State of Alarm - day Forty Eight

Another gloriously warm day. I was a little slow getting started this morning with a load of washing to do after breakfast, and then had an unexpected call from Owain just as I was about to set off on my morning walk, which put me behind schedule, not that it matters that much. There aren't many walkers out. More people go about business in cars on weekdays, it seems to me. Having completed this week's Bible Study last night, I recorded and edited it after lunch then emailed it to Dave for uploading.

I then drove up to the recycling point with a month's worth of sorted stuff to dispose of in the neatly ordered receptacles near 'Es Cuco'. After that I completed the second half of the day's walk. Rosi told me to look out for wild orchids, which appear at this time of year, but no luck so far, though I do see new flowers emerging which weren't there a month ago.

After supper, for a change, I relaxed on the bed, listening to the Leningrad Symphony number 7 by  Shostakovich, written as a memorial to those who died during the three year Nazi siege of city, over a million civilians and several million soldiers on both sides. I was fascinated to learn that it was performed in the city under siege in 1942, and that a microfilmed orchestra score was smuggled to the USA and performed there live a few months later under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. It is still performed in the city's cemetery in honour of the 600,000 war victims buried there. Great music in every sense of the word. 

I wonder how the world will remember covid-19 pandemic victims once monitoring, treatments and vaccines are universally available? It may be slowing down, but it's far from over. We have yet to see the impact this will have on very poor countries. Will it end up being as high as the fifty million victims of the 1918 pandemic?

   

Ascension up-country and an Artsenal concert

On his last visit, Owain accompanied me to the service in Salinas, and we continued afterward to spend the night and following day in Grenada. This time, he was content to have a lie-in and then go for a swim, so I set out for church at ten thirty, spent a while chatting with people arriving for the service at St George's, then set off for Salinas. using the back street route through La Meced to get to El Molinillo to follow the east bank main road along the rio Guadalmedina to reach the A45. Once again, this itinerary led to a set back, as a street linking the barrios was blocked by a cement pouring vehicle with no diversion signs in place. I had no option but to double back and take the longer route out to the autovia via the Avenida Andalucia. How frustrating!

Apart from that, the journey was uneventful, and unlike my other two Salinas trips, there was no rain just bright sunshine all the way. Much of the large parking area opposite the chapel was occupied by a big tent. It's the weekend of the San Isidro Laborador fiesta as well as Ascension Sunday. Inside the chapel entrance was a processional trona with the image of San Isidro from the side altar at the back mounted on it, ready for action, some time later in the day, I guess. A few families were setting up tents or canopies among the olive trees adjacent to the building for their festive picnics.

Today only half a dozen worshippers turned up, a third of the usual congregation. The entire choir and its leader was absent. Instead of the church being open at midday for choir practice, it remained locked until twenty past, which made me wish I'd gone to the toilet at the service station en route, where I stopped for petrol. A couple of visitors from Alicante turned up, and learned they were over an hour late for the Catholic Mass of the day. I was pleased to have an opportunity to speak Spanish with then, but they didn't stay for our service.

It was only after our Eucharist had begun that I realised that the reading which had been prepared and printed were for Ascension Day and not for Ascension Sunday, which I'd prepared for, and this meant I had to improvise around what I'd prepared to preach, not satisfactorily, from my perspective. This caught me off guard unfortunately. Singing everything unaccompanied was something I'm more used to thankfully. Afterwards, all the worshippers made for their cars, and there was no suggestion of retiring to Manolo's bar. I guess it might have been much busier than usual too, on account of the fiesta. It meant I could return immediately to Málaga to re-join Owain for lunch, however, an hour earlier than expected, and this compensated somewhat for the mishaps.

Later, we walked over to Artsenal at Muelle Uno to hear a live performance from a digital music artist from Madrid called 'Looping Greice' (aka Gracia Texidor). She relies on minimal percussion voice and occasional guitar to construct a live digitally recorded backing track against which she sings. It's a remarkable technique, which she's polished to create a sustained consistent performance. Here's an example from YouTube, and there are others! The sound system at Artsenal is very good, although an outdoor venue with people casually coming and going is less than favourable to a solo performer. Yet, she managed to hold an appreciative, if dispersed audience for an hour and a half, with nothing more than a bottle of water for sustenance. I'd like to see her perform in a club venue in her home setting, where the energy she emits would be less dissipated.

