LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 96 -Friday 19th June

Early morning swim today and I’ve booked another early morning swim for Saturday!  I am getting back into the groove – just in time to be told that the system will be changing on Monday!

     On Monday the pool will revert to the normal opening time of 7 am and the app-based system of booking will end.  You just turn up.  The showers which have been taped off will be open again and this will be the club getting to the New Normal.

     As far as I am aware we will still have to wear masks when we come into the reception, and our temperature will be taken with the non-contact forehead thermometers.  Presumably we will be back to multi-occupancy of the swimming lanes.

     That will be the single largest step towards how this particular aspect of my ‘sporting’ life will be continued in the phaseless future.

     On Monday we will be in Phase 4 probably and that is only a step away from no phase at all.  Statistics still tell us that the number of cases of infection are growing every day and that people are still dying of Covid-19 – but in an age (because every week feels like one) where German tourists have arrived in a holiday resort and where there will be a general opening up of the country to foreign tourists, it is hard not to believe that we are out of the other end of the pandemic.

     I know that we are not and I will continue to take every precaution – unfortunately it is not only the precautions taken by the wary, but also those of the heedless fickle people who believe that they are immortal that will decide how the final results of this pandemic pan out.

     Most of me is looking forward to a more open approach to living, but I have a deep underlying concern about the evidence for the progression that we are living through.

     It seems almost unbelievable that the change in our lives has been concentrated (so far) in about 16 weeks.  Life at Christmas time is nothing like it is now.

     This afternoon there was a large children’s party in one of the houses opposite.  As I type this evening I can hear a large group of adults talking into the night and laughing together.  In a few days time it will San Juan when it is traditional for fireworks, drinking and parties on the beach to take place.  Catalans are a convivial people and they love getting together.  And who can blame them?

     But these days of sunshine and festival are going to be testing.  Asymptomatic people walk among us and opportunities are going to come thick and fast for the spreaders to infect a whole chunk of the population.

     There have not been obvious attempts to take a critical account of what has gone on so far in the approach to the spread of the virus and its treatment.  We are ill-prepared to cope with a second spike in infection any better than we have done with the original outbreak.

     This is a phoney war after the initial disaster and things do not bode well.

Toni has gone to Terrassa to visit his family and I have given myself a list of tasks to fill his absence – those tasks that always seem able to wait for a better time to be completed.  Large and small I have listed them in my notebook and I have made a decent start for a Friday evening.  We will see how far I get before inertia and distaste limit my achievement!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 40 – Friday, 24rd APRIL

Years ago, when I was a volunteer on Cardiff AIDS Helpline, part of the duties of the volunteer was to staff the phones so that you could answer questions on the disease from members of the public who were able to ask for information in a safe environment where their anonymity was guaranteed.  It was very rewarding and volunteers were only allowed to take phone calls when they had undergone a fairly rigorous period of training.

     I remember, in one of the training sessions where we were being presented with simulations of calls one of the trainers, after listening to my responses said, “A little judgemental there, Stephen!”  I put it down to my being a teacher where there is an obvious overarching sense of direction and intent in the pedagogic approach.  But, with the Helpline, it was all about the caller: whatever the caller said and whatever the caller talked about, the volunteer had to go with it and suspend judgement.  I found it refreshing!  Whatever the caller had done, was doing or thought about doing, I was only there to give unbiased explanations and to give advice if asked.  I heard some shocking things but I learned not to judge only to supply facts to give the callers the information they needed to answer their questions and to give them clarity in the direction that best suited them.

     In the early days of the AIDS epidemic ignorance was the great killer.  In spite of the eventual mass advertising campaigns, the sometimes-gnomic approach was not direct enough for the basic information to get to the bulk of the population and some of the questions asked showed a shocking lack of understanding.

     One caller asked if it was possible for, “Me to give myself AIDS if I cut myself?”  While another when being told that the AIDS virus could be killed with a weak solution of bleach asked, “Couldn’t you inject that into somebody to kill the virus in them?”

     I was reminded of my time with the Helpline when reading and listening to Trump in one of his latest deranged pronouncements where he seems to be urging the use of internal UV treatment and the ingestion of bleach as a way of combating the Covid-19 virus!  30 years later and still the same level of ignorance, and this time not a random anonymous caller from Cardiff but the so-called leader of the free world who, from the time of his inauguration has spoken, “some weird shit” as Bush put it.

     At one time you could smile at the antics of the Orange Grotesquery, but it has become increasingly apparent that his mangled language simply kills.

The second attempt at Google Meet for our language classes was not an entire success.  The sound quality was variable, to say the least and the pictures confusing.  Having seen Zoom conferences of neatly aligned video feeds and exceptional audio, this experience was a little less than overwhelming.  I do not even think that I managed to get the basic information from our little gathering, but I will persevere and see what happens.

     Our Catalan group is about five or six on a good day, but I was the only one there and will have to relay imperfectly understood information in the hope of getting some sort of on line lesson up and running.  As far as I can tell, the only good thing coming out of the crisis is that we will not have any examinations; for which much thanks!  But it does call into question any certificate that we might be given at the end of the year!  What little Catalan I did have before the advent of Covid-19 has now altogether disappeared.  Every time I open my textbook, it is as thought I am starting from scratch.

     To justify our continued places in the virtual classes we have to do a certain number of ‘tasks’ and submit on line for assessment.  Having looked at the first one, I am even more confused than I was before the meeting, but no doubt, I will cobble something or other together and stagger on in the way that has become second nature to me when it comes to the study of languages!

We have just had a loudspeaker car come around the streets telling us that the normal municipal Friday collection of garden clippings and pine needles has been suspended until further notice.  You may not consider this much of a hardship, until you realize that the constant dropping of pine needles (in an area called after the pine trees) is a major problem.  This is not because of any unsightliness, but rather because of the threat that the accumulation of pine needles poses to the efficient working of our drainage system.  The pine needles block drains and cause floods unless they are cleared from gutters on a fairly regular basis.  Everything is interconnected and ignoring one part of the system will lead in a fairly short time to its collapse.  One wonders what other services have been dispensed with during this crisis and when the end results of this neglect will start showing itself.

     We are now two days away from the release of the Plague Kids into the streets on Sunday.  The rules (as far as anyone really knows them) say that a youngster can be taken out on a short walk accompanied by a single parent.  I simply do not believe that this is going to happen and we certainly do not have the number of police available to make sure that the rules are followed.  But, perhaps I am being cynical.

The sun is out and the sky is cloudless and all is well with the world.  At least, all is well with the world when it is concentrated on the third floor terrace, my private bit of the ‘outside’!