Onwards, onwards!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is always the temptation with a new bit of technical kit, to expect it to do more than the previous versions of it that one might have possessed.  And there is the expectation too that one will have the technical ability to push the envelope of comfortable achievement just a little further with something that is bright and new.

     So with my new watch.  In spite of the fact that I need it merely to tell the time and to count the number of lengths that I do in the pool to ensure that I get to my daily target of 70 and therefore 1,500m , I always hope that I can get it to do more.

      My relationship with my mobile phone is one of restriction.  Not, you understand imposed by anyone outside, but by my own limitations in using the device.  I use my phone to read The Guardian and the various volumes on the Kindle app and do my Spanish lessons on the Duolingo app.  And that is basically it.  You stand virtually no chance whatsoever of getting me to respond to virtually any form of communication, unless I am actually handling the phone at the time of the message.  I almost invariably have my phone set to silent and so phone messages come and go without my noticing them.

     At one time and with a past version of my present smart phone, I did have, for a limited period some sort of link between the phone and my watch so that when a message or telephone call occurred, it sent some sort of message and/or a vibration to the watch that could (on a good day) alert me to the fact that someone somewhere had tried to make contact.  This brief period of being ‘linked-in’ did not last and I accepted that watch and phone were devices apart and never the twain should meet in any digital sense.

     With my ‘new’ watch – which I might also point out is now ‘so last iteration’ as the next model is already being reviewed in the more salaciously flagrant hi-tec publications in certain parts of the world – I feel, yet again, emboldened to try and get some sort of link-up so that I can deflect the opprobrium that comes my way when I fail to respond to emails, telephone calls, or any other form of electronic messaging.

     Although, in theory, a great fan of linked-up electronic devices, in reality I have always been a separates sort of guy, with each piece of gleaming expense existing in its own little branded bubble of usefulness, while never quite achieving the connectedness that has been the vain aim of justifying all the bits and pieces of historical computing that I have acquired through the years-

     But this time (he says yet again) this time will be different and, behold, there will be an efficiency of through device computing that will link everything in a professional and useful way.  Well, at least I have got Alexa to work on the phone.  Though, when, by way of experiment, I asked Alexa how she was (I was ever polite, even to the inanimate) her reply that she was feeling ‘windy’ as so many people had asked her about ‘farting’ – was something of a surprise, as was also her unsolicited offer of doing her ‘rapping on farting’ if I so desired!  I did not and turned her off.

     It says something for the way that people are using the pseudo AI of Alexa that a perfectly civil asking after health gets such a scatological response!  What sort of depraved ‘conversations’ with the poor woman have been taking place for an ingénue of AI rapport to be so abused?

     The watch has now beeped, not to obliterate the racier utterances of Alexa, but to tell me that some twisted chess grandmaster is prepared to play naked to show that he is not cheating. 

     With news like that one almost turns with relief to the political situation in the UK where the Conservative Party has gone ‘all out and obvious’ in pandering to its paymasters and is now openly boosting the wealth of the obscenely rich at the expense of the obscenely poor.  A sort of refreshing honesty from a party that has previously tried to dress up its class preferences with mealy mouthed platitudes to try and ensure that the poor people that they are fleecing to feed the rich will not notice the Tories’ real intentions.

     As my (UK taxed) pension is paid in pounds sterling and transferred to me here in Catalonia in euros, every fall in the value of the pound is not a momentary worry about how much spending money you are going to have on the next holiday, but is rather more ‘here and now’ in the worry stakes for someone who relies on the cash being sent over to pay for basic living costs.

     If you are concerned about the cost of living, you might ask, why buy a new watch, rather than use one of the many that you have in reserve?  Well, you’ve got me there.  But I might point out that you are questioning a man who went out and bought a couple of new shirts rather than ironing one of the many clean but creased ones he had waiting to be attended to.

     I am not sure, exactly, what that little anecdote is supposed to illustrate, but it does certainly point towards an attitude to money where reality is only accepted when it bites.  Hard.

