To float at last!

 

Loath though I am to admit it, three weeks exile from the pool and ‘forced labour’ in the gym has had some sort of effect.

     Today was Liberation Day when the pool was finally reopened after the (extended) period of Maintenance work.  This grim period usually extends over a fortnight, and I can just about tolerate the regime of light-use machine work that I devise to fill up an hour of exercise.  But this year the work was over three weeks, and that extra week was almost unsupportable.

     With the liberal use of Kindle on my mobile phone for the bike and the walk, I am usually able to get through to the end of my stipulated period of torture and feel justified in my monthly payment which is specifically for Gym & Pool, so I am entitled to be there, in spite of my pointedly ignoring the gym for eleven-and-three-quarters months of the year.

     Yesterday I ritually knocked the dust from my shoes and vowed that my return to that particular circle of Hell would be no sooner than one long calendar year’s time, when the Maintenance work must begin again.

     Meanwhile, at 6.30 am this morning I was first into the water of the newly maintained pool and relaxed into the comfort of an adequately heated environment and started my swim/exercise that starts my usual day.

     And this is where what I have been doing for the past three weeks (apart from a few carless days) comes into its own.

     I start my ‘swim’ with physio approved exercises that when I first did them just after my knee operations made me yelp with pain.  Pain that was stonily ignored by the physio themselves (they were a moveable feast of considerate torturers) as they urged me to further exertions.  Now, using the cushion of the water’s hold, I can do the exercises with some ease, even the knee bends that at one time I thought would be impossible short of general anaesthetic!

     After about 30 minutes of stretches and bends and a couple of leg paddle lengths using floats, I start my swim proper with a push off from the end and crawl with my face submerged.  At one time I could do a length and a half with no real problem, but I have struggled to complete 20m of the pool in recent times.  So, it was with considerable surprise that I effort-fully managed to do a full length of the pool, which surely indicates that I have not been wasting my time during the pool closure.

     My swim was engagingly interrupted by other ‘regulars’ indicating by voice and air pumps their appreciation of the re-opened pool.  And, I should add, I do not mean to give a one-sided picture of the facilities of our city.  There are other pools that we could have used, quite apart from a chunk of the Med that runs along the southern edge of Castelldefels and an outdoor community pool for our houses.  But Our Pool is different, and to use other (lesser) pools (or seas) would be, somehow, verging on the treacherous.

     There are five lanes in our 25m pool, and, in theory, they can accommodate three people in each lane.  In practice, this is not true as the side lanes have steps leading into the water restricting the width, and more than two swimmers in those is uncomfortable.  Therefore, in total, the pool will work best with (at maximum) about 13 swimmers – if those swimmers are doing lengths and not socializing.

     It was, therefore, with some degree of horror that a mother and two young children arrived and entered MY lane.  If anyone needed a definition of sacrilegious, then there it was, in every splash.  I will reserve my wrath, unless this becomes an habitual invasion!

    

     Luckily by the time this invasion occurred I had reached the end of the swim part of my time and I was doing the final set of exercises, so I was able to complete my time at the opposite end of the pool, and propriety was observed.

     I am relying on the fact that this was the first day of the reopening of the pool and that the numbers generally tail off as we regulars soldier on.

 

Lunch today in the Pool’s restaurant, was preceded by a glass of Cava, a tradition that could (I mused) be extended to cover a glass before my swim each day. 

     A passing thought.  Though a tempting one!

 

 

Exercise, Music, and Literature?

 

 

 

Waterproof headphones for swimming have their limitations.

     I remember thinking that I could make use of all those lengths in the swimming pool finally to listen to and get to know Beethoven’s Late Quartets.  Pretentious?  Moi?  I worked on the assumption that as I was ‘trapped’ in the water I could use the enforced concentration to break the barrier of my earlier dismissal of the music and find a new appreciation.

     In theory that was a good plan.  I downloaded some of the quartets to the memory of the headphones and prepared myself to be amazed.  And it didn’t work. 

     It wasn’t my prejudices getting in the way, it wasn’t that I didn’t listen, it was more the actual mechanics of the production of the music.

     Swimming is loud.  To the outsider it is just the gentle (in my case) parting of the water in an unobtrusive and fairly quiet crawl, but to the swimmer, especially with earplug-type headphones on the sound of the motion of the arms through water and the bubbles of air are more cacophony than anything else.  And the subtlety of Classical music with its sonic highs and lows is not the best way of cutting through the ambient swimmer’s sound to make a good listening experience.

