Yesterday was a public holiday in Catalonia and today isn’t. The difference in the café after my swim was marked. I was virtually alone and, as I sit at a table next to the plate glass windows looking out onto the car park, I had nothing to distract me from adding to the writing in my notebook. Except, I didn’t much.
I have found, in the past, that even the most quotidian of reflections about the weather or the strength of a cup of tea can sometimes give rise to more profitable thoughts. Today, that was not the case, “Overcast, cold, with some hazy sun” remained a description of the state of the day and didn’t progress to profundity. Still, I had a decent cup of tea at the end of my swim and I had had a lane to myself, so to quote Lewis Carroll, I felt fully justified in marking the day “with a white stone” – which, if my memory serves me right is an old Roman custom, and which I claimed as my own as soon as I read about it in one of the footnotes of Gardner’s Annotated Alice.
Tomorrow is my flu jab, and I think it says something about the way that I fill my days that this has become An Event in my week. It is a step in the process of defending myself from the vicissitudes of various viruses and, as I have mentioned before, in my age group if you don’t look after yourself you can expect little from the authorities to help you. Though having said that I did get a message on my mobile phone yesterday telling me that I should be thinking about my flu jab and, if I hadn’t already made arrangements, I should get an appointment via the helpfully supplied link.
This will be an added layer of protection, especially as many of the Covid restrictions are being lifted.
For example, next week is my next visit to the Liceu, not for an opera this time, but rather for a ballet. If you have a season ticket then a couple of ballets and the odd recital are part of the package, and the package is worth getting because its purchase comes with a discount of 25%. And 25% off a lot of money is well worth getting!
During the course of the pandemic, we have had performances cancelled, and sometimes entire productions. When the Opera House opened up again, it was to a severely reduced seating capacity with various safety aspects enhanced. Our specified seats were no longer ours, and we season ticket holders were distributed around our chosen price area, to ensure that we could be islanded by empty seats. The staged production of The War Requiem was the last of the adjusted performances and for the next we should be back in our accustomed places.
But the pandemic is not over. Although many young people act as if the Covid Pandemic is an historical event and nothing to do with their immediate lives, this is simply self-delusion, a self-delusion that could be fatal for those that fit into the most vulnerable age and chronic illness categories. Double vaccinated people can get Covid and be capable of spreading the infection, even if they do not demonstrate symptoms of the illness itself. The largest age category of new infections is in children. We are not, in any way, shape or form safe from Covid.
In Catalonia we longer are required to wear masks in the open air, though it is suggested that in more crowded places like paseos it is advisable to wear a mask and to keep to the social distancing rules. But no one is entirely sure what, precisely, the rules are – and the mixed messages we get from our so-called political leaders do nothing to make the situation clearer.
I will continue to wear my mask throughout the winter and well into the spring, and indeed until well after politicians have stopped trying to convince us that everything is back to normal, and we all please spend more money!
It will be interesting to see exactly how the patrons of the Liceu behave in the new-normal dispensation. As the vast majority of patrons in the stalls of the opera are people past the first flush of youth, I think it is more than likely that precautions will still be fairly firmly in place as the lights go down!
Dinner this evening, at least for me, was the doggie bag remains of the paella that we had yesterday in the swimming pool restaurant. I have to admit that the flavour had intensified after the dish had rested for a day and there is still some left for lunch tomorrow. Though I will perhaps add a dash of curry to make the stuff taste a little different. Please don’t tell any Catalan cuisine purists what I am doing, as they are easily shocked by the unconventional (or blasphemous, as they would term it) approach to native cooking.
I am reminded of the time when I was charged with buying a melon for a ham and melon starter for a meal, and I returned from the shops with a sandia (a red watermelon) and there was chaos when the assembled company realized what I had done. We did have sandia and jamon, but it has been a memory which always raises a shocked smile as the misstep is remembered and discussed.
Personally, I found the combination excellent and would readily eat it again.
I am alone in that determination in this part of the world!
