LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 102 - Thursday 25th June

The highlight of today was at the end of it, when I tuned in to YouTube to watch the NT Live production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream an experience I urge you emulate by going to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Punzss5sHto

and enjoying a free production.  Though the hope is that you will have enjoyed the production enough to contribute at the end of it.  These productions are only possible because everyone involved has waived their fees and allowed the performance to be freely available for a week.

     Every Thursday that these productions have been available I have joined a virtual audience and enjoyed some superb performances.  Yes, watching on a screen is not the same as being in the theatre, but it is a privilege to be able to see productions that I missed when they were first produced and only experienced through reviews!

     One of the USPs of this production is the playing of Oberon and Titania where Oberon has his eyes anointed with the magic flower and he falls in love with Bottom’s ass (so to speak) rather than Titania.

     Puck is an amazing actor and dominates the stage when he has the opportunity, and he has many opportunities!

     This is a performance ‘in the round’ and it must have been an immersive experience if you were a member of the audience near the stage.

     An excellent, thought provoking, energetic, funny, delight of a performance.

Another beautiful day of sunny weather and heat.  Toni is back from visiting his parents and so to celebrate we went out to one of our favourite restaurants and, as it was Thursday, we had paella.

     We watch people in town and worry about a general laxity about the wearing of masks.  In this country it is an offence not to wear a mask in situations where physical distancing is not possible, and it is mandatory on public transport and in shops.

     There have been localized hot spots on infection and, although we seem set on a trajectory of determined progress to the New Normal, we are constantly worried by the ever growing numbers of infections and deaths throughout the world.

     Spain is set to welcome foreign visitors, and it seems prepared to accept visitors from places like the UK where the virus is nothing like under control.  Ironically, if tourists from the UK come to Spain they will find that they have freer movement in Spain than they do in the UK!

     I do understand that people are desperate to salvage something from the summer as far as tourism is concerned, but I do wonder at the cost that the economic activity will demand.

     All we can do is behave according to the rules and hope for the best.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 101 . Wednesday 24th June

I continue to be frustrated by the Catalan approach to time.

     I have given up trying to work out exactly the logic behind the opening and closing of shops and the continuation of some restaurants in staying open in spite of their cavalier attitude towards economics is mystifying to say the least, but I did think that I had the opening times of my swimming pool securely in my mind.

     Obviously during the more severe stages of the lockdown the pool was not open, and in the transition period from when it was open to the relative freedom of Phase Whatever The Hell We Are In Now there was a certain ad hoc nature of the time when we were let in for our regulated swims.  But the time did settle down to 8 am – the time, in the Old Days BC (before Covid) for the weekend opening times, the normal weekday opening time being 7 am.

     When we reached the present phase the opening time reverted to 7 pm, the showers were available for use and things appeared to be shaping up to be an acceptable New Normal.  Until San Juan.  As a recognized festival, this meant that opening time would be later, delayed until the weekend opening i.e. 8 am.

     Today, therefore, I had the luxury of a lie-in, or at least I would have if my built-in clock had not demanded that I wake up at my accustomed time, and I organized myself by setting off the robots to do the cleaning, making my cup of tea and doing a few of the clues in the Guardian Quick Crossword.  I made good time on my bike and I was at the gate to the pool by just before 8 am.  Unlike everyone else.  I was alone.

    OK, I thought, I will give them a few minutes to open up on the hour by going off on a little bike ride, making sure this time that I remembered to tell my watch that I was doing part of my exercise.  Too often I set off without pressing the right buttons to inform my watch to check my progress.  A little jaunt down the road and back again.  And nobody.

     I therefore made the executive decision that the time-honoured time for festive opening had somehow been delayed by an hour and so I would do my post swim bike ride, pre.  Which I did and made good time to get back to the pool just before 9 am.

     And there was nobody there.

     But at least this time, the gate was open and there were a couple of people sitting around the outside tables of the café.  But there were no people in reception and the café was closed.

     Eventually the shutters of the café opened, and Mario emerged to inform us that the opening time was 10 am for the pool.

     As I had my phone and my notebook (and asked Mario to bring me a cup of tea) a wait of an hour was as nothing and I finished the crossword and wrote a number of pages of quotidian rubbish in my notebook.

