Toni’s Name Day and the first time that somebody other
than ourselves has been inside the house.
The Family came down and, as we were unable to go out to our restaurant
of choice, we had a meal from the pollo a
last and so we had eight of us to lunch – the first time in well over
ninety days that we have had more than the two of us to a meal in the
house. And we touched elbows. Family members and we touched elbows! For a tactile people like the Catalans this
restraint is more than foreign!
As my
present world is quite small I tend to look at the ordinary things around me
and extrapolate from those to the general feelings of the population. So, while waiting for my turn in the queue
for the chicken I had time (a lot of time, the place is very popular) to watch
the way in which people queued. As the
trip to the pollo a last is a weekly event I can see weekly change in the way
that people queue.
This week
the queue was closer packed. Yes, we
were all wearing masks (and I had a pair of latex gloves!) but the proximity
suggests a further diminishing of the fear that the virus has over us. This suggests that on Monday most people are
going to assume that to all intents and purposes, the pandemic is over.
The progress in Catalonia might be real; it
might be self-delusion, we don’t really know because the amount of testing is
still limited. The government can say
what it likes and point to diminishing figures to support its case, but the
fundamental testing that might give us a more real picture has not
happened. We are still largely in the
dark about the true extent of the virus.
And those of us who think that we in in one of the groups at risk are
going to have to look after ourselves.
Although
cooler today with patchy sunshine, it was still summery and there were lots of
visitors on the beach and they were not physically distancing in the accepted
manner. This is still at the start of
our delayed summer and with people probably not taking foreign holidays there
is even more likelihood of extra visitors and even more likelihood of further
breakdowns in the already loosening system.
If I am
concerned about the situation here in Catalonia and in the UK, the news from
South America is much more disturbing.
Brazil is already a disaster the loss of life by the virus made worse by
the political viciousness of the demented president. A radio programme suggested that 50% of the
population of Argentina might be officially classified as “in poverty” in the
very near future. Other South American
nations are near financial collapse and so it goes on.
Trump seems
to have decided to ignore the numbers connected with the virus and is only
truly concerned with the numbers that he is likely to get in his idiotic
rallies. He is only concerned with his
re-election everything else, including the welfare of the country of which he
is the titular head. Populism is no way
to deal with the real problems of racism and viral infection and that is what
we have been cursed with at the present time.
At least I got some work done today, the next book is
developing nicely, though it is one of those ‘publications’ that might never
see the light of a pair of covers, but I am enjoying working on it!
No comments:
Post a Comment