Happy Christmas?

 

 

Today marks the real institutionalisation of the pandemic.  I had to show my Covid Certificate or Passport to get into the swimming pool.

     There was the usual failure of the technology when it turned out that the image of my scrambled digital thingy on my mobile phone (you can tell that I have forgotten what they are called) was too small to be read by the mobile phone app that was being used to check entry.  For some reason the phone did not allow me to expand the image to make things easier for the desk staff, but eventually I was allowed in.

     Last night on the television there was a piece on the long lines of people in the centre of Barcelona who had just realized that their access to bars, restaurants and gyms was going to be ended if they could not produce a valid covid certificate, and so they were desperately queuing to get their jabs.  I suppose that one should think, “Better late than never”, but one can’t quite rid oneself of the bone deep irritation that one feels when thinking about the sheer inconsideration of people who can’t give a hoot for the general good until it impacts on them directly.

     In the armed forces, I remember reading from years ago (and had it confirmed by my Dad) if you suffered from sun burn, it was considered an offence as the ‘injury’ was ‘self-inflicted’.  I feel very much the same from those people now clogging up precious hospital beds, where the vast majority of Covid patients in ICUs are unvaccinated!

     I don’t remember the same degree of vaccine avoidance about other fatal diseases and feel that the political edge given to Covid vaccine reluctance is one left over from the disastrous ‘presidency’ of Trump. 

     His macho idiocy and cavalier attitude towards disease prevention is directly responsible for deaths.  For anyone else you would ask yourself how the hell he manages to sleep at night knowing the damage he has done to families and to institutions – but with such a sociopathic narcissist like himself, where he is the centre of his own sick universe, he is able to redefine responsibility and ignore so-called collateral damage.

     In Catalonia, I take the requirement to show that you are vaccinated to be a clear sign that our government is taking things seriously. 

     Yes, there are contradictions contained in what we understand to be the new rules for socialising and, as things stand at the moment, I will be able to go to my next opera in the Liceu with almost full capacity.  I assume that we will be asked to show a Covid certificate for entry there too, but I have yet to be informed by the House, and the performance is only a week or so away.

     I do understand that, as a retired person, I can afford to take a fairly purist attitude towards restrictions: I do not have to commute, my financial wellbeing is not connected (directly) to the health of any one firm or place of work in the UK, I can afford to be complacent, in so far as my pension is from the government and not from any public company.  Yes, the ability of governments to pay their pensioners is directly dependent on the wealth of the country providing them, and the restrictions on people being able to work has lessened the tax money that the government can spend, but we are still protected in a more direct way than a self-employed actor, or waiter, or salesperson.

     Christmas is the time when some industries make a chunk of their earnings: the Panto season in theatres is essential to the health of the theatre for the coming year; restaurants look to party bookings during this period as a guaranteed source of income to see them through the leaner times in the year.  All computation about what will and will not happen financially has been thrown into disarray by the pandemic.  Nothing is certain.  Rules change on a weekly basis.  Long term confidence is something of a dream.

     Those lucky enough to be on a combination of full, state, and professional pensions are assured of a fixed payment each month.  For the majority of the working population the pandemic has shown how privileged this financial state is as what previously had been thought to be guaranteed proved itself to be not as firmly grounded as hoped.

     I do understand that keeping the economy going is of essential importance, pensions are, after all, paid by the contributions of those still working – but there is also the question of the health and safety of the nation to be taken into consideration too.

     In the UK at the moment, there are wildly differing approaches depending on who you listen to in Government about what you can consider doing this Christmas.  John Crace (the Guardian Political Sketch Writer, and well worth reading) is fond of using the image of Schrodinger’s Cat to illustrate some of the contradictory attitude of government.  Johnson seems to have abdicated responsibility for giving clear advice about what to do this Christmas apart from saying that Christmas Parties should not be cancelled, but he still harps on about personal responsibility where what he is doing is off-loading the burden of accountability on to some sort of mythical inner logician that we all have inside us, that will allow him to claim that any increase in deaths because of faulty precautions taken will be the responsibility of those who die and not the person who has the title of Prime Minister and who should be leading us.

