LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 24 – Wednesday in Holy Week, 8th APRIL

 

I realise that, with all my bluff optimism, I have been affected by the lockdown!  In the poem that I wrote yesterday (smrnewpoems.blogspot.com) I actually questioned, even if rhetorically, the value of sunbathing!

     It is shocking to have to confront a possible breakdown in your worldview that can contemplate something as self-loathing as a negative approach to the appreciation of the nearest star!  It is certainly a wake up call to reassess my attitude and determine to be more positive in the future.  The idea of getting to June and July and behaving like a troglodyte is entirely unacceptable.

     If something as fundamental to my view of life is capable of mutability, then it makes me wonder what other, more subtle changes there have been in this period of self-isolation.  It would argue a self-deluding insensitivity to say that one can remain entirely stable when the world appears to be changing around you.

     The irony, of course, is that the micro world of self-isolation is unchanging and stable.  The continuing horrific catalogue of death and infection is all around us, but not part of the life that we are leading.  It is as if we are living in some sort of medieval fort with a water filled trench around us: part of our surroundings, but separated from them.

     Unlike some others, I have been entirely unable to wean myself from the news.  My addiction to the Internet radio, and more specifically Radio 4 is total.  It is at times like this that the Conservatives detestation of the BBC becomes not only partisan, but also self-defeating.  At times of National Crisis we united around the BBC as a voice of and to the Nation.  I certainly do not look towards the Conservatives and their slavish news lap dogs to give me a sense of what the Nation is thinking or feeling.

     And The Guardian.  As a life-long Guardian reader (with a brief fall from grace and adherence to The Independent) I now read it on my mobile phone with an intensity that goes beyond belief.  And may I make a specific call out for the writing of John Crace, a columnist of rare wit and perception.  His political sketches have been part of the reason that I have been able to maintain my sweetness and equilibrium during the past few years where Brexit and the bloody Conservatives have convinced me that I am living in a society where the dominant ideology is the death-wish!

My early morning routine is now becoming more and more established: set Moppy (don’t blame me, the app demands that you call your robot cleaner something) off on her hoovering circuit; make my cup of tea (English breakfast and Earl Grey) and have the World’s Most Expensive Augmented Muesli (at least I have stopped adding Smarties to it) with fat-free milk; do the Guardian Quick Crossword (with light cheating); change Moppy to her mopping sequence; go for my pool circuits.  And a chunk of the day is gone!  Which is a clear exemplification of the work expanding to match the time available!

     I do miss my daily early morning swim and I can’t wait to get back to that part of my routine, because that morning start include my first writing of the day when I sit in the café or outside having my post-swim cup of tea.  Ah!  How life used to be!

Just back from the open kitchen window where at 8.00 pm our time, we applaud the front-line workers who are keeping our society going.

     Talking of health workers and their battle against the virus: the British Prime Minister now in Intensive Care.  As I said yesterday, I wish him better health and strength to his family – and he should resign.  Now.  At once.

     The Prime Minister’s bravado a while ago where he was joking about his meeting Covid-19 positive people and shaking hands with them; his visible inability to maintain social distancing when his government was promoting it as essential, now appear to be a foolhardy, self-indulgent imposition on health services that are overstretched.   

     I might also add, that the Prime Minister’s inability to give clear indications of who actually has ultimate power in government is a dereliction of duty.   

     chocolate, retribution, judgement, ineptitude, Throughout his career he has been first and foremost a second-rate, shoddy, narcissistic, journalistic liar and, while I have sympathy for his present state of health, I have none for his political.  We deserve better than him.  Though with the cabinet of freaks that he has accumulated, god alone knows who (or in the case of Gove, what) might take his place.

     So far the Conservatives’ management of the Covid-19 crisis has been fatally inept.  How many unnecessary deaths is it going to take before the people of Britain demand the reckoning that should come sooner rather than later?

Determined not to end this post on a sour note, I can report that we were able to buy chocolate in the last shop and you can be assured that my writing has been sweetened by the confectionary. 

     So just imagine what it would have been like without!

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.