Warm thoughts on a cold day

 

O

 

 

 

 

 

Today has been one of those November autumn days that you think you remember from your childhood: flawless blue skies, bright sun, and cold.  The world seems sharper, and the air is just a little bit more bracing.

     It says something for living in Catalonia, and living by the sea, that yesterday was the first night that we added an eiderdown to the cover sheet under which we sleep!

     The eiderdown is thin and stitched and was originally my grandmother’s, and possibly handed down to her too, it’s an antique, and still efficient and not looking anything like its age.

     It reminds me of the times that I used to sleep in my grandparents’ house under that eiderdown, in Maesteg, in the small back bedroom in a bed which I only later discovered was an old four-poster with the posts cut off. 

     My mattress was feather filled, and something into which you sunk, and which I now understand is not very good for your back and posture while sleeping, but I was only a kid and all I thought about was the joy of soft acceptance.  I can’t now recall if I felt anything about the difference of my modern bed in Cardiff and the anachronism that I slumbered in in Maesteg.  I think that forgetfulness is more to do with the fact that kids are able to compartmentalise experiences, and link places with circumstances and not extrapolate to continuous ‘everyday life’.

     An example I always like to cite concerns Easter.  Every Easter my parents would buy me an Easter egg and I would be delighted.  Easter eggs were Easter eggs to me, they were made by Cadbury’s had silver foil and them and the chocolate tasted different to that in the chocolate bars. 

     But, one year a friend of my mother gave me an Easter egg that came in its own satin finish box with a thin white ribbon holding the lid, with the egg itself positioned in the centre of the box in its own cardboard cut-out place with the chocolate arranged around it!  It was opulence and luxury that I had never experienced.  It was overwhelming!

     The magnitude of the experience might be gauged by the fact that I managed to get over my initial reluctance to ‘spoil’ anything by actually eating the chocolate and dutifully consumed the lot, but I did keep the box for years.  And years.

     My parents had never given me anything so splendid for Easter but, and this is the interesting thing for me, I did not expect such a glorious, boxed egg to be repeated the next year when only my parents provided the eggy gifts.  I did not take the exception to suddenly become the norm.  The present was from an ‘outsider’, it was something different, and I was more than happy with what my parents provided.

     Although I stoutly maintain that I was not ‘spoiled’ by my parents, I have come to realize, as I have heard other people’s experiences, that I had a fortunate upbringing.  I lacked for nothing important and, while I did not get everything I wanted when I wanted it, I had most reasonable requests granted.

     So, with the kid’s ability to say ‘this happens here, but not necessarily there’ you can navigate a complex series of domestic and relationship conundrums.  The only sad thing is that degree of intelligent accommodation does not always inform your later adult life – unless you take the ‘that happened then, but not necessarily now’ variation on a childhood acceptance!

Broken Un-Birthday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The week of un-birthday festivities and presents following my actually single birthday took a downward turn today.  Not only has it been raining all night, with howling wind and melodramatic thunder and lightning, but also, when I woke up the electricity had failed.

     I washed by the light of my mobile phone, refused to shave as the hot water wasn’t – see above, electricity failure – and hobbled downstairs (knees still not even remotely right) like some senile hi-tec Lady of the Lamp to do ‘something’ to the box of electricity switches and fuses.  I duly pushed up all those that were down, and nothing happened.

     I debated not going for my early morning swim in the local pool, reasoning that perhaps the outage had extended to their premises, and while I am more than prepared to get up early, I draw the line at swimming in cold water.  But I thought to myself, who else is going to brave the rain, the dark and the pre-dawn?  Only I!

     I was, of course, wrong, and there were plenty of other saddos ready and eager to get their daily exercise over and done with before most people were awake.

     As I am retired, I do not need to be there early ‘before work’, but I find that getting up (at what I am sure my grandparents would have called a ‘reasonable time’) has now become so engrained in me that to lie in bed after the alarm goes off gives little pleasure.

     I wish that I could say that I make full and enthusiastic use of my gained time – but what I do is read The Guardian and thoroughly depress myself before breakfast.

     Living in Catalonia, you would think that I would be able to be fairly detached from what is going on in the UK – and, to a certain extent I can be (or at least try to be) but the political, social, and economic situation in Spain is not rosy either.  Admittedly, we have not committed the idiocy of Brexit, and our Covid figures are nowhere as horrific as those in the UK, but there is little in present day Catalonia to make one wake up and skip one’s way cheerily into the day – but at least the day in Catalonia usually has sun in it!

     My art books are my escape.  Which is an odd thing to say because the sort of art that I like is rarely of the chocolate box niceness, and the arresting images that contemporary art slams into your mind rarely take you away from the world but force you back into it in an uncompromising manner.

     Sometimes the struggle is not with the images, but rather with the juxta-positioning that some curators impose on collections or exhibitions.  Having read through the catalogue for the Poussin exhibition in the National, I was reminded of another exhibition involving Poussin that I went to see in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in which Poussin’s paintings were paired with the coloured scribblings of Cy Twomby.  The Poussin paintings were his series of The Sacraments while Twomby’s paintings were, um, not.

