My
bike ride today was truncated by the police.
Not violently, you understand, but rather by an obstinately parked
police car and a flick of a police finger.
The way to Port Ginesta at the far end of Castelldefels was blocked off
and I had to return the way that I had come.
To compensate for the distance lost, I decided to add the ‘evening
cycle’ of going to Gavá before I came home, but that too was blocked off. Those in Castelldefels had to stay in Castelldefels. The Port Ginesta end of Castelldefels is
technically in Sitges and Gavá isn’t Castelldefels, in spite of the fact that
both places flow naturally into the city.
In the evening, both places appeared to be
open again, so the blocking off in the morning was difficult to
understand. But that goes for so much of
the civic life of this place!
I must admit that the inability to go to
either Port Ginesta or Gavá did actually make me feel a little trapped. The feeling was more mental than practical as
the freedom of the Paseo is more than enough for reasonable exercise, yet the
simple prohibition made the reasonable feel a little cramped.
As
Toni was going for a walk in the evening I ‘joined’ him after the eight o’clock
clap, even though he was walking and I was on my bike. I therefore postponed my watching of the NT
Live production of Antony and Cleopatra, but I look forward to seeing that
tomorrow evening, when I will need something to recover from our on-line
Catalan lesson.
The practical problems related to this
class are legion. There is the wonkiness
of the system that we are using to create the class in the first place, which
is added to the stubborn resistance of my computer to let me use the
microphone, which, for a language lesson is a bit of a bummer. Then there is the work that we are supposed
to be doing. The tasks are supposed to
be on line and when completed on line they will be marked on line. That isn’t working. The one task that I found and did do I had to
do off line because the document that I was supposed to use to write out my
responses would not allow me to edit it.
I wrote out my work and emailed it to the teacher – and that is the last
that I have heard of it!
I am sure that these are all teething problems,
but given the immanence of the end of term, we are not going to have many more
attempts at getting it right. My
offering is to change the computer and the network to try and get a more
practical link in the on line lesson. I
live, as ever, in hope.
Today
has been one of those inexplicably tiring days.
Although my bike ride has a respectable distance to it, the bike is
electric and I do welcome some level of assistance when I am peddling. It is still exercise, but I realize just how
much ‘assistance’ I am getting when, from time to time, I set the level to zero
and therefore use the bike as an ordinary form of un-augmented transport: not a
pleasant experience, and one that would not get me out of bed before eight in
the morning if that was the norm!
So, I cannot really blame my bike for my
tiredness, nor my shortish walk around the pool – so I will blame the weight of
worry about the way that life is being organized at the moment for taking away
my natural vitality.
The latest ‘worry’ is that the Spanish
government has decided that the present hours that the Plague Kids are allowed
to mix with human beings is inappropriate as the little virus ridden carriers
are out in the midday sun and it is obviously far too hot for the little
dears. I would have thought that the
heat would at least limit their viral load, but no, the hours will be
readjusted and we will have to concede time to them.
As I now regard every child below the age
of 25 (sic) as a potential personal death threat, my suggestion is that we find
some island somewhere and put them all on that until the crisis is over but, as
usual, such reasoned ways forward are rejected by people who never see the
wider picture.
And talking of the crisis being over,
there is a disturbing number of people whose public behaviour seems to indicate
that as far as they are concerned, the crisis is a thing of the past. True, there are people who ostentatiously
keep the requisite distance apart, but they are in the minority in my observation,
and the young cling to their immortality without responsibility and have
rejected all PPE and physical distancing suggestions and are embracing the
approaching summer with all the ebullience of the old normality.
Hey ho!
So it goes!
