The way that the Spanish talk about their climate makes the British preoccupation with the weather look like a casual remark.  Each year that snow falls in Spain (as it does every year without fail) it is greeted as a unique phenomenon and one worthy of vast swathes of television time, showing presenters knee deep in the white stuff with a 'natural' background of snowball throwing kids.  The falling level of the reservoirs in the summer is painstakingly documented with drowned villages seeing the air again and spoken of in apocalyptic terms as if the rains of Februrary are never going to happen and fill them up again.  And so on for each season as highs and lows are lovingly relayed to appalled viewers who at least have a ready made topic of conversation for the rest of the day.
     This year we have, to be fair, had pretty bad weather.  At least we have if you are looking at the whole of Spain and not just at Catalonia and Castelldefels.
     Here in Castelldefels we usually get off lightly.  Snow in Barcelona (it does happen!) does not mean that anything falls on our little town.  Even The Beast from the East has not really had that much effect, though it has been cold and we have had torrential rain.
     In all the years that I have been living in Castelldefels I have never seen snow where I live, near the sea.  I have once seen snow on some of the surrounding hills, but in my front of back garden - never.
     It was therefore with something approaching shock that I looked out at the car park from my inside seat in the cafe in my local swimming pool and saw undeniable flakes of snow.  Not only did I note it down in my ever-ready notebook, but I took a (bad) photograph of it failing to stick on cars as proof that it actually did occur.
     It seemed fitting to note the occasion with a poem and the following is what, with the sun shining outside and the temperature at 16C or so, I have come up with.
     The last line is one of the main reasons that I live in Catalonia!


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Castelldefels, one winter’s day

Light touch weather,

fleeting, not to stay.

The hills greyscale in mist.

The ‘snow’ a gesture of thrown flakes:

they’re countable.

The kids’ gloved hands,

are raised in

supplication to the skies

to catch the drifting cold.

The stark-pruned spikey canopies

await the promised picturesque.

Lo!  They come again!

Rain’s ghosts!

Zigzags to blot

in spots so slight

the cold evaporates.

Beach side

no flurry fell.

White rain is for TV

and not for us.

And all too soon

the mundane wet will come,

and then, the sun.

First steps!

My third week out of hospital and my first walks outside the house and my first trips to the local shops in the car!

It is a sign of how limiting the thrombosis and embolism are that such ‘easy’ actions I now regard as worthy of note.  Yesterday, with all the confidence of an idiot, I did rather too much and today I am aware that I did so.  I cannot say, in all truthfulness that I am actually suffering, but I am sitting down and biding my time before another foray into the lairs of commercialism!

I have not been idle in these last few weeks and have been working on the notes that I made during my stay in hospital and have worked them up into a series of poems that are part of my new chapbook called, “A Point of Blue”.

This chapbook comprises not only the dozen or so poems directly related to my stay (including one about the flowers that I was given!) but also half a dozen prose pieces to accompany them.  I have also included ‘drawings’ that I did on my reMarkable tablet that may be, “little more than glorified doodles” but they also, “come as near as I am ever going to get to some form of non-literary meditation”.  High-sounding words!  But this collection is best described as “a wry mixture of prose poetry and ‘drawings’” where, in spite of the seriousness of the condition, I am still able to get some humour out of the situation!

The chapbook is in process of being published and will have an ISBN number and will be one sale at €5 in the Euro zone and £5 in the UK.

I am pleased with how this chapbook has turned out and I am looking forward to comments about the content!

Next week will be a significant one for me as I intend to go to the opera.  The next opera in my season ticket is Romeo and Juliette by Gounod.  I have never seen this opera, although I know one or two of the arias, and I do not intend to let this opportunity slip!  I have book an hotel room for a night in Barcelona and the walk to the Liceu is very short.  We will have to see how it goes.  The only problem is that I have to inject myself at 9.00pm and that might be a little disconcerting for the audience if I do it during the performance!

Meanwhile the political situation in Spain becomes ever more murky.  On the television today there are scenes of pensioners throughout the country protesting and demonstrating about the derisory 0.25% increase – well below the rate of inflation, for yet another year – while the political fall out from the various corruption trials for members of the right wing minority government of PP continue to shock. 

