Odd numbers

There are some journeys which, in themselves, are pleasant and uneventful and yet memorable for curious reasons.  Last week I had to go to Segovia in Spain for a spot of literary hobnobbing, tied in with some work, and because I had to take quite a lot of gear (most of it ‘just in case’ stuff) I decided to drive.  The round trip is a little over a thousand kilometres – six hours in each direction – and the missus jumped at the chance of half a week in a mediaeval city on the sistema central rather than in the office.  She’s funny like that.  It also meant we could take turns with the driving, making the whole trip little more than a pleasant jaunt.

The outward journey was easy enough, crossing the eerily deserted border at Vilar Formoso/Fuentes de Oñoro and then via Cuidad Rodrigo onto the hot, dusty northern meseta under peerless blue skies.  I love this country, though I suspect I would hate to live there: empty, endless brown and yellow plains with excellent and empty roads connecting the sudden, gloriously amazing sight of Salamanca with the rugged walled city of Ávila.  We’d stopped off in some fly-blown village, Peñeranda de Bracamonte, for petrol and to be stared at by a population of aged beings who had clearly never seen a foreign plated car before – unabashed, hard staring.  In all, nothing to talk about at all, until we arrived, five hours and forty minutes after setting off, at the city limits of Segovia where we were greeted by a flash of lightening and a sudden roar of thunder and rain so heavy it rivalled a lake for density.  For those who don’t know Segovia then what you need to know is that it is built on a steep hill, of course, with a Disney-like castle at one end (Disney, in fact, modelled their trademark castle on Segovia’s El Alacazar), a wedding-cake of a cathedral in the middle and a magnificent Roman aqueduct at the other end.  The roads leading steeply up to this little marvel are all cobbled with granite setts which, when wet, become treacherously slippery, especially when wet after a long dry spell.  In other words in precisely the conditions we found ourselves in on arrival.  Now I wasn’t concerned about our car – it had four spankingly new tyres and had just been serviced and would have leapt up the greasy roads like an impala being chased by a lion.  What did concern us was the bus in front of us which was clearly not at all happy with the state of roads.  The back end of the bus, if you’ll pardon the expression, was sliding about sideways like a hippo in mud, clearing a swathe through the traffic.  I’ll give the driver his due: he wasn’t put off by the alarming antics of his bus and didn’t seem too concerned for the emotional well being of his few passengers either.  Up he went, slippedy-slidey all over the place, fighting for traction at every bend and occasionally sliding backwards.  And in case you haven’t got the picture quite clear in your mind, we were directly behind it.  Less and less directly so, I have to admit, as I allowed more and more slippage room between us and the beast, though ignoring the missus’s increasingly shrill calls to pull in and let it disappear out of sight.  All was well.  The bus made one final slide against the old city gate as it waddled through, the road flattened out, and off it sped.  The rain stopped and we found our hotel – actually a palace, but enough of that.  There was no more rain for the next five days.  It had simply been arranged for us to have this elaborate and faintly absurd entrance into town, I’m sure, and I spent the next few days looking forward to meeting the Mayor of Segovia so I could thank him.

The journey back was on even quieter, even hotter roads.  At 33C in the shade, it was considerably warmer on the burnt plains as we retraced our steps.  We had got back onto the autovia between Salamanca and Cuidad Rodrigo, where elaborately painted cows grace the side of the road, when we saw the first sign to Portugal. 111 kms to the border, it said, and we thought that a very neat number.  The next sign said 77 kms and the one after that 55 kms.  Interesting coincidence of numbers, we thought, and I mentioned that we ought to have one that said 11 kms and another that said 1 km, just for good measure.  And we did.  Was that deliberate? we mused.  As we crossed the border the overhead auto-estrada signs in Portugal said that the time was 13.31, another oddity, while the temperature was 31.  It was beginning to feel a bit creepy.  I then remembered that the only bit of toll road we’d used, a tiny stretch on the A6 before Ávila, had cost the weird sum of 1 euro and 11 cents: €1.11.  There’s more.  We arrived back home five hours and twenty seven minutes after starting the engine in Segovia – I know that because I looked at the clock on the dashboard precisely at the moments of departure and arrival.  That’s 333 minutes, in case you haven’t worked it out.  And the total distance travelled since we’d left home? 1, 111 kms.

