LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 66 – Wednesday, 20th May

On the Port Ginesta side of the Paseo I noticed a police car awkwardly stopped in the middle of the road.  As I approached I saw that the police were speaking to a grandfather who had his small Viral Assassin with him, clearly out of the allotted time slot for such things.  Unfortunately, I did not see any movement on the part of the police to leave their car and give a multa to the offending adult.  Still, it was encouraging to see that they were not letting flagrant ignoring of restrictions pass.

     In fact on my bike ride this morning I saw more police cars than usual.  There were four or five on the Marine road, but none at the Gavà part of my ride, so I took advantage of the absence and added the Gavà loop to my cycle.  I felt very virtuous at the end of my ride, which is more than I can say for my bum.  I have not idea how the more dedicated cycle riders manage 50k or more.  They must either have buttocks like hardened steel or they are dyed in the wool masochists.

On a rather more elevated note, the Lyric Hammersmith is going to screen a version of A Doll’s House by Ibsen for today only.

     I was tricked into first reading Ibsen by the enticing title of his play Ghosts that I rather expected to live up to its Gothic promise.  I enjoyed reading the play, in spite of their being no ghosts of a variety that I could shiver to and I also entirely failed to pick up on the unstated, but essential component of the narrative of the play, syphilis.  Given the fact that the main plot of the play passed me by, I now wonder what it was that kept my interest!

     Ghosts is one of those plays that I have seen where different productions have given me entirely different views.  The first live production of Ghosts that I saw was played as a serious tragedy, while another that I went to see with my mother in the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, was played as a comedy.  And both worked.

   The same thing happened with two productions of Death of a Salesman that I saw in relatively quick succession.  The first, again in The Sherman, left me feeling depressed and border suicidal, while the second in the West End left me with a happy smile on my face.  All four of the productions I should add were well produced and exceptionally well acted and I knew both plays well through academic study.

     The Lyric’s production of A Doll’s House is set in late C19th Calcutta (is it still ok to write the city like that?) and is listed as an adaptation of the text so it will be interesting to see how far the writer and director depart from the original.  But it got good reviews and this is an opportunity not to be missed.  It is only available from 2.30pm to midnight.

     I don’t know if this is true, but I was told that all West End productions lodge a ‘reference’ video of their productions with the National Theatre Museum and the videos or films are available for academic study.  Given that copies of play no longer have to be registered by law with the Lord Chamberlain’s office so that the Recorder of Plays can authorize them for public showings, it would be a criminal lack of intelligence to let the unparalleled collection of plays in Britain be wasted by not continuing some sort of archive.

     Perhaps in the future, theatres will make a video of their productions to augment their takings from on-line views.  Some Opera Houses and theatres have productions live streamed to cinemas around the world, but on-line could be (perhaps given the virus ‘must be’) one of the financial ways forward to keep, oddly, live theatre alive!

     I know that plays do not translate directly to film and a play in a theatre is altogether different from a film but, as my father was fond of saying, “anything is better than nothing” and a theatre audience, even given a long run, is in total tiny compared with a single showing on line.  Perhaps this virus will prompt a whole new generation of ‘theatre goers’ who take their pleasure on line!

The confusion, disinformation, misdirection and outright lying continue to confuse the ‘back to school’ impetus of governments in Spain and in the UK.  It does seem to me that without adequate testing and contact tracing there can be no safe way of returning to school.

     Blair did make the point that the children of the rich and privileged will have been ‘educated’ during the lockdown and the missed school for the underprivileged not only in terms of education but also in nutrition cannot and should not be ignored.  However, the solution to the problem of inequality is not to put teachers in the firing line and allow them to die.  I do realize that the ancestors of the public school boys who run the country probably had no qualms as they drew up their plans for the battles of The First World War, but one rather hoped that we had progressed somewhat during the last century!