It is becoming even clearer that the party is systemically corrupt and the frankly disgusting antics of the leader of Cs as he expresses his shock and distaste for the party that his group of sluttish politicos helped elect to government, masks the fact that the dyed in the wool sheer badness of PP was abundantly clear to even the most politically inept neophyte when his bunch of opportunistic riffraff voted for them.

More and more of the people who are in the courts being processed through the glacially slow judicial system are singing and implicating all the top echelon of PP.  The latest phase of this farce is the ex-treasurer of PP (all of the treasurers of PP in the history of the party have been accused of malpractice – and I’m using that word because they have not yet been sentenced and put in the prison that they richly deserve) has given evidence in the Valencia parliament about the funding of a past PP campaign.  As the national treasurer he has asserted that he no knowledge or control over the finances of the regional PP in Valencia.  In other words, he has thrown the past PP politicos in Valencia under the proverbial bus and washed his hands of a responsibility that you might, possibly have expected a national treasurer to have some knowledge about.  Especially as the campaign was such a major part of the national campaign and all the political leaders of PP were there to soak up the paid-for adulation!

In spite of the overwhelming evidence of corruption, I have no real expectation that any of the major political characters in PP will resign or have judgements (official judgements that is, in the court of public opinion they are guilty as sin!) against them. 

But, as always I live in hope and always believe that justice, will, eventually triumph.

Life after hospital!

It has now been a fortnight since I came out of my rather unexpected stay in hospital.  During that time I have been subjected (is that the right word I wonder?) to enforced (yes it is!) idleness.  Bodily idleness that is, where I have been encouraged to sit in my armchair and rest.  

            Going up stairs has to be done three at a time and then a pause and then the next three.  The third floor of the house has been deemed out of bounds and so has going outside.  Though I did, but that was only to let the doctor in, so I don’t think it counts as an official act of disobedience.  

         During this period I have also been wearing ‘pressure stockings’ where the impossibility of my getting the damn things on, has been the daily task of Toni – after which he usually needs a sustain cup of coffee to get him back to normal.  

            Also during this period I have been injecting myself twice daily with Clexane – which I suspect is just a fancy name for some form of rat poison that is being used to thin my blood.

            Today the stockings don’t have to be worn.  I can begin to walk about a little more and I can start looking forward to a real walk to sit on a bench by the sea – which I haven’t seen for a fortnight.

             My diet has been reasonably exemplary and, to be truthful, I am getting just a tiny bit stir-crazy.

            Not that I have been staring blankly at the wall during this period, I have been busy.  Busy is a sedentary way.

            During my time in hospital I was never far from my trusty notebook in which, each day, I write thoughts banal and halfway original in the hope that some of them might be the basis for a poem in the future.

            As I had never stayed in hospital before, I reasoned that it had to be the stuff of some sort of writing and I therefore wrote daily about what was happening and tried to sketch out my feelings and observations. 

            Reading over my notes and responses, the one thing that leaps out from the pages is not my fear about what was happening to me, but rather the composition of the meals that the hospital offered.  Each lunch and dinner is lovingly and compulsively detailed together with my evaluation, reflecting perhaps a natural obsession for those caught up in the institution of healing!

            Obviously, I do also comment on how I was living and what was done to me: the blood tests, the scans, the daily routines of blood pressure, temperature etc., the injections and drips, the oxygen masks, the smocks, the toilets, the showers, the structure of the day, the different people who came in and out of the ward.  It was all new, and at the same time, from past visits, from television shows, documentaries, friends’ explanations, and general knowledge, quite old as well.  The key difference was that I was the patient rather than the observer; the person things were happening to rather than the general landscape of ‘other’.

            As I began to work through my notebook I discovered some aspects that suggested poems at once, but there were other areas of experience that seemed to be better suited to prose, so I worked on the basis that what I was going to produce would be better suited to a mixture rather than being a ‘pure’ chapbook of poetry.  I also did some ‘drawings’/doodles while I was in hospital and, if I ever find a way of getting them from my reMarkable electronic tablet and into my computer I will be adding those to the mix!

