LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 66 – Wednesday, 20th May

On the Port Ginesta side of the Paseo I noticed a police car awkwardly stopped in the middle of the road.  As I approached I saw that the police were speaking to a grandfather who had his small Viral Assassin with him, clearly out of the allotted time slot for such things.  Unfortunately, I did not see any movement on the part of the police to leave their car and give a multa to the offending adult.  Still, it was encouraging to see that they were not letting flagrant ignoring of restrictions pass.

     In fact on my bike ride this morning I saw more police cars than usual.  There were four or five on the Marine road, but none at the Gavà part of my ride, so I took advantage of the absence and added the Gavà loop to my cycle.  I felt very virtuous at the end of my ride, which is more than I can say for my bum.  I have not idea how the more dedicated cycle riders manage 50k or more.  They must either have buttocks like hardened steel or they are dyed in the wool masochists.

On a rather more elevated note, the Lyric Hammersmith is going to screen a version of A Doll’s House by Ibsen for today only.

     I was tricked into first reading Ibsen by the enticing title of his play Ghosts that I rather expected to live up to its Gothic promise.  I enjoyed reading the play, in spite of their being no ghosts of a variety that I could shiver to and I also entirely failed to pick up on the unstated, but essential component of the narrative of the play, syphilis.  Given the fact that the main plot of the play passed me by, I now wonder what it was that kept my interest!

     Ghosts is one of those plays that I have seen where different productions have given me entirely different views.  The first live production of Ghosts that I saw was played as a serious tragedy, while another that I went to see with my mother in the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, was played as a comedy.  And both worked.

   The same thing happened with two productions of Death of a Salesman that I saw in relatively quick succession.  The first, again in The Sherman, left me feeling depressed and border suicidal, while the second in the West End left me with a happy smile on my face.  All four of the productions I should add were well produced and exceptionally well acted and I knew both plays well through academic study.

     The Lyric’s production of A Doll’s House is set in late C19th Calcutta (is it still ok to write the city like that?) and is listed as an adaptation of the text so it will be interesting to see how far the writer and director depart from the original.  But it got good reviews and this is an opportunity not to be missed.  It is only available from 2.30pm to midnight.

     I don’t know if this is true, but I was told that all West End productions lodge a ‘reference’ video of their productions with the National Theatre Museum and the videos or films are available for academic study.  Given that copies of play no longer have to be registered by law with the Lord Chamberlain’s office so that the Recorder of Plays can authorize them for public showings, it would be a criminal lack of intelligence to let the unparalleled collection of plays in Britain be wasted by not continuing some sort of archive.

     Perhaps in the future, theatres will make a video of their productions to augment their takings from on-line views.  Some Opera Houses and theatres have productions live streamed to cinemas around the world, but on-line could be (perhaps given the virus ‘must be’) one of the financial ways forward to keep, oddly, live theatre alive!

     I know that plays do not translate directly to film and a play in a theatre is altogether different from a film but, as my father was fond of saying, “anything is better than nothing” and a theatre audience, even given a long run, is in total tiny compared with a single showing on line.  Perhaps this virus will prompt a whole new generation of ‘theatre goers’ who take their pleasure on line!

The confusion, disinformation, misdirection and outright lying continue to confuse the ‘back to school’ impetus of governments in Spain and in the UK.  It does seem to me that without adequate testing and contact tracing there can be no safe way of returning to school.

     Blair did make the point that the children of the rich and privileged will have been ‘educated’ during the lockdown and the missed school for the underprivileged not only in terms of education but also in nutrition cannot and should not be ignored.  However, the solution to the problem of inequality is not to put teachers in the firing line and allow them to die.  I do realize that the ancestors of the public school boys who run the country probably had no qualms as they drew up their plans for the battles of The First World War, but one rather hoped that we had progressed somewhat during the last century!

