LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 26 – Good Friday in Holy Week, 10th APRIL

As an Anglican atheist it may come as a surprise that it is today that the restrictions on movement have hit me most.  I do not go out of my way to visit churches during the year, but Good Friday (for reasons about which I am not entirely sure, see above re. atheism) is one of the day on which I make every effort to visit a church, to go inside, to sit down for a few moments and think.

     Toni has given up trying to understand my attitude and now merely shrugs with something approaching disdain when I voice my predilections.  For whatever reasons I want to visit a church today and I can’t.  And I miss it.

     I have tried the idea of the virtual tour, but that does not even remotely touch the spot in my psyche that demands a touch of the ecclesiastic, because it is not just the look of the place to which I respond.

     Although the sort of Anglican atheism that I espouse is ‘Low Church’ my background in St Augustine’s Church in Rumney was ‘High Church’ in its ceremonial.  Ceremonial, I might add in which I participated as a lowly server, cassocked and surplice as an acolyte, boat boy, thurifer, book boy and eventually MC – and people wondered why I chose a Cardinal as my fancy dress when going to a party in college! 

      The point is, that my experience of churches is an olfactory one as well – there is something very distinctive about the smell of old incense lingering among the pews.  And then there is the sound.

     I favour older churches with high-beamed ancient roofs (probably extensively mucked about with in Victorian times) where there is a distinct echoing resonance when the place is empty.  In the days when churches used to be left unlocked, I would visit new and interesting examples on holidays and, if they were empty, I would go to the lectern and read a section of the bible out loud to hear the acoustic.  So for me there is a distinct sonic quality that I treasure in churches.  Even in modern examples of the architecture there is something to take out of the experience of visiting.

     I do not find most churches welcoming places, I mean I like being inside them, but people are usually a bit stand offish.  I will never forget going to early morning communion in a parish church in Edgbaston where I felt like a modern day peasant among the well-heeled congregation (you only had to look at the cars parked) and I was comprehensively ignored by priest and congregation alike.  Ho hum!  But there is something about the atmosphere and the hardness of the pews that encourages introspection.

     And I like the restraint.  At least the restraint that I find in churches in the UK.  Good Friday in the UK is a bleak time to be inside a church where images are shrouded, the altar is stripped and there are no flowers.  In Catalan churches there is the same shrouding, but there is a concentration on the gory so there is often a horrifically realistic corpse somewhere around to focus the mind: the suffering of Christ with blood and wounds is very much to the fore.

     Well, this year I’m at home and there is not even a soaring spire above the trees to be observed from the third floor.  No bells have rung, or not within the hearing of our house.  This is a day like every other in isolation.  Like every other day in Holy Week.  Identity is attached to the days, they possess none themselves.

     So, what will my poem today describe?  How will its usual identity change?  At the moment I have no idea, but, by the end of the day a draft will have been added to the Holy Week collection at smrnewpoems.blogspot.com  I hope.

Well, I’ve written a draft that is now in the blog above.

I spoke to Irene on the telephone and we are both getting progressively more worried by the attitude of our political masters who seem to be far more concerned with the economic situation of the country than with the health and life of the citizens.

     The key will be what happens after Easter.  Easter Monday is a Bank Holiday (if we are still concerned by such things) and the National Government seems to be concerned to get people back to work.  Any diminution in the stringency of the lockdown will have a disproportionate effect and will weaken the overall population’s dedication to the lockdown and there will be a progressive disinclination to behave properly.  And then an increase in death.

     Perhaps I am being unduly pessimistic, but the next couple of weeks are going to be crucial to the way the crisis develops and I lack faith in the politics of it all!

Accepting reality? I think not. Possibly.

I know I’m getting old!

Other ageing people point, often literally, to a selection of their aching joints, or illustrate with an airy wave of the hand a forgetful memory, or pause with what they hope is significant timing to try and find an errant word.  Not me.  Even though I act out those tell-tale signs I still spurn (as ‘twere a rabid dog) any admission of the fact that I am getting older.

But today, today was a turning point.

At lunch, the meal after the late night/early morning of the New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day family celebrations, I finally had to face the realization that the accumulation of years in my life had reached a disturbing point.

