Relief?

Today is the Day of the Catalan Examination!

After some laconically frenetic revising last night, I felt that I was reasonably confident about being able to flannel my way through yet another examination.  My piece of (memorized) writing (suitable for all examinable occasions) was almost in my personal brain RAM; my knowledge of accents was insecurely in place; my ability to translate was its usual rocky self – in other words, I was prepared!

     I eschewed my customary early morning swim in favour of some desultory looking over my notes (and completing the Guardian quick crossword, because, yes) and resentfully and fearfully girding my cycling loins (almost literally, the cross bar on my bike is set intimidatingly high) and setting forth to be examined.

     And the school was closed because of Corvid-19.  Irony, which is ever my companion in arms, strikes again!  To be fair, I am not sure whether I am relieved or annoyed.  Admittedly, I did not want to take the exam because of the almost inevitable ignominy that awaited me on the handing back of the papers; yet, on the other hand the exam is merely delayed and, frankly, I do not see myself getting stuck-in to more revision just because one of The Horsemen has gifted me a little more time.  My indolence in such things extends to encompass any temporal largesse!

     The Generalitat (the government of Catalonia) had issued statements to the effect that schools would be closed, but when I phoned my particular institution yesterday I was told that they simply didn’t really know.  Yes, they would be shut from Monday of next week, but tomorrow, who could say?  Well, say they didn’t, and it was left to me and my trusty cycle to make a fruitless journey through strangely unpopulated streets to my deserted place of education.  The silence was even more pronounced because the infants and junior school that adjoins our establishment was also closed – and believe you me, that place is never, ever silent.  Not even close to it, whatever time of the day you pass by! 

     My arrival there reminded me of the time I emerged from Westminster tube and instantly felt that something was wrong, but couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.  Then it struck me: I was looking at the Houses of Parliament in silence.  No traffic, no sound.  A moment later a policeman approached me and suggested that I return whence I came, immediately, down the steps and away.  There had been a bomb scare and the environs of parliament had been cleared.  It remains in my memory as a deeply unsettling memory, as does the memory of scuttling away down the steps and getting on the next tube out and away!

     This time there was sound and there were people, just fewer than usual.  As a Brit you sometimes get suckered by the fact that many shops open at 10.00 am and not at the more usual earlier hours of the UK.  As my class starts at 9.00 am ordinarily closed shops can look more sinister than they actually are.  And did!

     But, the important point is that my linguistic reputation gets to survive for a little longer, though I am aware that reality will catch up with me eventually!

The house next door continues to be the source of sound with roller blinds being installed and the threat of building blocks in the front garden waiting as a concrete reminder (see what I did there!) of sonic tension to come.  They have been working on the house since before Christmas and there is no end in sight!

Talking of ‘ends in sight’, I don’t know if it is tempting fate to say it, but some of the containment measures taken by governments appear to be working.  The outbreak in China might be in the process of being contained; Korea has had a drop in cases, it might be working!  Britain has been criticized as doing too little too late, but with Conservatives (especially the current toxic breed) presently in power, what can you expect?

     There has been, we have been told, no case of Covid-19 in Castelldefels, and the precautions that are currently being taken will limit our exposure.  It is a pity that the leader of the free world and the leader of the UK are both characters without integrity and scruple, but we have to work with what we have.  One can help thinking that the chant “LBJ! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today!” that haunted (rightly) the warmongering president will resurface after this crisis develops and people start looking for people to blame.  In a way Trump has forestalled this process in his shocking (for reasonable people) address to the American people when he referred to a ‘foreign virus’ and started blaming the EU, while at the same time lauding his own financial ‘policy’.  He truly is repulsive!

     In the tranquillity of my own living room, with the sun shining through the windows and the comfortingly domestic sound of the washing machine from the kitchen, it is easy to think the coronavirus crisis (should those words have capital letters?) as far away as the other plagues, rather than something on our doorsteps waiting for entry.  The measures being taken are unprecedented in my experience, and they give a weighty pause for thought.  Though, having said that, I cannot say that the crisis has changed the way I live yet: the cancelled lessons are the first ‘real’ effect.  The Liceu has a new production of Lohengrin, and with the new restrictions on large gatherings they had said that the first few performances would be cancelled, however the performance I am scheduled to attend is at the end of March, just after the ban comes to an end.  I thought that my luck was in, but an announcement yesterday informed us that all performances had been cancelled.  Museums, art galleries, theatres and sporting events have been cancelled, or games will have to be played behind closed gates.  So I am affected by the restrictions, but can continue to live in virtually normality.  It remains to be seen whether or not the present restrictions will be sufficient to contain the virus, one hopes so!

