The
latest figures for the dead in Spain from Covid-19 in a twenty-four hour period
are 832. This is the highest figure of
for a day’s deaths in Spain. This is a
catastrophe, and a catastrophe that people here are saying is partially of the
government’s making.
Last night the Prime Minister of Spain went
on television and informed the country that there were going to be far more
stringent restrictions from next Monday.
For a two-week period taking in Holy Week there will be a total ban on
all non-essential travel and all non-essential premises will be shut down.
It remains to be seen whether the
renovators next door who have been (and are as I type) working normally and
entering and leaving the workplace as if there was no crisis, will finally
knuckle under and obey the restrictions.
These people are perhaps symptomatic of the problem, where some consider
themselves outside the range of restrictions that are in place already.
The advice is simple: stay in your homes
and wash your hands. And it is
frustrating when some people ignore it so openly.
Every
evening at 8.00 pm there is the opportunity to show our appreciation for the
Health Workers. I open the kitchen
window and clap into the darkness and hear others clapping too. It is a moment of collective assertion of
thanks and a poignant moment of community when we isolates are linked by a
small but sincere gesture of thanks for the incredible job that our health
workers are doing in circumstances that are less than ideal.
I am still haunted by pictures of ill
patients in Madrid hospitals laying on blankets in corridors; blankets! not
even trolleys. We have been told that many
front-line health workers have not been tested; they do not have masks or the
appropriate equipment to protect themselves from the virus; some are making
their own protective clothing out of plastic bags; the hospitals in Madrid are
overwhelmed; there are insufficient ventilators, and so on, and on. Numbers of health workers have died and more
will unless they are properly looked after.
The government is accused of doing too
little too late and is playing catch-up to the situation rather than managing
it with any efficiency, and each mismanaged day brings new death, directly
attributable to political mismanagement.
I am not so naïf as to think that a crisis
can be managed with anything approaching perfection, “events, dear boy, events”
will always frustrate the most meticulous of plans, but some things are inexcusable. The signalling of the future lockdown of
Madrid, giving plenty of time for comfortably off Madrileños to decamp to their
costal summer homes and spread the virus was unforgiveable. And I hope that last word ‘unforgiveable’
becomes the major impetus when the inquiry into the crisis is started, when the
virus has been finally vanquished.
Two
weeks. Just two weeks.
It hardly seems credible that we have been
locked in for only a fortnight. The
world where social distancing (a wonderfully evocative phrase) did not exist
seems like another era of history, some exotic maelstrom of conviviality where
people actually touched and kissed each other, some rumbustious Restoration
frivolity, viewed with nostalgia from our Puritan isolationism!
I
suppose that I should be grateful that time, which seemed to be speeding up for
me as birthday after birthday flashed by, has slowed down again. I wonder how many weeks it will take, before
this becomes the new normal and time regains its usual velocity!
The
days are beginning to lose their character: weekdays are no different from
weekends; what is the essential difference between a Tuesday and a Thursday when
you are stuck at home?
If there seems a sort of stasis in one’s
perception of the distinct individuality of the days of the week, there will be
a ‘real’ difference in the individual hours, because today is the day when we
change the clocks and get an extra hour in bed.
This, of course, is only possible if you are still indulging yourself by
keeping to a mythical ‘working day’ timetable giving a façade of normality to
the structure of your enclosed temporal existence.
I
have to say that I truly regret the indisposition of Johnson as it gives an
opportunity for the Grotesque Goblin Gove to speak to the nation. The man truly makes my flesh crawl as his
mendacious sincerity constantly deflects questions into a fog of verbiage that
comes nowhere close to a specific answer.
I loathe his master, too, of course, naturally, but the Blond Buffoon’s
shaggy, unconstructed showiness when it comes to English expression is easier
to dismiss. There is something
adhesively repulsive about Gove’s loquacity that is more difficult to brush
away. It needs to be flushed. And then disinfected. And then bleached.
Tomorrow
a theoretical lie in, but I am sure that my ‘absolute’ body clock will get me up
at the usual time, for Day 15 and the start of the third week of Lockdown.
