LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 24 – Wednesday in Holy Week, 8th APRIL

 

I realise that, with all my bluff optimism, I have been affected by the lockdown!  In the poem that I wrote yesterday (smrnewpoems.blogspot.com) I actually questioned, even if rhetorically, the value of sunbathing!

     It is shocking to have to confront a possible breakdown in your worldview that can contemplate something as self-loathing as a negative approach to the appreciation of the nearest star!  It is certainly a wake up call to reassess my attitude and determine to be more positive in the future.  The idea of getting to June and July and behaving like a troglodyte is entirely unacceptable.

     If something as fundamental to my view of life is capable of mutability, then it makes me wonder what other, more subtle changes there have been in this period of self-isolation.  It would argue a self-deluding insensitivity to say that one can remain entirely stable when the world appears to be changing around you.

     The irony, of course, is that the micro world of self-isolation is unchanging and stable.  The continuing horrific catalogue of death and infection is all around us, but not part of the life that we are leading.  It is as if we are living in some sort of medieval fort with a water filled trench around us: part of our surroundings, but separated from them.

     Unlike some others, I have been entirely unable to wean myself from the news.  My addiction to the Internet radio, and more specifically Radio 4 is total.  It is at times like this that the Conservatives detestation of the BBC becomes not only partisan, but also self-defeating.  At times of National Crisis we united around the BBC as a voice of and to the Nation.  I certainly do not look towards the Conservatives and their slavish news lap dogs to give me a sense of what the Nation is thinking or feeling.

     And The Guardian.  As a life-long Guardian reader (with a brief fall from grace and adherence to The Independent) I now read it on my mobile phone with an intensity that goes beyond belief.  And may I make a specific call out for the writing of John Crace, a columnist of rare wit and perception.  His political sketches have been part of the reason that I have been able to maintain my sweetness and equilibrium during the past few years where Brexit and the bloody Conservatives have convinced me that I am living in a society where the dominant ideology is the death-wish!

My early morning routine is now becoming more and more established: set Moppy (don’t blame me, the app demands that you call your robot cleaner something) off on her hoovering circuit; make my cup of tea (English breakfast and Earl Grey) and have the World’s Most Expensive Augmented Muesli (at least I have stopped adding Smarties to it) with fat-free milk; do the Guardian Quick Crossword (with light cheating); change Moppy to her mopping sequence; go for my pool circuits.  And a chunk of the day is gone!  Which is a clear exemplification of the work expanding to match the time available!

     I do miss my daily early morning swim and I can’t wait to get back to that part of my routine, because that morning start include my first writing of the day when I sit in the café or outside having my post-swim cup of tea.  Ah!  How life used to be!

Just back from the open kitchen window where at 8.00 pm our time, we applaud the front-line workers who are keeping our society going.

     Talking of health workers and their battle against the virus: the British Prime Minister now in Intensive Care.  As I said yesterday, I wish him better health and strength to his family – and he should resign.  Now.  At once.

     The Prime Minister’s bravado a while ago where he was joking about his meeting Covid-19 positive people and shaking hands with them; his visible inability to maintain social distancing when his government was promoting it as essential, now appear to be a foolhardy, self-indulgent imposition on health services that are overstretched.   

     I might also add, that the Prime Minister’s inability to give clear indications of who actually has ultimate power in government is a dereliction of duty.   

     chocolate, retribution, judgement, ineptitude, Throughout his career he has been first and foremost a second-rate, shoddy, narcissistic, journalistic liar and, while I have sympathy for his present state of health, I have none for his political.  We deserve better than him.  Though with the cabinet of freaks that he has accumulated, god alone knows who (or in the case of Gove, what) might take his place.

     So far the Conservatives’ management of the Covid-19 crisis has been fatally inept.  How many unnecessary deaths is it going to take before the people of Britain demand the reckoning that should come sooner rather than later?

Determined not to end this post on a sour note, I can report that we were able to buy chocolate in the last shop and you can be assured that my writing has been sweetened by the confectionary. 

