Fettling

I feel a deep calm this evening: I've been fettling the bike.
To be precise, I've changed the forks on the Niota, a process which wasn't quite as straightforward as it could have been, because it required me to change the headset as well, which involved some thumping with hammers as well as delicate spanner-work, but it all worked well in the end.

The concentration needed to do mechanics is bliss for me, I feel relaxed afterwards and peaceful. I've realised in recent months that i haven't being doing enough of it, in spite of having a battery of parts with which I could construct a couple of new bikes, if I put my mind to it.

On, and this morning I took the singlespeed out for a pootle, but I met Simon & mates just when I was about to return home, so my ride was extended by another hour. So I'm physically tired and mentally relaxed - is there a better state to be in, on a Sunday evening?

:0)

Latitude II : older women

Latitude is primarily a music festival, so Moonface & I spent most of our time listening to music of various sorts. I tried to listen to bands that I either hadn't heard play, or of whom I had good reports. I was idling around on Saturday afternoon, unsure of where to go, then decided to go see the Pretenders for old time's sake: after all, who'd expect anything decent from a middle-aged band that was punk in the 1970's?

But they were great. Chrissie Hynde, at 58, is now my heroine. She was outstanding on her guitar and out-played men thirty years younger than her; she sang and posed with the best of them, and I think that their gig was one of the weekend's high spots for me. Who'd have guessed? Her attitude was still aggressive and attacking, the lyrics stood clear, and the audience rocked along. She swore, she joked, she sang and played guitar. I couldn't have asked for more.


Then, top of the bill on Saturday night on the main stage, we had Grace Jones. She provided a spectacle rather than a concert but captivated her audience and sang & danced semi-nude for most of the gig. At 61? She's not my type, but she was certainly magnificent. There's hope for us all.

:o)

Latitude I

I spent the last weekend at the Latitude Festival near Southwold, and am still a little shaken by it. To be honest, I didn't have a great time. It's difficult to explain why, because I did like the music, and the poetry and the theatre and all the activities; yet I felt slightly on edge nearly all the time. Even when listening and watching a great band, there was a part of me that just didn't want to be there.

I suppose it was the ambience that hit me, I just found that the crowds were too much for me, for all that time. Perhaps only one day at the festival would have been fine. I liked bumping into people whom I knew, though. Perhaps I'm just a particular type of middle-aged middle-class person with a narrow social orbit. Although Latitude was in the far east of England, 350 km from home and seemed to be full of Londoners we met half a dozen friends from just around the corner from us in Bishopston, one of the men I cycle with in Bristol plus his girlfriend, and also a couple of my south Bristol friends / acquaintances. Then I met with two of my cousins, two of their children (whom I'd never met before), and my brother's ex-girlfriend. I think that I was only relaxed when I was talking with or in a group of people I knew. So socially the weekend was great, but I was still uncomfortable.

It's strange that I feel like this, now. When I was younger I was much more sociable and was completely unfazed by such crowds, but gradually it's become less and less of a pleasure. I must be turning into a grumpy old man.

I only went to Latitude because Moonface enjoys them so much. After my last experience at Glastonbury she has gone to many festivals either on her own or with friends, but we enjoy each other's company so I decided to try again. The other factor, I suppose, was the chance to meet up with my cousins from that side of the country; 250 miles is a long way away and I hadn't seen Kate for many years, and had never met Lydia & Darcy, her daughters.

So it looks as if Moonface will be going to the next few festivals without me, except for the odd day trip. She's got at least two more lined up for the rest of the summer - good for her.

*******************

On the plus side, I have decided what would make a good weekend for me: exploring a city, seeing some art & architecture, eating & drinking, then going to see a band in a pub or club afterwards. City breaks are generally fun, but I've never tied any music into the weekends: that might make them even more memorable and exhausting.

:-/

Two Dawns

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing.