     This is where pop music comes into its own with a thumping bass and a clear instrumental accompaniment to a strong singing voice or voices: those come through loud and clear, where most classical music does not.  And yes, I have tried bone conduction as well and it works, but only up to a point, and that point is far away from the texture that makes listening enjoyable.

     But now, for another week, I am in the gym as the ‘maintained’ pool begins to refill and whatever has had to be done during its three-week shutdown draws to an extended close.

     Goodness knows, swimming is basically boring – and I therefore have considerable admiration for those professional swimmers who simply have to do length after length after length (after length) to maintain their professional standard.  And I can see why the sheer tedium of training encourages many dedicated swimmer sportspeople to give up.  I do not, of course, pretend to be in that category in either the dedication or in the tedium, but I do like to be distracted during my swims and during my (enforced) sojourns in the gym while the pool is being serviced.

     With my daily swim I have divided up the hour and a quarter that I spend in the water by doing firstly a series of water-based exercises loosely based on what my physio told me I had to do after the knee operations.  I then do two lengths of leg-paddling using spaghetti floats, then two lengths of breast stroke, then umpteen lengths of front crawl with one of those ‘infinity’ floats clutched between my legs, to compensate for the disequilibrium that two new metal knee joints give, then two further lengths of leg-paddling and finishing with a modified form of the exercises with which I started.  So it is a varied mixture and anyway, the thought of a cup of tea in the adjoining café keeps me keen!

     I have established a pattern for the gym (only another week before the pool is back in use!) which comprises 1km on the rowing machine; 30 minutes on the cycle; 5 minutes on a sort of knee compression thing; 5 minutes on a variant of knee pressing, and a 5-minute walk.  I also, at some point, do the leg raising exercises that I usually do in the pool and discover that they are a bloody sight more difficult in the air!  And that is my hour done.

     Only the cycle affords the opportunity to do something other than suffer, and I have found that I can read on my mobile phone (everyone else uses their phones to establish a wi-fi link with the machines so that their exercise can be endlessly analysed, collated and admired.

     As the bike that I use has an actual back to it, one can luxuriate in moderate comfort and there is the sort of stability that makes reading a positive pleasure.  Except, reading what?  Rather like my pretentions to get to know the late quartets in my swim, I realize that what you need when doing exercise is something that does not demand a great deal of brain power to appreciate.  And I have found that the perfect fodder for a 30-minute static cycle is firstly to complete the Guardian ‘Quick’ crossword, that I will have started before I leave the house and then let myself drift away in the narrative nonsense of one of the ‘free’ digital books that a website regularly offers me.

      The last book I read during my cycling was an episodic, feel-good narrative sparked by the finding of a book list by various characters, a conceit that allowed character development and a pleasing circularity to the various story lines.

     The latest book is, or seems to be, an Egyptian murder mystery with references to the British Museum and King Tut and the puzzle of mysterious inscriptions and that sort of thing.  Ideal!

     I only hope that I can spin it out over the next week, when the water will then reclaim me and the constant attempt not to drown will be mind-filling enough to keep me occupied.

 

The Price of Exercise

 

 

 

“You know that the pool is closed?”  Was the question that greeted me this morning as I waited to get into the centre just before 8 am.  Yes, indeed I did know that the pool was closed and I was about to begin my via dolorosa of gym use for the next three weeks.

     As I went through my selected series of exercises, I was interrupted by a number of acquaintances who questioned my presence, with a smile it must be added.  And they sympathised with me as I explained the extra time that the pool would be closed.  And if anything their smiles grew wider.

     The interesting thing is why I am bothering to go to the gym.  The choice is mine after all.  I can choose to do something else for the next few weeks and not moan about doing something for which I have, to put it mildly, little enthusiasm.

     Why I do it is all down to self-knowledge.  I enjoy swimming.  I like the difference that water gives, it is a different element, and moving through water is not the same a moving through air.  When you have suspect knees then the support that water gives allows you to glide without artifical aids – an experience that is unique to the element.  I am also able to do my exercises that are supposed to strengthen my knees and the muscles that support my new bits inside those knees!

     There are some that enjoy hard physical exercise and thrive on the pain that comes with pushing oneself to the limits of physical endurance.  I am not one of those people, and I look for an easy life.  Generally.  So, left to my own devices I would probably let exercise slide and do my mental exercises inside the pages of a good book.