     So just imagine what it would have been like without!

Bike trials!

I think that I have the wrong type of bum for my bike.  Either that, or I am jinxed.  [One should never give the opportunity to use a work like ‘jinxed’ is looks so exotic]  And yet, ironically, the pronunciation is excruciatingly difficult for an ‘exotic’ person to say!  Try saying it out loud and then think about a foreigner trying to come to terms with the way that you have said the ‘ed’ part of the word!  Take it from me, that sort of pronunciation (together with ‘phrasal verbs’) are part of the reason for the strained expressions on faces of non-natives trying to get to grips with the language!

Before this bike, my Mate – and that is its trade name, I am not so desperate that I have to claim friendship with inanimate objects, though, come to think of it, I have had on-going, very personal animosities with other things: cars, printers, computers, programs, tools, pencils – and I had better stop there as the list is becoming somewhat disturbing!  Anyway, in all of my previous bike-oid experience, I have never (repeat, NEVER!) had a wheel spoke break [and I rather like the rhythm of those three words, “wheel spoke break” it sounds almost like a chorus if you go on saying them] but now it happens every couple of weeks.

My bike repair person, with whom I am now on terms of incredulous intimacy due to my repeated returns with exactly the same problem, is mystified by the fractures and he has tried various remedies (one of which was quite costly) to no real avail.  I now take the breakages are part and parcel of having a bike and it will have to do until I get a new one.  Which should be in a couple of months time.  Or not. 

This is because I have ordered it from Kickstarter and the proposed schedules are always rather flexible when it comes to reality.  The new bike is going to small wheels, but the tyres are ‘fat’ and I am trusting this to lessen the forces that create the problems with the present bike.

I have ordered, you will be totally unsurprised to hear, all available upgrades from a full-colour bike computer screen to posh hydraulic brakes.  And it is of course electric.

Which brings me back to the present bike.  As the spokes break, I fold up the bike (it is collapsible as well) and put it in the back of the car.  The bike is solid and it takes a certain amount of manipulation to get it in place and the ‘cantilevered’ stage of putting it in the boot is a taxing one, and the frame sometimes lands on the floor of the boot with a bit of a bump.

I freely admit that what happened is (partly) my fault.  To cut a short story even more shortly, I have broken the ‘ignition’ key in the battery.  The battery is enclosed in the frame of the bike, and in the ‘on’ position it is locked inside the frame.  And, therefore, I cannot get the battery out.  To be recharged for example.  True, it is possible to recharge the battery while it is still in the bike, and true again, we do have power downstairs outside – but the idea of putting a charger on in the open is not one I relish or think safe – for all sorts of reasons.

Looking on the bright side, at least the thing is locked ‘on’ so that it can be charged on the bike and used in the normal way.  Unfortunately, the battery in the bike at the moment is slowly losing its ability to recharge; it is coming to the end of its useful life and soon I am going to be using a heavier than usual bike without the delight of easy power to get up those hills.  Well, hill.  Well, road bridge over the motorway.

I have no idea where to take the bike to see if anything can be done, as the manufacturer is in China (surprise!) and the company that produces the bikes is in Denmark.  I live in hope that something good will happen, though too much has to occur for that to be reasonable!

Meanwhile my second Catalan lesson of the week is looming and we have been expected to learn the numbers up to 100 – at the moment just being able to say them, not actually write them down.  Our accents are abysmal and, frankly, we all sound exactly like our nationalities when we speak in ‘Catalan’ – I’ve put in in inverted commas because it doesn’t (yet) bear any resemblance to the language that we hear around us everyday.

Not only is there the stress of having to articulate words with combinations of letters that are simply too foreign to allow ease of acceptance, but also, I have to go, immediately the class finishes, to a doctor’s appointment in Viladecans.  It’s all go!

Later.