     I do not trust the government in England to have due care and attention when it comes to restarting schools.  The politicians who run the government are in place because they subscribed to the self-harm of Brexit in spite of the overwhelming evidence that such an action would be disastrous.  We should always remember Cummings “Let them die!” as the modus operandi of the Conservatives.  “Money above lives” always has, and always will be their mantra.

     I am sure that there are ways in which schools can be opened with a liberal application of the fruits of the money tree that the Conservatives found to combat the virus – vegetation that was signally absent during the years of austerity and which made the present situation so much worse than it needed to be.  Smaller classes; more teachers; more school building; better facilities – all the things that teacher unions have been asking for, pleading for, for years!

     Let us never forget that this government has deaths on its ‘conscience’ and they must be held accountable.  I do not want to see the mortality total swollen with avoidable deaths of colleagues.

More and more people seem to be taking advantage of exercise time, especially more and more cyclists, but you get the sense that the people who are out are getting progressively freer in the way that they are treating the virus.  On the beach the construction of various kiosks has begun, though I think these are for the renting of sunbeds rather than the beach cafes that we have each summer – but they are a sign that Castelldefels is gearing up for the influx of visitors on which the town depends.

      I do not think that there is convincing evidence that the warmer weather will kill off the virus, so I really fear about what is going to happen in the future and the way that things are going and the general attitude of people a second spike in numbers of people infected buy the virus is almost unavoidable.

The free performance of A Doll’s House in the Lyric Hammersmith was very much an archive performance and lacked the polish of the NT Thursday performances, but the artistic director made the type of filmed performance clear in her introduction.  It is still very much worth watching and, at the time of writing, you have three and a half hours left to watch it for free.  You should!

     Tomorrow A Streetcar Named Desire.

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 55 – Saturday, 9th May

In one of those convoluted areas of jurisdiction that are more usual in Republican Party gerrymandering, part of Sitges curves over the hills outside the tunnels and engulfs the end of Castelldefels in the Port Ginesta area.  As this is a continuous part of Castelldefels most people actually forget that it is not part of our town.  The police, however, do know.  And this morning they were on the Paseo looking pained as all we people from Castelldefels were walking (or cycling) along the road.  Toni told me later (as he had gone for a walk in the opposite direction) that Gavá was also similarly policed and ‘isolated’.

     This is not something that happens on a regular daily basis and I think that it is confined to weekends when the ‘danger’ of outsiders infringing local boundaries is at its highest.  To be fair; it’s a fair cop.  We are, after all, supposed to be confined to our localities – however artificial they actually are.

     The news from the UK is not good in this area where six weeks of lockdown are facing what could be a sunny Bank Holiday weekend with police in London saying that they are losing the battle of the parks with people flocking to them to sunbathe and drink, and gather in groups not segregated by physical distancing.  As the weather here is not particularly sunny it will be interesting to see how many people are out and about this evening at 8pm when my age group is allowed to exercise.

On a more festive note, today is Toni’s birthday and I filmed him opening his presents (at a few minutes past midnight last night!) and put it online in the Family site so they could see the presents that they had only seen in photographs in Amazon!  It is a strange time with customs adapting to new circumstances.

     I hope that the chocolate cream birthday cake that I hid in the fridge has not yet been discovered so that it can make a suitable impression when it makes its flaming way into the living room!

     And it was delicious!

My evening bike ride was taken a little later than usual, in the dark rather than the twilight and it was, ironically, revealing.  Setting aside for a moment, my pet peeve of cyclists without lights, the most glaring element I observed was the grouping of teenagers in ‘bike gangs’.  Obviously they have their mobile phones to arrange the coordination of their exercise times and that gives them the opportunity to meet up.  As many of them use their bikes as seats there is a sort of built-in physical distancing, but they are more gang than individuals and there is little sense of viral threat.  Perhaps it is futile to expect teenagers to be constantly on their guard against a virus that they think will not single them out, but they must be made aware that they could easily be asymptomatic and therefore they could be a real threat to their parents and especially their grandparents.

