Oh god, not him!

 

 

 

There is surely nothing more engineered to foster confidence about the Brexit talks than to see the charlatan Gove (the love child of a defrocked pixie and a gobby goblin) skuttling his elven way to Brussels to – to do what exactly?  To add his five pennyworths of facile, slimy lies to the morass of doublespeak that is the British ‘position’ in what should be negotiations?   

     God help us all when that chubby cheeked cheat speaks for Britain!  Still, I suppose Gove can use his White Queen trick of believing five impossible things before breakfast to encourage his verbiage (conveniently forgetting his previous belief that Johnson was supremely unfit to become prime minister) and marching forward to defend the indefensible.

     I felt physically sick when, on the news this evening, I heard that the British Government had offered up as a bargaining chip to bring the discussion to a ‘satisfactory’ conclusion the offer not to behave illegally!  How jolly decent of them because, of course, an Englishman’s word is his bond, unless it isn’t.   

     How the EU side can stop themselves from treating the shambles of the British position with anything other than contempt, I really do not know.

    

Let’s face it, at this stage of the “Never ending, stor-ree!” (just thought that I would throw in a reference to the true earworm that music is) the only thing motivating the British side is not, emphatically not, Britain.  Our negotiators couldn’t give a toss for the country and the bulk of the people in it.  Fishermen, the population of Northern Ireland, businesses, imports and exports, areas of deprivation, they have all been thrown off the bus – you know the one that the liars’ liar Johnson paints for recreation – and the members of Johnson’s third or fourth rate cabinet merely look to their wealth as they crunch over the bones of the suckers who ever thought that they might be of concern to them.

     The Conservative Party, as we are regularly told, is one of the most successful political parties in the western world, and it has got its power and its longevity by a callous disregard for anything other than its own survival.  If they do good, like the 1944 Education Act, it is almost by mistake, and they certainly did not reward the architect of that act, RAB Butler with leadership of the party when the time came to choose.

     Johnson, the Man Who Would Be Prime Minister, does not have the intellectual or moral worth to be able to sustain the role.  He has got to where he is today by systematically lying and showing utter disregard to anyone and anything other than himself and his ambition.

     His empty rhetoric way wow blue rinsed ladies of various Conservative Associations, but it doesn’t work when practical things have to be decided on the basis of that rhetoric.  Johnson has no interest in the rules and regulations that govern institutions, he is, as virtually everyone has pointed out, not a details man.  Unfortunately (for us) he has become prime minister at a time when a details man is exactly what is needed.  Rhetoric kills – look at the number of Covid deaths in the UK.  Rhetoric destroys – look at industry still desperately asking the government for leadership and information about what is going to happen in a few weeks’ time.

     “Get Brexit Done!” – the perfect meaningless jingle for Johnson, allowing him to sound dynamic while the empty platitude played well with people who wanted simplicity in an almost terminally complex situation.

     Now we are in the final days when all the detail that Johnson hates so much is everything.  Rhetoric has to be written down in legalistic words where there is no wriggle room for gaudy metaphor and inept simile.

     Johnson’s shoddy, corrupt government now has come to the crux of negotiations.  Real things have to be decided and the only, the absolutely only (I know that is tautology, but I feel it fits here) thing that is motivating Johnson is what he can get away with.

     He will, as he always has done in the past, junk anything and anyone to get what he wants.  His situation is desperate: No Deal will be a financial disaster, and even his most stupefied followers will have to own and admit it eventually; a thin deal will please nobody as everyone will feel hard done by; a generous deal will be regarded by the Brexit fanatics as an act of treason.  There is nothing that Johnson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy everybody.  Perhaps there is nothing that Jonson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy anybody.  And he is going to have to own it.  And he will not be able to do that.

     I can imagine somebody doing the sums (Johnson is far too lazy to do them himself, and besides he doesn’t really know who is in his party anyway) and trying to work out which deal would be the less disastrous.  And the disaster will not be related to the people of Britain it will be directly linked to the fortunes of the Conservative Party.  Politics, not logic or faith or economics or fairness or justice, is going to determine what we get from the “oven ready” deal that has taken four long years to cook.

     And unless Johnson uses the “Long Covid Symptoms” to fabricate himself a get out of parliament card, then he is going to have to own the disaster of his making in years more of his narcissistic premiership, when we will continue to pay the price.

 

I put that bad feeling that you have just read down to the fact that I got to the swimming pool an hour early this morning.  Today was ¡Fiesta! and tomorrow will be an extra day of holiday so instead of opening at 7 am it will open at 8.  An extra hour in bed?  Not really, I am programmed to get up, or at least get ready to get up, at 6.15 am, and if I say in bed longer I feel that I am cheating and I do not get any real benefit.  It is easier to get up at the normal time and do neglected housework to make the time feel valuable, and to give myself a warm glow of self-satisfaction!

