Decisions!

 

Having finally found somewhere reasonable to have our Christmas Meal, the conversation and concern has now veered towards the advisability of taking up the reservation and actually turning up there.

     The description of the inexorable international advance of the Omicron Variant, and more especially the way in which the disturbing news is being treated in a frighteningly reasonable way, are true causes for concern.

 

      

 

     Taking the Johnsonian and ‘10’-idian approach as being ipso facto wrong because it is emanating from such laughably untrustworthy sources, we can assume that the ‘Christmas as normal’ advice is profoundly and totally unacceptable.  It therefore leaves reasonable people (i.e., those that didn’t vote for Brexit or the bloody Conservatives) debating the choices.

     And what the choices are for Christmas, are by no means clear.

     At one end of the operational scale there is the lockdown.  A reversion to the restricted days of only emerging from house isolation for essential shopping.  Or some version of ‘lockdown lite’ where there is freer movement, but the meeting of anyone outside your bubble is to be frowned on.

     The Christmas Meal will involve extended family and close family: parents, aunts, cousins, and their children.  But this will be in a setting where there are others from outside this tight little group in the Functions Hall of a restaurant.

     Even with The Family we do not have a day-to-day physical proximity.  All the adults have been (at least) double jabbed, but there are kids, some of whom are under the age of ten, and therefore presumably not injected.  What does vaccine safety mean in those circumstances?

     There are also the festivities of Christmas Eve (in Catalonia the traditional time to give out presents) and the traditional lunch of St Stephen’s Day, during which I expect to receive presents for my Name Day!  No plans for either of these days has yet been shared with me, so what will happen then is just up to my lurid imagination!

     The more the authorities do not give us anything like the full picture of what is actually going on in the world of the pandemic, the more I feel that we have to take pro-active steps to protect ourselves from what is probably happening that they are not telling us about.

     But most of me believes that what will actually happen for the festive season is that we will speculate away before, during and after the event – and only with hindsight will we know if our masterly inaction was justified!

 

 

I have taken the first step in junking my socialist principles, by looking at a list of sites on the web that offer a consultation with a specialist for about 50€.  I have worked out that I cannot reasonably wait about a year for a consultation and then another year before anything is done.  With the way things are going that would mean that I would have to camp out under the house to avoid having to go up and down stairs all the time.  This is something I am not going to do.

     I have discovered that the ‘telephone consultation’ with my doctor that follows my recent blood test was not within a couple of days as I had thought when I was told that that the call would be on the 16th, but rather yes, the 16th, but of the next month.  As I waited a week or so for the call to be made before going to the health centre to find out why it hadn’t happened, the gap between my first expectation and reality is considerably narrower, and I have to wait only two further weeks for it to occur.

     I am going to have to try and find out what, reasonably, I can expect from the Health System and then work with what I have to find a solution that is physically acceptable.

     Just to put things into some sort of perspective, I was speaking with a friend this morning who had had liver cancer and who had treatment not only here in Barcelona but also in America.  The treatment in America cost 44k dollars.  OK, the treatment was cutting edge and for cancer, whereas my operations will be orthopaedic, with more carpentry than anything else about them.  But such a sum gives one pause for thought.  And encourages an acceptable pause in treatment if it means that it can be done on the national health of Catalonia!

     But I am flailing about in the financial unknown dark at the moment as I have no certain knowledge of what exactly is wrong with my knees, and secondly what exactly will have to be done in order to make them more acceptable.  I have few illusions about them being transformed into good-as-new, but I will settle for less painful.

     One thing I do know is that I will have to lose weight.  This has been a perennial cry for medics and one that I will have to take incredibly seriously from now on.  Which is depressing.

     I have recently discovered (or should that be re-discovered) a book for recipes for diabetics.  This could be a double advantage find, as it offers not only good wholesome recipes of limited calories, but also as it is written in Spanish, it can only aid and succour my present attempts to learn the language.  Again.

 

In spite of my distain for the wiles of electronic apps in drawing you in, I have become infected by Toni’s paranoia about where in the league you end up at the termination of the number of days it lasts.

     Toni has managed to be first in each of the leagues in which he has been placed, while I have won one (you see, I used the word ‘won’ as if my language course was some sort of competition!) and been placed in the ‘Top 3’ in two others and finished in the promotion area in the rest.

