LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 38 – Wednesday, 22nd APRIL

An unconvincingly dry start to the day, where the most you can say about the weather is that it is not raining.  I will, however, take the opportunity to go for my walk in the dry, or dry-ish conditions, about which I will not complain – for fear the rains return!

     At times such as these one takes pleasure in small mercies, so I am truly thankful that I was able to complete my regulation walk unaccompanied by the lashing rain that has been such an obtrusive feature of the last three days.  And I had to wear a jacket, as the temperature was nowhere near the twenty-one degrees that my London cousin told me would be the norm where she was!  Still, I will bide my time and as we move nearer to the summer, I think that the balance of warmth will tip back in my favour!

Spain is going to ask for a two-week extension to the lockdown, putting its possible end some time in May.  Although the curve is flattening, there are still deaths and new cases of the virus and I am not sure that we have a convincing exit strategy.  It would be tragic indeed if the loosening of restrictions resulted in a virus spike towards the end of May.  I suppose the government is putting a great deal of hopeful expectation on the summer heat doing more efficiently what they have failed to do.  God help us all in the autumn!

     In Britain the controversy over the non-joining of the EU bulk buy initiative to get PPE shows no signs of calming down with the Civil Servant’s mea culpa letter being scrutinized stylistically in a way which would have done credit to the reading of the runes that used to go on in the gnomic pronouncements of the old USSR during the Cold War.  I do agree that paragraph three in the letter is one of Mandarin double-speak and the refutation of what was a clearly stated ‘fact’ that Brexit was the root cause of our non-participation is far less than convincing.

     It is depressing to realize that the government is more concerned about getting away with questionable statements, or maybe downright lies, in the short term in the hope that the inevitable inquiry in the longer term will be bad, but people will have moved one and memories are inevitably fickle and we will probably be back on the old territory of Brexit chaos to take people’s minds off what happened all those weeks ago.

     In the USA Trump is demonstrating on a daily basis that consequences are for little people and that lies, blatant and proven, are no hindrance to a narcissist’s grip on power if his base is indiscriminating enough.

     I feel very much the same about those people who voted for the present Conservative government and feel that the “Vote Conservative!” badge that I used to wear years ago is still more than valid, as around that injunction in smaller letters it had, “Young and stupid?  Old and selfish?”  Some things never change.

     Our ostensibly “socialist” government here in Spain, propped up with left wing parties’ support, is a little less than impressive and, apart from moving the corpse of the dictator Franco, it is difficult to point to any real achievements.  Admittedly, Trump has set the bar absurdly low for competence in crisis for a so-called democratic government, but his fatal dithering in the early days of the crisis has been mirrored to an extent in other governments in Europe.

     It remains to be seen how the releasing of the Plague Children into the community works out.  It has been said that kids can be unwitting carriers of Covid-19, so without testing allowing youngsters out from lockdown is something of a gamble, especially for the more senior parts of the community – in which category I firmly place my good self.  I can’t help thinking that there will be a whole age group re-watching Chitty-chitty-bang-bang and thinking that the figure of the ‘Child Catcher’ is one whose time has come round at last!

The story of the EU Bulk Buying Scandal has taken a further turn with the EU detailing when and how many times the UK had been informed about the whole thing.  One, or all of the front bench ministers is/are lying, as the ‘missed email farce’ is not really gaining any traction, while the 'Brexit Prejudice Pantomime' is seeming more and more like the truth.  So these unutterable bastards put the absurd foot-shooting of Brexit before actual people’s lives.  Who would have thought that Conservatives would have done something as despicable as that?  Well, I for one!

     This is obviously a resigning matter.  At a time of national crisis there might be some who might say that to change the people at the top would be counter productive.  Fair point.  But what if the people at the top are a bunch of vicious incompetents whose actions have killed people?  Surely getting rid of them is an act of self-preservation?  And don’t forget, the first to offer his too long delayed resignation should be the Blond Buffoon for his dereliction of duty in ostentatiously going out of his way to mix with Covid-19 carriers and thus become infected and deliberately taking a NHS bed that could have been used more profitably for those who, in spite of taking every precaution, caught the virus.  Vile man.  Vile government.

