LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 27 – Holy Saturday in Holy Week, 11th APRIL

We are waiting to hear what the traffic flow is like.  Spain and the UK have both emphasised that no one (except of course for Conservative Ministers) should travel during the Easter weekend.  We should all stay at home.  So far a large number of fines have been imposed on those who attempted to make the journey to second homes or to the beach.  The story of a group of people form the UK attempting to go on holiday to France via private jet both shocks and also doesn’t surprise: the rich assuming that rules are only for the poor.  Again.

     As I keep saying, I do realise that I am in a fortunate position being in a spacious home with access to a communal pool for my solitary walk – though today there was an entire family of parents and little girl in the tennis court next to our pool: on parent walking while the other played with the kid.  We even said, ¡Hola! to each other.  At a safe distance.  Such is community: you best show community spirit by shunning it!

The number of deaths reported in the UK continues to horrify and I have little faith in the ability of the government to organize themselves with sufficient efficacy to limit the growth in the numbers.  The distribution of masks and other PPE seems limited and the testing is little short of scandalous.

     In Catalonia we are entitled to a free mask, allegedly waiting for us in our local pharmacy, with the option to buy another mask.  Toni will have to find out if this is true by calling in to the pharmacy when he gets fresh bread.  It will at least be a small step in the right direction in coming to terms with the reality of the virus.

     Some firms in Spain are asking their workers to come back to work after the Easter Bank Holiday.  This is essential for the recovery of the economy, but I do not see how this can be done with any real degree of safety without adequate testing in place.  Some workplaces are simply not conducive to social separation and, with the best will in the world, people forget to be paranoid all the time and allow recently learned essential behaviour to slip.  Wearing a facemask is unpleasant and wearing it with glasses is clumsy and therefore all too likely to be pushed down or up rather than used constantly.

     You can sense, even in isolation, that people have a natural wish to ‘return to normality’ but if that totally understandable wish is allowed too soon, the end results will be deadly.  And, why should we expect or even want previous ‘normality’? 

     This virus and its progress and particularly the way that it has been dealt with by the politicians would seem to me to indicate in a blazingly obvious way that things must not be the same after this crisis.  The measures, financial, social and political that have been brought into play to cope with the crisis illustrate as clearly as possible the inadequacy of the previous financial, social and political measures.  Why should we return to proven, failed ways of life?

     You think of measures like guaranteeing a working wage; of housing the homeless; of supporting the NHS; of protecting people with disabilities – all the things that our austerity government previously said were unaffordable: now funded.  Failing railways renationalized; small businesses supported – no Socialist idea rejected!  If it can be done now, it could have been done then.  If it can be done now, it can go on being done.  If we pay money to keep airlines alive, then we own them.  We have already had the obscenity of Tesco receiving a governmental emergency handout and then paying a dividend to their shareowners.  How long do we go on encouraging with our money (and though I live in Catalonia I pay British taxes too) those who boost the inequalities in our society, giving ever more money to those who already have?  It seems to me that the message of one of the badges that I used to wear god knows how many years ago of “Eat the rich!” is more relevant now than it was then!  And what a condemnation of our political ‘progress’ that is.

     We cannot allow the billionaires and the big companies to pretend that they have nothing to do with the situation in which we find ourselves, not obviously in the making of the virus (though in my more paranoid conspiracy theory moments, I have my doubts!) but in the way that the government was equipped to deal with it.  Private Enterprise does not, essentially, care for us.  It is driven by profit and not by concern.  In times of crisis, it fails and allows government to ride to the rescue, and then, when things are better, it goes back to doing what it does best: exploit!

There is cloud cover, but intermittent sunshine – I’m not sure what this encourages on a population that really wants to get out and about.  Perhaps if it was blazing sunshine it would be more of a temptation, this neither one thing nor the other encourages people to go back indoors and watch something else on Netflix.  Probably.

Well, back to my daily poem.  I have an idea, its now just the working it up to be something that I can call a draft.  Check out what I have already written this Holy Week on smrnewpoems.blogspot.com

    

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 23 – Tuesday in Holy Week, 7th APRIL

A lie-in this morning.  I did wonder what it was that made the extra time in bed seem like a good idea and then I remembered my expedition of yesterday to get the weekly shop, and the even more stressful disinfecting each of the purchased items before they were put away!

     It shows how bizarre the times are, that something as mundane as shopping has become a major event, for which recuperation (i.e. a lie-in) is regarded as no more than reasonable.

Although some of those in Catalan public life, including politicians have tested positive for Covid-19 none of whom I am aware has been taken to intensive care like the British Prime Minister.  Being in medical danger does simplify reactions to political enemies: there can be no excuse for not wishing Johnson well and extending sympathy to his family.  His illness will not stop the blame game both for and against Number 10, but his personal situation can now be considered in terms of the stability of government and the smooth transition of leadership to designated deputies rather than his personal day-to-day involvement in the continuing crisis.

