LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 101 . Wednesday 24th June

I continue to be frustrated by the Catalan approach to time.

     I have given up trying to work out exactly the logic behind the opening and closing of shops and the continuation of some restaurants in staying open in spite of their cavalier attitude towards economics is mystifying to say the least, but I did think that I had the opening times of my swimming pool securely in my mind.

     Obviously during the more severe stages of the lockdown the pool was not open, and in the transition period from when it was open to the relative freedom of Phase Whatever The Hell We Are In Now there was a certain ad hoc nature of the time when we were let in for our regulated swims.  But the time did settle down to 8 am – the time, in the Old Days BC (before Covid) for the weekend opening times, the normal weekday opening time being 7 am.

     When we reached the present phase the opening time reverted to 7 pm, the showers were available for use and things appeared to be shaping up to be an acceptable New Normal.  Until San Juan.  As a recognized festival, this meant that opening time would be later, delayed until the weekend opening i.e. 8 am.

     Today, therefore, I had the luxury of a lie-in, or at least I would have if my built-in clock had not demanded that I wake up at my accustomed time, and I organized myself by setting off the robots to do the cleaning, making my cup of tea and doing a few of the clues in the Guardian Quick Crossword.  I made good time on my bike and I was at the gate to the pool by just before 8 am.  Unlike everyone else.  I was alone.

    OK, I thought, I will give them a few minutes to open up on the hour by going off on a little bike ride, making sure this time that I remembered to tell my watch that I was doing part of my exercise.  Too often I set off without pressing the right buttons to inform my watch to check my progress.  A little jaunt down the road and back again.  And nobody.

     I therefore made the executive decision that the time-honoured time for festive opening had somehow been delayed by an hour and so I would do my post swim bike ride, pre.  Which I did and made good time to get back to the pool just before 9 am.

     And there was nobody there.

     But at least this time, the gate was open and there were a couple of people sitting around the outside tables of the café.  But there were no people in reception and the café was closed.

     Eventually the shutters of the café opened, and Mario emerged to inform us that the opening time was 10 am for the pool.

     As I had my phone and my notebook (and asked Mario to bring me a cup of tea) a wait of an hour was as nothing and I finished the crossword and wrote a number of pages of quotidian rubbish in my notebook.

     My swim over, I had a second cup of tea and wrote further pages in my notebook and felt well satisfied and smug.  I declined to go on a further bike ride as the battery level on my bike had progressed to the single digit red number and I had no intention of being caught far from home with only pedal power to get me back!

It has been a beautiful day with only the screaming children lessening its beauty.  I truly think that kids have become even more feral with their extended absence from the calming discipline of school to contain their vocal exuberance.  If it were possible for kids to converse in anything less than a scream and shout I think I could become inured to their existence, but as it is, their obstreperous assertion of simply being makes them something Not Wanted on the Voyage of Life.  I’m afraid.

Our communal pool has become its usual magnet for those freeloaders who are not actually people who live in the houses for whom the pool is intended.  Just as the swallows come back to Britain in the summer, so various foreign fixtures take up their positions around the pool.  Shameless!

Tomorrow Toni returns, and I wait to see if he has been able to find any mature Cheddar.  He might have forgotten that he mentioned that he might look out for some, but I most certainly have not!

There are still a few laggard explosions, but as a slept through the ‘Main Battle’ last night, a few bangs are not going to keep me awake.  So to speak.

A pair of rather fearsome black reusable masks have arrived that I ordered via the Internet oodles of time ago.  They are not entirely comfortable to wear, but they do look the business and they have a satisfying seriousness to them.  They look the sort of thing to wear during shopping jaunts.

     The everyday masks are those that are shoved into pockets, and brought out and used because they are obligatory in Reception and the Café.  I am not sure what power they still retain as they have been overused, but I maintain the force of the family wisdom of, “Anything is better than Nothing.” And so they act as a barrier, no matter how flimsy.