     I am no fan of Twomby’s art, though you might be interested to know that I am in a minority, and in 2015 his Untitled (New York City) was sold at auction for $70,530,000 – so what do I know!

     You might like to compare the two artists:

 

Go

 

 

 

 

 

 

POUSSIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWOMBY

 

As I keep telling myself, the money is not relevant to the art.  Money is just the commodification of art.  What value people and institutions place on individual artists is something to consider in evaluating the place of art in a particular society, but it has little to say about the true value of art. 

I still don't like Twomby.

 

 

How to keep your sanity in world that is too right-wing for, well, sanity!

 

 

 

 

For the past few years, when the political situations in Catalonia, Spain and the UK got too much to bear, I turned to the antics of Trump and the Republican party to demonstrate that there were depths that this side of the Atlantic had not yet plumbed.  Now that Trump is more of a distant malign emanation from the depths of swampy Florida rather than an ever-present daily horror show in the newspapers, one has to rely on the pathetic, yet entirely disgusting, cavorting (I can’t think of any other word to describe what should be a serious political party) of the Trumpian Republicans in Congress and the Senate to set against whatever depressing failures one sees around the political sites in Spain and the UK.

     I have realised that I simply can’t do it anymore, by which I mean reading about Republicans with the semi-detached amazement at the jaw-droppingly callous human distain that they display on a daily basis.  I can no longer pretend that the grotesque views that Republican espouse were a function of The Orange Small Handed Horror.  Whatever the Republican Party might have been in the past, what it is now is a morass of ante-diluvian viciousness: the anti-abortion, election “rigging”, voter suppression, homophobia, etc etc etc – all the tropes of the far right coming home to roost (if they ever left) in the comfortable prejudices of an apology for a political party.  What is happening today is that the repressive idiocies of the Republicans and the super-charged language of political hatred and contempt that they use against their opponents is all too present in the life of politics here in Europe.

     The ‘comical’ lies of Trump are more than matched by the serial mendacity of Johnson.  Johnson now is a flagrant liar because he makes no attempt to correct the record when he has been found out.  And still the Conservatives are ahead in the polls.  Why should a liar change his deceit when he doesn’t seem to be penalized for the lies he tells?

     England and the USA are cursed with a two-party system: Conservative and Labour; Republican and Democrat.  Where do the votes go for those voters who look with something approaching horror at the way that they right wing parties are heading? 

     In the USA, the rhetoric of the right means that even the mildest of the Democrats is branded as extreme left wing or “Socialist”, whereas here in Europe they would be seen as just left of centre.  Old fashioned Tories must shudder to see what the party has become under the “leadership” of the third-rate chancers who now control the Conservatives, but their escape route of the Lib Dems has long since been shown to be a wasted vote and they probably will never bring themselves to vote for Labour, even with that nice Mr Starmer as leader.

     The situation is different in Catalonia, where the national conservative part PP has a derisory following and the so-called “centre right” of C’s has also been rejected at the polls.  The “”Socialist”” party PSOE and a variety of Independence and left-wing parties hold sway here, but we have no government as the parties have found it impossible to work together to get some sort of coalition off the ground.  As the days go by with a government “in functions” the frustration of the voters becomes more and more palpable.

     In a way in which I have never felt so strongly before, governments are simply not working; justice is becoming a by-word for partisanship; inequality is becoming more and more pronounced; corruption is rampant and the ordinary voter is made to feel more and more irrelevant as the tiny percentage of the rich and the powerful continue to act with absolute impunity.

     The word “Democracy” has become devalued as politicians mouth the word but ignore the concept in the ways in which they behave.

     Biden is trying to make a difference.  In spite of the torrents of abuse that he has to take as he tries to redress some of the worst excesses of his predecessor’s reign of terror, he is a beacon of hope.  But what is going on in the red states of America in the almost comical attempts to gerrymander the political situation to benefit the right is a worry.  Biden does not have his full term to make a difference.  His majority in the Senate is on a knife edge and if that is taken away by Senate elections next year then we have seen previously that a hypocritical Republican Party will be much more than willing to sacrifice country to the demands of the Party and stymie any bipartisan legislation and wait for 2024 to Bring Back Trump to win again!

     The election in Madrid will be an indication here of how the political situation is working.  The leader of Madrid at the moment is an unprepossessing Zombie of PP who has made the most remarkable pronouncements in the lead up to the voting.  We have an extreme right-wing party which is openly Fascist and revers the late Fascist dictator Franco.  The level of political debate is debased.  Threats and counter threats depress.

     It is very difficult not to be depressed at the prospects for a positive outcome to the election in the febrile atmosphere where everything seems to be tainted by Covid.

     But I remain an optimist.  

   And as long as I stop reading about red-neck, red-state Republicans and concentrate on things like the medical personnel who have worked tirelessly to vaccinate and medicate, then I can always look forward to a communal recognition that unselfish caring is also positive self-regard.

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!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.