     Perhaps I was looking for evidence of shirking the rules and therefore found it, but I do sense a feeling of relaxation that I think will be even stronger on Monday after a weekend of seeing television pictures of people exercising their ‘freedoms’.  It is something that concerns me.

     As it should!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 53 – Thursday, 7th May

My bike ride today was truncated by the police.  Not violently, you understand, but rather by an obstinately parked police car and a flick of a police finger.  The way to Port Ginesta at the far end of Castelldefels was blocked off and I had to return the way that I had come.  To compensate for the distance lost, I decided to add the ‘evening cycle’ of going to Gavá before I came home, but that too was blocked off.  Those in Castelldefels had to stay in Castelldefels.  The Port Ginesta end of Castelldefels is technically in Sitges and Gavá isn’t Castelldefels, in spite of the fact that both places flow naturally into the city.

     In the evening, both places appeared to be open again, so the blocking off in the morning was difficult to understand.  But that goes for so much of the civic life of this place!

     I must admit that the inability to go to either Port Ginesta or Gavá did actually make me feel a little trapped.  The feeling was more mental than practical as the freedom of the Paseo is more than enough for reasonable exercise, yet the simple prohibition made the reasonable feel a little cramped.

As Toni was going for a walk in the evening I ‘joined’ him after the eight o’clock clap, even though he was walking and I was on my bike.  I therefore postponed my watching of the NT Live production of Antony and Cleopatra, but I look forward to seeing that tomorrow evening, when I will need something to recover from our on-line Catalan lesson.

     The practical problems related to this class are legion.  There is the wonkiness of the system that we are using to create the class in the first place, which is added to the stubborn resistance of my computer to let me use the microphone, which, for a language lesson is a bit of a bummer.  Then there is the work that we are supposed to be doing.  The tasks are supposed to be on line and when completed on line they will be marked on line.  That isn’t working.  The one task that I found and did do I had to do off line because the document that I was supposed to use to write out my responses would not allow me to edit it.  I wrote out my work and emailed it to the teacher – and that is the last that I have heard of it!

     I am sure that these are all teething problems, but given the immanence of the end of term, we are not going to have many more attempts at getting it right.  My offering is to change the computer and the network to try and get a more practical link in the on line lesson.  I live, as ever, in hope.

Today has been one of those inexplicably tiring days.  Although my bike ride has a respectable distance to it, the bike is electric and I do welcome some level of assistance when I am peddling.  It is still exercise, but I realize just how much ‘assistance’ I am getting when, from time to time, I set the level to zero and therefore use the bike as an ordinary form of un-augmented transport: not a pleasant experience, and one that would not get me out of bed before eight in the morning if that was the norm!

     So, I cannot really blame my bike for my tiredness, nor my shortish walk around the pool – so I will blame the weight of worry about the way that life is being organized at the moment for taking away my natural vitality.

   The latest ‘worry’ is that the Spanish government has decided that the present hours that the Plague Kids are allowed to mix with human beings is inappropriate as the little virus ridden carriers are out in the midday sun and it is obviously far too hot for the little dears.  I would have thought that the heat would at least limit their viral load, but no, the hours will be readjusted and we will have to concede time to them.

     As I now regard every child below the age of 25 (sic) as a potential personal death threat, my suggestion is that we find some island somewhere and put them all on that until the crisis is over but, as usual, such reasoned ways forward are rejected by people who never see the wider picture.

     And talking of the crisis being over, there is a disturbing number of people whose public behaviour seems to indicate that as far as they are concerned, the crisis is a thing of the past.  True, there are people who ostentatiously keep the requisite distance apart, but they are in the minority in my observation, and the young cling to their immortality without responsibility and have rejected all PPE and physical distancing suggestions and are embracing the approaching summer with all the ebullience of the old normality.

     Hey ho!  So it goes!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 49 – Sunday, 3rd May

 

The enthusiasm for the outdoors early in the morning! 

