All this and more!

 

 

 

 

 

 

My choice of food for the birthday meal in the chosen restaurant was a ‘bocadillo classico’ of chorizo, morcilla (black pudding sausage) and cheese.  And it was tastily spicy, though a little dry, so I added mayonnaise.  The restaurant owner was delighted that I chose something so traditional and everyone else was horrified that I had chosen something so laden with cholesterol!  I have to admit, in spite of the hypocrisy of people questioning my choice while themselves have fatty alternatives, the roll was one of the tastiest that I have had for years.

     The delightfully indulgent theme was continued in the birthday cake that was a chocolate sponge with orange mousse cream, coated in chocolate with the topping of fresh fruit.  Utterly delicious!  The only restraint I showed was in my non-alcoholic beer – and that was purely on medical advice, and not, I hasten to add, in any way my free choice!

     The curfew has now ended, but we did not come back to Castelldefels much later than usual and, as I am now used to going to bed hours earlier than I used to, I was tired when we got home and soon went to bed.

 

There, the foregoing shows that I am capable of writing about something other than Covid and politics, though you will notice that the ‘curfew’ did manage to make an appearance.

 

Part of the fall-out from Toni’s birthday concerns his presents.  I bought him a pair of wireless ear buds to listen to the radio on his phone when he goes for his daily walk but you will be astonished to hear, they have not paired easily with the phone.

     I have yet to get a pair of wireless ear buds that have paired in the ‘automatic’ way that they should.  Much the same goes for smart watches seamlessly pairing with smartphones – ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, rather than anything remotely related to reality.  However, perseverance and a few fugitive tears usually manage to get the necessary results.

     As Toni is of the “why do I need the instructions?” generation, he is usually more intuitively sensitive to the petulant demands of electronic equipment than I, but at present he is claiming major mechanical failure to explain his almost complete lack of success in getting the ear buds to work.  I say ‘almost’ because he has got the ear buds to work, but not both at the same time.  The buds have not spoken or paired with each other – and I have nothing to suggest to resolve the situation.  Eventually, Toni will work out some sort of resolution, but at the moment he is frustrated and generally dismissive of the whole affair.  But it will nag at his technical reputation and he will get them working.  Probably.

The weather recently has not been wonderful; indeed the weather has not been sunnily acceptable for months.  I endured a lacklustre April on the assurance (an explicit assurance by Toni) that the misery of dull days would give way to a brilliantly sun-lit May.  And that has signally not happened.

 

And has still not happened and this is now some days later.  Although it is not raining, it has been trying hard to do so and generally unsettling the sunshine that should be pouring down on us.  But I have faith that the good sunny days are but days away.

 

I hate, have hated, and will always hate the wearing of glasses.  They put pressure in all the wrong facial places and steam up and slip and are generally hateful.  Since I was eighteen I have worn contact lenses, and, as I started wearing them in the hard-plastic era then those of my generation will know that the discomfort of glasses is as nothing to a speck of dust getting behind a lens.

     As I do a lot of reading and typing, it is generally better for me to wear neither glasses nor contact lenses for the best reading experience.  Typing is a little more difficult, but on the computer it is easy to increase the size of the type to accommodate my poor sight and then reduce it to normal size when printing.

     However, from time to time I get fed up with lenses and revert to glasses in spite of my antipathy, and for the last number of months I have worn my glasses.

     I had to visit the optician because of the ill fit of the glasses – to be absolutely fair, this was probably because I have left them on my leg (!) while reading and it is inevitable that some pressure damage will result from complete lack of care.

     Although my optician does such running repairs for nothing, he was obviously missing my injection of cash that the wearing of daily contact lenses brought him from me on a regular basis.  In a discussion about why I wasn’t wearing my lenses, I pointed out that I need varifocal lenses in my glasses to cope with my long and short sightedness.  He was not fazed and said that a new type of varifocal lens was available if I would care to try it.  Never one to reject the spending of money (free trial is never really ‘free’, even I know that) I agreed to give them a go.

     Now, I did go through a period when my optician in Cardiff tried to change my lenses to something more suited to my variable sight. 

     One of the failed experiments was to make each of my eyes do a different job: the left was for reading and the right was for distance.  Or possibly the other way around.  Whatever.  I was told that my brain would sort out the conflicting information and would ‘choose’ the appropriate eye for the task.  It didn’t.