Creepy, I tell you.  Damned creepy.

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Elegy for a goldfish

Why is it that pets always seem to die on Sundays?  It’s been over ten years since the finest mutt in all the world, ever, died, and that was on a Sunday night.  The second best dog in the world died about fifteen years before that, also on a Sunday.  In between all that, two cats died on a Sunday, though another one – always a cantankerous old puss – chose a Wednesday at the vet’s to shuffle off the feline coil.  Even the Bassett Hound that belonged to friends of friends, a huge, sulky hound that I’d promised to look after while aforementioned friends of friends went on holiday, morosely made it until 15 minutes into Sunday before expiring in a series of tremors that must have registered on the Richter scale while in the back of my car while I was waiting at traffic lights in Fazakerley, Liverpool.  The police car drawn up beside me had in it two uniformed policemen who observed the midnight spasms of the giant pooch, but they wisely decided against intervening, and sped away before the lights had even changed.  Possibly they remembered they’d left the kettle on.

This Sunday it was the turn of the little goldfish.  I know it’s not usual to mourn the loss of individual fish (we usually wait until we’ve wiped out a whole species before we do that) and, let me be honest, I eat enough fish in a week to be considered a mass murderer, but let not the passing of this small creature go unrecorded.

Until two years ago I gave no more thought to goldfish than most other people.  Little orangey things they were, that swam around in circles in bowls and who were well known for their short memories and for being prizes at fairgrounds.  So what?  It’s not as if we can bond with fish like we do with other pets – it would be counterproductive, for example, to take the fish for a walk, or to sit in front of the winter fire and stroke it upon one’s lap.  No fishy purring to be gained that way.  No finny sprints after sticks in the wood.

The missus had been given a goldfish by some weird company she did business with who thought that giving people live fish for Christmas was an acceptable thing to do.  She hid the wee beastie at work for some weeks before bringing it home.  She knows I take animals seriously. My position on this is that if you are going to take care of animals – whatever they are – then you should either do it properly or not at all.  Predictably, then, I was outraged at the cartoon-like round bowl the poor thing was trapped in, did my research and bought a proper tank with pumps and filters and lights and things.  And a kit to test the pH of the water, and another to test the nitrates and another to test the ammonia levels.  Doesn’t come cheap.  The fish looked awfully lonely in this big tank, so we went and bought it a companion.  It was the companion fish who has just died.

The fish – which was only ever known as ‘little fish’ (you may now easily guess the name of the other fish) was, of course, the one that got bullied by the other but also the one which displayed innate cunning and a distinct sense of humour.  Oh yes, this was a fish who knew a good practical joke when it saw one lining up.  Like it’s bigger companion it quickly got to recognise our voices and developed a set of endearing party tricks when it thought that a feed might be on the way.  Being a goldfish it thought that a feed might be on its way in almost any daylight hour.  That’s how they are.

The pair made a fairly decent comedy routine, with the little fish playing the straight man, leaving the showing off and the antics to his bigger companion.  I could swear that, at times, the little fish would glance at me after his mate had done something foolish, like dislodge all the aquarium plants, with a look that clearly said ‘Tch!  You can’t take him anywhere.’  You might say he was the quiet thoughtful one.

A couple of days ago he got sick and started to ignore food and slouched near the bottom of the tank.  His bigger, flashy companion took to pushing it up to the surface to eat – or at least, that’s what it looked like.  He certainly carried his ailing companion on his back for a bit. Googling for all known complaints for stressed goldfish didn’t help.  It wasn’t Ick and it wasn’t ammonia, nitrite or nitrate poisoning (we checked). We discovered an extraordinary and almost surreal website called, I kid you not, Goldfish Emergency 911, and we asked the young man at the pet shop.

I rummaged around in the garage for the older, smaller aquarium to convert into an emergency hospital room.  Little Fish seemed to revive for a while in the special solution we had prepared and floated in the last rays of the sun as they shone through the window into his hospital tank.  Then, as the sun sank, so did he and then followed a rapid decline.

So, goodbye Little Fish, and thank you for your winning ways.

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In or Out? Just where is the foot?

‘Ha,’ said the son recently, responding to something I had said, ‘there speaks someone with one foot out of the door.’  And dammit, he was right.  The son is pulling me up and re-orientating me more and more frequently these days.  Clearly the onset of my dementia is further advanced than I had thought.