    

    Meanwhile, time gained must be put to good use.  I am now drafting out two poems: the memory poem continues to be elusive and it has been joined by a poem about wasps – well, I thought I would branch out a bit from flies!

Flight to the library!

Having flounced out of the house because of the intolerable noise of the renovations next door I made my way (by bike) to the town library – an imposing modern building with desks (and an electricity supply) for those wanting to work.

     Finding the socket was the first problem when I had found a desk heartbreakingly close to the library’s collection of books on painting.  This is usually the kiss of death for any work that I might do as the lure of the lavishly illustrated books is usually an irresistible temptation for me.  I have however found the fortitude to stay my eyes from the luxury of paint and have stuck to some sort of travail.

     Admittedly, I have not (yet) done any of the work that ostensibly brought me to the library in the first place, but work of a sort has been done.  I have written three stanzas for the memory poem and generally considered that the rest of the writing that I have done for it is woefully inadequate and simply un-poetic.  The ideas might be interesting, but the way in which I have written them is too prosaic for my taste – and it doesn’t sound right when I say the lines!

     I have, therefore decided to rest that particular effort and turn to my languishing blog.  For someone who professes to be a writer, I sometimes evince a totally reprehensible disinclination to practice my art. 

     However, when it comes to displacement activity, I am truly one of the Greats.  Hence, my fingers pattering along the keyboard of my trusty MacBook Air.  This has become the machine that I take to public places where it might be stolen, because my Dell is simply too expensive to be put into a position of possible pilferation and so stays largely unused at home.  That logic is not entirely convincing, but it will have to remain as the explanation for my actions.

     In the way that irony follows me around, no sooner had I sat down and plugged myself into the power supply and typed the first words, than a whole horrendousness of children broke into their atavistic caterwauling outside the library and a group of public street drummers started playing their instruments.  But that sound was muted through plate glass and concrete and, anyway, the sound of rhythmic beats and young humans in full yell is nothing like so debilitating as the bone reverberating sound of workmen mindlessly (to the listener) hammering a party wall that amplifies and encourages sonic augmentation.

   Well, the sounds soon stopped and I only had to contend with the incessant conversation of the librarians at reception whose conversations fill the ample open stairways in the centre of the building.  On the other hand they add a touch of humanity to a space that can sound funereal in the total absence of human talk.  And silence can be distracting too!

Now on to the reason for my being here in the first place: the looming Catalan examination.  I should leave that sentence as a sort of gateway to learning, and stop typing and get on with the hard work of forcing Catalan concepts into my antagonistically resilient brain.  So I will.  After I have been to the loo.

    Back at my machine and, if you are wondering why I have not got down to the real work that I am supposed to be doing, then I will just say that when I went to the loo, I actually left my MacBook Air (open and on) at my desk.  Unattended.  Such is one of the advantages of being in a civilized place like Castelldefels.  I merely followed the example of the gentleman at the end of our row of desks who did the same.  Perhaps I should not be saying this in my blog, it is surely an open invitation to opportunistic thieves who prowl about seeking whom they might devour.  But now, work, Catalan!

And I actually did do some vocabulary work.  I am still confused by the accents which, as I have said before, go in all directions and attach themselves to more letters than I have heretofore encountered.  Still, some letters only have the accents going in one direction, so that should make my work easier.  As long as I can remember which letters they are.  And, of course, the direction!  Well, I have two and a half days left.  Think what can be achieved!  Even by me.

     Now I am going on to the more problematic element in the exam: the writing.  We know that we have a choice of two topics: one connected to our homes and the other an email to a friend.  As you can get away with more lists in the ‘home’ option (thereby mitigating the need for over many verbs, adjectives and adverbs) I think I might give that one a go.  I have recently learned the Catalan word for ‘nightmare’ which is ‘malson’ and I am bloody determined to work that in somewhere to describe the work going on next door.

