Where there's a will, there's an injury!

 

 

 

As domestic accidents go, being impaled by an electric toothbrush seems to combine triviality with impossibility.  And yet it drew blood!

     How, you might well ask, did I manage to stab myself with what is a fairly blunt instrument, with the bristles being the sharpest element in the construction? 

     The answer lies in my refusal to pay the inflated prices for the replacement brushes sold by the big-name maker of the toothbrush.  The cheaper alternative that I bought on line did not attach to the vibrating metal spike (the retaining, moving, part of the brush) as securely as it should have done and so it came loose, fell away from the spike and the residual hand pressure brought the spike into my face and into the right hand nasolabial fold - and that is the first time that I have ever written those last two words knowing what they mean.

     Luckily (if that is the word) the colour of the blood merely darkened the shadow of the nasolabial fold (2^nd use) and made me look a tad more mysterious.  I like to think.

     Shaving the next day did not reopen old wounds and so, apart from giving one line on my face a more emphatic outline, no real harm has been done.  And, anyway, I dabbed a bit of TCP on the wound to do its stuff and one can’t really be expected to do very much more in terms of medical care.

 

The month of May is a sort of Family Nexus, where everyone appears to have a birthday or name day and each one of which has to be celebrated.  When I was teaching in Barcelona, this period reminded me of the start of the Autumn Term in the UK which coincided with the start of the WNO Opera Season with a consequent attendance at various performances of WNO in my triple guise of Clarrie’s Friend, Friends of the WNO ‘helper’, and Opera aficionado with an almost fatal deficiency in time allocated for school.  The start of term is the worst possible time to have a multi-tasking crisis, but it did mean that after the start of the season I was able to relax into the frenetic horror of new timetables and making ‘grouping’ work, with something approaching failed-Zen tranquillity.  It is truly amazing how much you can be powered by hysteria!

     Anyway, we have had two birthdays so far: the first in a well-aired living room with mask wearing; the second in a 50% occupancy restaurant with mask wearing and ostentatious hand washing with alcohol, and the third is about to take place tomorrow in the outside terrace of a restaurant in Terrassa.

     The last of those celebrations will not be dovetailed into the time before the curfew as that particular restriction has now been stopped, so in theory we could actually get back to Castelldefels after 10 pm rather than making sure that we did get back before 10 pm with a Toni High Speed Drive of Death, during which I kept most mousey quiet!  But we did get back before 10 pm.  And we did survive.

     The loosening of restrictions is a prickly subject.

     The End of Curfew was officially at midnight last Saturday – so you had the really odd situation that, on Saturday night at 10pm you were expected to be in your home obeying curfew, but two hours later you could, quite legally, go out again to enjoy exercising your “freedom”.

     It is significant that the right wing have framed the Covid restrictions as attacks on “freedoms” and the Zombie of Madrid actually had the temerity and barefaced audacity to run under a banner of “Freedom”.  And, in spite of the astonishing hypocrisy and mendacity – she won!

     But, having painted the relaxing of restrictions as regaining freedom, it was hardly surprising that the younger population of Madrid saw a justified opportunity for celebration, and dully swarmed into the centre of the city and partied as though it was New Year’s Eve.  They did not of course socially distance and many of them were not wearing masks, and a medical expert who witnessed these scenes of mass celebration in Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, and other major (and not so major) cities remarked, “We will have to look at the Covid figures in a fortnight” when the new cases of Covid that could result from the ignoring of the on-going pandemic might show themselves.

     At present Madrid has a high rate of occupancy of ICU beds; it has a reasonably high rate of infection – it is a bloody good place NOT to visit, though Parisians have flocked there because as they said, “We can do things and go to restaurants and clubs here that we would not be able to do in France!”  So, Madrid has been accepting visitors from a place with an even higher infection rate in order to boost tourism – but, as always, collateral human damage has never been a disincentive to commercial gain and political advantage for the right.

     Although we are constantly told that the vaccination rate in the country (Spain and Catalonia) is increasing, and the President of Spain was on television yesterday keeping to his assurance that 70% of the population would have had a first jab by the end of the summer, the fact remains that a small proportion of the population has actually been vaccinated and a very small percentage of the population has had the second jab.  I suppose that I am one of the lucky ones, given a late-surgery jab that just happened to be a single dose vaccination.

     The fact remains that we are not prepared for an influx of tourists.  We do not have the virus “under control” and we are in the fourth wave of the pandemic.  The emergence of a new “difficult” variant of the virus would be disastrous as most people are (in spite of evidence to the contrary) looking towards old normality and assuming that the virus is all but beaten.  This is a very dangerous attitude.  And we will pay for it.

