LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 77 – Sunday, 31st May

I am more than ever convinced that my government has no real plan to exit the lockdown apart from a mystic belief in the ameliorative affect of the calendar, and hope.  I have seen no evidence that the political leaders have the slightest idea of what they are doing, why they are doing it and what they hope to achieve.

     It is fairly clear that the loosening of the lockdown restrictions were brought forward to try and combat the adverse publicity about the lockdown cheat Cummings.  The tracking effort seems stillborn given the information that we have had for those people who have been ‘trained’ so far.  The opening of schools in England seems motivated by politics rather than by health and education.  Every part of the crisis has been made worse by the way that it has been woefully mismanaged.  And people die because of the mistakes that this government makes, and they will go on dying until a more convincing/efficient/moral/realistic – well, add your own adjectives, I can think only of insulting ones for the bunch of incompetents that supposedly run the country.

     Here in Catalonia and in Castelldefels we are due to move to Phase 2 on Monday.  This unites all parts of the metropolitan area of Barcelona into one unit and that means that we are able to move about within the whole area.  In theory, we think, it means that Toni would be able to go to his home city of Terrassa and speak to his family, though he would still have to keep physical distancing when he speaks to them.  And I think that they could meet in an open space.  We are not absolutely clear about the rules.

     I have just come back from my evening bike ride and the area where we used to live when we were first in Castelldefels looked like a perfectly ordinary Sunday night in late May.  Families were out and there were groups of youngsters on bikes and wandering the streets.  The restaurants were doing a roaring trade and there were queues outside some.  The age range was from babies to pensioners so, as far as the good people of Castelldefels are concerned, the restrictions of Phase 1 are well and truly over.

     On Monday, if the weather is good, I confidently expect the beaches to be packed and we will then see if the discipline of physical distancing extends itself to the sand!

On the cultural front, lockdown has given me the opportunity via Netflix to watch an extended selection of episodes of “Family Guy” and it has taken over (almost) from my predilection for lauding “The Simpsons” as the best thing on our TV screens.  

     Admittedly my lack of access to past episodes of “The Simpsons” means that “Family Guy” has had something of a clear run in making me a fan, but just as there are episodes of “The Simpsons” that are stand-out amazing (I’m thinking of the episode when Bart is sent to France and finds that he is a slave in a vineyard; the one where Marge takes part in the musical version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” with a chorus number “You can always depend on the kindness of strangers” or the remake of “Of Mice and Men”) I have now seen an episode of “Family Guy” that stunned me.

     “Send in Stewie, Please” is focussed on just one character and is an extended episode that I understand was broadcast without commercial breaks.

     The action of the episode is centred on the obnoxiously precocious baby of the family, Stewie.  He has been sent to the child psychiatrist because, as we eventually find out, he has pushed another child downstairs.

     Stewie dominates this episode and through picking up clues in photographs and other things he is able to give a crushing description of the live and love of the psychiatrist (voiced brilliantly by Ian McKellen!) before breaking down himself and revealing The Truth about himself.  It is mesmerizing.  It is comic, without being funny and it is a very polished piece of writing.

     It was broadcast in March 2018 and I recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet.  Whether you will get the full flavour of the episode if you haven’t seen any other the others I am not sure, but it will still be a horrifyingly amusing sort of experience!

     “Family Guy” is a much more ‘adult’ animation than “The Simpsons” and uses tropes that you would never find in the latter.  It is also famous for its ‘cut aways’ and these often have ‘real’ film or ‘real’ characters in them.  Sexuality is a major theme, in a number of varieties, sometimes very uncomfortably!

     It’s all good stuff and I am thoroughly enjoying my belated introduction to a splendid series!

For Sunday lunch we had our traditional meal of chicken from the pollo a last where people are still maintaining adequate physical distancing and forming an orderly queue.  This Sunday the people tried to reinstate the ticket system where, having taken a paper ticket, you are informed that it is your turn by an electronic display.  For the last few weeks, because of the distanced queuing it was irrelevant and most of us had queued without taking a ticket.  This meant that, when the owner tired to call out a number there was instant rebellion from the queue and the system was dispensed with immediately.  Something to bear in mind for next week!

