LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 56 – Sunday, 10th May

I woke up this morning to the sound of rain and the threat of the “thin end of the wedge” challenge to exercise: if you don’t go out for your bike ride because of a little dampness, then what will you do if the sky is merely overcast tomorrow?  Will that be excuse enough to defer effort?

     Admittedly, rainy days are in the minority in this country, and therefore the opportunities for indolence are fewer too, but the rot can set in at any moment, and the dust can settle on a machine that is meant for motion!

     I do have waterproof leggings and a lightweight rain jacket so it is perfectly possible (if unpleasant) to go for a bike ride and stay relatively dry.  On the other hand, it does make the ride more duty than pleasure.  On the other hand (making three, by my computation!) exercise is essential for the preservation of a healthy lifestyle under lockdown and so the (unpleasant) effort should probably be made.

     As you can imagine, I indulged in such pleasant prevarication, while reading my Daily Dose of Misery from the news section of the digital Guardian and doing the Quick Crossword and, of course, drinking my essential cup of tea.  Time well spent.  And dry too!

     Eventually, I decided to test the weather and, after extensive sampling of the climatic conditions (i.e. opening the kitchen window) I reasoned that, while it was still damp it was not actually raining so the ride could be taken in relative comfort.

     It was only when I was gloved and helmeted with the bike newly charged and ready to go, that I looked at my watch.  I had missed my age-specific designated time slot for exercise, so back upstairs for a cup of tea?

     In the eagerness to return to the comfort of the sitting room I conveniently forgot the possibility of the mind numbing circling of the communal pool as a substitute for the more open and interesting vistas of the Paseo.  It comes to something that I have to write about it before the possibility of doing something that I outlined in the previous sentence becomes an imperative.   Moppy (for it is she, god bless her mechanical revolving cleaning pads) is about her business on our tile floors and therefore the presence of my obstructing feet are an impediment to her efficiency and I should remove them to the pool.  So I will.  And service will be resumed after I have listened on another episode of ‘In Our Time’ on the hoof!

     Which was Mandeville’s ‘Fable of the Bees’ – a book I own and have never read, but now I will be able to bluff my way and make links with present economic and sociological thought.  That’s what ‘In Our Time’ is all about!  Learning with walking stick in one hand and umbrella in the other and weaving my way around sun loungers to make the circuits a little bit more interesting.

     As the weather is glum, there are few people about and I am sure that gatherings of the ‘bike gangs’ (that makes them sound so much more threatening than these al fresco bike mounted chat groups are) will be loath to form without the clemency of warm weather.

     As it is Sunday, I will make one of my commercial outings to the pollo a last to get our chicken meal.  As well as facilitating the provision of food it also gives an interesting view of how well physical distancing is enduring.  So far, the distancing has been exemplary, although rain does encourage grouping under awning, so it will test discipline!

     And I can now confirm that discipline was preserved and, apart from the kids who now seem not to wear mask as a matter of course.

Rather than listen to the Blond Buffoon who was speaking at 7 pm I went out in the rain on my bike rather than listen to his bluster.  The lead up to this talk (Why on a Sunday?  Why not in parliament?) was a master class in communication ineptitude as expectation was allowed to distort any possible message.  The new slogan “Stay alert” is confusing and dangerously ambiguous, it just adds to the general air of desperate ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ approach that has characterised the methodology of this government.

     Spain too is easing restrictions in a stepped approach.  You would have thought that any easing would only be in those areas where the virus had been shown to be limited, with extensive testing to verify any such limitation.  Why then has Madrid decided that it is one of the regions where restrictions can be relaxed when the number of deaths and new infections is still rife?

     In Spain and the UK, it would appear that the political is more important that public health, and unless that is reversed then we are going to pay for that in more and more deaths.

