Heat and Hatred

 

 

 

It actually had the temerity to rain a few drops when I was in the swimming pool, though the weather now is not marked different from the last few days when it has been hot in a way that is not usual for this time of year.  August is traditionally a time of vague disappointment, when the weather is more variable than one remembers from previous years, ironically, even though one expects to be dissatisfied: Schrodinger’s expectations!

     At the moment we only have two fans working in the living room (out of a possible three) as a desperate attempt to mitigate the heat and since we don’t have air conditioning there is little else that we can do to make the living temperature well, liveable.

     There is something about the quality of heat this year that hasn’t been present in past years and if this is a harbinger of what we can expect as the norm for the summer in future years then we are going to have to do something different to cope with the temperatures.

     In a country that has hot and very hot summers and generally mildish winters, there is no talk of hosepipe bans and, in spite of the hot weather continuing for months, there is not talk of proclaiming a drought.  Whereas in the UK, the situation seems to have reached a crisis point.  Again.

     Trump sneered that the FBI raid on his Floridian swamp was turning the USA in to one of the “shitehole” “third world countries” that he has so often dismissed with contempt in the past as a condescending image to cover his own criminality and the eventual, glacial, movement of the institutions of justice finally catching up with him.  His images, as always, are absurd and insulting, but when I look at the situation of the UK then there appears to be an element of truth in the first world status slowly ebbing away.

     With twelve years of Tory misrule and the callous cutting of health, welfare, education and everything else the grasping Conservatives can get their dirty mitts on, the stories that one hears are more suited to a developing country than one of the richest in the world.

     The position of health services in the USA has always been something that has been beyond the comprehension of Western European nations, who generally do not regard providing health care for their citizens as being akin to rabid Communism.  Many Americans are frightened of ill health because of the financial penalties that treatment will entail.  The concept of healthcare free at the point of need is something far beyond the imagination of many American voters who see such a process as rampant Socialism and a denial of the American Way.

     In the UK, the NHS is something in which we can take a justified pride, but a Health Service that has been hollowed out by 12 years of cuts and austerity and one that has been put under almost intolerable strain by dealing with Covid is struggling to cope and, after the last 12 years of Tory Misrule who could possibly believe that the “NHS is safe in our (Tory) hands”?  Such a quotation from a past (and well hated Tory premier) seems like a sick joke.  Private healthcare is rejoicing in the boost that 12 years of Tory Misrule have given them – as well, of course as the illegal boost to their funds by the corruption of the crooked Tory crony profiteers who milked us in the procurement process geared towards Conservative chums.

     The provision of NHS dental care is a disgrace with whole swathes of the country described as “dental deserts” where 80% of dentists are no longer taking any new patients.  The stories of people travelling for hours to get to any NHS provider, is one of shame.

     Someone once told me that the worth of a country is found in the way that it treats the disadvantaged, the criminal and the sick.  If we use those criteria to judge the present state of Britain then perhaps we are nearer to a third world (in itself that is a condescending term) country than one that uses its wealthy status to ensure that there is provision for all.

     Inequality is rampant in Britain, crystalized by the grotesquery of a chancer like Johnson being (still) Prime Minister, and is unlikely to be mitigated by the lying equivocator lined up to take over, the woman who John Crace in the Guardian characterised as having grown up in “grinding middle class poverty” with her professor father and her sinkhole school only just managing to squeek her into Oxford.

     Nothing that either of the “candidates” have said to the Neanderthals that are going to elect one or other of them, show a concern for the realities of the situation that the majority of the country is experiencing and is indeed dreading in the near wintery future.  They are mired in the reality that allows such creatures as Rees-Mogg to be in government.  They, like the Republican Party in the USA are now far to the right of the general electorate, but Conservative parties are adroit in the manipulation of the processes of power, in pushing institutions to their will, of gerrymandering and obfuscating in plain sight, while their tools in the right wing press present a twisted version of reality to maintain power and wealth in the hands of the very, very, few.

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 28 – Easter Sunday in Holy Week, 12th APRIL

1.              I am glad that the Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of Intensive Care and is recuperating.

2.              The Prime Minister Boris Johnson should resign immediately for his dereliction of duty in wilfully ignoring his own government’s restrictions for social distancing and becoming infected.