Each day on Catalan TV we have political representatives explaining the latest situation and taking questions.  Each day we are told about the growing number of fines and even detentions linked to people ignoring the demands of the lockdown.  Pictures of people in public parks in South London and in Roath Park in Cardiff have been widely circulated to public dismay, but those of us in generous accommodation with space for separation and access to terraces or other ‘open’ enclosed spaces can only guess at the tensions for those living in inner-city cramped flats, possibly with kids, or with individual family members self-isolating within a domestic space.  In these circumstances the escape to an open space in welcome sunshine must be an almost impossible to resist temptation.

As is drink.  Catalan television has shown emptying shelves of booze in supermarkets, especially beer (or what passes for it in this country) sales of which have gone up by a substantial amount during this crisis.  This is one facet of life which passes me by.  Not, I must admit, though strength of character and commendable restraint, but rather through medical insistence.  I have not had an alcoholic drink for a couple of years and, apart from a certain hankering with some meals where a glass of decent red would go down a treat; I have not really missed it.

     Of more importance to me are those things with sugar and fat that seem to make up the more interesting sorts of foods that I ought to shun, but in times of crisis it would be inhuman not to have a treat from time to time to keep one’s sanity – and the square of dark chocolate with bits of caramel was just the thing!

On my pool walk today I was stymied at first by a pool worker being there before me.  Rather than walk around the worker, I decided to let him get on with his job without my distracting presence.  It was interesting that, although he was working by himself, he was wearing a facemask.

     When I went for my delayed walk after lunch, I was soon joined by a neighbour with a pram and we walked around the pool on opposite sides, keeping a damn sight more than two metres social distance between us!  Today I have observed others utilizing my exercise space, including a neighbour’s daughter attempting to make an (aided) circuit on a monocycle – that smacks of a father getting increasingly desperate to keep his progeny amused.

     And we have at least three more weeks of this!

The draft of the third poem in my sequence of poems in Holy Week can be found at smrnewpoems.blogspot.com

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 12

The Covid-19 statistics in Spain make sobering reading.  We are now at the top of the league for daily deaths and our total has overtaken that of China.  With over fifty thousand reported cases of infection the fear is that the situation will get worse before we see a flattening of the curve and a distant view of a way out of this crisis.

     And yet, my life goes on in the oasis of assumed safety and normality of my home and I write this with the comfortingly ordinary sound of the new robot mop making its stately progress across the tiled floor of the living room; the dishwasher rumbling away to itself as it goes through its own cleaning cycle; and the dregs of my first cup of tea of the morning cooling at my side.  But no noise of traffic; no sound of overhead planes landing in Barcelona airport; no sound of kids playing; no sound of workmen next door.

     Catalonia is a noisy country and a large part of social life is conducted outside the house.  As an example, the dinner parties that Brits have in their own homes where friends gather are more likely to be in restaurants rather than in homes in this country.  Eating at home in Catalonia is basically for the family, not for friends.  Restaurants are the natural meeting places, together with bars, ice cream salons and tapas haunts, so the isolation in homes is unnatural for a population that is naturally gregarious. 

     That sociability could be part of the reason for the number of Covid-19 cases here as football games and demonstrations were allowed to take place at a time when more judicial counsel should probably have restricted mass gatherings of people. 

     The large demonstrations that took place on International Women’s Day on the 8th of March were an obvious mistake and it is one of the many that the government will have to explain in the investigations that are carried out after the crisis is over.  The muddled thinking which led the government of Sanchez to give advance warning of a future lockdown of Madrid while giving those Madrileanos with second homes away from the hotspot of infection the opportunity to decamp and spread the disease will also have to be considered later when guilt is apportioned.  The government recognizes that it could have done some things better, but each of its failures is directly translatable into unnecessary deaths.

     Here in Castelldefels precise numbers are difficult for me to find, though it appears that there has been one death from Covid-19 of someone who was both old and who also had pre-existing illnesses. 

     The police and authorities have reinforced their instructions that nobody should leave their homes except for the specific reasons allowed, and have followed up this instruction by revealing that there have been 171 cases of the police charging people with breaking the restrictions here in Castelldefels!

     Which brings me to the renovations next door.

     I have decided that the renovations are a good thing.  Not because of the noise: I am not Catalan, I do not need constant hubbub as an essential part of my national psyche, I embrace silence – unless it is leavened with my own choice of music or conversation – and would prefer tranquillity rather than the musique concrète of inconsiderate construction that transmits itself through the structure of our houses.  No, I have decided that, in this time of crisis (or Time of Crisis if you prefer) that it is necessary to have an external focus for the animosity that I feel about the restrictions of my present situation.  I therefore, choose to transmogrify the selfish and inconsiderate irritation of rich people trying to get richer by tarting up a house near the sea for a profit, into something which is a piece of spiritual blotting paper, soaking up my negative feelings and giving me a focus for my hatred for all things that disturb my tranquillity, up to and including Covid-19.

