The
Covid-19 statistics in Spain make sobering reading. We are now at the top of the league for daily
deaths and our total has overtaken that of China. With over fifty thousand reported cases of
infection the fear is that the situation will get worse before we see a
flattening of the curve and a distant view of a way out of this crisis.
And yet, my life goes on in the oasis of
assumed safety and normality of my home and I write this with the comfortingly
ordinary sound of the new robot mop making its stately progress across the
tiled floor of the living room; the dishwasher rumbling away to itself as it
goes through its own cleaning cycle; and the dregs of my first cup of tea of
the morning cooling at my side. But no noise
of traffic; no sound of overhead planes landing in Barcelona airport; no sound
of kids playing; no sound of workmen next door.
Catalonia is a noisy country and a large
part of social life is conducted outside the house. As an example, the dinner parties that Brits
have in their own homes where friends gather are more likely to be in
restaurants rather than in homes in this country. Eating at home in Catalonia is basically for
the family, not for friends. Restaurants
are the natural meeting places, together with bars, ice cream salons and tapas
haunts, so the isolation in homes is unnatural for a population that is
naturally gregarious.
That sociability could be part of the
reason for the number of Covid-19 cases here as football games and
demonstrations were allowed to take place at a time when more judicial counsel
should probably have restricted mass gatherings of people.
The large demonstrations that took place
on International Women’s Day on the 8th of March were an obvious mistake and it
is one of the many that the government will have to explain in the
investigations that are carried out after the crisis is over. The muddled thinking which led the government
of Sanchez to give advance warning of a future lockdown of Madrid while giving
those Madrileanos with second homes away from the hotspot of infection the
opportunity to decamp and spread the disease will also have to be considered
later when guilt is apportioned. The
government recognizes that it could have done some things better, but each of
its failures is directly translatable into unnecessary deaths.
Here in Castelldefels precise numbers are
difficult for me to find, though it appears that there has been one death from
Covid-19 of someone who was both old and who also had pre-existing illnesses.
The police and authorities have reinforced
their instructions that nobody should leave their homes except for the specific
reasons allowed, and have followed up this instruction by revealing that there
have been 171 cases of the police charging people with breaking the
restrictions here in Castelldefels!
Which brings me to the renovations next
door.
I have decided that the renovations are a
good thing. Not because of the noise: I
am not Catalan, I do not need constant hubbub as an essential part of my
national psyche, I embrace silence – unless it is leavened with my own choice
of music or conversation – and would prefer tranquillity rather than the musique concrète of inconsiderate
construction that transmits itself through the structure of our houses. No, I have decided that, in this time of
crisis (or Time of Crisis if you
prefer) that it is necessary to have an external focus for the animosity that I
feel about the restrictions of my present situation. I therefore, choose to transmogrify the selfish
and inconsiderate irritation of rich people trying to get richer by tarting up
a house near the sea for a profit, into something which is a piece of spiritual
blotting paper, soaking up my negative feelings and giving me a focus for my
hatred for all things that disturb my tranquillity, up to and including
Covid-19.
I am reminded of some novel or other that
I read years ago where the admiral or captain of some vast ship forced the crew
to make him a yacht while the fleet was standing-to or laying-to or whatever
ships do when they are not, as it were, shipping. The sailors were forced into producing this
craft for their superior officer and constructed it with much moaning and
groaning and with feelings of resentment.
When taxed with his unreasonable demands on his crew by a senior
officer, the captain explained that he had deliberately focused the feelings of
resentment on himself so that the crew could be united in a feeling of
unfairness and not starts bickering among themselves in the phoney-war before
action.
I also remember that when the
admiral/captain actually sailed his new yacht around the fleet the seemingly
hard-done-by sailors took inordinate pride in the fact that the yacht was
something that they had made and was ‘theirs’ as well as the admiral/captain’s.
Not an exact parallel, I know, but the
principle is the same. Possibly. It is also a justification for exploitation
as well, but then I suppose we always find way to make the intolerable prosaic
and acceptable!
