Present depression; future hope!

 

 

“He looks like a homeless person,” my friend in the swimming pool said this morning before we started our swim, “With a tie!”  Perhaps it doesn’t need me to tell you which English political character he was taking about, given the international publicity that shuffling lummox has had over his latest U-turn.

     If it wasn’t for the unnecessary deaths that his ineptitude and indolence have caused, it would be rollickingly funny.  But it isn’t.  It’s a national humiliation as each new catastrophic missed opportunity or slipshod execution pushes the figures even further beyond the “optimistic” projected number of 20,000 dead by the end of the pandemic that was voiced with some belief in the early stages of the infection! 

     I hope that the increasing dead haunt Johnson’s every waking thought because it is his ‘”leadership’” that has pushed the figures into the national disgrace that they have become.  I think that the charges of “corporate manslaughter” that Johnson and his cabinet should face are becoming more and more of a necessity if the thousands of excess deaths are ever going to be properly laid at the feet of the architect of the political chaos that helped make them.  Indeed, I think that the term “manslaughter” is far, far too mild for what he and his low-life ministers have actually done.

 

However bitter my thoughts and how eager I am to see Johnson brought to justice; I know that my writing is just so much bile.  Even if Johnson were to read it he wouldn’t recognize the application to himself; he is so much of a narcissist that he would ‘naturally’ push the blame off on to someone else.  Responsibility has never been one of his strong points, well, not even a point really, so he would brush off any criticism as ‘inapplicable’ and carry on in the way that he has lived all of his life: falling upwards and ignoring negative opinions. 

     The only problem that I foresee is that his final comeuppance will come, but at a price that will involve the whole of the United Kingdom (for as long as that concept is going to survive his governance) in taking the hit for his failures, and he will gambol away (possibly humming a merry tune like Cameron) as he disappears into the lucrative lecture circuit and shallow book writing future that he has mapped out for himself.

     But wait, I was forgetting, as a past holder of his present post he will be entitled (?) to a peerage, Lord Boris of Bullshit, floridly resplendent in his (probably borrowed) robes, so that he can continue fleecing the country with his lordly per diems!

 

Enough!  We have only hours (or days, or weeks, or months, or years) left before the latest deadline for a Brexit agreement.  Has anyone bothered to count up the number of deadlines that have come and gone?  I do hope that someone has kept track of what we were offered and what we could have got at all the times in the past when an agreement was in the offing.  I am more than sure that what (if anything) we end up with will be a pale reflection of what we could have had if we had etc etc etc, and specifically if self-harming opposition of people like the Odious Rees-Mogg and the Unthinkable IDS had not been invented.  I have to admit that one finds it hard to imagine that those two (together with the unmentionables in the rabid Brexit gang) ever being ‘born’ in the normal human way.

With a lurch, I will try to stop foaming at the mouth with justifiable resentment and anger and become a trifle more composed.

     This evening I am going to a carol concert in Wales.  Not in reality of course, but virtually via Zoom.  The Cardiff Ardwyn Singers are presenting a Christmas Concert of carols dedicated to the memory of Gaynor Wilkins, wife of John, both of whom were connected with the Choir. 

     Money raised via the link below will go to the Haematology Unit for Cardiff and Vale Health Charity in recognition of the care that they showed in the treatment of Gaynor’s rare form of blood cancer Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS)

www.justgiving.com/fundraising/rhiannon-wilkins

Something real.

Why can't life be as it was?

 

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.