     Having an early morning swim, getting up at 5.45 am, takes effort.  If that effort can be integrated into a regime, then all the better, habits are difficult to shake off, the trick is doing something enough (if it is an effort) to make it into a habit.

     When I played squash I was a member of a squash league at my local leisure centre, that meant that I ‘had’ to play a certain number of games each month or I would be relegated.  It is the same methodology that keeps me doing a Duolingo exercise each day as I do not want to be relegated from the arbitrary league that the program has placed me in, and which encourages me to participate offering electronic digital inducements to keep myself applied.  We all need those incentives to keep us in line, because so few of us are real self-motivators.

     When I was in Cardiff, I used to swim early morning and after school.  After a day in work, virtually the last thing on my mind was calling into the David Lloyd Centre on my way home for a swim, and I spent the greater part of the journey home debating whether or not I really wanted to go for a swim.  Often that question was answered by the fact that I ‘found’ myself in the David Lloyd car park, while my internal debate was still going on.  Location trumping questioning!

     In a similar way, I go for a swim ‘most days a week’, it is a habit and I wake up at the appropriate time and get ready before I am fully awake!  It is built into the system that is me.  But, I also know that were I to break that system then the whole edifice of exercise will come tumbling down.  So, just because the pool is closed (other pools, and the sea are available) I know that I have to keep up the routine, even if it means going to the gym.

      One problem of gym going, as I found this morning, is that there is a different list of things that you must take to make the experience enjoyable and hygienic.  I forgot to pack another shirt ,and so I had to wear the soiled garment in which I exercised when I went for my cup of tea – luckily outside!

     And I learned my lesson.  Even though I liberally dowsed myself in Citronella, my sweat infused T-shirt attracted more than the usual tribe of blood sucking mozzies as punishment for my lack of preparedness.

   Tomorrow (Day 2 – only 20 to go, sigh!) I Will Be Prepared, and I will take a more potent repellent for fight off the desperation of the latter-part-of-the-summer insect life.

 

Stay in your lane!

 

 

 

Last night was not a good one.

     Incipient back ache developed during the night into one of those pains that while it wasn’t truly bad, it was bad enough to preclude the possibility of sleep.  And whatever position you choose, it is never the right one for any length of time.

     It reminded me of the horror (there really is no other word that captures it) that comes with trying to sleep in a horizontal position after having a complete knee replacement.  At its worst, my ‘sleep’ was limited to ten minutes from the time of hitting the mattress – not that’s not the right word, getting onto the bed was a tortuously slow process, as was getting up again – and giving up.

     Salvation during that period came from the reclining chair in the living room.  Although the foot rest part of the reclining process was never long enough to accommodate my height, it did allow me to adopt a three-quarter’s prone position that allowed at least fitful sleep – the sort that only occurs through exhaustion.

     What worked once for knees was pressed (literally with the reclining switch) into service for the back.  And to be fair, it did, sort of work.  The pain was still there, but it was almost like a ‘noises off’ effect and it allowed something approaching unconsciousness – a state I would not equate with real sleep.

     Because I go for a swim every morning during the week at 6.30 am, I am programmed to wake early and, even though the pool does not open until 8.00 am on the weekends, my internal body alarm does not differentiate, and I wake up at 5.45 am.

     Which I did this morning, and that gave me one and a half hours to debate with myself whether or not it might be a good thing to go for a swim or simply to stay at home, as, after a few tentative stretches it demonstrated that the pain in my back was still there.

     Eventually, I decided to go, as I reasoned that the water is supportive and I could adapt, tailor and truncate my pool activity to fit my pain threshold.

     The reality when I got into the pool showed that my decision not to skip a session was correct.  Not one of the exercise or stokes was so painful that it could not be done, and so I ended up completing a fairly normal session, with one or two of my exercises extended as I felt that the stretching might be beneficial.

     I cannot say that my swim has helped lessen the pain, which vividly reminds me of its presence when I move in certain ways, but I tell myself that I have exercised, and I have done my stretches, and so, even if I cannot feel the benefits immediately, it will help in the long run.  And in the short run there is the ever-present help of Paracetamol and pungent smelling unguent.  And looking at those two words ‘pungent’ and ‘unguent’ there must be some sort of linguistic link, that I am far too lazy to look up.

     Anyway, none of the above is the point that I set out to write about.  If you are in pain and the drugs and creams have had little effect, then you search for other ways to lessen the affliction.  And the swimming pool offers many.

