four hours away) and turn instead to the Problem of the Books.

The five new bookcases are looking very sleek and stylish: tall with white glass covered doors and six shelves inside. That makes thirty shelves of about 80 cm and there is an extra shelf on top of four of them. You can do the maths yourself but it means that I have fifty boxes of books which cannot be accommodated. Caroline has given me the number of a storage facility in Hospitalet which is on the same basis as the Big Yellow Storage facility in the UK, so I might be able to find something to act as a safe home for the rest of my essential books.

While trying to make decisions about what to keep and what to store I was reminded of the Tolstoy (?) story about ‘How Much Land does a Man Need?’ I read this in Standard Two in Gladstone Junior School in Cathays in Cardiff and I remember the story particularly because the book that I was given was new and I therefore was the first reader. I have never lost the delight in being the forcer of a book’s virginity – there is something altogether delightful in the feel and smell and sound of a new book; which is obvious to bibliophiles but those who regard books as dust attracting, ugly, dead blocks of irrelevance are oblivious to such rare pleasures.

Anyway, there was this precocious eight year old reading Tolstoy and the happy little narrative concerned a Russian pioneer who went to buy land and, for his money, he could have all the land that he was able to traverse in a day.

He started off and then as he walked around the land that was to be his he found things that were just too good to be ignored: a small lake, a little wood, a stream and suchlike, and he walked just a little further to include these juicy features in his new purchase. Alas! (this is a Tolstoy story so there has to be an ‘Alas!’) his greed meant that, as the sun began to go down he was still a long way from his starting point and, if he didn’t return to his starting point by sunset he would loose all the money that he had paid and get no land. So he started to hurry and ended up running desperately to return to claim what was his. He made it in time but, alas! (again) the effort had proved too much for him and he died as he arrived!

How much land does a man need? Enough for a grave!

As you can imagine the relevance of this story to life in 1950s suburban Cardiff was not lost on me and I eyed the local cemetery (next to the public library – surely a Tolstoyan juxtapositioning?) with wary circumspection on my way home.

One tends to take irony fairly literally at that age!

So, to paraphrase Tolstoy, how many books does a man need? Well, a bloody sight more than I can fit into the flat and not have the place looking like a library. The difficulties of choice have been exacerbated by the difficulties of accessibility. The boxes in the small bedroom fill the place so all the boxes had to be taken out (incidentally finding the computer, monitor and printer in the process) and as they are all sealed then guessing what they might contain.

Pickfords (bless!) had labelled the boxes with room/unit/shelf – so all I had to do was remember what I have placed where. This did not always work, especially as Pickfords got querulous towards the end of the packing and just labelled boxes with the simple, but effective designation of ‘books.’ This was not helpful; so I now have my books on obscure mystics but not some excellent anthologies of poetry.

Having deliberated and discarded I now have a thoroughly unsatisfactory selection of books where each volume seems to speak of a companion volume which is not there. This will not be resolved until Once (the Spanish daily lottery) does its stuff and makes the purchase of a suitable house (with sea views) a reality!

One lives in hope.

There's a machine for that!

The dishwasher has arrived and all is well with the world.

Apart, that is, for a momentary glitch when I thought that the dinner plates would not fit in without being smashed by the rotating washing arm. I was already making plans to use the next size down and write a scathing blog about the Catalan prejudice against ‘real size’ dinner plates when Toni pointed out that four small bandy legs on the upper basket were actually ways of raising the said basket and allowing ‘real size’ dinner plates to be safely placed in the machine.

I excuse my lack of analysis of the interior of this machine because it is different to the one that I have used in Cardiff. The Welsh one was a half size affair (Why, by the way, are dishwashers of half the size significantly more expensive than their larger brothers?) and there were no adjustment facilities. You have no idea of the hardships I endured in my domestic life! And now I find that I am back with the nice looking but infuriatingly inefficient electric rings.

When I had my kitchen designed I too was seduced by the hygienic, sleek, modern lines of electric rings: they looked so good in the pictures and in the show kitchens. You don’t actually get to cook in show kitchens and so you remain blissfully unaware of the fiendish spiv-like attraction that should be avoided at all costs when confronting electric rings for the first time. Spurn them as if they were the very devil! They are actually more difficult to keep clean; they have a life of their own and they retain heat for days afterwards. This latter attribute you usually discover when absentmindedly placing something on a ring which was last used the previous night, but which retains its destructive heat and destroys whatever it was the you stupidly placed there ignoring the discrete little light which is supposed to indicate that the thing which didn’t do what you wanted it to do when you were using it for cooking is now continuing its own sweet way and ignoring your preferences. There’s nothing like detecting personal experience in writing like this is there? And if you really must know, it was actually a dishcloth, which I know I should have put away, and it only scorched anyway. And, now that I remember, my flesh. Bloody things!

