LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 35 – Sunday, 19th APRIL

It’s raining. 

     I am disinclined to go on my circuits of the communal swimming pool in the pouring rain. 

     I am further depressed by the reading in the Guardian about Goblin Gove’s typically mealy-mouthed, unconvincing response to a series of allegations in The Sunday Times that the Convalescing Clot missed five consecutive emergency meetings of COBRA in the build up to the Covid-19 crisis and that the government shipped PPE to China in February. 

     That would have covered the period when our part-time Prime Minister was hidden away in Chequers, a prime minister who notoriously “didn’t work weekends” according to an unnamed senior adviser!  Once Bullingdon Club always Bullingdon Club: the lazy sense of entitlement of the rich and the privileged; let the lesser breeds without the law do the hard graft while the Johnson jonson sets about adding another child to the unnumbered brood.

     I am more than prepared to believe that the lingering poison of Brexit mixed with the euphoria of the Conservative right wing after the crushing electoral victory led the ‘government’ fatally to mismanage a coherent approach to the Covid-10 crisis. 

     The typical Tory inhumanity of the ‘herd immunity’ approach to dealing with the crisis, complacently accepting hefty deaths will be remembered, together with the astonishing U-Turn when it was suddenly abandoned in favour of approaches that more nearly matched virtually every other government in the world.

     The position of the Health Secretary is becoming more and more untenable – or at least it should be becoming more and more untenable as more and more avoidable deaths will be laid as a memorial to his incompetence.  Yes, efficient supply is difficult in times of crisis, especially in a cash and equipment and personnel starved institution like the NHS that is in its present state because of the cruel austerity practiced by the Tory government for the last decade. 

     The empty platitudes of support that Tory ministers mouth for Health Workers are cruelly ironic given their attitudes towards the NHS over the past years.  These are the same vile folk who cheered after a pay increase for Nurses was defeated in the House of Commons!  They disgust me.

     And, as I typed that last bitter sentence, the rain outside has grown appreciably heavier.  There is nothing like the Pathetic Fallacy to cement misery in place!

In an effort to escape the gnawing resentment contained in the paragraphs above, I have turned to something more creative.  My chapbook of poems written in Holy Week called Coasts of Memory.  I have been working on illustration and made a decision to use only photographs taken within the lockdown confines.  This means that the house, the garden, the communal pool and what I can see from the terrace and windows are all fair game for my camera!

     I spent yesterday evening playing around with the raw material that I had and started placing individual pictures in what I considered to be appropriate places in the chapbook.  I am constantly frustrated by petty mechanical problems with images and sometimes it is a case of printing what fits rather than fitting what I want to print!

     There is also the problem of he disappearing fonts.  I save what I do fairly religiously; I have been caught out too often and too painfully when documents develop a missing life of their own not to remember to save.  But I am often frustrated by the way in which complex documents do not always retain formatting. 

     The latest example of this concerns by choice of a fairly exotic fort used as a title.  This font did not transfer when I sent the document via email rather than copying it onto a memory stick - in spite of my avowal of the very latest in technology, I can be whimsically old-school from time to time!  The font is space greedy, so when it transfers as something altogether more prosaic it means that everything else on the page is out of place and that has a domino effect on all the pages afterwards.  As I was going to use that particular version of the book for detailed editing, it might turn out to be self-defeating if I have to redo everything with the ‘correct’ font in place in the final document.  Such things are sent to try me, and at least I can have a direct effect on what I do there, as opposed to whingeing on about what my government is doing or not doing in this crisis!

In the way in which the petty becomes important: Toni is going out to get bread!  An event for which he dresses up like an Inuit and wings the desolate abyss between our home and the bread shop that is a few streets away.  I enjoy the results of these little excursions as we usually have a little treat from the patisserie as well as mere bread – by which alone, one cannot live!

     This time, as well as the bread, Toni is going to attempt to get some chicken from the pollo a last, this will be our first ‘bought in’ meal since the lockin began.  However, if there is a queue, or there are too many people there then the meal will be called off and we will have to settle for the bread.  And treats.

There are increasing accounts in the media of the possibility of no vaccine being produced in the short term, or even ever.  We have the example of AIDS, where, in spite of extensive research over a number of years, we are still without a vaccine.  Treatment for the disease, yes; vaccine no.  That is a very sobering thought.  It means that we will be dealing with the virus as an ever-present threat well after this initial surge is over and it also means that for people in my age group the restrictions are going to last for the foreseeable future. 

     This is a more than depressing thought!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 3

OK, I admit it.  It only took me until Day 2 of the Lockdown to binge watch episodes of The Good Place on Netflix.  So much for strength of character and finding more culturally respectable resources to keep me occupied.  I have, however, given myself a little cultural leeway in my watching by asserting that the whole series is predicated on John Paul Sartre’s observation that “Hell is other people” and therefore I feel morally justified in watching.

     For those of you who don’t know about this series (even though I am now on Season 4!), it stars Ted Hanson and its central idea is that four people die and go to what they assumed is Heaven, but in fact it is a truly devilish new torment where they have actually been chosen to inflict torment on each other in what they think are perfect surroundings, their own discomfort at not being entirely satisfied in what they believe is heaven is another part of their torture.  It is a comedy and it ranges from slapstick to fairly sophisticated verbal humour, and I am slightly addicted.  Ever so slightly.  I wonder what other well established series I will ‘discover’ during this immolation!

I very much appreciate the messages from friends and relatives who have responded to the international news of the Catalan lockdown by sending us their concern.  I think that it will not be long before we in Catalonia are sending similar messages of support to those countries that are just starting the process that will inevitably lead to their own particular lockdowns. 

