Baby steps to almost safety!

 

Well, it’s a step forward.

     Today I had an SMS from the health authorities informing me that I am part of one of the groups called to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and urging me to request my appointment to get vaccinated.  Which I of course did, except (isn’t there always an ‘except’?) in all the centres that I selected I was told that there were no appointments available.

     So.  How am I supposed to take this? 

     I have previously been told that I will be ‘called up’ in exactly the same way that I have been when I get my winter flu jab in, or under the supervision of my local CAP (Health Centre), through the receipt of an SMS.  Perhaps this pro-active approach is just to keep us quiet as we try (and fail) to get an appointment, but to make us think that “at least we are on the system, and that is a good first step, eh?”

     Let it pass that ALL my friends of a similar age in the UK (and those a damn sight younger) have ALL had their first jabs, and I do not even have a firm date for my vaccination. 

     Still, the centres’ vaccine availability is updated weekly, so first thing on Monday morning (after my swim and cup of tea) I will be re-entering all my information to try my luck at another round of Vaccine Jackpot!

     In a nice reversal of blame, it now becomes my fault that I have not been vaccinated, as the onus has been placed on me to find a centre.  To be fair, I have only tried those centres that are within a reasonable (however you define that word in relation to a pandemic) distance from my home.  And you could always argue that were I to be truly serious about getting vaccinated, then I wouldn’t be so parochial and I would willingly venture into parts of Catalonia that I have only heretofore seen on maps!

     Or I could wait for my CAP to call me.  I think that will allow another week of querulous prevarication!

     And at least I am on the system, and that has to be positive, doesn’t it?

 

 

 

While I had my swim (and cup of tea) Toni was able to meet up with his sisters and his two nephews.  This meeting took place at our almost-local Outlet, full of logo heavy shops selling still overpriced items to an ever-credulous public.  In which of course I place myself.  But, as I was occupied in ploughing my watery way up and down the 25-metre lane of the swimming pool, I was unable to join them.

     I am not averse to visiting the Outlet, in spite of the fact that it does not have a Wedgewood Shop – but, there again, where does nowadays – where I can vicariously indulge my mother-inspired love of china, glass and cutlery.  But there are limits to the shopping masochism to which I will willingly lend myself: to go to an Outlet with one determined woman shopper might be regarded as foolhardy, to go with two smacks of the sort of extremism that destroys empires!  And two adolescent boys! 

     Anyway, I didn’t go and given my lack of a vaccine (see above) I am sort-of relieved.  Both the boys and their mother have had Covid – and I’m not sure if that makes them more or less worrying for an unvaccinated person.  As with so many impulses during this pandemic, isolationism and a sturdy stance of anti-society isolationism is the better bet!

     But we have now had more than a year where the normal interaction in the family has been stopped, the celebrations of Name Days and Birthdays have been via Zoom and, I have to admit, thoroughly unsatisfactory.  The joint visits to the beach have not taken place during the last summer and, given the rate of vaccination in Catalonia it looks more than likely that they will not take place during this summer (when we finally get to it) as well.

     Spain has said that they are thinking of delaying the second jab follow up to the AZ vaccine to 16 weeks after the first jab: that means 4 months.  Given that tomorrow is May Day, that means that given the delay and the time necessary for the two jabs to come to full strength, it is going to be well into September until this tranche of people is fully vaccinated. 

     I am in Group 5C and it is only today that I had the invitation (not an appointment) to try for the vaccine – so, if I had the injection tomorrow on May Day, it would the beginning of August before I was fully vaccinated.  And I am not getting the vaccine tomorrow!

     The projected timetable for full (70%) vaccination for herd immunity here in Catalonia looks ever more optimistic!  And are we seriously going to be welcoming tourists into our Covid hot spots during the summer?   

     Commerce is driving out sense!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's character building!

 

Man, and boy, I have worshipped at the shrine of The Gadget .

What luck is has been that I am someone who has seen the advent of the True Electronic Age with the invention of the transistor and its dissemination through society and useful (and otherwise) machines.

Sitting at my desk and without moving things out of the way, I can see a plethora of machines and gadgets.  Let me confine myself merely to the surface of the desk.

