Royal Excess!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It looks as though BBC Radio4 is going to be something of a no-go area for the next couple of weeks. 

     The wall-to-wall coverage of the death of QEII and the subsequent fawning hagiography, where people who barely knew her regale us with inconsequential anecdotes of the minutiae of royal protocol allowing them to see, uniquely, the momentary all-too-human interactions of the real person under the crown.  Frankly, they should have found something better to do than facilitate the beefing up of the repetitive narrative of a long reign until it becomes an unassailable national myth.

     I will be glad when the broadcasters begin to focus on the logistics of a State Funeral, that will at least give them something real to concentrate on, rather than scratching around trying to find something concrete to say about someone who is best known for what bad things she (as opposed to her dreadful family) hasn’t done rather than achieving something of moment.

     The high point of nationalistic absurdity came, courtesy of our (God Help Us!) new Prime Minister who actually said in all sincerity (in so far as that wooden dummy is able to articulate that quality) that QEII was, “one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known”! 

     Truss does the memory of the late Queen no service by stating such a ridiculous claim.  Such sycophantic hyperbole tells us more about the vacuity of the speaker than giving an insight into the character of the Queen.  The truly dreadful delivery of Truss’s speech made it appear as though it had just been thrust into her hands and that she had to make the best of an impromptu performance as she winged it through the to the stilted peroration. 

      Johnson, lurking in full sight on the back benches, just couldn’t stay away from an occasion to raise his debased profile, but he must have seethed internally as he saw a golden opportunity for his particular populist pomposity, thrown away on a ventriloquist’s dummy.

     It is at times like this that I pity John Crace, The Guardian political sketch writer, who actually has to sit through and watch the unutterable tedium of politicians scrabbling around for their five minutes of televisual fame as they mouth yet more platitudes about a person they hardly knew.  John suffers for the rest of us, and I do look forward to his acerbic take on the sad (in all senses) spectacle of politicians emoting on a Grand Occasion!

     Tomorrow QEII’s coffin will be on the move and at least we will have a change of scene from damp people laying flowers on a granite bridge in the Scottish Highlands.

     We were in London during the lying-in-state of The Queen Mother and the queue to view her coffin, when we passed it on an open top tour bus, stretched from the south bank over the bridge and into the distance!  

      Why?  This was a woman who was allegedly slighted by a member of the press umpteen years previously and did not talk to the media from then on.  She was an almost totally remote figure, who kept herself remote, apart from the hand waving and hat wearing that is a sine qua non of female royal ‘duty’.  And yet, an estimated 200,000 people over three days queued to see her coffin!  Extraordinary!  Why did they do it and what did they hope to get out of it?

     I do not for a moment doubt the sincerity of the grief that many people have expressed, and their sense of loss is palpable, and I too, am not insensible to the power of symbols – but, for me I look askance at such public displays of emotion for an unknown, highly privileged, fabulously rich person who are where they are because of an accident of birth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

I feel infinitely more concerned for the well-being of Salman Rushdie who has solid achievements to his name, than I do for the well-being of any member of the so-called House of Windsor.

     I do not wish ill to the royal family, but I certainly look forward to the day when their personification of the built-in, hereditary, inequality in Britain is finally broken.

     Like Truss, a Prime Minister ‘elected’ by a tiny minority of the population, and Charles III who is king and head of state because his mother has died, both are emphatically Not In My Name!

 

 

 

 

 

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!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 20 – Saturday 4th APRIL

To absolutely no one’s surprise our lockdown has been extended to the 26^th of this month: only another three weeks to go.  To what?  Do we seriously think that this whole disaster will have run its course in a few weeks?  Locked inside, we have little to think about than when this is going to end.  Or rather ‘if’ this is going to end.  Let’s face it, the end of this crisis will either be the final playing out of whatever the virus wants to do in its own sweet time, or the truncated reign of the virus brought about by the intelligent care and management of the politicians who are directing our fight against it.  Seriously, which would you think the more likely scenario?

     Admittedly we are not cursed with an a nepotistic buffoon like some (Republican voters have to ‘own’ their elected idiot) unfortunate Americans who goes out of his way to reject the advice of his own scientific advisors, for example over the wearing of face masks.  But our own political leaders do not inspire confidence: politics always seem to trump (ha!) national need.

