LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 57 – Monday, 11th May

The weather forecast for today was totally wrong and I therefore took advantage of what I understood to be freakish sunshine and went for my morning bike ride.  This time, I did not attempt to go into the Marina at Port Ginesta, being a law-abiding citizen of Castelldefels and not of Sitges, so I turned around at the end of the cycle lane on the Paseo and came home.

     After my dutifully disturbing read of the Guardian, it was then time for the sojourn to the shops.  Masked, and latex gloved I drove to Caprabo to get the ant traps and I attempted to do the rest of my shop there.  Not going to happen, so I slipped along to Lidl to finish off.

     In spite of the fact that Lidl did not have the 15-month mature Cheddar, I willingly settled for the soapier stuff and thought that Lidl is basically a better store than the small Caprabo that I frequent.  But, and there is always a but, there were things that I could get in Caprabo that are never available in Lidl; Lidl is never a one stop store, and that is a real disadvantage: when in lockdown you really do not want to visit multiple shops – you never know when you may come across a Plague Child or three!

     At the end of the shop, I was well and truly knackered, and not finding a parking space outside the house because of the bloody workers next door parking their various vans in OUR spaces was the final, energy sapping straw!

     I gave cursory help in unloading the car when it was parked in the front garden space, and then the heavy lifting, and the meticulous cleaning and putting away was done by Toni while I, literally, put my feet up!  [Are there too many commas in that sentence? Ed.]

It is almost lunchtime and we should be back in rain, if not thunderstorms, according to the weather forecast.  I wonder what the weather is like in the UK, and I wonder how people have reacted to the Blond Buffoon’s clear as mud instructions, suggestions, fugitive thoughts or whatever his broadcast was supposed to be.  It comes to something that, even after a scripted talk by the Buffoon, ministers have to be deployed at once to explain what he might have meant.  For example, who would have know that when the Buffoon uses the word ‘Monday’ he actually means ‘Wednesday’ – perhaps our Prime Minister (sic) is working to an Old Etonian (or Estonian, as my spellchecker wanted it) calendar where there is a languorous two-day difference from the Proles’ week to allow for an elite cushion of prevarication and indolence?

     My British friends and relations are not all of a type, but they are united in their contempt for the leaders who fail to take responsibility, fail to lead, fail to be imaginative, fail to save lives, and then treat us with condescension assuming that we have memories of the same capacity as the much maligned goldfish!  We have not!

     On a Catalan television station that had academics commenting on the Covid-19 Crisis, I noted one subtitle on a part of the discussion had something about the “extreme recklessness” of one group of nations in their approach to the virus.  Four states were listed: Mexico, Brazil, the United States of America – and the UK!  What exalted, socially responsible company to be in!  With equally delightful leaders!  God help us all, what have the Conservatives reduced us to?

     The fall out from the Sunday burbling meander to the nation continues with reactions of bafflement, amazement and disgust now augmented with further negative abstract nous being applied to the muddy exposition that was supposed to enlighten us this afternoon.

     When, by the way the Blond Buffoon going to accept responsibility for being Prime Minister?  He has a duty to appear before the press and answer questions; he has a duty to appear in Parliament and respond, he has a duty to justify his actions in a democratic society.

     We know that he cannot be trusted live to answer questions without there being an extensive amount of damage limitation after he has waffled his way through questions.  He was too frightened to be questioned by Andrew Neil; he fled into a fridge rather than be questioned by a television reporter; he has still not appeared before the Parliamentary Liaison Committee; he has missed PMQs; he prefers pre-submitted questions on Facebook to hard questioning from trained reporters; how often has he actually been in parliament – the parliament that he has tried so hard to limit, either by proroguing it for ILLEGAL lengths of time or by simply ignoring it?  Illness, holidays and cowardice – anything other than facing up to what he has done and is planning (if that is not too strong a word) to do, anything other than public accountability.

     And, in spite of the second highest death rate from Covid-19 IN THE WORLD; in spite of the obvious U turns, the evasions, the missed targets, the criminal lack of preparedness, he still has a reasonable amount of public support!