     The corruption, lies, deaths, incompetence, bullying, hypocrisy, and cowardice of this twelve-year-old government makes the “Thirteen years of Tory misrule” proclaimed by Wilson in 1964 look positively prim by comparison!

     Here in Catalonia, we have a government where the equivalent of the Conservatives has little power, but there is a limit to what can be done when the parties we do have are squabbling amongst themselves and hardly living up to the names of the political sections they are supposed to represent.

     Politics seems to be becoming murkier by the month and adds nothing to the confidence with which we can look forward to Christmas and the next year.

     I fear that the imposition of Covid passports is just a step in the process of softening us up to accept far more stringent restrictions when the full import of the growth of the Omicron variant is clear.

     “Happy Christmas” is a fond hope, not a greeting.

Page turning pleasure

 

Would I recommend it?  That is the question that I am asking myself after finishing the last page and plonking the weighty tome on the coffee table.  Origin is the fourth (I think) novel by Dan Browne that I have read – though, now I come to think of it, I haven’t actually bought one of them.  All loaned.  And gratefully received.

     Origin is one of those books which you can read as if it’s a screenplay, so many of the set piece descriptions seem purpose written for the cinema.  It makes much of its setting in Spain and Barcelona and, as someone living in Catalonia within easy distance of Barcelona, I cannot deny the little frissons of delighted recognition as major architectural landmarks like the Casa Milà (La Pedrera), La Sagrada Familia, and even a mention of the small airport in Sabadell that we sometimes pass when going to Terrassa are described.

     Brown is a master at grafting further meaning onto the already significant, and he makes the most of the architectural backgrounds that he uses.

     To say that his novel’s narrative structure is contrived, says little – of course it is, that is part of the reason that his work sells so much and so widely.  We expect high tension action in his work, and part of the delight is seeing how he fabricates the excitement around settings and buildings that millions of people have visited.  He finds a way to make your memory of the guided tour just a little more high-octane by sprinkling his narrative magic of mysterious codes and signs to be deciphered to make the ordinary, deeply fascinating.

     Brown shares with Bryson the ability to make what appears to be complex understandable to the general reader.  He is careful to give information so that we are not left behind so, for example, philosophers or painters or mathematicians may be cited in the text, but there will always be a little extra information so that the reader can place them, almost as if they are wearing a descriptive name tab.  This is done unobtrusively, but constantly, so that you start noticing the ‘helping informative hand’ that you are given.

     Did I enjoy the book?  I have to say I did.  Will I ever read it again?  I have to say I won’t.  But Brown as a safe pair of story-telling hands producing a rollicking tale, Origin works.

 

 

Where are we going to eat for Christmas?

     In the UK, this time in November is too late to think about getting somewhere in a restaurant.  All the spaces will be gone.  And at a price that makes you wonder if it’s worth it just not to have to do the washing up!

     Here in Catalonia, you can consider going out to a restaurant on Christmas Day for a decent meal, without paying a fortune.  But even here, where you can leave booking fairly late, it is advisable to book early.

     Family discussions have at least started and tomorrow we are going to try out a restaurant that has been suggested to see what the food is like.  I have not seen the Christmas Menu but going out for Sunday Lunch seems like a good idea, and I am all for trying before eating – at least this lunch will not be as expensive as the Christmas meal.

     I suppose we expect to pay something like 45 to 50 euros for the Christmas lunch and that will probably include wine and Cava and coffee.  Not that the inclusion of alcohol means anything to me, as I am still true to my determination to drink nothing, if the only ‘something’ that my doctor allows me is “one small glass of red wine a day”.  I would like to see any self-respecting Welshman stick to that!

     And I am now, after a number of YEARS of alcohol denial, more and more convinced that cold, pure, water is unbeatable as an all-round drink.  Honestly!