     I also had a bi-focal lens to try too.  That failed entirely as I couldn’t see well at distances and reading was a total disaster.

     So, my agreement to try the lenses has failure built into the experience.  To make matters much, much worse, the lenses were monthly wear rather than the daily wear that I had become used to.

     I have to admit that I never, truly, looked after my lenses properly, so a daily lens that you could insert in the morning and throw away at night seemed ideal for me, and they were soft and easy on the eye too.

     It has only been a few days with the new lenses and I have to admit that I am impressed.  So far.  I have not seen a lens through its life yet, so judgement must be reserved, but they are comfortable and although my sight is not perfect, it does allow me to read, type and see with some clarity.

     People with poor eyesight are prepared to put up with a lot.  You only have to look at the outer surface of a confirmed glasses wearer and note the number of smears, splodges and specks of dirt to be impressed by how many obstructions to clear sight we are able to take in our stride.

     The privations of contact lens wearers are usually epic.  A contact lens wearer will have harrowing stories of pain, loss and miracle that will make non-contact lens wearers doubt their probity, but all those stories are true!  We wear our tales as badges of endurance under tiny bits of plastic!

     It is far too soon to accept these new lenses as anything other than a promising experiment, but it is only when you have experienced the gradual increasing loss of sight through the years, that you will be able to understand the amount of blind (ha!) faith that lens wearers put in each innovation to make their sight sharper.

     My optician assures me that I am now wearing the very latest technology and that the improvements of the lenses from similar ones of only a year ago are remarkable.  Who am I to say?  But I hope he’s right and I further hope that the continuing streams of money that I pay will be justified in clear sight.

 

One side effect of not wearing glasses means that I can wear other glasses.  This is to do with my bike riding.

     Unprotected eyes, even at my gentle speeds, means that all sorts of detritus come smashing onto the eyeball.  Wearing glasses acts as a shield for the various irritations, especially tiny insects, that generally interfere with smooth riding.  So bike glasses were needed.  Which I have.  Somewhere.

      The Royal Hunt of the Eye Protectors eventually unearthed (not literally) some goggles that I had bought on Kickstarter.  The USB of these was they had a Bluetooth connection to my mobile phone and used bone conduction behind the ear to allow sound to come through, but still allowing ambient sounds to flow into unobstructed ears.  As far as my understanding of the traffic rules is concerned, in-ear buds are banned when you are cycling, but bone conduction variants are possibly allowed.  Certainly.  I think.

     I have used them once and listened to a fairly hard-hitting interview on the Today Programme (Radio 4) with a British Conservative minister trying to justify the absurd illogicality of the Covid rules regarding a worrying outbreak of the Indian Variant of Covid and allowing a crowd into a football stadium.  An embarrassing melange of words from the hapless minister did not hide the paucity of thought behind the non-policy of criminally culpable Conservatives.  So the glasses worked.  Frighteningly well.

     The battery life on the glasses is allegedly 6 hours, and other reviews have said that they hold their charge well.

     The only down side was the necessity of changing the visor from a muddy brown to a professional looking blue.  It was not a task that we (it took two of us) will repeat: the visor that is there now stays there.  For ever.  And I am inclined to write a scathing comment on the YouTube film of one reviewer who said, “Changing the lens is easy” and then DID NOT DEMONSTRATE how to do it, merely giving a vague indication of “pinching here and the lens will pop out” – lies and deceit!  However it is done and it adds a touch of professionalism to my altogether sit-up-and-beg style of stolid cycling.

 

Talking of which, where is my new bike?

     I had been warned that its delivery would take about 32 working days (an oddly specific number) but the bike seems to be stubbornly stuck in Poland after having been sent by train (is that likely?) from Hong Kong.  It is now getting to the stage of contacting my contact in the company and asking plaintive questions.

     Oddly enough, the reason for purchasing the new bike has become less moot.  I was having difficulty in dismounting from the vehicle and decided that I needed a ‘walk through’ version to accommodate my lessening agility.  However, I have developed ways of getting on and off the bike that suit my needs.  Furtherly however, I think that the new bike will be short-term-future-proofed.  Or that is what I am telling myself to justify the expense.  As the money has already been paid, it is just a matter of wanting to get my hands on what is mine already.