Anyway, let us take happiness where we can find it – and if you cant find it in a working dishwasher then I would suggest that you are still living at home and you should give your mother a break.

Yesterday we all went to the home of Cordinu and for a couple of euros we had the guided tour. The buildings which you enter firs were designed by a famous Modernist (in the Catalan sense; we’d think of it as Art Nouveau; the French as le stile modern – where is the sense in that?) architect. The most memorable characteristics of the buildings were the use of the Gaudi arches (so named because I have forgotten the correct geometrical designation for them) and the use of broken bottles in the modified crenulations of another building.

Cordinu has the largest system of cellars in the world. I expect that last statement is on a par with the phrase that came crackling over the loudspeaker system telling me that I was about to land in ‘the largest airport in the world’ which I heard applied by four separate pilots to four separate airports in America when I visited the country, and by Heathrow on my return to the UK! It all depends on what you mean by largest. Anyway, we had a little train ride in this one and we able to glimpse dark corridors filled with bottles in various stages of verticality: it’s all to do with the sediment.

Deep underground we were taken to a sort of small dungeon with a centrepiece of a stylized tree with electric multi coloured polygon lights. It looked like a piece of tasteless vulgarity, but we were told hat it represented the family of the Cava makers. On one wall was the end of an enormous barrel and this was the sacred spot on which the first Cava was fermented. There is a metallic bass relief which still bears the four bullet holes of one side or other in the Civil War.

The trip terminated, of course, in the shop where you were encouraged to spend more money – though I have to say it was far from a hard sell. The real end of the visit was a sip of the stuff which makes the name Cordinu famous. The variety of Cava which we were served was Non Plus Ultra, a stylish brut which encouraged me to buy a case – well, a box of six. I have told myself that I will keep these bottles for visitors, but I can feel myself weakening and it’s only just over 24 hours since I bought them! Ceri and Dianne might get a sip, but Paul and Paul Squared and Clarrie and Mary (autumn guests might have to be satisfied with something less elaborate!)

The weather yesterday was a perfect example of how unlike the home weather of our own dear Queen Catalan weather really is. The day started dark, cloudy and threatening. It descended into rain and, as we serpentined our way up picturesque bending mountain roads, I even had to use the fast setting of the windscreen wipers. Rain was here to stay. Lunch was thoroughly unsatisfactory as the restaurant we chose had a roof of vines. This was very attractive and would have provided green shade if the sun was doing its thing; but as rain was doing its thing you realise that, however attractive a vine roof is, it isn’t waterproof – as soggy remains of previous diners indicated. Our visit to the Cavas was a disaster.

Except, of course, this is Catalonia and not Cardiff. By the time we got to the Cava we were going to visit, the rain had stopped. By the time we started on our guided tour and walked out in the very English looking gardens, the sun was shining. I am still waiting for a true ‘British’ (that is, from the time you get up to the time you go to bed) day of rain.

Sigh.

Almost time to pop a tablet in the door and get the dishwasher to do what it does best.

Life is hard for we house proud perfectionists.

Sigh.

The sands in time

The topography of the beach has changed.

I used to think that beaches just ‘were.’ They were there as a result of natural processes: the grinding down of stones and shells; the daily wash by the tides; the leavening scouring of the wind – all nature at its best, presenting the beach to us new every day.

This jejune appreciation was based solely on extended childhood experience of the beach at Barry Island where the effect of the Bristol Channel meant that the whole of the sand was washed by the immensely impressive tide twice a day. My arrival on the beach was the signal for immediate digging to commence as I erected ever more impressive (though ultimately futile) ramparts to hold back the advancing sea.

It was when I forgot my door key to my apartment in Gran Canaria and found myself condemned to a night without the comfort of four walls that my childish assumptions were finally shattered. For reasons which in retrospect seem little short of suicidal, I decided to walk through the dunes and sleep on the hamacas on the beach.