     Now, off to the first concert in the new season!  Make music as the pounds falls!

Open Your Ears!

 

 

 

 

 

 

In anticipation of the first in the concert series located in the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona this Saturday, I have been trying to remember the last purely orchestral concert rather than an opera, that I have been to, and it is depressingly long ago.

     I do of course listen to music via CDs (yes, I am still old fashioned enough to use them) and mostly on line.  The on-line music is tricky.  I refuse to pay for a streaming service, because I (painstakingly) added most of my CDs to my music library and I was more than content to meander through versions of the music that I knew than make do with some un-provenanced rendition of a famous symphony or so.

     Some on-line offerings of music are somewhat like the web sites of information that may look professional but are actually made by some 14-year-old student in the rural Mid West for a school project and are heavily reliant on Wikipedia and other questionable sources.  So, you might want to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth, and find yourself listening to something that sounds as if it has been recorded in the studio equivalent of a shoe box, or a version of the symphony which sounds as though it has been transcribed from wax cylinders!

     Opera is particularly prone to musical mischief as you settle down to watch a YouTube ‘full’ performance and rapidly realize that you are watching something that is only a step above a poor school production with sound quality to match!

     Which is not to say that a live performance is always the gold standard of listening.  I have any number of performances in my experience when I would have been much better off listening to a recording.

    When a student I vividly remember going to an orchestral concert in the Glyn Hall in Neath, in South Wales and sitting in the cheaper (student discount) seats and being horrified during the first piece because it was as if there was a sonic barrier between our impoverished selves and the noise that the orchestra was apparently making – I mean we could actually see the musician moving hands and mouths, but it really wasn’t getting through to us.  I solved that problem by marching down the length of the hall for the second piece of music and sitting in a vacant more expensive seat, and considered myself totally justified because, after all, I had paid to listen to the music, not watch a musicians’ dumb show!

     Another time I was given a seat next to the double basses and the whole of the musical experience of the concert was filtered through the deep thrum of those instruments.  Not something that I would recommend unless you are a double bass player yourself, and perhaps not even then!

     The number of times that the people at the side or in front or behind my seat has shown the consideration of louts, by eating or talking or going on their mobile phone are many – and don’t get me started on the noisy breathers!  One performance of two of Nielsen’s symphonies was almost destroyed for me by the gasping difficulty of one man’s breathing that seemed to require emergency pulmonary treatment rather than live music.

     Of course there were other times when the experience has been magical: string quartets played on a Greek island with windows and doors open so that the breeze wafted the full length diaphanous curtains in a gentle material ballet to accompany the music; a London Prom where you really felt that the people standing with you cared about the music being played; The Swansea Brangwen Hall organ blaring out in my first hearing of The Manfred Symphony; a lunchtime concert in Cardiff City Hall and The Firebird Suite; the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra playing The Turangalila Symphony in St David’s Hall; a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony when I was seated directly behind the percussion and felt like an assaulted, but excited part of the performance!  Many more positive experiences than negative.

     With some pieces of music, my attitude is more like the attitude I have to the performance of Shakespeare plays.  I have seen some Shakespeare plays so many times (including three difference productions of Twelfth Night in a few months) that I look at them hoping that there will be something original thought provoking in the production that I can take away, and add to my appreciation of the play.  Sometimes just a moment, or piece of staging or phrasing of a particular line or lines can be enough to justify my being a member of the audience and my spending time there.

     With some music I have my preferences as far as weighting of instruments and tempi are concerned, but I have found in many compelling performances that a conductor can persuade me to a new way of listening.

     The main piece in the concert that I am going to on Saturday is Dvorak’s New World Symphony, a piece of music whose ‘tune’ is so famous that like the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech in Macbeth you can almost (and sometimes quite literally) hear the audience performing it too!  There is also a sigh of happy recognition of 'something we know' that you only get in a live performance.

