Learning is reading is seeing!

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It is gradually dawning on me that we are already in the month of July.  Which means that there is only one full month between today and the start of September.  So much, so obvious.  The reason why this is a disconcerting fact is that in September I start a new course in Spanish III.

Although I have lived in Spain for almost a decade, I am shamefully, and woefully inadequate when it comes to expressing myself in Spanish.  I mean, I get by.  No matter what the situation, be it garage, government, restaurant, optician, library, art gallery, theatre, opera house, museum, bus, train, bike shop, etc etc etc - I get by.  But I am always conscious that when I compare what I am able to say in English with how I express myself in Spanish, the different is, to put it mildly, glaring. I have Taken Steps to rectify my inarticulacy and this year I have taken an OU course in Spanish Beginners and a course in Castelldefels in Spanish 2.  This sort of overkill approach has had mixed results.

On the positive side I have passed my Spanish 2 course and am now officially certified as having a proficiency of A2 - I have documentary proof of this, and that is something which I look at from time to time as I am not entirely convinced that my ability matches the printed description.  Still, I have done the exams and got the paper. 

The OU course has been interesting, but my approach to it has been less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic.  My marks for the OU course have been among the highest that I have managed to get, with my lowest mark being 94%!  But perhaps those marks have more to do with the fact that I now know how the OU works and I am able to push them exactly what they want.  And this is not false modesty on my part, I know what I do not know, and I do know that the marks do not reflect my proficiency and ability.  Bumbling by in a confident ungrammatical style is not competence.

 

So, the start of Spanish III in September is a truly daunting prospect.  There is no way that I can get through this year by relying on quick wits and a smattering of half remembered vocabulary.  Spanish III is serious - that’s why I have written the number in Roman numerals rather than the more prosaic Arabic alternative.  [And just as a casual thought, how might I have translated that last sentence?  Pause.  Although I have no intention of showing you my version, I did put my Spanish attempt in Google translate and something vaguely similar came out the other end in English!]  I will have to take a more serious and studious approach if I am not to be humiliated by the experience.

I have determined an approach that might help, but it does need constant effort and a seriousness that I have not shown heretofore.  With the OU course I left out great chunks of the material, decided that other bits were stuff I knew, and concentrated on the tutor marked assignments and the computer marked multiple-choice questions.  I worked to the final result and the final result will therefore reflect my ability to understand the mechanism of the institution rather than show exactly how much I have learned and I know.

But I know that if my approach had been slightly different and I had been more methodical towards all the course and not just to those bits that had a final mark attached to them, I would have benefitted immeasurably.  The material is well thought out and leads you gently (generally) to proficiency.  It is a sign of the realism of the Open University that access to the studenthome website for the course is available to students for three years after the course has finished.  I think that I will need that to go over just what it is that I am supposed to have learned.

And then there is the course that I have just completed in Castelldefels.  We have a course book for this, complete with CD.  The lessons are generally more conversational than overly didactic so much of the hard graft learning is left to the students.  I cannot, in conscience say that I kept up my end of the bargain and too often the next time that I opened the books after the previous lesson was in the next lesson.  This does not work.  And it will not work in Spanish III.  So things will have to change.  I live in hope.

-oO0Oo-

As part of our “Summer is the Time to Explore” approach to life, we have been to a new/old restaurant in Castelldefels.  OK, it’s not exactly sailing up the Zambezi in a canoe made of matchsticks, but it is adventurous according to our lights.

We chose to go to an old haunt further down the beach road, where previously we had got a fairly basic menu del dia for about €10.  The food was not spectacular but it was good value for money. 

It must be over a year or so since we last went there.  At this point you have to understand that time in a seaside resort is not the same as in the rest of the world.  A single year in resort is equivalent to at least five in the normal time frame.  In our world shops come and go; restaurants rise and fall; banks close; hotels rise up like Lego constructions; car parks become flats - nothing stays the same for long.  So, you could say that we were somewhat naive in expecting to get the same experience from something so far back in resort time.

And things had certainly changed.  Rough and ready had now become canvas backed chic; tables and chairs had been redone, and there was air conditioning inside.  And the price was now €16, a 60% increase.  And that was without drink!

Service was poor and slow.  The starters were OK, but the main course was far too salty.  The piss-poor wine was €12 and the bottle of gaseosa was €2.50.  We had to pay €2 for parking because the service was so slow.  The final bill (after the beer that we didn’t have had been deducted!) was over €50.  We could have had better for €20 elsewhere.