Tomorrow is our weekly shop, something I look forward to with pathetic excitement!  There is an added delight this time, as I have to find some ant traps to combat a mild infestation upstairs.  Always something to make like just that little bit more interesting!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 11

I am, as I never tire of telling people, a Labrador person: yellow, bitch to be precise.  It therefore comes as something of a personal insult that people (even flat dwellers with limited space) can contemplate providing living area for the various species of rat dogs (goggle-eyed, spindly-legged, yappily-voiced) that abound in this area.  One such grotesquery lives near us, and its emasculated barks cut through the air with the irritation of a domesticated buzz saw.  It is the sort of sound that is intolerable at its first utterance; continuation is torture.

     When I started my solitary walk this morning on the first of many circuits of our communal pool, I was accompanied by the cringe-making sound of the damned dog-insult-creature.  And then I saw why it was making the sound.  Sitting in the lane that runs behind the creature’s house was an entirely unconcerned cat, studiously ignoring the high-pitched hysteria of the so-called dog.

     I am no lover of cats.  While I can admire the liquid beauty of the larger beasts of the category, I find the domestic variety repellent.  I think it’s the tiny teeth and the lazy contempt that I find so uncongenial.  To say the least.  
      I am not entirely negative: some cats are sleek and refined, but that is the sort of thing that you can admire in pictures, not in reality.  Anyway, this cat was obviously glorying in the commotion that it was causing and by unconcernedly licking itself and showing its undying contempt (which I share) for the noisy scrap of canine vulgarity.  However, that same attitude was extended to me when the cat noticed that I was walking about.  I changed my direction at once and made towards it.  Lazily, with that elegant lassitude that only cats can show, it moved away to its ‘home’ and the dog-scrap immediately shut up.  Mission accomplished!

     That was the only point of interest, as I wandered around and around with only the sound of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time programme on George and Robert Stephenson and the birth of the railways filling my ears.  As usual one comes away from programmes like that with snippets of knowledge to keep one sane: did I really know that it was Robert who did the work designing The Rocket and not George? 

     I also picked up on the panel’s championing of the Stephensons as opposed to the showier grandstanding of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (surely one of the few engineers who most people know by his full name) with some withering comments on Brunel’s engineering skills being somewhat partial as opposed to the comprehensive nature of the Stephensons’ skills taking in both the civil and mechanical aspects. 

     Radio 4 and The Guardian are the mainstays of my sanity in a time of confinement. 

     God bless them both!

We have been informed that this week that the number of cases of Covid-19 may peak.  The numbers certainly give no cause for complacency as Spain has now surged past China in the number of people with the virus.   
     One town in Catalonia has been put on total lockdown with people banned from coming in and out of the place.  This is because of a spike in the numbers infected.  Catalonia seems to be taking things extremely seriously and there appears to be growing animosity between Madrid and Barcelona, as Madrid appears to be much more lax than Barcelona – with a consequent surge in numbers of infected.

     We are also hearing of incidents of absolute stupidity.  The police stopped one car with five people in it (including one person in the boot!) who were going to visit a family!  Another couple of guys were found in a bar having a drink, claiming that it was a business meeting: that did not impress the police who promptly arrested them!

     The renovations in the house next door have ramped up again.  There are now two vans on the road outside and a variety of people working inside.  The people seem to be taking no precautions at all: no masks, no separation – and nothing happens.

     Toni is very cynical about what is going on and says that the stories that we actually get to hear of people not taking the virus seriously are just the tip of the iceberg and that things are going to get much worse as our period of lockdown continues for the next couple of months.

     As I have not been outside the front gate for ten days now, it is difficult for me to gain any real perspective from a first hand point of view; everything is via the television and the Internet.

     People are becoming lazy in assuming that the only fatalities are going to be the old or those with underlying conditions, but the death of a 21 year-old with no underlying conditions should be a wake up call to those who think that they are not vulnerable.

     We are all at risk, and I am more than prepared to put up with these restrictions if it is a matter of life and death – and it is a matter of life and death!