     Who really knows how effective the measure put in place are actually going to be?  We really are in a situation where we in the so-called developed world have not been since the Spanish Flu of just over a century ago.  That pandemic was characterised by lies and disinformation – how unlike our present times, and yes, I am being ironic, and yes, I am looking at you Trump!  Spain was one of the few countries to be open about the infection and consequently got the country labelled with the virus, though it is certain that Spain was not the country in which the virus originated.  Well, it is still relatively early days; we wait to see how the situation will develop.

I wrote another poem yesterday and I must start putting my new poems on my other blog [smrnewpoems.blogspot.com] together with a commentary about their genesis – I do, after all, have time to do it!

     After a moment of brief panic this morning, I found the notes that I had made for the poem on memory that has taken so much time.  There have been a few false starts with this one and one major re-think, but I am still convinced that there is a central idea worth working on and so I will continue to scribble my way through a few more sheets before I let the concept go.  When I have a draft approaching reasonableness, I will put it on the smrnewpoems site as well.  If nothing else, I intend to make this enforced isolation an opportunity for as much writing as possible!

     With other chapbooks that I have produced, I have always tried to add illustrations to them.  Sometimes this has been via the kind collaboration of friends and sometimes alone.  I enjoy photography and I have sometimes added photos to the poetic mix.  Being confined to a single house poses its own challenges when considering illustration, but it is one that I hope I can rise to.  I think this is a time to find those telling details to be the subject matter of my lens – there isn’t another option, so again it will be interesting to see how that idea develops through the weeks.

I’ve now watched the whole of The Good Place, some 40 episodes, but without advertising intervals and the introductions you get through then fairly quickly.  I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed them, though the concept was getting a little thin by the end and the eventual conclusion was welcome.

SM el Rey was making a speech to the nation in response to the allegations of financial corruption by his father and himself regarding illegal kickbacks and the foundation of offshore accounts.  At 9 pm when the Bourbon was making his statement people around Spain, and certainly here in Catalonia opened their windows and banged wooden spoons against saucepans as a (traditional) noisy sign of their disgust at the grubby machinations of the royal family.  It will be interesting to the see the response of our attenuated government and the usually slavishly loyal press in Spain.

Viva la Republica!

Not quite my scene

Our evening meal was taken outside a bar in the centre of town just by the railway station.  Considering its central position, as Laura noted, it was airy and tranquil, with the pots of sturdy greenery giving an illusion of a stunted dell.  Perhaps Laura’s comment was a hostage to fortune as almost immediately a deranged looking man staggering along the street with a plastic beaker full of what looked like liquid mud, lurched up to the entrance of the bar and asked the Chinese waiter if he could have a fill up of water.

The good-natured waiter complied with the request and the man went on his way muttering to himself and spilling quantities of his evil looking concoction and lurched his way into the open square space in front of the station.

Then the dogs started barking.  And went on barking.  And then there were sounds of an altercation with raised voices above the threnody of yelps.

Like the aristos in ‘Dr Zhivago’ looking out at the protesters in the snow from their warm and secure privileged position behind falsely secure windows, we, in our leafy bower watched developments, while I sipped my end of meal cup of tea.

Sirens heralded the arrival of the first police car and as the ‘trouble’ veered towards the pedestrian underpass through to the station car

parks someone shouted out to the emerging policemen, “He’s got a knife.”  From behind the safety of a couple of pot plants, we felt the thrill of proximity to danger and were determined to make our post-prandial beverages last the distance!

More police cars arrived, their flashing lights giving not only a suitably lurid setting for the excitement, but also marking a similarity to the ‘festa major’ fair that had been established at the far end of the car park - I do like an element of the serendipitous in my evenings out!

An ambulance then arrived, shortly followed by a second.  And we settled in for a suitably gory finale to the evening’s entertainment.

As we were finishing our meal it had the temerity to start raining, not convincingly admittedly, but still water falling from on high in August!

This soon stopped, as indeed did the drama as, one by one the police cars and ambulances drove off with nary a corpse or villain in sight.

The rest of the family were frankly sceptical about my explanation of the whole event being part of a street happening as part of the ‘festa major’ of our town – though Toni’s sister did applaud me politely at the end of the little drama and congratulate me (because surely I had something to do with it?) for finding a way to pass the time to the next event on the horizon.

This was a free concert.   

Now I have been to a totally memorable free concert next to the beach here in Castelldefels that featured the student orchestra of the University of Southampton playing a spirited performance of Sibelius’s second symphony, this concert, however, was not like that.

The entertainment, that had started by the time we got there, was of a Catalan group who sang, very loudly, in Catalan.  There were no seats.  But I soon discovered a fringe group of the elderly and infirm and the opportunistic who had found a limited number of metal chairs from somewhere.  I soon found the somewhere and Carmen and I were soon part of the group.

The disadvantage of our position (seated, with the rest of the audience standing) did mean that our view was, to put it mildly, limited.  But the very professional light show that accompanied the singing, together with a liberal amount of stage smoke, did ensure that the lighting effects were clearly visible ell beyond the confines of the stage.

I did attempt to take some photographs, where my mobile phone (disconcertingly) recognized that I was taking pictures of a ‘musical event’!  How did it know?  [I really wanted to use an interrobang at the end of the last sentence, but I don’t know how to print one.]  The end results were patchy, but taking pictures at night at x5 zoom on a handheld phone, I am not sure what I expected to get!

A long (for me) walk back to the car, bidding ‘bye’ to our second set of visitors and bed.  I slept as though drugged and snoozed more on the beach this morning!

It’s a hard old life, but someone has to live it!

Tomorrow Barcelona, and the start of my serious research in the library of MNAC to find out more, much more about the life and times of Adam Elsheimer.

Questing continues!