Tracking exercise makes it real!

 New Lockdown, Third Week, Sunday

 

 

 

 

Even colder this morning, though still stubbornly bright and sunny.  For the first time this year I could have done with something more substantial than sandals on my feet – but I will persevere.  Last year I wore sandals throughout the year and I will attempt to do the same this year too!

     On the exercise front, tomorrow is the first day for weeks that I will be able to go to the local (indoor) pool to do my customary metric mile.  That means that I will be getting up at 6.15 to be ready for the first swim at 7 am.  In spite of the weeks of enforced lie-ins that I have been able to enjoy, I haven’t.  Enjoyed them that is.  My internal clock is set for an early rise and my staying in bed seems forced and unnatural.  That is not to say that I get up that early with a merry whistle and a song in my heart – but I do feel better for it.  Eventually.

     Getting up that early does mean that I set off on my bike in the dark to get to the pool.  I always think that gives an extra bonus point on the “if it’s more difficult it must be doing you good” principle, and you do feel a certain smugness at wobbling your way along a generally deserted road with only a single beam to light to guide you through the darkness.

     It will be a relief to get back (literally) into the swim of things.  And, I think if my reading of the new regulations is correct, the café of the pool will be open for me to take my cup of tea at the end of my swim and just before my bike ride.  That little part of ‘normality’ is enough to make me somewhat satisfied.

     Talking of normal and new normal, the central government has been setting out their plans for the mass inoculation of the population.  Just talking about plans like this is encouraging, it gives the impression that we are now on some sort of roller coaster of administrative functionality where everything will just slip into place and everything will be hunky-dory by the Spring of next year – or that might be just one of the ‘saving lies’ that I tell myself to keep myself sane.  Hard to tell if it’s working!

 

 

 

 

One of the problems that face the modern technologically aware person is what watch face to have on your smartwatch.  Do you stick with conventionality and get something which looks like a digital rendering of an expensive watch face, sometimes with the logo of an expensive watch worked into the design?  Or do you go with the technology and have some all-colour over-informative face where the mere time is almost an extraneous detail in a wealth of numbers, colours, bar charts and moving bits?

     In early iterations of my present watch, a Fitbit, or possible Amazfit GR2, or something – the choice of faces was severely limited.  Yes, there was an option to customize the different elements that made up the face, but that was for the more advanced users who were not put off at the first signs of defeat.  I settled for a choice of the few designs that were built-in to the watch itself.  All you had to do was select, not create.

     You soon learned that what looked good in the app looked very different when it was portrayed by the limited number of pixels of your watch face.  Vibrant colours faded to insignificant pastels, and everything is so small!  With restrictions you soon found that even though there might be a dozen watch faces to choose, most were inadequate in some way or plain ugly.

     I tried to list what I wanted on a watch face apart from the time (and I had a series of ‘wants’ for the way that the time was displayed) and the essentials I decided that I did not want to do without were indications for: day, date, steps and battery power.  Anything else was extra and probably confusing.

     There is also the problem of the ‘always on’ aspect of the watch face.  Ever since the days of the good old Pebble watch, I have been used to an ‘always on’ face and very good battery life.  The Apple watch for example, always coming out the top or near the top of any list of ‘best’ smartwatches, has a battery life of a day, or more if you take all the power saving measures that make you wonder why you bought a smartwatch in the first place, if your discarded old self-winding watch gives you more!

     My present watch has an option for ‘always on’ but it does use up battery more quickly.  I have also found that not all watch face options are equal in their battery use, so I have set an ‘off’ period for the ‘always-on’ during the hours that I am asleep.  There is also a limited function for the ‘always on’ watch face when you are not using the watch as a smart watch.  At present all it shows is the digital time and an indication of PM.  If I twist my wrist then the screen bursts into full colour and all sorts of information is conveyed – including all of the elements that I consider essential.