 

Although with my single dose vaccination, I should be gaining daily immunity, I am taking no chances.  I still wear my mask at all times that I am out of the house and I continue to wash my hands with Uriah Heep regularity, but with real alcohol soap rather than false sanctimoniousness!  I am very wary when in groups and keep my distance.  I take to heart, “No one is safe, until everyone is safe” and hope that others are as fervent in that belief as I am.

     Not that safety is entirely risk free.

     Today we went out to lunch as we usually do on a Tuesday and, although we deemed it still just a fraction too inclement to eat on the terrace, we were happy enough to eat inside in a reduced capacity restaurant.  Toni is punctilious about hand washing with the ubiquitous 70% alcohol hand wash which is good, but the alcohol soap while disinfecting the hands also gives them a certain slipperiness which was disadvantageous when attempting to move a cup of Coke.  The glass certainly moved, but the contents of the cup moved even quicker and flowed along the tabletop from Toni and into my lap, my meal and my legs.

     Our waiter was one of the old school Spanish waiters (though Indian) and was effortlessly efficient in clearing the table and mopping up.  My meal was taken away, and I was given an extra portion of Catalan tomato and garlic bread to keep me happy while my meal was re-plated.

     The one good thing to come of this is that I will have to wash my shorts.  The shorts are new, and red - so the Coke did not stain, or not visibly at least.  They are also too big, and that brings me to our late PM Mrs May.  During her sad Brexit-fuelled decline, as the more rabid parts of her party turned on her in an orgy of self-delusion and lies, she was described by John Crace in the Guardian (and if it were not he, then it is something he certainly could have said) as having the same authority as the “Do not tumble dry” instruction on a garment.

     If clothes cannot be tumble-dried then they should be thrown out.  I therefore buy T shirts and shorts deliberately large on the expectation of shrinkage when they ARE tumble-dried.  So, if my super plan is correct, the Coke defiling will ensure that the clean shorts are a snugger fit.

     Never let it be said that I cannot find something positive in the most trivially negative irritations!

Blood should be on the inside!

 

When the event in your life that you are looking forward to is the inauguration of a new container for your daily pills, then I might suggest that your standard for a new experience is Lockdown Limited. 

     We have become used to accepting the more quotidian in place of the exceptional, because what we used to take for granted: visiting new places, meeting friends and family, eating out – all have become more problematical with the see-sawing restrictions that we have had to live with for the last eight months or so.

     But my day was about to become more eventful, though not intentionally so. 

I had to get a new supply of my pills from our local pharmacist and I incorporated that chore as the finale in my morning exercise.

     Having completed my morning swim, I emerged into the morning sunshine to find that the outside seating area of the café part of the pool had been converted into one large ‘crime scene’, with the striped plastic tape making sure that all the tables and chairs were out of commission. 

     The café is now a take-away establishment only and, as one regular said, “What am I supposed to do?  Buy a take-away coffee and walk around the block drinking it, before I get back into my car?”

     So, bereft of my bocadillo and cup of tea (a mixture of Earl Grey and English Breakfast, they know how I like it) I set out on my bike ride down to Port Ginesta intending to call in to the pharmacy near our house on my return.

     It was cold.  Although I am still wearing T-shirt and shorts with the essential sandals, I am getting to the stage where long sleeved shirts and gloves are going to be a necessity.

     I arrived at a fairly deserted pharmacy that is part of a commercial development that includes garage, shops and restaurants – that, given the new lockdown regulations, were not generally open.

     I attempted to dismount from my bike, but after a 15km ride (well, it’s a lot for me!) and what with the cold, I was a little stiff and I unbalanced and brought the bike down on myself.

     As I have previously had occasion to explain my bike is fat wheeled and heavy, so trapped by gravity and a solid metal frame I hurtled to the ground!

     I was more shocked than in pain – though there was pain as well – and, as there were no people around I sprawled on the ground, trapped by the bike and weighed down by my backpack and felt truly helpless!

     I eventually disengaged myself and dragged by bloody way into the pharmacy, bleeding from both knees, my left elbow and, oddly, right foot.  The pharmacist noticed nothing and so, somewhat shocked with bloody track lines streaking down my legs, I collected my pills.  And cycled home – easier than wheeling the bike.

     My arrival back in the house was dramatic as the amount of blood on legs and feet made the wounds look much more dramatic than they were.  Dabbing away the excess revealed the cuts’ actual extent and emergency treatment with TCP commenced at once.

     The impressive bruise on the side of my knee has now deflated and I am left with seeping and pain.  In my usual way of dealing with infirmity of any sort, I took to my bed for a few hours to allow my body to do whatever it is that it does in times of stress.  And now it is time for another cup of tea and some light reading.

