Lockdown lite? Really?

 NEW LOCKDOWN Day 2, Saturday

 

 Bit of an anti-climax, my bike ride, this morning.  There was I expecting to be stopped at the border by masked police as I dared venture into the ‘Sitges’ part of Castelldefels – and, nothing.  No even the sight of a police car.  Instead, joggers, cyclists and walkers (with and without dogs) and the vast majority of them without masks.

     Yet again, I wonder at what news broadcasts these people are watching, as the ones that I see add incrementally to the supressed terror with which I regard ordinary life in the Time of Covid – whereas, for those mask-less people they either have secret supplies of the Moscow vaccine or they are living in a fools’ paradise, in which infection only happens to other people.  On my bike ride I counted (because I do) 150 people who were not wearing masks, in an area where we have a new lockdown and where there is a curfew.  Logic seems to be in short supply.

     But enough of the constant bewailing of the idiocy of the general population; the sun is shining and I know that the real blame should be laid on those who have the PAID RESPONSIBILITY to consider our safety and to encourage us to abide by clear instructions for our SURVIVAL.

     I am convinced that the incandescent ineptitude shown by the governing classes will finally have allowed the status of politicians even to sink beneath the previously accepted nadir of human activity, estate agency. 

      

Trump (Dump him!  Dump him!) used to be an outlier for idiotic mendacity but, alas, he is now seen as more of a patron saint by bumbling politicos throughout the world.  Those sad imitators must be terrified by the prospect of Trump’s political demise, as they will no longer have the shield of his in-post awfulness to make their deficiencies seem moderate by comparison.  I wonder how Johnson is contemplating being called the British Bolsonaro?  Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it?

     Taking of U-Turn Johnson, it seems as if it is likely that there will be a pronouncement early next week that England will have a stringent lockdown, a firebreak, to contain the appalling increase in infection.  Perhaps Johnson should also U-Turn on the provision of free school meals at the same time in the hope that the reaction lockdown will cover any (further) fall-out. 

     I wonder what Brain Box Cummings (the Master of Forecasting) will have advised.  Cummings’ past performance puts him on a par with a pop ‘clairvoyant’ in one of the trashier teenage magazines and let’s face it, he only manages to preserve his ‘reputation’ for being far-sighted by retrospectively doctoring his past posts.

 

I have delayed posting this until after The Blond Buffoon spoke (eventually) to the British Public in his waffling, bumbling, ‘ur’-heavy delivery, and looking all the time as though he would rather be somewhere, anywhere else.  This is his umpteenth U-turn - is anyone keeping count?  Like Trump’s lies we need to have a Radio 4 programme like ‘More or Less’ keeping tabs on Johnson’s vacillation, and calling it out as such as yet another glaring example comes out of his mendacious mouth.

     As an example of speaking to the public it was an inept performance; as a way of rallying the troops and explaining clearly and carefully what we need to do and why we need to do it – well, Johnson has never been any good at that sort of thing.  And frankly, after Cummings’ various jaunts in defiance of the rules, it is very hard to take anything Johnson says as having even the faintest stamp of moral authority.

     In other words, we were treated to yet another public embarrassment of stuttering ineptitude by a public servant (sic!) who looks bored by the effort of having to do what he feels he has to do to keep the rule-following population that elected him quiet, or at least,  quiescent.

     For how much longer is anyone’s guess: and that covers not only Johnson’s position, where the people in suits are prowling around seeking whom they might kick out, but also the attitude of the British/English people, and their ability to keep from open rebellion against a distant elite that seems daily more remote from their concerns.

 

Today was sunny in Castelldefels and the paseo was crowded.  In theory all the people I passed on my bike ride today should have been from Castelldefels, but I very much doubt that that was true.  Every weekend we get an influx of people from the surrounding area and today was no exception.  I saw no evidence of an increase police presence checking family-filled cars coming into the coastal part of the town – and without that visible presence (going on the experience of the last lockdown) people will behave as if irksome rules are not for them.