     Ever since Covid our 25m swimming pool has been roped off into five lanes, and there is a booking system so that the lanes do not get overfull.  In theory each lane can take three swimmers as long as they swim in circles, or rather squashed ellipses.  This system depends on the three swimmers understanding the speed of the people sharing the lane and make due allowances, for example, allowing a stronger swimmer to overtake from time to time.  In theory this system works well.  In theory.

     In practice lanes are jealously guarded and any perfectly reasonable sharing is regarded more as an invasion.

     For example, I swim in lane 1, or lane 5, depending on how you look at it.  I have chosen (!) this lane because there is a hydraulic chair which lowers me into the water and the ladder that accompanies the equipment is particularly difficult to use.  With my two wonky knees I feel that I am more than entitled to use this ingress and egress, and I further feel that such a flamboyant entry surely entitles me to enjoy the lane in splendid isolation – and anyone sharing the lane will have to contend with the steps that jut out into the water and make a straight line difficult to keep.

     Although the basic stokes of swimming are well known, you only must compare two people swimming say crawl to see that their approach to the stroke is different.  In some cases, it is difficult to say with any confidence what particular official version of the common crawl or breaststroke that they are using.  The position of the hands, the length of the stroke, the turn of the head, the time underwater, the breathing, and the use of the legs and feet make an individual’s technique just that, individual.

     And then there is the amount of space that a person takes up when executing their brand of stroke.  The lanes are delimited by floats, they are, by definition, floating.  There is no separation vertically from the floats to the floor of the pool, only observation and consideration keep flailing hands, arms and feet inside the imaginary boundaries of an individual’s lane.

     Crawl is usually (just about) contained within the body’s width – though I have seen some versions of crawl where it is impossible to tell the difference between that and energetic drowning.  Breaststroke goes well outside the body’s width and if you are swimming your squashed ellipse in a lane with three swimmers and are near the floats then your hands and feet are almost certainly going to make your swimming into a contact sport.

     And then there is butterfly.  The sine qua non of selfishness in communal swimming – apart from one extraordinary occurrence I witnessed of a person swimming a width of backstroke when everyone else was swimming lengths!

     So, to lessen the paint of my backache I observed the tensions, the threats and the resentments that are inevitable when people seek to join an already crowded pool.

     As I start and end my session with a series of exercises based on the instructions from the physio who saw me through the first awful weeks after my operation, I have the opportunity to watch various dramas unfold with the barely concealed distate of people who think they are being hard done by.

     And it works.  I was more concerned about the human drama swimming around me than the pain tickling my back!

 

This & That

 

 

 

 In the compensatory way of Catalan weather, it is now gloriously sunny and raining!  I managed to get my tempest-delayed bike ride from this stormy morning in, just before the lashing rain thoroughly soaked me – and that last bit can be read in both ways, and both are right!

     In this part of the world, thunder sounds as if it is being ‘played’ by an over enthusiastic ASM in some ropey rep.  It grumbles away in the background until you suddenly feel as though you are in the front line in WW1 as a cataclysmic clap of thunder sounds as if it has taken over all of your immediate surroundings.

     As I have been typing, the rain has stopped and a sunny dampness has settled around the blissfully quiet pool, devoid as it is of persons of limited age.  It won’t be long before the determined sunshine chimes in with their youthful energy and the (imagined) solitude is rudely broken.  Again.

 

 We are approaching the two-week period when our local pool is closed for essential maintenance, or whatever.  This means that each year I have to decide about where I go to maintain my daily exercise.

     Let me be clear, only the pool is closed, all other aspects and facilities of the centre are available.  My knees preclude padel, so the only other alternative is To Go To The Gym.

     When I first came to join this centre, I was given the guided tour by one of the managers who asked, “Would you like to see the gym?”  To which I replied, “No.”  I was there for the covered 25m pool and nothing else.

     I am not going to the other main pool in Castelldefels because I have bad (and expensive) memories of using the place, so my choice in past years has been to go to the municipal pool in the neighbouring town of Gavà (Gavá, in Spanish) which means that I have to use my bike to wing the desolate abyss (an unlighted link road) between Castelldefels and my destination pool, with frankly rather frightening traffic obviously resenting my presence on the tarmac!

