Oh god, not him!

 

 

 

There is surely nothing more engineered to foster confidence about the Brexit talks than to see the charlatan Gove (the love child of a defrocked pixie and a gobby goblin) skuttling his elven way to Brussels to – to do what exactly?  To add his five pennyworths of facile, slimy lies to the morass of doublespeak that is the British ‘position’ in what should be negotiations?   

     God help us all when that chubby cheeked cheat speaks for Britain!  Still, I suppose Gove can use his White Queen trick of believing five impossible things before breakfast to encourage his verbiage (conveniently forgetting his previous belief that Johnson was supremely unfit to become prime minister) and marching forward to defend the indefensible.

     I felt physically sick when, on the news this evening, I heard that the British Government had offered up as a bargaining chip to bring the discussion to a ‘satisfactory’ conclusion the offer not to behave illegally!  How jolly decent of them because, of course, an Englishman’s word is his bond, unless it isn’t.   

     How the EU side can stop themselves from treating the shambles of the British position with anything other than contempt, I really do not know.

    

Let’s face it, at this stage of the “Never ending, stor-ree!” (just thought that I would throw in a reference to the true earworm that music is) the only thing motivating the British side is not, emphatically not, Britain.  Our negotiators couldn’t give a toss for the country and the bulk of the people in it.  Fishermen, the population of Northern Ireland, businesses, imports and exports, areas of deprivation, they have all been thrown off the bus – you know the one that the liars’ liar Johnson paints for recreation – and the members of Johnson’s third or fourth rate cabinet merely look to their wealth as they crunch over the bones of the suckers who ever thought that they might be of concern to them.

     The Conservative Party, as we are regularly told, is one of the most successful political parties in the western world, and it has got its power and its longevity by a callous disregard for anything other than its own survival.  If they do good, like the 1944 Education Act, it is almost by mistake, and they certainly did not reward the architect of that act, RAB Butler with leadership of the party when the time came to choose.

     Johnson, the Man Who Would Be Prime Minister, does not have the intellectual or moral worth to be able to sustain the role.  He has got to where he is today by systematically lying and showing utter disregard to anyone and anything other than himself and his ambition.

     His empty rhetoric way wow blue rinsed ladies of various Conservative Associations, but it doesn’t work when practical things have to be decided on the basis of that rhetoric.  Johnson has no interest in the rules and regulations that govern institutions, he is, as virtually everyone has pointed out, not a details man.  Unfortunately (for us) he has become prime minister at a time when a details man is exactly what is needed.  Rhetoric kills – look at the number of Covid deaths in the UK.  Rhetoric destroys – look at industry still desperately asking the government for leadership and information about what is going to happen in a few weeks’ time.

     “Get Brexit Done!” – the perfect meaningless jingle for Johnson, allowing him to sound dynamic while the empty platitude played well with people who wanted simplicity in an almost terminally complex situation.

     Now we are in the final days when all the detail that Johnson hates so much is everything.  Rhetoric has to be written down in legalistic words where there is no wriggle room for gaudy metaphor and inept simile.

     Johnson’s shoddy, corrupt government now has come to the crux of negotiations.  Real things have to be decided and the only, the absolutely only (I know that is tautology, but I feel it fits here) thing that is motivating Johnson is what he can get away with.

     He will, as he always has done in the past, junk anything and anyone to get what he wants.  His situation is desperate: No Deal will be a financial disaster, and even his most stupefied followers will have to own and admit it eventually; a thin deal will please nobody as everyone will feel hard done by; a generous deal will be regarded by the Brexit fanatics as an act of treason.  There is nothing that Johnson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy everybody.  Perhaps there is nothing that Jonson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy anybody.  And he is going to have to own it.  And he will not be able to do that.

     I can imagine somebody doing the sums (Johnson is far too lazy to do them himself, and besides he doesn’t really know who is in his party anyway) and trying to work out which deal would be the less disastrous.  And the disaster will not be related to the people of Britain it will be directly linked to the fortunes of the Conservative Party.  Politics, not logic or faith or economics or fairness or justice, is going to determine what we get from the “oven ready” deal that has taken four long years to cook.

     And unless Johnson uses the “Long Covid Symptoms” to fabricate himself a get out of parliament card, then he is going to have to own the disaster of his making in years more of his narcissistic premiership, when we will continue to pay the price.

 

I put that bad feeling that you have just read down to the fact that I got to the swimming pool an hour early this morning.  Today was ¡Fiesta! and tomorrow will be an extra day of holiday so instead of opening at 7 am it will open at 8.  An extra hour in bed?  Not really, I am programmed to get up, or at least get ready to get up, at 6.15 am, and if I say in bed longer I feel that I am cheating and I do not get any real benefit.  It is easier to get up at the normal time and do neglected housework to make the time feel valuable, and to give myself a warm glow of self-satisfaction!

     But today I forgot about the holiday and so I had to come back home and do neglected housework etc etc and complete the Guardian Quick Crossword, rather than fill in a single clue and then leave it for later after the swim.

 

 [Yes, I know this image is not upright, but it's too late and I'm too tired to re-jig it]

My catalogue raisonné continues apace with items of little value, but some interest, filling the pages.  Compiling the catalogue is forcing me to look again at some things that I have ignored for years.  For example, I have decided to list a copy of The Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde.  This is a volume printed in 1912 with a soft brown suede cover stamped with an interesting Art Nouveau flower design and with the title stamped in gold.  It is not particularly valuable, but it was bought by my father to give to my aunt who in turn gave it to me a quarter of a century later after my father’s death. 

     The suede is rotting and has an unpleasant feel to it, the binding is unravelling, the pages yellowing – and yet, it is important to me.  There is always something about reading the actual pages that people important to you have read before you, whose hands have held the volume in the way that you are holding it.