     I await further developments in our fortnight (as planned at the moment) of restrictions to see how the situation develops.

 

One does try to do the right thing. Honestly!

 

 

My fight against planned obsolescence has been lost.

     I did attempt to get the part of my cleaner that clearly wasn’t working properly repaired, but I was only offered replacement as an option.  As I am loath to throw away something that is ‘generally’ working I have opted to fork out a surprising amount of money for the so-called ‘power head’ of the machine (the bit with the revolving beaters that collect the dirt) to make it a fully functioning ‘up stairs’ cleaner. 

     God knows there is little enough floor space to be seen in the jumbled chaos of my ‘study’ on the third floor to tax the capabilities of even the weakest of suction hoovers, but even I am aware that the floor (however little of it is actually visible) should be cleaned from time to time.  It’s just the sheer fag of lunking a cleaner up three flights of stairs never really appeals – even when the cleaner is cordless.

     Well, now that I have expended money on the thing it has to be used to justify the price that I have paid to get it working again.  There is a logic there, though even I admit that it is tenuous.

 

 

 

The concern with the general concept of ‘tidiness’ (as opposed to cleanliness) is one of pressing import at the moment because Toni has embraced the life work of Cleaning The Kitchen. 

     Although this is a generally traumatic experience, I am spared the worst excesses of the process by being banished to the third floor because of my tendency to suggest that nothing that we possess is worth throwing away.  If the decluttering mantra of, “Only keep it if it brings you joy” were to be applied by Toni to the things that we possess then after his approach had been implemented I would be living in an echoing, empty tomb-like home, with only retro computers and their peripherals allowed to make it to a surface.

     Now admittedly, our kitchen cabinets were designed by a person who had obviously never worked in a kitchen before, or indeed been told its function, so that we have corner cupboards that mock attempts to use them as such.  They become kitchen black holes, anything that goes in, does not easily come out again.  This means that there is much in those Escher-like containers that has not seen the light of day for many a long year.  And I am not one given to exhaustive searches, as I find the ‘buy another one’ much more efficient and satisfying.  But such an approach does lead to duplication and considerable embarrassment when and excavation, such as the one that Toni is currently undertaking, brings to the surface and within the sight of a quizzical eye many inexplicable extravagances.

     Space has been created in the kitchen because much of my glass has been consigned to kitchen towel and plastic tubs now found in the cwtch under the stairs, and that new space has been given over to order and “everything in his place” which is an unsettling dispensation for those of my more cluttered ilk.  Still, I can always retreat from the regimented order of living room and kitchen and come to the comforting chaos of the third floor, and the tranquillity of the jumbled blunts the edges of rectitude.

 

 Set off for my pool swim on my bike at 6.45 am to be ready to enter the pool by 7.00 am and in the water by a quarter past.  It is still dark at that time of the morning and for the last few days it has been unquestionably cold.  Although I wear a T-shirt and shorts, I also wear a short coat for the journey to the pool and for my longer bike ride after my swim.  It is not quite cold enough to start wearing gloves for the morning ride, but that is not far away and then I will know that the summer (that I keep alive as long as possible) is truly over.

      I have always regarded Winter as a personal enemy and this year there has been a positively Medieval fear about a hard Autumn and Winter that we have to survive!  Usually, my distaste for Winter is linked to the sun and its limitations in the colder months, this year the personification of the seasons has taken on a mortal tone as I have had conversations with friends about how to survive, given that the Virus, like the Devil, is seen to be prowling around seeking whom he may devour .

     If I wasn’t real life, the present chaos in the White House as the results of idiotic macho libertarianism show that the greatest and the lowest are equally susceptible to an indifferent virus, would be farcically amusing.  But actual fear for survival is around in a way that it hasn’t been in my lifetime since the worst parts of the Cold War.

    

     Still, life must go on and I have the delivery of a Hoover spare part to look forward to!

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.

