Confusion of things

 

 

From where I sit, my right hand can stretch forth and get an iPad, a Kindle, stationery, a Spanish dictionary, a rubber band ball, reading glasses, a Snow White tin of pens, pencils and markers, earphones, wipes for glasses, a magnifying glass, a Bluetooth loudspeaker, pills, a Catalan dictionary and so on.  My left hand can reach out and encompass more pens, pencils and markers, a ‘spare’ mobile phone, an internet radio, usb hub, a three-drawer trolley which is filled with even more impedimenta.

So why, I ask myself, when I needed to write down book details from an article that I was reading on the Internet, did I scribble them down with a stub of a pencil on the back of an envelope?  Within the scope of both right and left hands there is a stick-it note pad and more writing implements than I can ever need during the course of a normal day.  So why, when something is needed did I make do with the makeshift?

I have to admit that I am only slowly becoming a user of the mobile phone.  I don’t mean that in any ordinary sense, I have had a mobile phone for a long time and have changed my phones with a regularity that had brought delight into planned obsolescence hard-hearted capitalists through the years.  I also have to admit that I have rarely used the mobile phone as, well, a mobile phone. 

In the early years when the functions of the phone were really limited to making and receiving calls, I think that my possession of such a machine was more of a status symbol than anything else.  And, of course, because it was a gadget and therefore it was something that I had to possess.

Now that mobile phones do so much more than merely allow people to connect via voices, I find that I use the ‘phone’ function even less than I used to.  I read The Guardian on my phone, I read books, I use the Internet,

I play games (I am ashamed to admit that I am something of an addict of Candy Crush – it encourages that partial mindlessness that is so relaxing) and I take photos. 

The first time someone actually phoned me on my present phone (a Huawei P20 Pro) I couldn’t work out how to answer it and had to phone the person back after I managed to cut her off with all my frantic finger prodding of the screen.  My purchase of the P20 Pro (and I had to look up the name of the damn thing on the Internet to get it right, and that indicates where my prejudices lie!) was largely influenced by the fact that there were lots of lenses on the back of the case and that the camera had been developed in association with Leica – and, let’s face it, that is about as far as I am likely to get to owing a real one.  So, I bought it because it was a camera that I could read, so to speak.

But I still have the remnants of what one might call the ‘Box Brownie’ mentality where each photograph taken was using up part of the film that one had threaded (with care and difficulty) onto the spindles.  Each photograph had to be developed, each photograph was precious and expensive, its quality being linked to the fact that a photograph was part of a slow laborious process, there was nothing instant about it: buying the film, using the film, developing the film all combined to give an almost ritualistic feel to the whole rigmarole of taking a photograph.

Now digital photos are truly instant – though the physicality of what used to be the photograph has now all but disappeared: the camera is the photograph.  When was the last time that I actually printed out a photograph that I had taken?  The fact that I have to think about it (and I am still thinking about it) shows how long ago that was and what an occasion it must have been!

But I still behave as if each photograph was on film, as if each skeuomorphic[1] click (or whatever recorded sound you have playing on your phone) was the introduction of an element of cost in the production of a concrete piece of visual information.  But, nowadays, the camera is used as an aide memoire, as something to be used casually and then discarded as a visual reminder.

Which brings us back to the back of the envelope.  It didn’t occur to me to take a shot of the screen, or even a screen shot (as if I knew how to do that!) and save it for future use.  For something like book information, I needed to be the ideal of the scholar that I will never be, and scribble something down, to make it real, so that at a later date I could riffle through all my notes and marginalia and references and play at learning!

But, there is a function in all this writing: I find that things are more real when I read about them – even if I am reading what I have just written!  So, this might be taken to be a note to myself to make my life easier and remember that a digital photo, is just a free(ish) image that is just as useful, if not more so, that a fugitive scrap of paper that is in constant danger of being tidied up and lost.

As if I haven’t lost things on the computer, or on the phone.  But that is for another blog!

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[1]

It is thanks to the Open University and a unit on Greek vases that I came across the word Skeuomorphic and I wholeheartedly recommend this essay because it says something about ancient tastes and a twisted modern interpretation of what they might have been at the same time.  It is a good read: https://www.academia.edu/8587519/Skeuomorphism_in_ancient_Greece_a_cost_analysis

Is easy good?