     My swim over, I had a second cup of tea and wrote further pages in my notebook and felt well satisfied and smug.  I declined to go on a further bike ride as the battery level on my bike had progressed to the single digit red number and I had no intention of being caught far from home with only pedal power to get me back!

It has been a beautiful day with only the screaming children lessening its beauty.  I truly think that kids have become even more feral with their extended absence from the calming discipline of school to contain their vocal exuberance.  If it were possible for kids to converse in anything less than a scream and shout I think I could become inured to their existence, but as it is, their obstreperous assertion of simply being makes them something Not Wanted on the Voyage of Life.  I’m afraid.

Our communal pool has become its usual magnet for those freeloaders who are not actually people who live in the houses for whom the pool is intended.  Just as the swallows come back to Britain in the summer, so various foreign fixtures take up their positions around the pool.  Shameless!

Tomorrow Toni returns, and I wait to see if he has been able to find any mature Cheddar.  He might have forgotten that he mentioned that he might look out for some, but I most certainly have not!

There are still a few laggard explosions, but as a slept through the ‘Main Battle’ last night, a few bangs are not going to keep me awake.  So to speak.

A pair of rather fearsome black reusable masks have arrived that I ordered via the Internet oodles of time ago.  They are not entirely comfortable to wear, but they do look the business and they have a satisfying seriousness to them.  They look the sort of thing to wear during shopping jaunts.

     The everyday masks are those that are shoved into pockets, and brought out and used because they are obligatory in Reception and the Café.  I am not sure what power they still retain as they have been overused, but I maintain the force of the family wisdom of, “Anything is better than Nothing.” And so they act as a barrier, no matter how flimsy.

     Mask wearing is the only visible element in most people’s approach to the virus.  Yes, we do obey (usually) the strips placed on the floor and there is some attempt at physical distancing with people that you do not know, but the fear of the virus is very much “over there” where “there” is very definitely not anywhere near our here.

     The virus news form around the world is uniformly depressing and there are spikes of infection in all countries.  I agree with Faucci (?) who said we should not look for second spikes of infection because we are still very much in the grip of the first spike.  I also agree with the director of the WHO who said that we are not safe until everyone is safe – and that means that we should all be very worried because there are too many leaders who are acting from economic and political standpoints and not human health standpoints.

I have written to my MP in Britain and urged him to consider aiding a movement to get Johnson and his cabinet charged with Corporate Manslaughter.

     I watched part of PMQs and was, yet again, ashamed by the way that Johnson failed to answer questions and became agitated when his failings were highlighted.  If he had a shred of common decency and humility and admitted the disastrous failures that his government has clearly owned, then I think he would have a certain amount of sympathy from the British people, and they would encourage the government to look at what has gone wrong and prepare for the worst in a more professional way than they have so far.  The government’s concern should be the welfare of the people and not how they look.  Each failure to acknowledge mistakes leads to further deaths.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 86 - 10th June

It is getting progressively more difficult to tell that there is a pandemic still raging in this country.  A couple of days into whatever stage we have reached so far and people are behaving, for the most part, perfectly normally.

     People generally wear masks in town, though along the paseo they are very much in a minority.  The tables on the terraces of the restaurants are more generously spaced out and now there are tables inside the restaurants as well.

     It is still difficult to tell how many of the smaller shops are going to open after the virus has finally been dealt with.  The supermarket that I went to yesterday and which is closing down has been failing for some time and most of us are amazed that it has managed to last this long.

My early morning swim is now part of a regime again, it doesn’t take long to slip back into sometime established ways, though it might be difficult to get the same slot in which to swim each day.  We are only allowed to book up to 2 activities at a time and as there are only five lanes in the pool and one person to a lane, it is going to be difficult to bag a spot at the same time each day.  So far, I have been lucky and I am OK until Thursday, but I think that I am going to have to get used to using the kitchen calendar more noting the different times when I have been able to get into the pool.

     I met two teachers from the British School just before my swim and they told me that the lessons have been on line for some time and that they will not be going back until September at the earliest.