     I understand that, in times of crisis, there is an understandable “rallying around the flag” effect, to go with the authority that one knows to work together and get through this all, sort of thing – but with him and the motely crew that he has gathered about himself?  Really?  What, in any aspect of his past life, would encourage anyone to trust or rely on this proven liar and opportunist?

The rain-filled day has not materialized and so I will be able to go for my evening bike ride as well, making the culmination of an excitement-filled day – you have to take your pleasures where you find them in lockdown!

     But just to make sure that I do not become complacent in my joy, my computer upstairs has decided to half start.  I get the Apple logo and the little line underneath that gradually fills up to the half way point, and then it blacks out.  With all my years of experience of the wayward ways of computers (I will not frighten you with the nomenclature of the early version of Windows that made me the gibbering technological wretch that I am today) I have turned the computer off and will hope that turning it on again will make all things well.

     As far as computers are concerned, I am a simple, trusting, peasant soul when things go wrong.  And I comfort myself with the fact that I have two laptop computers (at least) that will keep me typing!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 35 – Sunday, 19th APRIL

It’s raining. 

     I am disinclined to go on my circuits of the communal swimming pool in the pouring rain. 

     I am further depressed by the reading in the Guardian about Goblin Gove’s typically mealy-mouthed, unconvincing response to a series of allegations in The Sunday Times that the Convalescing Clot missed five consecutive emergency meetings of COBRA in the build up to the Covid-19 crisis and that the government shipped PPE to China in February. 

     That would have covered the period when our part-time Prime Minister was hidden away in Chequers, a prime minister who notoriously “didn’t work weekends” according to an unnamed senior adviser!  Once Bullingdon Club always Bullingdon Club: the lazy sense of entitlement of the rich and the privileged; let the lesser breeds without the law do the hard graft while the Johnson jonson sets about adding another child to the unnumbered brood.

     I am more than prepared to believe that the lingering poison of Brexit mixed with the euphoria of the Conservative right wing after the crushing electoral victory led the ‘government’ fatally to mismanage a coherent approach to the Covid-10 crisis. 

     The typical Tory inhumanity of the ‘herd immunity’ approach to dealing with the crisis, complacently accepting hefty deaths will be remembered, together with the astonishing U-Turn when it was suddenly abandoned in favour of approaches that more nearly matched virtually every other government in the world.

     The position of the Health Secretary is becoming more and more untenable – or at least it should be becoming more and more untenable as more and more avoidable deaths will be laid as a memorial to his incompetence.  Yes, efficient supply is difficult in times of crisis, especially in a cash and equipment and personnel starved institution like the NHS that is in its present state because of the cruel austerity practiced by the Tory government for the last decade. 

     The empty platitudes of support that Tory ministers mouth for Health Workers are cruelly ironic given their attitudes towards the NHS over the past years.  These are the same vile folk who cheered after a pay increase for Nurses was defeated in the House of Commons!  They disgust me.

     And, as I typed that last bitter sentence, the rain outside has grown appreciably heavier.  There is nothing like the Pathetic Fallacy to cement misery in place!

In an effort to escape the gnawing resentment contained in the paragraphs above, I have turned to something more creative.  My chapbook of poems written in Holy Week called Coasts of Memory.  I have been working on illustration and made a decision to use only photographs taken within the lockdown confines.  This means that the house, the garden, the communal pool and what I can see from the terrace and windows are all fair game for my camera!

     I spent yesterday evening playing around with the raw material that I had and started placing individual pictures in what I considered to be appropriate places in the chapbook.  I am constantly frustrated by petty mechanical problems with images and sometimes it is a case of printing what fits rather than fitting what I want to print!

     There is also the problem of he disappearing fonts.  I save what I do fairly religiously; I have been caught out too often and too painfully when documents develop a missing life of their own not to remember to save.  But I am often frustrated by the way in which complex documents do not always retain formatting. 