 

There is something deeply satisfying hearing the sound of the robot Roomba electric hoover busily bumping its gentle way around the bathroom and bedrooms upstairs as I sit down drinking a cup of tea and typing.  Though not at the same time obviously.

There is a remnant of the Protestant Work Ethic in my guilty sipping that thinks that this division of labour is somehow morally corrupting. 

I know from past experience of that electronic worm screen saver that used to eat its way through the active screen on older generation computers that had been left idle, I knew that a random thingy that goes off in different directions when it hits the edge of the illuminated workspace will actually clear the screen in a far quicker time that you would have expected.  It therefore follows that a robot hoover that does (virtually) the same thing, well, it moves in the same sort of way, will clean a given area just as efficiently.  And this hoover actually has some sort of sensor that ‘notices’ dirt that it is travelling over and does a little circular dance to remove it.  So, this is an efficient and painless way to do a daily cleaning.

It’s that ‘painless’ bit that causes concern.  If it is truly “painless” – and I can hardly make a thing of having to press a single button and empty the dust trap when it is done – then where is the merit in doing it, apart from the cleanliness, of course?  The saving grace of this house is that we live on three floors, with the rooms starting on the first floor, with the ground floor being a space beneath the house to park the car, house the barbecue and also to breed mosquitos.  

Roomba cleans floors, particularly the tiled floors that we have, but what it doesn’t do is stairs.  Or should that have been ‘are’ rather than ‘is’?  Anyway, stairs have to be done in the old-fashioned way with a human holding the hoover.

A three-floor house is not the place to encourage the use of a corded vacuum cleaner and so we have a battery operated one.  This one is actually a Hoover hoover and is light and easily manoeuvrable and therefore encourages use, and a single charge is well able to cope with the quick glancing clean that I give stairs with it.  And it does take physical effort and that allows me to regard the flat floor automatic cleaning as a sort of compensation and therefore something which is acceptable.

That vague guilt feeling is what I always refer to as The TCP Effect.  TCP was the go-to liquid in my childhood that was dabbed on any cuts and grazes to make them better and to protect them from germs.  The important thing about TCP was that it stung – and therefore you knew that it was doing you good.  It also had a strong smell, that I rather liked – but that might well have been by association of a boyhood wound being treated by a concerned mother, so that the aroma became inextricably linked to maternal love.  Or indeed with paternal love, but fathers usually applied TCP in a less gentle way than mothers!  Anyway, the sting of TCP was a sign of progress, something was happening, the germs were being fought and the sting was the tangible feel of the battle.  It is a version of the “No gain without pain” philosophy, there is always a cost to be paid.

It's strange, but I don’t feel the same way about the washing machine.  I can remember my grandmother and indeed my mother using a washboard to clean some clothes!  We later had a cylindrical gas fired washing machine in which clothes looked as though they were being stewed, and I can remember a pair of jointed wooden tongs that were used to get them out.  We had a mangle that I was sometimes encouraged to use.  I was always fascinated to put towels through those rollers and see the squeezed cardboard-like material come out of the other end! 

Eventually we owned a Flatley clothes dryer.  Our first twin tub was greeted with joy, but there was still a deal of work involved washing clothes.  It was only when we moved house and we had a new (one of the first)

Hoover Keymatic machines that the word ‘automatic’ could be applied to a washing machine.  [I have just gone through the paragraph above and removed all the references to the machines being “mother’s” washing machines.  My parents had comparable jobs and, to be fair, the housework was shared, as it had to be with both parents working and a young son coming home from school for his lunch.  I think, at least in my memory, my mother did the lion’s share of the housework, but I can also remember my dad taking his part too!  So, no sexism in the possessives! #menworktoo]

The dishwasher is more debateable.  Ecologically, I am not sure that the one that I own can be justified, especially with the A+++ machines they produce nowadays that wash on a thimbleful of water or something equally remarkable.  It might be lies, but they are comforting lies that I will fully believe when it comes to the time that I need to replace my present machine.

There are some (sad) people of course, who say that hoovering is satisfying and relaxing, but that conjures up memories of the worst excesses of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my mind, and we all know where books like that didn’t lead!

Having written about this thorny ethical problem and come to few conclusions, I feel strangely happier: writing as moral analgesic. 

Works for me!

Seconds count!

I had not planned to start my day so early in the morning, but needs must when public transport fails.  On a daily basis.