He was, of course, referring to my almost imminent departure from the British Council, which will happen in ten weeks, three days and twenty hours at the time of writing (not that I am counting, of course).  It has made me think about other departures and other times, of course, because I’m of an age when there is a great deal more time behind me than in front of me and so, like everyone else, I tend to dwell on where time is more generous.  In my youth, time was what we all had in front of us and we looked to the future with a mixture of courage and fear (which are actually the same thing in different packages anyway) but mainly anticipation.  Now, though, I’m at that point when decrepitude starts to wave its gnarled stick and when the future has a shorter attraction (though attraction there is) and the past seems lovingly enticing, golden and warm.  Yes, I know it’s an illusion.  Don’t spoil the story with facts.

Being positive (for a change) it is possible to see each departure as an arrival.  When you leave something you obviously move onto something else, which ought to be an encouraging way of seeing how you’ve grown and developed and moved on from where you were to where you are, or where you’re going to be.  Here I’m thinking about moving on from one job to another – there are lots of other departures and arrivals that I shall leave for a grisly autobiography which will be written only when I’m terribly old, bitter and cynical (clearly a long way away yet).  Yet looking back on ‘jobs I have left’ the most fun ones were the temporary ones – as a student or filling-in time – but that is probably because I knew they were temporary at the time.  For example, being a bus conductor and then a bus driver with Eastern Counties in Cambridge was one great hoot, and I particularly like the Thursday afternoon run on the 102 from somewhere in Chesterton into town when a large gaggle of old ladies would get on the bus and I employed my professional role as a conductor to lead them in community singing.  This was not approved of by the Inspector who once got on the bus during one of these riotous occasions, but he was harangued off the bus – a mighty double-decker full of singing septaganians – by the old dears in sensible shoes and don’t -mess-with-me hats.  It didn’t do my job prospects much good, that incident, and that Inspector then took it upon himself to track me down in all my misdeeds from then on (though my last memory of him was him stepping backwards off the rear, open platform of the 1960’s bus – as we all did in shows of bravado and stupidity – while the bus was still moving, only to descend into a lake-like puddle that had formed in the road, just as the back wheels of the bus splooshed out a rather large quantity of muddy rain water, soaking him from head to foot.)

I’m not sure, but I think I have had something like twenty temporary jobs, or jobs without proper contracts, but the job on the buses was amongst the best, topping the list along with being temporary ASM with Ballet Rambert and working at in Abbey Road recording studios in a variety of guises, including adjusting the sliders on the mixer desk during some of the recording of the Beatles ‘White’ album.

But none of that was engaging in departures and arrival: it was all about building experience or filling in time.  The big changes were the things that appear on my CV, which makes a jumbled reading.  My CV has caused me problems.  Too many changes, too many jobs. Until more recently, that is.  It used to be the case that you were expected to be more or less faithful to a career, or even a company, for very long periods of time, and redefining your career in your own image was not an acceptable way to carry on. Not unless you were some kind of hippie or, even worse, artist.  Well, I aspired to being an artist: I had the training, I had some talent, I had some of the temperament: I didn’t spend three years at the Royal College of Music for nothing. To me, the course of my ‘career’ has been a very connected process; it’s just that it doesn’t fit into the career path view of most industry managers (as all bosses seem to be these days).  It’s all a matter of perspective.  From a narrow point of view I have jumped all over the place – a state school teacher, an FE Lecturer, a Special Education teacher, an education project manager, a peripatetic music teacher, a children’s play organiser (when Adventure Playgrounds were THE thing), a materials writer, a community education worker, a voluntary community services manager, an ELT teacher and the rest.  But from a broader point of view, of course, it all fits neatly into two categories that help each other to grow: education and the arts.

In this respect, though I have worked my way through many farewell dinners, or drinks down the local pub, almost everything I have done has led to the next learning stage so I am in the odd situation of finding myself with more arrivals than departures.  It seems I keep arriving somewhere new, but I don’t really seem to have left the somewhere old.  It would appear, then, that although the son might well be accurate about his old man having one foot out of the door, from my point of view I suspect that what I really have is one step inside the (next) door.  Time will tell, as always, but in this case that is only, oh, let me see, ten weeks, three days and nineteen hours now.  Not that I’m counting, of course.

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