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 45 – Wednesday, 29th APRIL

The Great Adventure! Or going to Lidl’s.  Such as the delights when you are in lockdown, you take your pleasures where you can define them!

     There are many more people around in Castelldefels, though as I passed over the motorway bridge the amount of traffic was small for the time of the day.

     Lidl was relatively full, though I didn’t have to wait before I entered the store to wash my hands in liquid alcohol and start shopping.  Most, but not all people inside the store were wearing masks, and I think that it is becoming a generational thing with the older shoppers being much more likely to be masked up rather than the young.

     As people are supposed to be alone when shopping, it does mean that there is a self regulating holdup when it comes to the checkout, and an infuriating lack of urgency by most when it comes to putting purchases inside bags to take away.

     I have to say that my trip to the shop was uneventful.  People were generally good in their distancing and there didn’t seem to be any shortages – apart form my 15 month mature Cheddar – luckily I stocked up during the last shop and so I still have a chunk left.

     I came back via the sea front to check on how people are working with the new regulations allowing a parent with up to three children to go for walks of less than 1km.  That was what most appeared to be doing as far as I could see, and there seemed to be fewer people on the beach, most were walking on the paseo.  It is still an oddly quiet and lonely activity to drive along the beach road, especially when the weather is encouraging people to come out and walk.

     As the weather steadily improves, it is going to be more and more difficult to keep people in their homes and I can’t help feeling that the government’s intention to allow adults to walk for exercise from this weekend is little more than following the feelings of the population rather than following the science.

     We do not have adequate testing in place in Catalonia and without testing then any successful and safe loosening of the restrictions is going to be a matter of luck rather than confident, evidence backed steps back to normality.  It is my fear that the increasing zest to get back to free movement is going to lead to an inevitable spike in infections and deaths in the autumn.

     For me, a sober assessment of my position would suggest that I fit a few of the criteria for ‘at-risk’ and I think that the onus of my continued existence is going to be squarely on what I think is an adequate approach to my own personal safety rather than going with the flow of governmental encouragement back to normality.

     There is much talk of the ‘new normality’, but too much of it is predicated on the basis that mere talk will make it true.  I do not think that many people have really come to terms with the length of time that there might realistically be before anything approaching previous levels of ordinary domestic intimacy will be back with us.  The double kiss of meeting is very much a thing of the past.  At the moment.  But old habits die hard and it doesn’t need much for people to forget that there was ever an interruption.

     Because we cannot see the virus, it takes an effort of the imagination to take danger seriously.  And it takes a steely determination to be constantly on guard; it is too easy to let your defences down momentarily, and that is all the virus needs to infect and threaten.

The pdf file for my chapbook, Coasts of Memory, is far too large to send via a simple email, and I have been looking to find ways to reduce the quality of the photos that are the major space takers.  I had thought that I would have to alter each of the photographic illustrations individually in some way or other, and then re-insert them into the document.  I tired to use one or two ideas and failed until I noticed that there was an option actually called ‘Reduce file size’ on the ‘File’ menu.  I wonder how many times I have opened that menu and simply not noticed that particularly helpful option!  I suppose it is better to have found it now rather than carry on with a series of futile half-arsed attempts at uninformed self-help!

     I have sent two copies of the file to Irene.  The first was a failure and there was no way that she was able to open it, I have sent the second and I have great hopes for that one.  I wait with trepidation!

     If the file is openable then I intend to send it out and ask recipients, if they feel so inclined, to contribute to NHS charities in their respective countries as payment. 

     This is an on-going enterprise!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 22 – Monday in Holy Week, 6th APRIL

Escape!

     My first physical emergence into the wider world!  Well, I drove to Lidl a couple of kilometres from my home for our weekly shop and then drove back again.  As Toni has done this previously, I have to admit that I was mildly excited by the prospect of finally getting out of the house and environs for the first time in three weeks!

     The reality of my journey was, of course, an anti-climax.  I drove along virtually empty roads to a virtually empty Lidl car park, just as I used to find each day as I cycled to the pool for my early morning swim in the ‘old days’ of just under a month ago!

