Not quite my scene

Our evening meal was taken outside a bar in the centre of town just by the railway station.  Considering its central position, as Laura noted, it was airy and tranquil, with the pots of sturdy greenery giving an illusion of a stunted dell.  Perhaps Laura’s comment was a hostage to fortune as almost immediately a deranged looking man staggering along the street with a plastic beaker full of what looked like liquid mud, lurched up to the entrance of the bar and asked the Chinese waiter if he could have a fill up of water.

The good-natured waiter complied with the request and the man went on his way muttering to himself and spilling quantities of his evil looking concoction and lurched his way into the open square space in front of the station.

Then the dogs started barking.  And went on barking.  And then there were sounds of an altercation with raised voices above the threnody of yelps.

Like the aristos in ‘Dr Zhivago’ looking out at the protesters in the snow from their warm and secure privileged position behind falsely secure windows, we, in our leafy bower watched developments, while I sipped my end of meal cup of tea.

Sirens heralded the arrival of the first police car and as the ‘trouble’ veered towards the pedestrian underpass through to the station car

parks someone shouted out to the emerging policemen, “He’s got a knife.”  From behind the safety of a couple of pot plants, we felt the thrill of proximity to danger and were determined to make our post-prandial beverages last the distance!

More police cars arrived, their flashing lights giving not only a suitably lurid setting for the excitement, but also marking a similarity to the ‘festa major’ fair that had been established at the far end of the car park - I do like an element of the serendipitous in my evenings out!

An ambulance then arrived, shortly followed by a second.  And we settled in for a suitably gory finale to the evening’s entertainment.

As we were finishing our meal it had the temerity to start raining, not convincingly admittedly, but still water falling from on high in August!

This soon stopped, as indeed did the drama as, one by one the police cars and ambulances drove off with nary a corpse or villain in sight.

The rest of the family were frankly sceptical about my explanation of the whole event being part of a street happening as part of the ‘festa major’ of our town – though Toni’s sister did applaud me politely at the end of the little drama and congratulate me (because surely I had something to do with it?) for finding a way to pass the time to the next event on the horizon.

This was a free concert.   

Now I have been to a totally memorable free concert next to the beach here in Castelldefels that featured the student orchestra of the University of Southampton playing a spirited performance of Sibelius’s second symphony, this concert, however, was not like that.

The entertainment, that had started by the time we got there, was of a Catalan group who sang, very loudly, in Catalan.  There were no seats.  But I soon discovered a fringe group of the elderly and infirm and the opportunistic who had found a limited number of metal chairs from somewhere.  I soon found the somewhere and Carmen and I were soon part of the group.

The disadvantage of our position (seated, with the rest of the audience standing) did mean that our view was, to put it mildly, limited.  But the very professional light show that accompanied the singing, together with a liberal amount of stage smoke, did ensure that the lighting effects were clearly visible ell beyond the confines of the stage.

I did attempt to take some photographs, where my mobile phone (disconcertingly) recognized that I was taking pictures of a ‘musical event’!  How did it know?  [I really wanted to use an interrobang at the end of the last sentence, but I don’t know how to print one.]  The end results were patchy, but taking pictures at night at x5 zoom on a handheld phone, I am not sure what I expected to get!

A long (for me) walk back to the car, bidding ‘bye’ to our second set of visitors and bed.  I slept as though drugged and snoozed more on the beach this morning!

It’s a hard old life, but someone has to live it!

Tomorrow Barcelona, and the start of my serious research in the library of MNAC to find out more, much more about the life and times of Adam Elsheimer.

Questing continues!

Eating is difficult

Real August weather (he wrote bitterly): warm to hot, muggy, overcast, but in the tradition of off-days in Catalonia, brightly dull.  Were this Britain, I would write off the day – but Catalonia isn’t and therefore I expect better things weather-wise later.  Please.

Meanwhile there is the prospect of lunch.  And, more importantly, the new Thai restaurant in town.  Catalonia is not noted for the quality of local Indian or Asian restaurants.  The problem is that people here are not given to spicy foods.  Yes, there are types of local cold sausage that are piquant, but nothing like the solid fire of an after-drinking ‘Indian’ in any typical British late-night restaurant.  I am still trying process Toni’s sister saying that her first British Indian meal in Rumney in Cardiff was too hot for her – and she was attempting to eat a chicken korma!  With that in mind, it is hardly surprising that the blander ‘commercial’ Chinese food found in virtually any moderately priced Chinese restaurant is much more acceptable to the Catalan palate.

I have checked out the new restaurant and there is no indication that they have a menu del dia.  The a la carte offerings look to be quite expensive for this area and I am not prepared to pay evening meal prices for a light lunch, but it is worth trying to find somewhere that can give me an ironic ‘taste of Britain’!