     I will try the web site again and perhaps things (including my bike) will have moved on.

    I live in hope!

  

 

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!

A Cold Rant!

 

 

 

It may have been something to do with the cold, making me feel even more misanthropic than usual, or it may just be the way that my mind works, but I began to think of the Decline of Empires and how values are, well, devalued as a society sinks into the abyss.

     It is, after all, very easy to get into an apocalyptic way of thinking when a pandemic is raging around us and economic disaster is an everyday reality.  People talking of ‘The New Normal’ as if it is just a slight change in the weather, rather than a radical rethinking of the way that we have been doing things.  When you see a film on television and it shows crowds of people jostling their ways around a crowded city; when you see people flocking to stadia or theatres; when you see people greeting each other with a friendly kiss on either cheek – and you think, that is another world, you begin to realize just how massive a change in the way that we behave and the way that we think has taken place.  What we did this time last year was BC – before Covid.  A different world, another country, foreign, they did things differently there.  That is a bit of a mash-up of L P Hartley’s famous opening line of The Go-Between, but it expresses the sense of strangeness that passing time gives, or perhaps demands.

     The true strangeness of our times is that this revolution in our activity has taken place in months, not years.  Even with World War Two there was a sort of phoney war to get people used to the fact that there was a war on.  Yes, there was the air raid warning that went off soon after the declaration of war, but it was a false alarm, my Dad was in London at the time and remembered the sense of, “Bloody hell!  Here we go!” and the rueful anti-climax when no bombers swooped into sight.  London and the rest of the country soon learned the reality of all out total war.

     I am not sure what sort of reality prevails at the moment.  We live a fairly enclosed life, with the occasional sally out for lunch or supplies, but we have not left our area for months, but I refuse to believe that the pelotons of cyclists that I passed on my morning ride along the paseo had dressed up in all their latex awfulness just to ride the few kilometres contained in our town - in spite of curfew being in force from 10 pm on Friday night to 6 am on Monday morning part of which demands that no one moves from their municipalities.

     People are cherry-picking the rules that they want to follow.  The number of cyclists, runners, dog walkers, and strollers who were not wearing masks is astonishingly high.  They want normality to be here now, and they are perhaps used to living in a society where instant gratification is the norm.  Covid breaks the norms, the trick is understanding that fact.

     But, back to the Decline of Empire and the Decadence that is its usual accompaniment.  Britain is a country where the time for sighing over lost empire is so far in the historical past that we should just shut up and get on with living with the status of a relatively rich but relatively uninfluential country.  Our ‘special relationship’ with the USA is a sad self-deluding joke and we belittle ourselves as we preen ourselves in the reflected glory of a richer and much more powerful friend and ally.

     Trump has tested the strength of American democracy and illustrated its weaknesses.  His sad continuing tantrum that reality does not bow to his own sick idea of reality would be pathetic and risible, if he was not the most powerful man in the world with truly frightening resources at his disposal.  This is where the cheap comparison with Hitler in his bunker falls down; Hitler was sending imaginary armies to fight against his inevitable defeat, Trump has at his disposal weapons that make the whole of the arsenal of the last world war look like fireworks.  Trump can send real armies into the abyss!

     Even though he has been defeated, even though he is a lame-duck president, even though the leaders of the world have congratulated Biden on his victory, the Orange Outrage still persists in his presidential petulance and every day he devalues his office a little (and some days a great deal) more.

     But what has really struck me about the grotesquery of Trump’s tenure in the White House is how brazen he has been in rewarding the people like himself, privileged white plutocrats (if he does actually have the money to entitle himself to that title).  He has cut tax for the very rich, he has reduced restrictions of manufacturing, he has opened up areas for mineral exploitation, he has degraded many of the agencies which protect our physical and financial environment.  He has worked (between golf rounds) on making sure that his friends, family and industrialists have all benefited.

     What is shocking is not that Trump has demonstrated no ethical standards in his government, who would have expected him to be anything outher than he turned out to be, but what is shocking is the extent to which he has been aided and abetted to stay in office by those around him.

     When a friend was working, very unhappily, in a school where the owner was making everybody’s’ lives unbearable, I had to tell her the simple truth about the owner, she simply did not care.  To the question which began, “But how can she . . . “ the answer was, “She doesn’t care!”   

