Best granddad. Or the worst

The best Granddad in the world opens the door
for Elliott to make all sorts of new acquaintances

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, wrote the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. To him, it didn’t matter whether you always held the same beliefs, only that whatever you believed, you endorsed it forcefully and upheld it energetically at the time you believed it. ‘Speak what you think now in hard words,’ he urged, ‘and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’.

Well, it seems that at the tender age of three, our grandson Elliott, who has just spent four days with us without his parents or sister, is a convinced Emersonian. Indeed, I suppose a purist among logicians might go so far as to claim that he falls into a fallacy, the excluded middle. 

It seems that I am either the best granddad in the world, or the worst, but never any of the little dull things in between.

The visit started well. There was the ice cream in the centre of the village of La Cañada, to which our street belongs (I like to think of the shops in the centre as ‘downtown’ and, since the pocket handkerchief of a square with the ice cream shop has the same name as Madrid’s great Puerta del Sol, clearly the village authorities feel the same).

Joy is an ice cream

Later there was the opportunity to make the most of the cherry season.

Or a bowl of cherries

We also went several times to the swimming pool. It’s not ours alone. We share it with fifteen other households, but that’s not many and we often have it to ourselves. 

It took a little while for Elliott to get his confidence back, after a year without swimming. We spent our time mostly in the kids’ area, which is reassuringly shallow. But we were able to get some good games going, when the best granddad in the world (definitely!) swung him around in circles with his feet in the water or supported him while he doggy-paddled around. The best was when he came and sat on my lap while I sat on the bottom of the pool. That meant I could move around with him in that safe position, to the delight of us both.

Enjoying the kids’ pool with Granddad

But, sadly, things turned much less satisfying that evening. He and I went to Burger King, usually a moment of supreme pleasure for him. But, maybe because he’d been to the swimming pool twice that day, he was tired. He barely touched his food, announcing that he no longer liked nuggets, an astonishing declaration from someone who had always previously been a great fan of them. Then, while waiting for his dessert, he headed back to the play area, something he loves taking advantage of while at Burger King. This time, however, though he dutifully removed his shoes, as specified in the instructions, instead of climbing up to the top of the construction in order to slide back down from floor to floor as he usually does, he just lay on the ground without moving.

Eventually, his dessert was ready. It was ice cream with caramel sauce on it, which should have been received with enthusiasm. Sadly, it had been served with a spoon stuck upright in it. 

‘You’ve tasted it!’ Elliott challenged me and started to cry.

‘I haven’t,’ I assured him, with perfect truth.

‘You have, you have,’ he repeated, tears now running freely, ‘I don’t want it.’

He pushed it away.

No amount of reasoning on my part could convince him to eat it, so I started preparing everything to leave. But, rather than throw out his ice cream, now melting away, I quickly ate it myself. After all, he clearly wasn’t going to. On the other hand, with hindsight, it occurred to me that it wasn’t a move liable to make my protestations of innocence – true though they were – any more believable.

I’d undoubtedly become the world’s worst granddad.

Just before things turned dismal:
this playground, as well as rides, has rocks, water, fish and turtles

Nor was what I think of as the Burger King Incident the low point of the visit. That came the following day. We went to a favourite playground of his, by bike, him in the kid seat behind me. Everything went fine until we were a couple of minutes from home. There’s a downhill stretch there so I was going fairly quickly. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think I hit a bit of a shallow pothole, causing the front wheel to rise off the ground and, when it came down on loose stones, to slide away from me, bringing us both crashing down.

Poor Elliott. He had a terrible shock and wailed to show it. Fortunately, and this was confirmed by a paediatrician later, he had no worse injury than a nasty graze on his arm. With the help of several people who came rushing over to our assistance and assured him he had nothing seriously wrong, it was easy, courageous boy that he is, to calm him down quickly. He stopped crying though I don’t think his view of his granddad improved at all.

Meanwhile, my left leg and arm were covered in blood. I took a look at the knee and thought, ‘oh Lord! That could need stitches’. A neighbour tried to patch me up with steri-strips but she was convinced, and convinced me, that I needed to go and see a nurse. The nurse re-did the patching but told me I just had to go to hospital. As I feared, that meant spending five hours in an emergency department waiting for treatment which, in the end, involved six stiches.

The only good side to all this is that we had, I felt, reached rock bottom. The only way forward now was up. Or so I hoped. And it turned out my hope was justified.

I took Elliott out for another bike ride the next day, but of a very different kind. He was on his own bike and, since it’s a little big for him, I trotted along behind him holding his shoulder so he didn’t fall. That was a far more satisfactory experience.

