LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 71 – Monday, 25th May

I am still shaken by just how poor a defence Johnson mounted to justify the high-handedness of his arrogant aide.  When even the Daily Mail asks, “What planet do they think they are on!” as a reference to the incredible (literally!) insulting justification for Cummings’ rule breaking, joined with the sickeningly unedifying spectacle of supine ministers docilely toeing the Save The Dom cabinet line, you realize that you are witnessing a government imploding.

     Perhaps I should have said ‘seemingly imploding’ because I do not underestimate the ability of the Conservative Party to survive ‘fatal’ mistakes and misjudgements.  It is undeniable that Johnson is a lessened leader, I don’t say ‘character’ because that is clearly impossible, and if it becomes clear to him that his status is diminished then he will do what any narcissist does when self-worth is threatened: lash out and to hell with the collateral damage.

     Let us never forget that Johnson’s espousal of Brexit was quintessentially narcissistic: he was convinced by his own rhetoric, comparing and contrasting two pieces of his own writing to see which one would afford him greater possibilities for self-advancement.  I don’t know what the opposite of a Damascene Conversion would be to cover his case, but there was no blinding light from an all-powerful deity, but rather a greedy acceptance of his own perceived omnipotence fuelling his ludicrously inflated ego and presented as reason and logic and, god help duty, dedication and us!

     The front pages of the newspapers cannot make easy reading for Johnson, but they don’t make easy reading for the rest of the Conservative Party either.  Most MPs are concerned about their seats; anything that looses them public support is not to be tolerated – and these MPs postbags must be filled with howls of outrage about the preferential treatment of a member of the establishment as opposed to the PBI, or rather Plebs as they think of us.

     You can take the over-entitled git out of the Bullingdon Club, but the sense of them-and-us never leaves.  Johnson is a perfect example of the born into privilege and milking it for all it’s worth with the minimum of effort sort of the undeserving rich.  He is also a bully, a liar, malicious and, as the ‘defence’ of Cummings has clearly shown, a coward.  And cowards in power are dangerous.  As we are finding out every day.

     Unless Johnson takes visible control of the government then even his comfortable majority will not be enough to protect him from the Men in Suits whose only raison d’etre is to preserve power, and to whom Johnson is only a momentary blip on the time line of their sequestration of political dominance.

The fall out from the pathetic defence of Cummings, where we are expected to believe in a sort of Schrodinger’s Lockdown that does and does not allow free movement at the same time, continues.  Johnson’s cringe-makingly inept performance has had the surprising result of uniting all sections of society and all political parties in fully justified revulsion.  Except of course for the ‘usual suspects’ of Brexit insanity, though even some members of the ERG have called for Cummings’ head!  We truly live in strange times!

     As a last resort, Cummings himself is to make a public statement and take questions.  I suppose if Cummings can supress his natural revulsion for the carping criticism of the ‘lesser breeds without the law’ by whom he thinks he is surrounded, then a person of his obvious intelligence and manipulative skills would be the sort of man to carry it off.  But he really will have to out-Houdini Houdini to get away with it and I hope The Daily Mirror and The Guardian hacks have got their linguistic scalpels out and ready to dissect everything that l’éminence désordonée has to say. 

     I keep checking in with The Guardian on my phone to find out the time because I do not want to miss a word.  I have just found out that his statement will take place at 4pm UK time, 5pm my time.  I will be there, don’t let me down Radio 4!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 35 – Sunday, 19th APRIL

It’s raining. 

     I am disinclined to go on my circuits of the communal swimming pool in the pouring rain. 

     I am further depressed by the reading in the Guardian about Goblin Gove’s typically mealy-mouthed, unconvincing response to a series of allegations in The Sunday Times that the Convalescing Clot missed five consecutive emergency meetings of COBRA in the build up to the Covid-19 crisis and that the government shipped PPE to China in February. 

