What really makes sense nowadays?

 

 

 

 

Twelve days early morning swimming in the outdoor community pool!  Only two days to go before my local indoor pool reopens after the yearly fortnight maintenance closure.  Considering I was contemplating paying to use the Gavá pool, I’m quids in!  But it will be a relief to get back to my normal routine on Monday of next week

     In spite of the fact that I have given myself an extra hour or so in bed, to allow the sun to rise before I immerse myself in the chilly waters, I can’t say that I have benefited from the lie-in.  My body clock will not be denied, and I continue to wake up as if my swim was at 7 am, and any bedtime after my inexorable early rising time, is forced rather than easy and so, in the scheme of things, doesn’t really count.

     Apart from two startled Dutch strangers, I have swum alone since a week last Monday, and those interlopers were obviously just proving they had access to everything, as you do when you have just arrived for your holiday and feel that you must use all the facilities at once to get value for money!

     I would like to report that my lonely circling of the pool allowed my mind to drift into poetic reveries and that I, immediately on exiting the pool, rushed to my notebook, and wrote out my exquisite thoughts before they evaporated like the water on my skin.  Alas!  Not so! 

     The only time an image suggested itself was when, this morning, I (grudgingly) swum in the aftermath of a short, quasi, sun-shower, and the drips from the overarching pine trees produced little, short-lived bubbles on the surface of the pool.  Even then, when I did get out, writing in my notebook was not the first thing I did, and you might say that noting that omission is my way of encouraging myself to get on with it and at least jot down the phrases that (while swimming at least) seemed to have some poetic legs!

     I have also written nothing ‘poetic’ about the “collective hysteria” (one cousin) that has prompted actions like the laying of flowers (another cousin) to mark the death of QEII.

 

 

 

 

 

 

     The royal circus has now reached Wales, and there is a service in Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff and then a meeting in the Senedd.  Welsh First Minister Drakeford has made it clear that protest by anti-royalists is something that must be allowed and has suggested that the South Wales Police will be appreciative of that right.  We’ll see how that goes.

     Memories of my first and only trip to Mexico came back to mind when hearing about The Queue – it surely deserves the capital letter as it has become a defining aspect of The British Character. 

     Our arrival in Mexico for holiday after a very long and excruciatingly uncomfortable sardine-flight was just the prelude to a series of what I can only describe as humiliations.  We had to queue to get inside the airport, then queue to join a queue for customs, and then further queue to get through the various obstacles that Mexican bureaucracy provided before we were finally allowed to enter the country. 

     Now, from the comfort of my own armchair in Catalonia, I can watch a similar queueing quandary as the Main Queue for the lying-in-state has been (allegedly) closed because the maximum length has been reached, but people undeterred by the eleven-hour wait, have taken it upon themselves to unofficially queue in a park to wait to join the official queue! This is tantamount to insanity.

 

 

 

 

 

     I am reminded also of a story I heard about The Festival of Britain in 1951.  Although the war ended in 1945, rationing would not end until 1954, so the futuristic architecture, plate glass and colour of The Festival of Britain was something extraordinary.  It was a very popular exhibition, a statement of determination and optimism in the somewhat dreary post-war years and intended to be a “Tonic to the Nation!”  In total over eight million people visited the main exhibition site on the South Bank of the Thames, and I have been told that people were employed to go around the site and break up queues that had formed spontaneously. 

     Giving rationing and the scarcity of so much just after the war, people were used to queueing, and once a queue formed, it developed its own integrity with the people at the head of the queue thinking that there must be something worth waiting for because there were people behind them, and the people behind them assuming the same things given the people in front!

     I would, of course, maintain that both the queue for the late Queen and also the phantom queues of The Festival of Britain are alike in having no ‘real’ end destination.  I know that there is the viewing of a coffin on a catafalque in an ancient hammer-beam roofed hall, and there is always an off-chance of seeing a prince or two or the changing of the guard to justify the wait, but essentially the whole thing is a nothing.  It is a celebration of absence, of a distant unknowable entity now gone.  It is a fantasy of historicism and of significance, it is an illusion tyring to pretend to be something real.  But it’s not, no matter how many people emote when they see the symbols and think that they are participating. They are as deluded as those people queuing for nothing on The South Bank in 1951, and ironically in 2022 they are back queueing on The South Bank again.

     Where are the people to break up this queue and say, “Move on, there’s nothing to see here!”