            The working title of the chapbook is “A Point of Blue”, a reference to one of the completed poems based on the scrap of sky that I could see from my bedside chair alongside bed 13.2 next to the window in the ward, but I also like the ambiguity that the title holds as well.  An uninspiring view that ironically inspired me to write!

            I have a draft of the book that is almost ready: I have one more prose piece to write and get the ‘drawings’ in place and it will be ready for publication.  I also have a photo of me resplendent in smock and oxygen mask that I will consider for the dedication page perhaps!

            Now to make publication a reality!

            

Present sounds: past emotion

I am now firmly plugged back into BBC Radio.  Like The Guardian, I can only do without it for the length of a short summer holiday.  No longer.

It is odd to consider that the whole concept of ‘going on holiday’ has changed utterly in my lifetime.

My first foreign holiday at the age of 7, was with my mother and father and my uncle and aunt.  We went by bus, train, train, boat, train, coach, train, train, coach, coach (taking well over a day) to Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava in Catalonia.  I loved it.  I spent the majority of my time in the sea, trying out my new swimming mask and losing one of my new flippers.  I ate my first squid. 

And I realise that as a well-behaved and utterly polite child with four grateful adults, I must have been spoiled rotten!  Perhaps that holiday more than anything, ingrained in me a love of sunshine that has lasted up to today – though ‘today’ is not the best advert for Catalonia as it has been raining solidly for the last two days!  That is, to be fair, unusual.

We spent 15 days on holiday and during that time we didn’t have any British newspapers, we didn’t phone home, we didn’t watch television – except for me to see, with wonder, Bonanza in Spanish, that I found endlessly funny!  We were, in effect, cut off from home – and thoroughly enjoyed it.

When I was old enough to go on holiday by myself, then all my parents expected was the odd postcard letting the know that I was still alive at that point in my vacation.  My only attempts to phone home were total disasters that ended up in my feeding public phone boxes with money for no link to Cardiff. 

Three weeks going down the Greek Islands from Athens to Crete and staying in what could euphemistically be called ‘basic’ accommodation; five weeks travelling across the United States; a couple of weeks in Italy – none of these had me phoning home, nor reading a newspaper, nor listening to the BBC. 

My holiday effectively erected a cordon sanitaire around my previous life that was only broken through when I came back to Heathrow, or Luton, or Paddington and made the phone call home.  While the ring tone sounded I mentally wiped out all my family and waited, with a concern that I had not (oddly) felt for the previous weeks of the holiday, for my mother or father to answer.  And then my first question was inevitably how my other parent was!

My next task was to catch up on the world news that sunbathing or scouring galleries or swimming had allowed to pass me by.  And, as I did so, each day would bring in the post cards that I had posted weeks before!

Nowadays, thanks to the mobile phone, kids are never beyond their parents.  Pictures can be sent immediately.  Keeping in touch costs nothing, no matter where you are in the world.  News is a click away.  Google Translate is there for those tricky moments that used to be solved by a combination of mime and use of any foreign words you might have known said in an accent appropriate to the country in which you were stuck!

It is deeply ironic that “getting away from it all” usually involves sharing with everyone you know exactly where you are and exactly what you are doing moment by moment!

Young (and indeed the old) are all linked in to modes of instant communication that will make the 3 week hiatus of my first backpacking Greek holiday as a situation akin to travelling with maps that had areas marked “Here there be dragons” on them.  Communication is good, but sometimes-enforced separation is good for the soul!

These thoughts came to me when listening to my new Internet radio, a Sangean SIR-100 (that looks suspiciously, exactly like a Roberts Stream 107 that it is replacing) and, having worked out how to use the pre-sets enjoying the morning music programme on Radio 3.  They played the second movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony with The Tune.  Beautiful.  Hackneyed?  Well, it is very well known and the sort of thing that Classic FM plays at least twice a day – but I wondered when the last time I had heard it was, and then, by progression on to the first time I heard it.

