Time for what?

I tell you I don’t care!  What people think is of no significance to me!  What do they know about the so-called ‘right’ number of watches to own?  Eh?  What do they know?  Nothing!  That’s what they know!  Nothing!

So, now that is sorted I can share with you that I have bought another watch.  And no, I have no intention whatsoever of giving this one a number.  Not to have watches in double figures shows a callous disregard of the work of generations of watchmakers who have struggled over hundreds of years to bring the measurement of time within the grasp of the ordinary citizen.  I spurn people who say of the watch that they were given at 21 (or in recent times at 18) is for life!  For life is fine as a concept as long as it is not alone in that life!

The new watch is an automatic (how post-modern of me!) and has the usual essentials, to wit – waterproof, luminous, day, month, numbers, sweep second hand and it even tells the time!  The USP of this one (as if it needed one) is that  part of the face has been taken away and so it is possible to see some of the internal workings of the watch, uh, working!  It is fairly chunky and has some encouragingly prominent buttons to press sooner or later and a leather strap – but I’ve had leather straps before and they are fine even with swimming.

And swimming is something that I have done twice today.  Getting back to the old days when I had a swim before and after school.  I must say that the second swim was more to test the waterproof qualities of the watch, but I found it, let me search for the right word here, satisfying.  And swimming is something which always makes you feel good, or if not good, then at least virtuous!

And my new Kindle was delivered.  There is a touch of the watch syndrome about this new arrival as well.  You cannot hide with Kindle.  The new machine arrives and you put your details into it and it tells you exactly how far you have been sucked into the whole Kindle experience.  ‘Stephen’s fourth Kindle’ is says very clearly in their Paperwhite technology, so its there in black and white.  How the hell have I managed to acquire four of these machines each of which is able to hold a thousand or so books?  Well, if you have to ask the question, you obviously don’t know me!

The new version is, quite frankly, brilliant!  It is for reading books.  Simple.  And it provides an environment for doing just that very well indeed.  It is not a tablet, it doesn’t have any fancy extras – though the people at Kindle have tried their best to make the limited functions that the machine has seem bright and new.  I love it!  Buy one.  Even the touch screen technology on this version is much better than the Sony ebook reader that I had a few years ago.  I celebrate progress and am prepared to put my money where my weakness is!

Now the real struggle starts with my deciding whether or not to ‘replace’ something which is working perfectly well, but is a little tatty at the corners.  I don’t know why I write this because this ‘debate’ is already over as far as I am concerned, the only question is when.

There is a slow trickle of comments on the forum about my writing among others, but it is slow and I would like to have a more rapid turnaround of work and comments, but I will have to make do with what is emerging and make the most of it.

Our writing tasks are becoming more complex and we are being asked to work our notes and our techniques into more sophisticated pieces of work.  This is definite progression that is both encouraging and somewhat frightening at the same time! 

That’s education!

Never here - always there!

Back to situation normal and the non-delivery-delivery-people failed to deliver, or to be more exact they delivered a sheet of paper informing me that they were unable to deliver.  My pursuit into town got the package, but it wasn’t the one that I wanted to have.  I will have to wait another day for my new Kindle to be delivered, though, disturbingly (or ‘normally’ as I would say or ‘unsurprisingly’ as I might also say) they had no warning of the immanent arrival of a package, while I have been given quite specific information informing me that the Kindle will be in Castelldefels by tomorrow.  I wait with no expectation whatsoever.

And talking of expectation, our tutor is now getting to the end of the time allowed by the OU for her to complete the marking.  She is allowed ten working days and, allowing for empty weekends she should only have a couple of days left to get everything done and sent back to us.  We will see.  In my experience both staff and students are quite cute when it comes to making the most of the time available when it is there for the taking!

As this is a full 60-credit course I need to find out what priorities the tutor has because she is going to be sole arbiter of my mark.  There is no examination; everything is going to be done by assignment, so knowing what makes such a person tick is pretty important.  To be fair the OU does give a vast amount of information about how the stuff is going to be assessed, but however proscriptive the description there is always wiggle-room for personal interpretation.  And anyway this is all about personal interpretation.  There is only so much that can be give for accuracy and following the rules, this is, after all Creative Writing and therefore there must be a certain amount of latitude for personal taste to influence the final mark.