     In the UK the bunch of inadequate wankers that make up the government have done yet another U-turn about their insistence of kids returning to school in England before the end of the summer.  They have, at last, done the special sum of cutting class size and finding physical space to put double the number of classes in the space that previously accommodated half the number.  To say nothing of the extra teachers that are needed to make this happen.

     In education we are, of course, used to politicians telling us to do something and then ignoring the advice of experts saying why what these ideological purists want is simply not possible.  The real problem is that, with the cabinet of no-talents that Johnson has formed around himself, every department is failing and as chaotic as education, to say nothing of the writhing incompetence that the Home Office has come to personify.  It is intensely depressing to think that the immediate future of my country is in such inept hands.

     And then there’s Brexit.  Dear god!

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 74 – Thursday, 28th May

Today felt the least like being in lockdown.  My morning bike ride was 'open', in the sense that the paseo was fairly sparsely populated, it was almost like a ‘normal’ ride, except for the number of people sporting medical masks – though not by any means the majority.

      The first part of my ride was into the centre of town to post a delayed letter of condolence to the wife of an ex-colleague of mine.  As I had included a card I was not sure of the weight/cost and so a trip to the post office was necessary, and partly explains the delay.  The post office was only open until 2.30 so I was there early.  Not early enough. 

     There were a couple of people outside and a counter assistant was letting in people one by one.  I was prepared to wait right up until I saw the length of the queue on the other side of the building, it was stretched the length of the street.  I did not wait.

     Previously I had used the Tabac to get stamps and to deposit letters, so I decided to find out if you could still do that.  The stamps were not a problem and the lady behind the counter seemed to be confident about the amount that was necessary to send it off, the only odd point about the transaction was her wielding a pritt stick to put the stamps on.  It was only after she had done it that I realized that no one nowadays is going to lick stamps, not in the present circumstances.  There are going to be all sorts of little instinctive reactions that will now be potentially deadly!

     For the first time for ten weeks we actually used one of the motorways to go to a shop that sold fencing.  The shop was open, though sections were portioned off and each section had an assistant who took the name of each person who went into the area.  People were keeping their distance as far as possible, though we were still too close for comfort.

     I met somebody that I knew from the swimming pool in the shop and for the first time I bumped elbows by way of greeting and had a muffled mask-wearing conversation.  The New Normal indeed!

     Lunch was patatas bravas with my attempt at a salsa to go with them that Toni discovered on the Internet.  There is a bewilderingly large number of ingredients that you have to add to the mayonnaise up to and including orange juice and zest.  An interesting experiment, and tasty too.

Johnson, the sometime prime minister of the UK, has said that we should “move on” from the fuss about the wrongdoing of Cummings.  We should not.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 37 – Tuesday, 21st APRIL

 

It’s still raining.  It has been raining solidly for three days.  This is not what I paid up to join when I moved to Catalonia!  Where is the sun?

     Poor weather merely forces one to take even more notice of the news, and that of course drives one back to the weather once again.

     The scandal of the non-appearing PPE in Britain and the way that statistics are being thrown around concerning testing make me angry.  Politicians seem to equate hopes with hard statistics, as with the Turkish PPE that were talked about as supplying the NHS and they are still waiting.  In exactly the same way the Health Secretary was talking about the availability of tests for Covid-19, but the key question is how many tests have actually been administered?  From Beckett’s answers this evening, it is obvious that he is going to weasel out of resigning when he fails to get to the target for testing at the end of the month.

     While the supply of PPE rumbles on and with of course hospitals and care homes and health workers failing to be adequately supplied, the earlier part of that scandal has come back to haunt the government.

     Some time ago Britain was invited to join other EU countries in uniting forces to source supplies of PPE using the buying power of bulk purchase.  Though invited, Britain did not sign up.  Why?  According to the Conservatives, it was because they didn’t see the email.  According to a senior Civil Servant it was a political decision taken to placate the Brexit idiots.  According to the Conservatives, it was a single email that was missed.  According to other official is was a series of invitations that were not acted upon. 

     I have to say that I am inclined to agree with Philip Pullman who has written that he thinks the entire government front bench should resign at once, and if it can be shown that they ignored the invitation because of Brexit prejudice then they should be charged with manslaughter.  The Conservatives have issued a detailed refutation of the story in the Sunday Times that questioned their record and their motivations – but this story will haunt (as it should) the Government and the way that they played the early stages of the crisis.