You could say that I should name and shame - and the fact that I didn’t leave a tip shows how dissatisfied I was - but, how many of my readers are going to turn up looking for a cheap lunch any time in the next decade?  As a one off experience it was not good, but thinking about what I was prepared to accept when I first came to Spain, I would have been quite happy with the meal.  In those days I would have been impressed by the ‘free’ olives and even more by the thimble full of cheap vermouth with a speared olive in it.  But that was then and this is now and my standards are a little higher than they were.

This is a seaside town and summer is the traditional time to rip off those tourists who are so green that they look to have a meal with a sea view.  I should have known better, so I will let the restaurant hide behind my gifted anonymity and let them rack up the Euros while the sun shines!

-oO0Oo-

My eyes have never been the strongest part of my anatomy, and recently they have been more irritating than usual.

I can usually cope with the sheer frustration of short sightedness, and even the addition in later life of longsighted-ness to go with that: varifocal glasses are worth their weight in gold - just as soon as you have worked out how to walk down stairs in them!  I have been wearing contact lenses since I was seventeen and I have attempted to get used to a multitude of different forms of plastic pressed against my eyeballs.

Only those who have had hard contact lenses and then got a spec of grit behind one can truly understand the meaning of the oxymoronic “exquisite pain”!  The development of soft contact lenses and the further development of ‘daily’ soft contact lenses where, at last, you could throw them away at the end of the day, rather than pretending that you cleaned them properly and put them in fresh solution for the night rather than popping them in your mouth and sucking them to get them clean.  I pause here for opticians to have their fit of the vapours - which emphatically occurred when I first admitted to my optician that was my usual treatment.  From there I (like all other hard contact lens users) I lied.

Anyway.  Even with soft, daily contact lenses there will come a time when your eyeballs have had enough of plastic already, and demand that you dig out your old specs and wear those for a while.  My eyes have been getting ‘tired’ recently and my eyesight has become somewhat blurred, so I have gone back to glasses,

My glasses are lightweight, thinned, photochromatic, varifocal and laser and computer fabricated.  They have lightweight frameless frames made of matt platinum (going by the price) and are altogether things of loveliness - if you like that sort of thing.  I hate them, and only use them when my eyes scream for relief.

This time the respite that glasses is supposed to give to contact lens-abused eyes, has not worked out.  I am still getting blurred vision, and it is as if a tiny piece of translucent gauze has been stuck on my left eyeball.  And I am worried.

Worried in two ways.  I have an optician appointment at 6 this evening (this is Spain and not Britain you understand) and my first worry is trying to translate a phrase like “tiny piece of translucent gauze” into Spanish.  My second and more real worry is that what I am experiencing is related to diabetes.  I have been borderline diabetes 2 for some time and, although my last blood test was triumphantly negative for diabetes, I fear that I may have backslid.  So to speak.

Although it is the summer I have a lot of bookwork to do.  Not only re-reading the Spanish course that I didn’t read the first time around, but also working on my latest book of poems.  Although the poems are written, the introduction, the editing and the proof reading are all to come.  I need my glasses or lens assisted sight for some fairly intense work over the next few months.

Although I try and make light of it, I am worried.  There are too many nasty things that the “tiny piece of translucent gauze” might suggest.

However there is a whole hour before my appointment and I am not going to spend it in fruitless, frightened speculation.  I will write a poem instead.  Or at least draft one out.

My drafts of poems can be seen at http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/ that you are welcome to visit or ignore as your pleasure dictates.

58 more minutes to the appointment.  Not that I am counting or anything, you understand.  No indeed.  Indeed not.

Have they ever thought of trying politics?

 

There was a two-and-a-half hour meeting between the laughable (yet viciously contemptible) President of Spain, leader of the corrupt and corrupting PP group in parliament and the leader of the opposition and general secretary of the so-called socialist party PSOE.  The President does not have an overall majority in Parliament, but is able to govern because of the supine attitude of PSOE who (incredibly) abstained during the last vote of confidence against the government, and the active support of C’s the right wing sluts of Spanish politics.

God knows there is more than enough for these two ‘leaders’ to talk about ranging from the rampant corruption that marks the way that politics is lived in this country to the crucifyingly high youth unemployment rate; the rising numbers of the poor and dispossessed to the rising cost of living.  And much, much more.  But the pressing problem at the moment (leaving aside their own real failings and those of their parties) is Catalonia.

