New skills?

 

The electric scooter has been used as it was intended to be used: a way to get me from A to B without having to walk too much.  Result!

     I cannot pretend that I am the most confident user of this mode of transport, but I am a user.  And that surely is a start.  Maybe a shaky start, but start nevertheless.

     My unsteady progress is mocked by the number of teenagers (and there are many) who ride the damn things as thought they were born on them.  I am going to rely on the expectation that continued use will banish my rank amateurism. Possibly.  I live, as always, in hope.

 

The water in our local pool this morning was murky.  It crossed my mind that I had not idea how to translate that into Spanish.  I thought that perhaps ‘oscuro’ might work, but I wasn’t convinced.  I bowed to the inevitable and opened the Google translate on my phone and saw their suggestion, and immediately recognized that I should have known the word.

     There is a sort of Galician wine that, before you serve it, you turn the bottle upside down and tap the bottom.  The wine is called ‘turbio’ and is a reference to the fact that such a procedure mixed up the sediment in the wine and makes it murky.  It is not, as you might have expected an expensive wine, but in the days when I used to drink more convincingly that I do at present I found it a refreshing and inexpensive drink.  It was also a wine that used to disconcert the visiting British wine snobs who looked on askance at the barbaric pre-drink ritual.

 

I am ‘watching’ the opening game of Barça, the first game in the new La Liga season, though I would be hard pressed to say just when the season actually ended as the summer seems to have been filled with football.

     I have decided to make a stand against the obvious corruption of the World Cup being in Dubai.  The absurdity of having the World Cup in a location where the weather is obviously so disadvantageous to the safe playing of the game and where the rights of the foreign workers constructing the stadia and the hotels have been so flagrantly abused is enough to make the celebration of that corrupt state’s holding of a major world competition something to be ashamed of.

     I do not know how realistic a boycott of TV watching is going to be possible in a household where one half of the relationship is looking forward to an orgy of blanket football watching.  I think there has to be a finite limit to the number of times one can flounce out of the living room with one’s moral integrity intact.

     There is also the very real possibility that I might find myself being drawn into the jingoistic fever of supporting the Home Nations that are in the competition.  As Wales has made it to the World Cup for the first time in almost living memory I do feel duty bound to show at least some support, so I am qualifying my disgust well before the kick off, and I am confident that I will succumb to the saturation coverage.

Cold research

New Lockdown, Third Week, Wednesday

 

It was cold this morning and even I questioned the wisdom of wearing T-shirt and shorts with open sandals on my earlyish morning bike ride.  Admittedly, I was wearing a windcheater, mask and helmet which added to the general warmth, but my hands were definitely less than warm.  I mention this because, even when my legs are cold to the touch I do not feel too much discomfort, therefore for me to complain of the cold means that it’s, well, cold.

     It did get better during the day and we were able to have the window of the living room open without too much discomfort, but the reality of the second half of November is beginning to make itself felt.  And that is depressing because we have months of non-summer to look forward (!) to.

     The good news is that the swimming pool should re-open on Monday with the same restrictions as previously, that is, only ten people allowed into the pool during any one hour, meaning that the pool will have to keep to a maximum of two people per lane and reserving your place is essential.

     I have just checked and the booking app has the activities for Monday 22^nd of November listed, but greyed out at the moment, so they should become active towards the end of this week.  I will have to check in daily to ensure a place as, believe it or not, the 7 am slot for swimming is quite popular!

     I have to admit that it will be relief to get back into the groove of early morning swimming, as I am not the world’s greatest bed-lazer.  Although the is an initial spasm of resentment when the alarm does off at 6.15 am, it soon passes and I knuckle down to demands of the day and I think that I am becoming more or a ‘morning person’ than a ‘late night denizen’ – especially as I usually go to bed at around 10 pm nowadays!

     And perhaps the early morning start will encourage me to start filling out my notebook again.  This, of course, depends on what the swimming pool café is allowed to do.  If they can serve a limited number of patrons who sit physically distanced then that is ideal for my creative exercise.  If not, I really will have to make time to start a tradition of filling in the thing at another period in the day.

 

My Catalogue Raisonné is taking shape, and, at the moment, I am bogged down in the detail of the thing.  Getting accurate measurements and remembering (which I think I have not in my notes) that height goes before width in the dimensions of paintings and prints is a trick I should have learned by now.

     Finding out more details about the Habitat prints is becoming very difficult.  In 1999, the Habitat store in the centre of Cardiff had a scheme whereby a number of their employees were given training and the opportunity to produce a limited-edition print.  I bought three of the prints, two of which I have, and the third got lost in the move from Cardiff to Catalonia (together with a raku plate depicting fish).  I cannot fully decipher the signatures and there appears to be no information on the web about the scheme or the artist printmakers.