     Yes, I realize that this is Romantic nonsense, but it doesn’t make the oddly satisfying feeling I have when I handle the book any less real to me.

     A worthy addition to the catalogue!  And it takes my mind off other things.

 

 

 

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 98 - Sunday 21st June

Sitting on the spacious terrace of the third floor, warmed by the low summer sun of the early evening, drinking a cup of my brew of English Breakfast and Earl Grey and with a view of three swimming pools in the sort of open quadrangle formed by flats and houses – what could be more pleasant?

     The clue to disharmony is in the “three swimming pools”, no, not the swimming pools, it’s the conjunction of swimming pools and children that take away delight.

     Apart from lunchtime, where I had our communal pool to myself, and in which I was able to do “open water swimming” as the only setting that my watch recognizes the circles that I swim in a pool which is markedly smaller than the commercial pool that I use for my morning swims, these pools attract kids in the same way that lies attract Conservative cabinet ministers: they flock to them as if their very lives depend on them.

     This is all, you might say, very normal.  What child is not attracted to glittering water and in your own backyard?  Indeed, I welcome young people finding delight in the chlorinated waters of their pools, it is the noise that accompanies their delight that irritates.

     Today, for example, there seemed to be some sort of infernal timetable linking all three pools: screaming kids in one pool has no sooner gone than they were followed by shouting kids in another who augmented their lusty voices with explosives, and when their pyrotechnic noisiness eventually diminished their baton of cacophony was passed on to the third pool where very young kids shrieked while belabouring the water with those polystyrene spaghetti floats that make a penetrating slapping sound when applied to the pool’s surface.

     As if this is all not enough, there has been a resurgence of the moronically irritating game (sic) of Marco Polo.  This ‘game’ consists of one person (if children can be called such!) calling out ‘Marco!’ to which all the others reply (you’ve guessed it!) ‘Polo!’  This can go on for what seems like hours and I am convinced that any adult jury would acquit any mature act of infanticide if the ‘game’ had been played for longer than a couple of minutes.

     I think that it is important to have a ready crop of niggles such as the above during a pandemic as they take your mind away from the more pressing problems of life and death that our dear political leaders seem so incapable of managing.

      Here in Spain and Catalonia we have now officially come out of the State of Emergency and from Monday we will be living the New Normal.

     As I now rarely go to the shops and my sphere of geographical wandering is generally circumscribed by the shore to the south and my swimming pool to the north that my observation of humanity is necessarily compressed.  I see thousands of people along the beach as I go on my daily bike rides, but it is difficult to extrapolate from people sitting under parasols to the general population.  Yes, I watch the new on TV, but when did that ever give a balanced view of life!

     Monday will mean, for me, the opening up of the swimming pool.  More people will be allowed to swim and, O Joy!, we will be able to use the showers after we have completed our lengths.  You simply do not feel clean after swimming in a water-treated communal pool.  We will still have to wear masks when we are not 2m distancing, but there will be more of us around.  I think.  I wait to see what real differences there will be.

Today has been (generally) sunny and, as it is a weekend the beaches have been packed.  As far as I can tell, people are sitting in their domestic bubbles and are trying to leave some sort of space around themselves so that there is some physical distancing.

     The age groups that are least likely to practice distancing are also those who have been described as the most likely to be asymptomatic carriers – the age group 20-40, with the age group 20-30 being the most threatening to those who are sheltering or are in the age group that is the most vulnerable to infection.  Like mine!

     Spain has opened itself up for tourists – even for British ones, and that shows how desperate they are to try and salvage something from the ravished holiday period if they are prepared to take people from the European centre of viral mismanagement, infection and death: the UK!  Benidorm is desperate for the Brits to come and drink themselves into insensibility, and the bar owners and the hoteliers are prepared to risk death rather than have empty premises.

     And, to be fair, who can blame them?  Economic activity must restart, the whole of society depends on people earning money, spending money, and paying taxes.  As with so many things, it is a balancing of threats that will point to the way ahead.

     The trouble is that the British government, in spite of their oft repeated mantra of “We are following the Science!” gives the impression of making up their responses as they go along – mainly because that is exactly what they are doing.  The number of rubber-burning screeching U-turns show that they are basically clueless, and the ‘political’ and ‘populist’ are of supreme importance, and certainly of greater significance than the lip service they pay to experts and science.  And morality!

     Still, we are where we are, and we have to deal with what we have rather than what might have been if Johnson and his cabinet of third-raters had been even marginally competent.

     I am still waiting and willing to make a donation to the fund that will enable something like justice to take place so that Johnson and his cabinet are taken to court to face a charge of corporate manslaughter for the way in which the Covid-19 crisis has been mismanaged.

     And when is the Inquiry going to be established?  We need it now, so that the egregious mistakes that accompanied the primary outbreak are not repeated in the almost inevitable second peak.  Johnson and his crew have killed enough and too many, they must not be allowed to career onwards without the information from an exhaustive inquiry to guide them in the future.

     The future, let’s face it, is murky to say the least.  Given how the world has changed in the last 12 weeks, it is difficult and frightening to think about what our world will be like in another 12.

     It is difficult to be depressed in a sunny seaside town where most of the people are having fun and relaxing.  But that last word is also dangerous, at a time like this true relaxation is dangerous and possibly fatal.  By all means enjoy the sunshine; swim, walk, cycle, eat and play – but be aware, be safe.

     ‘Relaxation’ from 12 weeks ago is an historical memory, we have to redefine the word and the world in terms of the New Normal so that it becomes ingrained, a way of life.  A way of Life!