I suppose that writing is fairly close to my heart and I value the skill that I think that I have.  As a teacher I am well able to evaluate a piece of writing I have, after all been doing that for all of my professional career, I also know that I am much more than competent in dashing off a response to a limited exercise which can impress with its flashy imagination and facile style.  It is taking it a step further, which is what I want this course to do for me, that is the worrying part.  The importance is not linked to some sort of paper qualification but to something which is rather more central to my life – my belief in my ability to self-evaluate.  Perhaps teachers are the worst of all students in needing the comfort of peer group evaluation!  Doesn’t make it any easier!

My swim today was exceptional and I went beyond what I have done recently!  Though admittedly in a sort of low-key way.  I have no idea what sportsmen and women are talking about when they say that they are able to break through the pain barrier.  Does it actually mean anything at all?  Pain is nature’s way of telling you to stop.  We should always listen to pain because it always has the possibility of using the weapon of the ultimate silence to those who will not hear!  Do these mythical sportspeople have a gene which allows them to self-medicate?  Rubbish, they are simple masochists.  Pure and simple.

My ‘pain barrier’ is finding a rhythm and feeling that, if I wanted to I could swim for ever.  Now in reality I have no intention of going over my self-imposed limit of 30 minutes and it is only the continuation of a particularly interesting track humming its way through my cheekbones that ever takes me over that limit.  But that steady, many would say monotonous, churning of the water with strong, methodical, almost effort free strokes is a pleasant mode to be in.  It does take effort and I am well aware of that at all times, but in my own small way it is a technique of going beyond.

Toni is now obsessed by his course and it drives him relentlessly.  He complains about the work and the lack of response from some of his tutors, but the maniacal gleam in his eyes tells you that this is what his life has been leading up to!  In a way I feel that about my course too, though the fear of what I am supposed to create by the end of it is something which I find intimidating all these months before.  I know that at the turn of the year the speech towards the end of the course will increase and I will join in the hysteria of all the other students who begin to wail their inadequacies to the moon!  Though that is an accepted perk of doing distance learning, I understand!

Since the clocks have gone back the nights have drawn in with a terrifying velocity and its now only half past six but it is black.  I am already beginning to long for the expansive days of summer!  Greed has always been one of my besetting sins!

I am now almost through the second box of new CDs which are being put into the computer, only the box of Das Alte Werk to go and I will have added 150 discs to my system!  Amazing, and all of them quality.  Not quality for Toni perhaps but for me yes!  There is a lot on these discs with which I am not familiar and so I could start another learning curve and get some obscure music under my belt and into my ears – or I could just wait for the ‘random’ program to give it to me eventually.  Which seems a much use of my time.  I am listening to selected discs, but purely on the basis of absolute self-indulgence!

Tomorrow my new Kindle (!) and more deep thinking about the unfairly attractive watch in the local shopping centre!

Only human!

20%.  One fifth.  One in five.

When I was indulging myself at Irene’s the twenty per cent rule came into my mind.  Virtually everything that I ate in the house was something that has been forbidden by the dictates of my very reasonable diet.  But another part of my oh so reasonable diet says that 20% of what I eat can be ‘questionable’ or just plain wrong.

I am not sure just how little I will be able to eat during the coming week to justify the meal only accounting for 20%, but starvation seems like an attractive alternative to what I am going to have to do.  I think perhaps minor surgery will be necessary, but somehow we will get through.

I have now lost 5k which is impressive as long as you visualize it as bags of sugar.  You have to do thing because it doesn’t look as though I have lost a single solitary ounce – if I may be allowed to mix my weights!  Still, after a delicious backsliding I will attempt to keep on the straight, narrow and downward slope to what I fondly believe to be health.

The two pieces of writing that I did late yesterday night and posted on the forum have been signally ignored.  That is perhaps unfair as no one else has posted anything – but they must have looked at least and obviously been intimidated by the excellence of my work and fled in despair.  Or not.

We are now on to the next chapter in the Big Red Book and yet more exercise to complete and our tutor (who is soon to return out first piece of work) has established a new area in which we have to post our work.  There is a galloping relentlessness of work that has to be done which is nothing like my remembrance of a campus-based university!  It is quite exhilarating and exhausting at the same time.  Which is possibly how it should be.

