LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS – Day 92 – Monday 15th June

So, I was wrong about our moving phases today; we are still in Phase 2, I think that there will be another week before we move to a more relaxed point in this never ending saga of the virus.

     I did not manage to get my slot either today or tomorrow for my early morning swim and my slot for Wednesday is at 11 am to mid day.  This is playing havoc with the arrangements for my ‘lesson’ with my friend in the pool who wants to improve his English by having conversation classes with me.  Still, I think that the classes are worth continuing, with benefits for us both!

We went out to lunch to one of our previous (i.e. pre-Covid) haunts.  The seating in the restaurant had been adjusted to reflect the reduction in allowed capacity and, as we were quite late getting to the place, we had a pick of the empty tables.

     We chose one in the same approximate place where we usually sit and then we observed the service.  The wearing of masks by the serving staff was patchy.  They seemed to take every opportunity to remove them or to push them down to their chins.  Even when they were being worn, some of the staff only covered their mouths and not their noses.

     The restaurant also has a thriving delivery service which utilises scooter riders to deliver the food.  When the riders came up to the counter to collect the next order (a counter which is also the bar for the place) they were not wearing masks.

     I can well imagine that wearing masks when doing your job in a restaurant is an irritating annoyance – but it is also the legal requirement.  Toni actually asked the girl who brought us the menu (shouldn’t it have been a one page disposable thing?) to wear her mask – she did, but she shouldn’t have needed to have been asked. 

     Toni became more uncomfortable as the meal progressed and we saw further casual attitudes towards the clinical necessity of wearing masks.  I do not think that we will be going back, in spite of the quality and value for money of the food.

     Nothing in the general attitude of people that we see around us gives us any confidence that this pandemic is going to trail off into memory.  Yes, people are eager to find the freedom that comes with summer.  They want to go to the beach, take a dip and sunbathe, enjoy a drink, socialise with friends.  But if the crowded beach scenes that I observed last weekend become the norm then we should expect a resurgence of the virus in a few weeks’ time.

Tomorrow we are going to Terrassa for a Name Day of one of Toni’s nephews.  This will be the longest trip that we have made for months.  We got the presents in a large supermarket and, apart from the fact that everybody was wearing a mask, it was like a normal day.  And we are nowhere near normality at all.  We are kidding ourselves that each day brings us nearer to the end of the crisis and a few good, sunny days will knock the virus out of our lives for good.

     The situation in the Republican states in America; the re-imposition of lockdown of parts of Peking; the situation in Brazil; the increase in cases in India; the on-going chaos of the UK; Argentina, Peru, Africa – wherever you look there is evidence that we have not managed this virus with any degree of authority. 

     I shudder for what the next few months might bring.

     Obviously I hope that we find a vaccine or at least a treatment; I hope that measures put in place around the world lessen the impact of the virus; I hope that the fatal demagogues in positions of power finally begin to listen to reason; I hope that governments take compassionate measures to protect the less fortunate and at-risk members of society including the old, the ill and schoolkids.

     The disruption of the virus does give an opportunity for an inventive and empathetic government to re-think priorities and concentrate attention on the power-less, rather than the oligarchs throughout the capitalist world who are urging their ‘puppet’ politicians to maintain the status quo which has given the rich even more during this time of crisis.

     The real plague is not Covid-19, it is the power structure that allow a disaster to become a revenue generator for those who already have too much.

     In the ‘good old days’ when Theatre In Education groups came and performed in schools, I was able to welcome one company to my last Cardiff school, it was called the 7:84 Company, because seven percent of the population of the United Kingdom owned eighty-four percent of the wealth.  Do the sums, that means that for ninety-three percent of the population that left just sixteen percent of the wealth to be distributed among them all.  The only thing that has changed is that now, the disproportions are even greater.

     And what about the under-privileged?  One newspaper reported that about 2 million kids in lockdown in the UK have done little or no school work during this period.  You can bet your bottom dollar that the privileged have been working assiduously – so the gaps between those who have and those who have not will become greater.  There will be a whole generation of kids who will be playing catch-up with little or no technology to allow them to access on-line material.

     The government has already stated that the coupon or voucher system which allows poorer kids to have a school meal, will end with the end of term.  How much has this government poured into the hands of million and billion -aire owners of firms and industries?  But they are not going to feed the most vulnerable in our society.

     It is a damning condemnation of our society that in the 300 years since the publication of Swift’s Modest Proposal, there hasn’t been a time when it is more apt than now.  For those of you who haven’t read it, it is readily available on line.  It is a fairly short work, but the punch that it packs is out of all proportion to its brevity, and it is sickening because it still describes the reality of the way that we are.

     Some governments have come or are coming out of this crisis with their reputations improved; some are still in a slough of their own making. 

     What has happened and is going on happening in the UK should be the moment when the people stand up to be counted and say, “No more!”  There has to be a better way than allowing the hollow man Johnson to kill even more than he and his cabinet lightweight misfits have already done.

     The decade of Conservative rule has cheapened, humiliated, divided, impoverished and coarsened, we deserve better!

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS – DAY 80 – Wednesday, 3rd June.

Iffy weather means easier cycling along the Paseo for me.  Although this morning was bright and clear there were clouds around, and it was markedly less warm than yesterday.  As I am virtually geared up to set off at a set time I am impervious to the weather (unless it is raining – there are limits) and so I get to see a sparser selection of the population on my little jaunts.

     I have made a decision that I will not get grumpy on my ride by noting all the people who are breaking some or all of the rules about exercise and the times when they are supposed to be doing it.  I now cycle along in what passes for Zen serenity, or as near as I can get to it with the .active supressing of my Victor Meldrew inclinations.

