LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 12

The Covid-19 statistics in Spain make sobering reading.  We are now at the top of the league for daily deaths and our total has overtaken that of China.  With over fifty thousand reported cases of infection the fear is that the situation will get worse before we see a flattening of the curve and a distant view of a way out of this crisis.

     And yet, my life goes on in the oasis of assumed safety and normality of my home and I write this with the comfortingly ordinary sound of the new robot mop making its stately progress across the tiled floor of the living room; the dishwasher rumbling away to itself as it goes through its own cleaning cycle; and the dregs of my first cup of tea of the morning cooling at my side.  But no noise of traffic; no sound of overhead planes landing in Barcelona airport; no sound of kids playing; no sound of workmen next door.

     Catalonia is a noisy country and a large part of social life is conducted outside the house.  As an example, the dinner parties that Brits have in their own homes where friends gather are more likely to be in restaurants rather than in homes in this country.  Eating at home in Catalonia is basically for the family, not for friends.  Restaurants are the natural meeting places, together with bars, ice cream salons and tapas haunts, so the isolation in homes is unnatural for a population that is naturally gregarious. 

     That sociability could be part of the reason for the number of Covid-19 cases here as football games and demonstrations were allowed to take place at a time when more judicial counsel should probably have restricted mass gatherings of people. 

     The large demonstrations that took place on International Women’s Day on the 8th of March were an obvious mistake and it is one of the many that the government will have to explain in the investigations that are carried out after the crisis is over.  The muddled thinking which led the government of Sanchez to give advance warning of a future lockdown of Madrid while giving those Madrileanos with second homes away from the hotspot of infection the opportunity to decamp and spread the disease will also have to be considered later when guilt is apportioned.  The government recognizes that it could have done some things better, but each of its failures is directly translatable into unnecessary deaths.

     Here in Castelldefels precise numbers are difficult for me to find, though it appears that there has been one death from Covid-19 of someone who was both old and who also had pre-existing illnesses. 

     The police and authorities have reinforced their instructions that nobody should leave their homes except for the specific reasons allowed, and have followed up this instruction by revealing that there have been 171 cases of the police charging people with breaking the restrictions here in Castelldefels!

     Which brings me to the renovations next door.

     I have decided that the renovations are a good thing.  Not because of the noise: I am not Catalan, I do not need constant hubbub as an essential part of my national psyche, I embrace silence – unless it is leavened with my own choice of music or conversation – and would prefer tranquillity rather than the musique concrète of inconsiderate construction that transmits itself through the structure of our houses.  No, I have decided that, in this time of crisis (or Time of Crisis if you prefer) that it is necessary to have an external focus for the animosity that I feel about the restrictions of my present situation.  I therefore, choose to transmogrify the selfish and inconsiderate irritation of rich people trying to get richer by tarting up a house near the sea for a profit, into something which is a piece of spiritual blotting paper, soaking up my negative feelings and giving me a focus for my hatred for all things that disturb my tranquillity, up to and including Covid-19.

     I am reminded of some novel or other that I read years ago where the admiral or captain of some vast ship forced the crew to make him a yacht while the fleet was standing-to or laying-to or whatever ships do when they are not, as it were, shipping.  The sailors were forced into producing this craft for their superior officer and constructed it with much moaning and groaning and with feelings of resentment.  When taxed with his unreasonable demands on his crew by a senior officer, the captain explained that he had deliberately focused the feelings of resentment on himself so that the crew could be united in a feeling of unfairness and not starts bickering among themselves in the phoney-war before action.

     I also remember that when the admiral/captain actually sailed his new yacht around the fleet the seemingly hard-done-by sailors took inordinate pride in the fact that the yacht was something that they had made and was ‘theirs’ as well as the admiral/captain’s.

     Not an exact parallel, I know, but the principle is the same.  Possibly.  It is also a justification for exploitation as well, but then I suppose we always find way to make the intolerable prosaic and acceptable!