     Just to give you some sort of idea about the quality of the sales assistants in Habitat at the time, one of the printmakers with whom I spoke was actually a fully trained architect, but he couldn’t get work as an architect and so working in Habitat was at least in or around some sort of cutting edge design.

     I have Googled what I think the names are but have had no luck yet.  I will print out their signatures and see if anyone out there recognizes the handwriting or the signatures.   

 

 

I would dearly like to find out more about the consequences (if any) of the scheme with what happened next in these young print maker's careers.  Do get in touch if any of what I’ve mentioned happening twenty years ago rings any bells.

     And, before you ask, I have tried to contact what is left of Habitat these days, and they are only taking queries about problems in sales and delivery owing to the pressures of Covid, so no luck there.   I am patient – up to a point and will be satisfied with eventual knowledge as long as it comes soon!

We are all in this together. Really!

 New Lockdown, Day 15?, Friday

 

I thought of entitling this piece ‘Selfish Disaster’ because we have been told in Catalonia that the closure of bars, restaurants, gyms, theatres, opera houses and SWIMMING POOLS etc is to be extended for at least another ten days.  Another ten days without my early morning swim!

     And then I thought that, in the scheme of things, going without a swim for a couple of weeks more is hardly to be compared with the ravages of Covid 19 and the people who are in hospital or are recovering from so-called ‘long Covid’.

     And then I thought again and realized that another ten days could well be the tipping point in the survival of some businesses and, as businesses fail so they set off a sort of chain reaction, dragging in both direct suppliers and those suppliers who are indirectly connected with the enterprises.  In an inter-connected world when one suffers, we all suffer – though I do of course recognize that not taking part in a particular activity (swimming, eating out, watching opera, shopping) is not the same as not keeping your business going.  I don’t swim, I am repaid my monthly membership fee or fraction thereof – the club has something like 2,000 members: it’s a lot of money to pay out and get nothing back, while keeping the buildings and installations in good condition.  The Club is well run and seems to be financially stable, even with the financial blows that Covid gives, but for how long can this continue?  And what is happening to the employees?  And the suppliers?

     Just as Covid respects no boundaries, the financial, social, educational, structural damage being done is not discrete: everything joins to everything else.  My missed swim is inconvenience to me, is a livelihood threatened to others.

     On the other hand, avoiding death is worth a little inconvenience, indeed it is worth a great deal of inconvenience – and one only hopes that we have governments considerate enough to understand that interdependence means generous finance.

 

 

 

My greatest worry (after the destructive effects of Covid) is about the condition of the Heath Service.

     In Catalonia, as I can personally attest from hospitalized personal experience, our Health Service is excellent.  I was lucky enough to have my condition diagnosed and my superb treatment given at a time when the health services were not being overstretched by a pandemic.  I am sure that if I went through what I did a couple of years ago, now – would I be treated in the same way?

     I was taken to hospital in an ambulance that arrived before my consultation with the doctor had actually ended.  I was seen immediately in hospital.  I was treated and given a place on a ward where my treatment continued.  I spent eight days (and longer nights) in hospital.  My aftercare has been exemplary.  Even then I spent some time on a bed in what was a corridor in emergency before I got a bed in a ward.

     Since the Covid pandemic has been in Catalonia, I have had a scheduled appointment for blood extraction and a consultation with the doctor that I have seen throughout my treatment – and my next one is in six months’ time.  I have no complaints.

     But my extraction and consultation were over in minutes, there were no complications, no expensive treatments that needed medical intervention.  What, I ask myself, is happening to those who need more intrusive medical assistance?  For those who need minor operations or who need continuing cancer treatment?

     The answer is perhaps illustrated on television, by the number of adverts that we are now subjected to which urge us to take out private medical insurance.  Even the threat of delay is enough to frighten some into paying now in the hope that they will be able to queue jump some time in the future.

    

In the UK the Conservative ‘government’ has underfunded the NHS and privatized those parts of the organization that it thinks it can get away with.  The Tories disgraceful outsourcing of the Test and Trace shows their dedication to the private sector and their hope that Brexit will merely accelerate the transition from the lie of “The NHS is safe in our hands” to “The NHS is mostly there for those who can’t pay” - and they will get what they do not pay for.  Covid has a fair chance of destroying a meaningful health service free at the point of need with the bunch of self-seeking incompetents that we have in charge.