As it is the height of summer many menus offer the cold soup of salmorejo.  This is a very simple soup to make, but its very simplicity means that each person’s take on it is distinctively different.  It is usually very thick and is a different colour from the more recognizable cold soup of gazpacho.  Salmorejo usually has cold chopped egg mixed with bits of Spanish ham as an (essential) garnish and is delicious.  Here is a recipe to try!

Ingredients

Ingredients for 4 people: 1 kg tomatoes, 1 clove of garlic, 200 g bread (preferably a day old), 100 g extra virgin olive oil, 10 g salt. Optional: egg and ham.

Method

Wash the tomatoes, blend them and strain them to remove the skin and seeds. Add the bread (before this, leave to soak in water or in the blended tomatoes), extra virgin olive oil, garlic and salt, and blend again.

Presentation

Serve in individual bowls and garnish with chopped hard-boiled egg and bits of ham.

Perhaps the greatest culinary news for me this month occurred in Aldi.  Our local store has undergone a refit to accommodate an in-house bakery and a reorganization of the aisles.  Considering the way in which retail management has now become one of the dark sciences I don’t know whether the creation of bottlenecks at various points in the store, together with the narrowing of some of the aisles to make the passing of shopping trollies difficult is engineering or incompetence, but I am prepared to overlook those because I have discovered that Aldi is selling Taramosalata and Tzatziki in little plastic tubs.

I have tried, in a desultory way through the years, to find Taramosalata in Castelldefels and did indeed find it (or something like it) in a so-called Greek restaurant – though they looked at me blankly when I called they called the ‘salsa rosa’ Taramosalata.  The taste was near enough for me to kid myself that if not back in Greece on the beach in Mykonos, I was at least back in Wales where it was easy enough to get!  After a few visits to the restaurant, the staff there began to deny that they had ever had the stuff and my weary search continued.

In the way of the taste of Catalonia, humus is easy enough to get – in my view the least tasty of the trinity of Taramosalata, Tzanziki and Humus – because it is the blandest of the three.  Admittedly you can now get a piquant version which raises the taste level by a notch or two, but by itself, it is insufficient.  At least for me.

I am tempering my delight in finding these delicacies by my belief that with Aldi nothing lasts.  Buy it when you see it because tomorrow it will be gone is a commercial necessity with the discount stores.

I certainly did my bit when humus was introduced by buying quantities of it to try and ensure that it became a staple.  And I am now doing the same with the neophyte tara and tzanziki.  I am relying on the fact that there are substantial numbers of my fellow countryfolk in this area to make their retention a retail fact.

Not (as Toni continually reminds me) that I should be eating any of the above.  The fat and salt content is way beyond my limits, but I have convinced myself that the psychological satisfaction I can get from their consumption outweighs (a moot word) the deleterious effects on my physical health.

Talking of which I am steadily working my half-pill-a-day (except for Sundays when it is three-quarters) way to my next Control on the 21^st.  If my results are within the limits then the next Control could be in Castelldefels rather than in a more distant hospital.  It will be cheaper (you have to pay for parking in the hospital), quicker because I can use my bike for the short cycle of my health centre, and a damn sight less wearing.  The rat poison that I am taking is supposed to ‘thin’ my blood making coagulation less effective – this means that the clot in my right leg will thus be gradually dissipated and things will be well!

The key to my continued health is in getting the thinning component in my blood to register between 2 and 3, that is, my blood is between two and three times less likely to coagulate than normal.  This sounds dramatic (and I hope it is for the thrombosis in my right leg) but has little effect on normal life.  The advice from my doctor was, “Don’t fall over.  Don’t cut yourself!  Don’t run for the bus!”

Before you think that I have become the living incarnation of the Tsarevich looking for a modern-day Rasputin, my condition is nothing like as dramatic and I have indeed cut myself (accidentally) and did not bleed to death!  Or indeed, in my view, bleed any more dramatically than normal.  After all, I tell myself, they do prick me for a spot of blood for my Control and that in itself must tell you something!

So, as part of my regimen I am now off for my metric-mile swim.  On my bike.  Even though my bike is electric and has five levels of motor support for my pedalling, the battery level is very low and (horror of horrors!) I might actually have to rely purely on pedal power to get me to the pool.  As we are on the coastal plain, I do not worry too much, but the bridge over the motorway is officially classed as a hill in my book and is an obstacle to be overcome.

But, at my father was fond of repeating: “If it is easier to walk with the bike then pedal, then walk.”  It took me a long time to work out that the advice was not purely for the bike, but was more generally a view of life.  Making pointless effort because of peer pressure or how something looked was, well, pointless.  It links with Occom’s Razor and gives the sort of obvious direction that we frail humans are often too loath to take.