Glad that I have got that out of my system.  Again.  I am still recovering from a few hagiographical pieces that described Johnson’s visit to hospital in existentially catastrophic terms, right down to the “indrawn gasp of horror” at the news.  Get real!  It tells you something about my low expectations from the bunch of deadbeats with which Johnson has stuffed the cabinet that I was actually relieved that the trashy Brexit fanatic Raab turned out to be the deputy for the incapacitated Johnson rather than somebody (sic) of the dubious quality of the Goblin Gove, the pernicious Patel or the unspeakable Rees-Mogg.  Just the bunch you need at a time of crisis!

Talking of worthless political chancers brings us to the situation here in Spain.  Our Prime Minister/President has sent mixed messages to the population that the lockdown should be extended to the 26^th of this month, but that non-essential workers should return to work on Tuesday!  Masks will be provided for those using public transport.  Apparently.

     The figures for deaths and infections are still horrifically high and the President thinks that it will be safe – not, that can’t be true.  He thinks that it will be economically beneficial to open up the economy again.  As usual, the poor bloody infantry of the ordinary citizens can be seen as collateral damage.

     OAPs have been told that they, nay, we will have to isolate ourselves for an unspecified number of months to be safe. 

     This cannot be the way to go.  Where is the testing that we have been told about?  Our ‘free’ facemasks are allegedly available from Tuesday.  If nothing is done, then Tuesday is going to be chaos with people doing whatever they feel like.  Any gains that the past period of lockdown have given us are likely to be swept away by a surge in fatalities.  The logic of the position of our government is lost on me.

     And don’t get me started on the madness of Trump’s America where demagoguery is equated with scientific fact and logic.  We live in mad times with mad men dictating the interpretation of events!  Reality will eventually catch up – but what will be the eventual cost in terms of human lives before the lies are rejected?  If they ever are rejected.

What an Easter!  I can’t pretend that the ‘festival’ has ever been something that I have celebrated, apart from my earlier years of faith when I would go to church for communion.

     Here in Catalonia it is very easy to forget that this is a festival at all, let alone a Christian one.  Most of the people I know who might go to church, don’t.  If you see what I mean.  Catalonia is a Roman Catholic country, but the Catholics are generally of the non-church attending, anti-clerical sort that doesn’t go out of its way to show adherence to a particular theology.

     The only celebration was pounding music from neighbours on rooftops in a near street.  It was our version of the balcony concerts and musical episodes that other places had experienced.  It was not really convincing, but I found it quite uplifting it its way.

I think we are going to need many more uplifting moments in the coming weeks!

Goodbye to all that

 

Who would have thought that Prime Minister of the (presently) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland would turn out to be such a fire-brand radical.  Those of us who thought of her as merely the malicious bitch of the “zero tolerance” policy which continues to poison the workings of the Home Office, could not have imagined that her mindless destructiveness in support of the continuance of the hopelessly divided and self-regarding Conservative Party would espouse the most left-wing anti-imperialist views about the destruction of empire! 

But today, after her capitulation to fellow minority politician leader, Prime Minister Sanchez of Spain, she has signed away the concept of nationality as it relates to an overseas possession.  Gibraltar, whatever the mendacious May says about it, has now lost its British character as it becomes in future subject to a foreign country deciding aspects of its existence.

Let us not forget, too, the fact that Northern Ireland and Scotland also voted for Remain and the Brexit self-harm is making these countries’ futures inside the laughably “united” Kingdom more precarious.  Whatever happens now, the divisions inside the country are not lines of demarcation but gigantic fissures that no amount of mealy mouthed platitudes from a letter to the British people by a desperate and increasingly irrelevant “Prime” Minister of nowhere will be able to bridge.

It is supremely ironic that the party of Empire and National Unity, a party in whose title is the concept of conserving what is excellent in the past, has turned out to be the modern wreckers of the institutions that they formerly maintained they existed to serve.  They have placed party politics above national interest and, including the most fanatical of doctrinaire Brexiteers, they know and have admitted that the country is going to be worse off with Brexit, a price they say is worth paying for the freedom and liberty for our country to advance into the unicorn filled grassy uplands of future long-term prosperity. 

 

As someone rightly said, in the long-term we are all dead, and in the medium to short term most of us do not have the millions safely stashed away in European funds, like the ever-odious Rees-Mogg, to make the difficult times ahead just a little more manageable.

