Things change

 

 

I am not going to be coerced into making fatuous New Year Resolutions; I refuse to be dragooned into making a list of aspirations just because everyone else is doing it at the same time.

     Actually, I don’t think that many people actually do make such lists – they are more the preserve of desperate editors on the Today programme on Radio 4, looking for a cheap and easy vox pop to pad out some time.  As if the events of 2021 going into the equally bleak looking 2022 have any lack of ‘real’ news items to sober-up any English (remember all the other nations of the UK have imposed restrictions) revellers who might be thinking of a better way to be after the festivities on an untrammelled New Year’s Eve!

     So, I am merely going to knuckle down again to the task of writing.  I have been remiss for the past umpteen days and, while it is easy to put such indolence down to ‘Christmas Preparations’ it would be a ludicrous overstatement of the amount of time that we actually spent on thinking about the 25^th.

 

     My card writing is now consigned to a single Christmas donation to Oxfam, and Christmas presents are strictly Catalan Family, and usually proscribed by family members in advance, to make things easier.  Food is catered for by a restaurant meal.  All one has to do is turn up.

     Unless, that is, after the traditional Christmas Eve giving of presents (shat out of a log) [it’s a Catalan thing] and returning home to sleep before the Christmas Meal, you happen to have an email on Christmas Day informing you that a swimming friend with whom you had a cup of tea a few days previously had tested positive for Covid.

     Everything changed.

     I was still within the four-day period after ‘last contact with the positive subject’ and so I had to isolate myself.  The test I took was negative, but I would need to take another on the Monday after Christmas to make sure that I was securely negative.

     I therefore I had a solitary Christmas Meal, and I was similarly alone for my Saint’s Day - Boxing Day or Saint Stephen’s Day.  In Catalonia a Name Day is more of a deal than in the UK (where the concept doesn’t really exist) as it usually involves a special meal and presents.

     Before any sympathy is wasted on poor little me, I might point out that I was able to make myself a sumptuous and self-indulgent Christmas Feast and, anyway, I had books to read!

     My name day celebrations will probably be postponed until next weekend, when The Family will come down to Castelldefels and enjoy a walk along the beach.

     A walk, I imagine that will be seen as something as a luxury in the coming days and weeks, when the Super Spreader Events that characterize national fiestas nowadays will inevitably result in a startling (though entirely predictable) increase in Covid infection – and the belated imposition of more stringent limitations on our freedom of movement.

     Admittedly, Catalonia has already imposed a curfew from 1am to 6am and has emphasised the social distance rules and strengthened the public association regulations, but I fear that, as is natural for politicians, it is too little too late. 

     Which makes the lack of action in England all the more startling and worrying. 

     The Tousled Thug who masquerades as Prime Minister has, yet again, abdicated his primary responsibility, which is striving to keep the people of the UK safe.  His ‘masterly inaction’ which in his sick mind he probably thinks is modelled on the behaviour of the late Queen Elizabeth, is rather more reminiscent of the appeasement of Chamberlain as he waves a little piece of paper with his interpretation of “The Science” to justify a cowardly ‘doing nothing’ to keep the semi-evolved dregs of the Conservative back benches quiescent.

     In one respect the woeful responses of our political masters have ‘worked’, in so far as a reasonable number of people to whom I have spoken have a sort of fatalistic acceptance that, “We’re all bound to get Covid at some time or other” which means that more and more people have bought-into the ‘herd immunity’ approach to pandemic management, with a shoulder-shrug to the consequent deaths that this acceptance must entail.

 

As the more observant reader will have noticed, there is a sort of ‘wasn’t that in the past’ sort of vibe about the previous writing.  Which is fair, as it was written a week ago.  Or more.

     In the meantime, I have tested negative again and life of sorts can resume.  Except.

     There is always an except.  My questionable knees have now decided to make a statement about their physical well-being and have opted for the ‘pain and discomfort’ way forwards.

     In what has been a remarkably limited number of days, my right knee has gone from ‘something ought to be done soon’ to ‘basically, not working’.  This has meant that my progress up, down, and along is now only possible with the ostentatious use of Toni’s crutches (a bargain, 12 euros on the internet).  And our house is composed almost entirely of stairs.  Or at least it seems that way to me as I tap and hobble my way around with a complete lack of grace and agility.

     In less than a week we have gone from the ‘something ought to be done’ to the ‘something has to be done – now!’ in a matter of days.  In the middle of a pandemic.

     I do have an appointment for ‘rehabilitation’ – but, at we don’t really know where my knees have been (so to speak) there is little for the medical staff to go on.  We are hoping that my obvious discomfort will prompt the people there to demand a scan, be appalled at what they see, and put me on a list for something.  Anything.  To make what is a fairly intolerable position slightly more acceptable.

     The waiting times for surgery that have been suggested to me, not necessarily from doctors, but from surprisingly well-informed casual acquaintances, has been at the far end of eight or nine months.  And I think, given the backlog thanks to Covid, that is a dewy-eyed optimistic prediction. 

     However.  At present, I have more pain than information, and I am looking forward to the Catalan health service coming forward, scalpel advanced, to my aid.  I have to say from previous experience with the medical services of this country, I have been more than impressed, and I will throw myself on their mercy – before I swallow whatever socialist principles are left to me and go private!