     This year, however, I am seriously considering To Go To The Gym in the pool with a much shorter bike ride, and most of it on an actual bike lane!  My reasoning is, that if I can find a gym instructor who lacks that sadistic side that seems a common factor in so many of their approaches to exercise regimes, and someone who actually appreciates the bone-on-bone reality of arthrosis, then I could profitably do some exercises to strengthen by leg muscles to show willing by the time I (finally) get to the traumatologist where something might be done.  I have to admit, I am not entirely convinced by that reasoning, and I am telling myself that the early morning cycle ride to Gavà in the dark was frighteningly exhilarating and availing to good.

     The internal debate can continue until the 5^th of September (when I have a delayed routine hospital appointment in the morning) but by the 6^th I will have to have decided.  Probably before then, because the days of just popping into a pool and being able to have a swim, post pandemic simply do not exist.  So, some planning needs to be done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I sit in the sunshine drinking my tea and adding pepper to my tortilla francesa baguette I am often regaled by music that is entirely unknown to me, piped to the outside sitting area by who knows who inside.  Most of it washes over me, but occasionally I perk up a little and take notice.

     Yesterday was one such day because part of the lyrics of one of the songs sounded odd to me.  The song (I have since discovered) was a “collaboration” between Yves V, INNA & Janieck.  How it took that many to write the deathless lyrics or the equally deathless tune, is somewhat beyond me, but one particular line stuck out, “You haunt me like a déjà vu” (written without the accents in the original, but let it pass, let it pass – and I might add that they were added automatically by Word when I typed them and not with my fingers.) 

     And I realized that I have never seen the phrase used like that.  Yes déjà vu is a noun, but I had never seen, or indeed heard the phrase with only an indefinite article to keep it company “a déjà vu.” One hears things like, a sense of déjà vu; it is déjà vu; it was déjà vu; a feeling of déjà vu, but never, “a déjà vu.”  In the chorus of the song the first line uses “a déjà vu” but the repeat is “You haunt me like déjà vu” which is how I would use it.

     Obviously, using the indefinite article is not in any sense wrong, but it is odd that it is generally not done.

     I am now wondering if I should find an opportunity and try out the song’s way of using the phrase and see how it sits with my way of expression.

          

                    Words, I love them!

 

 

Frustration and release

 

 

 

Most days I get up at 6.15 am to get ready for my morning swim at 7 am in the local pool.  As it is August, I have the luxury of a lie in until 7.15 am as the pool opens at 8 am for that month.

     I would like to say that I feel a sense of smug satisfaction for rising so early and taking physical exercise before many people have stirred from their beds - and I suppose I do.  But, the thing is that I find it difficult to stay in bed after my accustomed rising time.  When I was working I went for a swim before work started and I have sort of continued that regime.  If truth be told, I do not really ‘lie in’ with any degree of sincerity.  At the time that I need to get up, I get up and if I try and stay in bed I feel uncomfortable.  So, my soft, musical alarm on my mobile phone goes off and I get up.

     This morning, my arrival at the pool was greeted by what appeared to be a small meeting at the gate.  It turned out that the increasing murkiness of the water in the pool over the last couple of days had prompted the technical services to Do Something and thus “product” had been added to the water, but for the “product” to work, we swimmers had to be excluded.

     The helpful message from management that the pool was closed was sent to members of the leisure centre via email at 10.10 am today, that is some two hours after we arrived to start our swim.  Sigh!

     I made the best of a bad job and decided to go for an extended bike ride from the pool to Port Ginesta, so that I could tell myself that I had kept up my morning exercise.

     Admittedly the effort of cycling those kilometres was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I have an electric bike and I make full (full!) use of its electric capabilities, but it is still exercise under the meaning of the act and as such it is duly recorded by my Smartwatch and adds to my daily PAI rating (whatever that is) – one of those acronyms linked to health and exercise that, in spite of its meaning being ambiguous (or even unknown) is something I take semi-seriously and try and maintain a rating of 100 or as near as I can get.  Because, yes.

     Not only did I go all the way to the beach in Port Ginesta, but I also went as far as the Gavà bike lane could take me in the opposite direction, which amounts to a total of 17.85 km which, even on an electric bike (for me) is quite a lot.

     Not that the electric bike is my only form of ‘personal’ transport.  The electric scooter was taken out of the boot of the car AGAIN yesterday and I used it to get to our favourite ice cream shop as a jaunt to get out of the house.