     But today I forgot about the holiday and so I had to come back home and do neglected housework etc etc and complete the Guardian Quick Crossword, rather than fill in a single clue and then leave it for later after the swim.

 

 [Yes, I know this image is not upright, but it's too late and I'm too tired to re-jig it]

My catalogue raisonné continues apace with items of little value, but some interest, filling the pages.  Compiling the catalogue is forcing me to look again at some things that I have ignored for years.  For example, I have decided to list a copy of The Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde.  This is a volume printed in 1912 with a soft brown suede cover stamped with an interesting Art Nouveau flower design and with the title stamped in gold.  It is not particularly valuable, but it was bought by my father to give to my aunt who in turn gave it to me a quarter of a century later after my father’s death. 

     The suede is rotting and has an unpleasant feel to it, the binding is unravelling, the pages yellowing – and yet, it is important to me.  There is always something about reading the actual pages that people important to you have read before you, whose hands have held the volume in the way that you are holding it.

     Yes, I realize that this is Romantic nonsense, but it doesn’t make the oddly satisfying feeling I have when I handle the book any less real to me.

     A worthy addition to the catalogue!  And it takes my mind off other things.

 

 

 

Bad start, got better

Extension of Restrictions, Day x++, Friday.

 

 

 

A catalogue of mishaps to start the day.

     Firstly, I forgot my mask and set off into the darkness, until the coldness across my lower face reminded me that something was missing.  Luckily I have masks secreted about my clothing and so was able to pull into the side of the road and garb myself up.

      There was a police check point set up just after the junction of the motorway exit and the road along the side of the Olympic Canal.  Luckily, as I was in the cycle lane I was not stopped and was able to get to the pool in good time.  To find that, as I started to change, I had left my bathing costume at home.  If I had thought for longer than a couple of seconds, I would have realized that the wet bathers from the day before were still in the compartment for used sporting clothing.  But I didn’t.

     To general hilarity from the centre staff, I left (almost) as soon as I arrived and plunged back into the darkness to go home.  Where, armed with dry bathers I returned to the pool, changed and got to the water much later than usual.

     Before I could plunge in, the lifeguard told me that the spaces for the next hour were fully booked and so I would need to quit the pool as the new folk arrived.

     As I was so late there was no clear lane for me to occupy and so I had to double up with a swimmer (five lanes, 10 swimmers, two to a lane swimming in parallel) and start my delayed efforts.

     As it turned out, not everyone turned up to claim their booked spaces and so, with a few judicious lane swaps, I was able to complete me full swim with the series of exercises that I do at the end of the official metric mile of overarm.

     After my cup of tea and bocadillo I usually set off on my bike ride to Port Ginesta and back, but the gage on my bike informed me that I was down to 20% power and, oddly, when I made my first attempt to come to the pool the screen actually registered 6%!  Only once have I attempted to ride the bike without any electrical assistance and it is an experience that I do not intend to repeat.  To give an equivalent example, without any electrical assistance, it is like driving a car without power steering, something I prefer not to do.

     It did not help that the weather was uncomfortably odd, the sky a funny colour and the temperature low.  I rode down to the paseo and as I met it, I made an executive decision to return home.  Being caught in a thunderstorm is another experience that I do not intend to repeat!

 

 

 

I now have a number of writing projects on which I am working, some of which require a little light research.  Some information is proving hard to find, but I know that it is only a matter of time before I find what is necessary.  Or not.  Sometimes the effort is all!

 

Tomorrow the restrictions on people travelling to other municipalities means that only Castelldefels people should be walking along the paseo.  It is very hard to believe that the strangers that we see are just fellow citizens who have kept themselves to themselves and have finally decided to come out to have a breather.

     We have had police checkpoints on entry points to Castelldefels (especially the beach area) to dissuade ‘outsiders’ from breaking the regulations, but it must be difficult for people close to us from not wanting to make a quick visit.

     The figures for Covid in Spain and Catalonia are not good.  The restrictions have been extended for a further 15 days here in Catalonia which virtually gets us up to the Christmas period.

     The loosening of the regulations and restrictions for Christmas seems to me to be fatal madness.  As experts constantly point out, the virus doesn’t recognize the Christmas period and will act accordingly.  We must expect an increase in deaths in the middle of January if people decide to meet up and try and experience anything but a shadow of what Christmas used to be like.