The meal was provide by the tired but indomitable mother of Toni and comprised a melange of potato, Spanish ham and egg with accompanying bits and pieces and whole prawns.  Delicious!  And to wash it all down was the inevitable (and loathed by me) Coke Zero Zero, and a bottle of water.  The real drink comprised a rather fine bottle of Cava.

As usual, for reasons that are all to explicable, I was given the bottle of Cava to uncork.  Which I did.  Offering it around to the diners, only one of us had a full glass: me.  The other three have a notional smear of the liquid so that they could say that they had been full of New Year Spirit.

Every offer of a fill-up (or augmentation of their piddling amounts) was met with a polite but firm refusal.  So I had recourse to the only other accepting rim, mine.

And here is where the realization of just how old I might be showed itself.  I eventually stopped filling my glass up.  I allowed a partially full bottle of Cava to leave the table and go into the kitchen where it will be poured away.  Into the sink!

I have always prided myself on being ‘so much younger than my grandparents were at my age’ – but how can I, in all conscience, maintain this assertion when I actually and in reality, allowed a half empty bottle of Cava to be ‘wasted’?

I remember, vividly, though years ago, a party in the Circle Bar in the New Theatre, Cardiff for someone’s birthday party where the drink provided solely consisted of cocktails.  There were three as I remember, but only one that I recall: a Champagne cocktail that, I can still see in my mind's eye, comprised a brandy soaked cube of sugar at the bottom of a glass that was then filled with Champagne.  

I tried one of these and thought, immediately, that the liquor soaked sugar cube was a profanation of decent Champagne.  So I took action.  I ‘acquired’ a bottle of Champagne and retired to a corner and slowly but purposefully drank it.  I then went looking for another bottle, which I found, but was not allowed to drink it in the sequestered peace of the first, as owners of un-drowned sugar lumps came in search of submersion.

It was an easy switch from Champagne to Cava, especially to the older, tastier Cava brut versions with which I am now familiar, and mostly especially given the radical difference in price.  

With a few adjustments made to my purchases over the years, spurning the offerings of Frexinet because of the poisonous political attitude of the owner and questioning a few of the other brands because of their suspect right wing leanings, I have learned to love Catalan Cava.  And apart from the cheaper and sweeter varieties I have never been known to leave a bottle half drunk.

But now I realize that the time has come to take stock and to consider what this not-empty bottle left in the kitchen might mean.  

I could, I suppose, assume that leaving alcoholic liquid that I don't really need to consume is a sign (at last) that I am getting to the age of discretion.  Or it could mean that the pain in the lower back is not muscular, but rather my tired kidneys calling out for respite!

Whatever the analysis might bring up, it remains as an indisputable fact that I did leave a bottle of Cava with some drinkable Cava inside!

Or could it be the start of a trend?  My suit was tight so I do need to lose weight; cutting down on my lunchtime red wine might be one way of doing it.  

Or it could be a flash in the pan and this disgrace will not be repeated.  We shall see.

Meanwhile I am dog tired and I feel that putting my watch to charge counts as housekeeping.

Time to think about a snooze and perhaps I will feel and think differently after some of the recent sleep deprivation losses have been partially made up.

What next?

 

The Day After The Night Before Syndrome has struck the political ruling class in Spain. 

They had a worrying few hours, as it seemed that their Master Plan to stymie the onrush of the independent movement in Catalonia had disastrously backfired, and then it was confirmed that far from being stopped, the independence parties had managed to retain their absolute majority in the new parliament of Catalonia.

How to spin the disaster? 

The Spanish ruling PP party did exceptionally disastrously in Catalonia: they lost 11 of their seats and now have the shaming total of 3 (three) seats in the new parliament!  And even more humiliatingly, they fail to justify the numbers to be considered a separate group and are now lumped in with the minor parties in the ‘mixed group’ of parliamentarians.

