What time of the year is it?

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas is trying its best not to be.  There is a forced quality about any celebratory approach to the time that makes it all the more unreal.

     I have not, physically in a hands-on sense, bought any presents – apart of course from my ruinously expensive office chair, and with only a deposit paid and its not being available until January, I’m not sure that it counts.  So, the Family’s presents have virtually all been bought and sent via Amazon; the Christmas cards will be (with few exceptions) virtual via email with a donation to Oxfam; the Christmas meal will be just the two of us with a possible Zoom element making everything just that little bit more embarrassing and uneasy!

     Happy Covid Christmas and a Vaccinated New Year!

     Of course, the best Christmas present this year is being around to be able to moan about the limitations of the festivities: there are plenty of Catalans and Welsh people who are unable to do so, and unless our respective governments approach the pandemic with something that is more appreciative about the risks involved, then potentially, hundreds of thousands more will die in the cause of political window dressing.

     We have been told that half a million people in the UK have had the first dose of the vaccine.  It’s a small start given the population, but at least it is something.  Spain, together with the rest of the EU are not going to start the programme of vaccination until the 27^th of December so lord alone knows when the programme will finally get to us in Castelldefels.

     A friend in Istanbul wrote that he looked forward to travelling more freely by April.  I think he is being charmingly optimistic.  I do not think that there will be anything like free movement until the end of the summer next year, and in my mind I have virtually written off 2021 as a sort of year in abeyance.  I think that 2022 will be the year in which things generally get back to normal, or what we will have accepted as normal by then.

 

 

 

I sense a real weariness about the restrictions from a lot of people that I see around me, and that quality of being fed up expresses its visible self in the laxity of many with the wearing of masks.  In the centre of town people are generally (and legally) obliged to wear the masks and they do, but on the paseo and the nearer you get to the sand, the slacker the attitude is.  To my mind, it doesn’t really matter if you are walking, running, dog walking, skateboarding, skating or whatever: you should wear a mask.  I find the allowance made for smokers to wander about in peopled spaces without a mask because of their addiction to be frankly astonishing.  Where is the logic in energetic exercise where the individual sweats and breathes more deeply and expels air more forcibly being exempt from mask wearing?  It simply doesn’t make sense.  At least to me.  And to logic!

     Johnson is coming under pressure to impose another strict lockdown.  It is not something than anyone wants, but it is surely necessary to prevent horrendous loss of life. 

     I was going to say that there is nothing special about Christmas – and I could defend that statement theologically, socially, numerically, historically, culturally with lots of other -ly words thrown into the debate – but clearly the Day itself is, not only in Christian terms but also in Family terms significant.  People want to be together.  People want to be with their families.  That is easily understandable.  But, with a vaccine being rolled out throughout Europe in a few days’ time, even if individual know that they are not going to be in the first tranche of vaccinations, they will know that within months they will start to gain the protection that they need to visit their loved ones and, more importantly, not kill them by visiting.

     It is asking a lot for people to be patient month after month and to see blatant unfairness, incompetence, corruption, lying and deceit – but the vaccines exist and, in time they will be given to everyone and we will then all have a degree of protection that will allow life as we knew it to become life as we know it.  And for the restrictions to become a way of life or a bitter memory.

 

We went out for lunch today and ate inside the restaurant at spaced tables.  When we go to restaurants Toni remembers to bring the bottle of soapless alcohol handwash and I remember to bring the pepper grinder.  Nowadays communal cruets are a thing of the past and oil and vinegar come in one-use little individual bottles; ketchup and mayonnaise are in sachets and salt and pepper are in little paper containers.  Pepper is the problem: while salt is always there, pepper is a wayward addition and I cannot rely on its availability, so I take my own.

     A couple of times in the past I have had to rescue my pepper mill from clearing waiters’ hands and remind them that does not belong to them – but nowadays the appearance of my own condiment raises no eyebrows!

 

So, Johnson has had to U-turn on yet another of his empty reassurances and Christmas had had to be to all intents and purposes cancelled.  We are not in such a Draconian lockdown in Catalonia, but I do not think for a moment that things are going to get better during the holiday period.  We are all waiting for the vaccine.

Tomorrow is our final shop for Christmas.  We still have not finally settled what it is we want to eat during our Christmas meal – but it is certainly not going to be turkey with all the trimmings!  Toni has suggested prawns and that seems like something with which I can work, especially as I intend to have salmon scrambled eggs to start off Christmas Day in the right style!  Alas!  I will not be having a glass of Cava to accompany it.  How many YEARS is it since I last had an alcoholic drink!  I don’t miss it.  Much.  Though there are a few times with a good meal when a glass of decent red would go down a treat.  According to my doctor I am “allowed” one small glass of red wine a day.  It just simply does not sound like me.  So, I am prepared to do without.  And I make do with non-alcoholic beer.  Which, to be fair, is much better than it was when I first tried it years ago!  Even if it is really larger and not real bitter beer.