 

On the first of October of this year the government of Catalonia has said that it is going to hold a referendum asking the simple question of the population of if they are in favour of forming and independent republic of Catalonia.  If the vote is positive, the government has said that it will start the formal process of withdrawing from Spain within days of the vote.

This is not the first vote that Catalonia has had.  There was a previous vote where the overwhelming majority of those who voted, voted for independence.  The qualifications in that last sentence are important.

The PP government in Madrid said that such a vote was illegal.  The question was referred to various courts including the Constitutional and High and all of them ruled that the vote was both illegal and invalid.  The government did not allow government buildings to be used to facilitate the vote; voter registration lists were denied to the organizers; various threats were made about the participation of any civil servants; there was a propaganda war against the government of Catalonia.

The vote was held and I voted.  The result was dismissed by the same government that had done all it could to make the holding of the vote difficult.  Considering the difficulties and the opposition, the turnout was remarkable.

The government in Madrid prosecuted the president of Catalonia for holding a democratic vote and he had to go to court.  He was found guilty and was banned from taking part in public political life for two years.  The Spanish government was a laughing stock for being seen as such an active opponent of democracy.

We have had the same sort of build up by the Spanish government for the next vote.  Legal arguments have been made and various courts have pronounced on the essential illegality of holding a democratic vote.  Our joke president of Spain has said that the only legal vote would be one in which the whole country of Spain takes part.  So, for example, the recent vote about Scottish independence, according to the rules of the Spanish government, would have been open to the voters of the entire United Kingdom England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - and not restricted to Scotland!  Absurd and ridiculous.

There has been some bellicose talk, with one minister in the past referring to the use of tanks!  But surely, even at this late stage, politicians could try politics to work out their problems?

I am constantly amazed by how little politicians in this country actually use politics to try and diffuse situations.  Their first loyalties are to party and not to country, and their nauseating repetition of platitudes fails to hide the paucity of ideas to take Spain forward.

 

Our television screens give us a daily diet of graphic depictions of corruption largely unchecked by what passes for Justice here.  The politicisation (in the worst sense of the word) of daily life of the rich and the powerful means that they evade the consequences of their actions.  Ministers refuse to resign in spite of votes in parliament and reams of evidence against them; proven criminals walk free from prisons; liars and thieves pay eye-wateringly large sums of money IN CASH to get out of prison; some convicted liars and thieves have yet to be put away.  But, speak in the ‘wrong way’ about the Roman Church, or the police, or the royal family, or make jokes in poor taste about ETA and you will find that ‘justice’ in this country can be swift and exemplary.  We have laws that ensure that if an individual films say, police brutality, then the person taking the film will be prosecuted before the offenders!

This is a country where a government grant is given to the Franco Foundation (sic.) but the same government is proud that it has not given a penny to fund the work of scientists who are trying to discover the DNA and therefore the identity of those who were murdered during the Civil War and thrown into common graves. 

 

Recently, a 92-year-old woman was able to bury the remains of her murdered father after an Argentinian organization funded the DNA work.  In her moving responses on television she expressed her gratitude that she was finally able to give her father the burial respect that he deserved, but she pointedly said that she gave no thanks at all to the Spanish PP government as they had done nothing at all to help.

Catalonia has banned bull fighting in the region and refused it regional finance; the Spanish PP government has tried to get bull fighting listed as of national historic importance and part of the patrimony of mankind and, where it is in power, it has financed it.  You go to the Plaza de España in Barcelona and the historic bullring there has been converted into a shopping centre. 

 

That just about sum up the attitude of many Catalans to the central government.

In my view the Spanish government seems set for a showdown with Catalonia, which is going to achieve nothing - except to harden attitudes on both sides.

I would give Catalonia a referendum.  Not immediately, but I would commit to holding one in the near future.  I would then work with the Catalan government to restructure the relationship between the Generalitat and Madrid.  Having drawn up a new map for the relationship between the two, then I would hold a referendum using the new relationship to urge voters to go with a united Spain.

There are many foreigners in Catalonia.  Not only those from other countries of the EU and the rest of the world, but also those specifically  including important sources of immigration from Morocco, China and Russia.  There are many from the ex-colonies of Spain and Portugal in South America.  To many those Spanish citizens from outside Catalonia (and there are many in this region) are also foreign.  I am sure that a renewed relationship, a more equitable relationship could be sold easily to unconvinced Catalans and a majority of ‘foreigners’ who are uneasy about the position of an independent republic of Catalonia.

But the government of PP shows no sign of reasonableness, shows no sign of being able to listen sympathetically to justified complaints.  As is not unusual with sides entrenched in positions because of years of intransigence, it looks as though, as usual, lack of political nous will ensure disaster.