     As far as I can see, Christmas will be just the two of us.  There may be a way for Toni to meet up with some of his family, but I really do not see the point in taking such a risk when the vaccine is only a few months away.  We will see.

     At least in the New Year the Trumpian Nightmare will have his tiny hands forced away from the levers of power and we can hope for a boring presidency to take its place.

     Pity that the horror of Brexit in some sense or other will be filling the minds of people in Britain.  To think that we have years (o god, years) more of the bunch of viciously and fatally incompetent chancers governing us is depressing.

     And what is more depressing is the Dance of Death that the Conservative Party is doing with the EU in the lead up to some sort of agreement.  I do not see how Johnson is going to be able to spin anything that he manages to get in a positive way.  He truly (as are all the rest of us) in a no-win situation.  Any Brexit is going to be a disaster, it just depends how big a disaster.  Whatever agreement he manages to get, it is going to be construed as a betrayal by whole swathes of his own party and the rest of the country.  God alone knows what Northern Ireland is going to get out of that bumbling fool’s final idiocy.

     If he does manage to cobble together some sort of paper-thin agreement then my pension will go up.  When I arrived in Catalonia the euro was 70p now it’s 90p+, that translates into a 30% reduction in my pension as it is paid in pounds (tax deducted) and then transferred to Catalonia.  If there is any sort of agreement then the value of the pound will go up, I will get more euros for my money right up until the full impact of the idiocy of Brexit comes home to roost and the pound plunges down again.

     And a Happy Christmas to us all!

How to fill a Sunday-feeling Saturday

 New Normal, Second week, Saturday

 

 

 

 

It’s raining. 

     I had to take the car to the swimming pool today, because, while I enjoy riding my bike, I am not a fanatic and for me, riding in the rain cuts the fun to less than zero. 

     I did try and remember the last time that I took the car rather than rode the bike to the pool, and I couldn’t.  Which rather makes the point that I continually make about the weather and my reaction to it in the two countries - three if you count the country of my birth and my later year-long “missionary work” there as a qualified English teacher teaching the natives their language, as befits any true Welsh teacher – in which I have lived.  I don’t like rain.  Or the cold.  But I can do with a bit of cold as long as there is the promise of a fair amount of rain-free time during the year.

     Alas!  Britain does not promise that, whereas Catalonia does.  Simple.

 

 

I have decided to do a bit of delving into the war service of my paternal grandfather.  I have his name and his number and his war service stretched from 1914 to 1918.  He was one of the early volunteers and so had his 1914-1915 Star.

     He never talked to me about his war service, and my Dad said that he was only told about a very few of his experiences.  I can well imagine that my grandfather found it difficult to relate details of his life in the army to anyone who wasn’t there.  The disconnect between what the soldiers actually experienced in the field and what was reported must have made it difficult to have a meaningful conversation.  And why would the soldiers give an accurate description of the almost unimaginable horrors that they witnessed to their loved ones on their return?

     I have tried to find out about his war service from the internet and I think that I will need to pay to get the detail that I require.  I am, as they say, looking into it.

 

 

 

I have now put some battery powered LED fairy lights around the newly framed watercolour (and glitter) paintings of winter trees by SQB and it looks magical.  I have never, ever started to put up Christmas decorations in November before, but then I have not experienced a year like 2020 before either, so a little jollity does not seem out of place no matter how vulgarly distant Christmas actually is.  And anyway, I have seen the first Christmas decorations being sold in Tesco in the past before the end of the summer holidays, so if anything, I am rather tardy in “trimming up” as one of my friends used to say!

 

Today has been one of those odd days when, in spite of evidence to the contrary, it has stubbornly felt like Sunday.  In the “Old Days” i.e. before retirement, such a misconception had its advantages as assuming a Saturday a Sunday meant that when one woke up on what, by extension of the faulty reasoning, could be a Monday – it was in fact, only Saturday and no work!  Now, of course, Mondays have lost a lot of their sting – well, to be fair, virtually all of their sting, but there is still something different about weekends that still gives me something of a buzz, in spite of it being an attitude rather than harsh reality!

 

We had lunch in Suso’s, a restaurant that we often patronize on a Saturday because it has a reasonably priced menu del dia, Suso being one of the few restaurants that do not take the opportunity of the weekend to inflate their prices.  The value is extraordinary, even though I do not nowadays take advantage of the bottle of wine that can come with the meal.  I felt very virtuous in restricting myself to pure, cold water – and I am sure that I felt all the better for it!

 

Now back to military records and finding out just which of the pointless bloodbaths my grandfather was forced to participate in by generals safely way behind the front line.  I will never forgive Haig for his attempted murder of my grandfather!