     Though, who knows how we will be behaving by next week!  Time now has the quick slowness or slow quickness that can easily catch you out!

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 76 – Saturday, 30th May

I’m still furious about the fact that Cummings is still in his position after he has been shown to have broken the lockdown guidelines.  He formed the rules; he should resign or be sacked.

     If I am furious about the fact that Cummings is holding on, I am sickened by the continuingly awful performance of the man who calls himself the Prime Minister. 

     His inability to articulate a convincing argument in the briefings and the embarrassingly inept responses to questioning revealing his shocking lack of detail in his understanding of his briefs used to be the basis for the reasons that I detest this shallow apology of a concerned politician having anything to do with the levers of power – but now I think that his demeaning protection of Cummings has taken pride of place in my reasons to despise the man.

     It is clear that Cummings should be fired, he is a glaring example of the ‘one rule for us and another for the rest’, he is a self proclaimed populist and disruptor, but in the case of his lockdown misdemeanours he has behaved like a typical member of the elite and the establishment (with a small ‘e’) has come to his aid.

     The feeling of the public however does not match that of the sometime prime minister (who has now surely forfeited his right to capital letters for the office that he has so demeaned) and the way that he has slavishly protected his advisor.  Too many members of the public have done exactly as the guidelines suggested and have suffered the consequences for them to be anything like sympathetic to the so-called travails of an over privileged git.

     Even though I am resident in Catalonia, I feel personally slighted by the government.  I have abided by the rules for over ten weeks, not only for my own safety, but also for the safety of others: the simple logic of safety.  But that sort of logic is only for the little people of whom Cummings is not, of course, one.

     I do not think that the feeling of being cheated will go away and Johnson’s government (if we can call it that) will be forever tainted.  Unfortunately the British electorate doesn’t seem to have many scruples about accepting tainted goods and so my hopes for the future are few.

     Quite apart from the criminally inept mismanagement of the viral crisis, when I really want to depress myself, I start thinking about what mess they are going to make of Brexit.  Silly me, they have already made a mess of it, I wonder what sort of monumentally, catastrophic balls up they are going to make of it.

     Whatever else this crisis has illustrated, one thing is abundantly clear, the personnel that form the government is of woefully limited ability.

Castelldefels is getting ready for the tourist season.  Restaurants are partially open and when I passed the centre of the beach part of Castelldefels there were people queuing for places in the limited dining accommodation available.  To the untrained eye things looked like a normal late May Saturday evening.  There were few masks and little to no physical distancing – but there again, we are allowed to meet in groups of up to 10!

     Neither Toni nor I are clear about how the rules change on Monday, when we go from Level 1 to Level 2.  What new delights at playing at freedom will that allow us!

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 74 – Thursday, 28th May

Today felt the least like being in lockdown.  My morning bike ride was 'open', in the sense that the paseo was fairly sparsely populated, it was almost like a ‘normal’ ride, except for the number of people sporting medical masks – though not by any means the majority.

      The first part of my ride was into the centre of town to post a delayed letter of condolence to the wife of an ex-colleague of mine.  As I had included a card I was not sure of the weight/cost and so a trip to the post office was necessary, and partly explains the delay.  The post office was only open until 2.30 so I was there early.  Not early enough. 

     There were a couple of people outside and a counter assistant was letting in people one by one.  I was prepared to wait right up until I saw the length of the queue on the other side of the building, it was stretched the length of the street.  I did not wait.

     Previously I had used the Tabac to get stamps and to deposit letters, so I decided to find out if you could still do that.  The stamps were not a problem and the lady behind the counter seemed to be confident about the amount that was necessary to send it off, the only odd point about the transaction was her wielding a pritt stick to put the stamps on.  It was only after she had done it that I realized that no one nowadays is going to lick stamps, not in the present circumstances.  There are going to be all sorts of little instinctive reactions that will now be potentially deadly!

     For the first time for ten weeks we actually used one of the motorways to go to a shop that sold fencing.  The shop was open, though sections were portioned off and each section had an assistant who took the name of each person who went into the area.  People were keeping their distance as far as possible, though we were still too close for comfort.