We then returned to La Malagueta and finished the day with a drink and tapas at Restaurant Flor across the road from the apartment, and talked over a bottle of once until midnight yet again. Not a good idea when you have an early start, but at least, when he gets back to Bristol Owain will have the rest of the day to recover as he doesn't work on Mondays. We both wish he could have stayed longer, even if neither of us could sustain the weekend's pace of stimulus for much longer.

Patronal Sunday

Although St George's Day is tomorrow, we celebrated him as part of celebrating the Easter mysteries this morning. After the Eucharist and fellowship time, I met with two of our adult candidates for Confirmation for a session about prayer. This was, as I suspected it would be, less than easy, as their everyday life is conducted far more in Spanish than English or their mother tongue. They can speak English and participate well in services, but engaging in discussion on a new topic, is another thing altogether. I needed to keep checking that my questions had been understood. It made me realise how out of practice in teaching I am nowadays.

After a late lunch, I walked to the port alongside Playa La Malagueta, and was surprised to discover another street market, selling clothes, jewellery, trinkets etc., about fifty stalls altogether. It looks a bit more downmarket than the extensive stylish array of stalls along the port, but clearly there's going to be demand, even before the peak holiday season arrives, as the beach is full of weekenders.

Down at Muelle Uno the market stalls there were also busy, and the Artsenal was hosting a couple of DJs with a live guitarist jamming together on the open air stage, and there was hardly an empty seat around the bar or the performance area. I took the opportunity to walk through and take a look at some of the 'alternative' sculptures and paintings on display. A striking and disturbing painting of a naked woman, hands bound, wearing an anonymising face mask caught my attention. It portrays symbolically the dehumanisation of women and children trafficked, enslaved by prostitution and pornography, reflecting Malaga's current theme of community solidarity with abuse victims, which provocatively overlaps with this weekend's Festival of Spanish Film.

Later in the day, it clouded over and there was a lengthy outbreak of thunderstorms with wind and rain, as it got dark. I had a grandstand view of this, sitting in the lounge. Slowly the weather is getting decently warmer, but not without protest it seems from intermittent bouts of cold damp air, afflicting many other parts of western Europe also.

  

Malaga Summer Festival Movies

I had two loads of washing to do this morning, a sermon to complete, and a couple of documents to prepare. Also I had a brief video chat with grand daughter Jasmine, who is over from Arizona for holiday travel in France and Britain with her Dad and Stepmother. She had not long arrived to stay with Clare in Cardiff, before going together to Kenilworth, so that cousins Rhiannon and Jasmine can spend the weekend together. They get on so well together. It's sad that they live so far apart.

Apart from shopping, I didn't get out of the apartment for a walk to the port until sunset. An event was just concluding on the Artsenal stage, and a setup crew was struggling to erect and secure a large inflatable cinema screen on the open patio above. Rows of white plastic chairs, seating for a couple of hundred was already laid out, and were rapidly being occupied. 

Tonight is the first of a series of free open air movies to be screened at different venues around the city under the title 'Cine abierto'. The movie? 'Hunger Games: Sinsajo Part 2', a fantasy genre of which I know nothing. Spanish subtitles accompanied Spanish dialogue, to compensate for lack of acoustic enclosure plus background noise from traffic and distant muzak from shops. Perhaps it would have done me good to stop and watch, but the first few minutes seen failed to arouse interest, so I strolled back to the apartment, and settled for an early bed time instead.

Night music

I didn't sleep much. Clare's alarm went off well before mine, so I cancelled it. We left the apartment to retrieve the car from the cemetery at four fifteen, and by twenty to five, after driving through empty streets with most traffic lights showing green, we were hastily kissing goodbye, whilst coping with new drop off parking arrangements I wasn't prepared for. 

