Broken Un-Birthday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The week of un-birthday festivities and presents following my actually single birthday took a downward turn today.  Not only has it been raining all night, with howling wind and melodramatic thunder and lightning, but also, when I woke up the electricity had failed.

     I washed by the light of my mobile phone, refused to shave as the hot water wasn’t – see above, electricity failure – and hobbled downstairs (knees still not even remotely right) like some senile hi-tec Lady of the Lamp to do ‘something’ to the box of electricity switches and fuses.  I duly pushed up all those that were down, and nothing happened.

     I debated not going for my early morning swim in the local pool, reasoning that perhaps the outage had extended to their premises, and while I am more than prepared to get up early, I draw the line at swimming in cold water.  But I thought to myself, who else is going to brave the rain, the dark and the pre-dawn?  Only I!

     I was, of course, wrong, and there were plenty of other saddos ready and eager to get their daily exercise over and done with before most people were awake.

     As I am retired, I do not need to be there early ‘before work’, but I find that getting up (at what I am sure my grandparents would have called a ‘reasonable time’) has now become so engrained in me that to lie in bed after the alarm goes off gives little pleasure.

     I wish that I could say that I make full and enthusiastic use of my gained time – but what I do is read The Guardian and thoroughly depress myself before breakfast.

     Living in Catalonia, you would think that I would be able to be fairly detached from what is going on in the UK – and, to a certain extent I can be (or at least try to be) but the political, social, and economic situation in Spain is not rosy either.  Admittedly, we have not committed the idiocy of Brexit, and our Covid figures are nowhere as horrific as those in the UK, but there is little in present day Catalonia to make one wake up and skip one’s way cheerily into the day – but at least the day in Catalonia usually has sun in it!

     My art books are my escape.  Which is an odd thing to say because the sort of art that I like is rarely of the chocolate box niceness, and the arresting images that contemporary art slams into your mind rarely take you away from the world but force you back into it in an uncompromising manner.

     Sometimes the struggle is not with the images, but rather with the juxta-positioning that some curators impose on collections or exhibitions.  Having read through the catalogue for the Poussin exhibition in the National, I was reminded of another exhibition involving Poussin that I went to see in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in which Poussin’s paintings were paired with the coloured scribblings of Cy Twomby.  The Poussin paintings were his series of The Sacraments while Twomby’s paintings were, um, not.

     I am no fan of Twomby’s art, though you might be interested to know that I am in a minority, and in 2015 his Untitled (New York City) was sold at auction for $70,530,000 – so what do I know!

     You might like to compare the two artists:

 

Go

 

 

 

 

 

 

POUSSIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWOMBY

 

As I keep telling myself, the money is not relevant to the art.  Money is just the commodification of art.  What value people and institutions place on individual artists is something to consider in evaluating the place of art in a particular society, but it has little to say about the true value of art. 

I still don't like Twomby.

 

 

Who counts the cost?

 

Just when you thought that Trump could not sink any lower in the human degradation scale, he is now, a lame duck president rushing to kill judicially as many death row inmates as his federal powers allow him.  The fact that no lame duck president has sanctioned judicial killing for over a century is of course not a deterrent to this sick joke of an incumbent.  Trump knows (I assume, though that is an assumption which credits Trump with a little too much knowledge or interest) that Biden is an abolitionist as far as capital punishment is concerned and so he is deliberately taunting the president-elect with a fatally childish display of time-limited residual power.

     I had thought that I was inured to shock from the antics of the most powerful man in the world, but as always, Trump confounds what you thought were the profoundest depths of his depravity.  In a way there is a certain consistency in his approach; his mismanagement of the response to the Covid catastrophe in the USA though his light touch indolence was at the expense of the death of Others, and his display of judicial slaughter is also at the expense of Others.  His presidency has been marked by misery and death, but he has survived and prospered, and that of course shows that he has been right all along.