     I met somebody that I knew from the swimming pool in the shop and for the first time I bumped elbows by way of greeting and had a muffled mask-wearing conversation.  The New Normal indeed!

     Lunch was patatas bravas with my attempt at a salsa to go with them that Toni discovered on the Internet.  There is a bewilderingly large number of ingredients that you have to add to the mayonnaise up to and including orange juice and zest.  An interesting experiment, and tasty too.

Johnson, the sometime prime minister of the UK, has said that we should “move on” from the fuss about the wrongdoing of Cummings.  We should not.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 72 – Tuesday, 26th May

My favourite part of the ‘lie-abetter for Brexit’ Cummings’ Rose Garden Explanation was his justification for going to local beauty spot Barnard Castle on his wife’s birthday: to test his eyes!  Now, even though he is the chief advisor to the dyed in the wool liar Johnson, I think it is perhaps unreasonable to call that little fantasy a lie.  The justification has obviously been studiously nurtured over the weeks when Cummings and No 10 steadfastly refused to give any details about Cummings whereabouts in the period he has now so splendidly ‘shared’ with we plebs.

     The ‘eye testing’ element is a tour-de-force in the ‘with a mighty leap he was free’ approach to difficult situations in the old Saturday Matinee serials from which there appeared to be no escape.  I also liked the Tom Lehrer, “We’ll all go together when we go” approach of loading the car with wife and young child to ensure totality of extinction if an ophthalmic accident happened.

     I listened to almost all the Rose Garden ‘Confession’ and was most struck by the fact that Cummings did not apologise.  At any time.  He went out of his way to assert that he considered that he had done nothing wrong.

     But, the simple fact is, he did do something wrong.  He did break the lockdown.  He did break the rule that says that you should not go on unnecessary journeys.  As one Guardian commentator, Owen, said, the central reality of what Cummings did shows that he broke the guidelines, “everything else is just noise”.

     As the focus is now ridiculously on him, other snippets of duplicity are coming out.  Today we have been told about a doctored blog where his tinkering allows him to present himself as prescient.  Editing past blogs is not a crime – but if you make reference to the doctored blog to substantiate a claim, it is at least an academic crime, and reflects nothing on your character.  He is the Mekon not Doctor Who, the only way he can travel in time is to alter the records and then pretend.

     The numbers of times I have said in the past, “I do not see how he/she/it can continue, with honour, in post,” have been uttered with tired exasperation because ‘honour’ usually has nothing whatsoever to do with it.  Whatever ‘it’ was or is, and the defective character defiantly brazens out the storm and continues in place.  Johnson is a perfect example.  He has been caught out lying, cheating, misrepresenting and philandering, to name just a few of the –ing words that spring to mind in his case.  He is selfish, disloyal, cowardly, hypocritical, mendacious, lazy, ill prepared, loutish, vulgar, dishevelled, conceited, arrogant, complacent, narcissistic and smug.  And he is the Prime Minister.  In spite of everything.

     Well, Johnson got his wish, he is in post and is making a true hash of things.  Like a number of people I have known throughout my life, he is a prime (ha!) example of somebody wanting something, but thinking little about what achieving that goal will mean.  He is Prime Minister, but he gives little impression either of enjoying his position or knowing what to do while he is there.  The demands of the pandemic show up all his failings.  He is not the leader to bring the UK together.  He does not engender trust.  He does not give the impression that he has the slightest idea of how to take the country forward.  As I fear that we will continue to see with the whole Brexit project, he fronted a campaign laced with lies, deception and half-truth; he has ‘achieved’ Brexit, but knows little about how to make it anything approaching a useful reality.  The major claims of the campaign are all turning out to be fantasy: the money for the NHS; the lack of a border in the Irish Sea; the ease with which an agreement could be done and so on.  His fantasies have cost us billions already as we stumble towards the hardest of hard exits and his lack of management and determination have cost us lives.  Tens of thousands of lives.

     I am sure that Johnson feels that he has been hard done by.  He did not want to become Prime Minister in a time of cholera, or worse.  He wanted to be the blond haired poster boy leading a flag waving pack of baying mindless Brexiteers towards the sunny uplands of whatever their deranged imaginations thought was better than we had.  He wanted to be delivering pseudo-intellectual speeches, full of blokey forthrightness laced with the soupcon of Classical Learning to impress what he regards as the Great Unwashed.  And it has all unravelled because of what Mac the Knife called, “Events, dear boy, events!”