I should, at this point, mention that I might have had one or two glasses of something a little more potent than orange juice earlier in the evening, which may in some part explain why I decided to go waltzing (not literally, though, thinking about it . . . ) off into the darkness.

The darkness was not complete: the clear skies gave a vivid view of the stars, and that very clarity should have prepared me for the sheer bone chilling coldness of lying by the sea in the early hours of the morning. My shivering rest was soon interrupted by a dystopian nightmare. Massive machines with blazing headlights came lumbering out of the darkness towards my craven figure. Hordes of dark shapes disgorged from the vehicles and started ‘doing things’ with noise and efficiency. I soon realised that they were tidying the beach; though I also realised that my concept of tidying and the local authority of Maspalomas’ idea of tidying were vastly different. These were not nocturnal spike wielders picking up the odd crisp packet, but tenders of machines that sieved through tons of sand every minute. These people were not tidying the beach so much as re-forming it. These people were using bulldozers to move the sand so that it looked natural in the morning!

Another illusion shattered.

The Mediterranean does not have the tides that I am used to, but at least you can always be sure that the beach will be waiting for you – if you timed it wrongly in Barry all you were left with was a fringe of sand next to the retaining wall and people retreating to those suspect restaurants for a cup of odd tasting tea.

From the balcony in Castelldefels you can see the wooden shack that serves snacks and drinks and the line of awnings next to the sea with the neat stacks of hamacas waiting to be set out in the morning. There are two wooden walkways and one of those intriguing geometrical rope pyramids for kids to climb. But for the last few days another aspect of the life of the beach has drawn attention. There is a storm drain opening out onto the beach and, since we arrived, this has been unobtrusive and the sand in front of the opening flat and featureless. A recent storm has changed all of that. We now have a deep river valley making its way to the sea.

On the first day of its formation a small white van stopped by the edge of the gorge and four men got out and spent some time chatting along the edge. They then, in the best traditions of council workers, drove off and nothing has been done. The machines that appear at night and sift the sand and collect the rubbish have had to make a detour but no intervention on the scale of Gran Canaria has taken place. Much, I might add, to my chagrin as I would have had a comfortable view with a glass of wine to watch as the landscape shapers did their work. All of this I am denied, but I live in hope that the authorities will act and I will see human nature at work if not the real thing.

Nature, as someone once said, is what you make it.

And in a tourist resort it needs a lot of making!

Lengthy completion - so to speak.

Although it is not the middle of January, I am contemplating broken resolutions.

I realise that middle of January is a little optimistic for me, but we literary folk can take a few justifiable spins with the truth. I determined, before I went on holiday to Mallorca that I would use Meic Stephens’ ‘A Most Peculiar People’ a book of quotations by and about the Welsh and Wales as the inspiration for a series of short stories. I would open the book at random, point the finger and use the quotation indicated as the starting point for my literary creations. I would be in Mallorca for eight days; therefore I could produce at least six stories.

It has been two weeks since our thirty minute flight home (how strange it is still to say things like that) and I have finally finished the sixth story on the beach today. Frailty, thy name is writing resolutions!

One of the many problems about being a teacher (or indeed having been a teacher) is that tenses make very little difference to your professional status: once a teacher; always a teacher. Some things might fade and change, but there is always the possibility of an instant reversion to type when considering a piece of work. You can see this most clearly when a doting parent (who is also a friend) presses an example of their offspring’s artistic, literary or scientific achievement upon someone who is not a blood relative and waits for confirmation that their scion is indeed “very advanced.” I have learned that “very advanced” is in the same category of meaningless utterances such as “we are striving to make everyone above average” – something I have always blamed That Woman for saying; even if she didn’t, it expresses an aspect of her cracked dogma and she probably thought it anyway.)

With some of my colleagues who have been placed in this invidious position I have watched with wry amusement as their normal professional mode assesses the work placed in front of them and produces a result which is accurate but not acceptable to any self respecting parent of an exceptional child, so a form of words is used which is nicely ambiguous enough to satisfy both parties.

So when it comes to your own productions of creative writing, when you are an English teacher, it is very difficult to step outside of ‘coursework mode’ and not assess the work as a possible inclusion in a GCSE folder. With that in mind, I find it difficult to place my efforts at anything beyond, “Clear A*; some excellent expression; a few wayward spellings, but should not detract from some fairly professional writing; will make an excellent AS student.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but I suppose that I am looking for something more than that. And I suppose that something more can come if I regard my efforts as a first draft and I take some time to revise and redraft and . . . but then, you see, I’m living on the beach by the sea and the sun is shining and . . . It’s not difficult to fill in the gaps!