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 15 – 30th MARCH

A thoroughly miserable start to the two weeks of ‘extreme’ lockdown imposed by the Spanish Government. Presumably what we had before was a ‘Lockdown Lite’ and what we have now is a ‘Lockdown Intense!” – complete with exclamation mark. 

     This attempt to be more stringent is a belated response to the truly horrific figures of the dead and the infected that will haunt this government forever.

     The steady rain is a depressing backdrop to a growing realization that this period of two weeks is more than likely to be followed by another, and another, and another.  The Guardian reports one medical expert saying that the lockdown in some form or other could last as long as a year.  I resisted the need to put an exclamation mark at the end of that last sentence because, truly, it would not come as any sort of surprise.

     At the end of World War II in Britain, it took until 1954 for rationing to end: nine years after the end of a conflict that we ‘won’.  It seems unlikely that the number of deaths from this pandemic will come anywhere near the totals of the World War, but the dislocation is perhaps more truly worldwide than that conflict.  And if it took nine years to get back to sub-normal, how long is it going to take this time?

     This time around no infrastructure has been destroyed, the networks of transportation are running albeit in a reduced form and, most importantly, there is not the international conflict that makes communal unity impossible – apart, of course from the various populists around the world who are finding fascist rhetoric is of no use in fighting a real virus.  Countries are generally sharing vital information; people are working together to find solutions.  It will be the micro political divisions that kill us, working against the macro attempts to save us.

Toni, in his hunter/gatherer mode has been venturing out into this new world of increased restrictions to get some food.  We did not indulge in the panic buying frenzy at the start of this madness, so we do routinely need to stock up. 

     We are fortunate that in Castelldefels there is one area where there are five large supermarkets within walking distance of each other, so choice is not a problem.  The only real fear is peoples’ lax social distancing habits when in the confined spaces of shops.

     We had a fairly large list of needs and most of them have been satisfied.  We have made it policy that only one supermarket will be visited and if you can’t get what you want there then it will have to wait for another time.  Our decision to have a few ‘treats’ came to nothing, as the chosen store (Aldi) had no chocolate or ice cream (overtones of “No more mushrooms!” there) but the other items on the list were obtained, more or less.

     The only things that we had actually run out of were eggs and milk; and Toni forgot the eggs (but remembered the milk) and I suspect that he simply missed the chocolate (he lacks my professionalism when it comes to shopping) and everything else he failed to find, but we do have all the essentials. 

     Being without milk, even for a number of hours rather than days, was a pain.  On the principle that it is better to be petty minded over slight inconveniences rather than freak out over major crises: I have to say that missing a late afternoon cup of my tea (50/50 English Breakfast and Earl Grey) was a real loss.      It threw my sense of new routine into chaos and unsettled me.  How, I reasoned, is civilized life to continue without a stabilizing cup of tea? 

     In spite of the horror all around us, we live in a sort of easy stasis where the day starts with the comforting rumble of the robot hoover and a cup of tea, and ends with the computer monitor going black.  During the time in between there are the little domestic things that have taken the place of engagement in the wider physical world, or at least engagement physically in the wider world.  Any disruption there is to the Important Little Things That Keep You Sane – well, the clue is in the last capitalized phrase!

     As befits the gravity of the situation that dictates our lives, I have taken to drinking only camomile tea in the late evenings: look on it as my way of saving milk, and indulging in a gentle quasi-protestant-self-denial.  I cannot really pretend that I like the taste of camomile tea, but I have rapidly got used to it, so that I am able to kid myself that the taste is at least ‘interesting’ and a ‘dis-flavoursome contrast’ to the beverages I usually drink.

     That is the sort of ‘re-branding’ that characterizes a great deal of what we are doing when locked down: a spiritual form of ‘make do and mend’, using what you have to make the most of what you want!

And talking of Protestantism, as I sort-of was in the last but one paragraph, the ‘treats’ that we had from Toni’s shopping expedition were almost perfect examples of the faith: two tone biscuits: Marie biscuit one side and a thin layer of chocolate covering (and overhanging) the other.  Marie biscuits are surely the most uninspiring biscuits in commercial production and delicious chocolate should never be thin. 

     Incidentally, when I explained to Toni the correct way to eat these biscuits: by nibbling away the overhang of chocolate round the edges, while trying to prise it away from the biscuit base to see how much of the covered biscuit you could uncover when you had nibbled away at the four sides, he had swallowed his whole.  And there you see the consumer differences between a Lapsed Catholic and an Anglican Atheist!

     And in a most un-Catalan like way, it is still raining and we have not had our customary glimpse of the sun. 

     It’s just one damn thing after another.