It is amazing how far the quality of an experience can be changed by the omission of a cup of tea.
I realize that the British obsession with our national hot beverage (not a leaf of which, with the exception of the botanical gardens in Kew, is grown in the country) is somewhat difficult for those not of a British persuasion to understand.
It is further complicated by our insistence that the milk be cold not boiling when added to the brew. “Why,” my foreign friends ask, “would you do that?” To ask such a question, almost by definition, defies an answer. Where, one asks oneself, does one start when confronted by such levels of Philistinism?
Anyway, at the end of my morning swim I am accustomed to make my way to the outside seating of the adjoining café and have a cup of tea and one made to my exacting standards of a mixture of Earl Gray and English Breakfast, and a brew that, when the milk is added the resultant colour is of a depth that my father would have found acceptable – though for him to be enthusiastic about a cup of tea it would have to be one of such strength that, “the tea spoon could stand up in it!” My normal cup of tea does not aspire to such flavoursome heights, but it does emphatically not look like the usual anaemic liquids served opening masquerading as tea in this country.
I swim a metric mile, that is sixty lengths of our 25m pool. I go up and down, and up and down, accompanied only by the sound of my exhaled breath bubbling against my stoppered ears and seeing very little in the myopic blur in which I swim – having recently given up wearing contact lenses because they irritated me. So, in the monotony of length swimming, the idea of a nice cup of tea waiting as a reward for early morning exertion is something to keep you going.
But for the next fortnight, the café is closed except for ‘take-away’ and the idea of drinking my tea from a paper cup standing next to my bike is not something that appeals. So, swim finished, dressed, straight out onto bike for the ride down to Port Ginesta and back.
It all seems a little earnest without the frivolity of tea, and it is, furthermore, while sipping my tea that I jot down ideas in my notebook. I could, of course, jot down notes at any time, but the time just seems to melt away when you are breaking routine to get something done. Notes are for post-swim tea drinking, not sitting in the comfort of an armchair later in the day. And, after all, it’s only for a fortnight.
And therein lies the rub. I do not think that this closing of bars and restaurants is going to be sufficient to deal with the upsurge in number of infections. I think that this partial lockdown is more a function of political cowardice and real fear over the financial consequences rather than a science-based solution. It seems to me that this is just a softening-up of an already tired and fed up electorate before something more drastic will be forced to take its place.
Although we are informed that there are over 170 trials of possible vaccines in operation and that by the end of the year there should be clear indications of likely candidate vaccines to roll out for the general population by early January, the more convincing voices has warned that the simple logistics of the immunization exercise make it unlikely that the PBI will get protection before the summer of 2012. Given what we have packed into the past months of 2020, the summer of 2021 seems a hell of a long way away, and our political leadership has been shaky to put it at its mildest!
Still, life goes on defiantly with people eagerly accepting ever changing versions of what New Normal might mean.
One example of this might be the new way to celebrate distanced occasions. Today is the Name Day of Toni’s sister and she has suggested that we have a distanced meal with her paying for a delivery of a menu del dia from one of our chosen restaurants here in Castelldefels because we are unable to go up to Terrassa and, anyway there would be more than six of us celebrating. I will let you know how this works out, but it is only a development of on-line presents where, with Amazon Prime, it is cheaper to send something via Amazon than buy it yourself and send it yourself.
Noticed on television last night that there were adverts for one of our largest Department Stores, El Corte Ingles, where they were saying that an on-line purchase could be delivered free of charge (?) within a couple of hours! This is throwing down the gauntlet to Amazon and it will be interesting to see how it all works out.
For shops here in Castelldefels, unless they get themselves organized via the web to do deliveries they are going to go out of business. The smaller shops will need help, perhaps via a sort of city version of a localized Amazon system, but unless something dramatic is done the whole commercial basis of city shopping is going to implode.
One of the lead items on the Catalan News was the fact that Wales has decided to impose a new/old stringent lockdown. It may be the first in Western Europe to do so, but I do fear that it will not be the last.
The tiered approach in England looks and sounds like an unsatisfactory compromise and the dump of documentation from SAGE telling the politicos that a short sharp shock was needed makes the shambolic behaviour of this totally discredited Conservative ‘government’ look even more mendacious that we already knew it to be.
Johnson is quite prepared to sacrifice lives rather than face up to his political responsibilities. He, and his cabinet of all the talentless, are despicable. And once again I make the plea for someone, anyone, to bring a charge of Corporate Manslaughter against him and his Brexiteer accomplices as they continue their ‘systematic’ attacks on the people and institutions of the United Kingdom.