I have been wondering about fireworks.

This is the time of the Festa Major of Castelldefels and the one thing that you can guarantee about any festival in Spain is that there will be fireworks. My camera has a special setting for taking pictures of fireworks and, although I have seen many firework displays I have taken only a few photographs. This is not because I have forgotten the camera as the more cynical among you might have thought, but rather because, when a firework display starts that you can pick me out because I am one of the few adults staring at the sky in open mouthed childish amazement like, in fact, a kid.

In the way that I do, I have tried to work out just why fireworks are so appealing. You will note that I have taken my fascination to be the normal response. Any one who is not fascinated is abnormal and therefore outside the scope of this analysis.

So the umpteen reasons for liking fireworks are:

1. They are attractive and, as we know, black is the perfect colour for showing off the bright and the glittering. The aesthetic is never accepted as a compelling reason for anything; take for example my collecting British First Day Covers (There’s an admission for you!) I was once asked by a philatelist why I collected them and my response of; “I think they are very attractive!” didn’t seem to impress him much.
2. They are an exhilarating total waste of public money; unjustifiable and criminal with so many other worthy things needing limited cash.
3. They are unique: no two fireworks can possibly be exactly the same.
4. They are brief. I don’t just mean the individual fireworks but the show as well. An hour’s worth of decent fireworks is the equivalent of the GNP of a medium sized African country.
5. They create a sense of wonder in a world that is rapidly losing the ability to be awed by anything apart from the salaries of kickball players – equivalent to the GNP of the African Continent.
6. They make you look up and out: which is a good perspective.
7. They remind the spectators of the brevity of human existence.
8. They are the ultimate existential experience: they explode in a showy display and fade to nothingness. They exist for the moment and nothing more.
9. They are a visual confutation of the Expanding Universe Theory.
10. They demonstrate, “the rest is silence.”

I could go on but you might think that I was over buttering the cake, or whatever the accurate culinary metaphor actually is.

Talking of the kitchen I thoroughly recommend a dish I had as part of a menu Del dia recently. It was basically spinach but served with pine nuts, chopped onion, sultanas, a touch of chilli and chickpeas – delicious; it can be served as a vegetable or as a dish by itself.

Never let it be said that I don’t eat and learn.

Reality is being surrounded by what you own

You are allowed a few days off to recover when your stuff arrives from the UK.

Moving house is supposed to be one of the truly traumatic occasions in an ordinary life; when your life is defined by the physical presence of books around you, then the word ‘traumatic’ hardly comes close to describing the cataclysmic emotional maelstrom that is occasioned by moving your personal library.

Although Toni doesn’t believe a volume of it, the number of books which were carted off to Oxfam in St Mary Street before the move was enough to make a hardened bibliophile weep. Whole sections of my library were placed in plastic boxes which then disappeared into the maw of the repository of literary charity. My seriously depleted library (together with other odds and ends like a table and chairs; a dinner service; cutlery and clothing) was packed into a commodious van and the contents unloaded in Castelldefels.

By a strange process of ‘close proximity tome bonding’ the boxes containing my books seem to have increased so that now one room of the flat is entirely filled with the basic essential books that any self respecting occasional reader would want to have with him; including of course that necessary work for living in a thoroughly Roman Catholic country – Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

I might add that the boxes of books also partially fill another bedroom, and the negative (that has to be one of the most understated words in context) approach to the seemingly never ending procession of sweating workmen bringing yet another box into the flat has meant that I have not had the courage to unpack any of them. The fact that they have all been packed according to room/unit/shelf means that they should be unpacked in order so that total chaos is avoided – but, I need a book, almost any book – and I do not think it politic to buy new in the present book box filled environment!

The aftermath of Pickfords has been a little trying: boxes everywhere (usually filled with clothes that neither of us can get into now) and generally too little space for too many things. What I have thrown out is heartbreaking not only in terms of the emotional value and dear memories associated with each individual item, but also because I have paid vast amounts to store and transport things only to have them grace the green refuse boxes at the end of the road in Castelldefels. I suppose this has been one of those ‘life lessons’ that I keep reading about. They are the sort of things which drive the narrative forward in well paced novels, but one doesn’t really want them happening in one’s own life.