The Spanish government has now (again) come round to the point of view of the Catalan government over the question of the Plague Kids and how free they should be in the Great Breakout for this weekend.  The untramelled liberation of the Plague Kids has now been modified to bring it more like the Catalan suggestions that stipulated that kids under 12 would be allowed to accompany a parent for recreational short walks but not NOT going to places like supermarkets and places where real human beings could be infected.

     It remains to be seen just how the population interprets this relaxation, though I do not think that people are going to be too scrupulous and if they are not, then we are looking at more deaths later.

On the more positive, cultural side, I have, at last been able to print out a copy of The Coasts of Memory – though I think that there is more editing to be done before I am satisfied!

    

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 12

The Covid-19 statistics in Spain make sobering reading.  We are now at the top of the league for daily deaths and our total has overtaken that of China.  With over fifty thousand reported cases of infection the fear is that the situation will get worse before we see a flattening of the curve and a distant view of a way out of this crisis.

     And yet, my life goes on in the oasis of assumed safety and normality of my home and I write this with the comfortingly ordinary sound of the new robot mop making its stately progress across the tiled floor of the living room; the dishwasher rumbling away to itself as it goes through its own cleaning cycle; and the dregs of my first cup of tea of the morning cooling at my side.  But no noise of traffic; no sound of overhead planes landing in Barcelona airport; no sound of kids playing; no sound of workmen next door.

     Catalonia is a noisy country and a large part of social life is conducted outside the house.  As an example, the dinner parties that Brits have in their own homes where friends gather are more likely to be in restaurants rather than in homes in this country.  Eating at home in Catalonia is basically for the family, not for friends.  Restaurants are the natural meeting places, together with bars, ice cream salons and tapas haunts, so the isolation in homes is unnatural for a population that is naturally gregarious. 

     That sociability could be part of the reason for the number of Covid-19 cases here as football games and demonstrations were allowed to take place at a time when more judicial counsel should probably have restricted mass gatherings of people. 

     The large demonstrations that took place on International Women’s Day on the 8th of March were an obvious mistake and it is one of the many that the government will have to explain in the investigations that are carried out after the crisis is over.  The muddled thinking which led the government of Sanchez to give advance warning of a future lockdown of Madrid while giving those Madrileanos with second homes away from the hotspot of infection the opportunity to decamp and spread the disease will also have to be considered later when guilt is apportioned.  The government recognizes that it could have done some things better, but each of its failures is directly translatable into unnecessary deaths.

     Here in Castelldefels precise numbers are difficult for me to find, though it appears that there has been one death from Covid-19 of someone who was both old and who also had pre-existing illnesses. 

     The police and authorities have reinforced their instructions that nobody should leave their homes except for the specific reasons allowed, and have followed up this instruction by revealing that there have been 171 cases of the police charging people with breaking the restrictions here in Castelldefels!

     Which brings me to the renovations next door.

     I have decided that the renovations are a good thing.  Not because of the noise: I am not Catalan, I do not need constant hubbub as an essential part of my national psyche, I embrace silence – unless it is leavened with my own choice of music or conversation – and would prefer tranquillity rather than the musique concrète of inconsiderate construction that transmits itself through the structure of our houses.  No, I have decided that, in this time of crisis (or Time of Crisis if you prefer) that it is necessary to have an external focus for the animosity that I feel about the restrictions of my present situation.  I therefore, choose to transmogrify the selfish and inconsiderate irritation of rich people trying to get richer by tarting up a house near the sea for a profit, into something which is a piece of spiritual blotting paper, soaking up my negative feelings and giving me a focus for my hatred for all things that disturb my tranquillity, up to and including Covid-19.

     I am reminded of some novel or other that I read years ago where the admiral or captain of some vast ship forced the crew to make him a yacht while the fleet was standing-to or laying-to or whatever ships do when they are not, as it were, shipping.  The sailors were forced into producing this craft for their superior officer and constructed it with much moaning and groaning and with feelings of resentment.  When taxed with his unreasonable demands on his crew by a senior officer, the captain explained that he had deliberately focused the feelings of resentment on himself so that the crew could be united in a feeling of unfairness and not starts bickering among themselves in the phoney-war before action.