 

 

What Covid has shown is how weak our public services are after years of Conservative ‘austerity’ and the post-Covid new-normal must be one where those public services are brought up to pre-Covid levels and more autonomy must return to local councils, so people can live.

     There is, of course, an element of hypocrisy in all this: my swimming pool is private, a private club run for profit.  The municipal pool is at the other end of town and up a steep hill which, even with an electric bike, I am not enthusiastic to climb.  I made a choice because I can afford to make that choice and I have gone for the pool nearest my home (leaving aside for the moment the sea which is at the end of the road) and the most convenient.  I have disposable income that I choose to spend on a well-appointed pool and in a cheerful café, I can even say that it is good value: I go there every day to swim and I end up paying about 50p for the privilege.  Money well spent I say!

     The US of A shows us that private medical health care is a nightmare and where a broken leg could be ruinous. 

     I am a fit and well chronically ill person!  I enjoy life but have to take pills every day and periodically go for consultations to check my progress.  It is no hardship; more mild inconvenience, and I know that I am being looked after well and I have no worries about the quality of my care.

     The New Normal is going to be different.  We have a duty to remind the government where its priorities should lie.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS – DAY 4

It has taken a pandemic to shut our bloody neighbours’ noisy reconstruction efforts.  The silence of their absence is absolutely delightful, though it doesn’t compensate for the intolerable thumpings that have characterised their reformations.

     In fact, we now have a silent cordon sanitaire as the neighbours on one side only use their house for the summer holidays and on the other side, the reformations make it unliveable for the owners while the work is going on and the lockdown restrictions make it inaccessible.  If we could only cause the terminal laryngitis of the bloody rat dog of another neighbour, we could even be sort of content.

     Traffic that passes us on the main road is at a minimum and there are few planes overhead.  For Spain, our surroundings are disturbingly silent – not for Britain perhaps, but for us, certainly!

I am missing my daily swim and am getting progressively more worried about the lack of exercise that I am taking.  Normally I would use my bike to get to my swim and back and then use the bike for a few shopping trips or whatever, so this enforced inaction is grating.  This afternoon I was driven to Take Measures.  I ventured out to the communal swimming pool and made a number of stately circuits of the pool leaning on my walking-stick.  I was alone with only the sound of a howling kid to keep me company.  Not literally, this one was in a flat next to our houses and I dread to think what his parents must be going through, his being too young fully to understand why his little life has been so suddenly cramped!  Good luck to them.  I did manage to get to my step goal according to my watch, so I must be very unsettled around the house!

     I will have to make circling of the pool a daily chore because it doesn’t look as though the relaxation of the restrictions on our movement are going to be any time soon.

     If the UK is going to shut the schools and cancel end of year examinations, it doesn’t really look too positive that our little class in Catalan is going to be restarted before Easter.  In theory our class could restart on the 30^th of this month, but that looks remote.  I think that it is unlikely that our class will restart this academic year, but who knows what will actually occur.

The PP and PSOE King (he was created by an agreement between the two political parties and nothing was put to the people) made a broadcast last night.  He said nothing about the continuing scandal that engulfs him and his elephant shooting father about off-shore accounts and kickbacks.  But his shameless broadcast did give the opportunity for right thinking people to show their disgust at the corruption by banging our saucepans.  It is wonderful how much penetrating sound is created by the simple application of wooden spoon to saucepan bottom!  The drive for an independent enquiry into the behaviour of the so-called king and his even more so-called emeritus king father continues.  The first call for an enquiry has been rejected on what I think are obviously spurious legal trickery grounds, but the parties of the real left are not letting a single obstacle stand in their way and are trying again.

     I think that the royal family in Spain has lost a great deal of popular support.  The antics of the king ‘emeritus’ towards the end of his reign before he was forced, by a surge of public disgust, to abdicate really did damage the prestige of the family.  The scandals that have involved other members of the family with consequent jail time have not helped.  I am sure that politicians will not put the continuation of the royal family to a public vote, but if they did, I think that the royal family would loose.  I think it is also getting closer and closer with the British version too, and when QE2 finally dies, the sobering prospect of Charles III will concentrate the minds of a large number of erstwhile monarchists towards the republican cause.  I hope.

I have started putting drafts of my most recent poems on smrnewpoems and that gives me the incentive to write more.  That came out as seeming to be more of a threat than an invitation to read!  But I assure you it is the former.

Toni is getting a trifle stir crazy with not going out, and it has only been four days!  Well, that four days is my computation.  Toni says that last weekend of Saturday and Sunday is actually counted in the lockdown, but I assumed that the lockdown was from Monday of this week.  Toni was with his mother on the Saturday and he came back to Castelldefels on Sunday afternoon, so his time in lockdown is questionable.  I am feeling quite chipper about my enforced detention at home, and I have done a quantity of writing: if nothing else confinement does concentrate the writing impulse. 