     To use lethal injection or whatever barbaric means capital punishment is administered in the USA as a sign of your own power is disgusting and is a travesty of justice.  I do feel for the victims of the actions of those on Death Row, but judicial murder can never compensate for another death.

 

     Meanwhile our own pale reflection of Trump parades on the international stage as if he has a shred of credibility.  Marina Hyde summed it up beautifully in today’s Guardian:

 

“Received wisdom seems to be that this is all theatre – designed to show that the UK, which has rapidly ceased to be a serious country, is serious about its threats. If there is a flaw to this plan – and really, it’s such a tiny cavil – it’s that our prime minister is a liar of international repute. Possibly even intergalactic. For Boris Johnson, lying is not second nature: it is nature. Even on the occasions he wants to tell the truth – a rarity, but imagine it momentarily aligning with his self-interest – he has to make a vast, almost physical effort to override his psychiatric biology. It’s like watching a cat try to bring up a six-kilo hairball.”

 

Do read the rest of her piece in The Guardian, and indeed anything else she writes, it is one way to stay sane!  The link is here:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/11/boris-johnson-charm-prime-minister-england-dover

 

And it rained today as well.  It’s just one damn thing after another!

Who are they?

 New Lockdown: Day 6, Wednesday

I admit it. I got up very early, in the darkness and, under the subterfuge of going to have a pee, I had a sneaky look at my mobile to find out the state of play in the American election.  What I read was not exactly comforting and my attempt to go back to bed and sleep until daybreak did not work.

     So, up before dawn and reading my Guardian app on the phone while listening to Radio 4, I had a consolatory cup of tea and pondered on the sheer unadulterated differentness of people.

     People like me are going to have to come to terms with the fact that Trump got more votes than he did in the election in 2016.  Whatever the outcome of the election, and, as I type nothing at all seems even remotely settled, over 50 million (probably nearer to 60 million by now) people watched Trump be ‘president’ for four years and still voted for him.  I will not recite Trump’s glaring faults – perhaps they trip too easily off liberal tongues, like mindless repetition of rosary prayers.  I am tempted to say that the repetition has the same empty efficacy, serving merely as sonic balm to hide the fact that they are merely words with no further function than mouthed sounds.

     I listened to a Trump supporter say that she had her doubts about the character of Trump but felt that she shared his ideas and values.  She obviously didn’t mean the repulsive ideas and values that I see in him, but presumably some hazy version of what being a Republican means.  She was affluent and had higher education, but she mentioned the disturbingly left-wing policies of Biden (!) and the fear that he would limit freedom in some undefined way as justifications for her instinctive rejection.

     Obviously, this woman was on camera, felt under an obligation to ‘justify’ her support of Trump and, as far as I could tell in the fairly unnatural position of a televised interview, she seemed sincere and content with her choices.  She seemed decent enough, but had obviously put aside, or perhaps rejected as False News, much of the negative (factual) coverage of this depressing presidency.

     It is certainly tempting, from my point of view to dismiss Trump supporters as self-deluding idiots, and some of the choices that non-American commentators make in their choice of Trump supporting interviewees seem to fit that category, but 60 million Americans (and counting) voted for this person, and they cannot all be idiots, and to continue to think so will ensure that the divide in the country will never be healed.

     Some of the Trump supporters are in it for the money and for the power, or are the immediate nepotistic-sweetened family, but that only covers a fraction of the voting electorate.

     The four years of Trump have led some people who seem to live fairly coherent lives to say that, “He is the best president we have ever had!”  To say, “He really understands people like us!” or, “He cares!”  They see his public speaking, which I see as cringe-makingly embarrassing, as “natural” and “welcoming”, that he is, “really speaking to us!”  His free association of incoherent and contradictory meanderings allow Trump supporters to see the wealth-inherited billionaire (he claims) as one of their own, chatting to them in a way no other ‘politician’ can - or would dare to.