I asked that afternoon who the best granddad in the world was.

‘You,’ he said.

One way of looking at that is to see it as Emersonian non-consistency. However, I like to think it’s more a matter of not holding a grudge. And in my view, that’s a really good character trait.

By then, I wasn’t feeling too well, so I retreated to bed. But Danielle tells me that when she dropped him off with his dad at the station in Valencia, Elliott told him, ‘I wish I hadn’t gone on that bike ride’. 

That’s amazingly mature for a three-year-old. It’s also entirely legitimate. I share the sentiment and also wish we hadn’t gone on that bike ride.

All I can say is, ‘don’t worry Elliott, or Matilda, that’s the last time granddad goes out on a bike with a child behind him. I can live with the chance of injuring myself, but never again want to put either grandchild at risk.’

Something I’m sure Sheena and Nicky, their parents, will be relieved to know.

 

Saying it simply, sliding to a fall and getting home quickly

Because English is a Germanic language that has absorbed a huge number of words of Latin origin, often via French, it contains quite a few pairs of words meaning roughly the same thing, each from a different root. As often as not, the Latin-derived one is longer and more learned, making it feel more pompous, than the other, simpler Anglo-Saxon term. 

You can describe someone as parsimonious, a fine term of Latin root, or simply say he’s mean, which is simpler, shorter and means pretty much the same.

You can observe things if you want to make sure we understand that what you were doing was intense and possibly research-oriented, otherwise you might simply say you watched them. 

You might feel that someone else (though never yourself, of course) is mendacious, rather than describing him as lying. To express myself (or say things) in a more demotic (or everyday) way, I might say he’s a lying git. That’s how a Londoner (and I’m the son of a Cockney and an adopted Londoner myself) might characterise (or simply call) such a person. Now ‘lying git’ is just as long as ‘mendacious’ in syllables, though it’s shorter in letters and a lot more colourful.

For that matter, take policemen. In Britain, some of them tell us that they go out on foot patrol and proceed along various thoroughfares. We, on the other hand, might think of them as bobbies on the beat, walking down the street (which even has the merit of rhyming).

I’ve been suffering from an earache for some time now. Eventually my general practitioner (or family doctor) decided I needed to see a specialist. This being Spain, that meant having to visit a department of Otorrinolaringología. That can be abbreviated, as it is in French, to ORL, but I noticed that everywhere I saw the specialty displayed – say on signs directing me to my destination (necessarily quite long signs) – it was written out in full. 

To be honest, I find it almost impossible to pronounce that mouthful. Not just in Spanish, come to that. Oto-rhino-laryngology exists in English too. I’m glad to say, though, that the term is generally only used in technical jargon. In England, I’d have gone to see an ENT specialist.

That’s someone who deals with disorders of the Ear, Nose or Throat.

Even a mug can understand the problem

The visit itself went quite well. The doctor prescribed a new treatment which (I hardly dare say this) may actually be working. He commented on my surname – Beeson – which he rightly identified as not particularly Italian in origin, which is surprising for someone born in Rome. I was impressed not only by the lighthearted way he was talking to me – which I welcomed – but with the thoroughness with which he’d read my record. No other doctor has ever commented on my Italian birth, probably because they hadn’t noticed.

Indeed, the only setback, or rather downside, literally, of the whole experience came on the way to the appointment. We’ve had a lot of rain here recently and I can state, from experience, that a heck of a lot of the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Also it creates a lot of mud.

I was cycling quite quickly along a cycle path and didn’t notice the patch of mud ahead until I hit it, on a curve which I’d already started to take before I realised what was about to happen. What was about to happen then happened. The wheels slid out from under me, and I found myself horizontal when I should have been vertical. And splattered in mud when I should have been clean.

This kind of fall has happened to me rather a lot in recent months, which is a lot more than most other people I know who use their bikes regularly. Each time I think it’s down to my misfortune (or perhaps I should say bad luck), but I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m just accident-prone.

Anyway, the result was that I turned up or my appointment with a grazed knee and elbow and mud on my shorts and shirt. I decided not to mention the mud, and neither did the doctor or his assistant, which struck me as not just tactful but much the least stressful way of dealing with the issue.

On the way back, I asked Google to find me a route and display it on my phone. Now, there were moments along the route when I was in known territory and realised that there were better ways to go than it was suggesting. That might be only because they avoided travelling along motorways surrounded by traffic doing 120 km an hour or more (including lorries). However, and I appreciate that this is undoubtedly merely a subjective reaction of my own, when I take a different route from the one suggested by Google, I always have the sense that it’s somehow offended. Even when, to be fair, it really ought to know better. Indeed, even when it turns out that it really did know better.