Last night I was ‘doing’ part of my new course on paintings and watched a series of videoed lectures on Van Eyck and Van de Weyden and, as I watched I could not help feeling a certain sense of dislocation between what was happening in the wider world and my attempting to rationalise my position of normality by studying Art History: when in doubt look at a painting! 

     That hardly seems to be practical advice – but that isn’t the point is it?  At times of instability and upheaval you find whatever ‘still point’ works for you to give the equilibrium you need, and if that is found in daubs of oil on canvas, then so be it.

     It is easy to rationalize turning to Art (capital A) in any of its forms to find placidity.  You are tapping in to a version of western culture, something that has lasted, stood the test of time, something that is generally regarded as important, something which seems to stand for the achievement of humanity that is larger than a single work or a single person, it links to into a continuum, into a story of progressive achievement that welcomes your passive contemplation and encourages your active participation.  Or something.

Toni has resurrected his electric guitar from the chaos that is the third floor and with notepad, Internet and a badly tuned instrument is attempting to drive me upstairs to get away from the more than slightly-off cacophony that learners engender.  This adds a new dimension of horror to our containment!

We have had a talk about how long we really think this form of confinement is going to last and we have come to the conclusion that things are not likely to get back to anything resembling normality until June or July.  God help the US if the man-child governing the country decides that “everyone back to work by Easter and with full churches” is the way forward.  I only hope that our political leaders have a tad more responsibility than that ignorant person (and that last word was my fifth choice!) when it comes to recognizing that a situation has returned to normal. 

     I am sure that there is someone somewhere who is calculating just how many people died to fit in with a political rather than a national methodology when it came to dealing with the virus. 

     CEOs and other executives of businesses can now be accused of Corporate Manslaughter if it can be shown that people have died because of the actions of individual firms. 

     It is not enough that our political leaders can be ‘voted out’ at the next general election; they should be held judicially culpable for the mortality of their political choices.  And I look towards the Civil Service to ensure that the paper proof of decisions by the politicians survive to be considered by the inevitable commission of enquiry that will take place when we are finally out of this crisis.

The weather has been cold and blustery with some periods of sunshine – not really the weather to laze out on the third floor terrace, but each day brings us nearer to the period of unrelenting sunshine that will make the time go more pleasantly.  Please.

Meanwhile, we try and not get too upset at the seemingly deliberate idiocy on the part of those charged with our safety.  Time after time, it seems that the only real safety is in our own hands and the intelligence and patience with which we approach the demands of this situation.

And I miss ice cream!  I really do!

Seconds count!

I had not planned to start my day so early in the morning, but needs must when public transport fails.  On a daily basis.

 

When the job starts at 7.00 am in Cornellá, and you live in Castelldefels then public transport will simply not get you there on time and so “needs must when the devil drives” comes into operation and I have to turn into a chauffeur.   

So, washed and tooth brushed, but un-showered and unshaven I face the day in the profound dark and make my way along an overcrowded motorway full of motorists who don’t seem to take their continuing life at all seriously and positively ‘last trip’ kamikaze motorbike riders.  Luckily the horror aspect of the driving is only on the going there, the coming back is much more relaxing, especially when viewing the growing tail-backs on the other side of the road.

But, to get back to the cruel start of the day.  To get to Cornellá before 7.00 am we must leave at the latest by half past six; given the special physics of over-used motorways into big cities, it is a given that every minute after 6.30 am that you leave the house will mean, in a fairly complex, inverse ratio sort of thing, that there is an exponential chance of delay or hold up of some kind – and, of course, domestic misery!

This means that Toni’s alarm goes off at 6.00 am and he gets ready to go.  I get up a vital 10 minutes later.

Those ten minutes are a delight.  A delight out of all proportion to the actual length of six hundred seconds!I hear the alarm and so, at 6.00 am, I am awake – but then I have the delight of literally turning over and not quite resuming my slumber, but allowing the shreds of almost lost dreams to pleasurably confuse is a real pleasure. 