I can still remember watching it live, staying up all night to do so. I was sixteen at the time, and my family didn't own a television back then, so I walked around to my cousin's house in the evening before and we stayed up all night to see the pictures on their black-and-white TV. I can remember Neil Armstrong fluffing his lines, and how this was not reported.

Strangely, my most intense memory is of the walk back home in the early hours of the morning, walking across the school playing-field all covered in dew, and watching rabbits eating & playing in the longer grass by the surrounding hedges. Rabbits were very rare, back then. It was only a dozen years or so since most of the rabbits in the country had been wiped out by myxomitosis and they were just beginning to re-establish themselves.

*************************

Forty years on, I stayed up all night to drive home this morning from the Latitude festival, 240 miles from Bristol, watching dawn breaking in the van's rear-view mirror as the tractor-like growl of the engine drowned out the nuances of the music on the radio. It was cool when we stopped for a break by the motorway services, red-pink skies and dewy grass.

There's a particular peace about watching morning arrive, when you've been up all night. It's a sense of quiet satisfaction, knowing that something has ween worthwhile - because otherwise, why would you have stayed up?


:o)

2nd -hand

As I'm something of a cheapskate with an eye for a bargain, I usually don't have any problems with buying goods or clothes in sales or second-hand. In some ways, I prefer to buy some clothes (not underwear!) from charity shops, as I know that whatever the source of my clothes, I make mistakes in sizing or style that I don't notice until it's too late to take them back to the shop. And I like the knowledge that I'm not just contributing to a big chain's profits, but to a charity.

The exceptions to this have been when I've been unemployed. For some reason, when I can't afford to buy new & quality out of income rather than savings, I don't want to buy cheap. I don't know whether this is due to pride, embarrassment or plain perversity, but it's what happens. Usually, when I feel skint, I can just stop spending on myself and live on reserves for a while.

Let's touch wood, and hope that I don't need to do that for a few more years.

:o/

Katyn

If I hadn't read about the recently released film, "Katyn", I'd not have paid much attention to this monument to war dead. There are so many of them scattered around Europe, that this would not have stood out except for its design and the explanation for it: the 22,000 Polish officers and officials executed by the Russians in 1940. But there it was, in bronze, the bound man with his hads behind his back and the hole in his head, with the angel of death above him. (That's not shown in the photograph) Reading, thinking, I realised that I didn't know the reason behind the massacre, nor the background to the Russians having Polish PoWs.

I frequently become annoyed at Americans who think of the last war as having lasted from 1941-46, and who don't know of the involvement of Russia, or who express surprise that British cities were bombed (The Blitz was the equivalent of a 9/11 every day for three months) and who think that they alone liberated France.

The story of Katyn made me realise that I'm just as woefully ignorant as anyone else: although I knew that Poland was invaded by the Germans in September 1939, sparking WWII, I hadn't realised that the Russians also invaded two weeks later. And I was surprised at how much the Poles I knew disliked Russia. It's time to revise my knowledge of the history of central Europe.

:o(

Relief & comparisons

I was rather nervous before going out to Wroclaw to meet Dorota, as the last time I had spent an extended weekend visiting a female friend, it had ended very badly and Kaa has not spoken to me since.

With regards to that Nancy weekend, I still don't know what I did wrong (if anything), as Kaa refused to say. That was a weird few days - thinking about it, it's now exactly two years since I flew out to Nancy to meet her and her man. I still cannot work out what I did to offend her, or why she wouldn't say what it was. The situation was surreal. At four in the afternoon of my last day she was happily scampering around naked at her brother-in-law's cabin by the river; by seven she was refusing to speak and had her face set with a scowl like stone. That was probably the worst emotional shock I'd had for years. It didn't help that I'd had a call to tell me that Moonface's mother had fallen badly and was in hospital.

But that's a long time ago, now.