     All of the usual on-beach café/restaurants (chiringuitos) have now been constructed or are in the last stages of production and these seasonal edifices will soon be plying their trade – though with reduced numbers of clientele – at least in this stage of the lockdown.  I do wonder about the economic reality of these places, where their existence is only for the summer months and now with a reduced number of patrons, how are they going to make a profit?

     Over the next few weeks we are going to see more clearly which cafes and restaurants, and indeed small businesses have managed to survive the lockdown.  In my more cynical moments I wonder whether only those places which seem to be centres for money laundering are going to be able to survive – not that I am going to make any concrete accusations, I am merely putting it forward as a possible scenario.  Hypothetical, of course!

     We are still nowhere near getting back to anything resembling normality, and even when more shops and shopping centres open fully, it is going to be a damn sight later before the attitude of people get back to where it was.

     At least, it will be for those “of riper years” as the Book of Common Prayer has it.  Some of us who are retired and with one or more of the conditions that place us ever so firmly in the “at risk” category will need a vaccine or at least a convincing treatment to be readily available before we return to anything like pre-Covid behaviour.

     The same does not, emphatically not, go for youth.  Although many of the members of the 14-24 year old groupings wear their masks, they do not wear them with anything like sincerity.  Too often the mask is on the chin, or in the hand, or wrapped around the elbow or simply not in evidence at all, when groups of kids are socialising, and that socialising does not often respect physical distancing.

     Don’t get me wrong, I do understand their scepticism and I only wish I could share their obvious belief that any infection will be like an infant infection of chicken pox – over in a day or so with the ‘sufferer’ hardly noticing.  And, let’s face it, statistics are on their side: the vast majority of Covid infections are mild and only a tiny minority necessitate hospitalization.  But as a person who contracted chicken pox in his forties, rather when he was four months or four years old, I have never felt so utterly ill and sorry for myself!  Being now a couple of decades older, I do fear what an infection of Covid-19 might mean for me now.  And indeed for those with whom I may come into contact.  The lesson is clear, it is up to the individual to follow the rules for the benefit of all – but the Cummings Cop-out seems to be all too ready to be called on by all too many people in this crisis.

Here in Spain the government is asking for a final extension to the State of Alarm to keep the restrictions in place during our transition to a looser approach to the virus.  Spain’s economy was not in the strongest of positions before this crisis and it will be a damn sight weaker after it.  The summer is the tourist season and, considering that the Easter Holidays were a disaster, it will be catastrophic if something is not salvaged from the summer holidays.  Spain is allowing the opening of hotels (though not their common areas) at a limited occupancy rate and in another week or so even we in Catalonia will probably be allowed to swim in the sea.  It is tantalizing to have the Med at the bottom of the street and not be allowed to swim in it.  I can’t swim in my local swimming pool either, and I fear that the restrictions that will be placed on public swimming when finally is allowed will make the experience something of a chore rather than a pleasure, but it will be interesting to see how our swimming club interprets the rules!

Johnson’s irascibility at PMQs when Starmer had the audacity to question him, is a clear sight of his lazy lack of preparedness and yet another example of his assumed possession of entitledness.  His bumbling non-answers are embarrassing in the extreme, and the sooner he is dispatched from the dispatch box the better.  I will have to devise an acronym to express his supreme unfittedness to the post for which he is paid.  Perhaps NAPM (not a prime minister) or TOAMP (travesty of a prime minister) or BIAL (bumbling idiot and liar) – they ned some work.

The situation in the USA is horrific in virtually every aspect: morally, socially, politically, legally, criminally, judicially – the list could go on and on.  As a white man, I do not know what it is to walk in a black person’s shoes, but I do know that my wholesale support is for the Black Lives Matter movement and I hope that something real comes from the world wide revulsion to the poison of racism that limits the development of so many black lives, not only in the US but also the UK, Spain, Catalonia and the rest of the world.

My addiction to the news, no matter how depressing it is, is something that I have mentioned before, and I can’t fight it.  I get even more depressed if I think that there are news stories that I might have ignored merely because my fragile sensibility finds it difficult to take.  I have to have my fix of Johnson, Trump et al, but I find that it is easier to take if I take it through the vision of writers like John Crace, the Guardian political sketch writer.  His wry writing lets you know that there is a voice of reason, articulating your sense of contempt in writing, which is so much more intelligent and wittier, allowing a Voltarian smile to leaven the misery of current political events.

Yesterday, before I went out on to the terrace on the third floor, I grabbed a book at random from the shelf nearest the door of my ‘library’ and started reading.  My choice was Lucia in Wartime by Tom Holt, which is a ‘continuation’ of E F Benson’s series of ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels the style of which one admirer described as being as if “the pens of Evelyn Waugh and Jane Austen had mated”.  The novels are studies in middle class mores and snobbery centred on the rivalry of Mapp and Lucia for pre-eminence in the small town of Tilling.

     There was a superb Channel 4 television production of three of the novels in 1985 and 1986 with Prunella Scales as Mapp, Geraldine McEwan as Lucia, Denis Lill as Major Benjy Flint and Nigel Hawthorne as Georgie.  As someone said about the writing of James Thurber and his cartoons, “If you don’t find them funny – there is something wrong with you!”  I feel the same way about Lucia.  I urge you to sample any and all of EF Benson’s oeuvre and of Tom Holt too.

     It may seem perverse to single out a book about Mapp and Lucia which was not written by E F Benson, but rather by Tom Holt over forty years after Benson’s death, but the book is so well written and such a tribute to the power of Benson’s creation that it can be mentioned in the same breath as that of the master himself!

     I might add that my copy of Lucia in Wartime by Tom Holt was a 1986 Christmas present, inscribed by the two friends who gifted it to me, “An imitation Lucia, for an imitation Lucia” 

     How well they knew me!