     I do not trust the government in England to have due care and attention when it comes to restarting schools.  The politicians who run the government are in place because they subscribed to the self-harm of Brexit in spite of the overwhelming evidence that such an action would be disastrous.  We should always remember Cummings “Let them die!” as the modus operandi of the Conservatives.  “Money above lives” always has, and always will be their mantra.

     I am sure that there are ways in which schools can be opened with a liberal application of the fruits of the money tree that the Conservatives found to combat the virus – vegetation that was signally absent during the years of austerity and which made the present situation so much worse than it needed to be.  Smaller classes; more teachers; more school building; better facilities – all the things that teacher unions have been asking for, pleading for, for years!

     Let us never forget that this government has deaths on its ‘conscience’ and they must be held accountable.  I do not want to see the mortality total swollen with avoidable deaths of colleagues.

More and more people seem to be taking advantage of exercise time, especially more and more cyclists, but you get the sense that the people who are out are getting progressively freer in the way that they are treating the virus.  On the beach the construction of various kiosks has begun, though I think these are for the renting of sunbeds rather than the beach cafes that we have each summer – but they are a sign that Castelldefels is gearing up for the influx of visitors on which the town depends.

      I do not think that there is convincing evidence that the warmer weather will kill off the virus, so I really fear about what is going to happen in the future and the way that things are going and the general attitude of people a second spike in numbers of people infected buy the virus is almost unavoidable.

The free performance of A Doll’s House in the Lyric Hammersmith was very much an archive performance and lacked the polish of the NT Thursday performances, but the artistic director made the type of filmed performance clear in her introduction.  It is still very much worth watching and, at the time of writing, you have three and a half hours left to watch it for free.  You should!

     Tomorrow A Streetcar Named Desire.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 55 – Saturday, 9th May

In one of those convoluted areas of jurisdiction that are more usual in Republican Party gerrymandering, part of Sitges curves over the hills outside the tunnels and engulfs the end of Castelldefels in the Port Ginesta area.  As this is a continuous part of Castelldefels most people actually forget that it is not part of our town.  The police, however, do know.  And this morning they were on the Paseo looking pained as all we people from Castelldefels were walking (or cycling) along the road.  Toni told me later (as he had gone for a walk in the opposite direction) that Gavá was also similarly policed and ‘isolated’.

     This is not something that happens on a regular daily basis and I think that it is confined to weekends when the ‘danger’ of outsiders infringing local boundaries is at its highest.  To be fair; it’s a fair cop.  We are, after all, supposed to be confined to our localities – however artificial they actually are.

     The news from the UK is not good in this area where six weeks of lockdown are facing what could be a sunny Bank Holiday weekend with police in London saying that they are losing the battle of the parks with people flocking to them to sunbathe and drink, and gather in groups not segregated by physical distancing.  As the weather here is not particularly sunny it will be interesting to see how many people are out and about this evening at 8pm when my age group is allowed to exercise.

On a more festive note, today is Toni’s birthday and I filmed him opening his presents (at a few minutes past midnight last night!) and put it online in the Family site so they could see the presents that they had only seen in photographs in Amazon!  It is a strange time with customs adapting to new circumstances.

     I hope that the chocolate cream birthday cake that I hid in the fridge has not yet been discovered so that it can make a suitable impression when it makes its flaming way into the living room!

     And it was delicious!

My evening bike ride was taken a little later than usual, in the dark rather than the twilight and it was, ironically, revealing.  Setting aside for a moment, my pet peeve of cyclists without lights, the most glaring element I observed was the grouping of teenagers in ‘bike gangs’.  Obviously they have their mobile phones to arrange the coordination of their exercise times and that gives them the opportunity to meet up.  As many of them use their bikes as seats there is a sort of built-in physical distancing, but they are more gang than individuals and there is little sense of viral threat.  Perhaps it is futile to expect teenagers to be constantly on their guard against a virus that they think will not single them out, but they must be made aware that they could easily be asymptomatic and therefore they could be a real threat to their parents and especially their grandparents.

