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!

  

Early action!

Up betimes!  

The changing of the wheel was as featureless as it should have been.  Putting the ‘compact’ wheel back in the boot was anything but.  It eventually took four of us to solve the three dimensional problem that putting everything back in so that it all fitted together!

My swim was at an earlier time than usual and as it coincided with a jumping dance class of a regiment of women there was no parking space available.  And all the swimming lanes were taken – though as soon as I arrived one gentleman left showing, I thought, a keen sense of responsibility!

My cup of coffee was taken in leafily bright sunshine.  And it’s November!

My Morning Pages were written a little later than usual and I think they were of even less interest than usual!  Never mind, I am optimistic that something will come out of all the effort that I am putting into them.  Or self-delusional.  Who cares, it has now become part of my daily ritual and even though it is costing me an arm and leg in disposable fountain pens, it is something that I am sort of enjoying in a masochistic sort of way!

Lunch was in the Little Pla and was light by any standards.  I felt thoroughly morally fortified by the time I had finished eating my melon!  I even had a cup of tea rather than coffee – restraint can go no further!

The recording of the new discs on the computer goes on apace.  There is something deeply satisfying in doing such a mundane task.  I am keeping the booklets close at hand so that I can refer to them to see if there is anything that should be listened to out of sequence.  It was easier when I was traipsing off to school every day in Barcelona as it meant that I got through the discs in double quick time.  Depending on traffic each disc took a day and half.  Now, with the limited amount of travelling that I do it takes a little longer – and I have to suffer the pointed indifference of Toni as he listens to yet another masterpiece!

At the moment I am listening to a Kurt Weill compilation recording and it has reignited my enthusiasm for The Threepenny Opera and my personal favourite, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.  I shall have to try and find the discs that I already possess of these ‘operas’ somewhere in the filing system whose key was lost from the memory banks of three separate computers in a truly disastrous sequential crash!

More writing to do!

It's all money!

The delivery people actually did their stuff and I am now the proud possessor of three new box sets of previously (well, forty odd years ago previously!) unobtainably expensive recordings.  Admittedly not all of them are that old, many are fairly recent issues, but there are certainly old favourites among the 150 CDs that I now have!  A box of Teldec, Erato and Das Alte Werk with treasures in all of them – and of course some discs that I may not even listen to once.  But that is where my swimming comes into the equation.

The little memory inside my swimming device is set to ‘random’ so that I get what could be described as an eclectic selection of music to accompany my stokes.  Half of it (or more if I am truly honest, although it comes from my collection) is made up of music I don’t know.  

Perhaps some bits are taken wildly out of context and one has to make allowances for the noise of exhaled breaths and the splash of swimming to lessen the quality of the musical experience.  There have been times when I have wondered what the music was and then gradually disentangled the tune from the watery obstructions to clarity and realized that it was very well known to me.  So, the listening experience is experiential as well as entertaining.

But the random switch does mean that I get to hear parts of my collection that other devices do not reach!  And to make sure that this voyage of discovery continues I am assiduously loading the discs into my computer so that when I come to change the music in my swimming device there will be a whole range of new material to delight!

The car crash saga continues with a voyage to pastures new to see the garage that the hittor wants me, the hittee to use.  I am prepared to do this, but never again, after trying and failing to find the building in which the hittor worked.  When we eventually found it, it turned out to be the flashy headquarters of a pharmaceutical company in the same town where Barça have their equally flashy (though not quite so tall) out of town forcing academy and extensive playing facilities.  Indeed while sitting on the tasteful sofas in the entrance hall we saw a star of the team appear.  It turns out the Piqué has founded a computer games company and has his business in part of the building!

Things have been arranged so that the car (and a replacement for me for a couple of days) will be done starting next Thursday.  Fine by me as long as it is done.

The day has not merely been composed of futile searching for large buildings and eating an extraordinarily expensive compensatory meal.  Which, interestingly was composed, for me of crystal bread with oil and tomato and a plate of some form of potato with fried eggs sprinkled with a fierce sauce and overlaid with elvers – that isn’t the interesting part, what is fascinating is that I felt absolutely stuffed after it!  I am daring to trust that my stomach might actually have shrunk a tad.  I say this because it doesn’t really look like it – but I have a touching faith in the power of words!  No indeed this was not the only notable occurrence today.