     Mask wearing is the only visible element in most people’s approach to the virus.  Yes, we do obey (usually) the strips placed on the floor and there is some attempt at physical distancing with people that you do not know, but the fear of the virus is very much “over there” where “there” is very definitely not anywhere near our here.

     The virus news form around the world is uniformly depressing and there are spikes of infection in all countries.  I agree with Faucci (?) who said we should not look for second spikes of infection because we are still very much in the grip of the first spike.  I also agree with the director of the WHO who said that we are not safe until everyone is safe – and that means that we should all be very worried because there are too many leaders who are acting from economic and political standpoints and not human health standpoints.

I have written to my MP in Britain and urged him to consider aiding a movement to get Johnson and his cabinet charged with Corporate Manslaughter.

     I watched part of PMQs and was, yet again, ashamed by the way that Johnson failed to answer questions and became agitated when his failings were highlighted.  If he had a shred of common decency and humility and admitted the disastrous failures that his government has clearly owned, then I think he would have a certain amount of sympathy from the British people, and they would encourage the government to look at what has gone wrong and prepare for the worst in a more professional way than they have so far.  The government’s concern should be the welfare of the people and not how they look.  Each failure to acknowledge mistakes leads to further deaths.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 100 – Tuesday 23rd June

Perhaps it’s fitting that the 100^th day of Lockdown is on the eve of one of the more anarchic festivals in the Catalan calendar - San Juan.

     I have put down the blinds in the living room to limit the sonic bombardment that will continue spasmodically for hours and hours and hours.

     I decided not to do a tour on my bike this evening I am going to try and emulate the sleep that I had last night that my watch informed me was better than 99% of users!  I don’t remember it being that profound, but perhaps that is the point!

     I do realise that I should have had a glass of Cava and a piece of coca (the bready hot cross bun like cake) to be traditional for San Juan, but I celebrated with yogurt ice cream!  It is also at times like this that I think about my last drink of Cava, or indeed of any alcohol if it comes to that.  It has now stretched into years.  I can’t say that I truly miss alcohol, though a nice glass of decent red wine with a meal is a nagging desire from time to time!  And I always used to like a glass, or even a bottle, of Cava.  Ah, times past!

     Today has been one of those pleasantly ‘nothing’ days where I did more recreational reading of a novel and The Guardian with a little sunbathing with of course my bike ride and swim.

     I also hoovered the stairs and I was horrified at the amount of dirt that the activity produced.  My little robots do the level surface cleaning, and I await with considerable impatience a commercially available robotic stair cleaner!

     Around me the rumbling of explosions is now almost continuous, but I sense that the campaign of noise is not as overwhelming as it has been in years past.  Perhaps it is yet another tradition that is having to cope with the limitations of the virus.

     Tomorrow is classified as a fiesta and so the swimming pool is open an hour later.  I can’t be bothered to change my alarm and so I will have the delight of waking up to go to sleep again – though the danger there is that you oversleep and you also lack the backstop of a later alarm.  I like living dangerously!

      I am now off to bed, no doubt my dreams using imagery from the First World War to work the whizz-bangs into a surrealistic narrative!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 99 – Monday 22nd June

Day 1 of the New Normal in the swimming pool.  We still have to book our time, but more people are allowed during the hour.  How this is going to work out I’m not sure as, today, there were few enough people for one-per-lane as previously.  The difference was that we were given a key for a locker (whereas previously we had to pack our clothes and take them with us to the pool side) which we had to disinfect before use and after we had dressed at the end of our swim.  The showers were open for use.  I assume that, for the foreseeable future, this will be the way that we swim nowadays, with the major difference being that we have to book times rather than simply turn up.

     The weather was good today and there were plenty of people on the beach, but it was noticeably quieter than over the weekend.

     We are building up to tomorrow evening, the eve of San Juan when there will be bangers, drinking and picnics.  At least that was the case in all previous years, it remains to be seen how the pandemic and physical distancing will change the experience of the fiesta.