     Johnson is a diminished man, politician and Prime Minister.  His inability to gauge the feeling of the nation in their disgust at what Cummings has done will, I think, be something of a turning point in his frankly disgraceful career.

     Or not, of course.  To Cummings and Johnson, what we think is fairly irrelevant.  We are not the wielders of power, we are not the ones ‘born to lead’.  We, at a very basic level, do not matter to them.  We are the goldfish, throw us some titbits of salacious news and our five-second memories will wash away recent events and return us to the quiescent subservience that they think is their due.

     I only hope that the groundswell of revulsion at Cummings is too big and too powerful to be relegated to the ‘other country’ of the past and that simple justice might prevail and a man whose arrogance has become too big for the country to stand is torn away from the front stage of politics.

     It’s time for the toddler Johnson to come out of his Cummings style Pampers and wear his own grown up underpants with clean confidence!

     As if!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 71 – Monday, 25th May

I am still shaken by just how poor a defence Johnson mounted to justify the high-handedness of his arrogant aide.  When even the Daily Mail asks, “What planet do they think they are on!” as a reference to the incredible (literally!) insulting justification for Cummings’ rule breaking, joined with the sickeningly unedifying spectacle of supine ministers docilely toeing the Save The Dom cabinet line, you realize that you are witnessing a government imploding.

     Perhaps I should have said ‘seemingly imploding’ because I do not underestimate the ability of the Conservative Party to survive ‘fatal’ mistakes and misjudgements.  It is undeniable that Johnson is a lessened leader, I don’t say ‘character’ because that is clearly impossible, and if it becomes clear to him that his status is diminished then he will do what any narcissist does when self-worth is threatened: lash out and to hell with the collateral damage.

     Let us never forget that Johnson’s espousal of Brexit was quintessentially narcissistic: he was convinced by his own rhetoric, comparing and contrasting two pieces of his own writing to see which one would afford him greater possibilities for self-advancement.  I don’t know what the opposite of a Damascene Conversion would be to cover his case, but there was no blinding light from an all-powerful deity, but rather a greedy acceptance of his own perceived omnipotence fuelling his ludicrously inflated ego and presented as reason and logic and, god help duty, dedication and us!

     The front pages of the newspapers cannot make easy reading for Johnson, but they don’t make easy reading for the rest of the Conservative Party either.  Most MPs are concerned about their seats; anything that looses them public support is not to be tolerated – and these MPs postbags must be filled with howls of outrage about the preferential treatment of a member of the establishment as opposed to the PBI, or rather Plebs as they think of us.

     You can take the over-entitled git out of the Bullingdon Club, but the sense of them-and-us never leaves.  Johnson is a perfect example of the born into privilege and milking it for all it’s worth with the minimum of effort sort of the undeserving rich.  He is also a bully, a liar, malicious and, as the ‘defence’ of Cummings has clearly shown, a coward.  And cowards in power are dangerous.  As we are finding out every day.

     Unless Johnson takes visible control of the government then even his comfortable majority will not be enough to protect him from the Men in Suits whose only raison d’etre is to preserve power, and to whom Johnson is only a momentary blip on the time line of their sequestration of political dominance.

The fall out from the pathetic defence of Cummings, where we are expected to believe in a sort of Schrodinger’s Lockdown that does and does not allow free movement at the same time, continues.  Johnson’s cringe-makingly inept performance has had the surprising result of uniting all sections of society and all political parties in fully justified revulsion.  Except of course for the ‘usual suspects’ of Brexit insanity, though even some members of the ERG have called for Cummings’ head!  We truly live in strange times!

     As a last resort, Cummings himself is to make a public statement and take questions.  I suppose if Cummings can supress his natural revulsion for the carping criticism of the ‘lesser breeds without the law’ by whom he thinks he is surrounded, then a person of his obvious intelligence and manipulative skills would be the sort of man to carry it off.  But he really will have to out-Houdini Houdini to get away with it and I hope The Daily Mirror and The Guardian hacks have got their linguistic scalpels out and ready to dissect everything that l’éminence désordonée has to say. 

