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I’ve always felt that Polonius in Hamlet has had a bad press.  He is usually dismissed as a boringly preachy busybody who voices trite truisms and is eventually killed behind the arras, and who cares?

     In my production of Hamlet, Polonius would be a master of state craft and a more intelligently Machiavellian protagonist than the fussy old father that he usually is.  I think that a lot of the advice that he gives is good and has become unattributed aphorism.  It is particularly pleasing to see that our departing Prime Minister has taken one of his homilies to his tiny little heart.

     In what is probably Polonius’s most famous utterance he says, and he prefaces it with a ranking of its importance (“This above all”) “. . . to thine own self be true” – and with his last speech Johnson has personified that dictum, by using his last public performative vomit of words as Prime Minister to lie, lie and lie again!

     His achievement of the first stage of becoming World King (i.e., Prime Minister of Great Britain and The United Kingdom) was through the lies that seeded the victory in the corrupt Brexit campaign.  Throughout his inglorious stewardship of the Government, he has lied to The Queen, Parliament (repeatedly) and The British Public – as well, of course as various lovers, friends, officials, foreigners, wives, colleagues, bosses.  Everyone, in short, with whom he has ever been in contact.

     Everything in his Last Speech was either an out and out lie, a wilful misinterpretation of accepted reality, or a shading of the truth with intent to mislead.  From his false assurance that he would retire to his plough, knowing as he did that his chosen Classical reference was to a man who was called from rusticity to public life again, to his fulsome assurance of his backing of Truss (an assertion of loyalty from a man who made an entire career out of disloyalty) his statements were, one after the other, disingenuous.

     It is remarkable that being Prime Minister during one of the most turbulent post war times has left his character untainted by any scintilla of self-knowledge.  He started the job on a lie, he has lied through his time in office, and his valedictory speech was also a pack of lies.

     His baseness is so profound that nothing, not a near death experience; unnecessary Covid deaths; divorce; marriage; birth of a child; criminality; public disgust; rejection by colleagues; degradation of Britain’s position in the world; breaking draconian rules and being found out; presiding over a cost of living crisis; threatening the destruction of The Union; breaking the law – and so on, NOTHING has been able to dent, nay, scratch his galactic self-esteem.

     His leaving speech reeked of faux humility – lauding his imaginary achievements and parading his equally imaginary victimhood; praising a woman he hopes will fail, so that he can be seen as a Bonnie Prince Charlie character, the king over the water, waiting for the call to take what is rightfully his.

     Johnson should remember that The Young Pretender’s life ended in bitterness, loneliness, drunkenness, and failure and, something that Johnson can all too easily relate to, dependent on the charity of others for his lifestyle!

 

 

 

 

 

     

 

 

 

 I am building up my strength to respond to his replacement’s speech in little over an hour or so.  Toni has suggested a coffee in town and perhaps a sugar free ice cream in our favourite gelateria.  Sounds like a good way to separate myself from the political anger that is all too evident in my world view nowadays.

 

Oh, and by the way, the “to thine own self be true” continues:

 

“And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man”

 

And to be fair to Johnson, he has been glaringly true to his debased self from day 1, in his twisted world of alternative facts, the only way in which he could have been false to himself, was to have told the truth occasionally, but he had the strength of character to resist such weakness!

 

The Coming Storm

 

 

          

 

 

 

 

 

Are people in denial?  Do they really think that the winter is going to be just another season?  Why isn’t there much more outrage at the threat of heat/food/accommodation poverty that IS going to take out a chunk of the population not only in the UK but also here in Catalonia?

     It is easy in an affluent seaside resort like one in which I live to see little evidence of deprivation.  The shops are open and seem to be doing well, people are coming in their drove to the beaches and exclusive new development along part of the beachfront is full steam ahead.

     And I suppose that is part of the point.  If you have money then much of the hand to mouth poverty is going to pass you by. 

     Am I going to stop plonking my bum on my expensive opera seat for the next season?  No.  Not yet. 

     But do I notice that even casual spends in the supermarket now always seem to be 100 euros and above? 