 

 

Are you sitting comfortably?

 

 

 

Even though we are at the fag-end of the year, something happened today that will be the defining feature for me, and possibly for a few others too.

     My ‘creative space’ is not my brain, it is a ‘squalid corner’ of the third floor where my desk (cluttered) is hemmed in on one side by a sawn-off storage unit, a plastic segmented bookcase and a queeny printer; on the other by a series of CD box vaults, the back of an IKEA bookcase and an Anglepoise (knock-off not real) lamp; behind three low-rise bookshelves, a bewilderingly large number of plastic mini-shelved units and a lopsided arrangement of Things Too Large to Put Away Properly; in front is a low wall and the stair well.  And this altogether conducive-to-creation ensemble is finished by a high-backed office chair that is literally falling to bits, with the faux leather coming away in specks.

     Enough, I said to myself, I said, is enough!  A new chair is necessary and, furthermore, it will be something that can sweep up my Christmas and Name Day offerings into one coherent present.  The ‘Name Day’ thing is important in this part of the world and you ignore the recognition-through-presents at your own risk, it therefore follows (as the night the day) that reciprocation can work together for good.  As my Name Day is actually Boxing Day a seasonal personal present objective makes sense, so I thought a new chair would concentrate minds and contributions.

     Having tried a selection of chairs in all the main superstore outlets in the vicinity and found all of them lacking, Toni actually discovered a dedicated office furniture outlet with ‘sale’ prices in Cornella, a place a few towns along one of our motorways and a place passed through by me on my daily journey to the School on the Hill.

     Today was the day we visited the place.  I had (in mind and written in my notebook) a list of desirable attributes of the New Chair.  It had to have  i) a base of five wheeled feet  ii) a high back  iii) gas suspension  iv) be ergonomic  v) be made of leather  vi) have no arms or have removable arms  vii) look ‘the business’.  I did have a vague sort of idea of what sort of cost it might be, but I decided to be adventurous.

     The end result of much sitting and trying this and then trying that, was that the ergonomic trumped the leather.  The seat that I have decided on, and indeed ordered for delivery in January looks a bit more medical than office-like, but it is comfortable and virtually everything that can, adjusts.

     And the cost.

     Toni was and still is shell-shockedly stunned that any sentient life-form could even contemplate paying so much for what is, after all, at the end of the day, an office chair.  Well, I have.  Or at least I have paid a deposit.  And even the 20% deposit was large.  So, you can imagine that the whole thing (the other 80%) is, well, monstrous.

     In my defence, I would opine that my complete lack of smoking is a major factor in allowing sums of money which would have gone up in smoke and been ingested in tar to be used for something that is much more (much more) useful and necessary.  But is an awfully large sum of money.  For a chair.

     And, as its main material is a sort of mesh (to allow for air flow and healthiness) you don’t even get plush, buttoned leather for your money – in spite of the fact that the money you have paid could easily have allowed wheels to have been fitted to a handmade ottoman and still have had money left over.

     And I don’t care.  I have got (or at least will have) what I wanted.  And it is something that will be used.  And used constantly.  And, and I think I am trying to persuade myself here rather than any reader.  And so, I will stop.  But I (and that is the important pronoun) I, think that it is money well spent.  And I sincerely trust that I will be saying that in twenty years’ time (when I am still using the bloody thing) and then dividing the price I paid in 2020 by the number of years I have been using it and saying to myself, “It’s a bargain!” and “My back has never felt better!” and so on.

     I am further encouraged by the fact that the person selling me thing was actually using one of them as her own office chair.  And that has to be good.  Doesn’t it?  Yes?

     What the AOTC (Advent of the Chair) will necessitate is Doing Something to the chaos of the third floor.  Such a splendid beast must have space in which to dominate the surroundings.  The detritus behind me at the moment must go.  Where?  I know not, but somewhere not behind me.  The Chair will be brought unto me by the lackeys of the firm and they will Construct The Chair, presumably by bringing up the pieces to the third floor.  There is no room whatsoever to do any construction so, what years of nagging by Toni have failed to do, the AOTC will force me to do: create space where no space exists.