And that brings me to Brexit.

But this post has been depressing enough without that!

Tomorrow I will be more cheerful.  Honestly!

It's only a phase!

I am not happy.

Not exactly sad either.  I am more dissatisfied.  That ill-felt sense of not-rightness that sometimes irritates and leaves you with an unsettled approach to life.

So, at times like this I do what comes naturally to me: I write things down and then read what I have written to see what I think!  I know that this sounds depressingly like the actions of the Blond Buffoon who was rumoured to have written two versions of a piece for the Spectator concerning his approach to Brexit – one in favour of staying in the EU and the other for leaving.  He read both and then made up his mind, as ‘any fule no’ to do what was best for his career and to show himself up as a brave champion of the worst dregs of the xenophobic Conservative party and go down fighting as, in spite of his most loquacious efforts, the pro-remain camp wins.  His face the day after the Brexit ‘victory’ as he realized what he had helped to do was indeed a picture of oh-god-what-have-I-done-ness. 

To be fair to me, I am just trying to find the source of a nagging discomfort, not destroy the financial, cultural and political future of a country, so writing things down can be seen as something helpful and innocent rather than, well, how should one describe Boris’s asserted actions?

Accepting for the moment that the story of the two versions is true, rather than an elegant fabrication, it is obviously significant that Boris would be influenced by his own literary style rather than content.  After all, the most obvious way of helping yourself come to a decision is to list elements of an argument for and against rather than write them out as a polished essay.  For a reasoned approach, you need to strip away excrescence and get to simple, fundamental points.  That is the sort of basic ‘summary’ approach that used to be taught in the early years of secondary education to allow the discriminating reader and writer to get to the nub of the argument.

Following my own advice, I made a stark list of those elements that I am finding negative and then read them through while, of course, sipping my post-swim cup of tea in the sun. 

They made sobering reading. 

The points that I made were not so much disasters as ‘slants’, more of a way of seeing than actual negative fact.  Many of my grumbles were subjective assessments rather than facts, and my judgements were relative rather than absolute.  And trivial.   Lots of the points that I made I hesitate to share as their sheer irrelevance to personal happiness would be too stark to tolerate.  I will illustrate the sheer unfairness of the points that I made to justify my feelings by citing just one: the non-arrival of a yet to be published book.  Once you read something like this, in black and white, then the absurdity of the thing strikes you – or more precisely, me!

Some of the things that I noted can be dealt with by more efficient use of my time, though I also have to admit that some of them will only be dealt with by a radical change in my character – and that ain’t going to happen any time soon!  But I have shown myself that by the simple act of writing niggles down their essential triviality can be emphasised.  In this case and at this time. 

Let’s face it, I can easily imagine an approach where writing things down will starkly illustrate the real horror of a situation rather than contain it.  One only has to think of Brexit, or the continuing idiocy of 45 to imagine a rather different list of points that, having been read through would leave you even more depressed than when you started writing!  This however is not the case with me.  At the moment.

And having written this, I feel better.  The sun is still shining and we are about to go out to lunch.  And in spite of the political programme that is playing on the television at the moment showing smiling faces of corrupt politicians escaping the condemnation that they richly deserve, and the graphs showing just how unjust the distribution of wealth is in this country, I prefer to concentrate more on the jolly ballet music that is playing through my headphones. 

It may be escapism and my writing may be deflection, but it is getting a smile back on my face.

The Great Stink

We have a great beach - it may not be very wide, but it is certainly long.  The entire population of Barcelona can easily fit on it, and on many sunny Sundays in summer I think it probably does!  The currents in the sea generally bring people in to the shore rather than drag them out to their deaths; the water is fairly shallow until you get out a reasonable distance; we have restaurants, bars and chiringuitos, and, above all we have sun.  A perfect little seaside town with all the facilities that you would expect.  Perfect.

Except for the smell.  One redolent of drains and not the sort of ambience in which the consumption of anything (including sunshine and sea bathing) is encouraged.

The smell reminded me of something that Cousteau said in the 60s, about the Med being already dead because of the amount of waste that the Med countries emptied into the waters.  He was wrong of course, but not for lack of unscrupulous countries trying to prove him right by treating (in whatever verb tense you would like to consider) the Med as a handy sewer.