     So, I have, with a magnanimity of spirit that does me credit, subsumed the sonic grit in my eye, into the wholeness of my soul.  Which is made easier by the fact that the workmen next door have not yet turned up and it is so much easier to be philosophical when the disturbance is not physically present.  Let us see how I cope when hammer falls (yet again) on concrete.

In a similar way, my mother, in a never to be forgotten phrase (nor was she ever allowed to forget it!) uttered when our household spending had reached the astronomical level of £5 (!) a week, and my parents were discussing retrenchment, said, “Right!  That’s it! No more mushrooms!”   

     The stunned hilarity of her husband and son on hearing this credo, axiom or tenet of belief meant that this cri de coeur was resurrected in a variety of circumstances as a universal panacea when the way forward was unclear.  How to cope with The Cold War?  “No more mushrooms!”; Industrial unrest?  “No more mushrooms!”;  Margaret Thatcher?  “No more mushrooms!”             

     As a rallying cry, it may not have been over-effective, but it did add to the gaiety of nations; well of that section of the nation that included Dad and me, and grudgingly, my mother too!

     It would be tempting to call my mother’s emphatic statement of frugality a non sequitur, but that would not be strictly true.  Mushrooms have value, they are not distributed free in the shops, but the value saved by spurning them as an unnecessary expense is, shall we say, marginal: it is the old (dated) joke about slimming where some trivial nutritional denial on the part of the slimmer is likened to emptying the ashtrays on a 747.

     I have been trying to think of the literary technical term to describe the phrase my mum used: understatement doesn’t really cover it; litotes or melosis?  Well, my mum was being sincere, not using deliberate understatement to emphasise.  Perhaps the term I’m looking for is “woefully inadequate”!

     However you describe the phrase, at least for my mum, it gave a concrete ‘solution’ to a practical problem: too much expense: cut mushrooms.  Job done.

     We all do it, a sort of variation of the ‘thumb in the dyke’ technique where something seemingly trivial, has an out-of-proportion final effect.  We hope.  And this approach is probably more apparent during times of enforced introspection, especially when they are seasoned with personal peril! 

     We want a simple solution something that is easily graspable, something comforting and achievable.  Alas!  If only solutions to our present crisis were as simple as shunning fungi!

My pool circuits today were accompanied by the World Service of the BBC, as my preference over Woman’s Hour.  Don’t get me wrong, I listen to Woman’s Hour with the best of men, but today the lure, nay the addiction of World News from the BBC was the greater pull.  So, I was able to trudge my walking-sticked way round the water, listening with ever-growing pleasurable panic to the news.

     In one of the gardens that I pass on my peregrinations, a father and young son were running from the front garden to the gate in the back garden as part of their exercise regime (this is directly possible because our houses are hollowed out at ground floor level and rooms start on the first floor) with a sort of determined seriousness.

     On the opposite side of the pool and next to the tennis court of the flats on our left, two small boys were playing a form of tennis.  Considering the racket for one of them was about two thirds of his total height, he wielded the racket with considerable skill, if not always accuracy.   

     With earplugs firmly in place one is ‘allowed’ to ignore other human life forms with impunity: which I did.

     I continued my slow paced walk until I began to feel a little weary and, just as I had decided to call it a day, the smallest of the boys lofted the ball into our pool area.  In fact, into the pool.  As I had passed him on my circuit I could only gauge the trajectory of the ball by vague World Service blanketed mewls.  I had no wish to be mean, but I had an equal determination not to touch anything that the kids had touched and so I (seemingly oblivious to all) walked out of the pool area and into my back garden.

     I rationalised my callousness by reasoning to myself that all the boys would have to do was go back to their parents and get another ball.   

     And, anyway, I have spent my time characterising any person of a youthful disposition as a Plague Child, and it would appear that my designation is now born out by reality with Covid-19, as kids can have the virus, not suffer the consequences, but effectively spread the infection. 

     Justification!