CASTELLDEFELS LOCKDOWN - Day 94 - Wednesday 17th June

Today, this evening, our first trip outside Castelldefels proper for months – to Terrassa (still in the province area of Barcelona and therefore legal) for the Name Day of one of Toni’s nephews.

     We have been on one of the motorways to the local superstores but they are within a couple of minutes of where we live.  This will be well outside our usual routes.  Not, of course, that the journey is not something that we haven’t done many, many times – but the experience will be different this time.

     Just a quick note before we go, perhaps I’ll add to it later.

We don't actually know where, specifically, we are going as the restaurants in Terrassa are not taking bookings and so I am not entirely sure how our final location is going to be worked out.  Adds to the excitement of the journey. 
     And the weather looks threatening.  After an indifferent start to the day, it gradually brightened up and, apart from a fairly still breeze, the day was one during which you could have gone to the beach and expected to tan - the sort of day, in short that inexperienced visitors from duller shores such as Britain would assume would be an ideal 'starter day' to work on the tan.  And they would have been flayed by the time of their evening shower.  Though, there again, as one of my friends used to say, "If your first shower after sunbathing doesn't hurt, you haven't been sunbathing properly." [N.B. This advice and comment does not meet the requirements for safe sunning and should not be taken as a recommendation.]
     I suppose that it is often true that, depending on the direction in which you are looking, you could make radically different predictions about the weather.  I have often noted in Castelldefels that observing the climactic conditions from the cardinal points of the compass gives one views which are often diametrically opposed - whereas, in Britain one was often surrounded by a unity of weather in which ever direction you cared to glance!

The trip to Terrassa had an odd feel to it as this was, for us, a major jaunt - the furthest that we have travelled from our house in months.  We thought that there was less traffic than usual, but we were driving after 8 pm so the usual rush hour traffic (whatever that term means nowadays) had died down.
     There was a sense of freedom, or at least of some sort of normality about our trip that was satisfying . as though another part of Old Normality was adding to whatever New Normality is going to be.
     The Name Day celebrations were held in a restaurant chain called Viena (sic) which is a take on a fast food burger place, but with a slightly higher quality of food.  The design and uniform of the staff has an odd dirdle vibe with some odd Austrian Tyrol embroidery thrown in for what appears to be no good reason! 
     My 'meal' was chicken fillets with some strange and messy sauce whose selling point was that it was supposedly picant - perhaps for the Catalans, not really for me, but the end result was messily delicious - as opposed to the '0% alcohol' beer which was disgusting, do not drink Heineken alcohol-free beer in cans!
     Because of faulty crossed-lines of communication, we ended up walking far too far to the eventual restaurant and I tripled my steps target for the day.  Even linking that to swimming 1,500m and going on two bike rides of over 20k, my smart watch still rated my 'exercise capacity' as 'Low' for the day!  What else do I have to do!

The excesses and corruption of the Bourbon de Bourbon family i.e. the so-called royal family of Spain, are being splashed across the newspapers in the European press - not so much in the Spanish press.  The debased political parties of PSOE and PP have joined together to kill-off any attempt by the authorities in this country to investigate the mounting evidence of theft and corruption of the family.
     In spite of the fact that the thief-in-chief (aka the so-called king emerito, the one who was forced to abdicate to try and control the mounting rumours and overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing; the one who went on television to vaunt the 'fact' in Spain that, "Justice is the same for everyone" but obviously did not include himself or his family in the category of "everyone" and has, so far, escaped judicial punishment while the powers-that-be here have ignored the evidence of his skimming-off contracts to boost his finances.
     One of the latest exposés is in the Times, in one of their supplements entitled, "Sex, lies and Swiss bank accounts"!  You can read that here:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sex-lies-and-swiss-bank-accounts-the-allegations-against-spains-ex-king-that-are-rocking-his-sons-reign-0sgw99c2b

because you can't read it in Spain!

