Present depression; future hope!

 

 

“He looks like a homeless person,” my friend in the swimming pool said this morning before we started our swim, “With a tie!”  Perhaps it doesn’t need me to tell you which English political character he was taking about, given the international publicity that shuffling lummox has had over his latest U-turn.

     If it wasn’t for the unnecessary deaths that his ineptitude and indolence have caused, it would be rollickingly funny.  But it isn’t.  It’s a national humiliation as each new catastrophic missed opportunity or slipshod execution pushes the figures even further beyond the “optimistic” projected number of 20,000 dead by the end of the pandemic that was voiced with some belief in the early stages of the infection! 

     I hope that the increasing dead haunt Johnson’s every waking thought because it is his ‘”leadership’” that has pushed the figures into the national disgrace that they have become.  I think that the charges of “corporate manslaughter” that Johnson and his cabinet should face are becoming more and more of a necessity if the thousands of excess deaths are ever going to be properly laid at the feet of the architect of the political chaos that helped make them.  Indeed, I think that the term “manslaughter” is far, far too mild for what he and his low-life ministers have actually done.

 

However bitter my thoughts and how eager I am to see Johnson brought to justice; I know that my writing is just so much bile.  Even if Johnson were to read it he wouldn’t recognize the application to himself; he is so much of a narcissist that he would ‘naturally’ push the blame off on to someone else.  Responsibility has never been one of his strong points, well, not even a point really, so he would brush off any criticism as ‘inapplicable’ and carry on in the way that he has lived all of his life: falling upwards and ignoring negative opinions. 

     The only problem that I foresee is that his final comeuppance will come, but at a price that will involve the whole of the United Kingdom (for as long as that concept is going to survive his governance) in taking the hit for his failures, and he will gambol away (possibly humming a merry tune like Cameron) as he disappears into the lucrative lecture circuit and shallow book writing future that he has mapped out for himself.

     But wait, I was forgetting, as a past holder of his present post he will be entitled (?) to a peerage, Lord Boris of Bullshit, floridly resplendent in his (probably borrowed) robes, so that he can continue fleecing the country with his lordly per diems!

 

Enough!  We have only hours (or days, or weeks, or months, or years) left before the latest deadline for a Brexit agreement.  Has anyone bothered to count up the number of deadlines that have come and gone?  I do hope that someone has kept track of what we were offered and what we could have got at all the times in the past when an agreement was in the offing.  I am more than sure that what (if anything) we end up with will be a pale reflection of what we could have had if we had etc etc etc, and specifically if self-harming opposition of people like the Odious Rees-Mogg and the Unthinkable IDS had not been invented.  I have to admit that one finds it hard to imagine that those two (together with the unmentionables in the rabid Brexit gang) ever being ‘born’ in the normal human way.

With a lurch, I will try to stop foaming at the mouth with justifiable resentment and anger and become a trifle more composed.

     This evening I am going to a carol concert in Wales.  Not in reality of course, but virtually via Zoom.  The Cardiff Ardwyn Singers are presenting a Christmas Concert of carols dedicated to the memory of Gaynor Wilkins, wife of John, both of whom were connected with the Choir. 

     Money raised via the link below will go to the Haematology Unit for Cardiff and Vale Health Charity in recognition of the care that they showed in the treatment of Gaynor’s rare form of blood cancer Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS)

www.justgiving.com/fundraising/rhiannon-wilkins

Something real.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 14

The latest figures for the dead in Spain from Covid-19 in a twenty-four hour period are 832.  This is the highest figure of for a day’s deaths in Spain.  This is a catastrophe, and a catastrophe that people here are saying is partially of the government’s making.

   Last night the Prime Minister of Spain went on television and informed the country that there were going to be far more stringent restrictions from next Monday.  For a two-week period taking in Holy Week there will be a total ban on all non-essential travel and all non-essential premises will be shut down.

     It remains to be seen whether the renovators next door who have been (and are as I type) working normally and entering and leaving the workplace as if there was no crisis, will finally knuckle under and obey the restrictions.  These people are perhaps symptomatic of the problem, where some consider themselves outside the range of restrictions that are in place already. 

     The advice is simple: stay in your homes and wash your hands.  And it is frustrating when some people ignore it so openly.

Every evening at 8.00 pm there is the opportunity to show our appreciation for the Health Workers.  I open the kitchen window and clap into the darkness and hear others clapping too.  It is a moment of collective assertion of thanks and a poignant moment of community when we isolates are linked by a small but sincere gesture of thanks for the incredible job that our health workers are doing in circumstances that are less than ideal.

     I am still haunted by pictures of ill patients in Madrid hospitals laying on blankets in corridors; blankets! not even trolleys.  We have been told that many front-line health workers have not been tested; they do not have masks or the appropriate equipment to protect themselves from the virus; some are making their own protective clothing out of plastic bags; the hospitals in Madrid are overwhelmed; there are insufficient ventilators, and so on, and on.  Numbers of health workers have died and more will unless they are properly looked after.

     The government is accused of doing too little too late and is playing catch-up to the situation rather than managing it with any efficiency, and each mismanaged day brings new death, directly attributable to political mismanagement.

     I am not so naïf as to think that a crisis can be managed with anything approaching perfection, “events, dear boy, events” will always frustrate the most meticulous of plans, but some things are inexcusable.  The signalling of the future lockdown of Madrid, giving plenty of time for comfortably off Madrileños to decamp to their costal summer homes and spread the virus was unforgiveable.   And I hope that last word ‘unforgiveable’ becomes the major impetus when the inquiry into the crisis is started, when the virus has been finally vanquished.

Two weeks.  Just two weeks.

     It hardly seems credible that we have been locked in for only a fortnight.  The world where social distancing (a wonderfully evocative phrase) did not exist seems like another era of history, some exotic maelstrom of conviviality where people actually touched and kissed each other, some rumbustious Restoration frivolity, viewed with nostalgia from our Puritan isolationism!

     I suppose that I should be grateful that time, which seemed to be speeding up for me as birthday after birthday flashed by, has slowed down again.  I wonder how many weeks it will take, before this becomes the new normal and time regains its usual velocity!

The days are beginning to lose their character: weekdays are no different from weekends; what is the essential difference between a Tuesday and a Thursday when you are stuck at home? 

     If there seems a sort of stasis in one’s perception of the distinct individuality of the days of the week, there will be a ‘real’ difference in the individual hours, because today is the day when we change the clocks and get an extra hour in bed.  This, of course, is only possible if you are still indulging yourself by keeping to a mythical ‘working day’ timetable giving a façade of normality to the structure of your enclosed temporal existence.

    

I have to say that I truly regret the indisposition of Johnson as it gives an opportunity for the Grotesque Goblin Gove to speak to the nation.  The man truly makes my flesh crawl as his mendacious sincerity constantly deflects questions into a fog of verbiage that comes nowhere close to a specific answer.  I loathe his master, too, of course, naturally, but the Blond Buffoon’s shaggy, unconstructed showiness when it comes to English expression is easier to dismiss.  There is something adhesively repulsive about Gove’s loquacity that is more difficult to brush away.  It needs to be flushed.  And then disinfected.  And then bleached.

Tomorrow a theoretical lie in, but I am sure that my ‘absolute’ body clock will get me up at the usual time, for Day 15 and the start of the third week of Lockdown.