     I am reminded of some novel or other that I read years ago where the admiral or captain of some vast ship forced the crew to make him a yacht while the fleet was standing-to or laying-to or whatever ships do when they are not, as it were, shipping.  The sailors were forced into producing this craft for their superior officer and constructed it with much moaning and groaning and with feelings of resentment.  When taxed with his unreasonable demands on his crew by a senior officer, the captain explained that he had deliberately focused the feelings of resentment on himself so that the crew could be united in a feeling of unfairness and not starts bickering among themselves in the phoney-war before action.

     I also remember that when the admiral/captain actually sailed his new yacht around the fleet the seemingly hard-done-by sailors took inordinate pride in the fact that the yacht was something that they had made and was ‘theirs’ as well as the admiral/captain’s.

     Not an exact parallel, I know, but the principle is the same.  Possibly.  It is also a justification for exploitation as well, but then I suppose we always find way to make the intolerable prosaic and acceptable!

     So, I have, with a magnanimity of spirit that does me credit, subsumed the sonic grit in my eye, into the wholeness of my soul.  Which is made easier by the fact that the workmen next door have not yet turned up and it is so much easier to be philosophical when the disturbance is not physically present.  Let us see how I cope when hammer falls (yet again) on concrete.

In a similar way, my mother, in a never to be forgotten phrase (nor was she ever allowed to forget it!) uttered when our household spending had reached the astronomical level of £5 (!) a week, and my parents were discussing retrenchment, said, “Right!  That’s it! No more mushrooms!”   

     The stunned hilarity of her husband and son on hearing this credo, axiom or tenet of belief meant that this cri de coeur was resurrected in a variety of circumstances as a universal panacea when the way forward was unclear.  How to cope with The Cold War?  “No more mushrooms!”; Industrial unrest?  “No more mushrooms!”;  Margaret Thatcher?  “No more mushrooms!”             

     As a rallying cry, it may not have been over-effective, but it did add to the gaiety of nations; well of that section of the nation that included Dad and me, and grudgingly, my mother too!

     It would be tempting to call my mother’s emphatic statement of frugality a non sequitur, but that would not be strictly true.  Mushrooms have value, they are not distributed free in the shops, but the value saved by spurning them as an unnecessary expense is, shall we say, marginal: it is the old (dated) joke about slimming where some trivial nutritional denial on the part of the slimmer is likened to emptying the ashtrays on a 747.

     I have been trying to think of the literary technical term to describe the phrase my mum used: understatement doesn’t really cover it; litotes or melosis?  Well, my mum was being sincere, not using deliberate understatement to emphasise.  Perhaps the term I’m looking for is “woefully inadequate”!

     However you describe the phrase, at least for my mum, it gave a concrete ‘solution’ to a practical problem: too much expense: cut mushrooms.  Job done.

     We all do it, a sort of variation of the ‘thumb in the dyke’ technique where something seemingly trivial, has an out-of-proportion final effect.  We hope.  And this approach is probably more apparent during times of enforced introspection, especially when they are seasoned with personal peril! 

     We want a simple solution something that is easily graspable, something comforting and achievable.  Alas!  If only solutions to our present crisis were as simple as shunning fungi!

My pool circuits today were accompanied by the World Service of the BBC, as my preference over Woman’s Hour.  Don’t get me wrong, I listen to Woman’s Hour with the best of men, but today the lure, nay the addiction of World News from the BBC was the greater pull.  So, I was able to trudge my walking-sticked way round the water, listening with ever-growing pleasurable panic to the news.

     In one of the gardens that I pass on my peregrinations, a father and young son were running from the front garden to the gate in the back garden as part of their exercise regime (this is directly possible because our houses are hollowed out at ground floor level and rooms start on the first floor) with a sort of determined seriousness.

     On the opposite side of the pool and next to the tennis court of the flats on our left, two small boys were playing a form of tennis.  Considering the racket for one of them was about two thirds of his total height, he wielded the racket with considerable skill, if not always accuracy.   

     With earplugs firmly in place one is ‘allowed’ to ignore other human life forms with impunity: which I did.

     I continued my slow paced walk until I began to feel a little weary and, just as I had decided to call it a day, the smallest of the boys lofted the ball into our pool area.  In fact, into the pool.  As I had passed him on my circuit I could only gauge the trajectory of the ball by vague World Service blanketed mewls.  I had no wish to be mean, but I had an equal determination not to touch anything that the kids had touched and so I (seemingly oblivious to all) walked out of the pool area and into my back garden.

     I rationalised my callousness by reasoning to myself that all the boys would have to do was go back to their parents and get another ball.   

     And, anyway, I have spent my time characterising any person of a youthful disposition as a Plague Child, and it would appear that my designation is now born out by reality with Covid-19, as kids can have the virus, not suffer the consequences, but effectively spread the infection. 

     Justification!