     The problem with this watch is that, after the last update, there is now a superabundance of watch faces to choose.  I have meandered my way through them and chosen one or two to see what they look like in reality, but I have had to be stringent in my application of what I need and expect to allow me to reject the colourful blandishments of vulgarly attractive faces.

     My real problem is that, as far as watches are concerned, I am never satisfied.  Or you could say that is my real delight.  There is always the prospect of a new watch fulfilling all my present and future requirements and I will find watch buying peace.

     I hope not!

Christmas comes early!

 New Lockdown, third week, Saturday

 

 

 

 

This morning I unearthed my gloves before I set off on my bike ride.  And I needed them!  Although it was bright, it was cold and I was glad when my constitutional ride was over and I could have my cup of tea and a bowl of muesli as my reward. 

     The ride was made a little more exciting because the battery level was fairly low and when this electric bike does not have any power assistance it drives like a lump of clay – heavy clay.  Only once have I had the misfortune to run out of battery and even on level ground on the lowest gear setting it was hard bloody work!  So, instead of taking in the empty swathes of beach and the glittering expanses of sea, my attention was pretty much focused on the mobile phone sized screen that gives me information about my ride, and more particularly, how much battery life is left.

     To add to the gaiety of one’s concern the battery percentage is depicted in different colours with the last gasp of the machine being numbered in red.  For the whole of the return leg of my journey, the figures were in the red and I had to concentrate hard on other things rather than allowing my stress levels to be raised by wondering if I could make it back without wheeling the bike home.

     I did manage it, and even allowed myself the luxury of a higher power setting for the final few hundred metres, tempting my luck.  The bike is now drinking deeply on the outside power point and should be fully charged for my ride tomorrow.

 

 

Christmas (as I think is allowed in the wreckage of the year that calls itself 2020) has come a little early this year.

     Every year I debate whether to delve into the space under the eaves and exhume the artificial Christmas tree that is stored there.  It is a great deal of effort for something that takes up too much space in the living/dining room.  Where the tree used to go, the space is now occupied by Moppy, the Narwal machine that hoovers and mops automatically, well, robotically.  As the machine lives in a home station which is the size of a squat pedal bin, where it is, is where it stays.  So, we were presented with a problem.

     The solution came in the form of a small shelf that was erected by Toni to hold a fan, used to deflect the cigarette smoke from the next door neighbour who indulges her filthy habit sitting on the tiny balcony of her living room, then the prevailing breeze takes the mephitic miasma into our living room via the open windows.  As we don’t have aircon, open windows during virtually the whole of the summer and a chunk of the autumn are essential.

     The neighbours (on the mephitic side) are only there during the summer, so the shelf and the fan are not presently in use and the small shelf was calling out for a miniature Christmas tree – that Amazon has provided.  It came today and with the handmade decorations made (for Charity) by SQB it has now been decked out.  The lights are a string of those LED tiny lights powered by 3 AA batteries, and as I have rechargeable ones I think that we can be fairly profligate with the lights.  So, we have started now.  For the first time in my life, I have put up my Christmas tree, tiny and artificial as it might be, over a month before Christmas!

     The next festive thing to plan for in the putting up of the Belen, or nativity scene.  Over the years the characters that I have added to the basic Holy Family and a Cow have grown exponentially to include not only the Wise Men and Farmers, but also various other trades people and surrounding bits and pieces.

     But the bits and pieces of a Belen do not make up for what promises to be a strange Christmas.  Toni will want to see his family, but that doesn’t really look as though it is going to be possible safely.  All is still speculation and we have made no plans whatsoever.  We haven’t really discussed it apart from my asking in a fairly jocular way, “What do you want for Christmas Dinner?”  And we didn’t come to any real conclusions.  What is likely to change and get better in the next month?  Who knows?

 

I have started cleaning the glass of long ignored paintings and putting some of them up again.  The idea of a full re-hang is attractive, but the sheer effort in moving everything around is daunting and some paintings are too big to be moved easily.  I need more wall space!  Or, in my lottery dreams, a gallery with library and study on two levels with one of those ladders on rails to get at the higher books!