     Yes.  50 euros used to be enough to fill my tank, now it comes nowhere near.     My rent will be increased by the cost of living rise in percentage terms; my income will not.  If I wish to continue my present standard of living, then my pension will have to be augmented by dipping into my savings.  I tell myself, that savings are there to be used not to be mindlessly horded – as if I have ever had wallet that didn’t have scorch marks on it from the money burning its way through!

     I am by no means rich, but I also do not want to plead poverty.  I am aware of the increasing costs of everything and acutely aware of the diminution in the adequate provision of those social services that I have paid for throughout my life through taxes etc.

     My expectations (as a complacent Baby Boomer) are for my path through life to be relatively smooth (free education up to university level; job for life; pension; health care etc.) and I have little to complain about when I look back.  But the future is different.  Fixed income and rising costs are not good companions – and as I am reliant on my pension, government talking about the difficulties of maintaining the present levels of payment and then talk of different rates and speculation about not keeping to past rules are all things that concentrate the mind.

     The crisis of Covid was, while it was going on (and as long as you were careful, and lucky!) a fairly placid disaster.  Stuck at home, washing your hands like a fully conscious Lady Macbeth, finding ways to stay sane and waiting for things to get better.  The worry was not paying for things, but rather getting your hands on them.  It was almost as if time and the economy were in abeyance.  It was a period of waiting and hoping for something not to happen.

     That was then and this is now.  The idiocy of Brexit and its inevitable deleterious consequences; the catastrophe of the pointless invasion of Ukraine; the failure of normal politics; the lingering after-shock of Covid; the stuttering and virtual collapse of social services – a catalogue of horror and despair. 

     Yet the sun is shining and people are on the beach and in the cafes having a good time.  Because now, during the holidays, the summer holidays, is not the time to be thinking about the harsh realities that are going to hit, hard, in the autumn.

      In T S Eliot’s much quoted (and more often misquoted) “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” from The Four Quartets, he accurately summarises the tendency for us all to avoid those things that are difficult to take in or accept.  We like our dystopias and Armageddons to be narrative devices in stories or films rather than what’s going to happen in the next few months.

     We are going to have to bear it!

Things change

 

 

I am not going to be coerced into making fatuous New Year Resolutions; I refuse to be dragooned into making a list of aspirations just because everyone else is doing it at the same time.

     Actually, I don’t think that many people actually do make such lists – they are more the preserve of desperate editors on the Today programme on Radio 4, looking for a cheap and easy vox pop to pad out some time.  As if the events of 2021 going into the equally bleak looking 2022 have any lack of ‘real’ news items to sober-up any English (remember all the other nations of the UK have imposed restrictions) revellers who might be thinking of a better way to be after the festivities on an untrammelled New Year’s Eve!

     So, I am merely going to knuckle down again to the task of writing.  I have been remiss for the past umpteen days and, while it is easy to put such indolence down to ‘Christmas Preparations’ it would be a ludicrous overstatement of the amount of time that we actually spent on thinking about the 25^th.

 

     My card writing is now consigned to a single Christmas donation to Oxfam, and Christmas presents are strictly Catalan Family, and usually proscribed by family members in advance, to make things easier.  Food is catered for by a restaurant meal.  All one has to do is turn up.

     Unless, that is, after the traditional Christmas Eve giving of presents (shat out of a log) [it’s a Catalan thing] and returning home to sleep before the Christmas Meal, you happen to have an email on Christmas Day informing you that a swimming friend with whom you had a cup of tea a few days previously had tested positive for Covid.

     Everything changed.

     I was still within the four-day period after ‘last contact with the positive subject’ and so I had to isolate myself.  The test I took was negative, but I would need to take another on the Monday after Christmas to make sure that I was securely negative.

     I therefore I had a solitary Christmas Meal, and I was similarly alone for my Saint’s Day - Boxing Day or Saint Stephen’s Day.  In Catalonia a Name Day is more of a deal than in the UK (where the concept doesn’t really exist) as it usually involves a special meal and presents.

     Before any sympathy is wasted on poor little me, I might point out that I was able to make myself a sumptuous and self-indulgent Christmas Feast and, anyway, I had books to read!

     My name day celebrations will probably be postponed until next weekend, when The Family will come down to Castelldefels and enjoy a walk along the beach.