What has caused our noxious effluvium?  Construction.  It turns out that one building site (and believe you me, we have many) has punctured or ruptured or simply buggered up one drain with the result that waste has flowed through storm water channels through the beach to the sea.  Television last night showed depressing black-rivers-of-death like pictures of filth flowing into our sand heavy waters.  To add to the drama of the situation, red warning flags were flown on the beach and lifeguards were patrolling urging people not to bathe.  We were also told that thing would be back to normal in a day.  Which is today.  And the smell, through reduced, is still there.

For any place this would not be good news, for a place that makes the bulk of its income from a family-safe tourist destination it is little short of disaster.  Having said that, on my bike journey back from the pool after my swim that takes me along the Paseo of the beach, I saw that, for a Tuesday the beach was filling up nicely and that there were quite a few people in the water.  And not dissolving!

To be fair, our town takes such things seriously and when something happens to threaten the reputation of the resort, they do something about it.  I will be interested to see the colour of the flags when we go out for lunch; whether I believe them or not, however, is quite another story.

In Castelldefels you are much more likely to be injured by the quality of driving and parking, than you are by anything to do with the beach and the water.  As a resident I have to keep telling myself that many of the drivers are coming here for the first time and looking for a parking space and, clearly, not thinking about other road users.  Pedestrian visitors usually park next to the beach on a long car park that is separated from the beach by the main beach road.  There are numerous zebra crossings linking the parking area with the paseo and beach, but pedestrians are not inclined to walk more than a few meters for a safe crossing and are much more likely to chance their arm (and all other part of their anatomy) by blithely walking across the road as through it was one extended crossing.  I have noticed in Spain that there is an assumption that there is an extensive zone around the actual painted crossing which has exactly the same rights in pedestrians’ minds as the crossing itself.  Remember, I tell myself, these people are visitors and the sight of the sea turns them into vulnerable lemmings.  And I further remind myself that having right on your side is insufficient comfort for injury.  So give them leeway and believe in the myth of the extra crossing zone.  I may tell myself all these reasonable things, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce my irritation by the continued unreasonable conduct of some of our visitors.  Most of our visitors.  No, that’s unfair.  Probably.

Parking, however, is in another universe of selfishness.  I use the Tesco Scale of Unreasonable Parking to guide my responses.  It never fails to horrify me to see just how far selfish parkers will go in Tesco car parks rather than walk a couple of steps and be legal.  Parking without cards in disabled spaces is the norm; double yellow lines are routinely ignored; parking across space lines, single people parking in family spaces, parking on crossings, double parking - I’ve seen all of them, and I’ve also seen just how near a legal empty space can be for these people.  Apart from some small Tesco’s in London with little car parking space, I have never been to a large Tesco where the car park was full.  Never.  So, I thought that I was prepared for anything.

Castelldefels is the only place in the world where I have seen a driver reversing on a small roundabout!  Now that is what I call spectacular idiocy!  There may be elements of inconsideration in the action too, but generally, given what a roundabout actually is, the no-brainer stupidity of the action is more of a characteristic!  But, leave that almost glorious piece of anti-driving aside, how do our visitors park in Castelldefels?

Appallingly.  Selfishly.  Dangerously.  Some of their decisions are aided and abetted by the way that our streets are organized.  It is a general truth that many Spanish towns developed before the widespread adoption of the motorcar.  Our streets are too narrow and curbside parking makes them perilous.  In Cardiff the go-to solution for any traffic problem is to seed the roads with traffic lights, in Castelldefels the solution is zebra crossings.  Except, of course, the solution is one that comes with ready-made problems.

I do not know the regulations for the position of zebra crossings in Castelldefels, and I am certain that if road designers know them they forget them as soon as they look at a road plan.  There is one large roundabout in the centre of the town where, each time I go around it, I tell myself that this time I will finally count the number of crossings that it spawns, but by the time that I finally get there after so may stop starts and sudden sallies by suicidally inclined pedestrians that I have inevitably forgotten the number by the time I emerge from the circular hell.

Although Toni tells me that it is illegal and not in the Spanish version of the highway code, cars park right up to zebra crossings and sometimes on them!  Cars park on corners, on pavements, on chevroned areas, on lines of any colour.  They park within inches of other parked cars - which make one wonder how they got in.  Well, no it doesn’t: I have watched Spanish drivers ‘parking by touch’ on more than one (or indeed twenty) occasions.  Your average Spanish driver may be better than I am at reverse parking into a small space, but not that much better.  Space is at a premium this close to the sea, so where you can find it you use it, and the hell with consideration!