 

When the job starts at 7.00 am in Cornellá, and you live in Castelldefels then public transport will simply not get you there on time and so “needs must when the devil drives” comes into operation and I have to turn into a chauffeur.   

So, washed and tooth brushed, but un-showered and unshaven I face the day in the profound dark and make my way along an overcrowded motorway full of motorists who don’t seem to take their continuing life at all seriously and positively ‘last trip’ kamikaze motorbike riders.  Luckily the horror aspect of the driving is only on the going there, the coming back is much more relaxing, especially when viewing the growing tail-backs on the other side of the road.

But, to get back to the cruel start of the day.  To get to Cornellá before 7.00 am we must leave at the latest by half past six; given the special physics of over-used motorways into big cities, it is a given that every minute after 6.30 am that you leave the house will mean, in a fairly complex, inverse ratio sort of thing, that there is an exponential chance of delay or hold up of some kind – and, of course, domestic misery!

This means that Toni’s alarm goes off at 6.00 am and he gets ready to go.  I get up a vital 10 minutes later.

Those ten minutes are a delight.  A delight out of all proportion to the actual length of six hundred seconds!I hear the alarm and so, at 6.00 am, I am awake – but then I have the delight of literally turning over and not quite resuming my slumber, but allowing the shreds of almost lost dreams to pleasurably confuse is a real pleasure. 

 

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me my body seems to know when the glorious ten minutes are up and a shake of the wrist (it is that sort of watch) my Pebble confirms that it is 6.10 and time for me to get up.

I get up willingly, but only because of those precious ten extra minutes, a sort of gift to start the day.  Although there are few who will see it that way unless they have to share my early rising!

As we were held up yesterday and Toni was a few minutes late for work (unavoidable given the accident that was in our way) we left a little earlier this morning and I returned a little earlier as well.  This meant that I was actually waiting outside the locked gate of the swimming pool for the place to open!  There seems to be an element of desperation about that, until you realize that this early start is not exactly my unforced choice!

I will say that I am getting used to the early start and am trying to make the most of the ‘extra’ hours that I have ‘gained’.  Trying.  There is a nice ambiguity in that word!

-oOo-

In our Catalan classes, we have now just about finished the first unit in our text books.  We are still firmly in the present tense, and only the first three persons (I, you, he/she/it), but we have also been introduced to a variety of verbs and tricky words that change with person and number.  It may only be a single unit, but there is a frightening amount of new information to take in and, more horrifically, apply – and we know that there is an examination at the end of the second unit.   

And that is something that I am trying hard not to think about too much.  Or even at all, on the “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” sort of thing.  I know that I need to up my game substantially if the examination, when it happens, is not to be something of a condemnation of my learning ability!

-oOo-

Something that is deflecting me from my linguistic travails has been the arrival of the Melvyn Bragg & Simon Tillotson book celebrating twenty years of In Our Time.  The book is a self-indulgent (for me) pleasure with a stimulatingly bewildering variety of subject matter that reflects the range of the programme itself.  From bird migration to The Salem Witch Trials; from The Death of Elizabeth I to Kant’s Categorical Imperative; from Zoroastrianism to Absolute Zero – each topic is compressed into seven or eight pages with illustrations with a variety of responses from the academics collected to discuss each individual concept. 

The book is very like a drug and is compulsive and thoroughly interesting, even on those topics that you might think would not be engrossing.  They all are, and I have had to limit my reading to try to stretch out the pleasure.  It’s not really working and I am already half way through.  I think that the programme has published an earlier book and I may be forced to buy a copy of that one as well to satisfy my greed!  For knowledge that is, of course.

This book is an elegant hard back volume of over 400 pages with a range of colour and black and white illustrations.  The text is generously spaced with contributors’ names in bold capitals.  I presume the unjustified lines are to give, what is a book of an unscripted live radio programme, a more informal look.

The only thing I don’t like is the dust jacket.  The look is good, a sort of restrained confident professionalism with a sans serif capital title in embossed gold that is flaking off.  It’s not the look, it is more the feel.  The paper has a slight suede-like touch that I find quite unpleasant, but other might think adds a touch of luxury.  A slight point, and not one to dissuade any future reader.  This is a book worth buying.  Buy it!

Remember the Ruskin quotation that has been a guiding light for me since I was a schoolboy: “If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.” 

For me, that is a simple (if expensive) truth!