     Gloved and masked I marched towards the shopping trollies to find out that I had no change – when was the last time that I used money as cash?  Luckily there was a Lidl employee at the entrance and she went to a till and found me a plastic token and emphasised that I could keep it, and it is now safely lodged in my wallet where I will probably forget that I have it the next time I find myself without change, but still, a little gesture makes all the difference to a shopping expedition!

     At the entry to Lidl was a person who demanded that all shoppers first use the hand sanitizer and then glove-up before they were allowed to go in.  As I was already wearing gloves I had to sanitize and the liquid stayed damp on the plastic for a damn sight longer that it did on flesh.  But, who could quarrel with this basic form of hygiene and it did emphasise a level of concern that one could only hope was carried on into the store itself by the shoppers.

     People did keep their distance and there was an obvious wariness about Others, as the best form of protection is to assume that everyone you meet and see is positive for the virus.

     To my utter horror there was no Cheddar cheese in the dairy section.  I specifically went to Lidl because they have a 15-month matured Cheddar at a cost that matches that in Britain and without the premium that decent Cheddar has elsewhere in Catalonia – if you can get it.  I was able to compensate with a few other cheeses, but Gouda and Emmental hardly match Cheddar for taste, texture and versatility.   How I suffer.

     The other main reason for my going to Lidl is their range of nuts and the prices they charge.  I did not trust Toni to understand the quantity and variety of nuts that I demand for everyday use and rather than explain and justify it was so much easier to go myself!

     I got virtually everything that we had decided was essential and the only things that I failed to find were radishes and soya sprouts – no great loss, either of those.

     On the more than positive side, for the first time in Lidl I found sugar free ice creams and sugar free biscuits – and for the sake of my sanity, I understand ‘no added sugars’ to be synonymous with ‘sugar free’ because, yes.

     We are now set for the next week with only fresh bread for Toni being an on-going concern.  We do have a bakery near us and Toni goes there every couple of days and brings back a little treat with the baguettes.

Going shopping did not push my steps up to the minimum that my unrelenting smart watch demands, and by the time that we had put everything that I bought away.  We were both exhausted.  Let me explain.  Toni is a stickler for the correct procedures so we therefore wiped each and every item before we put it away.  As it was a ‘major’ shop, it took a lot of time, with my being accused of being slip shod in my wiping.  God give me strength!  Anyway, at the end of the putting away, going for a walk to make up my steps lost out badly to having a decent cup of tea and then one thing led to another and suddenly it was night, and therefore time for me to work on the poem ideas for PIHW Poem 2.

     And that is what I need to get on with now.  PIHW Poem 1 is on smrnewpoems.blogspot.com and by tomorrow morning I hope that it will be joined by Poem 2.

     Work to do!

Sheep and goats!

 

There are, as is well known, two types of people in the world: those who find stationery (with an ‘e’ for envelope) endlessly fascinating - and those that don’t.

I am, enthusiastically and terminally, in the first category.

One can speculate about how such fixations develop, and I have thought back to my childhood, and I think that I can see the reasons that I am how I am.

My first ‘remembered’ pocket money was 6d (sixpence in old money or 2½p in the ‘new’) even in those distant days that was not much.  It would have bought me 24 blackjacks, 6 chews or one and a bit sherbet fountains: and it had to last a week.

This is where the lure of stationery comes in.  You could buy drawing pins or paper clips with part of your money and you got lots of ‘things’.  You didn’t ever use them all, but it was a real example of plenty for not very much.  Like staples.

Not every six or seven year-old would ask for a stapler for Christmas - but I did.  And I got one too (my parents probably delighted that a childish wish could be fulfilled at such little expense!) they may have been delighted, but it could not possibly match my ecstasy on owning a grey, sleek, official-looking piece of grown-up machinery.  There was not, it must be admitted, a whole stack of papers that I needed to staple, but the fact that I could if I needed to was the point.  And the further point is that a stapler needs staples, and for a very small outlay you could get a thousand of them.  A thousand!

It was the same with notebooks: lots of pages for small amounts.  It almost seemed a pity to have to write in them.  Which, again if I am fair, I seldom did.  It was the ownership of flickable blank pages that really mattered.

As I grew older I was able to rationalise my addiction into defined ‘necessity’: I needed folders for schoolwork.  And clips.  And pens.  And rubbers.  And Tippex.  And so it went on.