Life today

I have just been listening to the afternoon play on Radio 4, not only because it was a dramatization of part of Muriel Sparks’ life, but also because I caught on a trailer for it, that it was about disinformation during the Second World War in Britain. 

     With a bump I was taken back to a library book I took out when I was in school and the name Sefton Delmer came back to me.  It took a bit of Google searching, but the title of the book that I read (I actually recognized the cover!) was called Black Boomerang, written by Sefton Delmer the head of our black propaganda efforts during the war and published in 1962, so I was remembering a book I read over half a century ago.

     Although most of the details of the book are long lost to my retrieval system, the name of the author is something that has always stayed with me, together with thoughts about the morally ambiguous basis for black propaganda.  I have used this concept as something that linked usefully in to my work in school with media, advertising and indeed literature in the ways that all of them attempt to persuade and convince.

     The Radio 4 play was a fairly insubstantial piece of fluff, but it did raise a number of interesting ethical dilemmas and, although the ending of the play was flip and facile (even if it was true, which given the subject matter of the play etc etc) but has provoked me into writing.

     It has been famously reported that when Sir Strafford Cripps found out what Sefton Delmer was doing, he wrote to Anthony Eden the Foreign Secretary and said, “If this is the sort of thing that is needed to win the war, why, I’d rather lose it.”  Perhaps, even at the time, this attitude was considered a trifle precious, after all we were fighting ‘total war’ that seemed to justify anything – and against a foe whose moral worth was demonstrably low.  But, and there is always a but, if you lose your own moral standards in fighting someone with low moral standards how are you better than they are?  The ends justify the means is Machiavellian, literally!

     And the times in which we are living make you wonder if the pioneering work of Sefton Delmer in the black arts of information manipulation are not now the normal way that all governments behave – but openly and with a complete lack of shame and a totally confusing acceptance of fabricated lies are truth and reality.

     The present governmental attitudes towards information about the Coronavirus (or ‘Caronavirus’ to the idiot in the White House) have much more to do with presentation than reality.  We expect totalitarian regimes to hush up, massage, lie, obfuscate, whitewash and bluster – but these techniques are all too familiar to the degraded governments of the part-time British Prime Minister and the full-time American golfer.

     Given the state of truthfulness in the political world today, perhaps I should re-read Black Boomerang to remind myself of the techniques that are being used on me today.  If you are interested, then all of Seton Delmer’s books are available on-line at psywar.org.

In spite of the fact that I sometimes use the weekend to justify laziness in getting up, today I got up for my early morning swim and was rewarded with a lane of my own (eventually) and a well-deserved cup of tea outside (in my coat, obviously) afterwards.

My post-swim cup of tea and notebook use produced further ideas for the recalcitrant poem, or maybe another completely different one.  I will try and mash the concepts together and find out what happens, though I think that I have a title.

     For the first time in my life I actually thought about the phrase, “Now then!”  And wondered why its contradictory nature had never struck me before.  It can be used in different circumstances and could mean anything from “Steady the Buffs!” to “That’s enough of that!” to “Just wait until you hear what I have got to tell you!” to “Don’t be nasty” and so on.

     I liked it, when I thought about it, for the way in which it links the present to the past in an easy colloquial phrase.  And ambiguity is always stimulating! If you are interested in further discussion then I suggest you look at the site https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24882/the-origin-of-the-phrase-now-then

I will, however use the phrase in my own way!

My zest for lino cutting did not win out against tiredness and bed last night, but I might be open to doing a bit of artistic slashing this evening. 

     The major problem for me with this new/old hobby is that I never can find enough free surfaces to allow the prints to dry before I make other cuts and prints. 

     I think that I will have to ‘prepare’ backgrounds so that I have a ready supply of treated pages to use at leisure. 

     Well, it’s worth a try and, as I always say about my attempts at things artistic, “What have I got to lose but my self-respect”!