To add to the precious irony of it all, the weather has not been at its best either – we’ve even had a day of rain. What next? Snow?

On a more positive note, the cheque from UK which I paid into my Spanish bank has cleared in just less than a month! When you think of all those ancient bank couriers creeping steadfastly somewhere or other, clutching the cleft stick with my cheque firmly wedged therein, just behind the man carrying the red flag - one can only wonder at the dispatch of it all! And you thought that most of the banking transactions carried on today were electronic! How foolish! That’s why it costs so much; and you thought they were merely thieves. Shame on you!

We have now paid our second month’s rent and our first electricity payment – all the little (!) expenses that convince you that living in Castelldefels is a reality.

Tomorrow a dishwasher – too much reality is obviously a bad thing!

Poison pen again

Mea Culpa!

Been back in Castelldefels for days and not a finger to the keys! Well, I’ve had a cough; nuff said!

The flight back from Mallorca was not as smooth as it might have been with the inevitable delay which always seems more intolerable when it’s late at night. As the plane was not full a kindly stewardess took pity on my cramped state and ushered me to the limb friendly expanses of the seats by the emergency exits. It was only a pity that the flight was so short – though as a person who likes arriving rather than the process of getting there, no flight can be too short!

We tried to do some preparation for the arrival of Pickfords, scheduled for the third of August by packing plates and cutlery and other odds and ends which would be replaced with far better from the wooden vastness of Pickfords’ stores. You have to have been brought up by my mother to realise fully the unbearable burden of having to eat and drink using substandard dishes, knives and forks and glasses. You may laugh but it is something about which I feel my mother’s shade looking on sorrowfully as I seem to deny all her patient teaching about the important things in life!

The Problem of the Books becomes ever more pressing and its final horror has only been delayed by the fact that Pickfords are not coming until a week after I was led to expect them. IKEA has been searched and there appears to be a possible compromise buying a bookcase with nondescript doors so the books are not visible (don’t ask!) The problem is buying them; transporting them; constructing them and positioning them – before Friday. No pressure then.

We have had our first visitors from Wales: Nicky, Nigel and the girls: we sat on the balcony and enjoyed the view – I shall now assay my first invited guest meal next Tuesday.

We watched Babel after I had mustered my Spanish enough to join the local Video Club. This is a card operated shop where you make your choice on a touch sensitive screen and the selected disc is ejected from the innards of the machine and, when you have viewed the disc you feed the thing back into it.

My first choice of Babel (Director: Alejandro González Iñárrituwith a cast including Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Mohamed Akhzam) was not an inspiring one.

This self indulgent, overlong and self congratulatory story of the consequences of a random bullet and the interlocking stories that lead up to and away from the shot fail to convince or grip.

For me the film is summed up by the opening shot of a walking Moroccan; nice enough in its own way but too long and essentially empty.

I started to think about the meaning behind the title but soon discovered that I was being more intellectually rigorous and analytical than the film had any right to expect.

I understand that the film was shot on four different continents (Oooh! Babel, yeah, I see!) and that some of the actors did not meet until the premiere. It shows.

If you want a film of consequences then watch Cage in Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War (2005) for a much more stylish and accomplished piece of work.

I was glad to put Babel back into its sleek plastic case and send it back into the machine.

Tomorrow Carles’ birthday and yet another party in Terrassa – the family party capital of the world!

And I haven’t got him a present!

Last days

Today to the north.

A little resentfully on my part because I wanted to go to the beach and swim rather than go to some historically significant part of the island for cultural reasons. I was however mollified by the fact that we were going to see the tomb of Robert Graves, a writer who I will always remember for his more than vivid description of the colourful stages of decomposition of rotting corpses trapped in No-Man’s-Land while fighting in the trenches in the First World War.

In the event, after a tiring journey via circuitous roads and hindered by various idiots who meandered their way slowly in front of us, we were more than happy to give Robert’s last resting place a miss as we had had our fill of donkey created roads and donkey headed drivers and we had lunch instead.

The town we visited had a converted monastery which had the distinction of having had the notorious couple, Chopin and George Sand for a winter in the late nineteenth century. The monastery had been ‘dissolved’ with all the other religious houses in Spain two years before the lovers arrived. The property had been sold off and the couple had rented a couple of the monks’ old cells and did their thing for a number of months.