During the week, even in summer, things are sort-of manageable, but during the weekends, and especially holiday weekends they are unimaginable.  Finding a parking space becomes the only moral imperative in driving, and all road rules are thrown out of the window as lane crossing and indication becomes something of winter, not a luxury that can be allowed in the height of summer!

“Zen and the Art of Spanish Driving” would be an interesting book to read, though I am not sure under which section it would be kept: Philosophy? Religion? Fiction? Self-defence? Fantasy? Dystopia? Wish-fulfilment? Humour? Adventure?  I am half inclined to type it into Google just to see if it exists!

My Chinese phablet is under repair.  Or possibly not.  It may be that repairing it goes beyond a necessary expense and becomes a ‘junk-it’ alternative.  The problem is that I keep my mobile phone in my short’s pocket and the phablet being oversize meant that I managed to bend the body slightly.  However slightly it was it has played merry hell with the charging of the bloody thing.  I have had to fall back on my Russian alternative.

Yota phone is a make that no one apart from myself seems to have heard of.  It was discovered by Toni who informed me that a phone existed that had two faces: one an ordinary mobile phone screen, and the other on the back something like a black and white Kindle screen.  I did not believe that such a thing existed, but now I have had three of them (1 stolen; 1 dunked in the swimming pool; 1 bought cheaply as a reserve and now in full use) and can recommend them fully but, as is noted in the parenthesis, they are not waterproof!

It may be that the repair to my phablet is affordable, in which case I will return to the phone and enjoy the large screen.  If it is not then I will either stick with my Yota phone or go for something more substantial and waterproof.  I rather like the idea of getting a new phone, but Toni will be disapproving of such warrantless expense.  I have found a phone called the Blackview BV8000 Pro, where even the product name seems defiantly rugged.  I must admit that I am tempted and the price is not too ridiculous.  As opposed, for example to the new proposed Samsung 8 Note.

I was one of the hapless potential owners of the ill-famed Note 7, that the entire technology world remembers as The Phone That Exploded, or at least burst into flame.  I pre-ordered one of these phones and, after a long waiting period was finally told (by the World Press) that Samsung had had to initiate a worldwide recall.  Which was a little harsh, as I didn’t even managed to get my hands on one for even the briefest moment of time.

Samsung have announced that they are going to refurbish some of the millions of recalled phones (with a non exploding battery) and sell them at a yet-to-be-announced price.  I am strangely drawn to this, especially as the new and improved Note 8 is probably going to be the first (non-bling) production mobile phone to break the four figure price barrier: certainly in dollars and perhaps in Euros as well!  Even I draw the line somewhere in my lust for cutting edge tech.  Though the suggested appearance of the thing does make it look lovely.  And it is waterproof - or however such a term is subscribed, qualified and defined in relation to expensive gadgets and liquids.

I will be strong.  I can resist.  But, as always, Oscar is right, everything but temptation.

I Don't Believe It! Again

The prime function of a school is to separate children from human beings.  As any teacher will tell you, the inclusion of children in the designation of ‘human’ is as absurd as linking Conservatism with “strong and stable” government.  During the greater part of the year, with the exception of those pernicious periods when children are allowed, nay encouraged, to flaunt their otherness in public manifestations at Christmas and Easter, we denizens of the human world are able to live reasoned and reasonable lives.  It is the summer that is the most trying part of the year.  In Britain the so-called summer is mercifully confined to a few bright days, while the rest of this season is usually the sort of rain-sodden dullness that encourages children to stay indoors under the supervision of their keepers and plug themselves in to various electronic devices.

Spain is different.  As various people have pointed out: Spain and Britain both have seasons, but it is only in Britain that all four of them can (and do) occur on the same day.  You could say that summer in Spain extends from May to October - obviously there are rainy and dull days, but it is rare indeed that a whole day passes during these months without the sun at least showing itself for a brief moment.  Eating outside, sunbathing, visiting the beach or just promenading are all actions that our sunny months encourage.  Unfortunately, for two of the key months of July and August (with almost two weeks of June) these are the same months of schools failing in their duty of containing the childish hordes from being unleashed on the human population.  Swarming, as my grandmother would say, like “black pats” (on reflection I think that I will try and ignore the double racism suggested by that oft heard dismissal) children spill onto the streets, the beaches, the shops and my leisure centre.