At one time, when I turned away from the Google route, I could almost hear it saying to me, ‘oh right, you’ve decided not to take my recommendation that would get you home in 40 minutes, have you? On your head be it. Let me just recalculate. Your route, smartarse, will take you a full 32 minutes.”

Honestly. My route was quicker than what it had suggested. And it knew.

So here’s my question: if it knew that all along, why didn’t it recommend the quicker route in the first place?

Still, at least I got home in one piece and with no further falls. Which was fortuitous. Or, as we say in plain Anglo-Saxon, bloody lucky.

Cycling: once learned, never forgotten. Except for the tactical nuances

They say that you never forget how to ride a bicycle. It’s true up to a point: when we went for a cycle ride, up along the Dutch coast one way, back through the Dutch countryside on the return, the simple matter of pedalling and guiding the bike were, as ever, simplicity itself despite a year or two since I’d cycled anywhere.

From the length of that gap, you can reasonably infer that I’m not generally an enthusiastic cyclist. There are just too many hills. But since Holland solves that particular problem by basically having none, I was happy to get back into the saddle on this occasion.

By “having none” I mean that the clever app I used to map our route suggests that we started at an elevation of 11 metres and reached a maximum elevation of 19 metres. That’s a level of hilliness that I think of as acceptable.

No problem with the basic process, then. What I’d forgotten about was a key principle of cycling tactics. But I discovered it again, the hard way.

Not the Med or the Caribbean, but the North Sea has its charms too

We moved along the coast cycle path at a stimulating pace. Most of the way was in among impressive dunes, with occasional glimpses of the sea through pathways down to the beach. We even popped down one of them, to our considerable satisfaction We made such good time – I couldn’t believe how much better the hired bikes were than last time we used some – that I proposed cracking on up the coast trail right to pretty much the outer suburbs of Amsterdam. Then we could travel inland and down past water meadows and even see a windmill or two.

Sadly, what I’d failed to take into account – the cycling principle I’d forgotten – was the difference the wind makes. On the way up, it was at our back, and what joy it was to cycle in that direction!

Nothing to do with bike quality. Nothing to do with our mastery of the techniques. We were being pushed along.

On the way back, on the other hand, you can readily deduce, everything was reversed. The wind – and in a land of windmills, the wind’s more or less ever-present – that had made our progress so light and easy was now making it feel like a ride through treacle.

That was also when I discovered the downside of the lack of hills: there’s no shelter. The wind would drop while we were behind a run of trees and then, when we re-emerged, there it would be again, cruel, baleful, malicious and waiting for us so it could come howling across the wide expanse of flat, open land, with its canals and flower fields, lovely to see but painful to suffer, straight into our faces, unimpeded by so much as the slightest rise in the ground.

A good moment. Before the rain started

Cycling can be a joy. It can also be grim. And it was grim then. On the way out, I barely got below fourth gear out of seven; on the way back, I never went up above third and, to my shame, found myself repeatedly in first.

The weather saved a sting in its tail for us, too. Just as we got back to the village where we were staying, it unleashed a regular storm on us, accompanied by rain for our amusement. The last kilometre or so was all uphill. Not uphill by much, I grant you, but in those conditions, it felt like the Alpe d’Huez.

It was getting late. We didn’t know at what time the hire shop shut, but we could see ourselves stuck with the bikes overnight and, to add injury to insult, having to pay extra the next day for the privilege. Indeed, as we came around the final corner, we saw all the bikes and motorbikes had been cleared away from the front of the shop.

Still, I decided to take a closer look. To my joy, as I approached the front, I found a door open. They’d cleared away the display bikes, but two men were still waiting for the hired ones to come back. I headed towards them in some trepidation, expecting a ticking off for being back so late. It was with great relief that I heard their greeting as I pushed the bike over the threshold.

“Hello. You look wet. Would you like a beer?”

Wet outside, I was parched inside and the offer was immensely welcome.

A good touch, a touch full of the warmth we met from most Dutch people, and a satisfactory way to wrap up what had gone from a quiet day out to something more like an epic.

I told them about the tactical error I’d made. They laughed.

“Always go upwind first, so the return trip’s easy.”

Yes. That was a nuance that had escaped me before but I hope it won’t again.

“You could always take one of our electric bikes, you know.”

Excellent advice, if just a tad tardy. Still, I was enjoying my beer and I wasn’t going to complain. Instead I’d just try to remember another useful lesson.