Chopin wrote some of his music there including the Raindrop Prelude (?) while Sand produced a book, “A Winter in Mallorca which seems to have had the same effect on the Island that Mrs Trollop’s disquisition on America had on that country. The most interesting item on display was the typed and corrected manuscript of Robert Graves’ introduction to a critical account of Sand and Chopin’s visit. It displayed his usual robust and opinionated style and was an eloquent peon of praise to his adopted island.

The port of this town was reached by a hair raising series of hairpin bends down the side of a sizable mountain with the usual vertiginous views only tangentially obstructed by the minimal barriers which ostensibly were there to keep wayward transport from falling hundreds of unobstructed feet to destruction.

The beach itself was minimal and very rocky and did not meet with the general approval of the family and so after a brief swim we moved on.

This is our last night in Mallorca and we walked down to the town after our dinner to get a coffee and an ice cream. The denizens of night life were beginning to take over the place and it was obvious that this was a young person’s resort. The predominant nationality is German and it is a relief to be shocked by the behaviour of another nationality other than my own!

I think I’m getting old!

An island revalued

Visiting relatives can be very trying: especially if they are not your relatives and they have desirable houses!

Carmen has contacted some of her relatives who still live on the island of Mallorca and the first set we went to see had their summer home in the north. This was a four bedroom villa set on the coast with glorious views. They apologised for the near beach being overcrowded but, as they explained, it was the weekend. If that was overcrowded then they obviously haven’t been to the Costa del Sol, or the resort on the south where we are staying! The meal they gave us was delicious and when we finally set off the next set of relatives my eyes were a decided shade of green.

The light green became emerald when the next house turned out to be a traditional Catalan style ranch like house (with air conditioning) with a decent sized pool in the garden. After availing ourselves of the pool we had to get changed to meet the rest of the relatives which turned out to be a Grand Gathering of the Clans as more and more cousins and second cousins turned up. The evening meal here was eaten outside and I had to field one or two snide questions about what I would have been doing if I had still been in Cardiff. The answer, of course, would have been sheltering from the lashing storms, but let is pass, let it pass.

The next day we visited a place that I had heard of from my parents when, after one holiday, I was presented with an EP (extended play) 45 rpm record with a bizarre picture of rock formations on the front and a gaping space where the discrete spindle hole should have been. Before I could say anything, my mother pre-empted my bemused questions by saying, “I couldn’t think of anything else to buy you!”

The record had to be centred carefully on the turntable, judging by eye the exact placement. This was never exact so when the needle started its spiral course towards the Great Nothingness at the centre the music sounded, you might say, a little idiosyncratic. To this day I cannot hear Offenbach’s Barcarolle without putting in the Doppler-like effects that I was used to hearing on the EP. My mother’s horrified response to the travesty of music that came from the speaker was that, “It sounded very nice if you were there!”

The “there” was the Caves of Drac; a remarkable cave system discovered by a French speleologist in the nineteenth century and containing a fabulous wealth of every variety of stalagmite and stalactite you could wish to see. I must admit it made the Cheddar Caves seem a little parochial! But the high point in the visit comes at the end of the system, when the pathway through the limestone wonderland opens out into an amphitheatre which can accommodate a few hundred people. At the bottom of the amphitheatre is a lake and with the lights extinguished illuminated boats appear on which musicians play classical music and yes, they did finish their short programme with the Barcarolle and yes, it did sound very nice because I was there to hear it.

I resisted the temptation to buy a CD containing all the music played by the nocturnal musicians in their floating cavern: some things are best left to sketchy memory.

The beach we went to after our Cave experience was another confidently spectacular place: a narrow beach surrounded by wooded hills and just too pretty to bear!

Today we have been to the very north of the island and visited two beaches. The first was yet another attractive location, but swimming obstructed by stony swathes; the second was just about as far north in the island as you can get and combined all the characteristics of the place that make for wonderful photographs and a slightly unreal sense of being there. The crystal clear water lapped a narrow beach which was fringed with pine trees. The pine trees spread up the hills around the water and, in the distance you could see the fantastic formations of the bare rocky mountains.