     My last and latest attempt to Clear Up the third floor comprised checking through long unopened files and junking and shredding irrelevant papers.  This created gratifying large bags of rubbish, but not any appreciable space as I had been excavating rather than bulldozing.  Something much more radical is called for, and to be frank, I am not sure that I can muster up enough iconoclastic zeal to do the necessary.  Toni has, bless him, offered to do the ‘tidying up’ for me, but I know that I would have to ‘dispose’ of him after the event when I realized what priceless pieces of ephemera he might have got rid of!

     So, the next few weeks are going to demand a positively Dominican level of material rejection from me if I am to make any impression on the cluttered chaos.  Wish me luck or wish me the equanimity to see the AOTC as setting a diamond in the dross of attic confusion!

     And yes, I am well aware that I have not actually told you the price of the thing.  And yes, I have no intention whatsoever of so doing.  I may be happy (if that is the word that I am looking for) with what I have done, but I think that I can only convince others by denying them specific totals.  Better to speculate with lurid imagination rather than condemn in black and white!  And you will have noticed that I chose a generic chair for illustration rather than something more identifiable.

 

 

 

 

And talking of the unjustifiable, Johnson is trying to have his cake and eat it: he fulfils his promise to allow us to celebrate Christmas but wants us not to do it because it will fuel the increase in Covid infection.  So, what this appalling man is actually doing is putting the onus on the British People.  He lacks the courage to admit that he was wrong to promise a variant on the “it will be all over by Christmas” (that always works out well!) and instead of imposing legally enforceable restrictions he is leaving it all up to us.  He will then, of course, wash his hands and say that it was made clear by the government that there were risks involved and people were warned, but people will be people and therefore you have only yourselves to blame!  He truly is repellent.

     Here in Catalonia and in Spain things do not appear to be much better.  Our prime minister has had to self-isolate because of his proximity to the French president and we all know that all hell is going to break out after the Christmas period.

     We have gone through a year when normal has been taken out roughed up, lightly killed, spat at, insulted, trampled on and general bad mouthed.  I think we know that we are in the final stretch, and I further think that we know that the final stretch is not going to be measured in weeks but rather in months.  And probably quite a few months.  I am telling myself that I will be lucky, very lucky, if I am vaccinated by April.  And since I tick a few of the ‘at risk’ boxes, I think it is going to be the end of the summer or the middle of the autumn until a majority of the country is close to having had the jab.

     Given those expectations, Christmas is neither here nor there, it is just an odd date in the unrelenting sequences that we have been subject to during this pandemic.

 

But my chair will be here in January.  Something concrete to look forward to.

We exist too, Mr Johnson!

 

 

 

 

 

Only a two-faced lazy chancer like Johnson could appeal to “the power of sweet reason” to get a Brexit agreement “over the line” without apparent recognition of irony.  This is because there is no real link between what comes out of his mouth and any discernible link to what might be loosely termed “reality” in the Conservative dystopia that passes for politics nowadays.

     “Reason” is the very last thing that has driven the Brexiteer Vandals, they have behaved like berserkers drunk on their intoxicating brew of bigoted self-interest and blind adherence to a twisted ideology of purist Brexit where mere reality is relegated to a lowly, nay insignificant place in what passes for their thinking.

     Given Johnson’s morbid narcissism it is impossible to tell whether his assessment of a Brexit agreement as “looking very, very difficult at the moment” is yet another of his macho taunts to the EU showing that he can play the poker hand with steely nerves, or whether he is really preparing us for the fact that we are not actually going to get an agreement as all.

     The inherent contradictions (or lies as it might be fairer to call them) in the Brexiteers’ position have always been there.  The questions that are the sticking points today have been the areas of confusion from the start, and in the years that the Brexiteers have had to make their plans clear in how they were going to work, they have done virtually nothing, except talk incoherent, self-defeating nonsense.  They have no ideas about how to get what they want (when they actually know what it is that they want) except through tantrums and unreasonable demands.