     That would have covered the period when our part-time Prime Minister was hidden away in Chequers, a prime minister who notoriously “didn’t work weekends” according to an unnamed senior adviser!  Once Bullingdon Club always Bullingdon Club: the lazy sense of entitlement of the rich and the privileged; let the lesser breeds without the law do the hard graft while the Johnson jonson sets about adding another child to the unnumbered brood.

     I am more than prepared to believe that the lingering poison of Brexit mixed with the euphoria of the Conservative right wing after the crushing electoral victory led the ‘government’ fatally to mismanage a coherent approach to the Covid-10 crisis. 

     The typical Tory inhumanity of the ‘herd immunity’ approach to dealing with the crisis, complacently accepting hefty deaths will be remembered, together with the astonishing U-Turn when it was suddenly abandoned in favour of approaches that more nearly matched virtually every other government in the world.

     The position of the Health Secretary is becoming more and more untenable – or at least it should be becoming more and more untenable as more and more avoidable deaths will be laid as a memorial to his incompetence.  Yes, efficient supply is difficult in times of crisis, especially in a cash and equipment and personnel starved institution like the NHS that is in its present state because of the cruel austerity practiced by the Tory government for the last decade. 

     The empty platitudes of support that Tory ministers mouth for Health Workers are cruelly ironic given their attitudes towards the NHS over the past years.  These are the same vile folk who cheered after a pay increase for Nurses was defeated in the House of Commons!  They disgust me.

     And, as I typed that last bitter sentence, the rain outside has grown appreciably heavier.  There is nothing like the Pathetic Fallacy to cement misery in place!

In an effort to escape the gnawing resentment contained in the paragraphs above, I have turned to something more creative.  My chapbook of poems written in Holy Week called Coasts of Memory.  I have been working on illustration and made a decision to use only photographs taken within the lockdown confines.  This means that the house, the garden, the communal pool and what I can see from the terrace and windows are all fair game for my camera!

     I spent yesterday evening playing around with the raw material that I had and started placing individual pictures in what I considered to be appropriate places in the chapbook.  I am constantly frustrated by petty mechanical problems with images and sometimes it is a case of printing what fits rather than fitting what I want to print!

     There is also the problem of he disappearing fonts.  I save what I do fairly religiously; I have been caught out too often and too painfully when documents develop a missing life of their own not to remember to save.  But I am often frustrated by the way in which complex documents do not always retain formatting. 

     The latest example of this concerns by choice of a fairly exotic fort used as a title.  This font did not transfer when I sent the document via email rather than copying it onto a memory stick - in spite of my avowal of the very latest in technology, I can be whimsically old-school from time to time!  The font is space greedy, so when it transfers as something altogether more prosaic it means that everything else on the page is out of place and that has a domino effect on all the pages afterwards.  As I was going to use that particular version of the book for detailed editing, it might turn out to be self-defeating if I have to redo everything with the ‘correct’ font in place in the final document.  Such things are sent to try me, and at least I can have a direct effect on what I do there, as opposed to whingeing on about what my government is doing or not doing in this crisis!

In the way in which the petty becomes important: Toni is going out to get bread!  An event for which he dresses up like an Inuit and wings the desolate abyss between our home and the bread shop that is a few streets away.  I enjoy the results of these little excursions as we usually have a little treat from the patisserie as well as mere bread – by which alone, one cannot live!

     This time, as well as the bread, Toni is going to attempt to get some chicken from the pollo a last, this will be our first ‘bought in’ meal since the lockin began.  However, if there is a queue, or there are too many people there then the meal will be called off and we will have to settle for the bread.  And treats.

There are increasing accounts in the media of the possibility of no vaccine being produced in the short term, or even ever.  We have the example of AIDS, where, in spite of extensive research over a number of years, we are still without a vaccine.  Treatment for the disease, yes; vaccine no.  That is a very sobering thought.  It means that we will be dealing with the virus as an ever-present threat well after this initial surge is over and it also means that for people in my age group the restrictions are going to last for the foreseeable future. 

     This is a more than depressing thought!