     Even as I try and be fair-minded, I can feel my bitterness and contempt seep through into my writing.  But astonishment at his continued ‘success’ will do nothing to stem the toxic populism that he represents and fosters.

     People on the left have a duty to understand how it is that so many people reject what seem like age-old standards of human decency for a strident self-defeating national selfishness.  And where do we start?

     Only one of my friends has admitted (that is an important qualification) to voting for Brexit.  None of them admits to voting for the Conservatives.  I read The Guardian and study the History of Art and live in Catalonia, not the obvious background to a right-wing populist, or a background likely to bring me into contact with other populists.  But my point is, that if the numbers of those voting for Trump or Johnson can be taken as a guide to how widespread their ‘ideology’ is then I must know a fair number of people who vote for what I regard as the disturbingly right-wing, and they are the people I need to understand and interact with in the expectation of bettering not only my own understanding of what is making people tick at the moment, but also of bettering our national dialogue.

     The problem, of course, is what to do next.

     I reject the idea of living in a Trumpian world: virtually everything he does and says is anathema to me.  But how do you change what seems to be a perniciously attractive way of looking at the world and one’s place inside it to many whom I have been able to regard (and I mean in an observational sense) as ‘other’?

     Perhaps, as part of our ‘Family Wisdom’ has it, “Anything is better than nothing!”  Speaking, conversation, writing, participating in political life, sharing thoughts, ideas - who knows what might eventually help, but an awareness of the divisions within society and a sensitivity towards them must surely be a step forward.

     And, when I get up tomorrow, perhaps Biden might have garnered the requisite number of Electoral College votes to start the process of the reinvention of the New Normal Politics, and then we can work on the New Normal during/after Covid without worrying what the so-called Leader of the Free World might tweet off the top of his head!

 

LOCKDOWN [Level 1] CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 73 – Wednesday, 27th May

Yesterday, the second day of our being on Level 1 of Lockdown rather than being at Level 0, we had our first Menu del dia for ten weeks!  We sat outside the restaurant on well-spaced tables in bright sunshine (Toni in the shade of course) with a gentle brisk breeze to keep things pleasant.  The food was good (apart from the mediocre melon for postre) but the ambience was wonderful, the freedom of someone else making the meal and being surrounded (though not too closely) by other people.  An absolute delight!

    

Before lunch we both went to the Chinese supermarket to get wire and netting to repair our broken fences.  It was the second time that I had been to the supermarket as I had cycled into town to go to my dental appointment.  Except I was a week early!  Rather than waste the effort I went further into town and got myself some money.  Getting money was related to my first visit to the Chinese Supermarket where, after I had collected the materials that Toni needed to put the fence up I was informed that the card machine was not working and they only accepted cash.  I have not used cash for two and a half months and had none.  I rather resented having to return to grubby, virus laded notes!

     As we were out and about in the car we called into our medical centre because I have lost my prescription and I needed to replenish my stocks.

     We were able to park outside the centre – which was unusual – but the locked metal doors of the centre indicated why.  A notice on the door informed me that the centre was permanently closed and urged those who needed attention to go to another centre.

      Now we get to the part of the story that is specifically for my friend Squidge.  She is the sort of person who always gets served last in any restaurant grouping; she is the one whose choice is “off”; she is the one whose eventual meal is not what she ordered – you get the idea.  Whereas good things (usually) happen to me!

     Anyway, the door to the medical centre was firmly closed.  But, as I stood there, a window opened and, lo and behold! my doctor magically appeared and asked, “Stephen what are you doing here?  I was going to ignore you, but then I saw it was you!”  Needless to say I got my prescription, printed out then and there!  When I got back to the car I began to explain what had happened, but I didn’t get far before Toni’s expressions of exasperated recognition of my typical good fortune made us both laugh, though Toni’s laugh was a trifle more wistful than mine!

The Cummings fiasco continues.  There are many elements of this farce that are comment worthy, but I will choose just one.