     Perhaps I was looking for evidence of shirking the rules and therefore found it, but I do sense a feeling of relaxation that I think will be even stronger on Monday after a weekend of seeing television pictures of people exercising their ‘freedoms’.  It is something that concerns me.

     As it should!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 51 – Tuesday, 5th May

All my life (except for one brief flirtation with the showy radical charms of The Independent) I have been a Guardian reader.  I know that, in many ways, I am a typical Guardian aficionado: wishy-washy-left-wingy-middle-classy what have you.  Every morning I do the Quick Crossword and read (nowadays) virtually everything.

     And that is the problem.

     After twenty minutes of headlines and leading articles I have virtually lost the will to live.  The unrelentingly negative news about the duplicity and mendacity of our political leaders; the ravages of Covid-19 and its increasing devastation in the Developing World; Brexit; Trump; the Spanish and Catalan economies and the continuing disaster of the lockdown; the building work next door; the closure of the Liceu; the continuation of my Catalan lessons.  Everything works together to depress.

     But, as one astute friends remarked, “You are almost enjoying this, aren’t you?”  And, yes, apart from the inability to go for my daily swim, the forcing myself on my own resources is not something that I dislike!  Obviously the reasons for the change in life style are appalling and I am horrified by the loss of life and the descent into poverty for so many in the world as their life line of occupation is modified or taken away – but I am able to count my blessings, and my personal circumstances are so much better than many.

     What is difficult is balancing my present ‘fortunate’ position with the more than negative circumstances of so many others.  Reducing myself to misery reading about the privations of others, mixed with sharp guilt because I am not ‘suffering’ like so many, is essentially an arid waste of limited joie de vivre.

Why as the Health Secretary not resigned?  Touchy little Matt who was offended by the ‘tone’ of a shadow spokesperson’s pertinent question about his and his government’s shortcomings obviously lied about achieving 100k tests by laughably inflating the testing figures and for the last three days the total has fallen below his self-set target.  If he had an ounce of decency he would go; but one has to remember that he joined Johnson’s government in spite of what he had said previously, so he has no decency.

     What I find most objectionable is that ministers behave as though they are playing a game of ‘deflect the blame’, using words to hide the yawning gaps in health care provision and what they do not seem to understand is that people, actual, real people, are dying because of their actions, inactions and wordiness.

     Every day brings new scandals, new statistics, new depths to which the government effortlessly sinks.

I went out for a bike ride this evening in ‘our’ time slot and noticed only one obviously illegal Plague Kid out and about, together with a number of marginal looking ‘kids’ who if they are supposed to be 14 plus to be in our group were marginal to say the least.

     I enjoy my jaunt up to the end of the coastal road in Gavá, because I always end up feeling pleasantly, resentfully irritated by the entirely predictable poor behaviour of pedestrians and their encroachment on our cycling lanes.  These lanes are clearly marked with white lines and little logos of bikes and pedestrians should stay out.  But they don’t.

     The really irritating ones are those that walk deliberately on the outside white line of our double lanes and look pained when you don’t deviate from your painted path and force them (usually) to give way.

     People walk backwards into the lanes, allow their dogs to meander on absurdly long leads, let kids go on toy cycles and scooters, have conversations in the middle of the lanes and on and on.

     The worst offenders are of course runners.  It is a bike lane and not a runner’s lane – but runners seem to believe that they are in a different moral universe to the rest of us.

     In the interests of fairness and truth, I have to admit that some cyclists are just as obnoxious, showing little to no concern for pedestrians and ostentatiously riding in the pedestrian part of the road.  Alas!  If we were all judged by our total behaviour, who would ‘scape whipping!

     But I find that, factoring in the irritation, it is an excellent and not too long ride with plenty to see and, as I pride myself on being a considerate cyclist, I end up slightly tired with a warm sense of superiority at the end of my journey.  And, and this is the key difference between myself and most of the other bike riders, I use my lights!

     Sigh!