Driving through Fuengirola you get the distinct impression that every builder and architect here was allowed to do "his own thing". If so they certainly did. Looking at the buildings individually, some of them are not too bad as far as designs are concerned, but all combined the overall impression is discord and chaos.
However suddenly you arrive at a place where the individual ambience is so strong that it negates everything around it.
One such place is the Plaza de Carmen, a mere 100 meters away from the Age Concern Charity shop. It is a small square, only covering the width of the lovely white chapel in front of it.
There are a sculpture and fountain in the middle and restaurant tables covering one third of the Plaza. A few trees provide small patches of shade around its perimeter and four black wrought iron benches invite those in search of repose and reflection (like myself).

Thursday I attend again the Age Concern social morning at the Oasis Bar, which is good fun.
Friday I go down to Fuengirola to help out at the Charity shop. Today there are only three of us, Marilyn (I met on Monday), Ann and myself. It is much quieter than last Monday, but still always 4-6 customers browsing through the shop and sales continue at a steady pace.
There are several males helping out, but they are all either bringing produce or taking it away by car. I am the only one I believe who is helping out in the shop itself. I get on fine with the ladies and they appear to enjoy my company too.

Microwave meals
I feel fine, but am still very weak where activity is concerned, which worries me. It is the result of two things I believe.
Firstly I have a craving for liquid food, especially soups, but don't eat much else except rice crackers. They have only the basic Heinz soups here (like tomato, chicken, etc), none of the great chunky soups they sell in Australia. (Since living in my apartment I only venture out 3 or 4 times a week.)
Secondly there are very few microwave dinners available here in the shops.
I talk to Ann (from the Charity shop) about it and she advises me to go to Iceland, a large English supermarket in Fuengirola, with (as its name suggests) lots of frozen ready made meals. Most of their produce comes directly from the UK.
So after the Charity shop closes I take a cab and go directly to it. I buy heaps of frozen meals there and take another taxi straight home. Will this do the trick ? Hopefully.
The local grocery shops have heaps of wonderful fresh produce, so I may go back and make my own salads again.   I notice Enrique (the Cometelo chef), carefully measures out 6 table spoons of olive oil, then only 2 table spoons of balsamic vinegar (plus some salt and pepper) for his most basic salad dressing, So I will try that too.

Sunday - Monday, November 19-20 2017 (page 323)

After many years I am reading again (in iBook version) 'Lust for Life', Irving Stone's wonderful biographical novel of Vincent van Gogh.
I can't help suffering with van Gogh as he struggles through the early years of his adult life.
First as an amateur preacher in Wasmes in the Borinage (Belgian coal district).
Then, by continually being rejected by the art dealers in the Netherlands when van Gogh tries to establish himself as a painter.

Vincent van Gogh used as subjects the ordinary people, like the miners in Belgium, the farmers, weavers and other labourers in Holland, even subjects in mental institutions, which he considered interesting. This was very much against the normal practice of the time where subjects were always rich, upper class people who could afford to buy the paintings.

Vincent van Gogh certainly selected his subjects on the basis of his own ideas and preferences. Although he did read quite a lot, van Gogh was almost certainly unaware of a similar trend in English literature at about the same time. Shifting from the previous general focus on the upper classes to subjects from lower social levels. The writer Thomas Hardy especially (besides crossing the moral boundaries of sexual relationships beyond marriage) championed the ordinary people of the land. It are farmers, wood cutters, trades people that feature in Hardy's novels, such as Far from the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders and Under the Greenwood Tree.

Irving Stone portrays very well the two major forces within van Gogh, his mind and his emotions. When these forces work against each other, such as with his love for his cousin from Amsterdam, he becomes desolate. When the two forces work together, first while being a preacher, then by becoming a painter, van Gogh is unstoppable.

The dual forces of mind and emotions are of course present within all of us. They act together or against each other. The intensity of this interaction depends on the nature of an individual. I personally can identify with van Gogh. In mid-life my emotions strongly directed me into studying music. Supported by my determined mind, it became an epic 6-year long struggle to succeed, but in the end I did. Perhaps only as a passable musician, but very well (and more in line with my nature) as an on-line music educator of, what many consider to be, world standard.

In van Gogh's painting, although strongly supported by his mind set to succeed, his emotions are paramount. Van Gogh (I believe) expresses not what he sees, but what he senses. This represents a seismic shift in art.
In the past painting where what you saw. Moods and emotions were conveyed by facial expression, body language, or by symbolism. No wonder that the Dutch art dealers rejected van Gogh's work, they still judged his work by the established norms from the past.

By expressing his view of the world beyond what can be seen (matter) to what he feels (emotions), van Gogh in a sense precedes an analog discovery decades later in quantum mechanics.
The smallest particles, such as electrons and positrons, which were believed to be matter are in fact vibrations.

The views expressed in this article are my own, not necessary Irving Stone's.

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© 2017 Michael Furstner