LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 100 – Tuesday 23rd June

Perhaps it’s fitting that the 100^th day of Lockdown is on the eve of one of the more anarchic festivals in the Catalan calendar - San Juan.

     I have put down the blinds in the living room to limit the sonic bombardment that will continue spasmodically for hours and hours and hours.

     I decided not to do a tour on my bike this evening I am going to try and emulate the sleep that I had last night that my watch informed me was better than 99% of users!  I don’t remember it being that profound, but perhaps that is the point!

     I do realise that I should have had a glass of Cava and a piece of coca (the bready hot cross bun like cake) to be traditional for San Juan, but I celebrated with yogurt ice cream!  It is also at times like this that I think about my last drink of Cava, or indeed of any alcohol if it comes to that.  It has now stretched into years.  I can’t say that I truly miss alcohol, though a nice glass of decent red wine with a meal is a nagging desire from time to time!  And I always used to like a glass, or even a bottle, of Cava.  Ah, times past!

     Today has been one of those pleasantly ‘nothing’ days where I did more recreational reading of a novel and The Guardian with a little sunbathing with of course my bike ride and swim.

     I also hoovered the stairs and I was horrified at the amount of dirt that the activity produced.  My little robots do the level surface cleaning, and I await with considerable impatience a commercially available robotic stair cleaner!

     Around me the rumbling of explosions is now almost continuous, but I sense that the campaign of noise is not as overwhelming as it has been in years past.  Perhaps it is yet another tradition that is having to cope with the limitations of the virus.

     Tomorrow is classified as a fiesta and so the swimming pool is open an hour later.  I can’t be bothered to change my alarm and so I will have the delight of waking up to go to sleep again – though the danger there is that you oversleep and you also lack the backstop of a later alarm.  I like living dangerously!

      I am now off to bed, no doubt my dreams using imagery from the First World War to work the whizz-bangs into a surrealistic narrative!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 99 – Monday 22nd June

Day 1 of the New Normal in the swimming pool.  We still have to book our time, but more people are allowed during the hour.  How this is going to work out I’m not sure as, today, there were few enough people for one-per-lane as previously.  The difference was that we were given a key for a locker (whereas previously we had to pack our clothes and take them with us to the pool side) which we had to disinfect before use and after we had dressed at the end of our swim.  The showers were open for use.  I assume that, for the foreseeable future, this will be the way that we swim nowadays, with the major difference being that we have to book times rather than simply turn up.

     The weather was good today and there were plenty of people on the beach, but it was noticeably quieter than over the weekend.

     We are building up to tomorrow evening, the eve of San Juan when there will be bangers, drinking and picnics.  At least that was the case in all previous years, it remains to be seen how the pandemic and physical distancing will change the experience of the fiesta.

     There have been a number of explosions during the past few days, with the kids next door seeming to take teatime around 5pm as an excuse to cavort around the streets setting off the sort of fireworks which are sure to get a chorus of dogs barking in distress.  They are completely unsupervised by adults and every bone in my fussy pedagogic body aches to do something and my channelling of Victor Meldrew also aches to shout something admonitory out of the window!

     Tomorrow evening I may well draw down the shutters and retreat to my armchair with a good book, or alternatively I might mosey down the maritime road to see what people are doing!

     San Juan is one of those festivals where slightly rowdy behaviour is encouraged and the throwing of the Catalan equivalent of penny bangers is almost mandatory.  Kids usually equip themselves with what look like the old fashioned Smiths Crisps twists of salt, but in this case they are of gunpowder and they make a most satisfying ‘bang!’ when thrown on the pavement.  There doesn’t seem to be an age limit for this form of anti-social behaviour and parent and grandparents look on approvingly as their kids waltz about in a mist of explosives!  Each to his own!

     Usually the explosions go on for most of the night, there doesn’t seem to be a cut-off at 10 pm – which is the usual time for the stopping of noise making.  This fiesta encourages that petty decency to be ignored and loud explosions go on until the small and sometimes the larger hours!  I wonder, though, if it will be the same this year?  All things are different.

On Wednesday most places will be closed as it is a national holiday, but I intend to go for a swim, perhaps go for an exploratory bike ride to see what the beaches are like after the festivities of the night before and keep myself very much to myself.  I stocked up on food and essentials before the weekend and I don’t need to go out for anything until the end of this week.  Television will have to be my eye on the world – that and Radio 4 and the World Service of the BBC of course.

The tasks that I set myself for the last few days have been completed or compromised with varying degrees of satisfaction.  I rely, yet again on the old family wisdom of “Anything is better than nothing!”

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 97 - Saturday 20th June

[This entry is out of sequence because of the vagaries of my ‘vintage’ laptop where the program froze and nothing worked.  After forcing a ‘quit’ the day afterwards, I discovered that most of the entry had been lost when I eventually started the program up again and tried to find the writing that I had done.

I am going to leave this as I found it, as an example of the tyranny of locking your writing to a machine!]

The day was punctured by explosions as we are reminded that we are working our way towards San Juan when the setting off of petados is encouraged, with kiosks springing up along the paseo selling explosives.  This day and the days around it are the equivalent of Guy Fawkes Day, though with more loud noises than flamboyant fiery inscriptions in the sky.  It is, of course, a nightmare for dogs, though I am (callously) open to the more spindly-legged rat dogs suffering terminal shock as one way of stopping their endlessly squeaky pseudo-barks.

     In previous years the most worrying aspect of the festivities are kids setting off penny-bangers, the sort of things that have long been banned in the UK, but here are probably regarded as a hallowed tradition that some right-wingers will probably urge should be regarded as part of the Patrimony of Humanity – the sort of designation that PP wants connected to bull fighting and other grotesque practices.

     It will be revealing to see just how many people turn up on the beach of Castelldefels as there is a tradition of staying up all night drinking around a camp fire that has been progressively modified over the past few years.  It is now illegal to light fires on the beach and public drinking is always frowned upon in this country.  During a pandemic what sort of physical distancing should be taking place.  What will the police be doing during the festival?  How desperate are people to get back to what they know and love?  It all waits to be seen.

The app for booking my swim seems to have gone a little haywire.  A previous booking for tomorrow has disappeared though the booking procedures for next week still seem to be in place, but with double or even more places available, but I was told that all restrictions had been removed.  This does not seem to be the case, but I am sure that things will be made a little plainer when I go to my swim in the morning.  Or not of course!

Today has not been as productive a day as yesterday and I even found myself dozing off after lunch!  But I have managed to get some of the more basic tasks done, even though the place is still looking a little dishevelled as I have not tidied up my tidying up, if you see what I mean.

I am re-reading some of Steven Saylor’s Mysteries of Ancient Rome on my Kindle and thoroughly enjoying them.