Realizing that Brexit is a disaster is not rocket science and there are politicians on all sides who know this.  I do not paint the whole of the Conservative Party in one colour, there are people in the party who must be desperately worried that their party is going to be accused of national destruction in the future, and they know that the present policy is not one that will benefit the people of Great Britain – to say nothing of Northern Ireland.  I also know that there are Brexiteers in the Labour party, some, like fox-hunting Kate Hoey (who to me seems to have no place in the party) and others who, with some justification, are deeply suspicious about the workings of the EU.  But, as with democracy (a questionable quality in many aspects of EU governance) so with the EU, it is not ideal, but it is better than the alternatives. 

 

And remember, my father and grandfather fought in World Wars, both started in Europe, and I am of the generation that has not had to suffer that obscenity.  Unity in Europe has been tenuous enough and has not eliminated wars on the continent, but the situation is not going to be made better by a major country in Europe withdrawing to its insular boarders.

Today the minsters of the EU will sign the “agreement” and then May will have to go, metaphorical begging bowl in hand, to try and get support for a document that does not seem to settle any of the major questions that make leaving the EU so problematical.  It has been suggested that May has already been stooping to dangling knighthoods in front of those MPs who might be tempted to change sides and support this insupportable agreement.  The next few weeks are going to be catastrophically unedifying - and those are two words that I have never had occasion to put together before.

I am fed up with being a citizen of a country that is now regarded with bemused contempt by those who have bothered to look at our mare’s nest of a national situation.  I am fed up with having to try and explain why my country is doing things that are absurdly out of kilter with rational thought.  And I am fed up with my situation as a British Citizen living in an EU country being used by MY government as a negotiating chip in a no-win game at MY expense.

It is at times like these that I wish I could use the “Delete all and insert” approach of General Body meetings in my University, where one motion could be amended to its opposite by the “Delete all and insert” gambit.  The trouble is for that to work today for the absurdity of Brexit, there would need to be an addition to those four words – the word “forget” between “all” and “and”, so that the revised amendment would be “Delete all, forget, and insert”.

In real life, unfortunately, amendments like that don’t work.  However absurd and dangerous Brexit actually is, we seem to be stumbling, blindly towards our doom.  And even if, by some miracle, we were able to reverse the absurdity, there would still be the corrosive memory of what has been said and done during these two years of governmental paralysis.

Whatever happens, Britain has changed and there is no going back.  My only hope in the chaos that I foresee in the near future, is that something positive will be salvaged by politicians who finally realize that their responsibility is to the country and not to their parties.  Hoping for politicians to “do the right thing” is, clearly, desperation! 

 

But, I am an eternal, if cynical, optimist and the historical precedent of the Conservative Party of Peel and the Repeal of the Corn Laws shows the way!

Do your duty!

Now you listen here!

Unsettling violence and raw sexuality mark Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”, it certainly resonated with the contemporary audience, as it was a popular and critical success.  After two years and hundreds of performances the fame of the piece reached the attention of the most powerful man in the country and he decided to go to a performance.  He was appalled by what he saw and heard and left before the end of the piece.  The next day, what had been an overwhelming success was denounced in the newspaper, and the authorities began monitoring Shostakovich’s activities.

The man who had come to see the opera was Josef Stalin, and his dislikes had a way of being fatal.  Shostakovich had to do something, so he started writing his 5^th Symphony and when it was completed he subtitled it, “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Justified Criticism.”

Whatever the moral and artistic justifications for the subtitling, you have to admit that the 5^th is a fantastic piece of music.  What was it?  Cowardice?  Self-preservation?  Subtle defiance?  Capitulation?  Irony?  Who knows – but it kept Shostakovich alive and he continued writing.  He was, after all, dealing with one of the greatest mass murderers in the sad history of mankind’s inhumanity.

I thought of this piece of history from the 1930s when I was watching the television news and they played a part of Felipe VI of Spain’s speech at Davos, that comfortable gathering of the rich and privileged in a little Swiss ski resort.

The part of the king’s speech that grabbed me was:

“With all this in mind, I don’t wish to conclude this part of my speech without addressing the recent crisis in a truly fundamental part of Spain’s soul and diverse identity: Catalonia; where we have seen an attempt to undermine the basic rules of our democratic system.” [My emphasis]

Let us forget about the location of this speech for a moment, though the people there certainly forget about democracy on a regular basis, but concentrate firstly on the person speaking.