Which, philosophical musing aside, will get me to the pool somehow.  1 ,500 meters here I come!

Well, the swim took place, but the restaurant was a washout.  It turns out that the restaurant has suspended the menu del dia for the month of August.  So, we looked elsewhere for sustenance.  Unfortunately, we settled on an establishment that provided us with a sub-standard set of tapas.  Not a place to go back to.  But I am too lazy to find the receipt to give a name to the guilty.  Perhaps I can edit it in later.

A stint on the beach after Irene left and the threat of a concert at eleven thirty at night of non-classical music will bring an eventful day to an end.

Roll on tomorrow.

Playing The Game

 

The fact that I am tapping the keys to my laptop early in the morning is a tribute to my determination to lay off my compulsive reading of The Guardian as soon as I had eaten my muesli.  The unrelentingly awful news contained in its pages, that seems to bring to mind the worst excesses of the 1930s, and the feeling that I could do nothing about what was happening, was certainly beginning to get me down.

I now give the Guardian headlines a rapid scan on my phone and do the quick crossword and then leave the gruesome details for later in the day.  I still listen to the Today programme on Radio 4 - there are limits about how far I am prepared to go to set myself free from negativity – but there is something more transitory about hearing the news rather than reading it, and that makes it easier to take.  At least for me.

There is always the problem of 45.  I, like so many others, have never (and will never) come to terms with the reality of the present POTUS.  You see, try as I might I cannot get the news out of my mind, no matter how early in the morning I get up!

I have been struggling to find an image to sum up my understanding of how characters like 45 and the ex-third-rate Foreign Secretary actually see the world.  I know that both of them are incapable of seeing anything without the opaque filter of their own egos, but I do wonder about characterising their views of the political reality around them.

I suppose the easiest way for me to consider them and their activity is to find a game that can act as a metaphor for their respective approaches.

To start with 45.  I think that he sees the world as a game of Jenga, but his concept of the rules is not to see how many pieces he can pull out without destroying the construction, but rather to find the piece that will bring the whole structure down to ruin – and then reveal that he actually owns a much better, gold plated, Trump-stamped version of the game that will make everyone (i.e. himself) much better off.  And, after all, it’s only a game – and a game that lacks the seriousness of, for example, golf.

Johnson, (I refuse to call him by his Christian name because that gives a faux chumminess to his selfish egotism) is the leading instigator of coulrophobia in British life.  Dangling from a zip line while waving a toy Union Flag, tousling his carefully unruly hair, roguishly spouting Latin to liven up his calculated throwaway phrases, he assiduously works to polish his upper-class-twit-of-the-people image to mask his embarrassingly naked ambition.

His game is a more sophisticated one than 45’s, it’s the game of tea leaves.  You wait until the dregs are left in the cup, swirl them around and invert the cup then gaze at the pattern that is left and interpret it as a sign of the future.  Johnson is a master of pareidolia, apophenia, patternicity and agenticity – all of those are words that define the ability to perceive patterns where none, perhaps, exist.  Johnson wittingly or unwittingly (both work for him) situations and then he defines the resultant chaos through the refining lens of his own ego.

And, of course, Johnson has perfected the “delete all and insert” approach to life.  The term comes from my experience in General Body meetings in university where in student debates someone would propose an amendment of the “delete all and insert” type which converted the original motion into its opposite!  Johnson is very good at that because he lacks historical perspective – at least as far as his own ethical narrative is concerned.  So, to play his game, all you have to do if the last set of tea leaves were not satisfactory is drink another cup of tea and get a new set.

 Johnson is a ‘crisis manager’ not, in any sense that he is able to calm the situation or even manage it competently, no, his type of ‘crisis manager’ is the type that makes the most of a self-made crisis to advance his career.

Johnson is working to emulate his role model, 45, so that he can walk down Oxford Street and shoot someone and get away with it.  Given the way that he is regarded by the so-called base of the Lower Than Vermin Party, Oxford Street might be a no-no, but the High Street in one of the more rural shire villages might be a possibility.

It is now time for my swim where I can wash away the import of the previous thoughts, at least for an hour or so.

And then back to my work on Elsheimer, who is proving to be a much more elusive character for my research than I would have thought possible for a painter who is, undoubtedly, famous.  But that makes it all the more interesting and I have ordered books!

When 45 and Johnson have been consigned to the ignoble waste heap of grotesques, the paintings of Elsheimer will still, in their jewel-like intensity, be providing delight.  And that is an article of faith that I keep hold of whenever I listen to the news!