Here in Spain and Catalonia there is almost terminal confusion about the government’s plans to loosen the lockdown to allow children to leave the house when accompanied by a parent.  The details of who, what, when, where, how often, how far, how old, how many and on and on are all bubbling up and there is no real authoritative governmental voice giving the sort of clarity that needs to be in place if there is not to be utter chaos when the policy comes into play.

     Like the masks that each citizen is entitled to.  On the first day of the distribution of the masks via the pharmacies the system crashed and so the television news carried stories of chaos rather than the extension of protection for us all!

     There are too many stories of chaos and too few of planned competence.

On the lighter side, I have received my parcel from Pound Shop.  It seemed to me that that could be a way of getting essential supplies through via the UK.  It all depends, of course, on how you define ‘essential’.

     In order to make the delivery charge worthwhile I had to spend about fifty euros and what I ended up with was a positive lucky bag of questionable goodies ranging from ‘chip shop curry granules’ via Cross and Blackwell baked beans to dark chocolate Toblerone. 

     In times of isolation, one needs one’s treats!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 30 – Tuesday, 14th APRIL

We may be in uncharted territory now, where the rigid restrictions on lockdown have been eased for certain businesses to open even though we are still in the crisis with significant deaths and increases in the numbers of the infected.  How this policy is meant to work in curbing the virus’ spread I do not understand.

     The Government maintains that the lockdown is still in operation; but businesses are open today: how are these two compatible?  How are they going to explain the increase in deaths?  Sanchez, the Spanish President, does not have the mindlessly fanatical following of the Orange Outrage in the US.  Sanchez has a minority government, his so-called Socialist party bolstered by other minority left wing parties – who are going to be electorally tainted by participation in what is an unfolding disaster – and he cannot afford to act without a weather eye on the threat of yet another election in our chronically divided country.

     In a frightening development in the US in an even more jaw-droppingly awful public performance, Trump has claimed Absolute Authority – perhaps the logical extension for an unfixed populist demagogue.  Virtually everything that Trump has done has pushed at the limits of what The Founders feared when they wrote the Constitution.  The very federalist foundations of the US state are being tested and we know which way Trump would have voted when the title of ‘King’ was considered for the leader of the new American state!

     The fascist roots of the “America First” slogan are revealing and limiting; just as the petty-minded Brexiteers with their “Britain First” ideology underpinning their xenophobic, nationalistic, narrow-mindedness have led to Britain not participating in an EU led attempt to use their clout to purchase PPE at advantageous rates.  Virus does not respect national boundaries, I would much rather be part of the widest effort supra-nationally to combat a common danger than to be apart and weaker.  How many times must it be reiterated that nationalism and narrow, insular politics will lead to unnecessary death?

My second trip to the shop.  Singular, it is only one, we don’t go to a few, just the one and then home.  What isn’t there we don’t have.  Simple.

     I truly hate wearing the masks and the wearing of glasses seems to add to the irritation of the experience.  In deference to Toni’s stern strictures of not touching the face once one is out of the safety of the house, I was considering some form of elastication to keep them from slipping down my nose, but then I remembered lenses.  So, for the first time for a long time, I put my lenses in.  I do like the range of focus that lenses give as opposed to glasses, but I have bifocal needs for my eyes and therefore I need reading glasses with lenses – though I can usually make do if the print is not too small.  I am used to living in a variously out of focus world, so I can accept clarity that is approximate for most of the time!

     Given the fact of Sanchez’ loosening of the lockdown, though he claims he hasn’t - in the face of the facts, there was appreciably more traffic on the way to Lidl and more I could see when the road crossed over the motorway.  But still, markedly down on a normal (whatever that means nowadays) Tuesday.

     Lidl’s too was fuller than on my last visit, but that might have been because I was later in the morning than my previous jaunt.  Most people were wearing masks, and I have to say that those who were not were, how shall I put it, obviously noticed by the other people in the shop.  People are, quite clearly, wary of each other.