Filipe VI is the son of Juan Carlos I, the man personally selected and groomed for kingship by the Spanish Dictator Franco.  Juan Carlos eventually abdicated after a number of scandals including going on an all expenses paid hunting trip after a television performance where he sympathized with the economic lot of the struggling mass of the population; his various paternity cases; Royal spending and the usual corruption of the very rich.  His abdication to become “King Emeritus” and the coronation of his son Filipe was a political solution via a stitched-together deal between PP and PSOE.

So this hereditary monarch, Bourbon de Bourbon, whose house was reinstated by a Fascist dictator, has the temerity to talk about democracy!  There was a referendum in Catalonia about Independence; there was an election in Catalonia to form a new Parliament – I can’t remember any referendum or election regarding the slipping on an eldest son onto the throne of Spain!

Bourbon de Bourbon talking about Democracy is like Rees-Mogg campaigning for a statue of Marie Stopes to be erected in Parliament Square.

After what Bourbon de Bourbon’s family has taken from and done to Spain over the years, it is difficult to take his mouthing of platitudes as anything more than calculated insult.

Meanwhile the “undermining of the rules of our basic democratic system” continues apace with the farcical scattering of the police around any entry point, though not all, to Spain just in case the dangerously elected politician, and our President, Puigdemont might make it to Parliament where he is the only candidate slated for the investiture of the office.  The ever-absurd Zoido (sic.) the burly cartoon character who has been inflated to be Minister of the Interior bustles about the place trying (and signally failing) to look ministerial, or at least competent, or even credible. 

We have had television pictures at the border crossings with France where the police are searching cars for our exiled President and also searching handbags!  I don’t know whether these boys in blue (or whatever) think that canny Catalan scientists have mastered the techniques shown in The Incredible Shrinking Man and that Puigdemont is truly being smuggled in via a pencil case so that he can be dramatically returned to full size inside the Parliament.  Or perhaps they are just stupid.  To be fair, I think it is more reasonable to suppose that, given a stupid job they are trying to make it appear at least halfway sensible, by searching properly.  Making the best of futility!

Meanwhile my enforced exile inside my house continues.  I am counting the days to when I might actually be allowed to take a short walk!

This morning I actually managed to re-arrange the flowers that I have been given.  Toni brought them to my chair and I snipped and pruned and arranged.  This is something that I have always enjoyed doing.  Flowers add life to a room and well arranged blooms become more than their individual plants.  I cannot pretend that I have my mother’s skill, but I try my best and I am constantly amazed by just how much pleasure flowers can give – especially if you are spending hour after hour in the same chair!

I have also received a get-well card that also has flowers on it with the stamens touched with gold!  It all works for me!

Toni is cleaning the kitchen.  Although a comparison with the Augean Stables would be unfair (though Toni reports far too many surfaces are too sticky for comfort!) in terms of sheer clutter rather than filth it is an accurate image.  

We suffer from the Impenetrable Cupboard Syndrome, where a wall of kitchen thingerie meets the baffled gaze when a door is opened.  We know that somewhere there lurk Useful Things, but to find them everything has to be taken out and then put back again.  When that is the modus operandi it is amazing how much and how often one can ‘make do’ with what one can see.

For example, I know that I possess a melon baller, as who doesn’t?  I have used it, and I know that it works.  It does make a fairly mundane fruit look interesting, but how far is one prepared to exert oneself in the effort of looking?  I think there is a time limit of a couple of minutes and a quick glance in The Drawer Where Things Are – you know, that drawer that contains things that you could not work out where else to put: The Drawer of Last Resort.

What truly frightens me is that Toni is now making executive decisions based on the fact that I am supposed to sit down quietly and rest.  And I am resting in the living room and not the kitchen – where I can hear things being moved around and placed, who knows where, maybe even in the bin!  And breathe, and relax!

This is now Day 6 (by my reckoning) and I have to get to Day 14 before I can do anything as exciting as, for example, going for a walk.  On Day 32 I might be able to go for a short, slow swim.  Something to work towards.

Meanwhile, there is editing, writing and reading.  And I enjoy all three.

To work!