     The real problem of live performances is that we members of the audience are spoiled, in so far as we have probably got to know the individual pieces of music through recordings – and those recordings are the results of numerous ‘takes’ and of electronic tweaking after the event, so that what we hear as the final result never happened in real time.  How can a perfectly balanced and engineered performance complete with a listeners not sitting in the ‘ideal’ spot, on a chair that is not very comfortable and next to people who noisily exist at the same time as the music!

     I suppose that the point is that each live performance is unique for everyone.  What I am hearing is not what you, five rows back and to the side are hearing.  It is a perspective that I value and sometimes it is a revelation.

     Many times I have gone to a concert at the end of a working day because I had already bought the ticket as part of my subscription.  I went almost with a sense of duty, and the thought that I couldn’t waste the cost of the ticket.  And I have been blown away by what I have heard.  All tiredness gone in the delight of music heard afresh.

     It is always worth hoping for revelation, and when it does happen, well, it justifies one or two duff performances that one can put down to experience!

     For this concert, my hopes are high!

Cracked Time

 

This morning, while swimming back down the pool, my left hand inadvertently hit the side of the pool, not hard enough to hurt myself, but hard enough to find the sweet spot of my smart watch’s screen and crack the face and take a small but essential chunk out of the strengthened glass.  To be fair to the timepiece, it is still telling the time, but the touch sensitive quality of the broken screen is not irreparably lost.

     To someone like myself, a noted relojophile (I think the combination of Spanish and Greek in that neologism is more than satisfying) a broken watch is not a disaster, it is far more an opportunity.

     I could, of course, go to my boxed collection of older watches and choose one (or twenty!) to attach to my wrist, and there might even be a few rejected smart watches to choose. 

I could also, as I am at the moment, revert to and wear my ‘emergency’ watch, a Seiko that almost comically ticks almost all of the boxes for a perfect watch.  The model is a Seiko ‘Rail Road Approved’ smallish white face, with Arabic numbers, day/date, sweep second hand, luminous hour and minute hands, waterproof for swimming, and solar charging.  I leave it out on a sunny shelf and it is constantly ready to head wristward should anything untoward happen to my smart watch of choice: the Amazfit GTR.

     As I said, I do have choices, many choices, to replace the broken watch, and the replacement was on sale in Amazon and other outlets for a more than reasonable prime considering what the watch can actually do.  But, as I also said, I see destruction as a chance to try and better what I had.

     As with smart watches, so with mobile phones, we seem to have reached a stage in their development where we are asked to pay more and more for what I seem to remember from painful A Level economics classes is “eventually diminishing” returns.  The so-called ‘flagship’ phones of all the major brands (including those who used to be considered budget but excellent value for money) are absurdly expensive, and if you go to the extent of getting a foldable phone, astronomically expensive!  And, of all the much-vaunted attributes of the machine, how many are actually used by the individual purchaser?  Like computers and the programs that we use on them, we (well, I) barely scrape the surface of what they can do.

     If I am truthful about my smart watch use, I need the thing to tell the time with an always-on display and count my lengths while I swim and the distance I go for my morning bike ride after my swim.  And that’s just about it.  My simple demands do not, of course, stop me from pouring over the almost unending list of things that my watch could do if I understood how to get it to do it.  I find it difficult enough to get my watch to evaluate my exercise before my swim and then to switch to counting my lengths – something to do with moisture on the touch sensitive screen, and it’s always touch and go about whether I can make the thing work.

     Informing me about the receipt of emails and messages, linking to Alexa, storing music, remotely answering my mobile phone and all the other things that the watch allegedly finds simplicity itself, become much more complicated when I get my hands on the thing and the functioning of all these add-ons becomes much more problematical.

     But, with watches, I am an eternal optimist.  I believe in the incrementally commercially inexorable movement towards horological perfection and that what I experienced only imperfectly in one iteration of the watch will become sublime in a later one.

     I suppose that all of the above is going a long way round the houses to say that instead of using one or other of my numerous watches to fill the gap left by my broken (but still time telling) one, I decided after a Nano second’s hesitation to buy new.