The so-called Old School gadgets: stapler, Sellotape dispenser, stapler remover, pens, pencils, markers, scissors, paperclips, rubbers, etc

Electronic: digital web radio; Mac Computer,  Bluetooth keyboard, ditto mouse, Bose mini Bluetooth speaker, studio microphone, digital led lamp with USB connections, telephone, new smartwatch for a present, electronic flashlight, cables, connectors, batteries, battery charger, power points and plugs galore, printer, removable hard drives and on and on.  And I’ve left some of the things out because such a mass of things becomes rather embarrassing when you list them!

The number of computers that I have owned is little short of astonishing in all their forms from handheld, through portable to desktop.  I have loved them all and have willing accepted the cruel price that dedication to the computer has demanded in terms of lost time in front of an unresponsive screen when programs simply didn’t work or went wrong at exactly the wrong time, in spite of the pleading that all of us have done to the harsh masters of plastic and glass when they decided not to cooperate.

I am not afraid to admit that I have wept tears of pure unalloyed frustration in front of dead computer screens, when I had put all of my digital eggs in one fickle electronic basket.  But I have kept on, keeping on.

And let’s be fair, modern computing is nothing like it was in the Dark Ages of thirty years ago.  Things generally go well.  Delays are minimal.  When you consider that with one of my early computers, the Sinclair QL, I had to wait up to a minute for the machine to save one A4 page of typing – and you could do nothing but wait while it saved – the microseconds that you wait for small documents to save nowadays is little sort of miraculous.  And programs (generally) work and there is a logic behind operations that you are (usually) more than capable of working out.  Life working with computers is (generally) good.

Which brings me to today.

And banks.

I am in the process of buying a new bike and, for reasons too complicated and irritating to go into, I had to pay for the bike by getting my bank to send the money in US dollars to Hong Kong.

The money was sent off.  And eventually the bike makers plaintively asked where it was.  The money had been sent god know where, but my bank did not see fit to let me know that the payment had been unsuccessful. 

When I went to the bank a second time to find out what had gone on, I was informed that the money had been returned and would I like to try again to send the money to the manufacturer.  As the manufacturer had, by this time, sent me a photograph of my bike packed up with my name on it waiting to be shipped, I said that would be a good idea.

So, the money was sent off and successfully reached its destination.

 

But.

 

I was charged 22 Euros for the original sending of the money.

I was then charged 22 Euros for the money to be returned.

I was then charged 22 Euros for the money to be resent.

66 Euros for payment of a printed invoice!

This is an on-going case!

 

However, I had another bill to pay, this time to a firm in Barcelona and I was determined that I would not be caught in the 22 Euro trap of getting a bank teller to do the transfer of funds – I would use the digital aspect of my bank to do it myself.

It took half the morning and a fair part of the afternoon to get things organized.  I could, without too much difficulty, get into my account online.  I even managed to input all the details necessary to pay the debt, it was just the final part of the transaction that let me down.

It was not enough to use all the security to get into the account to make things safe, there was also a mobile phone app that acted as a sort of digital signature.

I am not, for the sake of my sanity, going to itemize the number of times that I went back and fro, from computer to phone, copying and pasting various security numbers (“Only valid for 5 minutes!”) to get some sort of mystical authorization so the bloody money could be paid.

In the course of trying to get things done, I utilized the menu help, the automated digital assistant and anything else that I could click on.  Nothing worked and I found myself in a Circle of Authorization of the Damned, repeating various SMS routines and getting precisely nowhere.

I eventually, through a process of elimination, clicked on a link to a named individual who was apparently my Personal Banker.  I asked for help and nothing happened and so I gave up.

And then the phone rang and, to cut a long story short, after a confusing conversation I was given Another Way to try and it worked.

 

My point is that things were difficult when they should have been easy.  In spite of my dedication to things gadgetful, I was still left hanging.  And re-living the frustration of years ago.

If I think about it, years ago I would have written a cheque and put it in the post.  Job done.  When is the last time you wrote a cheque?  You are not given a cheque book in Spain.  If you need a cheque you have to get the bank manager to sign one and they cost a fortune!