     Social distancing, where possible, was observed, though passing in aisles was sometimes more intimate than one would have liked.  The Checkouts were well done with distances pasted on the floor to keep us a reasonable distance apart.

     Most of the stuff that we wanted was there, though this time I didn’t even look for radishes, so who knows if they are now back on the shelves.

     Most importantly for me, the 15 month matured Cheddar cheese was there and so I bought a few extra to freeze.  I know that defrosted cheese is not quite the same as the natural type, but it is a bloody sight better than nothing.

     In the way that irony happens, as soon as I got home and Toni started unpacking and wiping the purchases before putting them away, there was a buzz on the doorbell and the 2kg of award-winning local cheese was deposited on the wall for me to collect.  Well, as I, though indubitably not Toni, would say, one cannot have too much cheese!

     So, apart from fresh bread, we are now set for another week of isolation.  At least today, the depressing rain of yesterday has vanished (though not entirely evaporated) and the sun is shining down.

My ‘Poems in Holy Week’ chapbook, now entitled Coasts of Memory, is taking shape, with a number of fairly substantial edits in the drafts that you can find on my poetry blog: smrnewpoems.blogspot.com   

     As usual, the technical layout aspects taking up an inordinate amount of time, but as Toni says, “You love it!” and there is something deeply satisfying is seeing a book (albeit a fairly short one) take professional shape.  Or at least as professional a shape as I can make it!

    

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 28 – Easter Sunday in Holy Week, 12th APRIL

1.              I am glad that the Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of Intensive Care and is recuperating.

2.              The Prime Minister Boris Johnson should resign immediately for his dereliction of duty in wilfully ignoring his own government’s restrictions for social distancing and becoming infected.

Glad that I have got that out of my system.  Again.  I am still recovering from a few hagiographical pieces that described Johnson’s visit to hospital in existentially catastrophic terms, right down to the “indrawn gasp of horror” at the news.  Get real!  It tells you something about my low expectations from the bunch of deadbeats with which Johnson has stuffed the cabinet that I was actually relieved that the trashy Brexit fanatic Raab turned out to be the deputy for the incapacitated Johnson rather than somebody (sic) of the dubious quality of the Goblin Gove, the pernicious Patel or the unspeakable Rees-Mogg.  Just the bunch you need at a time of crisis!

Talking of worthless political chancers brings us to the situation here in Spain.  Our Prime Minister/President has sent mixed messages to the population that the lockdown should be extended to the 26^th of this month, but that non-essential workers should return to work on Tuesday!  Masks will be provided for those using public transport.  Apparently.

     The figures for deaths and infections are still horrifically high and the President thinks that it will be safe – not, that can’t be true.  He thinks that it will be economically beneficial to open up the economy again.  As usual, the poor bloody infantry of the ordinary citizens can be seen as collateral damage.

     OAPs have been told that they, nay, we will have to isolate ourselves for an unspecified number of months to be safe. 

     This cannot be the way to go.  Where is the testing that we have been told about?  Our ‘free’ facemasks are allegedly available from Tuesday.  If nothing is done, then Tuesday is going to be chaos with people doing whatever they feel like.  Any gains that the past period of lockdown have given us are likely to be swept away by a surge in fatalities.  The logic of the position of our government is lost on me.

     And don’t get me started on the madness of Trump’s America where demagoguery is equated with scientific fact and logic.  We live in mad times with mad men dictating the interpretation of events!  Reality will eventually catch up – but what will be the eventual cost in terms of human lives before the lies are rejected?  If they ever are rejected.

What an Easter!  I can’t pretend that the ‘festival’ has ever been something that I have celebrated, apart from my earlier years of faith when I would go to church for communion.

     Here in Catalonia it is very easy to forget that this is a festival at all, let alone a Christian one.  Most of the people I know who might go to church, don’t.  If you see what I mean.  Catalonia is a Roman Catholic country, but the Catholics are generally of the non-church attending, anti-clerical sort that doesn’t go out of its way to show adherence to a particular theology.

     The only celebration was pounding music from neighbours on rooftops in a near street.  It was our version of the balcony concerts and musical episodes that other places had experienced.  It was not really convincing, but I found it quite uplifting it its way.

I think we are going to need many more uplifting moments in the coming weeks!