That last one is interesting.  As a child of two teacher parents, holidays were never the problem that most of the non-teacher-parent population must have.  My childhood holidays coincided with my parents’ holidays.  The only disruption that I can remember was when I made the transition from Primary to Secondary school, when one holiday was slightly different.  That problem was solved by accompanying my father to his school and bouncing for most of the day on a trampet!  [I note, by the way, that the word ‘trampet’ has been underlined by Word, but I have never referred to the small angled mini-trampoline used by those foolish enough to vault over a horse as anything else.  Have I been wrong for the last fifty plus years of my life?  You will also note that I have been too lazy to look it up on line - though, oddly enough I did make the effort to look it up in my massive Encarta dictionary!  And it wasn’t there.]  We also lived with my paternal grandparents when I was younger and so there were babysitters at hand.  Upstairs.  So, it is perhaps a little disingenuous of me to harrumph about how some children are treated during the long holidays.  But it will not stop me.

As soon as the holidays (any holidays) start my local leisure centre springs into action with Summer School or Easter School or Holiday School.  As far as I can see, these estimable organized activities exist for one (or perhaps two) reasons.  The first and most obvious is that of commercial necessity: the leisure centre makes money out of the invading armies of kids that are contained by activity after activity to fill the day.  The second is, of course, to get rid of the kids.  The Spanish are a tactile people and leaving your child in the leisure centre is accompanied by much hugging and kissing and fond waving of goodbyes.  But I have seen the faces of the parents as they finally turn from their progeny and walk (or skip) towards their cars.  That look of delighted relief is one that I recognize.  And, another thing, I have seen parents leave their children at times when it would be difficult to imagine the workplace missing them.  In other words, I think that parents go back to something other than work when they leave their kids in the centre.  Those smiles are not of delighted expectation of what their profession might offer to fill the rest of their day!

And this is where things get difficult.  Not for them (parents and kids) but for me.  I go to the leisure centre from my swim each day.  I swim a metric mile.  I feel smug and exercised.  But now that schools have abrogated their incarceration duties their escaped inmates impinge on my life.  Because of the swarms of parents hurling their kids with shrieks of delight towards the welcoming doors of the swimming pool my swimming has become cabined, cribbed and confined - to quote a poet of my acquaintance.  Probably wrongly.

There are five lanes in our 25m pool and nowa-summer-days by 9.30 am four of the lanes are given over to the young pretenders to leisure time.  This morning, for example, there were three of us in a single lane.

Two decent swimmers in a single lane is easy, as it is quite possible to swim expansively and safely in parallel.  A third person necessitates swimming in a clockwise or anti-clockwise way.  This is fine if all three swimmers are evenly matched, but if one swimmer is substantially faster than the other two there are problems.  None of which are insurmountable with the application of Basic Lane Discipline.  BLD is the thing that keeps chaos at bay, but it is a fragile concept and swimming (just like driving) does not generally bring out the best in people - especially if they are, or consider themselves to be, Serious Swimmers.

Suffice to say that, of the three of us, I was the slowest (and indeed the oldest, now I come to think of it) swimmer.  There was a lady swimmer who was punctilious in her adoption of BLD and was content to swim in circles and adapt her swimming to compensate for speed differences, e.g. using a breaststroke or a backstroke from time to time rather than her speedy crawl.  There was however, a gentleman swimmer.  With a goatee beard. 

I have an unreasoning prejudice against this hairy excrescence and was therefore prepared to think the worst of my fellow lane sharer.  And his actions more than justified my concern.  For him, BLD was as a foreign language and he committed the signal swimming crime of overtaking at a crowded end.  Let me explain.  If you are a powerful swimmer and you are stuck in a lane with two slower plodders then BLD dictates that you can overtake a slower swimmer as long as you can get in front of your target swimmer without impeding the third swimmer.  There is also another approach that involves judging things nicely and then reversing course mid length into open space.  This swimmer did neither but swam parallel with another swimmer so that he could push off from the side first and thereby bumping in to the swimmer finishing his (yes, reader, ‘twas I) length.  Very bad form.

My mood was not improved by noticing that one swimmer from the aquacize class was given a created restricted lane to himself!  Not happy - in spite of the fact that I have had exactly the same thing done for me on some occasions.  It wasn’t on this occasion and therefore I felt aggrieved!  And on either side of us, occupying four lanes (or rather three and a half allowing for the restricted lane) the children continued to bray and howl and generally gloat in their exuberant there-ness.

And another thing.