     I keep checking in with The Guardian on my phone to find out the time because I do not want to miss a word.  I have just found out that his statement will take place at 4pm UK time, 5pm my time.  I will be there, don’t let me down Radio 4!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 69 – Saturday, 23rd May

So, “Let them die! Cummings” is now shown to have broken the lockdown rules that he helped frame, by driving 250 miles from London when he was positive with the Covid-19 virus to self-isolate in his parents’ house – a flagrant flouting of the rules.  If we look to the immediate past, other high profile flouters have resigned.  So should he.

     He won’t of course.  The Blond Buffoon would be lost, directionless, gibbering – sorry, even more lost, directionless and gibbering, without him.  And where would Hardest of All Hard Brexits be unless driven (ha!) by the Manic Mekon of Maliciousness!

     I look forward to the puerile mendacity of third-rate cabinet ministers (are there any others?) as they (yet again) defend the defenceless.  I do hope that the Guardian manages to get an appropriately evil photograph of the Bald Bastard (I can say that as I share his follicle challenge) to illustrate the mealy mouthed explanations for his ‘entitled’ flouting.  If, of course, anyone deigns to give an explanation.  It remains to be seen if there are sufficient Tory MPs to force The Blond Buffoon into another U-Turn, and if there is a feeling in the country that Cummings’ position is untenable.  One can only hope!

     This comes at the same time as the fall-out from the self-quarantine for visitors to the UK controversy; the continued failure of track and test; the chaos and division on the school return plans; the continuing horror of the mismanagement of Covid-19 in Care Homes; the total number of deaths and infections; the release of SAGE advice showing just how political the decisions have been; confusion of intentions about how, when and where we can holiday, and on and on. 

     Our present government is exactly the wrong group of politicians in position at exactly the wrong time.  And there is a proposed trip for the Blond Buffoon to the Orange Monster as if the link of shared shittiness was not close and dirty enough even with an ocean between them, they have to get together to share the shame!

My bike ride this morning was through a positive throng of people walking, running and cycling on the Paseo, the most crowded that I have experienced.  The beach was also fairly densely populated with some people swimming – it just shows you what odd times we are living in that such a comment seems remarkable!  Given that Monday marks a further loosening of the restrictions, I confidently expect there to be an exponential rise in people along the front.  We will be open to visits from people in the whole Barcelona metropolitan area, though I am not sure that overnight stays are yet allowed.  There are numbers of second homes in Castelldefels so there must be people itching to get to the seaside for the traditional stay.  Sigh!

     This means that our summer neighbours are likely to arrive as soon as they are given permission, and then they will be here until at least the middle of September.  Usually they arrive just after the schools close, though this year that date is something of a moveable feast to say the least, more conjectural than calendrical!  [ look it up, it exists!]

     My sports club can reopen on Monday as well, though I am not sure that the pool will be open yet.  The web site does not give information about sports apart from some 1 to 1 activities in padel and pilates.  Nothing about swimming.  As my membership of the Club has been temporarily suspended during the virus crisis I suppose that I will know that things are getting back to normal when the bank starts taking money again!  I am looking forward to my first lengths.

     I assume that when swimming eventually resumes it will be in a ‘timed’ slot and that changing facilities and showering facilities will not be provided. 

     We may well have to turn up in our bathing costumes and that means I will have to delve into my wardrobe and see if I can find a tracksuit.  That still fits!  I fear that most of the bits and pieces of past tracksuits are nylon based and therefore efficient producers of static electricity.  As someone who has ‘fallen upwards’ after crossing the carpet of the National Theatre and placing a hand on the exposed metal stair rail and shocking myself from side to side as I instinctively flinched away with one shocked hand and then grabbed for support with the other to be shocked in turn, and so on – I am prone to crackling displays of painful personal electric discharges.  I dread the return to nylonic [that doesn’t exist, but I like the sound] Faradaean [that doesn’t either, ditto] excesses!  But, there again, no pain – no gain!

