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 Stab to Start the Day

 

 New Lockdown, Day X, Tuesday

 

 

 

Not everyone starts their day by stabbing themselves with their electric toothbrush.  And I mean real stabbing.  With blood.

      Not an easy feat, but I managed it.  The head of the brush somehow or other came away from the main body of the brush and I then was distracted by the perception of distance and I brought the vibrating metal stalk forcibly into in the right-hand side of my mouth, just below the bottom lip!  It certain woke me up, and any lingering drowsiness was jabbed away in a concentrated moment of pain.

     Before you start thinking of wasting any sympathy on me and my injury, I would point out that the puncture is small and it looks more like a shaving nick than anything else – but still a wake-up call to the unwary to beware of seemingly domestic dental devices.

     When I checked the errant brush head, it did look a little worn and perhaps I should have replaced it earlier.

     Toothbrushes (and electric toothbrush heads) are in a category of simple things that could be easily and cheaply replaced but aren’t, until something happens.  This is a category they share with wooden kitchen spoons and spatulas; face flannels; tea towels and coffee mugs.

     Actually, the last item, the mug, is something that I will throw away as soon as I detect even the smallest chip or crack – some things are ingrained in your innermost soul by maternal edict that cannot, dare not be gainsaid.  My mother regarded a chip or crack in pottery and china as being as toxic as a vomiting fly, safe harbours for unmentionable and uncountable germs.  Discard instantly!  And I do.

     But the other things?  I have some wooden spoons (not thrown away) which look as though they were carved from a beam in the ark; tea towels that have only the faintest suggestion of pattern, others delicately threadbare.  Why?  They are so cheap to replace, and I am not known for my thriftiness – indeed, in certain respects I am an eager celebrant at the altar of planned obsolescence.  But you can almost read the history of our family in the tea towels that we use, whereas my purchases of watches or computers brings tears to the eyes of my bank manager, and untold you to manufacturers.

     I have known people (well, one person) who would refuse to go into a café for a cup of tea because of the mark-up on the cost of a cuppa compared with what he knew it cost at home.  He would actually wait outside the café while the rest of us imbibed in feckless luxury and then re-join us when we had finished our squander.  But for other things, he paid the price asked without question, even when the profit margin was just as substantial.  Ah well, one shouldn’t always look to logic to explain how humans work.

 

 

 

The radio in the kitchen is a Roberts and is Internet linked, so, in theory I should be able to get Radio 4 (without which civilized life is not even remotely possible) but the reception is unruly.  Toni has suggested a solution which involves turning the electrical wiring system into some 

 

sort of conduit for the Wi-Fi link to the internet.  All this involves is the purchase of a link from the router to the socket and then another link from the socket to the radio: one of those “plug and play” solutions.

       

     “Ho!  Ho!  Ho!” he laughed hollowly.  It didn’t work.

     The reason it didn’t work is that the link to the router has to be direct to the socket in the wall.  That, in this house is a problem.  Built in the days when a couple of sockets was more than enough for any home, the availability of power is an ongoing quest.  And an extensive use of extension leads.

     The router is in the living room and the radio is in the kitchen.  The area behind the television and almost hidden from view is a writhing mass of cabling for the basic electrical necessities of modern life.  There is no socket available for the frivolity of getting Radio 4 when so much else needs power.

     No problem.  We have another router on the third floor.  The house is built of concrete and is terrifyingly solid, wi-fi needs boosts to get all the computing machines to work, so all I had to do was find the socket on the third floor and we could try that.

     The third floor is my workroom.  It is also a comically unreal picture of cluttered chaos.  Bookshelves line the walls and extension plugs proliferate.

     Finding The Source of The Nile was one of the great stories of exploration and daring, but it pales into vapid insignificance when compared with the Search for the Socket on the Third Floor.

     There is no space.  For anything.  On the Third Floor.  If anything is moved, then something else must be moved to make a space for the thing that has been moved to a new location.  At the moment, when many, many things have been moved, the space looks like a vindictive labyrinth, and my progress from desk to stairs is in a slow undulating slink as I manoeuvre around insecure piles of stuff and am rewarded by sharp book corners biting into ankles and shins.

     Like some demented game, I followed power leads, trying to find their source – only to be frustrated by finding one trailing socket only led to another trailing socket, not to the true source of power.  Crouching, crawling, moving books to move bookcases, shining a torch behind pieces of furniture (and ofttimes being bewitched into reading volumes that I had not seen for some time, but then needed by immediate attention) I felt the full weight of despair.  Indeed, I began to doubt that that there was ‘a’ source of power – it (The Power) was numinous, it was ubiquitous, it was ‘there’ and not to be questioned or assumed to have a simple source: it simply Was.

     Well, that is fine and dandy thinking for Scholastic monks, but I needed the physicality of a plug.  Which I eventually found directly behind me.  A four-socket thing, with leads going off in all directions but, amazingly with one socket free.  End of story.

     No.  The lead supplied with the magic plug is too short to reach the router and the router cannot be moved.  So, in spite of all my misgivings about the pernicious influence of Amazon in the world today, necessity bent my principles (again) and a longer lead has been ordered and will be delivered to the door tomorrow.  When we will discover the next problem to cope with.  Plug and play indeed!

 

 

 

Tomorrow the Liceu is putting on a performance of an early Mozart Opera.  The original date of the performance has been changed twice.  The time of the performance has been brought forward by two hours, and the audience has been limited to 500 people.  Masked, we sit in a circle of empty seats – and are grateful that at least something is being done in the season.

     Because of the re-arrangement the cost of the ticket has been halved, and as I sit in an aisle seat in the front stalls, that is a considerable amount of cash!

     This is a concert version of the opera, which is never a truly satisfying way to see an opera, but it was always going to be a concert version so I have nothing to complain about there.  The countertenor in the piece has a wonderful voice and I only hope that it is enough to keep me interested in a less than convincing narrative – though there are powerful human passions behind those ordered notes!

     It will also give me an opportunity to see at least some of the Christmas Lights in Barcelona, and perhaps I will feel a little more of the spirit of the ‘festive’ time – though the only present that anyone really wants is a double dose of efficient vaccine!

 

The excavations on the Third Floor have revealed more items that will be added to my growing Catalogue Raisonné, including one thing that I had thought was long lost!  It is good to see that there is some gain from the pain of sorting out!