     I also remember that when the admiral/captain actually sailed his new yacht around the fleet the seemingly hard-done-by sailors took inordinate pride in the fact that the yacht was something that they had made and was ‘theirs’ as well as the admiral/captain’s.

     Not an exact parallel, I know, but the principle is the same.  Possibly.  It is also a justification for exploitation as well, but then I suppose we always find way to make the intolerable prosaic and acceptable!

     So, I have, with a magnanimity of spirit that does me credit, subsumed the sonic grit in my eye, into the wholeness of my soul.  Which is made easier by the fact that the workmen next door have not yet turned up and it is so much easier to be philosophical when the disturbance is not physically present.  Let us see how I cope when hammer falls (yet again) on concrete.

In a similar way, my mother, in a never to be forgotten phrase (nor was she ever allowed to forget it!) uttered when our household spending had reached the astronomical level of £5 (!) a week, and my parents were discussing retrenchment, said, “Right!  That’s it! No more mushrooms!”   

     The stunned hilarity of her husband and son on hearing this credo, axiom or tenet of belief meant that this cri de coeur was resurrected in a variety of circumstances as a universal panacea when the way forward was unclear.  How to cope with The Cold War?  “No more mushrooms!”; Industrial unrest?  “No more mushrooms!”;  Margaret Thatcher?  “No more mushrooms!”             

     As a rallying cry, it may not have been over-effective, but it did add to the gaiety of nations; well of that section of the nation that included Dad and me, and grudgingly, my mother too!

     It would be tempting to call my mother’s emphatic statement of frugality a non sequitur, but that would not be strictly true.  Mushrooms have value, they are not distributed free in the shops, but the value saved by spurning them as an unnecessary expense is, shall we say, marginal: it is the old (dated) joke about slimming where some trivial nutritional denial on the part of the slimmer is likened to emptying the ashtrays on a 747.

     I have been trying to think of the literary technical term to describe the phrase my mum used: understatement doesn’t really cover it; litotes or melosis?  Well, my mum was being sincere, not using deliberate understatement to emphasise.  Perhaps the term I’m looking for is “woefully inadequate”!

     However you describe the phrase, at least for my mum, it gave a concrete ‘solution’ to a practical problem: too much expense: cut mushrooms.  Job done.

     We all do it, a sort of variation of the ‘thumb in the dyke’ technique where something seemingly trivial, has an out-of-proportion final effect.  We hope.  And this approach is probably more apparent during times of enforced introspection, especially when they are seasoned with personal peril! 

     We want a simple solution something that is easily graspable, something comforting and achievable.  Alas!  If only solutions to our present crisis were as simple as shunning fungi!

My pool circuits today were accompanied by the World Service of the BBC, as my preference over Woman’s Hour.  Don’t get me wrong, I listen to Woman’s Hour with the best of men, but today the lure, nay the addiction of World News from the BBC was the greater pull.  So, I was able to trudge my walking-sticked way round the water, listening with ever-growing pleasurable panic to the news.

     In one of the gardens that I pass on my peregrinations, a father and young son were running from the front garden to the gate in the back garden as part of their exercise regime (this is directly possible because our houses are hollowed out at ground floor level and rooms start on the first floor) with a sort of determined seriousness.

     On the opposite side of the pool and next to the tennis court of the flats on our left, two small boys were playing a form of tennis.  Considering the racket for one of them was about two thirds of his total height, he wielded the racket with considerable skill, if not always accuracy.   

     With earplugs firmly in place one is ‘allowed’ to ignore other human life forms with impunity: which I did.

     I continued my slow paced walk until I began to feel a little weary and, just as I had decided to call it a day, the smallest of the boys lofted the ball into our pool area.  In fact, into the pool.  As I had passed him on my circuit I could only gauge the trajectory of the ball by vague World Service blanketed mewls.  I had no wish to be mean, but I had an equal determination not to touch anything that the kids had touched and so I (seemingly oblivious to all) walked out of the pool area and into my back garden.

     I rationalised my callousness by reasoning to myself that all the boys would have to do was go back to their parents and get another ball.   

     And, anyway, I have spent my time characterising any person of a youthful disposition as a Plague Child, and it would appear that my designation is now born out by reality with Covid-19, as kids can have the virus, not suffer the consequences, but effectively spread the infection. 

     Justification!