     Still, the Christmas Meal will look good and I have bought a few little things to make the festive board look appetizing!

     We will see how it goes and we will certainly take a photograph to remind us of the end of a truly awful year!

YOUR life in YOUR hands

 

New Normal or lockdown or whatever, Second Week, Sunday

 

 

 

 

As far as I am aware the restrictions about moving from one location to another during the weekend is still in force, though it was difficult to believe that as I threaded my wobbly way past the masses of people who were thronging the paseo this morning.

     In many ways, it is difficult to blame people wanting what seems like a fairly innocent and safe pastime: wandering in time honoured fashion along the side of the sea.  On the other hand, I also regard every stranger as a possible enemy, and a deadly one at that.

     It is the fatal nature of the disease for many and the lingering serious complaints that are now being registered after surviving the virus for some, that make me question the absurd optimism of so many who live and act as though they do not really need a vaccine because they are so obviously immune.  And they are not.

     On my daily bike ride, I can judge just how seriously people take the fact that we are in the middle of the second wave of infection, and that we may yet see the totals for the first wave overtaken.  Most runners on the paseo do not wear masks.  A minority of cycle riders wear masks.  Some recreational walkers and dog walkers do not wear masks.  Some ‘regulars’ I pass every day have never worn masks, and some of those regulars are obvious OAPs and therefore in one of the most vulnerable categories.

     I have to say that a greater proportion overall of the people I pass now do wear masks, probably (but not unequivocally) a bare majority.  I have no idea what news broadcasts or newspapers these people glean their information from, but they are obviously very different from the ones that I see and read!

     Virtually everything that I hear about the virus frightens me.  Obviously you can’t live a life in perpetual terror, it’s too bloody wearing, but concern (to put it mildly) is never far from the surface: “hands, face and distance” is a sort of mental mantra by which I live my life!

     It looks as though one of the vaccines is likely to be rolled out within the next week or so.  This will be reserved for front line staff and those in immediate contact with virus infected people, but the rest of the vaccines should be available for the rest of us within weeks, though it will obviously take months for the population to be vaccinated.

     As soon as any of the vaccines start being used in the country, I think that will signal one of the most dangerous times in the pandemic, as people take from the application of a vaccine very different messages.

     From what I understand the vaccine will be delivered in two shots some time apart and, when an individual has been vaccinated they will be expected to continue the mask wearing, hand washing and physical distancing that they should have been observing up to the point of their vaccination.  This is going to be a hard ask when people are looking forward to the “freedom” that a vaccination is supposed to give.

     Even after the second shot, defences should not be lowered.  I wish the publicity campaigns that will be flooding our media outlets the best of luck, because they are going to need it.

     Why are we making an exception for the Christian festival of Christmas when we signally did not for festivals of other religions?  The relaxation of the rules for the Christmas period is a political decision and one that will cost lives.  That, together with the woeful approach of Johnson and his no-talent cabinet to tackling the pandemic lends further weight to my insistence that Johnson and co are charged with corporate manslaughter.  The blustering incompetent cannot put off the inquiry for ever, and when it starts taking evidence and delivers its report, then is the time for criminal prosecution to take place.

     In my adolescence, it took “thirteen years of Tory misrule” to show the corrupt, unfeeling incompetence of Conservative contempt for the ruled: it has taken Johnson far less than eighteen months to produce a ‘government’ mired in cronyism, corruption, arrogance, incompetence, dogmatic blindness, viciousness, petty mindedness and mendacity.  I am ashamed that my country is led by such a witless pack – and they should not be allowed to get away with it.  For once in his worthless life, Johnson must face up to his responsibilities, and if he is ‘disinclined’ to do so he must be forced to.

     And when you consider that in little over a month, this bunch of feckless liars are going to take us into the unicorn-filled lands of plenty of Brexit, the only realistic reaction is to weep!

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, my research about the war service of my grandfather progresses slowly.  I have discovered that he was a member of the Royal Field Artillery, in C Battery in the 173^rd Brigade.  What is more difficult is finding out exactly where he would have fought.  My grandfather did not have an easy war and was in some of the most bloody of the conflicts in France and Flanders.  I will persevere and find locations to add to the records that I have at the moment.