But there was one bright spot for the woefully inadequate political leader Rajoy to go on about.  The fairly new right wing party of Cs gained 25.4 of the votes and 37 seats and will be the largest single party in parliament.  But an absolute majority is 68 seats and so they are nowhere near that number.  If they were to go into coalition they could count of the mighty support of the party with whom they slavishly vote with nationally, PP - so that boosts their total by 3 (sic.) to 40, still 28 seats short of an absolute majority.

They might be able to use the votes of the Catalan ‘socialists’ PSC, as PSC have allied themselves with their natural enemies of PP and Cs against the independence movement in Catalonia.  PSC gained 17 seats, so if they voted with PP and Cs the total strength would be 57, still 11 short of an absolute majority. 

The only other party which is opposed to independence for Catalonia (though they do advocate a binding referendum on Catalan independence some time in the future) is Comú, the Catalan version of Podemos.  Comú is more left wing than the other parties in this grouping and is a very, very uncomfortable bedfellow, even if they could be persuaded to join such an unholy alliance.  And even if they did, their 8 seats would give a final total for the anti-independence grouping of 65 - 3 short of an absolute majority.

On the other side: JxC with 34 seats; ERC with 32 and CUP with 4, make a total of 70 - 2 over an overall majority.  They win.

So, our exiled President in Belgium has offered talks with Rajoy anywhere in Europe other than Spain (where he would be arrested as soon as he set foot on Spanish soil) to start the political dialogue.  This is a situation that needs a political solution.

Rajoy has refused.  Or rather he has offered talks, or as he puts it in his alternative universe, “continued dialogue” (!) as long as the Catalan side is legal i.e. have rejected the idea of independence.  This is a sort of Catch-22 situation where the reason that there is a problem is the only thing that can’t be talked about in trying to resolve it.

I sometimes wonder if Rajoy doesn’t have some orange sash wearing Northern Ireland protestant unionist blood in him somewhere as the only word that he can say (and does with boring regularity) with absolute confidence is, “No!”

Our Spanish “entirely independent legal system” (sic) has stated that it has its sights on other rebellious, seditious and criminal persons of interest who all happen to be leaders of independence groupings.  As some of our political leaders are already political prisoners we can see where this is going.

As these political prisoners have now been elected to the new parliament, how is that going to work?  Are the imprisoned parliamentarians going to be ferried to the parliament building in prison vans and taken back to prison at the end of the day?  How is our likely president going to function when he is in exile in Belgium?  How will the voting take place?  Will the prisoners be allowed to vote?  Is that how Rajoy hopes to reduce the absolute majority of the independence parties to allow more ‘friendly’ fellow travellers to take over?

Rajoy has already said that he will ready and willing to talk to the ‘winner’ of the election in Catalonia: the leader of the Cs.  This is not the way forward.  Unfortunately Rajoy is too politically myopic to see any way forward but his own.

The New Year will bring the first meeting of the new parliament. 

Who knows what might have happened before the vote for the next president!

Everything is still to play for.

Why do I listen to the news?

Today is the Day of the Constitution.  And a Bank Holiday.

Horrifically, we get to see our “government” – the worthless bunch of right wing self seeking members of the minority government of the most corrupt party in Western Europe all standing together, smirking at a population that did not vote for them to be the government but, due to the ineptitude of the opposition political parties has allowed this ‘criminal’ bunch to stay in power, to force our President into exile, to imprison our political leaders, to invoke 155 and all of this from a party with 9% support in Catalonia that has assumed control of our country.  And you have to say that vast sentence in one breath to get the full effect!

And now on television, Ana Pastor the president of Congress, is making a speech in which key words like “liberty”, “democracy”, “justice”, “rights”, “tolerance”, “dialogue” are being used that, for this ‘government’ have a very specific meaning which does not even come close to anything that I understand the words to mean. 

Listening to the national Spanish government reminds me of my time in a student strike in Swansea University when I was part of a delegation which met with members of the governing body of the University.  The Chair of the university Council that we met was Ifor Davies, trade union supported Labour MP for Gower, and it became clear that the words and concepts that I was using to put forward the student case were also being owned by Ifor Davies, but it rapidly became clear that a common vocabulary did not mean common beliefs. 

There is nothing more frustrating to hear your words used against you by someone who wilfully redefines their meaning poles away from an understanding that should be common to you both. 

