LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 77 – Sunday, 31st May

I am more than ever convinced that my government has no real plan to exit the lockdown apart from a mystic belief in the ameliorative affect of the calendar, and hope.  I have seen no evidence that the political leaders have the slightest idea of what they are doing, why they are doing it and what they hope to achieve.

     It is fairly clear that the loosening of the lockdown restrictions were brought forward to try and combat the adverse publicity about the lockdown cheat Cummings.  The tracking effort seems stillborn given the information that we have had for those people who have been ‘trained’ so far.  The opening of schools in England seems motivated by politics rather than by health and education.  Every part of the crisis has been made worse by the way that it has been woefully mismanaged.  And people die because of the mistakes that this government makes, and they will go on dying until a more convincing/efficient/moral/realistic – well, add your own adjectives, I can think only of insulting ones for the bunch of incompetents that supposedly run the country.

     Here in Catalonia and in Castelldefels we are due to move to Phase 2 on Monday.  This unites all parts of the metropolitan area of Barcelona into one unit and that means that we are able to move about within the whole area.  In theory, we think, it means that Toni would be able to go to his home city of Terrassa and speak to his family, though he would still have to keep physical distancing when he speaks to them.  And I think that they could meet in an open space.  We are not absolutely clear about the rules.

     I have just come back from my evening bike ride and the area where we used to live when we were first in Castelldefels looked like a perfectly ordinary Sunday night in late May.  Families were out and there were groups of youngsters on bikes and wandering the streets.  The restaurants were doing a roaring trade and there were queues outside some.  The age range was from babies to pensioners so, as far as the good people of Castelldefels are concerned, the restrictions of Phase 1 are well and truly over.

     On Monday, if the weather is good, I confidently expect the beaches to be packed and we will then see if the discipline of physical distancing extends itself to the sand!

On the cultural front, lockdown has given me the opportunity via Netflix to watch an extended selection of episodes of “Family Guy” and it has taken over (almost) from my predilection for lauding “The Simpsons” as the best thing on our TV screens.  

     Admittedly my lack of access to past episodes of “The Simpsons” means that “Family Guy” has had something of a clear run in making me a fan, but just as there are episodes of “The Simpsons” that are stand-out amazing (I’m thinking of the episode when Bart is sent to France and finds that he is a slave in a vineyard; the one where Marge takes part in the musical version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” with a chorus number “You can always depend on the kindness of strangers” or the remake of “Of Mice and Men”) I have now seen an episode of “Family Guy” that stunned me.

     “Send in Stewie, Please” is focussed on just one character and is an extended episode that I understand was broadcast without commercial breaks.

     The action of the episode is centred on the obnoxiously precocious baby of the family, Stewie.  He has been sent to the child psychiatrist because, as we eventually find out, he has pushed another child downstairs.

     Stewie dominates this episode and through picking up clues in photographs and other things he is able to give a crushing description of the live and love of the psychiatrist (voiced brilliantly by Ian McKellen!) before breaking down himself and revealing The Truth about himself.  It is mesmerizing.  It is comic, without being funny and it is a very polished piece of writing.

     It was broadcast in March 2018 and I recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet.  Whether you will get the full flavour of the episode if you haven’t seen any other the others I am not sure, but it will still be a horrifyingly amusing sort of experience!

     “Family Guy” is a much more ‘adult’ animation than “The Simpsons” and uses tropes that you would never find in the latter.  It is also famous for its ‘cut aways’ and these often have ‘real’ film or ‘real’ characters in them.  Sexuality is a major theme, in a number of varieties, sometimes very uncomfortably!

     It’s all good stuff and I am thoroughly enjoying my belated introduction to a splendid series!

For Sunday lunch we had our traditional meal of chicken from the pollo a last where people are still maintaining adequate physical distancing and forming an orderly queue.  This Sunday the people tried to reinstate the ticket system where, having taken a paper ticket, you are informed that it is your turn by an electronic display.  For the last few weeks, because of the distanced queuing it was irrelevant and most of us had queued without taking a ticket.  This meant that, when the owner tired to call out a number there was instant rebellion from the queue and the system was dispensed with immediately.  Something to bear in mind for next week!

     Though, who knows how we will be behaving by next week!  Time now has the quick slowness or slow quickness that can easily catch you out!

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!