      I have to admit that I am adept at constructing pieces of writing in translation which are heavy on the use of all and any language reference books that I can get my hands on, and yet make the final piece of writing sound like a convincing attempt by an enthusiastic, if inept, learner!  It’s a sort of skill – but not one much called for.

     The trick I need for next Friday and the exam, is to have a store of key phrases that will lift my ‘listy’ vocab-heavy stodge into something a little more interesting and lively.  All I am looking for is a pass.  Just a pass.  Please.

The little rituals of life

No matter how early I make it to the pool for its opening, my little friend with his cigarette is there before me and trips off to the pool from the changing room to bag his accustomed end lane.  It is a wise choice because the last lane is rarely doubled swum so to speak.  If you are in it then the people who come after you choose one of the other lanes.  I had to make do with lane 4, a good choice this morning as I had it to myself, and I was able to pace myself against my little friend.

     MLF can swim crawl, and he swims the first length using this stroke, but his succeeding lengths are steady breaststroke – steady, but relatively slow.  My pacing him therefore is lapping him.  I set myself to lap him ten times before he leaves the pool.  When he leaves the pool, it is time for me to do my ‘endgame’: six lengths, of which the last two are, respectively, an assessment lane as to how I think I have swum, and during the last length I try and estimate my total distance.  My aim is to complete 1,500 m and it usually takes me about 40-45 minutes.  If at the end of my last six lengths I have completed my fifteen hundred (my smartwatch tells me exactly) then I do one length as quickly as I can and then a leisurely length of sedate breaststroke.  I then have a series of stretching and cool down exercises at the far end of the pool and my last length is a high stepping walk to a final series of twenty knee bends and out.

     Usually I go to the pool café when I have completed my swim, but today was one of the two days when I have an early class in Catalan.   

     Today’s lesson was taken up with the searing film of a young girl’s experience of growing up in Afghanistan as the school contribution to activity associated with the Week of the Woman.

     The film was called Osama and it produced one of those experiences that leave you feeling weak with impotent fury about how humans treat each other.  Admittedly the Taliban does not have a very positive public image and most of us feel an instinctive revulsion against the whole ethos of what the Taliban stands for.  Like Apartheid in South Africa, the Taliban is something that can be rejected with something approaching complacency as their attitudes towards women are simply totally wrong.  No excuses, wrong!  To say nothing of their attitudes to culture and expression.

     Because the subject matter of the film is so appalling and so transfixing, it is difficult to evaluate the film as a film.  There were shots of great beauty and the director was not afraid to extend some shots and consciously dwell on squalor artistically viewed – but the story of a family of women forced to dress the child as a boy to allow them to go outside after the Taliban refused to let women work and be outside of their homes without the presence of a man or boy is gripping.

     There is a meeting next week in school that I may attend which builds on the momentum from the film - but it depends on how the Catalan revision is going!  The meeting, after all, will be in Spanish – which is not in the test!

First into the pool this morning (i.e. the day after the opening paragraphs) and safely within the untouchable watery embrace of lane number 5!  And I kept it until the end of my swim: alone, inviolate!  And as a bonus, during my after-swim tea (outside, though the weather was at the limit of outsidedness) I thought of a word that I had searched for in vain last night when I was doing more work on the memory poem: validation.  And that can be used easily in phrases to lessen its awkwardness.  Each small step towards completion is gratefully accepted.

     

     Today a lunch date with Irene and the opportunity for more cups of tea and word in conversation.

         

     My revision for Catalan has taken a backward step because the set of vocabulary cards that I wrote have disappeared and I am loath to make another set.  A clear case of prevarication – and the exam is now five clear days away!  O god! O Montreal!

     And now to go upstairs and do some real Catalan work.  And hope, against hope that it will result in some sort of residence in my memory.

Swimming while Rome burns!

     

Although I am still getting up in the dark, the light is appreciably sooner in making its appearance than it has done recently.  We are at the stage where you can kid yourself that summer is just around the corner.  Though I have to admit that I sat inside the café to have my post-swim cup of tea rather than sitting on a damp chair in the cold outside, no matter than a weak sun was doing its best to spread a little cheeriness.