Very short stay cars must now take a ticket and get corralled into the multi storey parking complex, level with the departure hall, and you get fifteen minutes for free, though the system isn't clear as to whether you must validate your ticket before leaving within the free time, as you must when you need to pay. I was able to drop Clare off as close as possible to the entry where Terminals Two and Three meet. This is convenient, as Vueling check-in desks are opposite this entrance. She had all the time to spare she needed, and texted me progress reports until she arrived in Cardiff.

As I drove back, still two hours before dawn, the new moon was rising over the horizon, an orange sliver of light in dust laden darkness, hanging above the Avenida de Andalusia as I drove eastwards back into the city centre. A wondrous sight. I went back to bed and made up some of the sleep I'd lost, though not enough, and passed the day pottering about until it was cool enough in the evening to do some food shopping, and then go far a stroll along the Palmeria de las Sopresas.

A bassist and a singing electric guitar player were busking at the start of the open air sculpture display. I think they were singing in Portuguese. On the open air stage of the 'Artsenal' art-space, a jazz quartet was busy re-creating the music and ethos of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelly in the 1930s Hot Club de Paris quintet. The violinist, apparently classically trained, learning how to swing, was using sheet music when she wasn't improvising. The two guitarists and bassist were using tablets showing chord sequences for tunes. It sounded pretty authentic, despite lacking the third guitarist. Each evening I go down there, something different is happening live. What a treat.
   

Unexpected Windows wobbles

Late last night, we walked around the port and ended up again at 'Artsenal', where a 'Poetry Jam' was taking place. A succession of men and women of various ages came out of the audience, and spoke their own works, accompanied by two guitarists improvising a background accompaniment. It was pleasant to listen to, even if our understanding of the Spanish was limited. A gathering of this kind onm a hot summer evening, despite its contemporary setting, has a truly timeless dimension to it. This event could have occurred in any era over the past three thousand years. Wonderful.

Malaga was shrouded in sea mist with a topping of low cloud when we woke up this morning, so we made the effort to get out as soon as possible and climb up to the Gibralfaro Fortress before the sun appeared in full strength. Plenty of others were out with the same objective in mind. We toured the ramparts, and had a beer at the cafeteria before walking back down. In the largest open coutyard, a stage with sound system had been erected and couple of hundred black plastic chairs laid out, ready for a performance, probably this evening, although there was no information readily to hand to tell what this might be. 

It made me wonder if a lot more publicity, particular for nice performances here is done on line. If a ticked event was already fully booked, there'd be less need to advertise in a traditional way. This would also explain why little information in the form of posters about events is displayed in La Malagueta barrio about event in in the Plaza de Toros. Certainly any time I have sought information about the next event most likely to deliver us a reduced night's sleep, I've been directed to the ticketing website for bullring events, and more of a hunt is required to find a website delivering a full season's event diary. No information delivery system can avoid making assumptions about how best to serve its clientele, and that can lead to variations in difficulty when it comes to finding out what you need to know, when crossing boundaries of language and culture. Intriguing thought.

On our return from Gibralfaro, we walked to Mercadona to do our weekend shopping, then cooked lunch, and had a siesta. When I came to use the office computer to get my sermon printed off, it failed to start and went into repair mode. It stayed in repair mode for several hours, during which I went with Clare to the beach for her daily swim. The system seemed frozen in time, so I switched it off, a hard reset using the power button and re-started it, with the same result. I did the same again, pressing F8 at boot, to supply the various trouble shooting and repair menus. Same result each time, it was stuck somewhere in loading the Windows environment files, a repair job I could do nothing about without have possession of a Windows 7 system disk.

Having forgotten to make a copy to USB stick of my Sunday sermon, the original was inaccessible. So, I hunted down my digital toolkit, which currently includes a bootable copy of Ubuntu Studio on a Memory Stick. The PC booted this with ease. It was reassuring, as it meant the problem was not a hardware failure, but just a Windows 7 missing file. Then I was able copy the sermon file across to another flash drive, for transfer to my Chromebook. From there I could shift the file to my tablet, and read it from there tomorrow. The Bluetooth link on the Nexus 7 and Toshiba Chromebook both staid they were working, but refused to handshake properly after performing protocols correctly. If two Google devices have this kind of hassle, how useful is Bluetooth at any time. I emailed the file to myself, and got it to display satisfactorily, just before supper.