     The latest example of this concerns by choice of a fairly exotic fort used as a title.  This font did not transfer when I sent the document via email rather than copying it onto a memory stick - in spite of my avowal of the very latest in technology, I can be whimsically old-school from time to time!  The font is space greedy, so when it transfers as something altogether more prosaic it means that everything else on the page is out of place and that has a domino effect on all the pages afterwards.  As I was going to use that particular version of the book for detailed editing, it might turn out to be self-defeating if I have to redo everything with the ‘correct’ font in place in the final document.  Such things are sent to try me, and at least I can have a direct effect on what I do there, as opposed to whingeing on about what my government is doing or not doing in this crisis!

In the way in which the petty becomes important: Toni is going out to get bread!  An event for which he dresses up like an Inuit and wings the desolate abyss between our home and the bread shop that is a few streets away.  I enjoy the results of these little excursions as we usually have a little treat from the patisserie as well as mere bread – by which alone, one cannot live!

     This time, as well as the bread, Toni is going to attempt to get some chicken from the pollo a last, this will be our first ‘bought in’ meal since the lockin began.  However, if there is a queue, or there are too many people there then the meal will be called off and we will have to settle for the bread.  And treats.

There are increasing accounts in the media of the possibility of no vaccine being produced in the short term, or even ever.  We have the example of AIDS, where, in spite of extensive research over a number of years, we are still without a vaccine.  Treatment for the disease, yes; vaccine no.  That is a very sobering thought.  It means that we will be dealing with the virus as an ever-present threat well after this initial surge is over and it also means that for people in my age group the restrictions are going to last for the foreseeable future. 

     This is a more than depressing thought!

All Brexit Eve

Loping towards the burning fires fuelled with the broken hopes of gullible voters, the knuckle dragging denizens of comfortable wealth look towards their warm future with undisguised relish as they realize that, once again, the people who could have made a difference have, once again, voted against their own interests and allowed the arrogant, the privileged, the entitled and the callous to do what they do best: gloat.

As with virtually all aspects of Brexit, the idea that today is the eve of something tangible is actually as diaphanous as the reality that the Liars’ Liar paraded during the election campaign.  There will be no real Brexit tomorrow.  Things will go on going on and little will actually be settled.  The only actualite will be the issuing of a “celebratory” 50p piece (without the Oxford comma) which at least gives we Remainers something concrete to spurn!

Meanwhile, whatever the tousled-haired tosser says, the interminably sad saga of Brexit goes on.  And on.  And on.  He might be able to ban the word itself from the discourse of government, but Brexit is yet to be achieved.

Amazingly (or not, if you have been following the tortuous and torturing progress of the Conservative Party throwing the country under the bus [the one with 350m quid on its side] to persevere its existence) we still do not actually know what has really been decided and we still have no confidence that we will depart with a comprehensive deal.

At least in Spain we Brits think that we have some sort of deal which allows us to sleep at night, with pension and healthcare taken care of – unless things fall apart, and we do eventually crash out finally and catastrophically.  For we people, Brits living in Europe (or rather The Rest of Europe as Britain has decided that it is not part of the continent on whose shelf it is perched) we have another eleven months of uncertainty as we see our futures in the hands of the third-rate chancers that now govern us, being used as bargaining chips in what will surely turn out to be a depressingly one sided negotiation.

I don’t want this to turn into yet another Moan from somebody who has still not come to terms with the result – though it is difficult (if not impossible) to get the sense of unreality out of one’s mind.  The British electorate have done what they have done, for whatever reasons and we have to accept that the system by which we are governed allows this travesty to happen.

It would be easy to roam around Cassandra-like bemoaning the horrible reality, but one has to try and fine something positive to take from the debacle.

I once asked my mother whether she had considered that Britain could have lost when she was living through World War Two and she replied that she never, for one moment, ever considered the prospect of defeat.  I pointed out that there were times when the situation of Britain looked dire and the German military machine looked unstoppable.  She accepted that there had been bad times, but, as she put it, “I always knew that we would muddle through!  Eventually.”