Abnormal normality

“The curious incident of the dog in the night time” came to mind as we made our way to work, or rather I drove Toni to his work at our regular ungodly time in the morning so that he could start his travails at 7.00 am promptly.  Except in this case it was the traffic that was notable by its absence rather than the bark of a dog.

Part of Toni’s way to work is along the C-something or other, one of the main motorways into Barcelona from the west of the city.  Even at 6.30am the traffic is heavy and, at St. Boi we take a slip road off the main motorway which winds its circuitous way around the road works for a new section of motorway that have been going on for as long as I have been in Catalonia - and still no new road.  We branch out at the notorious St Boi roundabout to a link road that takes us into Cornella and then a few side streets (along which major busses go!) to his place of work.

As with all attempts to use urban motorways to get places in the morning, timing is everything.  If we leave at 6.30 am promptly, although the traffic is heavy and marginally suicidal, we get there with enough time to spare for Toni to have a quick coffee in the café at the end of the street a few steps away from his work, should he chose to do so.

The traffic this morning was eerily sparse and by way of equilibrium for the spaciousness of the roads we were stuck behind two large slow moving lorries on the slip road that slowed us down.  But, lo! As we passed the usual bottleneck where the slip road has its own slip road to join another motorway - there was nothing.  Not a single car. 

To give you an idea of normality, I sometimes count the number of seconds that it takes to get to the end of the queue I observe on the opposite side of the road as I return to Castelldefels on the largely empty side of the road that it not going in to Barcelona or other major cities: my longest count has been twenty-seven seconds of tail back, counted while travelling at 80 kph!  Nothing.  Not a single angry driver keeping as close as possible to the driver in front to ensure that no chancer tries to cut in to save a few seconds.

In the couple of minutes that it takes to deposit Toni and make my way back onto the major road system and pass the link road, a small queue had built up and was visibly growing by the second.  You see what I mean about timing!

We realized that the paucity was due to (or is it “owing to”?  I can never remember the rule that I learned imperfectly back in form 4 of Cardiff High) the fact that most people have not yet returned to work.  Schools are back on the 7^th of the month, I think, and our Catalan class recommences on the 8^th.  So, next Monday we will find the entire motorway fuming with resentful workers still half asleep, dreading the day ahead and spoiling for a traffic jam to make their return to work complete in its awfulness.

Today, however it meant that I got back to Castelldefels in good time and turned into the Swimming Pool car park just as the gate was being unlocked.  Timing again!

It further meant that I was one of the first to get changed, but no matter how precisely I make it for the opening time of 7.00 am I am never the first in the pool, there must be people who have secret ways into the complex to allow them to bag a lane!

But when I got to the pool, some of the usual suspects were not in place.  I am there early because I have to be, but there are a couple of obviously retired ladies who do slow mysterious strokes who seem to monopolise the outside lanes.  Why are they there so early? 

There are ‘serious’ swimmers who move through the water as if they are being chased by piranha and you can almost hear them clucking with annoyance if anyone dares to join their lane when there isn’t another option. 

 

These are the swimmers who will do butterfly in a crowded lane which, “as any fule kno” is the height of bad swimming manners.  It is wrong for a variety of reasons; first and foremost, because I can’t do the stroke for more than a few seconds, so I take it as a personal affront; secondly, because it takes up the entire lane; thirdly because it is very splashy, and for reasons that I do not fully understand I abhor being splashed when I swim.  In water!  Fourthly because it is a vulgar display of offensive physicality and small-minded showing off. 

Mind you, I have to say that I feel the same for any stroke other than crawl.  In a crowded lane, crawl is the only stroke where your efforts stay (roughly) within the width of your body and you do not encroach on another swimmer’s space.

I managed to complete my swim in a lane that I had largely to myself, so I have little to complain about.  And the cup of tea in the café afterwards was not accompanied by the Camino of parents-with-children using the car park to leave the car and then march the kids through the café to the school.  It was oddly tranquil, and far too early for even the most resolute of parents (who in this part of the world seem to spend - and I mean spend - a lot of time, effort and money to getting someone/anyone else to look after the kids when they are on holiday) looking to take their charges for a quick or even a long swim.