Tomorrow my new Kindle should arrive, a delayed birthday present to myself, although it is in the hands of the non-delivery-delivery-people that Amazon stubbornly keeps using in this area.  To be fair, they are starting to deliver things and the last couple (and when I say couple I mean two, it’s quite specific) of items have actually been delivered to the door.  I am not so gullible to believe that this is something that will continue, but I am enjoying a firm actually doing what it is paid to do!

The arrival of a new gadget will not drain my enthusiasm for spending yet more money – the watch, and something a little more expensive are still tickling the edge of my weakness which is visibly fraying – if I may be allowed to mix my metaphors!

So far today I have only done my morning pages and that finished the notebook that I am using.  Tomorrow to the supermarket to get more supplies.  Buying stationery has always had a strange appeal for me.  I am sure that it is something to do with what you get for your money.  Such seeming value!  Think of a box of staples, how many you get.  A thousand for pence!  And safety pins and paper clips and paper.  It is only when you put things together that the expense starts piling on.  Eighty sheets of paper costs very little, but as soon as you put a spiral binding with two cardboard covers around it the price spirals up in a most remarkable way.  Still, at least I have been able to resist the decorated notebooks which take expense into another universe!

I may or may not be spendthrift, but even I recognize when some expense is just too much! 

Probably.

More moans!

The shopping centre in the town of Gava has the worst underground car park music in the entire universe.  It has the sort of plinky-plonky randomness that makes it impossible to imagine that it was created by any sort of human.  The only human part in the musical creation was the nerd who created the sub-standard computer program which produced that cacophony.  Though that is not the right word, the music is always soft and tinkly with the hanging chime glissando of metallic irrelevance and it has that New Age awfulness that makes it the perfect music for suicide! 

Every time I go there my teeth are set on edge by the insinuating formlessness if the so-called music.  Thank god for the proliferation of inexpensive box sets of classical companies selling off their old and not so old backlists!

When I listen to Beethoven, say his 5^th Symphony, I can think back and consider all the different forms I have used to listen to it apart from live concerts: radio broadcasts; TV broadcasts; cheap records; cassette tapes; expensive records; CDs; DVDs, and all giving a reasonable listening experience of the written music all of which would not have been available to people like me at the time when Beethoven was writing his music.  If you didn’t hear the symphony in the concert hall then your experience of it would have been limited to a piano transcription or buying the printed score.  The ready availability of good quality music reproduction must have changed how we respond to music – and the quality of music that we listen to.

Which is why the music in the subterranean car park in Spain is so offensive.  There is no excuse for it.  We are used to much, much better.  Or at least we should be.  Music is now so cheap and easy to get hold of.  Whatever type of music I want is readily available at the click of a button.  Are we more sophisticated listeners nowadays though?  When I listen to what young people are listening to, I find it hard to believe.  And where the bloody hell did rap come from and having come why did it stay?  Perhaps it is something to do with attention span.  Watch television and see how many seconds a normal shot lasts.  Look at the way that information is streamed at people.  As Sleary said in Hard Times, ‘people mutht be amuthed’, by god they must!  That is not the same as education!

Today has not felt like a Saturday.  Even in the swimming pool, though there were small human life forms around when they are mercifully absent during the week, their pernicious presence was not enough to dispel the week-like feel of the day.  The truly retired were playing boules and another group were snapping down dominos and the bored housewives were doing their pointless dance steps to thumping music.  The only important thing was that I had a lane to myself – everything else is detail. 

Though I do like days to feel like themselves and I am still not entirely sure why today didn’t.  But such speculation is as nothing compared to the fact that I have seen another watch.  I know that my watch buying has now reached the proportions of an obsession, but it hardly an addiction to cocaine so I fail to be intimidated by the fact that some people only own a single watch.  I can type things like that, but they have absolutely no meaning in my world.  The latest little object of desire is another Kenneth Cole creation.  This time it is a day, date, second hand, waterproof etc. and automatic with a semi skeleton showing the movement and a glass back (a detail I have never understood, who looks?), it also has a leather strap, but that is something I am used to and they are specially treated to be worn for swimming and all the time without rotting on the wrist.  Sounds as if I have already bought it.  But it is too expensive for an impulse buy.  And there is, of course no possible reason or excuse to buy it.  Tempting isn’t it!

Tomorrow our long delayed lunch with Irene.  I must remember the stuffed vine leaves and a bottle of Cava.  Always-acceptable calling cards!