Christmas comes early!

 New Lockdown, third week, Saturday

 

 

 

 

This morning I unearthed my gloves before I set off on my bike ride.  And I needed them!  Although it was bright, it was cold and I was glad when my constitutional ride was over and I could have my cup of tea and a bowl of muesli as my reward. 

     The ride was made a little more exciting because the battery level was fairly low and when this electric bike does not have any power assistance it drives like a lump of clay – heavy clay.  Only once have I had the misfortune to run out of battery and even on level ground on the lowest gear setting it was hard bloody work!  So, instead of taking in the empty swathes of beach and the glittering expanses of sea, my attention was pretty much focused on the mobile phone sized screen that gives me information about my ride, and more particularly, how much battery life is left.

     To add to the gaiety of one’s concern the battery percentage is depicted in different colours with the last gasp of the machine being numbered in red.  For the whole of the return leg of my journey, the figures were in the red and I had to concentrate hard on other things rather than allowing my stress levels to be raised by wondering if I could make it back without wheeling the bike home.

     I did manage it, and even allowed myself the luxury of a higher power setting for the final few hundred metres, tempting my luck.  The bike is now drinking deeply on the outside power point and should be fully charged for my ride tomorrow.

 

 

Christmas (as I think is allowed in the wreckage of the year that calls itself 2020) has come a little early this year.

     Every year I debate whether to delve into the space under the eaves and exhume the artificial Christmas tree that is stored there.  It is a great deal of effort for something that takes up too much space in the living/dining room.  Where the tree used to go, the space is now occupied by Moppy, the Narwal machine that hoovers and mops automatically, well, robotically.  As the machine lives in a home station which is the size of a squat pedal bin, where it is, is where it stays.  So, we were presented with a problem.

     The solution came in the form of a small shelf that was erected by Toni to hold a fan, used to deflect the cigarette smoke from the next door neighbour who indulges her filthy habit sitting on the tiny balcony of her living room, then the prevailing breeze takes the mephitic miasma into our living room via the open windows.  As we don’t have aircon, open windows during virtually the whole of the summer and a chunk of the autumn are essential.

     The neighbours (on the mephitic side) are only there during the summer, so the shelf and the fan are not presently in use and the small shelf was calling out for a miniature Christmas tree – that Amazon has provided.  It came today and with the handmade decorations made (for Charity) by SQB it has now been decked out.  The lights are a string of those LED tiny lights powered by 3 AA batteries, and as I have rechargeable ones I think that we can be fairly profligate with the lights.  So, we have started now.  For the first time in my life, I have put up my Christmas tree, tiny and artificial as it might be, over a month before Christmas!

     The next festive thing to plan for in the putting up of the Belen, or nativity scene.  Over the years the characters that I have added to the basic Holy Family and a Cow have grown exponentially to include not only the Wise Men and Farmers, but also various other trades people and surrounding bits and pieces.

     But the bits and pieces of a Belen do not make up for what promises to be a strange Christmas.  Toni will want to see his family, but that doesn’t really look as though it is going to be possible safely.  All is still speculation and we have made no plans whatsoever.  We haven’t really discussed it apart from my asking in a fairly jocular way, “What do you want for Christmas Dinner?”  And we didn’t come to any real conclusions.  What is likely to change and get better in the next month?  Who knows?

 

I have started cleaning the glass of long ignored paintings and putting some of them up again.  The idea of a full re-hang is attractive, but the sheer effort in moving everything around is daunting and some paintings are too big to be moved easily.  I need more wall space!  Or, in my lottery dreams, a gallery with library and study on two levels with one of those ladders on rails to get at the higher books!

 

Monday will be the end of this particular lockdown and we will be able to go out for a meal and I will be able to go for a swim.  I don’t think that anyone is kidding himself that this is going to be anything like normality.  If we put all the ‘ifs’ together that we have been listening to, then some sort of vaccine should be rolled out in the New Year and the bulk of the population should have been inoculated by April.  That is, of course, the most optimistic view of the next five or six months.