Our pool/sports centre usually has a sort of sports camp where parents deposit their kids in the morning and pick them up in the evening, the centre will have amused and fed them during the day.  This must be a very profitable part of their activity and they have ‘camps’ for all the major holidays.

So this week will be one of non-normality with routine being re-established on Monday of next week.  When the city will be back in the safe hands of the retired.  Again.

A day can be too long!

 

‘Taxi’ service, swim, shower & shave, hospital appointment, blood test, Catalan lesson, visit to the framers, a little light shopping.  All starting at 6.00 am.

And yesterday, in spite of my knowledge of myself, I wrote that, “The afternoon can be given up to writing.”  As if!  I am not sure that my weariness was because of having done so much before the morning was out or because of the sheer differences of experience that the six hours between 6.00 am and midday afforded.

Whatever the reason, by the time I had had my lunch and sat in my armchair, I knew that my right hand would search out the remote to recline the seat and drift into that half-waking dreamland that is a function of relaxation and the sound of Radio 4 playing in the background.

The only thing that got me up and doing was the realization that my supplies of tea are getting dangerously low.  Catalonia is not the arid wasteland of tea-lessness that it once was.  I mean, tea has always been available, but not the British tea (with taste!) that I have been brought up with.  However, my tea now has the extra need to be decaffeinated because it is an integral part of the regime laid down by my doctors, by which I am supposed to live - or suffer the fatal consequences!  And decaffeinated tea is not as easily available here.

That should not be problematic in this age of the internet where anything and everything is available at the frenzied pressing of money into the ever-open electronic grasping hands of Amazon.  And, sure enough, there are numerous suppliers who make decaffeinated tea and it can also be sent to be Catalonia.  The only question is that of cost.  One supplier seemed to offer a reasonably priced product, but the price of sending it to Catalonia was almost as much as the product itself!

I have now been to a local supermarket which caters, in some of its product range, to the British residents.  In the reasonably extensive ‘tea’ section there are indeed two or three makes of British tea, but none, alas, that are decaffeinated.  The range includes those fruit and herb teas that sound good in theory but invariably fail to please.  At least fail to please me.

It was at the point that I was almost driven to buy a vegetable tea that I had never seen before, that I finally noticed the unobtrusive boxes that claimed to be decaffeinated black tea – the supermarket’s own make.  I made an executive decision and bought half a dozen boxes and thought that having bought them I would get used to whatever it tasted like – and anyway I also bought some ‘full-strength’ Earl Grey to make it palatable in the mix that I usually drink. 

  

And, having just sampled this new double brew, it is – acceptable.  But that is very much not the adjective that I would use for my blends that are lying unused in myriad containers, where the mere aroma is intoxicating enough without the use of boiling water.  I have limited myself to a cup of ‘real’ tea every few days which is probably a bad idea because it shows up the rather vapid drinks that I try and pretend are reasonable cups of tea!

And now that I am (more) refreshed, I could turn to my writing – but Toni has just appeared after an unsatisfactory day at work and he wants to go out for something to eat for our evening meal, and I am not so churlish as to refuse.  Even if his day of ‘work’ cannot have been as taxing as mine!

-oOo-

There is a positive and a negative to be taken from my activity today. 

 

In hospital my blood test result was exactly in the range where it should be and so, finally, I was given the go-ahead to change the location of future tests from Bellvitge Hospital to our local medical centre.  At least I think that is what is going to happen, I have been given a photocopied standard letter and I will have to take it in to my doctor and take it from there.  If nothing else I will be able to go to our local centre by bike and not have to use the expensive car park in Bellvitge.