 

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me my body seems to know when the glorious ten minutes are up and a shake of the wrist (it is that sort of watch) my Pebble confirms that it is 6.10 and time for me to get up.

I get up willingly, but only because of those precious ten extra minutes, a sort of gift to start the day.  Although there are few who will see it that way unless they have to share my early rising!

As we were held up yesterday and Toni was a few minutes late for work (unavoidable given the accident that was in our way) we left a little earlier this morning and I returned a little earlier as well.  This meant that I was actually waiting outside the locked gate of the swimming pool for the place to open!  There seems to be an element of desperation about that, until you realize that this early start is not exactly my unforced choice!

I will say that I am getting used to the early start and am trying to make the most of the ‘extra’ hours that I have ‘gained’.  Trying.  There is a nice ambiguity in that word!

-oOo-

In our Catalan classes, we have now just about finished the first unit in our text books.  We are still firmly in the present tense, and only the first three persons (I, you, he/she/it), but we have also been introduced to a variety of verbs and tricky words that change with person and number.  It may only be a single unit, but there is a frightening amount of new information to take in and, more horrifically, apply – and we know that there is an examination at the end of the second unit.   

And that is something that I am trying hard not to think about too much.  Or even at all, on the “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” sort of thing.  I know that I need to up my game substantially if the examination, when it happens, is not to be something of a condemnation of my learning ability!

-oOo-

Something that is deflecting me from my linguistic travails has been the arrival of the Melvyn Bragg & Simon Tillotson book celebrating twenty years of In Our Time.  The book is a self-indulgent (for me) pleasure with a stimulatingly bewildering variety of subject matter that reflects the range of the programme itself.  From bird migration to The Salem Witch Trials; from The Death of Elizabeth I to Kant’s Categorical Imperative; from Zoroastrianism to Absolute Zero – each topic is compressed into seven or eight pages with illustrations with a variety of responses from the academics collected to discuss each individual concept. 

The book is very like a drug and is compulsive and thoroughly interesting, even on those topics that you might think would not be engrossing.  They all are, and I have had to limit my reading to try to stretch out the pleasure.  It’s not really working and I am already half way through.  I think that the programme has published an earlier book and I may be forced to buy a copy of that one as well to satisfy my greed!  For knowledge that is, of course.

This book is an elegant hard back volume of over 400 pages with a range of colour and black and white illustrations.  The text is generously spaced with contributors’ names in bold capitals.  I presume the unjustified lines are to give, what is a book of an unscripted live radio programme, a more informal look.

The only thing I don’t like is the dust jacket.  The look is good, a sort of restrained confident professionalism with a sans serif capital title in embossed gold that is flaking off.  It’s not the look, it is more the feel.  The paper has a slight suede-like touch that I find quite unpleasant, but other might think adds a touch of luxury.  A slight point, and not one to dissuade any future reader.  This is a book worth buying.  Buy it!

Remember the Ruskin quotation that has been a guiding light for me since I was a schoolboy: “If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.” 

For me, that is a simple (if expensive) truth!

No time for 'work'!

Well, if nothing else I have done my Catalan homework.  To an outsider, I must have looked like some casually dressed general planning an invasion as I consulted double page spreads of grammatical explanations and examples, thumbed my way through my totally inadequate “easy learning” dictionary, and resorted from time to time to Google Translate on my mobile phone.  

And all of that was for a relatively easy grammatical exercise!  God help us all when we get to the rest of the declensions of the verbs!

 

Still, it gives me a sense of satisfaction to think that I am at least starting from the very depths of ignorance and any accretion of knowledge will be a bonus.  And, I have to say, that the odd words are getting through to me when I watch the Catalan television station.  Bit by bit.

This all sounds very commendable until you realize that there are students in my class who are learning Catalan after being in the country for fewer weeks than I have been here years.  And the most that I could use the language for was to ask for a cup of iced coffee!  That is, at least, in the process of changing.