Last weekend in Wroclaw was different. For a start, Dorota and I didn't know each other so intimately beforehand. We'd talked a fair bit when she worked in England, but that was in 2001. And we'd exchanged irregular emails since then, but nothing really personal - it was more of the sort of relationship that men have, I suppose; nothing too deep. So really, things could have gone very wrong but they didn't, and the opposite happened.

We got on very well, surprisingly well, and had such a good time. I'd been expecting Dorota to be there with her boyfriend but it turned out that he'd remained in Torun, and her working days were less extensive than we'd feared. This meant that we had a decent chunk of time every day to just spend chatting, walking around doing some desultory sightseeing and drinking beer. So that's what we did, and enjoyed it. Her work commitments meant that we didn't get on top of each other too much, so we coped better with the time we had and (I hope) extended a good friendship. So here's to her visits to the UK in September and possibly before.

:o)

Music?

Over the last few months, I've been feeling dissatisfied with the music I've been listening to, yet I couldn't work out why. Last weekend, I found out. Dot had loads of music on her phone, to which she constantly listened when we weren't talking; and she asked about the music on mine. And it seemed that 80% of it was just samey - I'd been listening to variants of the same old voices and beats and tunes for the last couple of years, and it had all gotten too much. Dot's phone-full was much more varied, from trip-hop to Portuguese fado to rai to Indian stuff.

Now I need to re-educate my ears with new music, and enjoy it again.

Perhaps the coming weekend at Latitude will help.

:o]

Wroclaw

Wroclaw is built around its islands, where the Odra used to run in rapids and split into many smaller streams which I guess once made it easier to bridge and the islands into secure places to live. Now the river is tamed and the city has extended, but its heart is still the river, the many small islands and the old town.

I enjoyed my stay there. Obviously for the company, the relaxed atmosphere, but it's also a good little city for a not-very-busy weekend break. The centre is pretty but typically central European, with not much to see beyond the reconstructed square and the many brick churches.

And there are lots of rather nice beer vendors in the main square, serving lots of drinks for very reasonable prices (so far as Brits are concerned). I must confess that I spent quite a bit of time there yet didn't get a hangover at all, which is unusual for me and beer.

It's unlikely that I'd choose to return to Wroclaw except for sentimental reasons, but I do want to go back to Poland as there seems to be much more to see than I'd expected, and the history is something which needs to be explored.

:o)

Family History

It's funny how circumstances prompt memories to surface. In this case, it's been my weekend in Wroclaw and an introduction to one of Dorota's favourite bands, the trip-hop Sneaker Pimps.

Wroclaw, much rebuilt, bears so many scars from its past. It was once a German city, extensively damaged during the war and filled with grey concrete in the communist area. That made me think of history. And the Sneaker Pimps were from Hartlepool.

****************************

In December1914 my grandfather was in the army and stationed in Hartlepool, with a sentry's job of guarding the docks, which were the closest port to the vast Durham coalfields which fuelled half of the British Navy. He was also courting my grandmother at the time so for the 16th December he asked to exchange shifts with another soldier.

There's a plaque to his comrade there, now.

The man with whom my grandfather swapped shifts was killed by a shell from a German ship offshore; the first man killed on British soil during the First World War. It should have been my grandfather. Life and death are a matter of chance, so often.


:o/

Weird

I'm in Wroclaw, meeting Dorota for a long weekend although she has to work for several hours per day even over the weekend which means that we've spent less time together than either of us would have liked.

But in a sizeable city, we've just bumped into each other by coincidence, twice.
Yesterday I was strolling back to my hotel through a park on the outskirts of the old town - and there she was, taking a break from teaching. She had her phone in her hand, half-way through sending me a text.

Then today, it was my turn to go somewhere for my lunch so I walked from my hotel to another small park on one of the many islands. Just as I was about to sit down, there was Dorota, with her crocodile of students all heading off to another lecture at a church.

To meet by chance like this not once, but twice was just so strange. What were the odds? Thousands to one against?

But it was lovely to just say "Hi" to her again during the day.

:o/