Well, I suppose I should count myself lucky.  Not about the broken key, I have done nothing about that except worry, no, my luck held in the car park.  I found a space and was able to (almost) cover the time that I would be in class with the money that I put in the machine to get my ticket.  I reasoned that an extra 10 minutes or so would not be unreasonable to chance.  And so it proved, as my windscreen was little-plastic-bag-less when I returned from my lesson and set off for my next appointment in the hospital in the next town but one along the motorway.

As with everywhere else at the present time, construction work is going on in the hospital car park and a first glance showed it to be worryingly full.  I eventually found a space with very little wriggle room which made shimmying out of the car a painful experience.

I was half an hour or so early for my appointment, but the hospital has a system that uses your health card to log yourself in via some optical readers dotted around the corridors.

I settled down to wait with my mobile phone, but was actually seen in a few minutes and dealt with expeditiously in the company of bevy of medical students one of whom was picked on to explain what was going to happen to me in English.  She did not look particularly happy with this task, but started gamefully enough with an attempt at that condescending bedside manner that doctors sometimes adopt, you know the sort of thing, “ . . .we will have a little look at your leg . .” except she said “to your leg” and when I corrected here there was raucous laughter from all concerned.

After one particularly long monologue from the doctor, who then turned to the girl to continue her translation, I did take pity on her and say, “I understood that” and she smiled her relief.

The end result is that he wants me to restart wearing the bloody pressure stocking again and he has booked me in for another ultra sound investigation to see if the thrombosis is still there.

But the really important fact was that I was squeezing myself back into the car, five minutes before my scheduled appointment was to take place.  Now that, I call a real result.

To celebrate I called into the shops to do a little light shopping for Toni’s knees (his present job is somewhat physical and calls for me to be on said joints for long periods of time) with the result that I have now bought a sort of square padded prayer mat that can only be of help.

Oddly, talking of new possessions, books have come for the two of us!  Toni’s volumes for the next part of his course and a ‘Teach Yourself’ book of Catalan for me.  Unusually for me, I have sampled this book on the internet and found it congenial and, since my taught course is being delivered in Catalan and Spanish is it somewhat comforting for me to have a book where the language of instruction is English.   

The new book itself urges its use as an adjunct to to other forms of and from a cursory look through it appears to be a good buy.  It is a sign of the times that the usual CD accompanying such sorts of books is missing from this volume because the audio files are all available free on line and I have already (I think) downloaded them to my phone.  I progress in this course in a much more realistic way than I ever did in Spanish!  But these are early days and I will have to see how far my patience and dedication go!

-oOo-

The robot cleaner has been hoovering around the house and I wait for the silences that tell me that something has happened before I go and investigate.  Sometimes the machine has been trying and failing to devour something that will not go into its innards; sometimes it decides that it has cleaned enough, and sometimes it simply gets stuck.  I have to pick the thing up, get it back in to working order and set it down somewhere else, rather like a very elderly relative being wheeled into a new space and left to his own devices!

Its last location was in the kitchen where there are various worrying things that it can discover and fail to get around.

Its most worrying predilection is for the gently curved bases of floor mounted fans: these the little machine mounts with relentless orgiastic energy!  But enough of domestic chores.

-oOo-

Today is Toni’s half day at his new job and we are going to celebrate by going to the shopping centre over the other side of the road from his works to try another menu del dia in the restaurant we used on the when we checked out to to get there, and where exactly ‘there’ was before he started.

-oOo-

Now I have to find the spare key to the battery of my bike and attempt the grisly job of trying to extract the remains of the broken key from the ‘ignition’.  I am looking forward to neither of these tasks, but they have to be done.  The trouble is that I do have a ‘key box’ in which, unsurprisingly, I have put most of the keys that I have accumulated.  For many of these objects, I have little idea what they might unlock, but I know that, given time, I am going to be frantic in trying all of them when I find a locked thing that I want to use.  It is the fear of going to the box and not finding the key there that is making me carry on typing rather than taking action.  But, no, enough, have the courage of your ‘key box’ being comprehensive and get going on part one of the restoration of the bike to full working order.

To be continued . . .