But Ivor Davies was an established, institutional ‘Socialist’ in a safe Labour seat and he was never going to be on the side of radical change, and it was my first ‘real life’ experience of, “the devil can cite scripture for his purpose” approach to political debate.  In spite of this happening decades ago, I still find that approach hurtful and distasteful.  And I hear it every day as soon as a member of the Spanish National Minority Government opens its mouth.

I can’t even turn to the UK news to add a moment of tranquillity as the Conservative Brexit convulsions continue to make my country an international laughing stock. If I understood the extract of the news on Radio 4 correctly the government has not undertaken a study of the financial implications of Brexit on British Industry!  

If that is correct, then the government and especially the Minister for Brexit have been criminally incompetent; if they have done studies (surely, they must have) and they are deliberately keeping yet more compromising information about the disaster that Brexit is going to be from the general public then they should resign.  En mass, and now!

Though, finding out that the minority Conservative government is unprepared is par for the course given the generally clueless mess that the Conservatives (“lower than vermin”) have made of the whole Brexit fiasco so far.

I thought about that after the last Brexit disaster but two (or was it three) when the unprepossessing leader of the troglodytic DUP (the dim but intense girl you wouldn’t have wanted to have been put next to in school) Arlene Foster phoned up the zombified misfiring robot that masquerades as our Prime Minister and peremptorily informed her that she had to stop talking to those nasty Europeans.  And the very next day the throwback Tories rose like the scum they are and mouthed their inane platitudes.

It was seeing in The Guardian a photo montage of the main Tory Brexiteers applauding the stance of Foster (Ian Duncan Smith, Redwood, Lawson, Rees-Mogg etc) I was reminded of the line up of The Munsters or The Addams Family, the same freakish look but without the family charm of The Munsters or the moral clarity of The Addams Family.

Why is it that we have to tolerate these startling failures (IDS for the state of social services and care of the disabled; Redwood for his ‘singing’ of the Welsh National Anthem among other things; Lawson for his singing as the pound plunged; Rees-Mogg for existing) pontificating about an appalling situation that they have consciously helped produce.  Based on what they have already done, what the hell do they know about how to make the situation in the United Kingdom any better?

I need to watch a film or go to the opera again or listen to music or read a book and convince myself that there is intellectual life out there that is not tainted by political idiocy.  And Trump is now moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem!  Each day brings more bad news than can be easily consumed in a twenty-four hour period!

We must make the days longer!

Beggar him!

Close

Miss Havisham going up in flames in grainy blank and white in a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations was something I had to wait for as the novel unfolded week by week in its allotted TV spot in the schedules.  There were no short cuts, you had to wait.

     How different the present!  Having recently discovered that I had access to series and films via one of my subscriptions I have binge watched the first series of The Man in the High Castle – the story of what might have happened if German and Japan had been the victors in World War Two. 

In this version of reality, America has been divided between the Germans on the East Coast and the Japanese on the West, with a lawless Neutral Zone in between.

     The production values of the series are high and the detailing of each scene is replete with intelligent and satisfyingly visual suggestions as to how the reality might have worked out.

     The mixture of plots and sub plots using politics, espionage, deception and brutality to further the story line; the Resistance and its struggle against totalitarian governments; a love story; the clash of cultures – all of these elements can be found in any number of dramas, the ESP of this series is the injection of a disturbing element of Science Fiction.

     A key plot device in the action of the series is played by a series of films.  These films seem to show a different reality, one in which the Axis powers did not win the war and our version of the Allied Powers being triumphant is the subject of the films.  These films are being collected by the eponymous Man in the High Castle who may, or may not be an ageing Hitler.

     There are hints in the episodes that suggest that there might be parallel universes and that somehow or other elements from these parallel universes are leaking into the reality of the series: either that, or the whole 10 episodes of Series 1 was an elaborate dream in the Japanese Trade Minister’s mind!  As there is a Series 2 and 3(?) I don’t think that device can be used to justify another 20 episodes!