     And not only new, but also falling into the patently obvious manufacturer’s trap of a so-called ‘limited edition’ version of something I could have got cheaper in its un-limited form. 

     But, I am ashamed (and yet defiant) to admit, that I was seduced by a bit of bling (it is gold coloured) and by the fact that it comes in a much nicer and more sophisticated box than the common or garden version!

     Sometimes I surprise even myself by how gullible I am when confronted by blatant ego flattering commercialism, but, as I am sure Truss the Heartless Far Right Zealot would assure me, my purchase is doing its bit to ensure the ‘trickle down’ of wealth!

     For some strange reason that thought does not  comfort me.  At all.

Result? Misery!

 

 

 

 

 

The chiringuitos (the pop-up bars and restaurants on the beach) are being dismantled: the sign that summer is truly over.  We may get an unobstructed view of the sea again, but, that sea will gradually take on the appearance of a more northerly stretch of water rather than the twinkling blueness of the Med.

     The sun however, continues to shine, though I have now taken to wearing a short jacket when I go for my early morning swim (defiantly un-zippered) but I do not need it (yet) for the return home.  Day by day, the temperatures get lower, but not low enough for us to dispense with the fans that have been godsends through the hot summer months.

     I dislike late autumn and winter because I feel more comfortable in t-shirts and shorts and I prefer the heat.  I do not ‘fear’ the winter, as so many of my fellow citizens both here in Catalonia and Spain and in my home country of Wales and the UK. 

     Prices are rising steadily and in some cases radically and people must, in their own words and their own languages be echoing the truism of William Micawber, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”

     So many (all!) the politicians in Westminster are at least comfortable in their financial states (unless they have, like Mr Micawber been feckless beyond) and they can look forward to the coming months with something approaching complacency – at least as far as their own personal circumstances are concerned.   

     They have no conception of the true horror of having no money, or being in debt and having no realistic way of paying essential bills to keep themselves fed and warm.

     This winter could see obscene numbers of people experiencing real ‘misery’, of seeing no way out of a situation that is financially impossible.  And, at the same time seeing the number of millionaires and billionaires expanding exponentially as circumstances which are crippling middle and lower earners bring a sense of real desperation to the working of the body politic.

     The last twelve years of vicious Tory mismanagement have seen a hollowing out of the functions of a caring state, with yawning gaps in essential provision failing to be filled by the charitable and voluntary sector.  We have food banks saying that they are not only running out of food to give to those who are needy, but also they are going to find it difficult or impossible to continue their work with the ever escalating costs of power, let alone anything else.

     The announcement of The Fiscal Event of the Tory government to be foisted on us on Friday, reminds me strongly of Putin’s cruelly euphemistic description of the bloody War in Ukraine (the largest war in Europe since the end of the Second World War) as a so-called "special military operation." 

     Semantics matter. 

     For Truss calling the mini or emergency or timely or desperate budget, a "Fiscal Event" allows the government to do without an up-to-date report from the Office for Budget Responsibility (a parliamentary committee with a Conservative majority) which would have given an assessment of the economic consequences of the proposals outlined in it.  As apparently, the Fiscal Event is not a budget, it allows her to escape scrutiny.  Again.

      Truss is developing something of a reputation for being what That Woman referred to as “frit” when it comes to putting herself forward to have her views examined.  She evaded a full scale, in-depth interview during her interminable campaign to get the genteel knuckle dragging Tories of the South East to vote for her, and she seems to be following that obscurantist trait in her first days in Number 10.  She has been a stalwart member of the "Hide & Silence" brigade and her disreputably repressive government seems eager to continue on its suppressive way, as far as possible out of the glare of any hostile scrutiny.

     Truss, it cannot be emphasised too much, has a conflicted mandate.  She has no mandate from the public and she was not selected by a majority of Tory MPs.  If Johnson drew his cabinet from the dregs of what was left after he had purged the government of any ‘reasonable’ one-nation Conservatives, I struggle to find the word for the strained dregs that Truss used to form hers!

     Look at the holders of the four great offices of state and weep!