LOCKDOWN – DAY 1
A
miserable day to start our two week sojourn in the house! The Pathetic Fallacy is alive and well and
living in the Castelldefels climate today!
We have not been outside once, which is
hardly surprising for the first day.
Come back in a week or so and find out how well we are doing then! That’s four sentences so far, and I’ve used
exclamation mark in 75% of them; if I am using them up as such a prodigal rate
on the first day of our incarceration then what on earth am I going to be using
as punctuation by the end of the fortnight?
As is to be expected we have been glued to
the news broadcasts and we have watched them with different degrees of
exasperation. What does the term ‘lockdown’
actually mean? As far as the metro in
Madrid is concerned then it appears to mean nothing, nothing at all. We have been shown pictures of crowded trains
filled with people ostentatiously not the regulation metre apart: each person
should be (ideally) in an empty circle of two metres diameter, or (even more
ideally) not travelling at all.
We have also seen pictures of factories in
industrial areas seeming working perfectly normally. Normally in anything by normal
circumstances. It is, however, difficult
to take restrictions with anything approaching seriousness when shops that have
been exempt form closure include tobacco shops, hairdressers and lottery outlets! I will look further into that, as I am more
than willing to be shown to be wrong in such muddleheaded exclusions.
Apart from the noise from the (illegal?)
renovations in the house next door, the passing traffic, um, hasn’t. Planes have not been passing overhead. People have not been over-keen to play around
in their gardens. It’s too cold for even
the hardiest swimmer to venture into the open air pools. We have felt almost isolated, except of
course, with television you are never alone, you are always plugged into the wide,
wide world, which brings us to the Internet and Social Media.
In the Sixties and the Age of the
Telephone, it was only love-sick teenagers who were in constant communication
with each other, and that was usually a single two-way link. Now with the ease of Twitter, and emails and
all the other forms of wordiness that are available to a tech-savvy isolate,
you need never feel alone. Be alone? Yes.
But never lack the comforting little sounds that your mobile phone makes
to let you know that you are the recipient of yet another breathless,
quasi-aphoristic, random thought that lets you know that Others are there. Not here, but certainly there.
During the Great Snows of 1963-64 in
Cardiff when even traffic on the Newport Road was stopped, we did feel
trapped. We did have neighbours, and
there was the landline phone, but we were forced on our own resources. I can remember that it was then that we frantically
retuned the radio to a local station to find out exactly what was going on in
our own location. There was no sense of
danger, just of pleasurable otherness in the uniform whiteness of deep, deep
snow.
Today is different, today is not the same:
the roads are clear, if wet. There is
nothing to see. We have to take on trust
that we are in danger, that people are dying, that the threat is all around us.
People are generally well stocked with
necessary supplies, indeed with the jealously horded stash of toilet rolls that
each inhabitant must surely possess, we could pass the time of our lockdown by
pooing our time away! People seem to
have lost the concept of how much of anything is needed for a two week survival
IN YOUR OWN HOME and catered (if that is the word) for a season’s roughing it
in an excavated hole in the garden. When
we were doing Tudor History in school, we were constantly being acquainted with
the phrase “The King should live of his own” in other words be self-sufficient
and not ask for the imposition of taxes.
Given the contents of fridge, freezer and cupboard, I think that most
people could “live of their own” for a time longer than the projected two weeks
that we will be in lockdown. But, the
panic buying has emptied shelves and I wonder just how well supplied the
supermarkets will be when we finally venture out to get essentials.
I have stocked up on individually wrapped,
calorie reduced, grain enhanced break squares that appear to have a shelf life
of god alone knows how long, but it isn’t really bread under the meaning of the
act. If we want fresh break then,
logically, we have to go and get it on a daily basis, but I am not sure that we
want to do that. And if we don’t do it,
we can survive. And that goes for a lot
else too.
I wonder when we will go out. How long we will be able to remain cloistered
and allegedly ‘safe’?
Time will tell.
And time has brought the rain to an end,
but it’s now night and no chance of sitting out on the balcony and taking in
the non-existent sun.
If today has given me opportunity to
reflect then I have to say that none of cogitations are in any way
positive. In both my countries,
Catalonia and Britain, the situation seems to be getting worse and the pronouncements
regarding my age group seem to be verging on the catastrophic. The suggestion is, depending on how you
define the age at which people become ‘most at risk’, that people over 65
should consider putting themselves in isolation for something like three to
four months! It would appear than my
missed Catalan examination is going to be the ‘one that got away’!
I fail to see that a mere two weeks is
going to see the Covid-19 peaking in Catalonia, and even if it did ‘peak’ there
would still be danger from the tail of the infection. I think that those experts who say that we
have to be in a protective situation ‘for the long run’ are probably correct
and that this outbreak is going to have a society changing impact.
And then there’s Brexit! What a stupid, self-harming irrelevance that
foolish piece of nostalgic nationalism now seems!
Well Day 1 (or Day 2 or 3 by Toni’s
reckoning) is now over and bed beckons. One
of the many good things about the way I go to bed is that, whatever concerns I
have waking, when I put my head on the pillow, I sleep. I might wake in the morning with a crystal
clarity of understanding of why my sleep should have been disturbed, but when I
sleep, I sleep. So, oblivion and
forgetfulness call!
Good night!