My next swim is at 12 mid day tomorrow.  My slots get worse and worse!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 91 - Sunday, 14th June

Cloudy, sun, breeze: not the perfect sun drenched Sunday that our visitors were hoping for, but still good enough to come out for.  Castelldefels was crowded today.

     Not as crowded as it could be, but certainly fuller than it has been for a while.  People are determined to have sunny fun by the sea.

     From the perspective of my bike rides, I am able to note the increase in traffic and the numbers of people doing what they do best in our long beach town: walk along the paseo to see and to be seen.

     Rules?  Well, most people are somewhat sketchy about what part of which set of rules is applying at any particular time, and the fragmentation of Spain into the regions and countries with their own system of lockdown and their own notation of phases and you have something purpose made for confusion.

     Catalonia has hot-spots of viral infection and those were kept back from the general loosening of restrictions.  We in Castelldefels are part of the Barcelona region, which is itself sub-divided into further parts each of which has its own set of rules and its own level of phasing.

     As far as we know we are now in Phase 2, but tomorrow, Monday, we will be in Phase 3.  The cafes and restaurants that have survived so far are desperate to open as much as they can and start making up for the disastrous season that they have had so far this year.  The loss of the Easter holiday period is going to be difficult to make up for and the fact that they will not be back to full occupancy is going to make future survival difficult.

     It will be interesting to go into town tomorrow and see exactly what is open and what is likely to open.  I have a need to get my mobile phone repaired as it is a complete, but working, shattered mess.  The phone is far too expensive to junk, and I am prepared to pay up to 20% of its cost new to get it back into something like its original condition.  I live, as always, on hope!

I have been told that I have ‘passed’ my Catalan course and I am entitled to a certificate to show my ‘ability’.  All I have to do is collect it from my ‘school’ when that institution opens its doors again.  Unfortunately, in collecting my certificate, I will have to speak the language in which I have obtained an alleged proficiency, and that is a daunting barrier.  Which tells you something about the worth of the piece of paper that I am debating whether to humiliate myself and get!  Choices, choices!

As we had chicken from the pollo a last yesterday, we did not have our traditional lunch today.  Instead we had the albondigas that I bought in case somebody didn’t want the chicken.  They are very good, and they come with a ‘home made’ sauce from the pollo a last place.  One portion is not quite sufficient to form a meal for two, so I augmented the sauce provided and cooked some pasta.  Toni was very impressed with the final result and demanded that I repeat the repast at some future date.  As the selection of ingredients for the augmentation was based more on inspiration than recipe I think that a repeat performance is going to be the other side of difficult, but I remember most of the ingredients (at least two of which Toni would demand excluded if he realized they were there) and it is likely to be edible even if it will have serious differences from the food that had his accolades.  I can’t help feeling that there is a wider metaphor lurking somewhere in those last sentences, together with life advice!

Next week sees the second ‘lesson’ with my friend in the pool and I am having fun thinking of topics to extend his vocabulary.  I have been unable to get an 8 am start for Monday or Tuesday, but I will probably meet him at the changeover tomorrow as one hour ends and the next starts and so I can find out if he is prepared to wait for me to have my swim and join me for a later breakfast chat, or other arrangements will have to be made.

Toni is determined to ‘sort out’ the garden and this needs some thought and preparation.  We should go to a garden centre and get some plants and compost.  Now that the pine trees have been cut back, our front garden actually gets some sunshine and for the first time in many years, weeds are actually able to push their heads above the pine needle carpet which, this year is not there!  We might think of a few garden boxes and get some instant colour.  If the plant places are open.

     This week will see a more determined approach to getting back to something approaching what used to be normal.  It remains to be seen if we have the determination to do so.

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS – DAY 81 – Thursday, 4rd June.