     Out of the baying pack of fanatics than have chosen to junk their morals and support the upside down logic of breaking the rules not being breaking the rules I would like to highlight one sparking example of Conservative doublespeak: Robert Edward Jenrick, presently drawing a salary as a Member of Parliament and serving as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.   

     You may recall his 2014 Newark by-election that was mired in accusations of overspending with the Electoral Commission judging that the accusations were valid.  Or perhaps you recall more recently that Jenrick was against Brexit, until his career demanded he think otherwise. Or perhaps we should look back no further than April of this year where during lockdown he travelled 150 miles to his second home and then 40 miles to visit his parents AFTER going on television and urging people to obey the rules and not even visit their mothers on Mother’s Day.  And to bring us bang up to date with his career, the scandal of a timely planning permission that appears to have been given to a major Conservative donor saving the developer millions!  And this is the sort of hypocrite asking us to excuse Cummings!  Why should we even be remotely surprised!

As I have not fully recovered from the double brain-numbing whammy of Johnson’s defence and Cummings’ defiant ‘explanation’ in the Rose Garden of No 10, I couldn’t face listening to Johnson’s performance in the liaison committee and, as John Crace’s excellent parliamentary sketch in today’s Guardian adequately shows, I didn’t miss much.

     What is abundantly clear is that this appalling government appears to have reformed part of the ‘law’ around the arrogant reinterpretation of a governmental aide.  Johnson has junked his reputation and the authority of his government to save Cummings. 

     God help us all!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 51 – Tuesday, 5th May

All my life (except for one brief flirtation with the showy radical charms of The Independent) I have been a Guardian reader.  I know that, in many ways, I am a typical Guardian aficionado: wishy-washy-left-wingy-middle-classy what have you.  Every morning I do the Quick Crossword and read (nowadays) virtually everything.

     And that is the problem.

     After twenty minutes of headlines and leading articles I have virtually lost the will to live.  The unrelentingly negative news about the duplicity and mendacity of our political leaders; the ravages of Covid-19 and its increasing devastation in the Developing World; Brexit; Trump; the Spanish and Catalan economies and the continuing disaster of the lockdown; the building work next door; the closure of the Liceu; the continuation of my Catalan lessons.  Everything works together to depress.

     But, as one astute friends remarked, “You are almost enjoying this, aren’t you?”  And, yes, apart from the inability to go for my daily swim, the forcing myself on my own resources is not something that I dislike!  Obviously the reasons for the change in life style are appalling and I am horrified by the loss of life and the descent into poverty for so many in the world as their life line of occupation is modified or taken away – but I am able to count my blessings, and my personal circumstances are so much better than many.

     What is difficult is balancing my present ‘fortunate’ position with the more than negative circumstances of so many others.  Reducing myself to misery reading about the privations of others, mixed with sharp guilt because I am not ‘suffering’ like so many, is essentially an arid waste of limited joie de vivre.

Why as the Health Secretary not resigned?  Touchy little Matt who was offended by the ‘tone’ of a shadow spokesperson’s pertinent question about his and his government’s shortcomings obviously lied about achieving 100k tests by laughably inflating the testing figures and for the last three days the total has fallen below his self-set target.  If he had an ounce of decency he would go; but one has to remember that he joined Johnson’s government in spite of what he had said previously, so he has no decency.

     What I find most objectionable is that ministers behave as though they are playing a game of ‘deflect the blame’, using words to hide the yawning gaps in health care provision and what they do not seem to understand is that people, actual, real people, are dying because of their actions, inactions and wordiness.

     Every day brings new scandals, new statistics, new depths to which the government effortlessly sinks.

I went out for a bike ride this evening in ‘our’ time slot and noticed only one obviously illegal Plague Kid out and about, together with a number of marginal looking ‘kids’ who if they are supposed to be 14 plus to be in our group were marginal to say the least.