     As the series is set in the 1960s there are technological elements that jar, including the appearance of a German supersonic ‘rocket’ plane which has the delta wing formation of the late lamented Concorde.  The aircraft set looks very impressive on the ground, but I found it singularly unconvincing in flight, an odd glitch in otherwise excellent CGI.  There are also trains that use a magnetic drive – these things are anachronistic for the 1960s and might therefore strengthen the supposition that someone is able to travel between the parallel universes and take technology from a ‘future’ world or a parallel but more advance one and use knowledge to boost technology in the reality of the series.

     I have just discovered that I have access to the ten episodes of Series 2 – so that’s another day of my life given over to being hooked to the screen of my computer!

     The acting in the series is, for the most part, convincing and enjoyable to watch.  The basic premise of the plot it interesting and the production professional.  The script is sometimes indulgent and philosophical profundity can be signalled a little too obviously, but the action is engaging and such attention is given to the appearance of things that I am convinced and satisfied.

     Obviously, there are a number of questions that have been posed in this first series that might be addressed in the second.  I can’t wait to find out.  And I don’t have to, all the episodes are waiting for me just to click the mouse and enjoy!

In the same way that my typing for this blog is often displacement activity from doing my Spanish homework, so too is my choice of topic.  Much though I enjoyed watching the series above, there are more pressing things to talk about than an old TV series.  Like, for example, the present political situation in Castelldefels and Catalonia.

     The election in Catalonia is less than a month away and the political parties are gearing up for the fray.  One television station has taken to referring to the ‘Constitutional’ parties i.e. PP (Hard, corrupt right); C’s so-called ‘centre right’ but in reality, hard right as well, subsidised by business and sluttish in their approach to power; PSC (the Catalan version of PSOE, the so-called ‘socialist’ (sic.) party that has aligned itself with the right and is opposed to Catalan independence.)  Then all the other parties are lumped together under the Independent label as if it is opposed to the concept of constitutional, rather than the reading of constitutional that has been made by the other parties.

     According to the latest poll, the veracity of which I cannot vouch for, the figures show that the two ‘sides’ are fairly equally matched with neither side able to gain an overall majority.  The balance of power, according to this poll, will be held by the Catalan version of the left wing Podemos, which has declared itself opposed to independence, but in favour of a binding referendum about independence.

     The ruling (corrupt and corrupting) party of PP stands little chance of gaining more than 8 or 9 seats in Catalonia as they are cordially despised as crypto-fascist and anti-Catalan.  PP put their hopes in the sluttish C’s party which is headed by a photogenic power-hungry Catalan (allegedly) whose party was formed specifically to stop Catalan separation and was funded by big business and who once posed nude for an election poster to show that he had nothing to hide!  This apology for a party stands to gain the most in the elections.  I hope that this is not true, and Toni assures me that it won’t happen, though I am not as sanguine as he.  The traditional party of left wing opposition is PSC, the Catalan part of PSOE, unfortunately their position has been totally compromised by their national dalliance with PP to get a taste of power.  The fact that the word ‘Socialist’ forms part of their party’s title should be a standing condemnation of their actions: PSC is a party without a soul and without an ethic.  They have shared a platform with PP and C’s: they have marched with PP and C’s; they have voted with PP and C’s.  In some ways it would be fairer to call PSOE/PSC power sluts rather than the traditional political sex workers of C’s.  Whatever, they have forfeited their right to my vote.

     Which leaves my choice on the, presumably, ‘unconstitutional’ side of the political debate!  But my thoughts about the parties which comprise this element of Catalan politics can wait for next week.

    

Lunch was from our usual takeaway restaurant in Castelldefels and was well up to standard, though the owner of the restaurant urged me to look at the rotisserie where an entire suckling pig was being roasted.  It looked delicious and only cost 100 euros!  How do they do it for the money?  I think that the test of something cooked like this is that you should be able to cut the meat up with the side of a plate!  As this beast was supposed to feed eight it means that the individual portion would only cost 12 euros per person – which, thinking about it seems like good value, or at least worth it!

     The chicken that we actually had, while perfectly acceptable, was not really as spectacular as that which I left turning in the heat. 

      At least I can live with expectation!