    

     Long may it continue.

Abnormal normality

“The curious incident of the dog in the night time” came to mind as we made our way to work, or rather I drove Toni to his work at our regular ungodly time in the morning so that he could start his travails at 7.00 am promptly.  Except in this case it was the traffic that was notable by its absence rather than the bark of a dog.

Part of Toni’s way to work is along the C-something or other, one of the main motorways into Barcelona from the west of the city.  Even at 6.30am the traffic is heavy and, at St. Boi we take a slip road off the main motorway which winds its circuitous way around the road works for a new section of motorway that have been going on for as long as I have been in Catalonia - and still no new road.  We branch out at the notorious St Boi roundabout to a link road that takes us into Cornella and then a few side streets (along which major busses go!) to his place of work.

As with all attempts to use urban motorways to get places in the morning, timing is everything.  If we leave at 6.30 am promptly, although the traffic is heavy and marginally suicidal, we get there with enough time to spare for Toni to have a quick coffee in the café at the end of the street a few steps away from his work, should he chose to do so.

The traffic this morning was eerily sparse and by way of equilibrium for the spaciousness of the roads we were stuck behind two large slow moving lorries on the slip road that slowed us down.  But, lo! As we passed the usual bottleneck where the slip road has its own slip road to join another motorway - there was nothing.  Not a single car. 

To give you an idea of normality, I sometimes count the number of seconds that it takes to get to the end of the queue I observe on the opposite side of the road as I return to Castelldefels on the largely empty side of the road that it not going in to Barcelona or other major cities: my longest count has been twenty-seven seconds of tail back, counted while travelling at 80 kph!  Nothing.  Not a single angry driver keeping as close as possible to the driver in front to ensure that no chancer tries to cut in to save a few seconds.

In the couple of minutes that it takes to deposit Toni and make my way back onto the major road system and pass the link road, a small queue had built up and was visibly growing by the second.  You see what I mean about timing!

We realized that the paucity was due to (or is it “owing to”?  I can never remember the rule that I learned imperfectly back in form 4 of Cardiff High) the fact that most people have not yet returned to work.  Schools are back on the 7^th of the month, I think, and our Catalan class recommences on the 8^th.  So, next Monday we will find the entire motorway fuming with resentful workers still half asleep, dreading the day ahead and spoiling for a traffic jam to make their return to work complete in its awfulness.

Today, however it meant that I got back to Castelldefels in good time and turned into the Swimming Pool car park just as the gate was being unlocked.  Timing again!

It further meant that I was one of the first to get changed, but no matter how precisely I make it for the opening time of 7.00 am I am never the first in the pool, there must be people who have secret ways into the complex to allow them to bag a lane!

But when I got to the pool, some of the usual suspects were not in place.  I am there early because I have to be, but there are a couple of obviously retired ladies who do slow mysterious strokes who seem to monopolise the outside lanes.  Why are they there so early? 

There are ‘serious’ swimmers who move through the water as if they are being chased by piranha and you can almost hear them clucking with annoyance if anyone dares to join their lane when there isn’t another option. 

 

These are the swimmers who will do butterfly in a crowded lane which, “as any fule kno” is the height of bad swimming manners.  It is wrong for a variety of reasons; first and foremost, because I can’t do the stroke for more than a few seconds, so I take it as a personal affront; secondly, because it takes up the entire lane; thirdly because it is very splashy, and for reasons that I do not fully understand I abhor being splashed when I swim.  In water!  Fourthly because it is a vulgar display of offensive physicality and small-minded showing off. 

Mind you, I have to say that I feel the same for any stroke other than crawl.  In a crowded lane, crawl is the only stroke where your efforts stay (roughly) within the width of your body and you do not encroach on another swimmer’s space.

I managed to complete my swim in a lane that I had largely to myself, so I have little to complain about.  And the cup of tea in the café afterwards was not accompanied by the Camino of parents-with-children using the car park to leave the car and then march the kids through the café to the school.  It was oddly tranquil, and far too early for even the most resolute of parents (who in this part of the world seem to spend - and I mean spend - a lot of time, effort and money to getting someone/anyone else to look after the kids when they are on holiday) looking to take their charges for a quick or even a long swim.

Our pool/sports centre usually has a sort of sports camp where parents deposit their kids in the morning and pick them up in the evening, the centre will have amused and fed them during the day.  This must be a very profitable part of their activity and they have ‘camps’ for all the major holidays.

