Extension of Restrictions, Day x++, Friday.
A catalogue of mishaps to start the day.
Firstly, I forgot my mask and set off into the darkness, until the coldness across my lower face reminded me that something was missing. Luckily I have masks secreted about my clothing and so was able to pull into the side of the road and garb myself up.
There was a police check point set up just after the junction of the motorway exit and the road along the side of the Olympic Canal. Luckily, as I was in the cycle lane I was not stopped and was able to get to the pool in good time. To find that, as I started to change, I had left my bathing costume at home. If I had thought for longer than a couple of seconds, I would have realized that the wet bathers from the day before were still in the compartment for used sporting clothing. But I didn’t.
To general hilarity from the centre staff, I left (almost) as soon as I arrived and plunged back into the darkness to go home. Where, armed with dry bathers I returned to the pool, changed and got to the water much later than usual.
Before I could plunge in, the lifeguard told me that the spaces for the next hour were fully booked and so I would need to quit the pool as the new folk arrived.
As I was so late there was no clear lane for me to occupy and so I had to double up with a swimmer (five lanes, 10 swimmers, two to a lane swimming in parallel) and start my delayed efforts.
As it turned out, not everyone turned up to claim their booked spaces and so, with a few judicious lane swaps, I was able to complete me full swim with the series of exercises that I do at the end of the official metric mile of overarm.
After my cup of tea and bocadillo I usually set off on my bike ride to Port Ginesta and back, but the gage on my bike informed me that I was down to 20% power and, oddly, when I made my first attempt to come to the pool the screen actually registered 6%! Only once have I attempted to ride the bike without any electrical assistance and it is an experience that I do not intend to repeat. To give an equivalent example, without any electrical assistance, it is like driving a car without power steering, something I prefer not to do.
It did not help that the weather was uncomfortably odd, the sky a funny colour and the temperature low. I rode down to the paseo and as I met it, I made an executive decision to return home. Being caught in a thunderstorm is another experience that I do not intend to repeat!
I now have a number of writing projects on which I am working, some of which require a little light research. Some information is proving hard to find, but I know that it is only a matter of time before I find what is necessary. Or not. Sometimes the effort is all!
Tomorrow the restrictions on people travelling to other municipalities means that only Castelldefels people should be walking along the paseo. It is very hard to believe that the strangers that we see are just fellow citizens who have kept themselves to themselves and have finally decided to come out to have a breather.
We have had police checkpoints on entry points to Castelldefels (especially the beach area) to dissuade ‘outsiders’ from breaking the regulations, but it must be difficult for people close to us from not wanting to make a quick visit.
The figures for Covid in Spain and Catalonia are not good. The restrictions have been extended for a further 15 days here in Catalonia which virtually gets us up to the Christmas period.
The loosening of the regulations and restrictions for Christmas seems to me to be fatal madness. As experts constantly point out, the virus doesn’t recognize the Christmas period and will act accordingly. We must expect an increase in deaths in the middle of January if people decide to meet up and try and experience anything but a shadow of what Christmas used to be like.
As far as I can see, Christmas will be just the two of us. There may be a way for Toni to meet up with some of his family, but I really do not see the point in taking such a risk when the vaccine is only a few months away. We will see.
At least in the New Year the Trumpian Nightmare will have his tiny hands forced away from the levers of power and we can hope for a boring presidency to take its place.
Pity that the horror of Brexit in some sense or other will be filling the minds of people in Britain. To think that we have years (o god, years) more of the bunch of viciously and fatally incompetent chancers governing us is depressing.
And what is more depressing is the Dance of Death that the Conservative Party is doing with the EU in the lead up to some sort of agreement. I do not see how Johnson is going to be able to spin anything that he manages to get in a positive way. He truly (as are all the rest of us) in a no-win situation. Any Brexit is going to be a disaster, it just depends how big a disaster. Whatever agreement he manages to get, it is going to be construed as a betrayal by whole swathes of his own party and the rest of the country. God alone knows what Northern Ireland is going to get out of that bumbling fool’s final idiocy.
If he does manage to cobble together some sort of paper-thin agreement then my pension will go up. When I arrived in Catalonia the euro was 70p now it’s 90p+, that translates into a 30% reduction in my pension as it is paid in pounds (tax deducted) and then transferred to Catalonia. If there is any sort of agreement then the value of the pound will go up, I will get more euros for my money right up until the full impact of the idiocy of Brexit comes home to roost and the pound plunges down again.
And a Happy Christmas to us all!