Just watched 1917.  Superb!  I am usually quite squeamish about films concerning the First World War, partly I think because I feel that I have an emotional investment in the things as my grandfather was a volunteer at the start of the war and he was someone who survived, though not without scars – both literal and mental.  He was wounded during one ‘battle’ (if you can call the ill planned slaughter by upper class idiots a ‘battle?) and was seriously enough wounded to be sent back to Britain to recuperate.  When he returned to his point in the line, nothing had changed except the whole of his company had been killed.  Everyone.

     Every time that I have walked past the statue of Earl (!) Douglas Haig in London, I have felt a personal affront on behalf of my grandfather.  A man who fought in the Somme.  Ah well, let it go, but I am not neutral when I see soldiers in the trenches.  1917 was a worthy addition to the sorry story of the senseless slaughter in France and Belgium – that should never be forgotten.  There are too many easy parallels of the waste of human life in our present time for the excesses of 1914-1918 to be ignored.  Though it would be difficult to say that the lesson has been learned.

     A film worth watching.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 54 – Friday, 8th May

Where does one start? 

     It almost takes me back to what I realize now, were the morally halcyon days of the end of Thirteen Years of Tory Misrule when scandal followed scandal culminating in the heady sexuality (which I must admit I hardly appreciated at my age then) of the Profumo Scandal.  I can still recite the names of the main characters in that sordid grande affaire with salacious relish!  Of course the most notable thing about that particular scandal was that Profumo actually resigned.  A politician resigning!  Ah, those were the days.

     So we come to the present regime in the UK, another Tory regime with a decade of misrule behind it and a bewildering array of ‘resignable’ mistakes connected to the Covid crisis.

     The papers of SAGE have been released to the press but with redacted sections to protect the government’s narrative of ‘following the science’ as if there was a concept of Science that was absolute and beyond political mediation.  Were I a scientist advising the government, this government, I would be very, very concerned because it is fairly obvious that the Tory party is lining up the Science (with a capital ‘S’) to be the fall guy in the inevitable public inquiry.

     Let us continue with the catalogue of contempt.  The care homes situation does not seem to be getting any better.  On the anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen, it is a cruel irony that the care homes in Europe now appear to have distressing overtones of extermination camps, in spite of the sterling service of care staff who are woefully and disgustingly underpaid, understaffed and under equipped.  How many elderly people have to die before this discredited government accepts its blame and works to ameliorate the situation?

     The continuing numerical farce of the testing seems to be unending and the increasingly discredited Beckett has not, again, accepted that he has failed.  And Beckett is one of the less noxious members of this government, especially when you consider that the organizing brain is the loathsome Cummings, the Marie Antoinette/L’eminence gris de nos jours but with a more vicious take on Marie’s airy dismissal, more of a “Let them die” sort of vibe rather than an invitation to appreciate brioche!

     The numbers of those infected continues to grow and the daily death count is a constant accusation.  One that cannot be avoided by using the amours of a randy professor to try and subvert the news on the day that the death rate became the largest in Europe.

     The comedy of errors that is the ordering and non-delivery and eventual delivery and delay and quality check and rejection and farce and death is something that is so absurd that it couldn’t be made up!

     The latest idiocy can be placed fairly firmly at the feet of the Blond Buffoon who ignoring parliament, decided to announce the easing of some of the lockdown measures.  Unfortunately the right-wing press has hailed the announcement as something of liberation from the tyranny of lockdown deprivation and has geared up the population to expect dramatic ‘freedom’ when the numbers of deaths and infections does not justify anything other than the mildest of loosening.  This weekend is going to be fine and it has a Bank Holiday, so people are going to expect sunbathing, beach visiting and lazing about in parks.  The expectation of more than is likely to be on offer is going to produce tensions that can have fatal consequences.

     Here in Catalonia and Castelldefels, the mere suggestion that there are going to be phases of loosening of lockdown has been enough to inflate expectations and suggest that it might be time to bring on the new normality.

     From my observation the young have comprehensively decided that they are immune to the virus and they are certainly acting as if the virus is only for the old.  I think that the transition from lockdown to anything that is not lockdown is going to be very difficult to bring off, when the younger part of the population thinks it is immune and the other feel that they have done more than enough already and are ready for a little (or a lot) of relaxation.

     It is going to be a rough few days - with worse to follow.