We have a communal pool for the sixteen or so houses that form our little community.  Access to this private pool is via a garden door for about half of us, and a lockable gate from the street for the rest.  Imagine my disquiet on my return from the pool to find the silence of the afternoon - usually only broken by the sound of the sea and the various building work which seems to go on for ever accompanied as always by the howling banshees of the electric leaf blowers - augmented by the shouting of Strange Children.  These were leaping in and out of the pool with their towels and then whupping the wet towels on the pool surround to produce a deep, resonant and supremely irritating sound.  Then these imps rushed towards the gate that they found locked and proceeded to scramble over it.  One boy (they were all boys) indeed re-scrambled over the gate to have one last plunge and thwack before he left!

I must admit to my shame that the use of superglue and broken glass did flit into my mind before the word ‘curmudgeonly’ suggested itself to cover everything that I was thinking, and indeed everything that I have written.

But there is a serious point (ish) to this musing.  Since retirement I have been delighted at the spaciousness that having the whole of a day to do something allows.  No longer trying to get things done in a break-time or during lunchtime, or after 4 pm.  I can go (and park) easily and if something needs more time for it to be completed, then more time I have.  And it’s the empty shops, especially supermarkets that are the delights.  I sometimes forget and get to a shop at 5pm (when most shops re-open after the afternoon closure) and am horrified at the number or children-clutching parents who get in my way!

When I was with my parents, we rarely went anywhere on Bank Holidays, my parents rightly suggesting that the roads would be clogged and places crowded and, anyway, we had other holiday days to use and we shouldn’t make things even worse by adding ourselves when we had other opportunities.  I well remember, for reasons that I forget, going to Weston-Super-Mare on a bank holiday and being scarred by the whole experience.  I am well prepared to admit that I am hopelessly prejudiced against that ‘seaside’ (sic.) resort, and, to be fair, Burnham-on-sea on a wet Sunday was an even worse experience, but I was not prepared for the horrific tackiness and unpleasantness that Weston offered.  And the people, my dear!  And didn’t the odious ex-Chairman of the Conservative party and hack, Archer take his title (has he still got it?) from the bloody place.  ‘Nuff said.

I will now go out on to the terrace and take the sun and allow the golden rays to sooth me to better thoughts!

Having a cup of tea after having a swim (even though it is to my onw special brew requirements) is hardly the most exciting thing to do, and yet simply sitting, sipping and looking have provided me with an amazing amount of raw material for use in my poetry.

     When I first went to Turkey I was armed with a sketch book.  I do not, for a moment, pretend to possess any technical artistic ability, but I doggedly sat and drew some sort of picture for every day of my three week stay.  I would love to be able to report that by the end of my time there I was producing fluent, artistic and compelling work, but I wasnt.  My drawings were just as pedestrian at the end of my holiday as they were at the beginning - but I had looked, and I mean LOOKED at things.  Sitting down in front of a mosque, monument, landscape, bottle of after sun (don't ask) or a knife and fork (when I almost forgot to do the daily drawing) made me appreciate the detail of what we usually only glance at.  It was a valuable lesson and one that I apply today.

     I know that as I take my accostomed seat and have my usual cup of tea something will be new and different from what I have seen before.  I look and, if I concentrate I see.

     To be fair, it doesn't take a highly developed form of perception to realize that with a title like "I watched a pigeon die" there is visual material that should be obvious.

     The dramatic nature of the incident also posed its own questions about guilt.  The title was anticipatory and also accusatory - though I am not sure what I could have really done about it.  I felt that I was in a sort of Christopher Isherwood mode, when he wrote "I am a camera" recording rather than acting, my writing in my little yellow notebook gives me a distance which allows inaction.  If you see what I mean.

     As you will see from the poem, there is a sort of twist.

     This was a satsifying poem to write.  Though it didn't 'write itself' the strength of the opening line encouraged a direction that guided the production.

I watched a pigeon die.

It limped, theatrical, goitered left leg,

into the sun.  Once found,

it folded, wearily, into itself,

looking, oddly, as though about to lay.

Its head, sleek in the light,

made jerky quarter turns until

it too sank in the feathered heap.

A public path was this bird’s grave:

its headstone was an open gate.

Approaching feet -

                       and what was moribund

took to uneasy wing and landed,

painfully, a few sad foot along.

A Desperate Last Flight, I thought,

and now The End Game plays.

The feet walked on, and once again

the tired bird pushed

from the ground,

                       but this time

made an arching loop,

above the fence, beyond the trees

into the open blue.

And death will be a little late this year.

At least for some.

Or just, perhaps, for one lone bird

whose flapping flight made false

my quick fatality of thought.

Though, there again,

who knows what must occur

beyond our seated sight?

As always, comments are more than welcome!