You could, of course look at that sort of attitude as one of self-delusion – but she was right.

I have often thought about my mother’s attitude during the bleaker times of the on-going process of Brexit and thought that the British do seem to have a sort of ability to “muddle through” and “make the best of it” no matter how negative things look.

I do not wish my country ill.  I want the country to prosper.  I want a decent NHS and education and transport.  I want full employment and so on.  I have absolutely no desire to see my country come to harm just so that I can point towards the architects of the chaos and say, “I told you so!”  That petty triumph will mean the defeat of so many who are less able to defend themselves than the comfortable hypocrites of the Conservative Party as they carefully move their wealth off-shore or to EU states so that they can buttress themselves against the storm that the self-inflicted harm of Brexit could bring.

We might have made things more difficult for ourselves, but those are the obstacles that we have to surmount.  And I am sure that we will.  We will find a way to play our part in the continent of which we are, self-evidently, a crucial part.  But, just like Universal Credit, a reasonable idea badly administered will have casualties.  People will die, as they have done as a result of IDS’s botched fiasco.  But the casualties need to be limited.

I feel resentment and anger about what is going to be done in my name.  But resentment and anger are negative and the division that has and will rip the country apart must, somehow be overcome if we all are to prosper.

I will be nauseated by any celebration of the dark day that Brexit signifies, but more important than my disgust is my willingness to work to mitigate the effects of the policy and to remember that a country is composed of more than Guardian readers. And listeners to Radio 4. 

And that is something that I will have to accept.  All societies are plural and diverse.  Let us hope that the obvious talent and enterprise of our country can show a way to bring us together.

I wait to be convinced.

Saying something trying to be nice

 

I am going to try hard, and do my very best not to be abusive as I write about Trump.

I let that sentence stand as a paragraph to remind myself of my starting point as I continue to type!  But, truly Trump has exceeded the normal bounds of political discourse and has put in place something new and, I am going to say, ‘exhilarating’.

On the positive side, Trump has shown that you need have no experience in politics or local, city, state or national governance to become Head of State.  He has shown, truly, that everyone has a chance.  For someone as seemingly unprepared and unqualified (no, I did use the word “seemingly” so I am still being sort-of polite) he illustrates graphically that the top job is not the reserve of those who have worked a lifetime to get there.  People must look at Trump and say, “There, but for the fact that he got there before me, goes I!”

Was it not Napoleon who said, “Every French soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack”?   The clear implication being that everyone, no matter how ‘low’ had the potential to become great.  And those words were said by an Emperor - the Little Corsican, risen to greatness!

Trump’s speeches may be, let’s be generous, “free-wheeling”, but he constantly hits the spot with his base and, although he has very low approval ratings generally, he is still riding high with the people who originally voted for him.  He knows (even he knows) that he did not get a majority of the votes cast in his election, not by millions, but he is now the President and not Clinton.  The Electoral College may be an anachronistic absurdity, but that is the system and that system got him elected.  We have the same sort of result in some elections in Britain where the party of government did not win the popular vote, but they did get the greatest number of members of parliament – and that is the system with which we have to work.

So Trump knows that “The Liberal Establishment” (whatever that might be) can say and do what it likes because he knows that it will have little effect on the forces that elected him.  Rather like the Daily Mail for me: it may be the most read newspaper in the country and have a mythical reach in articulating the voice of the disturbed right, but it might as well not exist for me because I NEVER read it.  Even when it is given away free at airports I shun its rancid pages.  So, for me, the Daily Mail can say what it likes, it doesn’t actually touch me. 

 

Yes, I know that the pernicious influence of the rag constantly corrupts our political discourse, but I, a confirmed Guardian reader disdainfully ignore it.  And that is part of the reason that Brexit happened.  As I continue to live my arts-heavy, opera going, European life style I have failed to notice or to take proper account of those who do not have, and may never have or want, the luxury of sitting in a stalls seat in the latest performance in the Liceu in Barcelona These are the people who may never have, to get slightly more real than opera seats, the right to a decent pension, or education or health service.

