LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 100 – Tuesday 23rd June

Perhaps it’s fitting that the 100^th day of Lockdown is on the eve of one of the more anarchic festivals in the Catalan calendar - San Juan.

     I have put down the blinds in the living room to limit the sonic bombardment that will continue spasmodically for hours and hours and hours.

     I decided not to do a tour on my bike this evening I am going to try and emulate the sleep that I had last night that my watch informed me was better than 99% of users!  I don’t remember it being that profound, but perhaps that is the point!

     I do realise that I should have had a glass of Cava and a piece of coca (the bready hot cross bun like cake) to be traditional for San Juan, but I celebrated with yogurt ice cream!  It is also at times like this that I think about my last drink of Cava, or indeed of any alcohol if it comes to that.  It has now stretched into years.  I can’t say that I truly miss alcohol, though a nice glass of decent red wine with a meal is a nagging desire from time to time!  And I always used to like a glass, or even a bottle, of Cava.  Ah, times past!

     Today has been one of those pleasantly ‘nothing’ days where I did more recreational reading of a novel and The Guardian with a little sunbathing with of course my bike ride and swim.

     I also hoovered the stairs and I was horrified at the amount of dirt that the activity produced.  My little robots do the level surface cleaning, and I await with considerable impatience a commercially available robotic stair cleaner!

     Around me the rumbling of explosions is now almost continuous, but I sense that the campaign of noise is not as overwhelming as it has been in years past.  Perhaps it is yet another tradition that is having to cope with the limitations of the virus.

     Tomorrow is classified as a fiesta and so the swimming pool is open an hour later.  I can’t be bothered to change my alarm and so I will have the delight of waking up to go to sleep again – though the danger there is that you oversleep and you also lack the backstop of a later alarm.  I like living dangerously!

      I am now off to bed, no doubt my dreams using imagery from the First World War to work the whizz-bangs into a surrealistic narrative!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 58 – Tuesday, 12th May

I slept the sleep of the dead after my exertions yesterday.  Though thinking about it, that metaphor could have been better chosen.  In fact, it is a wonder I ever get to sleep given my insatiable appetite for the depressingly predictable latest escapades of Orangeblond a portmanteau word I will now use to refer to the sad populist narcissistic twins of the USA and UK, as they vie with each other to show which one cares less about the population they pretend to ‘serve’.

     Try as I might, I cannot wean myself from the heady narcotic cocktail of BBC news and The Guardian, with a dash of Spanish and Catalan televisualisation to add an exotic spice to my neurosis.  Though, thinking about it, wouldn’t an absence of neurosis in these times argue a disassociation from what is actually going on that would be a compelling basis for a text book definition of mental illness?

     No one in Britain (including [especially?] the government) appears to have the slightest idea about what has been ““decided”” – and the double inverted commas there appear to be far too subtle to give a clear idea of the tenuous nature of the word as it is applied to government policy.

     Yesterday/today/tomorrow is when the population should/should not go to work by foot/bike/Star trek beam if possible and not by public transport unless you have to  .  .  .  and one could go on, but this government defies irony and sarcasm.

     600 deaths today, three thousand new cases – how is this a situation in which it is sensible to ease the lockdown.  The testing target was missed AGAIN yesterday – and without adequate testing, anything that the government says is nugatory.  So no surprise there then!

My bike ride this morning was fairly early, but there were many people around, with bikes outnumbering cars and the same thing on my bike ride in the evening.  The evening ride should be Plague Kid Free as their time to roam around ends at 7pm – except of course for those parents who don’t want to stick by the rules.  There were over twenty Plague Kids joining the adults on the paseo; and yes, I counted, just as I counted the number of cyclists who had lights on when I made my way back from the far end of Castelldefels (23 out of 127, if you are interested) and thought to myself, if people are not prepared to do something as simple as switching lights on in the darkness, what hope do we have for something more sophisticated and difficult when connected to the requirements for a successful lockdown?

     Not good!