So, although on my digital account I can see every payment and get details of when and how much has been taken from my account; I can see pretty graphs of my expenditure; I can sort and search, it is just all there to compensate me for the fact that some things were easy and are now complicated.

But, and this is the real lesson that one takes from the digital experiences that bloody one; the next time it will be easier and I will be able to take advantage of the glorious possibilities that digital banking offers.

Such self-delusion is the way that we keep sane.

Words are important!

 

 

Still no indication of when I am going to be vaccinated.  My group has been prioritised in so far as we are told that efforts are being made to vaccinate us, but we have also been told to be patient we are at the younger end of the tranche.  Which of course, I am.

     The galling thing is that, had I still been in the UK, I would have been vaccinated by now.  I always told myself that my probable jab date would be in April, but it looks likely that my first jab will now be next month.

     I do have an alternative: to go to one of the mass vaccination centres and I did get as far as filling out an on-line application, until I found that the nearest centre is rather further away than I am comfortable with.  But, I have also decided that if I get no indication of my chance of a jab by the end of the week, then I am filling out the form and going wherever I can get one.

     Next month also sees the relaxation of national State of Emergency rules and even now, people are behaving in a more relaxed way, and given the low rates of vaccination that seems foolhardy to say the least.  It therefore follows that to be safe, it will be worth a boring car ride to some centre outside the region to start to get at least a putative 60% protection from the influx of visitors that we are bound to get as the weather gets warmer.

 

I watched PMQs today and saw Liar Johnson have a whole series of anger management problems with the clinical questioning of the Leader of the Opposition.  Keir was viciously glacial in his contempt for Johnson’s bluster.  And, as usual, I watched the Prime Minister’s performance with a mixture of shame and loathing: shame that such tawdry liar could get to the highest office in the land; and loathing that the burbling semi-coherent venom he spat out abused the language in which I delight.

     When teaching Paradise Lost, especially Satan’s great speeches in Book 1, I always said that politicians could learn a lot from the way that Satan use the form of what he said to cover the truth in what he said.  The Heroic cadences of his words almost masked the reality of defeat.  The speech is magnificent in the way it sounds – but it is all lies, a series of empty rhetorical gestures.  Johnson didn’t even rise to an interesting rhetorical gesture in what he said – but what can you expect from a moral vacuum?  Johnson should read Paradise Lost – not Satan’s speeches, he will never rise to those linguistic depths of mendacity, but rather to read about what happens to someone who tries to live the lies he spins!  Unfortunately, Johnson is clinically and morally incapable of what Satan experiences,

“Abashed the Devil stood

And felt how awful goodness is”

Since Johnson is incapable of feeling shame, there is not even a slim chance that he will ever be “abashed” and as he finds it virtually impossible to appreciate “goodness” without seeing it as weakness, there can be no moment of recognition of a force greater than himself.  He has no moral compass because he is his own loadstone.

     I am not, by the way, comparing Satan with Johnson.  Satan in Paradise Lost is a literary construct, a humanized embodiment of evil and therefore the purity of the depiction is compromised by the very humanity that makes his character able to be appreciated by the reader.  But the concept of the character of Satan is a very useful example to use when comparing what he says and how he says it with the way of looking at and listening to the techniques that politicians use to duck answering questions or to rewrite disaster as victory.

     Time after time, I come back to the failure of the “delete all and insert” technique of formal debate from my time in college, when clever debaters used to think up amendments to motions using the “delete all and insert” to try and completely change the original motion to its opposite.  Sometimes this worked or should I say ‘worked’ and the amended motion was passed, but then it failed when reality came into play and the thing had to work in the real world outside debate.

     Words are tricky things and you play with them at your peril.  In the graveyard scene in Hamlet when talking with the gravedigger who plays linguistic games with what Hamlet is saying, Hamlet says, “How absolute the knave is!  We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.”  Johnson, Gove and the rest of the third-rate lickspittle lightweights with whom they have surrounded themselves are playing the gravedigger and hoping to “‘scape whipping”

     I would remind those worthless attendant lords that Hamlet does not end well and neither will they.