If you see a bleak future in which you are probably going to be worse off than your home owning parents then you look around for someone or something to blame.  And history teaches that, in the short term, the obvious victims are The Others.  Those people who are different: skin colour; religion; sexuality; politics; language; nationality – anything that can be shown to be a threat.

In this respect Trump is an idiot savant – and I don’t think that is a real insult, even if it does have the word ‘idiot’ in it.  After all, I am well educated, articulate, reasonably intelligent and sociable, but the highest ‘0ffice’ that I ever had was the largely ceremonial post of President of the Cardiff branch of The National Union of Teachers – where the real work was done by the Secretary and the Treasurer.  I chaired meetings and had headed notepaper!  And Trump is President of the United States of America after inheriting vast sums of money and becoming a reality show front.  Whatever else he doesn’t know, he certainly does know what buttons to press.

A key exponent of button pressing was Enoch Powell, most particularly in his ‘Rivers of blood’ speech.  Yes, I have read the whole speech and, yes I know that the key phrase did not actually occur in the actual talk he gave.  The whole episode is extremely distasteful, though, taken as a whole the speech is more reasonable than the fabricated extract by which it is known.  But Powell was no idiot, even in those far off days he knew a thing or two about ‘soundbites’ and he knew which parts would be taken up by the press and he knew the consequences.  Or at least he thought he did.  He could defend himself from accusations of outright racism by reference to the speech as a whole, but he could not defend himself from the political consequences of such a speech, that such inflammatory comments for general consumption would be. 

For me Powell will, for ever, be associated in my memory with a particularly incisive caricature by Ralph Steadman in Private Eye, which, if anything flatters the man!  

It is said that every politician’s career ends in failure and perhaps that is true of Powell.  After his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, although he was a national figure and idolised by certain sections of the population he was not in government in the cabinet ever again.  Although listened to and respected and reviled he did not have his hands on the levers of power.  He paid the price for his calculated speech.

Trump has said many things that, in their way, are just as astonishing and outrageous as Powell.  He still has his hands on the levers of power.  He has survived and indeed thriven and his standing in the Republican Party is even more secure.  To a large extent the Republican Party IS Trump.  This is an amazing achievement for a person whose statements have been so divisive – and there is the clue.  Division is his stock in trade.  He is not, and does not pretend to be a President of the whole of America.  He plays to his base, and that base is astonishingly accommodating.  He knows that his grasp on power is dependent on that base staying loyal and voting and they have to be fed the right sort of sound bites on a daily basis.

The latest gift to his base is a masterwork.  Today Trump has said that he is minded to end the practise of allowing anybody born in the USA to claim citizenship.  Trump has framed his possible executive order as being one opposed to illegal immigrants who give birth and then their children become citizens.  There have been howls of outrage and assertions that such an executive order would be unconstitutional.  That may or may not be true but it is irrelevant because Trump’s base will have heard yet another strong statement from their champion showing that their views are being held at the highest level in government.  Whether this order actually ever appears is not the important element here, what is important is the timing, so close to the crucial mid-term elections.

This purported action, together with the ‘army’ sent to stop the caravan of potential immigrants making their slow way to the Mexican border and the possibility of a presidential speech on immigration a few days before the elections themselves are all elements in a masterful display of ‘strength’ to energize the base.

If this strategy is the sole idea of Trump then it is a remarkable achievement in inventive marketing.  Ethically dubious certainly, but politically astute.  The fact that it is transparently opportunistic is not important because intention is more real than actuality.  Trump speaks his own reality and if you have bought into his pronouncements then The Word is all you need to know that your concerns are being met.

I have absolutely no faith that the people of America will produce the Blue Wave that is being hoped for.  None.  Trump has not fabricated the zeitgeist though policy or ideas – he is not creative enough for that, he embodies the zeitgeist, he is the zeitgeist, and if that is true what he does is, and is enough.