The less positive element in the day is connected with the framers.  I knew that my little ‘project’ had elements that might be problematical, but when I was in the framers these were brushed aside with a ‘we can do this’ approach that I found stimulating.  It didn’t last.  This afternoon I was phoned up by the actual framer who said that they simply did not have the equipment to realize my idea.  Pity.  There are other shops in Castelldefels, but I might have similar problems there too.  I have not, however, given up.  It will exist!

Now out for an evening meal.

And who knows, after being fed (no salt, low fat) and watered (0% alcohol) I might feel inclined to, finally, get on with the writing that I thought would be a simple progression from a full morning!

Belief and action are not the same thing.

Tea at last!

Back home and my first decent cup of tea in what seems like weeks, but was actually just over two days!

And there is, as everyone must admit, that other great aspect of being at home, because there is nothing quite like sleeping in your own bed – especially when you are studiously trying to ignore the fact that various malignant microbes are infesting your bronchial tracts and trying to create colonies in other sensitive parts of your body and make their presence noisily evident.

This Sunday needs me to be doing something mindlessly empty. And my task of choice is putting all my new Christmas CDs from Toni, the 50 CD Deutsche Harmonia Mundi box set of a selection of Baroque and Ancient Music from the label on the hard disc of my computer. I am aware that, in spite of my well-known love of electrical gadgets of all kinds, this might appear as something more Luddite-like than I would like to admit. I have recently (I know, I know) downloaded Spotify and found out that they have a stupefying collection of classical music at various clicks of the fingers. So why, you might ask, am I going through the archaic, and to some of my friends, the insultingly unintelligent approach of actually 'buying'? CDs and then making the situation much worse by laboriously downloading the music on to the hard disc of my computer?

I suppose my attitude is a hang-over from the early days of my computer ownership when I must have been one of the few people in the computer owning universe to have the discs for all the programs on my machine, including, of course, a growing pile of squashed cardboard boxes. My music collection was similarly backed up by CDs, at least it was as soon as CDs became the music system of choice. If I am brutally honest I have to admit that my purchase of an early Philips portable cassette player/recorder did allow me to add a tape version of Beethoven's First and Eighth Symphonies to my collection of LPs, but cassettes were always a fairly noisy alternative to a decent LP and anything I recorded from the radio was merely the excuse to find a budget LP version to replace it. So, although it might take some searching, there is a physical backup for everything (mostly, I am not absolutely perfect) that should have been bought.

Toni's IT course encourages the students to find free-source versions of everything that they need in IT terms and he has passed on his practical knowledge to me – or at least I allow him to load up free-source programs on the machine on which I am typing this.

There are disadvantages, as I have found out. My years of using a Mac when everyone else was using a PC have come back to me, when all the programs which were supposed to work on both machines, did – but only worked perfectly (at least for the state of computers at the time) on PCs. Those days have now come again as the free versions of programs do almost everything that the paid-for versions do. Almost. And that 'almost' is the area of heartbreak and wasted time! Still, I solider on and I have found 'ways' of using the free programs and not quite losing out!

I wonder if it is just coincidence, or vicious intent that so many simple finger moves on the mouse pad on one system are slightly different or the opposite on the other? As I am using both PC and Apple at the moment, it is constantly frustrating to assume that something is going woefully wrong until you realise that you are using four Apple fingers to do something when you should be using three PC ones, and Apple's up is PC's down!

So, I will continue merrily to load up my CDs – especially as this computer has a hard disc of 2TB, so I can load on and up with impunity and not take away valuable space from other things.

I have now completed by re-reading of The Portrait of Dorian Gray – there is so much to be said for carrying a complete library with you on your smart phone when dealing with family get-togethers. And looking at a smart phone screen is so much more socially acceptable in company than reading a book! Even if that is what you are actually doing rather than checking your messages – and why, by the way, should checking your messages be any more acceptable than reading? I thank god for the lack of logic that allows me to read in any and all situations. And long may such rudeness continue.

I have done no work on my poem today, but the ones on my blog might be worth reading at

http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/

Give them a try and let me know what you think.