     There have been a number of explosions during the past few days, with the kids next door seeming to take teatime around 5pm as an excuse to cavort around the streets setting off the sort of fireworks which are sure to get a chorus of dogs barking in distress.  They are completely unsupervised by adults and every bone in my fussy pedagogic body aches to do something and my channelling of Victor Meldrew also aches to shout something admonitory out of the window!

     Tomorrow evening I may well draw down the shutters and retreat to my armchair with a good book, or alternatively I might mosey down the maritime road to see what people are doing!

     San Juan is one of those festivals where slightly rowdy behaviour is encouraged and the throwing of the Catalan equivalent of penny bangers is almost mandatory.  Kids usually equip themselves with what look like the old fashioned Smiths Crisps twists of salt, but in this case they are of gunpowder and they make a most satisfying ‘bang!’ when thrown on the pavement.  There doesn’t seem to be an age limit for this form of anti-social behaviour and parent and grandparents look on approvingly as their kids waltz about in a mist of explosives!  Each to his own!

     Usually the explosions go on for most of the night, there doesn’t seem to be a cut-off at 10 pm – which is the usual time for the stopping of noise making.  This fiesta encourages that petty decency to be ignored and loud explosions go on until the small and sometimes the larger hours!  I wonder, though, if it will be the same this year?  All things are different.

On Wednesday most places will be closed as it is a national holiday, but I intend to go for a swim, perhaps go for an exploratory bike ride to see what the beaches are like after the festivities of the night before and keep myself very much to myself.  I stocked up on food and essentials before the weekend and I don’t need to go out for anything until the end of this week.  Television will have to be my eye on the world – that and Radio 4 and the World Service of the BBC of course.

The tasks that I set myself for the last few days have been completed or compromised with varying degrees of satisfaction.  I rely, yet again on the old family wisdom of “Anything is better than nothing!”

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 97 - Saturday 20th June

[This entry is out of sequence because of the vagaries of my ‘vintage’ laptop where the program froze and nothing worked.  After forcing a ‘quit’ the day afterwards, I discovered that most of the entry had been lost when I eventually started the program up again and tried to find the writing that I had done.

I am going to leave this as I found it, as an example of the tyranny of locking your writing to a machine!]

The day was punctured by explosions as we are reminded that we are working our way towards San Juan when the setting off of petados is encouraged, with kiosks springing up along the paseo selling explosives.  This day and the days around it are the equivalent of Guy Fawkes Day, though with more loud noises than flamboyant fiery inscriptions in the sky.  It is, of course, a nightmare for dogs, though I am (callously) open to the more spindly-legged rat dogs suffering terminal shock as one way of stopping their endlessly squeaky pseudo-barks.

     In previous years the most worrying aspect of the festivities are kids setting off penny-bangers, the sort of things that have long been banned in the UK, but here are probably regarded as a hallowed tradition that some right-wingers will probably urge should be regarded as part of the Patrimony of Humanity – the sort of designation that PP wants connected to bull fighting and other grotesque practices.

     It will be revealing to see just how many people turn up on the beach of Castelldefels as there is a tradition of staying up all night drinking around a camp fire that has been progressively modified over the past few years.  It is now illegal to light fires on the beach and public drinking is always frowned upon in this country.  During a pandemic what sort of physical distancing should be taking place.  What will the police be doing during the festival?  How desperate are people to get back to what they know and love?  It all waits to be seen.

The app for booking my swim seems to have gone a little haywire.  A previous booking for tomorrow has disappeared though the booking procedures for next week still seem to be in place, but with double or even more places available, but I was told that all restrictions had been removed.  This does not seem to be the case, but I am sure that things will be made a little plainer when I go to my swim in the morning.  Or not of course!

Today has not been as productive a day as yesterday and I even found myself dozing off after lunch!  But I have managed to get some of the more basic tasks done, even though the place is still looking a little dishevelled as I have not tidied up my tidying up, if you see what I mean.

I am re-reading some of Steven Saylor’s Mysteries of Ancient Rome on my Kindle and thoroughly enjoying them.