We never did see those windmills. Still, they may have been there. When you’ve got your head down to avoid the gale and the rain, enjoying the view’s not a top priority.

Riding a bike: it's just like programming a relational database

There’s something gratifying about trying your hand at something you haven’t done for years, and discovering that it all comes back to you. You might only be as good as you were then, and that may not be saying much, but at least you’re no worse.

It turns out, to my amazement, that working with the Microsoft relational database system SQL Server is just like riding a bike. Well, if you exclude the wheels, pedals, saddle, handlebars and, naturally, Lycra. Or come to that the ghastly hills.

Actually, no, that’s not right. The hills are there. You keep meeting an Alpe d’Huez here, a Mont Ventoux there. They’re logical rather than physical, but no less daunting. Or exhausting.

The joy of cycling.
Or, alternatively, of the SQL Server Query Analyzer

One of the aspects that I like the most about my present job is its variety. Whether by design or merely good fortune, I’ve found myself in something of a firefighter role, where I try to leave well alone and only get stuck in when things are going wrong: the project that’s beginning to drift seriously off timetable or is facing a major setback. The kind of task that requires all those involved to get stuck in, roll up their shirtsleeves, get their hands to the pump, and mix metaphor clichés to their heart’s content.

Hence my dusting off of my SQL Server skills, such as they are, eight or nine years after having last used them in earnest. Or do I mean in anger? Often the anger of other people, especially those who had to clear up my errors.

It’s been like meeting of old friends again. Those glorious struggles with convoluted logic: if I want to know this, then I have to get that from here, and combine it will all of those from there. Heady stuff. Exhilarating.

I wouldn’t want to do it for ever. My colleagues wouldn’t want me to do it for ever. Or, indeed, any longer than absolutely necessary. But it’s fun until the next project comes up.

It’s all come flowing back. Just like riding a bike. But I have to say I was never a Tour de France rider. I never even attempted London to Brighton as a friend of mine recently did, exciting my admiration but none of my envy. No, I was strictly a local cyclist – you know, home to office, office to shops, that kind of thing.

Still, it worked. And my SQL’s working. And that’s gratifying.

Haven’t fallen off the saddle yet.

The rain in Spain

It’s always fun to test received phrases and sayings in practice.

Travel broadens the mind, I’m told.

This I’ve always taken as meaning that they do things differently in other places and visiting them helps understand that one’s own way isn’t necessarily the best, let alone the only one.

Sometimes, though, travel can reveal things to be exactly the same somewhere else. In a village, up in the mountains north of Madrid, we came across an English party over for a wedding. Spain in June: unbearably hot, flooded with sunshine, making a high-factor sunblock vital for health. Not hard to imagine what the happy couple were expecting.

They didn’t get it. Instead they, and we, found fine rain alternating with grey skies which would have felt like that most comforting of places abroad, a home from home. Except that England enjoyed superb weather over the weekend. 

The experience at least gave me the satisfaction of learning that the rain in Spain by no means stays exclusively in the plain. You can get plenty of the damn stuff up in the mountains too. Even in June.

We took advantage of the occasional gentle rain and the cool temperatures under grey skies to tackle a bit of a hike to a place called ‘the cascades of purgatory’. Interesting notion. The place is actually rather attractive, the waterfall impressive. The purgatorial bit is the eight kilometres to get there, including a 500 metre rise. 

The Falls
Not so purgatorial as the way to get there

The irony is that the walk took us two hours each way, admiring the falls about two minutes. As they say, what matters isn’t the destination, but the journey.

Danielle in the Sierra
Proving that the journey matters as much as the goal
and adding a splash of colour as vivid as the flowers she's photographing

Of course, once we’d finished the sixteen kilometre round trip – something good about that number, incidentally, since it just takes you into double figures in what I still shamefacedly regard as real money, working out at ten miles – my youngest son Nicky felt he’d barely scratched the surface of his need for exercise. So he went off to climb another mountain pass by bike, to ensure that he didn’t have a wasted day of it.

He was doing the same stuff today, though this time we went up ahead of him by car and could greet him, cameras at the ready, as he reached the top. 1796 metres above sea levels, after a 700 metre climb. And barely out of breath.

Hard to tell from the photo, but he's smiling

Watching him convinced me that every remarkable endeavour includes a measure of madness.

Nicky reaches the top.
He seemed disappointed there wasn't any more

That isn’t a received expression, though. I offer it as a modest contribution to the world’s stock of proverbial sayings. And at least I can attest to the truth of this one, from the behaviour of a member of my own family.