It
has taken a pandemic to shut our bloody neighbours’ noisy reconstruction
efforts. The silence of their absence is
absolutely delightful, though it doesn’t compensate for the intolerable
thumpings that have characterised their reformations.
In fact, we now have a silent cordon sanitaire as the neighbours on
one side only use their house for the summer holidays and on the other side,
the reformations make it unliveable for the owners while the work is going on
and the lockdown restrictions make it inaccessible. If we could only cause the terminal
laryngitis of the bloody rat dog of another neighbour, we could even be sort of
content.
Traffic that passes us on the main road is
at a minimum and there are few planes overhead.
For Spain, our surroundings are disturbingly silent – not for Britain
perhaps, but for us, certainly!
I am
missing my daily swim and am getting progressively more worried about the lack
of exercise that I am taking. Normally I
would use my bike to get to my swim and back and then use the bike for a few
shopping trips or whatever, so this enforced inaction is grating. This afternoon I was driven to Take Measures. I ventured out to the communal swimming pool
and made a number of stately circuits of the pool leaning on my
walking-stick. I was alone with only the
sound of a howling kid to keep me company.
Not literally, this one was in a flat next to our houses and I dread to
think what his parents must be going through, his being too young fully to
understand why his little life has been so suddenly cramped! Good luck to them. I did manage to get to my step goal according
to my watch, so I must be very unsettled around the house!
I will have to make circling of the pool a
daily chore because it doesn’t look as though the relaxation of the
restrictions on our movement are going to be any time soon.
If the UK is going to shut the schools and
cancel end of year examinations, it doesn’t really look too positive that our
little class in Catalan is going to be restarted before Easter. In theory our class could restart on the 30th
of this month, but that looks remote. I
think that it is unlikely that our class will restart this academic year, but
who knows what will actually occur.
The
PP and PSOE King (he was created by an agreement between the two political
parties and nothing was put to the people) made a broadcast last night. He said nothing about the continuing scandal
that engulfs him and his elephant shooting father about off-shore accounts and
kickbacks. But his shameless broadcast
did give the opportunity for right thinking people to show their disgust at the
corruption by banging our saucepans. It
is wonderful how much penetrating sound is created by the simple application of
wooden spoon to saucepan bottom! The
drive for an independent enquiry into the behaviour of the so-called king and
his even more so-called emeritus king father continues. The first call for an enquiry has been
rejected on what I think are obviously spurious legal trickery grounds, but the
parties of the real left are not letting a single obstacle stand in their way
and are trying again.
I think that the royal family in Spain has
lost a great deal of popular support.
The antics of the king ‘emeritus’ towards the end of his reign before he
was forced, by a surge of public disgust, to abdicate really did damage the
prestige of the family. The scandals
that have involved other members of the family with consequent jail time have
not helped. I am sure that politicians
will not put the continuation of the royal family to a public vote, but if they
did, I think that the royal family would loose.
I think it is also getting closer and closer with the British version
too, and when QE2 finally dies, the sobering prospect of Charles III will
concentrate the minds of a large number of erstwhile monarchists towards the
republican cause. I hope.
I
have started putting drafts of my most recent poems on smrnewpoems and that
gives me the incentive to write more.
That came out as seeming to be more of a threat than an invitation to
read! But I assure you it is the former.
Toni
is getting a trifle stir crazy with not going out, and it has only been four
days! Well, that four days is my
computation. Toni says that last weekend
of Saturday and Sunday is actually counted in the lockdown, but I assumed that
the lockdown was from Monday of this week. Toni was with his mother on the Saturday and
he came back to Castelldefels on Sunday afternoon, so his time in lockdown is
questionable. I am feeling quite chipper
about my enforced detention at home, and I have done a quantity of writing: if
nothing else confinement does concentrate the writing impulse.
Long may it continue.
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