     Toni is thousands of points (literally) ahead of his presumptuous challenger in second place, whereas in my league the leaders are more equitably spaced so that there is a certain amount of jostling for the top three places.  At the moment I am placed second, but with learners 3 and 4 within double figures places of me.  All is to play (see, I’m using exactly the language the app wants me to use) for – with three days to go before the competitors in the Sapphire League see whether they have made it into the Ruby League!

     As time goes on the league in which you find yourself is more and more likely to be composed of people who have made a concerted effort to be promoted (demotion is also a possibility if your work rate slows) so the pressure on you to strive is more and more pronounced.  Even as I am sucked in, I can take a moment to admire the automated structure that electronically pushes my buttons!

 

T

 

 

Talking of pushing buttons, I must give a call out to the animated series on Netflix, Arcane.  The nine episodes so far have been gripping.  This is high quality animation with artwork of cinematographic sophistication.

     The narrative is apparently backstory and origins of characters in some sort of arcade (are they still called that?) game of which, of course, I had not heard.

     Although the conflicts that animate the narrative are tried and tested: magic/science; rich/poor; privilege/powerlessness; strength/weakness; morality/practicality; law/lawlessness; drugs/sobriety; politics/truth; war/peace; etc etc the progress of the story line uses strong characterisation and allows individuals to develop within a taut narrative.

     Well worth watching.

 

 

Knees Up Mother Brown!

sticks,          

 

Well, I suppose it is something to be told that the x-rays of your knees are “the worst that I have seen” by your doctor, as the opening gambit in a conversation that stopped before the Pandemic made seeing actually speaking face to face with your doctor a thing of the past.  Welcome to the new future.

      

 

My knees have never really been my strong point and a few tumbles while dismounting from my bike, have made them a damn sight worse.

     I can walk unaided, but it is so much better with a stick – and my walking is strictly limited to that which is strictly necessary.  Which sometimes means that I don’t even reach the unambitious target (set by my smartwatch) of 3,000 steps a day.

     The process of my future care is now slotted into The System and that will grind its inexorable way forward, although given the pandemic, the number of untreated cases of wonky knees is probably in the tens of thousands, and the medical mills grind slow.

     My prescriptions have changed, but only to give me better pain killers, which the doctor has suggested I use with caution – which makes you wonder just what drug they are derived from!  I have done without pain killers up until now and I can stumble my way onwards without them.  Hopefully.

     A blood test has been set up for me and another appointment with the doctor to see exactly what is happening and then, who knows?

     There was a horror story of a guy in the UK who needed to have a back tooth taken out and who searched for an NHS dentist to do the job.  He couldn’t find one locally, and after some fifty phone calls to increasingly distant practitioners, he eventually found one who suggested that the earliest appointment he could have would be THREE YEARS DISTANT! 

     Perhaps this is one of those instant urban myths that flourish in straitened times, but I am sure that I read about it in the Guardian, and since I put all of my faith into the probity of that newspaper, it gives you a mighty pause for thought.

     I have to say that the medical treatment that I have had in Catalonia has been exemplary and my doctor has been essential to my well-being.  But there is only so much that a local health centre can do.  Operations on the knee are well outside their remit.

     It is at this point that I remember my father.  He too had problems with his knees, but his problems came after a career as a PE teacher and playing professional Rugby League.  I really have to hunt around to find reasons for my knee problems, and I don’t think that a few nasty tumbles from the bike explains everything.

     Dad was told that he would have to have an operation but, even in those days, there were waiting lists and he would have to go on being in pain, waiting for a bed to become available.

     In spite of his socialist beliefs, he eventually listened to his surgeon who told him, “If you have a private consultation with me, I will be able to recommend you to one of ‘my’ beds in the hospital and then the operation will be done on the National Health.”  My father paid the fifteen guineas for the consultation, with the surgeon, which was obviously just a form of words, he was given a bed and was operated on, basically by jumping the queue.  Dad was in pain, and he couldn’t walk.  The NHS should have been able to deal with his condition but, we do not live in an ideal world, and the fifteen guineas was money well spent.

     When I find out exactly what is wrong with my ‘disaster area’ knees and what the specialist suggests needs to be done about them, then I will have to look at the possibilities and what is going to work for me.