If you, as I did, swim out and simply revolve in the water you have a panorama of beauty that is thoroughly and selfishly delightful. As I revolved I wondered how many people were going to be able to go on holiday this year and have such an experience of natural landscaped delight as I was – and that is anywhere in the world. Mallorca has a lopsided reputation based on the mass tourism that has made the island so much money and defaced so much of it, but there are areas and places which (although developed) still retain the dignity of their beauty.

And I hear that some parts of Britain have actually had one day without rain!

Such luck!

Holiday Delights!

There has been a gap in my blog which will be filled by the following diary.

DAY ONE

Toni is a front seat driver.

He is the sort of front seat driver that is just a few points lower than the ‘grab-the-wheel-and-scream’ passenger, so setting out on a first journey to Barcelona to visit Habitat (old shopping habits die hard) was one which was destined to failure from the first.

As we set out o an epic journey of what should have been about twenty minutes driving, Toni managed to give the impression that Barcelona was as foreign a city to him as it was to me. This was a little surprising as he had lived in the vicinity of this major sea port for most of his life, but we pressed on with the dogged determination of Scott of the Antarctic, though obviously a littler warmer and without the ponies.

As we were headed for the centre of the city, a sign invitingly informing us that we could get to Gran Via tempted us, and we duly fell. The Gran Via in question was, it turned out, obviously not that of Barcelona and, although as a sort of bonus, we found out where our local IKEA was, we were soon more than a little lost.

Signposting was uninformative and, in the various tunnels we travelled through, unobtrusive to the point of insult.

When we finally emerged into what was obviously a fairly major sort of city we were greeted with the delightful reality of a major conurbation in which the traffic lights were no longer working. There was not, I have to admit, the amount of apocalyptic chaos there would have been in any fair sized British city, but closed roads and policemen on most intersections (except where we drivers were allowed to battle out priority for ourselves) did not lend itself to calm driving and accompanied as it was by a triumphant denial of recognition of any streets, landmarks or directions from my passenger we were both a little stressed by the time we eventually decided we were in Barcelona and found ourselves a parking space.

We did make it to Habitat: triumph! But found that our proposed purchase weighed over 50 kilos and came in two wooden crates.

All things considered, our journey from the car park at the bottom of the Ramblas to the side street where we could pick up our purchase was less fraught than might have been expected. And our journey home showed us just how near our flat actually is.

Nevertheless, it was all worth it, because our balcony is now the unique possessor of a Habitat water feature and Toni has grandiose plans for its further beautification so that we can enter the Best Balcony Garden Competition in Castelldefels; in which, of course, we will win second prize!

DAY TWO

In spite of having done only the most cursory packing we went to the beach.

I needed the rest to collect my wits to attempt ironing. I am not an ironer and I have failed in all my attempts to find that calm, Zen-like peace that people have told me you can find in this activity. I am very much with Lao Tzu who in one of his more enlightened moments pronounced that, “Only in non-ironing can true ironing we found; he who irons embraces the obvious and denies the world – which is wrinkled.” How true that is.

The plane was, of course, late – though this didn’t necessarily stretch one’s patience as travelling from Barcelona to Mallorca is only thirty minutes by plane!

A couple of passengers a few rows ahead of me seemed to embrace the short time and each other in a rather public attempt to join the five mile high club – though given the shortness of the flight I’m not sure that we made it to those heights: neither we passengers nor the eager lovers!

We arrived in Palma airport at some ungodly hour of the morning to find that the car which had been booked to transport all seven (!) of us around the island wasn’t really booked in the sense that it was waiting for us. Or indeed had been booked at all. There is something about the empty wastes of modern airports in the early hours of the morning that empties the soul of hope but, on the other hand, it wasn’t my fault and that is something which always give a spring to my step.

By using two taxies we eventually arrived in the hotel and settled down to a hot night. Quite literally: the briskly turning fan on the ceiling merely seemed to stir up the heat not dissipate it in any way. But there again that is what this island is famous for and there would be precious little tourist trade if the heat became only moderate!

DAY THREE

A visit to Palma to refresh the memories I have of the place from the last visit. It turns out that I have virtually none and I begin to wonder if I actually visited the place at all!

Our lunch on a street flanking the cathedral was of paella – a dish I could quite happily eat in its various forms throughout the week – and this gave us the internal nourishment to tackle a visit to the cathedral.