-oOo-

I have had a letter from yet another hospital summoning me to yet another appointment.  Don’t get me wrong, I am more than appreciative about the way in which my thrombosis, embolisms and dicky heart have been treated – after all, I did manage to produce a chapbook based on my stay in hospital – and I am more than prepared to turn up promptly and wait while another doctor reads my details for the first time and makes a pronouncement.

This time the hospital I have to visit is in the third town away from Castelldefels along the motorway towards Barcelona, in St Boi.  We usually go to St Boi to visit the supermarkets (or ‘Sheds’ as we used to call all those large stores on Rumney Common in Cardiff along the Newport Road) and very little else.  It is, it has to be said, an unlovely place, and it is further hated by motorist commuters who have to go through a bottleneck there to change motorways.

 

For as long as I have lived in Castelldefels there have been roadworks in St Boi as the slowest road construction in the world eventually will (please god) transmogrify itself into a motorway interchange and cut out the need to navigate ever-changing temporary roads whose ineffable structure is presumably there to facilitate the building of the big new quick roads that will make the daily commute just a little less miserable.

But this deliverance is in the unknowable future, like Tantalus’s sustenance, just out of reach.  To be fair, a decade’s worth of roadworks has accomplished the moving of the traffic jams little further along the motorway, so that is something.  Not much, but you really have to experience the bone grinding futility of parts of the network of roads feeding Barcelona to be able to appreciate even the smallest amelioration.

In my darker moments (like, for example, at 6.30 am taking Toni to work because there is no public transport to get him to there for 7.00 am when he starts) I fear that I will see the completion of the Sagrada Familia before this bloody road is opened.  What makes things worse is that you can see pylons stretching emptily towards the skies that should be carrying a road bridge – they have been there so long that they are now covered with graffiti; you can gaze at empty stretches of multi-lane highway running parallel to our inefficiently winding road; you can see machines, lorries, equipment – but no people actually working on the bloody thing.

In my lighter, and therefore far more pretentious, moments, I have assumed that these ‘roadworks’ are nothing of the sort and are actually a vast piece of performance art/installation piece and as such I should be grateful that I have been able to appreciate its developing complexity over the years.

Talking of complexity, tomorrow morning should be an example of the sort of life that can only be lived by the very fortunate - or the retired.  The day starts with my staggering out of bed well before half past six, and having a cursory wash before taking Toni to work.  Returning to Castelldefels, I get to the swimming pool just as it opens at 7.00 am and have my 1,500 m swim.  By the time I am done, having had a shave and completed more thorough ablutions, the café is open so that I can have MY special cup of tea and do a little desultory writing in my ever-present note book.  

I then go directly from the pool café to Bellvitge hospital in Hospitalet de Llobregat for my monthly Control where a single drop of blood, from the tip of the middle finger of my right hand, is tested to see that the viscosity of my blood is within the limits set to encourage the disappearance (the gradual disappearance) of the thrombosis.  I am then given my schedule of rat poison (because that is what I am taking in reality, dress it up with scientific names as they might) for the next month.

Once I am released from the hospital I then make my way back to Castelldefels to go to my first Catalan lesson of the week.  At 12.30, my lesson ended, I make my way into the centre of Castelldefels to go to the framers to discuss how best to bring to concrete fruition a little idea for a ‘picture’ that I have devised.   

Its realization all depends on how much the framer’s bits and pieces that are essential to make it work, cost.  And I should have a price in my mind beyond which I will not go.  There again, ‘should’ is not ‘will’!

The afternoon can be given up to writing.  My publications are lagging behind schedule and I need to get them back on course.

-oOo-

Being up so early, I heard a healthy chunk of the Today programme on Radio 4 and therefore caught the ‘puff’ for Melvyn Bragg and the new book celebrating the twentieth anniversary of ‘In Our Time’.  I made the serious mistake of looking it up in Amazon and bought it at once!  In hardback!  It looks exactly the sort of thing that I like – with pictures!   

 I will review it in a later blog, as soon as it arrives!