     As well as the horrors of being a combatant in The First World War, my grandfather also had to cope with the pandemic too, the Spanish Flu outbreak, which he survived.  We may have a rough year in 2020, but he had a succession of horrors for year after year!  We should be grateful!

 

Having now thoroughly depressed myself, I will turn to Netflix for some mindless amelioration! 

 New Lockdown, Week 3, Thursday

 

Was it really six months ago that I had my last dental treatment?  I know that the perception of time has been different during the various periods of various types of lockdown, but still!  Six months from November going backwards would take us back to May.  What that when one of my teeth broke?  Time really is tricky nowadays; normal life is like participating in an episode of The Twilight Zone where some clever Sci-Fi writer plays around with the temporal concepts that we take for granted.  Or you could assume that my reaction is one which is quite normal when anyone thinks about going to the dentist.

 

     Talking of which, I managed not to miss the last part of Hostel III.  Try as I undoubtedly did, by ostentatiously ignoring the screen and reading my mobile phone instead, I was drawn to look at the passing action – and was drawn in by the violence porn that makes up the franchise.

     The premiss is that there are very rich people who will pay vast sums of money to spectate at what are live snuff spectacles where, while being served drinks by fetishly clad waitresses (looking, I have to admit like live versions of something from the soft-porn imagination of artist Allen Jones) they place bets on how and how long the death-throws of the unfortunate victims, safely separated from the rich voyeurs by floor to ceiling plate glass – no blood splatters on them!

     Amid the bloodletting, the gratuitous bloodletting, I might add – I did begin to wonder about the attraction of this sort of slasher movie, and especially the elite group with the money to pay to watch such things.

     It reminded me of The Purge where the bloodletting there was to secure the regime of another wealthy (white) group dedicated to the ritual destruction of those deemed surplus to requirements.  It was the emphasis of a wealthy elite travelling in darkened windowed limos, that made me link it to the ‘customers’ in Hostel III, another wealthy elite, rich and depraved.  And that brings us to QAnon, the ultimate absurdity of conspiracy theories with the same emphasis on a seemingly untouchable elite doing unspeakably nasty things.  These films and this conspiracy theory obviously touch some sort of emotional dark fairy tale need in some people who believe that the horrors of the world must be linked to some directed malevolent force.

     Perhaps in previous times this belief could have been directed towards the Devil and Hell – but even there you could say that the creation of the devil and hell were part of the ways in which the previous religious elite cemented their hold over the fearful imaginations of the paying customers in their churches and their religious wealth allowed them to do unspeakable things – one only has to look at the history of the papacy to see corruption and depravity at its hypocritical worst.

     Financial inequality in the world means that real wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very, very few – and that minority has and will always try and behave with the impunity that they believe their money entitles them to.  During the Covid crisis the super-rich have become richer and the inequality is getting gallopingly worse. 

     The poster boy for wealth without responsibility or concern is of course Trump.  He clearly thinks that laws, the constitution and social norms are, as Leona Helmsley said in 1989, “only for the little people.”  And then she was convicted of income tax evasion.  Helmsley’s comeuppance was over thirty years ago, and since then we have had more of the super-rich brought down by sex scandals than by their everyday theft.  Trump paid 750 dollars in taxes last year in the USA and he boasted about sexual molestation.  When is he going to get his comeuppance?  Losing the election is not enough, he must lose money as well, and a prison term would do him no harm!

     QAnon is ridiculous and intellectually insulting, but there is a tiny elite manipulating the levers of government for their own advantage, but they do it in full sight.  Trump promised to “drain the swamp” but stuffed his cabinet with the super-rich and made them richer by his tax ‘reforms’.  He put wildly inappropriate people in government agencies and encouraged them to foster big business, fossil fuels, banks and all the other agencies of everyday life and profit for the few.

     Charles Wilson said in a senate hearing when Eisenhower wanted him to be Secretary of Defense, “What is good for General Motors is good for the country” – and he had millions of dollars in stock in the company.  It is perhaps unfair that that quotation is the only thing that most people remember about Wilson, and it has come to represent a particular view of capitalism in society.  But Trump has tried his best to make the ethos of that disturbing belief true in his so-called government.

     70 odd million Americans voted for Trump, the second largest pool of any presidential candidate – but Trump has never governed for the American people, only for those who are rich, no, only for the very rich.

     QAnon is the ‘bread and circuses’ distraction for those who believe that they are being manipulated by a tiny minority of perverts, so they do not see the Big Money that really does the dirty work.

     The sooner the obscenity of Trump and his shameless supporters are consigned to history the better.  Whatever Biden may be, he has shown himself to be a fundamentally decent sort of human – and I will settle for that for the next four years as a way of recovering from the disaster of the last four years.