LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 14

The latest figures for the dead in Spain from Covid-19 in a twenty-four hour period are 832.  This is the highest figure of for a day’s deaths in Spain.  This is a catastrophe, and a catastrophe that people here are saying is partially of the government’s making.

   Last night the Prime Minister of Spain went on television and informed the country that there were going to be far more stringent restrictions from next Monday.  For a two-week period taking in Holy Week there will be a total ban on all non-essential travel and all non-essential premises will be shut down.

     It remains to be seen whether the renovators next door who have been (and are as I type) working normally and entering and leaving the workplace as if there was no crisis, will finally knuckle under and obey the restrictions.  These people are perhaps symptomatic of the problem, where some consider themselves outside the range of restrictions that are in place already. 

     The advice is simple: stay in your homes and wash your hands.  And it is frustrating when some people ignore it so openly.

Every evening at 8.00 pm there is the opportunity to show our appreciation for the Health Workers.  I open the kitchen window and clap into the darkness and hear others clapping too.  It is a moment of collective assertion of thanks and a poignant moment of community when we isolates are linked by a small but sincere gesture of thanks for the incredible job that our health workers are doing in circumstances that are less than ideal.

     I am still haunted by pictures of ill patients in Madrid hospitals laying on blankets in corridors; blankets! not even trolleys.  We have been told that many front-line health workers have not been tested; they do not have masks or the appropriate equipment to protect themselves from the virus; some are making their own protective clothing out of plastic bags; the hospitals in Madrid are overwhelmed; there are insufficient ventilators, and so on, and on.  Numbers of health workers have died and more will unless they are properly looked after.

     The government is accused of doing too little too late and is playing catch-up to the situation rather than managing it with any efficiency, and each mismanaged day brings new death, directly attributable to political mismanagement.

     I am not so naïf as to think that a crisis can be managed with anything approaching perfection, “events, dear boy, events” will always frustrate the most meticulous of plans, but some things are inexcusable.  The signalling of the future lockdown of Madrid, giving plenty of time for comfortably off Madrileños to decamp to their costal summer homes and spread the virus was unforgiveable.   And I hope that last word ‘unforgiveable’ becomes the major impetus when the inquiry into the crisis is started, when the virus has been finally vanquished.

Two weeks.  Just two weeks.

     It hardly seems credible that we have been locked in for only a fortnight.  The world where social distancing (a wonderfully evocative phrase) did not exist seems like another era of history, some exotic maelstrom of conviviality where people actually touched and kissed each other, some rumbustious Restoration frivolity, viewed with nostalgia from our Puritan isolationism!

     I suppose that I should be grateful that time, which seemed to be speeding up for me as birthday after birthday flashed by, has slowed down again.  I wonder how many weeks it will take, before this becomes the new normal and time regains its usual velocity!

The days are beginning to lose their character: weekdays are no different from weekends; what is the essential difference between a Tuesday and a Thursday when you are stuck at home? 

     If there seems a sort of stasis in one’s perception of the distinct individuality of the days of the week, there will be a ‘real’ difference in the individual hours, because today is the day when we change the clocks and get an extra hour in bed.  This, of course, is only possible if you are still indulging yourself by keeping to a mythical ‘working day’ timetable giving a façade of normality to the structure of your enclosed temporal existence.

    

I have to say that I truly regret the indisposition of Johnson as it gives an opportunity for the Grotesque Goblin Gove to speak to the nation.  The man truly makes my flesh crawl as his mendacious sincerity constantly deflects questions into a fog of verbiage that comes nowhere close to a specific answer.  I loathe his master, too, of course, naturally, but the Blond Buffoon’s shaggy, unconstructed showiness when it comes to English expression is easier to dismiss.  There is something adhesively repulsive about Gove’s loquacity that is more difficult to brush away.  It needs to be flushed.  And then disinfected.  And then bleached.

Tomorrow a theoretical lie in, but I am sure that my ‘absolute’ body clock will get me up at the usual time, for Day 15 and the start of the third week of Lockdown.