 

On the more positive side of life, the Family did come down to Castelldefels for my postponed Name Day and a good meal was had by all. 

     And it’s not raining. 

     One takes one’s positives where one finds them.

What time of the year is it?

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas is trying its best not to be.  There is a forced quality about any celebratory approach to the time that makes it all the more unreal.

     I have not, physically in a hands-on sense, bought any presents – apart of course from my ruinously expensive office chair, and with only a deposit paid and its not being available until January, I’m not sure that it counts.  So, the Family’s presents have virtually all been bought and sent via Amazon; the Christmas cards will be (with few exceptions) virtual via email with a donation to Oxfam; the Christmas meal will be just the two of us with a possible Zoom element making everything just that little bit more embarrassing and uneasy!

     Happy Covid Christmas and a Vaccinated New Year!

     Of course, the best Christmas present this year is being around to be able to moan about the limitations of the festivities: there are plenty of Catalans and Welsh people who are unable to do so, and unless our respective governments approach the pandemic with something that is more appreciative about the risks involved, then potentially, hundreds of thousands more will die in the cause of political window dressing.

     We have been told that half a million people in the UK have had the first dose of the vaccine.  It’s a small start given the population, but at least it is something.  Spain, together with the rest of the EU are not going to start the programme of vaccination until the 27^th of December so lord alone knows when the programme will finally get to us in Castelldefels.

     A friend in Istanbul wrote that he looked forward to travelling more freely by April.  I think he is being charmingly optimistic.  I do not think that there will be anything like free movement until the end of the summer next year, and in my mind I have virtually written off 2021 as a sort of year in abeyance.  I think that 2022 will be the year in which things generally get back to normal, or what we will have accepted as normal by then.

 

 

 

I sense a real weariness about the restrictions from a lot of people that I see around me, and that quality of being fed up expresses its visible self in the laxity of many with the wearing of masks.  In the centre of town people are generally (and legally) obliged to wear the masks and they do, but on the paseo and the nearer you get to the sand, the slacker the attitude is.  To my mind, it doesn’t really matter if you are walking, running, dog walking, skateboarding, skating or whatever: you should wear a mask.  I find the allowance made for smokers to wander about in peopled spaces without a mask because of their addiction to be frankly astonishing.  Where is the logic in energetic exercise where the individual sweats and breathes more deeply and expels air more forcibly being exempt from mask wearing?  It simply doesn’t make sense.  At least to me.  And to logic!

     Johnson is coming under pressure to impose another strict lockdown.  It is not something than anyone wants, but it is surely necessary to prevent horrendous loss of life. 

     I was going to say that there is nothing special about Christmas – and I could defend that statement theologically, socially, numerically, historically, culturally with lots of other -ly words thrown into the debate – but clearly the Day itself is, not only in Christian terms but also in Family terms significant.  People want to be together.  People want to be with their families.  That is easily understandable.  But, with a vaccine being rolled out throughout Europe in a few days’ time, even if individual know that they are not going to be in the first tranche of vaccinations, they will know that within months they will start to gain the protection that they need to visit their loved ones and, more importantly, not kill them by visiting.

     It is asking a lot for people to be patient month after month and to see blatant unfairness, incompetence, corruption, lying and deceit – but the vaccines exist and, in time they will be given to everyone and we will then all have a degree of protection that will allow life as we knew it to become life as we know it.  And for the restrictions to become a way of life or a bitter memory.

 

We went out for lunch today and ate inside the restaurant at spaced tables.  When we go to restaurants Toni remembers to bring the bottle of soapless alcohol handwash and I remember to bring the pepper grinder.  Nowadays communal cruets are a thing of the past and oil and vinegar come in one-use little individual bottles; ketchup and mayonnaise are in sachets and salt and pepper are in little paper containers.  Pepper is the problem: while salt is always there, pepper is a wayward addition and I cannot rely on its availability, so I take my own.

     A couple of times in the past I have had to rescue my pepper mill from clearing waiters’ hands and remind them that does not belong to them – but nowadays the appearance of my own condiment raises no eyebrows!

 

So, Johnson has had to U-turn on yet another of his empty reassurances and Christmas had had to be to all intents and purposes cancelled.  We are not in such a Draconian lockdown in Catalonia, but I do not think for a moment that things are going to get better during the holiday period.  We are all waiting for the vaccine.

Tomorrow is our final shop for Christmas.  We still have not finally settled what it is we want to eat during our Christmas meal – but it is certainly not going to be turkey with all the trimmings!  Toni has suggested prawns and that seems like something with which I can work, especially as I intend to have salmon scrambled eggs to start off Christmas Day in the right style!  Alas!  I will not be having a glass of Cava to accompany it.  How many YEARS is it since I last had an alcoholic drink!  I don’t miss it.  Much.  Though there are a few times with a good meal when a glass of decent red would go down a treat.  According to my doctor I am “allowed” one small glass of red wine a day.  It just simply does not sound like me.  So, I am prepared to do without.  And I make do with non-alcoholic beer.  Which, to be fair, is much better than it was when I first tried it years ago!  Even if it is really larger and not real bitter beer.

     Still, the Christmas Meal will look good and I have bought a few little things to make the festive board look appetizing!

     We will see how it goes and we will certainly take a photograph to remind us of the end of a truly awful year!