God help us all!

Oh, for the great outdoors!

I am beginning to forget what it is like to have the unmediated sun on my skin and feel the wind where my hair used to be!

I am not yet at the stir-crazy point of my enforced house holiday, but I am getting near.

I do realise that thrombosis in the leg and embolisms in the lungs with an effected heart demands certain restrictions if there is to be a realistic hope of recuperation, so I am trying to keep to the outline of what I should be doing and, more particularly, not doing.

Ideally, I should spend my days sitting in my armchair and being waited on hand and foot.  Not bad, you might think – but even slavish attention to one’s needs pales after a while.  Or a week in my case.  Not that I am not entirely grateful to Toni for butlering about in a most professional manner and providing me with sugar, fat and salt free dishes for my delectation.  I truly am grateful.  But I cannot walk very far (I mean, I can, but I mustn’t) and I can’t drive and I can’t swim and I can’t ride my bike and I can’t go to the opera.  Whoops, that last bit of self-denial makes me appear more bourgeois than I care to appear, however accurate it may be in reality. 

The point is, although I am working well in my enforced sedentary period of acclimatising myself to a New Way of Life, I am constantly frustrated by having to ask somebody else (aka Toni) to do the most trivial things for me if they require any physical effort.

At least this initial period of ‘rest’ should only take up the first two weeks, and already I have sat my way staunchly through one half of the time.  One week to go and I will be ale to go for a short walk.  Outside!

As someone who has been driving since he was able to drive – that, I now realize,  is half a century – it is much more difficult to adapt to not being able to get up and go whenever I like.  When you can’t, you realise just how much you use the car (or bike) for all those little things that are just out of reach, but no problem when you can slip into the car and get it done in no time at all.

I am sure that this experience will be a valuable life experience for me: I can’t really afford for it to be anything else!  And I am sure that not being able to do so much (if only for a strictly limited period) will (must) make me appreciate what I will be able to do soon enough.

As my existence has been circumscribed to contain only the living room and bedroom (with excursions to the bathroom) I have had time to read the Guardian in depth.  With a short period where I deviated towards the Independent, I have been a staunch Guardianista (and indeed in the style of that newspaper I actually reversed the ‘a’ and ‘r’ in the word!) and feel comfortable with the way that the news is reported and the articles that sum up the quirkiness and essential intelligence of the paper.

But it is also depressing as you surely feel yourself part of the minority/majority (who knows?) that thinks Brexit is an act of national self-harm unparalleled in our life times.  But this feeling of being on the right but losing side means that every opportunity to read about Brexit is compulsive – and the Guardian provides many opportunities to do exactly that.  It is the same with 45 in America where we (the Guardianistas) loathe and despise the man, but cannot stop ourselves from reading about him as if we were all suffering from some sort of addiction.

The only respite from my misery is that the coverage of Catalonia is hardly as exhaustive as the other two and therefore I do not sigh so much in that respect – but television here more than makes up for that lack as the Spanish government would rather talk about Catalonia than any of the corruption and disasters that comprises their contemptible administration.

Meanwhile, I am getting on with the poems drawn from the notes I made while in hospital.  I have to admit that my hospital diary stretches only over eight days.  And did I suffer!  Well, the only pain that I felt over that period was from the injections that I was given; the obtrusive inflation of an automatic blood pressure cuff – this actually caused sores; discomfort from an unyielding bed and a vigorously flesh pressing radiography nurse.  Hardly the stuff of great drama.  I didn’t feel truly ill when I went into hospital and I felt much the same when I came out.  There is no harrowing story of suffering and no real learning or change of situation or comprehension at the end of it.

There is, of course, the realization of just how lucky I have been: if this condition had not been discovered at the time it was then it probably wouldn’t have been discovered until it was too late!  That is something worth thinking about.  But my poetry has ever been the stuff of unexceptional observation and so my observations throughout the week should play to my strength.

At least that is my story and I’m sticking to it.