My inner Ben Gunn (cf. Treasure Island) has surfaced with the last piece of cheese consumed being a fading memory.  I have therefore ordered 2kg via the Internet (at premium price) and it is something to look forward to when it is finally delivered in a week or so’s time.  I have also ordered a collection of goodies from The Pound Shop, mainly because it is one place that makes no bones about delivering, even if it takes a couple of weeks.  If nothing else, it will make a pleasant surprise when it finally arrives, as I have already forgotten what I ordered!

     I have comprehensively failed to get a slot from any of the major supermarkets for a home delivery, so for the foreseeable future (forget about the 26^th being a cut off date!) Toni will have to venture out and brave the inconsideration of people who fail to cough into their elbows!

On the other hand the sun is shining and, although my early morning walk was a trifle chilly, the warms must now have heated up the tiles on the floor of the terrace on the third floor and I am prepared to grace the place with my presence.

     From my eyrie on the third floor it is possible to look around at a whole selection of houses and flats swimming pools and tennis courts. 

     My assessment of the strictness of the lockdown, based on the microcosm I can see, is that the rigour of the isolation is fraying at the edges.  The kids in the flats are playing together; over the other side of the main road, people are grouping together; four guys were playing tennis; kids were playing in the car park under the building of another set of flats. 

     OK this is a Saturday (if anyone is keeping track) and a certain relaxation goes with the day, but the figures of infection and deaths are still frighteningly high in this country and any slackening of the procedures would be counterproductive (what a euphemism!) at this stage of the measures that we are taking to cope with the virus – if our figures indicate that we really are dealing with it.

    If we take the government’s time line, we are half way through the period of lockdown. 

     The next three weeks are going to be telling ones.

Having a cup of tea after having a swim (even though it is to my onw special brew requirements) is hardly the most exciting thing to do, and yet simply sitting, sipping and looking have provided me with an amazing amount of raw material for use in my poetry.

     When I first went to Turkey I was armed with a sketch book.  I do not, for a moment, pretend to possess any technical artistic ability, but I doggedly sat and drew some sort of picture for every day of my three week stay.  I would love to be able to report that by the end of my time there I was producing fluent, artistic and compelling work, but I wasnt.  My drawings were just as pedestrian at the end of my holiday as they were at the beginning - but I had looked, and I mean LOOKED at things.  Sitting down in front of a mosque, monument, landscape, bottle of after sun (don't ask) or a knife and fork (when I almost forgot to do the daily drawing) made me appreciate the detail of what we usually only glance at.  It was a valuable lesson and one that I apply today.

     I know that as I take my accostomed seat and have my usual cup of tea something will be new and different from what I have seen before.  I look and, if I concentrate I see.

     To be fair, it doesn't take a highly developed form of perception to realize that with a title like "I watched a pigeon die" there is visual material that should be obvious.

     The dramatic nature of the incident also posed its own questions about guilt.  The title was anticipatory and also accusatory - though I am not sure what I could have really done about it.  I felt that I was in a sort of Christopher Isherwood mode, when he wrote "I am a camera" recording rather than acting, my writing in my little yellow notebook gives me a distance which allows inaction.  If you see what I mean.

     As you will see from the poem, there is a sort of twist.

     This was a satsifying poem to write.  Though it didn't 'write itself' the strength of the opening line encouraged a direction that guided the production.

I watched a pigeon die.

It limped, theatrical, goitered left leg,

into the sun.  Once found,

it folded, wearily, into itself,

looking, oddly, as though about to lay.

Its head, sleek in the light,

made jerky quarter turns until

it too sank in the feathered heap.

A public path was this bird’s grave:

its headstone was an open gate.

Approaching feet -

                       and what was moribund

took to uneasy wing and landed,

painfully, a few sad foot along.

A Desperate Last Flight, I thought,

and now The End Game plays.

The feet walked on, and once again

the tired bird pushed

from the ground,

                       but this time

made an arching loop,

above the fence, beyond the trees

into the open blue.

And death will be a little late this year.

At least for some.

Or just, perhaps, for one lone bird

whose flapping flight made false

my quick fatality of thought.

Though, there again,

who knows what must occur

beyond our seated sight?

As always, comments are more than welcome!