Any new system for stationery organization or display had my attention.  The different folders that I purchased usually had differing configurations of holes for the paper - and that necessitated the purchase of hole punches, and then the purchase of those paper Polos that you stuck around the holes to stop the paper from tearing through over use.

From where I sit typing this I can see two domestic paper guillotines to my right; behind me is a long arm stapler purloined from my last school (with the full knowledge of the senior management team); on a shelf in front, the thermal binder is next to the ring binder; further along is the plastificator, with A4, A5 and card sized plastic sleeves; there is a printer within arm’s reach, to say nothing of the serious table-mounted guillotine that can slice through 500 pages at once.

I have enough pens and pencils (for which, incidentally I have an electric sharpener) to supply a school; I have various small staplers (with staples) and a staple remover; I have post-it notes in many sizes and colours; I have stickers (both festive and plain); plastic rulers, metal rulers, cutters, tape dispensers, Dymo machines (manual and electric) and a bewildering array of magnifying glasses.

I am insatiable in my need for aspects of the stationeryatorial possibilities - even if I have nowhere to put my acquisitions and struggle to find a use for those I already have.  But I don’t smoke and so I am ‘allowed’ a minor aberration or three.

As with watches (I will go into that in another post) I am searching.  Searching for perfection.  In this case the perfect pen.

I much prefer to write with ink through a fountain pen nib and, over the years, Parker, Montblanc and Sheaffer have been purchased and gifted to me.  And I have lost the lot.  Some blotty biros stay with me for years, but give me a decent fountain pen and it will be lost before the ink cartridge empties!

I eventually found a solution that met my inky needs and my propensity to mislay, by discovering the pre-filled disposable fountain pen.  A wasteful extravagance, but one that I embraced.  The nib was a good match for my scribbled writing and seemed to be able to cope with my destructive scrawl through the length of the reservoir of ink, and the smallish cost of the thing meant that it didn’t really matter if I lost it.  This attitude of course encouraged me to buy the things in relative bulk so that I could, as it were, go on finding the ‘lost’ pens in a continuous serendipitous discovery process, before they too were lost in the never ending cycle of my stationery life.

Which brings me to Lidl, or possibly Aldi, but certainly one or the other.  Catalonia, unlike the UK, does not start putting out the ‘Back to School’ merchandise on the first day of the summer holiday, they wait until the calendar indicates that it is only a despairing teacher’s scream away from the start of term.  So, it was in early September that I noted a matched set of pen, roller ball and packet of ink cartridges set out alluringly in one of those impossible to breach plastic bump packs.  “Why not?”, I thought rhetorically, and put one in my basket.

It was only when I got home that I discovered that the design on the barrel of each of the writing instruments, that I had thought to be vaguely Orientally inspired, was actually an open, monster’s claw.  I am going to continue using it in the expectation that other people will, like me, take the graphic to be bamboo rather than something else beginning with the letter ‘b’ related to the gruesome that I can’t think of.

As I am wise in the ways of ink cartridge fountain pens, I knew that while one cartridge was feeding the nib, an extra cartridge should be able to be fitted into the empty space of the barrel.  And it could and was.

I then turned to the rollerball.  And it didn’t work.  And it continued not to work even after some vigorous flicking to get the ink to flow.  Disgruntled I dismantled the pen to find that there was nothing inside.  I mean there was no refill there.  Nothing.  I then realised that the thing actually used the cartridges supplied.

This was a revelation!  It is surely a rule that the refills for rollerballs come complete with ink supply and nib, like the refills for ballpoint pens.  But I also realised that I had never seen an ink cartridge rollerball pen before.  And I further realised that, if a roller ball could work with an ink cartridge - why hadn’t it been done before?  Perhaps it has been done, but for something that momentous to escape my stationery eye would be remarkable.

It must be greed.

It is said that HP printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids on the planet. The cost of the printer machine has fallen dramatically over the years, but that it because the companies know that they can make so much more money by customers buying their ink.  Even a cursory exploration on the Internet about how computer printer companies limit the life of the ink cartridge in the printers is easy to find and surely, is little more than theft.  There are, allegedly, chips inside printers that count up the number of copies that you make and, at a number decided by the company, the machine will begin to display error messages urging you to buy a new cartridge, irrespective of whether you actually need one or not, and if you do not buy a new one, then the machine will simply stop printing.