     I have decided to give the pool a miss for the weekend to allow the scabs to form and, anyway, I think my fellow swimmers might be a little disconcerted in the time of a pandemic to see me wandering around with open wounds!  Well, open-ish, and more like cuts to be absolutely truthful, but I am prepared to milk whatever sympathy I can get.

      Meanwhile I fully intend to be ‘palely loitering’ for the duration of the weekend and emerge revivified on Monday!

    

Is easy good?

 

There is something deeply satisfying hearing the sound of the robot Roomba electric hoover busily bumping its gentle way around the bathroom and bedrooms upstairs as I sit down drinking a cup of tea and typing.  Though not at the same time obviously.

There is a remnant of the Protestant Work Ethic in my guilty sipping that thinks that this division of labour is somehow morally corrupting. 

I know from past experience of that electronic worm screen saver that used to eat its way through the active screen on older generation computers that had been left idle, I knew that a random thingy that goes off in different directions when it hits the edge of the illuminated workspace will actually clear the screen in a far quicker time that you would have expected.  It therefore follows that a robot hoover that does (virtually) the same thing, well, it moves in the same sort of way, will clean a given area just as efficiently.  And this hoover actually has some sort of sensor that ‘notices’ dirt that it is travelling over and does a little circular dance to remove it.  So, this is an efficient and painless way to do a daily cleaning.

It’s that ‘painless’ bit that causes concern.  If it is truly “painless” – and I can hardly make a thing of having to press a single button and empty the dust trap when it is done – then where is the merit in doing it, apart from the cleanliness, of course?  The saving grace of this house is that we live on three floors, with the rooms starting on the first floor, with the ground floor being a space beneath the house to park the car, house the barbecue and also to breed mosquitos.  

Roomba cleans floors, particularly the tiled floors that we have, but what it doesn’t do is stairs.  Or should that have been ‘are’ rather than ‘is’?  Anyway, stairs have to be done in the old-fashioned way with a human holding the hoover.

A three-floor house is not the place to encourage the use of a corded vacuum cleaner and so we have a battery operated one.  This one is actually a Hoover hoover and is light and easily manoeuvrable and therefore encourages use, and a single charge is well able to cope with the quick glancing clean that I give stairs with it.  And it does take physical effort and that allows me to regard the flat floor automatic cleaning as a sort of compensation and therefore something which is acceptable.

That vague guilt feeling is what I always refer to as The TCP Effect.  TCP was the go-to liquid in my childhood that was dabbed on any cuts and grazes to make them better and to protect them from germs.  The important thing about TCP was that it stung – and therefore you knew that it was doing you good.  It also had a strong smell, that I rather liked – but that might well have been by association of a boyhood wound being treated by a concerned mother, so that the aroma became inextricably linked to maternal love.  Or indeed with paternal love, but fathers usually applied TCP in a less gentle way than mothers!  Anyway, the sting of TCP was a sign of progress, something was happening, the germs were being fought and the sting was the tangible feel of the battle.  It is a version of the “No gain without pain” philosophy, there is always a cost to be paid.

It's strange, but I don’t feel the same way about the washing machine.  I can remember my grandmother and indeed my mother using a washboard to clean some clothes!  We later had a cylindrical gas fired washing machine in which clothes looked as though they were being stewed, and I can remember a pair of jointed wooden tongs that were used to get them out.  We had a mangle that I was sometimes encouraged to use.  I was always fascinated to put towels through those rollers and see the squeezed cardboard-like material come out of the other end! 

Eventually we owned a Flatley clothes dryer.  Our first twin tub was greeted with joy, but there was still a deal of work involved washing clothes.  It was only when we moved house and we had a new (one of the first)

Hoover Keymatic machines that the word ‘automatic’ could be applied to a washing machine.  [I have just gone through the paragraph above and removed all the references to the machines being “mother’s” washing machines.  My parents had comparable jobs and, to be fair, the housework was shared, as it had to be with both parents working and a young son coming home from school for his lunch.  I think, at least in my memory, my mother did the lion’s share of the housework, but I can also remember my dad taking his part too!  So, no sexism in the possessives! #menworktoo]

The dishwasher is more debateable.  Ecologically, I am not sure that the one that I own can be justified, especially with the A+++ machines they produce nowadays that wash on a thimbleful of water or something equally remarkable.  It might be lies, but they are comforting lies that I will fully believe when it comes to the time that I need to replace my present machine.

There are some (sad) people of course, who say that hoovering is satisfying and relaxing, but that conjures up memories of the worst excesses of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my mind, and we all know where books like that didn’t lead!

Having written about this thorny ethical problem and come to few conclusions, I feel strangely happier: writing as moral analgesic. 

Works for me!