     I am not a natural bike rider, but I am semi-professional compared with my shaky progress on the scooter.  On the scooter, like a highly-strung thoroughbred horse, I am spooked by: anything other than a completely level surface, traffic, people, turns, crossings, pavements, other scooter users, hills, slopes and the state of the world.  I do not, I have to admit, exude confidence when I am a-wheel, but it is the only way that I can match Toni’s walking without having to pay the price in pain for days afterwards!

     So far, my two trips on the scooter means that I have paid 150 euros per trip, given the total cost of the purchase.  A sobering thought.

 

 

The weather is a little cooler, I think, but that doesn’t make me particularly happy.  Yes, the sort of heat that we have been experiencing has been of a different quality than in previous years, but I’d still prefer that to the cold of winter – that any diminution of heat now makes me far is almost upon us!  But that is only may paranoia speaking.  I hope.

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 79 – Tuesday, 2nd June

It doesn’t help that my head is buzzing not only with the rules and regulations modified on the hoof in Spain and Catalonia, but also the nonsensical doublethink of Orwellian proportions that cover the gibberings of various ministers as they constantly try and square the political circle on various media outlets.

     No one really knows what is going on.  Forget for a moment the on-going series of lies, deceptions, mendacity and invention that are linked to the Unicorn figures regarding testing that Hancock delivers to a sullenly disbelieving audience; and set aside too, the fantasy that is rapidly growing up around the Track and Trace fiasco, what we are left with are a series of instructions/suggestions/laws/stimuli for the instinct/or whatever that are supposed to cover our actions during our daily life.

     I know that I can go out for exercise during certain times (distinctions that appear to be generally ignored in Castelldefels); I know that I can go to the shops to get essential goods whenever I like; I know that I can go to a restaurant and eat on the terrace of same, but I can’t go inside, or go to the loo; I know that I think that I can meet others outside in a park or a garden – but anything from this point onwards is just a bit hazy.

     It all reminds me of school.  But then most things do, it is difficult to be a teacher for thirty years and not use that experience as a sort of range of reference.  So, anyway, rules.  Every school that I have taught in or been in has a series of rules.  It might be an infant’s school, or a secondary school or the Open University, they all have rules.  And very necessary they are too, at their best they allow you to know where you are and they give you the satisfaction of knowing limits.  But.

     And there is always a ‘but’.  Take one school rule from my past: “When pupils have entered the school buildings, they must take their outdoor coats off.”  Let us, for a moment, forget about the raison d’etre for this rule, if indeed there ever was one.  Just consider the rule.  It is simple and easy to see if it is being obeyed.  As the pupils came into the school after break or the lunch hour, teachers were monitoring their entrance and could therefore urge the pupils to obey the rule.  Which I did.  In spite of the fact that I couldn’t see the point of the rule.  Take off coats in the classroom?  Yes, I could see the point there.  Take them off as soon as they entered the school buildings?  Why?  Still, I did my duty and asked hundreds of kids to “Take your coat off!” and carry it.

    In every staff meeting where rules were discussed I urged the abolition of what I saw as a completely pointless rule.  Every one!  But I got scant support.  Even from those members of staff whom I had seen (with my own eyes!) disobeying the instruction to tell the kiddiewinks to obey, but in front of the senior staff they all became rule enforcers, and to hell with reality.

     The rules of lockdown are there and people obviously can agree with them, because it for their own health and safety.  But in reality rules are always for others, or they are like Schrodinger’s Rules, they apply and they do not at the same time.  If other people break the rules then they become glaringly obvious and essential to maintain, whereas if you break then, then it’s . . .

    

Every day seems to bring evidence of the deliberate attempt of government to humiliate and denigrate the people that they are supposed to serve.  In Britain the latest idiocy of Rees-Mogg in forcing parliamentarians to come in person to the Palace of Westminster to vote was, after a three-line whip from Johnson, was passed.  This effectively disenfranchises those members who are over 70, with childcare issues and those with conditions that mean that they should shelter.  All that forced through to get Johnson some sort of crowd so that his glaring deficiencies are moderated by baying support from the rabid sheep of the Conservative party.

     In the USA, Trump’s forcing a cordon sanitaire through peacefully protesting demonstrators who were there because of the murder of George Floyd, just so the spiteful inadequate could have a photo op in front of a church holding a bible upside down, was low even for a semi evolved life form like Trump.  He never fails to find new depths of squalid self-referential unfeeling vulgarity. 

     Vile populist governments, demonstrating, with a sickening lack of regard, just how much they think of the people who misguidedly elected them, unite both sides of the Atlantic.

     God help us all!