This is yet another example of the planned obsolescence exemplified by the light bulb.  There is one electric light bulb that has been burning continuously for over 100 years and I believe that it had its own website and there is a camera trained on it so those with nothing better to do can stare at a lighted lamp and think about all the light bulbs that they have thrown away because they have ‘blown’.  

It’s funny, too, isn’t it, that modern cars don’t seem to rust like they used to?  New technology has nothing, or little to do with it, manufacturers have known how to make cars rustproof for years, but they got more money by ensuring that expensive welding would be needed after a certain number of years, ensuring too a continual replacement of the vehicles.  And don’t get me started on coffee capsules!

In spite of these examples, and many more, that show the uncaring nature of capitalism and the gullibility of we the consumers, I am still enthralled to know that I now posses a roller ball that uses ink cartridges.

And, in yet another example of how the things around me don’t really change, I couldn’t find it to get a real look at the design.

But it will turn up and it will give me pleasure when I find it.  Though I may not, or indeed, ever really use it.  

But that response is the nature of addiction and I am working on it.  

Sometime or other.

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The little things in life

The smallest room

I do not usually feel drawn to disquisitions on toilets but my recent visit to Barcelona makes such a discussion inevitable.

            I usually stay, when in the city, in a dated hotel near the Liceu and just off the Ramblas.  Its cell-like rooms are basic, but as far as value for money is concerned for a city-centre hotel it is unbeatable.  And breakfast is included!

            As he days of roughing it are well and truly over for me, however basic the accommodation I do insist on en suite.  And the rooms in his hotel are.

            I have now stayed in a variety of the rooms that they offer and my quibbles are usually with the showers.  Either the fittings are unreliable or the availability of warm water is only available if you have the precision of a micrometre adjuster in your fingertips.

            With the room last night it was the toilet.  It is obvious (you only have to look at the ceiling mouldings) to see that the present arrangements of rooms have been cobbled together by cannibalising the originals.  In the case of the room in which I stayed last night the chief victim of the savaging of the original floor plan was found in the bathroom.

            Firstly it wasn’t a room, it was more of a raised wedge-ledge from the bedroom separated from it by a curtain!  The shower filled one end of the wedge (there was no door) and immediately next to it and virtually touching the wall was the toilet.

            One does not want to be indelicate, but there was not way that the toilet could be used by a sitting customer if any form of clothing was still about their person.  It was also necessary to do a form of seated splits with one foot in the shower tray.  No conducive to, um, anything really!

            But I will go back.  Hotel Peninsular offers a unique experience at an unbeatable price – and anyway, restaurants have loos!

Things poetic

The Holy Week poetry sequence has now stalled and there is a build up of notes and no finished results of complete poems.  I am confident that I can complete one of them tonight, but that still leaves me a day behind.  Never mind, I am sure that they will be worth the effort when they are finally done.  Hopefully.

Easter

The great question taking my wallet at the moment is whether or not to give in to commercialism and buy an Easter Egg or not.

            A number of consumer programmes that have told us that Easter Eggs are nothing more than a rip off are too many to ignore, but buying anything else always seems a bit mean.

            I think that I will probably do what I do best in situations like this, wander from shop to shop in a vain attempt to gauge value, and end up doing something entirely different.

Shopping – you know it makes sense!

I went into Lidl to buy a tub of their excellent Greek yogurt and came out with a gel cover for my bike seat, lights for back and front and a new helmet (with built in rear, detachable, flashing light) as I am now, much to Toni’s amused contempt, a born again bicycle rider.

            Necessity, in the form of the reconstruction of the parking area in the swimming pool and the complete lack of parking spaces, prompted me to get the bike out of retirement and use, over the last few weeks has changed me mind.  As the weather gets warmer, it becomes more of a pleasure to ride.  At least until the end of the summer, I am toying with the idea of using the bike even when I do not need to.

            Toying.  Not a final decision, you understand.  Not by any means.  Yet.

Flesh Can Be Bright

The book takes another step nearer completion, with one or two of the plans in place to cope with other plans possibly not working are now not needed as the plans which weren’t working might be operational once more.  

          As you probably don’t understand.