     I’d also forgotten my notebook, and further forgot to ask at reception for a sheet of A4 so that I could write out my fugitive thoughts before they seeped away.  I was reduced to ripping off the back cover of a real estate advertisers’ booklet to use instead.  To be fair to me, the reason that I didn’t have my trusty notebook in my pocket was because I was working on a poem last night and using my (almost) indecipherable scrawl to encourage me to work on the ideas that I had.  I’ve now started the poem twice and I am not even remotely satisfied with the direction that it is going in.  This is par for the course and I confidently expect that later today I will find a more satisfactory format to try and tease out a satisfactory structure!

     And while I am on a ‘fair to me’ jaunt, I am happy to say that I have actually done my homework for Catalan and a bit of revision too.  Our teaching this year has been somewhat fractured with an array of teachers and, while our main teacher has attempted to keep things together, there are gaps in our sacred texts where they have not been filled in.  We are now in the process of going back to horribly grammatical lacunae and pencilling in our responses.  Luckily, one of the books has the ‘answers’ in the back, so that you are able to check your answers and make suitable adjustments. 

     This is not cheating; this is just practical.  Catalan has rules, but it also has exceptions and, unless you know those exceptions then you are going to make mistakes, and, if we are on our own for some of the time, we have to get our accurate information from somewhere. 

     Some of our exercises are structured on the same principles of the maths exercises that I remember with fear and dread from my O Level torture: rule – example – another example following the rule – then, all hell breaks loose and you are on your own!  And Catalan has accents which go in all directions on any unsuspecting vowel, and it has the funny C and a double L with a floating full stop. 

     Unfortunately, our next examination will take note of where and how one adds the accents and This Time It Is Important.  So, we have been given a vocabulary list riven with accents and we will have to learn them.  Or rather I should have phrased it, “should have learned them by now” as the examination is a week tomorrow!  I have always found it amazing just how much one can cram into the last few days with fear fuelling one’s ability!  At least I hope that is still the case for me.

The house next door is being fully (and I emphasise the word ‘fully’) renovated and, for the last three months we have been subject to hundreds of thousands of hammer blows to the fabric of the house.  As we live in conjoined dwellings, a blow to a wall in one is a blow to the wall in all.  Given the number of blows that we have experienced, I cannot believe that there is a single square millimetre of the next door flat (floors, ceilings and walls) that have not been battered – and each one of those blows echoes through our house.  At times the sound has been unbearable with the vibrations having a physicality that stops thought.  And they are at it seven days a week, all day, and sometimes well into the evening.

     It is difficult to know what to do.  Renovation, when you are removing floor tiles, wall tiles, replacing the electrics, adding air con, restructuring, it all takes effort and a great deal of noise – but that is what renovation is, mess and noise.  It would have been nice if the neighbours who own the house (they are not here for the renovation, only the workmen are there) had had the common courtesy to let us know that our lives were going to be a daily misery for months before they put the first hammer to the first wall.  But that didn’t happen.  So there.

     Given the amount of noise and the dislocation that it provokes, I had occasion to look up the word for ‘nightmare’ in Spanish so that I could throw it into conversation to explain how we have felt about the sheer noise.  The Spanish word for ‘nightmare’ is pesadilla (pes-ah-dee-ah) while the Catalan word for it is malson.  I don’t know which one I prefer.  I do like the ‘mal’ part of the Catalan, but the workers and the neighbours speak Spanish not Catalan so malson will be lost on them.  Oh, and by the way don’t be taken in by the seemingly effortless transition between the two languages; it’s all theoretical not ingrained!

     I am praying that the major construction work is over and that the most that we will be subject to in the coming months is the altogether quieter application of paint on plaster!  Though, by that time the family will be in residence and we will have to see how they behave.  We got used to have people free dwellings on either side of us, so anything is going to be more negative than that.  And then in the summer the neighbours on the other side of us return for the holiday period.  So it goes.

Coronavirus in Spain appears to be taking a stronger hold.  Catalonia appears to have the second greatest concentration of cases in Spain, but the total numbers are still relatively small, but there is always a possibility of an exponential increase.  More and more news of prohibitions is getting on to the television.  Nothing has much of an effect on us yet, but the measures taken in Italy are an indication of what can happen in a very short period of time, and certainly the constantly repeated information that we are getting via the media seems to be preparing us for a real disruption to our normal way of life.

     The sun has reappeared, the wind has dropped and all is momentarily well with the world!