     So far, the Catalan health service has been brilliant and has fully justified my faith in it.  My knees might pose a problem that will need a little more than faith to sort them out.    We will see.

You can't force imagination

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday was a public holiday in Catalonia and today isn’t.  The difference in the café after my swim was marked.  I was virtually alone and, as I sit at a table next to the plate glass windows looking out onto the car park, I had nothing to distract me from adding to the writing in my notebook.  Except, I didn’t much.

     I have found, in the past, that even the most quotidian of reflections about the weather or the strength of a cup of tea can sometimes give rise to more profitable thoughts.  Today, that was not the case, “Overcast, cold, with some hazy sun” remained a description of the state of the day and didn’t progress to profundity.  Still, I had a decent cup of tea at the end of my swim and I had had a lane to myself, so to quote Lewis Carroll, I felt fully justified in marking the day “with a white stone” – which, if my memory serves me right is an old Roman custom, and which I claimed as my own as soon as I read about it in one of the footnotes of Gardner’s Annotated Alice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow is my flu jab, and I think it says something about the way that I fill my days that this has become An Event in my week.  It is a step in the process of defending myself from the vicissitudes of various viruses and, as I have mentioned before, in my age group if you don’t look after yourself you can expect little from the authorities to help you.  Though having said that I did get a message on my mobile phone yesterday telling me that I should be thinking about my flu jab and, if I hadn’t already made arrangements, I should get an appointment via the helpfully supplied link.

     This will be an added layer of protection, especially as many of the Covid restrictions are being lifted. 

     For example, next week is my next visit to the Liceu, not for an opera this time, but rather for a ballet.  If you have a season ticket then a couple of ballets and the odd recital are part of the package, and the package is worth getting because its purchase comes with a discount of 25%.  And 25% off a lot of money is well worth getting!

     During the course of the pandemic, we have had performances cancelled, and sometimes entire productions.  When the Opera House opened up again, it was to a severely reduced seating capacity with various safety aspects enhanced.  Our specified seats were no longer ours, and we season ticket holders were distributed around our chosen price area, to ensure that we could be islanded by empty seats.  The staged production of The War Requiem was the last of the adjusted performances and for the next we should be back in our accustomed places.

     But the pandemic is not over.  Although many young people act as if the Covid Pandemic is an historical event and nothing to do with their immediate lives, this is simply self-delusion, a self-delusion that could be fatal for those that fit into the most vulnerable age and chronic illness categories.  Double vaccinated people can get Covid and be capable of spreading the infection, even if they do not demonstrate symptoms of the illness itself.  The largest age category of new infections is in children.  We are not, in any way, shape or form safe from Covid.

     In Catalonia we longer are required to wear masks in the open air, though it is suggested that in more crowded places like paseos it is advisable to wear a mask and to keep to the social distancing rules.  But no one is entirely sure what, precisely, the rules are – and the mixed messages we get from our so-called political leaders do nothing to make the situation clearer.

     I will continue to wear my mask throughout the winter and well into the spring, and indeed until well after politicians have stopped trying to convince us that everything is back to normal, and we all please spend more money!

     It will be interesting to see exactly how the patrons of the Liceu behave in the new-normal dispensation.  As the vast majority of patrons in the stalls of the opera are people past the first flush of youth, I think it is more than likely that precautions will still be fairly firmly in place as the lights go down!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dinner this evening, at least for me, was the doggie bag remains of the paella that we had yesterday in the swimming pool restaurant.  I have to admit that the flavour had intensified after the dish had rested for a day and there is still some left for lunch tomorrow.  Though I will perhaps add a dash of curry to make the stuff taste a little different.  Please don’t tell any Catalan cuisine purists what I am doing, as they are easily shocked by the unconventional (or blasphemous, as they would term it) approach to native cooking.

     I am reminded of the time when I was charged with buying a melon for a ham and melon starter for a meal, and I returned from the shops with a sandia (a red watermelon) and there was chaos when the assembled company realized what I had done.  We did have sandia and jamon, but it has been a memory which always raises a shocked smile as the misstep is remembered and discussed. 

     Personally, I found the combination excellent and would readily eat it again.  

      I am alone in that determination in this part of the world!