     And in the middle (sometimes, when he can be bothered) is the joke of a man who wears the title of prime minister. 

 

Johnson must know that he is in a no-win situation.  To gain the agreement of the rabid Brexiteers in the Conservative party, he will lose the majority of the ‘moderate’ (whatever that means in Conservatism nowadays) majority that makes up the Parliamentary party.  If he gets anything like a reasonable (whatever that means in terms of Brexit nowadays) agreement, he will have the right-wingers frothing at the mouth.  Whatever he manages to get from a reasonable agreement to a full repudiation of Brexit to a no-agreement Brexit, he is going to be pilloried.

     You might say, with some justice, that he fully deserves to be attacked en mass; the only thing that drove him to espouse the Brexit ‘idea’ was naked cynicism wrapped in all-devouring ambition.  Public service and the country didn’t get a look in.  So, we could stand back and watch the blood bath and say, “jolly good riddance!”

     Except we can’t.  As John Donne stubbornly reminds us, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent” – the irony of the word ‘continent’ being used when you  think about Brexit is tellingly ironic!   

     Although Johnson doesn’t give a damn about us, the ordinary people, we cannot share his wealthy distain for the realities of lived life, we are directly affected by his decisions and the decisions of his party.  Johnson may be concerned with his self-image and be concerned about how posterity sees him; we have to live in the world and country that he is making.  His wealth largely insulates him from the financial and practical effects of his policies: he is not concerned about the problems of being able to live, he is more concerned with how he appears.

     When all is said and done, I simply do not trust Johnson.  I don’t trust him as a politician and I don’t trust him as a person.  He lacks morality.  He is a liar.  He is a deceiver.  He is an opportunist.  And he is deciding my future.

     It is a sad and almost tragic thing to say, but I do put my trust in one aspect of Johnson’s modus vivendi, he is a betrayer.  He betrays because, as one commentator put it, he lives in the moment and the past is not of any real concern to him.

     And that is our hope!  Johnson will produce an agreement that goes back on virtually everything that he has said because that is what he does!

     It’s a frail hope, but I think it is the only one that we have because “sweet reason” left the room many years ago.

 

Today has been, continues to be, cold.  13c.  It rained briefly last night, but today we have had fluffy clouds with patches of blue – not much actual sunshine, but no rain.

     The weather is important because today is a holiday and this time (as opposed to the weekend) people from outside Castelldefels can legally come and walk along the paseo.  It is an opportunity for bars and restaurants to try and get some cash flow before Christmas.  We went to a restaurant, one of our usual haunts, and it was quite full (with the 50% limit), there were certainly people around and yesterday there were television pictures of queues of people waiting to go into shopping centres to get their Christmas gifts organized.

     Which begs the question of what people are going to do during the holiday period.  As I have said before, I think that the next month or so is going to be critical in the way that the pandemic pans out.  If people regard Christmas as a time to be laxer than they already are, then the middle of January will show a massive jump in infections.

     Realistically people are not going to be vaccinated until the middle of next year.  I think that I may be lucky if I manage to be vaccinated by April, as I manage to tick a few boxes for the early application of the needle!  This means that we will be well into the summer of next year before the majority of the population have had their double injections.

     But what I am hearing are sighs of relief that a vaccine, or series of vaccines, are being rolled out and that the horrors of the pandemic are numbered.  Which they are not.  We are not safe until everyone is safe and we have been told by numerous authorities that Covid is a virus that is not going to be eradicated and is something that we are going to have to live with.  For ever.  That hard truth has not found its way into many consciousnesses.  And that means more death.

 

On a different topic entirely.  I am trying to find out how to treat the rather exotic book cover that I talked about yesterday.  This cover is made of suede and is falling to pieces.  I am not sure what to apply to the cover to preserve it.  Would leather cream or polish do anything?  Any thoughts gratefully received!