     I enjoy my jaunt up to the end of the coastal road in Gavá, because I always end up feeling pleasantly, resentfully irritated by the entirely predictable poor behaviour of pedestrians and their encroachment on our cycling lanes.  These lanes are clearly marked with white lines and little logos of bikes and pedestrians should stay out.  But they don’t.

     The really irritating ones are those that walk deliberately on the outside white line of our double lanes and look pained when you don’t deviate from your painted path and force them (usually) to give way.

     People walk backwards into the lanes, allow their dogs to meander on absurdly long leads, let kids go on toy cycles and scooters, have conversations in the middle of the lanes and on and on.

     The worst offenders are of course runners.  It is a bike lane and not a runner’s lane – but runners seem to believe that they are in a different moral universe to the rest of us.

     In the interests of fairness and truth, I have to admit that some cyclists are just as obnoxious, showing little to no concern for pedestrians and ostentatiously riding in the pedestrian part of the road.  Alas!  If we were all judged by our total behaviour, who would ‘scape whipping!

     But I find that, factoring in the irritation, it is an excellent and not too long ride with plenty to see and, as I pride myself on being a considerate cyclist, I end up slightly tired with a warm sense of superiority at the end of my journey.  And, and this is the key difference between myself and most of the other bike riders, I use my lights!

     Sigh!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 42 – Sunday, 26th APRIL

As I had to replenish my meds I visited the pharmacy this morning, giving me a representative view of the effects of the loosening of the lockdown in respect of children under 14.

   There were plenty of kids around and with the exception of one child none of them was wearing a mask and neither was the parent.  The kids were on scooters and bikes and in one incidence on a skateboard.  The paseo was fairly full and there were people on the beach.  The fact that this is notable in a seaside town speaks volumes for what we have been going through!

     Perhaps it is naive to suppose otherwise but the kids acted as though there was nothing wrong and that there had been nothing wrong.  If that totally understandable reaction of the kids is transferred to the parents, or even more disturbingly has come from the parents, then the virus results in a fortnight are going to give pause for thought.

     If things go according to the plan outlined by the Spanish government, then next week we may see a further loosening of the restrictions, and adults will be able to exercise outside too.  What exactly that might mean is not clear at the moment – but the idea of being able to go for a bike ride at least would be something to look forward to.

     Whatever happens in the immediate future, I think the idea of breaking down the in-house seclusion will gain an inevitable momentum that will be very difficult to reign in again.

     There are hundreds of people in Spain dying every day from Covid-19, the crisis is nowhere near over, but the mind set is looking towards some sort of conclusion.  And that is dangerous.

Meanwhile in Britain, tomorrow sees the return of the incompetent politician who went out of his way to get infected with Corvid-19 and who ‘leads’ a government that dithered at the start of the crisis ensuring the grotesque figures of infected and dead that we have now.

     One wonders how he will stage his return and then how he will divide his time between trying to explain what has gone on and working towards a no-deal Brexit.  I shudder for the future of my country.

     Talking of shuddering, Cummins the creepy power behind the empty throne is a participating member of what should be a purely scientific advisory committee.  The revelation in The Guardian about his membership over the weekend has sparked a controversy, but given the way that this government reacts to such things, I wonder just how much traction such a revelation will have.

The continuing story of printing out the final draft copy of The Coast of Memory has now reached epic proportions.  The problem is the ink.  God alone knows what sort of depraved electronic jiggery-pokery there is inside a printer that limits the usefulness of the ink in cartridges, but the woeful capacity of the replacements that I have used in the printing is beyond astonishing.  I suspect that there is some artificial limiting device that is able to override the obvious and audible reserves of ink in the cartridge and ensure that it is inoperable.  I refuse to give up, but the last printing was less than satisfactory.

     I might even end up going to a commercial outlet.  Except, of course, all of those are closed at the moment.  Ah, the travails of the would be publisher are never over!

And tomorrow is the next on line Catalan meeting!