Rain!  The fact that the word has an exclamation mark after it shows how rare it is, hindering me from taking my daily earlyish morning bike ride.  I mean, I am not fanatical about it and I have discovered that my lightweight coat is now (after lockdown girth-gain) somewhat snug to the point of constriction.  This means that my ‘small enough to be compressed to the size of a cricket ball’ coat is now not so useful and I will have to look around though my weather-wear to find something more suitable to carry with me on the bike as an emergency covering to cope with inclement weather.

     The rain held off for almost all of my ride, and even towards the end the rain was ‘only in the wind’ and I did not need to put on the jacket that I had packed into a small backpack.  The inclement weather encouraged most people to stay at home and so my ride was rather more spacious than usual and a damn sight more pleasant.

     As Catalan weather is not quite as spiteful as British weather, the rain did not really develop into something more damp and we even had some sunshine, though I was too tardy to take much advantage of it.

The cultural event of the day was the National Theatre free play from the Donmar Theatre of Coriolanus with Tom Hiddleston.  Again it was one of those filmed performances that you really wanted to experience in the theatre rather than on the screen, but it was a moving experience, and I am glad and grateful that I have had the opportunity to see it.

     I think of Coriolanus in the same way that I think about Madame Bovary: there is no one in the play or novel whom I really like, but I very much enjoy the moral dilemmas and quandaries that both throw up in their essentially chaotic lives. 

     The production of Coriolanus was complicated by the fact that Hiddleston has something of a mesmeric stage presence and, in spite of what he was saying it was almost impossible not to feel for him.  Both Coriolanus and Madame Bovary are both characters whose impossibly complicated lives seem to insist on death as the only reasonable solution to their situations!

I have now read (via Kindle) the second of Tom Holt’s novels using the characters created by EF Benson.  I think that I read it too soon after my re-reading of the first, with the result that the second, Lucia Triumphant, seems a little formulaic and self-indulgently picaresque – though, to be fair, that is quite like the style of the originals.  There were one or two points of real pleasure in the elegance of the writing and the cleverness of the situations engineered, but it did not satisfy as much as the first, possibly because the setting in the Second World War gave a more convincing overarching backdrop.  Nevertheless, worth reading.  And indeed, worth buying in Kindle.

     After talking to Irene, I have also downloaded at her suggestion a book of short stories by John Grisham called Ford County which I look forward to reading tomorrow.

The extension of the lockdown seems to be a formality here in Spain.  We seem to be heading for the next level in our lockdown by the weekend and who knows, it might even be possible to swim in the sea next week. 

     We take our pleasures as we are allowed to find them.

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 75 – Friday, 29th May

Disaster!  My mobile phone (in its case) slipped out of my pocket and managed to land on a tiled floor in such a way that it came out of its case and smashed the mirrored back.  So much for my Huawei P20 Pro.  It’s still working, with an artistically crazed back and a large cavernous gap between the front and the back.  I will have to investigate to find out if there is any way in which it can be salvaged – it is after all working perfectly well; it is only the case that is broken.  I am not confident, and I expect to be both disappointed and angry at the built-in obsolescence or intentional difficulty in repairing it.  But, at the moment I have done no investigation to find out what is possible.  Perhaps I will surprise myself.

My bike ride this morning was again relatively quiet with few people joining me in their period of exercise.  The evenings are much fuller and more crowded with an age-blind selection of people walking, running and cycling.  When I go out only adults aged 16? to 69 should be there – but cafes and restaurants along the sea front are open and the whole family, regardless of age, can go to those so the discipline of lockdown is being made slacker by the day.

     According to our government, we will progress to the next stage of loosened restriction on Monday.  The progression is measured by days and not my figures.  There seems to be an assumption that the virus will be subject to a daily reduction in a whole area in an almost sequential way.

     As far as I can observe people in Castelldefels have already moved to the next level in their behaviour, so Monday’s new regulations will only make official what they are already doing.

For the first time for over three months we went to one of our favourite bar/restaurants for tapas and a drink.  We were outside, as restaurants are still not using interiors.  Even though the tables were generously spaced, it still felt as though we were getting nearer to some sort of normality, some sort of New Normality.