So, I have, with a magnanimity of spirit
that does me credit, subsumed the sonic grit in my eye, into the wholeness of
my soul. Which is made easier by the
fact that the workmen next door have not yet turned up and it is so much easier
to be philosophical when the disturbance is not physically present. Let us see how I cope when hammer falls (yet
again) on concrete.
In a
similar way, my mother, in a never to be forgotten phrase (nor was she ever
allowed to forget it!) uttered when our household spending had reached the
astronomical level of £5 (!) a week, and my parents were discussing retrenchment,
said, “Right! That’s it! No more
mushrooms!”
The stunned hilarity of her
husband and son on hearing this credo, axiom or tenet of belief meant that this
cri de coeur was resurrected in a
variety of circumstances as a universal panacea when the way forward was
unclear. How to cope with The Cold
War? “No more mushrooms!”; Industrial
unrest? “No more mushrooms!”; Margaret Thatcher? “No more mushrooms!”
As a rallying cry, it may not have been
over-effective, but it did add to the gaiety of nations; well of that section
of the nation that included Dad and me, and grudgingly, my mother too!
It would be tempting to call my mother’s
emphatic statement of frugality a non
sequitur, but that would not be strictly true. Mushrooms have value, they are not
distributed free in the shops, but the value saved by spurning them as an
unnecessary expense is, shall we say, marginal: it is the old (dated) joke
about slimming where some trivial nutritional denial on the part of the slimmer
is likened to emptying the ashtrays on a 747.
I have been trying to think of the
literary technical term to describe the phrase my mum used: understatement
doesn’t really cover it; litotes or melosis?
Well, my mum was being sincere, not using deliberate understatement to
emphasise. Perhaps the term I’m looking
for is “woefully inadequate”!
However you describe the phrase, at least
for my mum, it gave a concrete ‘solution’ to a practical problem: too much
expense: cut mushrooms. Job done.
We all do it, a sort of variation of the
‘thumb in the dyke’ technique where something seemingly trivial, has an out-of-proportion final effect. We
hope. And this approach is probably more
apparent during times of enforced introspection, especially when they are
seasoned with personal peril!
We want a simple solution something that
is easily graspable, something comforting and achievable. Alas!
If only solutions to our present crisis were as simple as shunning
fungi!
My
pool circuits today were accompanied by the World Service of the BBC, as my
preference over Woman’s Hour. Don’t get
me wrong, I listen to Woman’s Hour with the best of men, but today the lure,
nay the addiction of World News from the BBC was the greater pull. So, I was able to trudge my walking-sticked
way round the water, listening with ever-growing pleasurable panic to the news.
In one of the gardens that I pass on my
peregrinations, a father and young son were running from the front garden to
the gate in the back garden as part of their exercise regime (this is directly
possible because our houses are hollowed out at ground floor level and rooms
start on the first floor) with a sort of determined seriousness.
On the opposite side of the pool and next
to the tennis court of the flats on our left, two small boys were playing a
form of tennis. Considering the racket
for one of them was about two thirds of his total height, he wielded the racket
with considerable skill, if not always accuracy.
With earplugs firmly in place one is
‘allowed’ to ignore other human life forms with impunity: which I did.
I continued my slow paced walk until I
began to feel a little weary and, just as I had decided to call it a day, the
smallest of the boys lofted the ball into our pool area. In fact, into the pool. As I had passed him on my circuit I could
only gauge the trajectory of the ball by vague World Service blanketed
mewls. I had no wish to be mean, but I
had an equal determination not to touch anything that the kids had touched and so I
(seemingly oblivious to all) walked out of the pool area and into my back
garden.
I rationalised my callousness by reasoning
to myself that all the boys would have to do was go back to their parents and
get another ball.
And, anyway, I have
spent my time characterising any person of a youthful disposition as a Plague
Child, and it would appear that my designation is now born out by reality with
Covid-19, as kids can have the virus, not suffer the consequences, but
effectively spread the infection.
Justification!
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