 

Monday will be the end of this particular lockdown and we will be able to go out for a meal and I will be able to go for a swim.  I don’t think that anyone is kidding himself that this is going to be anything like normality.  If we put all the ‘ifs’ together that we have been listening to, then some sort of vaccine should be rolled out in the New Year and the bulk of the population should have been inoculated by April.  That is, of course, the most optimistic view of the next five or six months.

     The logistics of getting viable vaccine to an entire population is daunting.  Given the way that most politicians have reacted to the pandemic, we have absolutely no optimism that things are going to be better than the chaos of the initial approaches.  But, there again, I am always optimistic and you never know, perhaps at last, this bloody Conservative government (UK) and the so-called ‘Socialist’ government of Spain can get their shit together.  For once.  I know that I am better off in Barcelona than I would be were I to be in Madrid!  For that, thanks!

Words and pictures

 

New Lockdown, Third Week, Friday

 

 

      

 

 

The real danger in adding my tiny number of ‘1^st Editions’ to the catalogue raisonné, is not the peril of advertising stealable wealth (one of my books I checked on a 1^st edition web site, and it cost three times more to send the book from the USA than the actual cost of the thing itself!) but rather the danger of the books themselves; once looked at and opened up I began reading them.

     

 

 The one that I am re-reading at the moment is called ‘One’ – a dystopian novel by the American author David Karp, where the benevolent government regards individuality as heresy and tries to root it out.  The central character is a lip-reading English Professor called Burden who is employed as a government informant who writes reports on the heretical things that his colleagues say and which he transcribes every evening.  Burden thinks that he does a valuable and governmentally appreciated job, and his own self-worth shows that he is well on the way to the heresy of individualism himself, though of course he does not recognize it.  It is however, recognized by the inquisitor character in the novel called Lark who feels an instinctive revulsion when he hears Burden and tries to claim him as someone to be ‘saved’.

     The novel was published in America in 1953 and you can tell that Karp is indebted to the 1948 publication of ‘1984’ by Orwell and perhaps a memory of the Grand Inquisitor’s Tale in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’.

     I think in this re-read, I am more interested in what the characters are actually saying rather than the action of the narrative: the difference in reading the novel as a piece of literary sci-fi and reading it as a discussion about the possibility of human freedom and independence in a caring society – and I feel that I should scatter a fair number of quotation marks in the last part of that sentence!

     It’s just as well that I am (re)enjoying the book because as an artifact it is interesting without being valuable.  It lacks its dust cover; the front cover has sun damage; the spine is a little tatty; there is a chunk out of the margin of page 11; the back cover is sun damaged; there is slight foxing on the edges; it has one of my ‘Ex libris’ stickers inside – in other words, it’s an interesting first edition, but basically worthless to a collector!  But it is still, at least to me, rather remarkable that this ‘modern’ novel is just three years younger than me, and reading the original hardback is somehow more of an experience than reading the Penguin paperback edition that I also possess!

 

My paintings and prints are now catalogued and I am determined to find a way to display the ones that have not been looked at for some time.  I remember that the National Gallery has a downstairs area where paintings are displayed floor to ceiling, the sort of thing that you can see in a painting by

Zoffany of the Uffizi in Florence.  These paintings (in the National) where not displayed in the main collection, but it was thought better to put them on show in that crowded way rather than have them lurk in some depository.  A good idea I think and one that I have decided to adopt on the sides of the bookcases in the ‘library’.  The smaller etchings can be placed there, they can be seen and, more importantly, they can easily be moved around to gain new perspectives.

     I have realized that the positions of some of the paintings have not changed since we moved into the house, and I have also realized that the glass of some of the paintings has not been cleaned for the same period of time.  When the grime of years has been removed, the paintings will live again!