Later, I switched on the Windows 7 laptop again, and when it displayed the 'Repair' menu, I opted to go straight to normal Windows boot routine - much to  my surprise it worked normally. This meant I could print off my sermon after all, and take the machine through clean up and de-fragmentation routines, just in case.

Maybe the initialisation part of the boot routine threw up an error message calling up the 'Repair' menu because of some minute impact on the machine of heat and/or humidity. Maybe it's running too hot for its own good. It certainly gave me five hours of bother I could have done without on a Saturday. Amazing, nevertheless, how well the live boot version of Ubuntu Studio worked, to give me hope. Where it failed was in attaching the wi-fi module to the system, making it impossible to search for and download and install the Linux HPLIP driver package which so often delivers just what you need for a printer to work properly with no messing about. Ah well, nice try.

Glad that I had my little box of tricks with me to rescue the sermon file, even if, in the end, Windows 7 got around to working the way it was intended to.

A journey through Russian art

This morning, we walked over to the Paseo del Parque to catch a number 16 bus that would take us to visit a remarkable Malaga cultural institution, housed in one third of an imposing stylish 1920s building which was once a tobacco factory. Now it houses a major automobile collection in one wing, a tech' startup incubator in another, and an amazing art gallery in the central section. It houses a permanent collection of Russian art, with fresh exhibits from St Petersburg art gallery collection of 400,000 works from the past millennium.

After we got on the bus, a young lady carrying a microphone and a man with a video camera got on the bus. I noticed they were wearing bus company authorisation badges. Once we were under way, the camera was set to work, and the young woman started to address passengers enthusiastically and loudly, inviting them to be interviewed on camera and say what they love about the city. They got an equally enthusiastic response from travellers. I believe they were on an assignment from a local cable TV channel. It certainly made the bus ride a bit more interesting than we'd expected.

The exhibition we were going to visit focuses on the art of the three centuries of the Romanov dynasty, which ended with the 1917 Russian revolution. It was a huge illustrated guide to three centuries of Russian political and cultural history. Substantial if rather heavyweight on times, but an occasion to see a remarkable variety of art works without having to travel to St Petersburg.

Alongside this was an exhibition of the earlier works of Vassily Kandinsky, a Russian artist and musician, friend of Arnold Schoenberg. Kandinsky was born and bred in Russia, and lived there until after the revolution. The exhibition demonstrated how profoundly influenced he was by the colours and forms of Russian folk art and iconography. It was an excellent essay in art history.

The vast gallery space, in the upper floor of the old factory, with bookshop and restaurant are minimally furnished, making good use of glass walls, simply images and lighting. Best of all, with our pensioners' discount, we paid just eight euros for a double ticket, plus a menu del dia for under ten euros each. A great four hour excursion, with a travel time of twenty minutes each way.

Later in the evening, after sunset, we went out for a walk around the port, and found our way to the open air contemporary art gallery and bar next to the Malaga Pompidou Centre, called 'Artsenal' - a play on the word Arsenal, written with a 'no nukes' background logo, making the point that this area is a safe place for cultural 'weapons' to be displayed and safely stored. A jazz trio with a singer in the Billie Holliday style were just finishing their gig. Many of the audience were on their feet, jiving or dancing quickstep in front of the open air stage. All part of a laid back open air night time lifestyle which comes naturally to people in this part of the world.

As we returned to the apartment, walking past the bullring, the sound of a musical performance issued from within. Italian singer song-writer Franco Battiato was on stage, thankfully not as loud as last Saturday night's Queen event. Thankfully, when there events finish, there's not much noise or rowdiness in the streets afterwards. This city, this barrio, is such a delight to be part of, even if the humidity and heat are almost unbearable on times and drive sleep away.