     The Republicans in the Senate and in the House have shown that they simply, “do not care”.  As long as they get what they want they can allow the president to do little or nothing as a quarter of a million fellow Americans die of Covid; they can work to repeal the Affordable Care Act threatening to leave millions of poorer Americans without health insurance; they can stuff courts with ill-suited right-wing judges; they can lie; they can be proven hypocrites and they simply don’t care.

     The shocking thing is that it is all so plain to see.  They lie and cheat in plain sight.  They are caught out again, and again, and again.  But they simply don’t care.  Because the people that are suffering are not them.

     The Republicans have allowed a clearly unsuited person to be president.  They have supported him in the face of indisputable facts which disprove his position.  They have been venial and base – and they should be finished as a political party.

     Perhaps they are.  The sick nightmare of the Republican Party that has been formed in Trump’s image is perhaps something that will linger on longer than the one-term president who allowed the absurd parody of self-interest to stand for Republican American politics,

     The truly sad thing about the last days of the would-be despot is that he had the second highest number of votes ever cast for a presidential candidate and still people cling to his lies and delusions.  There are weeks to go before he finally leaves the White House and the trappings of power are taken from his tiny hands.  God alone knows what mischief he can do in that time.

     And he will be supported by Republicans in both houses, because they do not care.

What a legacy!

 

What people say can live after them.  From the self-consciously orotund phrases (with a cynical ear to history) of the odious Churchill to the simple quotidian statement of General Patton, there are words that sum up a personality and proclaim that character to the ages.

     I hadn’t realised that my own deathless claim to verbal immortality had already been established.  This was made clear to me by the giving of two cellophane wrapped assemblages given to me yesterday as part of my birthday presents from The Family.

     The first illustrated my response to being asked what I would like to drink when we go out for a meal, “Una cerveza sin alcohol, gaseosa, y un vaso grande para mezclar, por favor.”  (“A non-alcoholic beer with Gaseosa and a large glass to mix them in, please.”)  Gaseosa is a sugar-free, sweetish, fizzy drink used by itself and as a mixer.  So, the first assemblage had a chunky ‘real’ looking beer glass, a can of 0% beer and a plastic bottle of Gaseosa.

     The second assemblage illustrated my end of meal instructions: “Un té negro, con dos bolsitas, 

y un poco de leche fría aparte, por favor.  (“A black tea, with two teabags and a little cold milk apart, 

please.”)  Beneath the cellophane I could see an impressive mug (with lid) at the side of which two 

teabag ends could be seen and a small jar of milk (with instruction not to drink it because it had 

not been in the fridge for some time!).

     So, that is me, summed up in two phrases.  I should have expected something like this because 

Toni’s two nephews look forward to my opening my mouth and then chorus my requests with me.

     And so, my birthday (a ‘significant’ one, if you care about such things) with only a visit to the 

Opera in the Liceu in Barcelona to see a lack-lustre production of Don Giovanni with Christopher 

Maltman in the evening to make the day even remotely significant.

     The experience was out of the ordinary of course, because of all the precautions that the theatre 

had taken to make our visit ‘safe’.  The number of audience members was restricted to 50% of the 

possible seats available and we were seated in a little island of isolation with adjacent seats vacant.  

 We had to wear masks for the duration of the performance; there were no refreshments, no 

paper programmes – and scene changes were done with the safety curtain not brought down, 

partly to encourage us not to leave our seats during the interval!

     I wish that I could say that the music transcended all the safety distractions – but it didn’t.  

 The production failed to engage with me, it seemed static and under sung.  I really wanted to enjoy 

it because it is all too likely that the increasing stringency of the measures to limit the spread of 

Covid will impact on the rest of the season – a season I might add with a late start.

     We are now under curfew (10pm to 6am) and there is talk of limiting people to their 

municipalities.  Although I live in the province of Barcelona, I do not live in the city and so 

restrictions will make it impossible to travel to the Opera House.  Still, it hasn’t happened yet 

and given the contradictory confusion of the stream of instructions that we have had so far, it 

might well be that oddities like opera-going will survive and I will have a ‘safe corridor’ to culture.