     Well, the general enthusiasm had markedly diminished by the time I got onto the Paseo at just after 7 am!  The First Day zest had cooled as I rode down a sparsely populated sea front.  Don’t get me wrong, there were more people there than usual (I mean the usual of more than six weeks ago) but given the masses who were relishing their new found freedom yesterday, their staying power was something of a squib!

     I did my stint from the house to Port Ginesta beach that is at the far end of the gentle arc of the bay that ends with the train tunnels that eventually lead to Sitges.  This journey I saw nobody whom I knew and my trip was personally uneventful.

     What was interesting was the positioning of the police at the roundabout at the end of the Marina, guarding the road that leads into the beach part of Castelldefels.  This was obviously there as a deterrent to any ‘visitors’ to the beach, as we all should be exercising near or rather ‘near’ our homes.  The positioning of the police links up with what Toni told me yesterday when he noticed the police stationed on the part of the beach road that links Castelldefels with Gavà.  Toni also mentioned that the end of his walk was getting closer to the cut off time for our age group of 10 am, and the police are not hesitant in dishing out fines to those who break the regulations.

     I am just over five months away from being cast into another age group when my times for exercise will differ from those of Toni – but who really has the slightest inkling of what will really happen in those countries which have suffered (and go on suffering) the most from the virus in five long months.  Given the speed of the news cycle nowadays we may not be able to recognize the world as we knew it as having any real relationship with the way that we will be living then!

     The incubation period for the virus is two weeks or thereabouts, so we should be checking the infection statistics on May 16^th to see if the relaxation has had any numerical results.  I hope to god not, but given the way that people are responding to the fine weather and the new freedom, I fear the worst.

At the moment Toni’s family is having a joint ‘meal’ via the Internet to celebrate Mother’s Day.  Unfortunately Toni’s mum does not know how to join the videoconference and so she is present in thought only!  Though now she is being contacted by phone in the hope that it can be converted into some sort of joint effort.  I do not hold out any lively hopes.

     I suppose that what we are stuttering out way through at the moment could become the fabulous New Normal that everyone is talking about and no one knows how to make real practical sense of it.  If physical distancing continues for the foreseeable future and travel between towns is banned, then the videoconference is the only way of giving a form of immediacy with sound and vision.  Like so much else, what is now new and unusual will become the everyday.  Mobile phones and smart phones are a case in point, who now does not own one and, more importantly, know how to operate it at a level of sophistication that would shock the selves of just five years ago!

     If this does become more usual then I am sure that there will be something like a curated service that will guarantee HD quality sound and picture and give a firm electronic link – and there will be plenty of people who would be prepared to pay for something a few shades of sharpness better than that you get for grainy nothing!

After the 8pm clap for health workers I made my second bike ride of the day along the beach path to Gavà, and it was fairly full.  I only saw two illegal kids who should have been indoors at the time that I was there, but it was the other people who made me wonder about how this is going to turn out.  There was little evidence of physical distancing and, when I returned I went in the opposite direction on the Paseo towards Port Ginesta, there was even less.  As far as I could see, the people on the Paseo looked and behaved as if it was a normal Sunday evening.  And that is worrying!

My collection of poetry, Coasts of Memory, continues to frustrate.  I am satisfied with the general editing; it is more the practical production of a printed version that is causing me heartache!  The Brother printer that I have was bought specifically for its ability to print booklets.  I make problems for myself by adding colour photographs to the mix that have vast implications for the memory.  Even with cutting the size of the file it is too unwieldy to sent via email.  I therefore took the decision to reformat the colour photographs and ‘transform’ them into artistic black and white productions. 

     There were yet more printing difficulties and the photos had to be redone.  Again.  But, at last, I managed to get something printed with which I am almost satisfied.  I think that I will have to see if I can get a professional to give me a quotation for the printing of the chapbook in colour.  Otherwise, the black and white will have to do!  And I have to admit that the final product does look quite elegant.

     Now, on with my plan to distribute it via email and ask for a donation to the NHS charity of a country of choice!  Onward and upward!