     The logistics of getting viable vaccine to an entire population is daunting.  Given the way that most politicians have reacted to the pandemic, we have absolutely no optimism that things are going to be better than the chaos of the initial approaches.  But, there again, I am always optimistic and you never know, perhaps at last, this bloody Conservative government (UK) and the so-called ‘Socialist’ government of Spain can get their shit together.  For once.  I know that I am better off in Barcelona than I would be were I to be in Madrid!  For that, thanks!

One does try to do the right thing. Honestly!

 

 

My fight against planned obsolescence has been lost.

     I did attempt to get the part of my cleaner that clearly wasn’t working properly repaired, but I was only offered replacement as an option.  As I am loath to throw away something that is ‘generally’ working I have opted to fork out a surprising amount of money for the so-called ‘power head’ of the machine (the bit with the revolving beaters that collect the dirt) to make it a fully functioning ‘up stairs’ cleaner. 

     God knows there is little enough floor space to be seen in the jumbled chaos of my ‘study’ on the third floor to tax the capabilities of even the weakest of suction hoovers, but even I am aware that the floor (however little of it is actually visible) should be cleaned from time to time.  It’s just the sheer fag of lunking a cleaner up three flights of stairs never really appeals – even when the cleaner is cordless.

     Well, now that I have expended money on the thing it has to be used to justify the price that I have paid to get it working again.  There is a logic there, though even I admit that it is tenuous.

 

 

 

The concern with the general concept of ‘tidiness’ (as opposed to cleanliness) is one of pressing import at the moment because Toni has embraced the life work of Cleaning The Kitchen. 

     Although this is a generally traumatic experience, I am spared the worst excesses of the process by being banished to the third floor because of my tendency to suggest that nothing that we possess is worth throwing away.  If the decluttering mantra of, “Only keep it if it brings you joy” were to be applied by Toni to the things that we possess then after his approach had been implemented I would be living in an echoing, empty tomb-like home, with only retro computers and their peripherals allowed to make it to a surface.

     Now admittedly, our kitchen cabinets were designed by a person who had obviously never worked in a kitchen before, or indeed been told its function, so that we have corner cupboards that mock attempts to use them as such.  They become kitchen black holes, anything that goes in, does not easily come out again.  This means that there is much in those Escher-like containers that has not seen the light of day for many a long year.  And I am not one given to exhaustive searches, as I find the ‘buy another one’ much more efficient and satisfying.  But such an approach does lead to duplication and considerable embarrassment when and excavation, such as the one that Toni is currently undertaking, brings to the surface and within the sight of a quizzical eye many inexplicable extravagances.

     Space has been created in the kitchen because much of my glass has been consigned to kitchen towel and plastic tubs now found in the cwtch under the stairs, and that new space has been given over to order and “everything in his place” which is an unsettling dispensation for those of my more cluttered ilk.  Still, I can always retreat from the regimented order of living room and kitchen and come to the comforting chaos of the third floor, and the tranquillity of the jumbled blunts the edges of rectitude.

 

 Set off for my pool swim on my bike at 6.45 am to be ready to enter the pool by 7.00 am and in the water by a quarter past.  It is still dark at that time of the morning and for the last few days it has been unquestionably cold.  Although I wear a T-shirt and shorts, I also wear a short coat for the journey to the pool and for my longer bike ride after my swim.  It is not quite cold enough to start wearing gloves for the morning ride, but that is not far away and then I will know that the summer (that I keep alive as long as possible) is truly over.

      I have always regarded Winter as a personal enemy and this year there has been a positively Medieval fear about a hard Autumn and Winter that we have to survive!  Usually, my distaste for Winter is linked to the sun and its limitations in the colder months, this year the personification of the seasons has taken on a mortal tone as I have had conversations with friends about how to survive, given that the Virus, like the Devil, is seen to be prowling around seeking whom he may devour .

     If I wasn’t real life, the present chaos in the White House as the results of idiotic macho libertarianism show that the greatest and the lowest are equally susceptible to an indifferent virus, would be farcically amusing.  But actual fear for survival is around in a way that it hasn’t been in my lifetime since the worst parts of the Cold War.

    

     Still, life must go on and I have the delivery of a Hoover spare part to look forward to!