Spanish roads are not know for their sympathetic layout.  Or their signage.  Or the quality of their upkeep.  Or the quality of their lighting.  Or – but you get what I am trying to say.  I was beguiled by a straight road to continue in a straight line and therefore bumped into an intrusive kerb.  A truly horrible sound.  With worse results.

I must have looked like the archetypal pseudo maiden in distress.  I couldn’t find the spare wheel at first, so I had to get the manual out of the car and start looking things up.  I eventually found the bits and pieces but only after deconstructing the boot of the car in a way in which I am not confident of ever getting all back together again!  My distress must have been so palpable that a stockily competent lady accosted me in a torrent of Spanish from which I understood that the corner was a notorious accident spot, multitudes of drivers had suffered what I had experienced and the police, contacted on a number of occasions had done nothing!  (Their being, of course, inside the bars.)  So far so interesting, but she also reminded me that I was within screaming distance of a mechanic and garage!

Scream, well, walk and ask, I most certainly did and had to drive the car a horrific distance to the garage because the guy was by himself and couldn’t leave the premises even though the car was within sight.  Given the one way systems that are de rigeur in all parts of Spain I had to drive four times the distance to get to the garage because I couldn’t get there by reversing or driving directly.

The garage man was either generous or canny or both, but he changed the wheel for nothing.  The wheel which is my spare is completely different from the other wheels and is described as ‘compact’.  It is the same diameter you understand, but about half the width.  I assume this is because there is little space in the boot as the batteries take up a lot of the spare room in the car.  I now have to replace the ‘compact’ wheel with a real one.

Easier said than done.  We went, after our epic journey to get the details of how the car was going to be sorted, to a place which looks to my untutored eye most like the change-while-you-wait places in the UK.

Wait was certainly the operative word.  I detest garages because of the condescending nature of the employees there.  They ignore queues with a lofty indifference that puts one in mind of the excesses of behind-the-golden-curtain Chinese emperors, in their more autocratic moods!

Anyway I stomped out in a huff and drove to the next commercial centre down and there, behold, we were ignored again!  This time by people gazing with adoration at their computer screens, so actual human customers were more of an irritation than a guarantee that their jobs would continue to exist!  Toni however calmed me down and, given the general run of these sorts of characters, the one who dealt with us was of a higher quality than one is used to.  Although he didn’t actually have the tyre that I needed (of course) he did guarantee to get it by tomorrow and we could leave the damaged wheel with him and it would be ready to place on the car by the time I called in tomorrow morning.  This I have to experience to believe but at least he didn’t ask for money and so I am going to go with blind faith!

Toni is having study deprivation and fell back on his computer with a disturbingly voracious appetite to make up for time lost!

The OU course continues with people becoming a little more critical in their analysis, which is good.  There is little point is giving some sort of bland approbation for stuff which needs work.  A new critical pair of eyes is essential to improve standards.

As I type I am listening to a version of the next opera in my series, a Handel opera called ‘Agrippina’.  I have been dreading Handel: the operas are Wagner-long with idiotic stories and are full of recitative.  But the music is by Handel and there is something compulsive about the whimsical logic of his sounds.  And they are something you can listen to for the first time and feel that you are getting something more than just a first experience for another dozen listenings before you ‘get’ the music.  This is the sort of music that calls for an imaginative approach to give the ever-suffering member of the audience to look at while the plinkerty-plink music is going on.  I wait to be amazed by the experience!

The more I listen to the music the more it seems to suggest that I have heard it before.  I know I haven’t and I further know that I am responding to style rather than anything else, but that is a stage in getting to know and love.  That might be going a step too far, but I think that I will be able to get through the three hours without too much pain!

And while I type and Handel plays, the Turangalila Symphony is loading into the computer to join the three or four versions that I have, though not possibly in the computer memory yet.  The last year has seen me hoover up all the disc bargains that have been around so that I have more than a lifetime’s music waiting to be listened to.  O the joy!  I think I will leave the Bach until last!

I am looking forward to the weekend because Sunday or is it Saturday is the day when we go to Irene’s for our long, long delayed Eastern Meal.  Unfortunately spiced down for Spanish and Catalan taste, but it will be something different and if I am in a good mood I will donate a tin of my stuffed vine leaves that I have been hiding away as a treat for when I deserve it!  Even I can share when necessary!