     A walk, I imagine that will be seen as something as a luxury in the coming days and weeks, when the Super Spreader Events that characterize national fiestas nowadays will inevitably result in a startling (though entirely predictable) increase in Covid infection – and the belated imposition of more stringent limitations on our freedom of movement.

     Admittedly, Catalonia has already imposed a curfew from 1am to 6am and has emphasised the social distance rules and strengthened the public association regulations, but I fear that, as is natural for politicians, it is too little too late. 

     Which makes the lack of action in England all the more startling and worrying. 

     The Tousled Thug who masquerades as Prime Minister has, yet again, abdicated his primary responsibility, which is striving to keep the people of the UK safe.  His ‘masterly inaction’ which in his sick mind he probably thinks is modelled on the behaviour of the late Queen Elizabeth, is rather more reminiscent of the appeasement of Chamberlain as he waves a little piece of paper with his interpretation of “The Science” to justify a cowardly ‘doing nothing’ to keep the semi-evolved dregs of the Conservative back benches quiescent.

     In one respect the woeful responses of our political masters have ‘worked’, in so far as a reasonable number of people to whom I have spoken have a sort of fatalistic acceptance that, “We’re all bound to get Covid at some time or other” which means that more and more people have bought-into the ‘herd immunity’ approach to pandemic management, with a shoulder-shrug to the consequent deaths that this acceptance must entail.

 

As the more observant reader will have noticed, there is a sort of ‘wasn’t that in the past’ sort of vibe about the previous writing.  Which is fair, as it was written a week ago.  Or more.

     In the meantime, I have tested negative again and life of sorts can resume.  Except.

     There is always an except.  My questionable knees have now decided to make a statement about their physical well-being and have opted for the ‘pain and discomfort’ way forwards.

     In what has been a remarkably limited number of days, my right knee has gone from ‘something ought to be done soon’ to ‘basically, not working’.  This has meant that my progress up, down, and along is now only possible with the ostentatious use of Toni’s crutches (a bargain, 12 euros on the internet).  And our house is composed almost entirely of stairs.  Or at least it seems that way to me as I tap and hobble my way around with a complete lack of grace and agility.

     In less than a week we have gone from the ‘something ought to be done’ to the ‘something has to be done – now!’ in a matter of days.  In the middle of a pandemic.

     I do have an appointment for ‘rehabilitation’ – but, at we don’t really know where my knees have been (so to speak) there is little for the medical staff to go on.  We are hoping that my obvious discomfort will prompt the people there to demand a scan, be appalled at what they see, and put me on a list for something.  Anything.  To make what is a fairly intolerable position slightly more acceptable.

     The waiting times for surgery that have been suggested to me, not necessarily from doctors, but from surprisingly well-informed casual acquaintances, has been at the far end of eight or nine months.  And I think, given the backlog thanks to Covid, that is a dewy-eyed optimistic prediction. 

     However.  At present, I have more pain than information, and I am looking forward to the Catalan health service coming forward, scalpel advanced, to my aid.  I have to say from previous experience with the medical services of this country, I have been more than impressed, and I will throw myself on their mercy – before I swallow whatever socialist principles are left to me and go private!

 

On the more positive side of life, the Family did come down to Castelldefels for my postponed Name Day and a good meal was had by all. 

     And it’s not raining. 

     One takes one’s positives where one finds them.

Buildings take time

 

 

 

Another tortuous milestone in the construction of the Sagrada Família has been reached with the placing of the star light on the top of the Virgin Mary Tower and, this evening, blessing and lighting it.  This is the first of the two filial lights to be achieved, the second will top the central and largest tower in the basilica – the one which will mark the completion of the project and the one on which building has been delayed because of Covid.

     There was an ambitious plan to have the building complete for the centenary of Gaudí’s death in 2026, but this is looking more and more unlikely.

     In spite of living in Barcelona (the province and metropolitan district) I have visited the Basilica only once, in the summer of 1958 when my father dragged me off the bus tour of the city that we were on and took me to what I understood to be a series of ruins but was informed that I was standing in the unfinished part of an on-going masterpiece by the Catalan architect Gaudi.  I was, generally, unimpressed – though that attitude changed as I found out more about the architect and his buildings.