So this week will be one of non-normality with routine being re-established on Monday of next week.  When the city will be back in the safe hands of the retired.  Again.

The Use of the Ordinary

Although I swim every day, I have never pretended that swimming is anything other than boring.  It is now like brushing my teeth, it is something that is necessary and you do regularly, but is not exactly pleasurable.  If I don’t have a swim, in the same way when I (rarely) forget to brush my teeth before I go to bed, I feel that there is something missing, something is not right.

I set myself a metric mile each day and up and down I go for sixty lengths in my local pool and at the end of it I feel that I have accomplished something and like ‘Doing a good turn to somebody every day’ my duty is done.

So swimming in our community pool attached to our house raises another problem motivation.  As our community pool is quite small, the last few meters separated form the main pool by an underwater wall to create a ‘kiddies’ splash around area, the actual straight swimming length is limited.  If the pool is empty I compensate by swimming in circles, but it is not entirely satisfactory.

I have, therefore, devised an approach that combines exercise with the law of the Wolf Cub Pack and make a virtue of necessity and swim around picking up and discarding the rogue pine needles that settle on the surface of the water.

I have discovered that reflection or refraction or possibly both, mean that it is easier to see the floating needles from under the water with a pair of goggles than searching the surface from above.  I therefore must look like a swimmer motivated by Brownian Motion as I jitter my way through the water seeking the double refraction of the needles before they are swept out of the pool and to the side - where I am sure that a gentle breeze will waft them back into the water.  But that is not the point: I swim and feel that I am exercising while performing community service.

From time to time I come across insects that are vainly wing-swimming their way through the water to a chlorinated death.  When I do spy the odd wasp or beetle or fly in their death throws, with a positively Franciscan magnanimity, I scoop them out and deposit them on the pool side and drift away on my hoovering duties feeling quasi angelic and somehow ‘justified’!

Today, I have to admit, I haven’t been to the pool for a swim (for lunch, yes, but not for a swim) instead we went to the beach.  We live one street away from the sea, and yet we rarely go to the beach.  I see it every day because I usually cycle down the paseo and drive past it, but we have suddenly become aware that it is already August and we haven’t really ‘done’ the beach.  So two hours was spent beside the waves.

And waves there certainly were.  People usually assume that the Med is a quiet and domestic body of water - and to be fair, it usually is.  Sometimes, however it can be a little spirited.  Today, for example, a yellow flag was flying which indicates that swimming is not recommended.  That could be for a number of reasons, ranging from the quality of the water, through an infestation of stinging jellyfish to adverse water conditions.

Today the water was rough.  Even the profile of the beach has altered, which certainly indicates the waves and currents have been in a terraforming and sand-sculpting mode.

Castelldefels is a generally safe swimming spot because although currents can be strong, they usually drag you back to shore and along the beach.  And that was true today, with the added excitement of tumbling waves strong enough to knock you over.  Which they did.  And strong enough to remove Toni’s bathing costume - though that was in the shallows and he was able to restore decency in the masking obscurity of sand heavy water!

Most of my time was taken up, not with swimming in the sea, but reading on the beach.  I grabbed, at random, an unread Iain Banks novel called The Crow Road, which has (I am not surprised to find out) a place in the Daily Telegraph’s 30 best opening lines in literature (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/30-great-opening-lines-in-literature/the-crow-road/ ) I cannot say, by the way, that I agree with all the choices made there, but I made the mistake of looking through all thirty and for many I was half inclined to find the book in my library and start reading it again - which is always the danger when you have a snippet of something great to tempt you!

Anyway, I have had this novel for some time and only read the first few pages (as who cannot given the opening line!) and for some reason had laid it aside.  This is not something that I usually do, except for Virgina Woolf’s To The Lighthouse that I did (and did with gusto) on many occasions before I finally bit the bullet and read the whole of the damn thing.  I have decided to keep the novel that I am now gripped by purely as beach reading as that gives me an incentive to engage in the futile and empty pastime of lazing in the sun and gives it a sort of purpose.

Tomorrow the first of our final tranches of summer visitors arrive and I am minded to write a series of poems suggested by visitors, their arrival, response etc.  I have made some preparatory notes and look forward to seek where such an enterprise takes me.  The time period is from tomorrow to the end of the month and into September and the three ‘groupings’ of visitors are very different.  I hope that this blog can also be part of the process either for ideas or responses. 

I can but try!

Though I also fear that such a task is merely displacement activity for the work on my Spanish grammar and vocabulary.  Are both possible?  Should be.

Now, having written it down, it seems like a sort of contract with the future!

A contract easily broken!