Spain has now had its ‘Callous Cummings’ moment where a dinner party for 150 people was held 

in Madrid hosted by the rich for the politicians and the corruptible.  Given that we mere mortals 

cannot go to closed restaurants and bars; cannot gather in groups of more than 6; have to be home 

by 10pm, you can take your choice of hypocrisies that the Great and The Good have illustrated by 

their ostentatious cavalier behaviour which, of course, spits in our collective faces.

     The reactions have been predictable: the government supporting press (right and left) failed to 

carry any information about this disgraceful event.  It was left to social media to spread the news 

and force the criminals to respond.  Will we get any more than platitudes?  Doubtful.  Justice in 

Spain is politicised and mere innocence will fail to get you freedom if you are perceived by the 

governing elite to be threatening their positions; glaring guilt will fail to get you convicted if you 

are part of that elite.

     To my knowledge none of the trough-swillers at that event has attempted a variation on the “I 

was testing my eyesight” by trying to read the menu card in the artificial light of the crystal 

chandeliers!  But give them time and they will come up with something equally blatant and insulting.

      Meanwhile, of course, our errant ex-king is still skulking in the shadows hoping that paternity 

and corruption cases will fade into the background – much like his son-in-law who is allegedly in 

a women’s prison (sic.) for his thieving.  Every other high and mighty fallen on hard times dweller 

in pokey also has to deal with photographic evidence of the degradation showing them in prison 

fatigues playing cards or something equally banal, but not with this particular prisoner.   

Not even a hint of evidence that he actually is in prison.  Makes you think.

The latest piece of idiocy in Catalonia concerns the Guardia Civil (the police guys with funny hats and guns) where there have been 20 arrests connected with the demonstrations and the financial organization thereof in support of our president Puigdemont who is at present in exile in Belgium.  This is a serious matter, but the general appearance of this operation (given the name “Volhov” by the Guardia Civil, referring to a battle during the Second World War by the División Azul which comprised Spanish soldiers fighting for the Nazis!  Such sensitivity!) has descended into farce by the claims of involvement of Putin and the threat of Russian soldiers being made available to Puigdemont and so on, into the realms of fantasy, QAnon and the delusions of dedicated conspiracy theorists.  Twitter and the social media are awash with spoofs and derisive comments on the latest putsch against Catalonia.

     Spain is not averse to looking ridiculous in the international court of public opinion, as witness their hapless defence of police brutality over the referendum of the 1^st October 2017 and the imprisonment of the organizers, some of whom are STILL IN PRISON.  For organizing a referendum.  In which millions of Catalans participated.

 

Such is the fluidity of the situation at the moment that the restrictions that I alluded to above are no longer a full description of what we are expected to observe.  It seems as if the government is trying to get as near as possible to a full lockdown without actually having one. 

     This is the sort of thing that the mendacious Conservative government tried with the situation in Northern Ireland and the attempts to convince us that there was a way to have some sort of Brexit and not to have a land border or a border somewhere: trying to convince people about something that was an impossibility, but faffing around to try and find the right linguistic display to make a contradiction appear smooth and joined-up.

     It is yet another variation of the “Delete all and insert” approach to debate that I remember from my days in General Body Student Meetings in University.  Even when agreement on some weasel formulation was found, it invariably came to pieces when confronted with practical reality.  It was a valuable Life Lesson to see specious agreement in action and to watch it later fail.  In ordinary life, instead of saying “Delete all and insert” the ‘compromise’ is usually preceded by, “What about if we” – but the end results (agreement/failure) are the same.

     We are still not sure about the exact details but, we are now expected to say within our municipalities during the weekends, so if the coastal resort of Castelldefels is packed on Saturday and Sunday with people from god knows where – what precisely are we supposed to do?  Our 10pm to 6am curfew continues.  Large stores are to be closed, and so on tinkering around the edges of what is actually necessary.

     While encourage not to make ‘unnecessary’ journeys, we are not banned from going where we like, within our province and within our municipality.  Mostly.  My swimming pool appears to be open for the foreseeable future (about three days in Covid terms!) and I can continue to take my bike rides, though the end part of my usual route, which is technically in Sitges, may be out of bounds during the weekends.

     As usual we are presented with yet more new rules about which we have a sketchy understanding at best – at a time when mistakes can and will be deadly!

 

Still, I have a new art book, and I have an active imagination, so no lockdown is going to contain me!