     Why, you might ask, have I not visited the building again, especially as it now has a roof, and the interior is complete?

     Gaudi is constantly associated with natural forms and the Basilica looks like a growing thing, something more vegetable than stone. 

     Gaudi ‘lived’ his buildings, he was intimately involved in their evolution from design to structure and he was capable of making on-site adjustments to his plans, so that the word ‘evolution’ associated with his buildings is something which is real – that is what happened.  The plans were a starting point and Gaudi was the guide to their development.

     The great cathedrals of the past were always works in progress, and sometimes that progress was glacially slow, as buildings emerged over decades and sometimes centuries.  Gaudi lived on site towards the end of his life, and he was dedicated to seeing his concept of the building rise.  And that’s the point: a Gaudi building needs Gaudi to see it through to completion.  Without Gaudi, the building is something else.  Not worthless and not necessarily inferior, but definitely something else.

     Gaudi was killed in a traffic accident, but his plans survived.  Well, they survived until the Spanish Civil War when they were burnt, but enough survived for projections to be made about what the final form of the building should take.

     Every great building is, of necessity, a collaboration – it is how far that the collaboration should ‘develop’ from the original idea that is in question about the ‘finishing’ of Gaudi’s masterpiece.

     I used to say that I would have preferred to have had some sort of encompassing structure placed around the parts of the Basilica that Gaudi had completed and say, this is what we have, we can imagine the rest.  A building without Gaudi throughout is not a Gaudi building.

     Perhaps that is a little too purist and I have vowed that if and when the building is finished (in my lifetime) I will visit.

     Those visitors from the UK who have visited the Basilica have come away singing its praises.  I have been content to view it from a distance and enjoy the silhouette rather than look too closely at the detail!

     The quick-sketch outline drawing of the Sagrada Família shares a place with similar sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and The Sydney Opera House as being something that is instantly recognized from a few quick lines.

     As I visit Barcelona on a fairly regular basis, I have of course, seen the Sagrada Família close-up from the car and I have to admit that it is an imposing pile, I hope that things come together, and I will be able to visit!

Johnson is a liar.  He is liar who is found out in his lies on a regular basis.  He treats the truth with the same contempt that he reserves for his past wives.  And yet, he preserves his popularity with the voting public.

     Perhaps, the Christmas Party of Christmas Past will be the ghost that drags him down.  With scandal piling onto scandal in the traditional way of Conservative rule over any period of time, it seemed as if each new disgrace was something that could be wafted away with an airy phrase or some cod Latin.

     The joking contempt that his personal spokesperson displayed in laughing about how to deflect difficult questions about a Christmas party held during the height of Covid restrictions might be the thing that finally (finally!) cuts through to the general population and brings about, if not his downfall, then at least some sort of change in the way that we are governed.

     Johnson has tired his usual tactic of smooth sincerity and the sacrifice of an underling to turn away the rightful wrath that should be meted out on his head.  His lies have finally caught up with him and there is a growing groundswell of opinion that he should resign.

     Although I personally think that he should have been sacked rather than given the chance to resign a long time ago, I am still not convinced that the Tory Faithful will give up what they see as an electoral advantage (i.e., Johnson’s skills (!) in campaigning) for any airy concept of honesty or probity.

     This evening, Covid Plan B has been announced by Johnson (in a press conference NOT in The House of Commons) as a necessary part of the regulations to try and keep the Omicron variant in check – but also, and far more importantly from Johnson’s point of view as a “dead cat on the table” distraction to keep prying noses out of the detail of exactly what when on in the Christmas Party Fiasco of last year.

     Why should anyone do anything Johnson says, when he so signally doesn’t feel himself to be bound by the rules that he stipulates for others?

     It will be interesting to see what the media say about all of this, especially as there were pointed questions about the hypocrisy of Johnson and his misfits in the press conference announcing the measures.

     The best Christmas present that we could all have, is that Johnson resigns instantly.  God knows I loathe the deadbeat candidates that are likely to take over, but they (with the possible exception of Goblin Gove) are almost bound to be better and to have at least a shred of something approaching an ethic.   

Please!