The cathedral of Palma is a gothic masterpiece. The outside is dominated, to my view, by the odd buttresses that keep the place together. Although there are the usual curved plying buttresses with ornate caps there is also a series of rectangular buttresses which give the appearance of a Soviet series of blocks of featureless flats. I don’t know if these are contemporary or if they are a modern, unsympathetic attempt to curb gothic cathedral spread and destruction!

The space inside the cathedral is wondrous; that’s the only word for it. The height is impossible, and it hardly seems conceivable that the structure can be supported by the delicate columns which hold up the roof. The rest of the accoutrements of this building signally do not live up to the space.

Gaudi’s baldachin looks like an exercise in wire supported extravagance, but in the lighting that the cathedral gives this extraordinary construction is looked rather forbidding and the unlit lamps look uninspiring.

The glass looks depressingly modern and the great east window looks like something that a department store could use in their Christmas window display.

I am used to Roman Catholic Cathedrals having side chapels which look as though they have escaped from the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussaud’s, but Palma Cathedral has produced the chapel at the end of the east transept as something which seemed solely designed to give kids nightmares. I think that it was supposed to represent the creation of the world with the dark glass in the windows seemingly scratched with white gashes to represent the power of god. The walls have been used as the backdrop to a stitched plaster skin depicting a ghastly vision of creation with fish, faces and geographical features erupting from the surface. Most unpleasant.

DAY FOUR

A trip by rickety wooden, electric train to a town called Soller. The train starts from the Plaza de Espana and then the lines take it through the streets until it heads for the mountains. The single line cuts through solid rock until it arrives in a town which must have the only station in the world to have two museums to Picasso and Miro as part of their waiting rooms!

A further trip by electric railway takes you into the port of Soller which is part beach resort and part marina. The narrow beach is circumscribed by the tracks of the electric railway and the hotels and bars and shops are penned in by the range of wooded hills which surround the town. Beyond those hills you see a vista of ragged, stone mountains which meant that our lunch was eaten with a spectacular view as a backdrop.

Just outside the station in Soller was a pastry shop which sold a mouth watering array of goodies which Carmen forced us to choose. I chose a chocolate confection with added hazelnuts, all of which, I was informed was for me to eat alone.

Which bring us to . .

DAY FIVE

Which I have spent, so far, in bed with a bad tummy.

It is now four in the afternoon and I am going to venture into the town, a thinner (don’t ask) and a wiser man!

I've read it. Have you?

There are times when altruism pays off.

I was searching through the bookshops of Castelldefels for an Ellis Peters novel, which I had recommended to Carlos and which I thought would make a suitable present for his birthday.

I had been to the one shop that I knew sold a range of books with a concerned if ineffectual bookseller: his fluent Spanish commentary on my request for any Peters’ novel was incomprehensible but I recognised failure when I heard it, even if I didn’t fully understand the words. My request (in fractured Spanish for other shops in the area which might sell the novel) was greeted with a despairing shrug.

It took a couple of days (and a certain amount of buying substitute presents because I couldn’t find the precise author) before I found in a bookshop in a side street which actually sold a variety of novels by Ellis Peters and, staring me in the face, lying on the counter, was the latest Harry Potter novel. In English.

I decided that Carlos was not the only one who was going to get a present!

I spent the rest of the morning reading the novel then I had to go to Terrassa and the birthday party. After which I resumed my reading and eventually went to bed at some unearthly hour of the morning. I mean really unearthly. I mean just about getting up time.

Once again the compulsive nature of Rowling’s writing was obvious and, like the other novels, it was a real page turner.

It is very easy to dismiss the literary quality of Rowling’s writing: she enjoys cliché and is a shameless ‘padder’ when it suits her. Her plots are like Gaudi cathedrals: full of bits and pieces; looking as though they’ve been made up as they were being created, but essentially interesting.

The set pieces are more than competently handled and the series comes to a satisfying conclusion; including an ‘epilogue’ for all those people who want to know what happened next. If I’m being cynical, the epilogue does give the opportunity for the author to expand the series by doing a ‘Next Generation’ twist on the well tried characters.

As most people will not have read the novel yet I will not give any ‘spoilers’; I will merely say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to the inevitable film.

We now have a date for the rest of our property to be delivered to Castelldefels: the third of August. As we will not be back from Majorca before the first of August this does not give me much time to make arrangements for the realistic accommodation of the Books. This is a problem which is going to cause chaos, but I will think tranquil thoughts and hope, with Mr Micawber, that something will turn up.

Apart from my books!