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Showing posts with label Orange Monster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orange Monster. Show all posts

Saturday, May 23, 2020

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 69 – Saturday, 23rd May



So, “Let them die! Cummings” is now shown to have broken the lockdown rules that he helped frame, by driving 250 miles from London when he was positive with the Covid-19 virus to self-isolate in his parents’ house – a flagrant flouting of the rules.  If we look to the immediate past, other high profile flouters have resigned.  So should he.
     He won’t of course.  The Blond Buffoon would be lost, directionless, gibbering – sorry, even more lost, directionless and gibbering, without him.  And where would Hardest of All Hard Brexits be unless driven (ha!) by the Manic Mekon of Maliciousness!
     I look forward to the puerile mendacity of third-rate cabinet ministers (are there any others?) as they (yet again) defend the defenceless.  I do hope that the Guardian manages to get an appropriately evil photograph of the Bald Bastard (I can say that as I share his follicle challenge) to illustrate the mealy mouthed explanations for his ‘entitled’ flouting.  If, of course, anyone deigns to give an explanation.  It remains to be seen if there are sufficient Tory MPs to force The Blond Buffoon into another U-Turn, and if there is a feeling in the country that Cummings’ position is untenable.  One can only hope!
     This comes at the same time as the fall-out from the self-quarantine for visitors to the UK controversy; the continued failure of track and test; the chaos and division on the school return plans; the continuing horror of the mismanagement of Covid-19 in Care Homes; the total number of deaths and infections; the release of SAGE advice showing just how political the decisions have been; confusion of intentions about how, when and where we can holiday, and on and on. 
     Our present government is exactly the wrong group of politicians in position at exactly the wrong time.  And there is a proposed trip for the Blond Buffoon to the Orange Monster as if the link of shared shittiness was not close and dirty enough even with an ocean between them, they have to get together to share the shame!

My bike ride this morning was through a positive throng of people walking, running and cycling on the Paseo, the most crowded that I have experienced.  The beach was also fairly densely populated with some people swimming – it just shows you what odd times we are living in that such a comment seems remarkable!  Given that Monday marks a further loosening of the restrictions, I confidently expect there to be an exponential rise in people along the front.  We will be open to visits from people in the whole Barcelona metropolitan area, though I am not sure that overnight stays are yet allowed.  There are numbers of second homes in Castelldefels so there must be people itching to get to the seaside for the traditional stay.  Sigh!
     This means that our summer neighbours are likely to arrive as soon as they are given permission, and then they will be here until at least the middle of September.  Usually they arrive just after the schools close, though this year that date is something of a moveable feast to say the least, more conjectural than calendrical!  [ look it up, it exists!]
     My sports club can reopen on Monday as well, though I am not sure that the pool will be open yet.  The web site does not give information about sports apart from some 1 to 1 activities in padel and pilates.  Nothing about swimming.  As my membership of the Club has been temporarily suspended during the virus crisis I suppose that I will know that things are getting back to normal when the bank starts taking money again!  I am looking forward to my first lengths.
     I assume that when swimming eventually resumes it will be in a ‘timed’ slot and that changing facilities and showering facilities will not be provided. 
     We may well have to turn up in our bathing costumes and that means I will have to delve into my wardrobe and see if I can find a tracksuit.  That still fits!  I fear that most of the bits and pieces of past tracksuits are nylon based and therefore efficient producers of static electricity.  As someone who has ‘fallen upwards’ after crossing the carpet of the National Theatre and placing a hand on the exposed metal stair rail and shocking myself from side to side as I instinctively flinched away with one shocked hand and then grabbed for support with the other to be shocked in turn, and so on – I am prone to crackling displays of painful personal electric discharges.  I dread the return to nylonic [that doesn’t exist, but I like the sound] Faradaean [that doesn’t either, ditto] excesses!  But, there again, no pain – no gain!

Just watched 1917.  Superb!  I am usually quite squeamish about films concerning the First World War, partly I think because I feel that I have an emotional investment in the things as my grandfather was a volunteer at the start of the war and he was someone who survived, though not without scars – both literal and mental.  He was wounded during one ‘battle’ (if you can call the ill planned slaughter by upper class idiots a ‘battle?) and was seriously enough wounded to be sent back to Britain to recuperate.  When he returned to his point in the line, nothing had changed except the whole of his company had been killed.  Everyone.
     Every time that I have walked past the statue of Earl (!) Douglas Haig in London, I have felt a personal affront on behalf of my grandfather.  A man who fought in the Somme.  Ah well, let it go, but I am not neutral when I see soldiers in the trenches.  1917 was a worthy addition to the sorry story of the senseless slaughter in France and Belgium – that should never be forgotten.  There are too many easy parallels of the waste of human life in our present time for the excesses of 1914-1918 to be ignored.  Though it would be difficult to say that the lesson has been learned.
     A film worth watching.