Music for me carries a personal history.  I can still remember the LP covers of the Music for Pleasure and Classics for Pleasure 

budget LP manufacturers when records could be bought for ten bob (10/- or 50p) and I was getting to know the Classical Canon.  Some music I recorded, Beethoven’s 1^st and 8^th Symphonies on cassette in my (ground breaking at the time) Philips portable cassette recorder.  Hearing the music takes me back to my bedroom in 32, Hatherleigh Road in Cardiff where they were first recorded and listened to, amazed at what sort of sound could be got out of such a small loudspeaker and even more amazed when played through my Boots Stereo Record Player.  But the tape hiss and the slightly cramped sound still stays with me.

Mahler’s 4^th is bottles; Nielsen’s Helios Overture is corn fields; Beethoven’s 5^th is a Constable painting; Immortal Melodies is a large flower bloom; Sibelius’ 1^st is broken snow mounds; Britten is Aldeborough; the 1812 is that graphic cannon – and so I could go on, remembering the cover art of my LP collection (now long gone in favour of CDs) but forever imprinted on my mind, and having some sort of intangible effect on the way that I heard the music and continue to hear it.

Place is also important.  The quickest way to learn new music is to play it.  As an inept trombone playing member of Cardiff Youth Orchestras as well as a member of a various Brass Groups and the School Orchestra I ‘learned’ a lot of music by being there.  I have to admit that in most orchestral pieces the trombones are usually tacet (i.e. being silent) and much of our time is taken up with counting bars (or asking the members of the orchestra in front who play more to give us a nod when ‘figure E’ has been reached in the score) and then lurching into action hoping that the embouchure was still good enough to get most of the notes!  But you did learn music and appreciate the structure of orchestral sound.

For trombone players the best pieces of music (or the most threatening) were when We Had the Tune.  The overture to Tannhäuser is an excellent example where the trombones come into their all, though the first time we played through this piece the awful realization that we were the only ones playing in the orchestra brought us all to an abrupt embarrassed silence!  I still get a little rush of combined panic and pleasure each time I hear the music!

All music, no matter how hackneyed it might appear to be, is new and original to somebody who has never heard it.  I was played the 4^th movement of Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony by my piano teacher in the days when it was still thought that I might be able to do more than the first few bars of Für Elise on the damn thing.  I was much taken by the music and bought a cheap LP of the symphony and when I listened to it, I was stunned by the second movement: simple repetitive and magical!  I was not at all surprised to discover that this movement was given an encore on its first performance!  My listening to the symphony is always in some ways bound up in my abortive attempt to master the piano, together with the patience and feel of the piano in my music teachers dining room in a house exactly like my own home but made so different by the decoration and the smell and feel.

There are also parts of well-known musical pieces that have associations.  The BBC National Orchestra of Wales has given me many and varied delights and I used to go to the concert series in St David’s Hall when I lived in Cardiff where some of the performances were among the best I have ever been to of the pieces played.  The orchestra that one hears today is a development from other variations on a National Orchestra that have been tried in the past.  I can remember as a school boy going to performances in the Assembly Rooms of the City Hall, other performances in Broadcasting House in Llandaff and yet others in the Coal Exchange in Mount Stuart Square.

One early performance stands out.  It was of Beethoven’s 3^rd The Eroica and the part that particularly stays with me is the horn’s solo.  The symphony was taken at a lively pace until the entry of the horns when everything slowed down for them to try and get the notes, then the music returned al tempo for the rest of the orchestra.  I still can remember my exquisite embarrassment for the horn section and my relief when such an exposed passage was over.  I still feel some of the tension whenever I hear that particular section.  Still.

Lest this memory be the abiding one from this piece, I should mention a couple of performances of the Turangalîla Symphony by Olivier Messiaen that I heard in St David’s Hall.  These were played spectacularly well and left me literally open mouthed in astonishment and musing about how far the orchestra had come in terms of sheer technical accomplishment. 

And, after all, I have an abiding debt to the orchestra from the time when I went to a performance of The Firebird that I had never heard before.  I was sitting in the middle of the audience and when the fff chord introducing a piece was played the entire audience jerked back in their chairs.  That sort of thing spoils you for every other performance because not one of them, on record or live, has had the same effect!

But, as always, I live in hope!