You can't force imagination

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday was a public holiday in Catalonia and today isn’t.  The difference in the café after my swim was marked.  I was virtually alone and, as I sit at a table next to the plate glass windows looking out onto the car park, I had nothing to distract me from adding to the writing in my notebook.  Except, I didn’t much.

     I have found, in the past, that even the most quotidian of reflections about the weather or the strength of a cup of tea can sometimes give rise to more profitable thoughts.  Today, that was not the case, “Overcast, cold, with some hazy sun” remained a description of the state of the day and didn’t progress to profundity.  Still, I had a decent cup of tea at the end of my swim and I had had a lane to myself, so to quote Lewis Carroll, I felt fully justified in marking the day “with a white stone” – which, if my memory serves me right is an old Roman custom, and which I claimed as my own as soon as I read about it in one of the footnotes of Gardner’s Annotated Alice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow is my flu jab, and I think it says something about the way that I fill my days that this has become An Event in my week.  It is a step in the process of defending myself from the vicissitudes of various viruses and, as I have mentioned before, in my age group if you don’t look after yourself you can expect little from the authorities to help you.  Though having said that I did get a message on my mobile phone yesterday telling me that I should be thinking about my flu jab and, if I hadn’t already made arrangements, I should get an appointment via the helpfully supplied link.

     This will be an added layer of protection, especially as many of the Covid restrictions are being lifted. 

     For example, next week is my next visit to the Liceu, not for an opera this time, but rather for a ballet.  If you have a season ticket then a couple of ballets and the odd recital are part of the package, and the package is worth getting because its purchase comes with a discount of 25%.  And 25% off a lot of money is well worth getting!

     During the course of the pandemic, we have had performances cancelled, and sometimes entire productions.  When the Opera House opened up again, it was to a severely reduced seating capacity with various safety aspects enhanced.  Our specified seats were no longer ours, and we season ticket holders were distributed around our chosen price area, to ensure that we could be islanded by empty seats.  The staged production of The War Requiem was the last of the adjusted performances and for the next we should be back in our accustomed places.

     But the pandemic is not over.  Although many young people act as if the Covid Pandemic is an historical event and nothing to do with their immediate lives, this is simply self-delusion, a self-delusion that could be fatal for those that fit into the most vulnerable age and chronic illness categories.  Double vaccinated people can get Covid and be capable of spreading the infection, even if they do not demonstrate symptoms of the illness itself.  The largest age category of new infections is in children.  We are not, in any way, shape or form safe from Covid.

     In Catalonia we longer are required to wear masks in the open air, though it is suggested that in more crowded places like paseos it is advisable to wear a mask and to keep to the social distancing rules.  But no one is entirely sure what, precisely, the rules are – and the mixed messages we get from our so-called political leaders do nothing to make the situation clearer.

     I will continue to wear my mask throughout the winter and well into the spring, and indeed until well after politicians have stopped trying to convince us that everything is back to normal, and we all please spend more money!

     It will be interesting to see exactly how the patrons of the Liceu behave in the new-normal dispensation.  As the vast majority of patrons in the stalls of the opera are people past the first flush of youth, I think it is more than likely that precautions will still be fairly firmly in place as the lights go down!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dinner this evening, at least for me, was the doggie bag remains of the paella that we had yesterday in the swimming pool restaurant.  I have to admit that the flavour had intensified after the dish had rested for a day and there is still some left for lunch tomorrow.  Though I will perhaps add a dash of curry to make the stuff taste a little different.  Please don’t tell any Catalan cuisine purists what I am doing, as they are easily shocked by the unconventional (or blasphemous, as they would term it) approach to native cooking.

     I am reminded of the time when I was charged with buying a melon for a ham and melon starter for a meal, and I returned from the shops with a sandia (a red watermelon) and there was chaos when the assembled company realized what I had done.  We did have sandia and jamon, but it has been a memory which always raises a shocked smile as the misstep is remembered and discussed. 

     Personally, I found the combination excellent and would readily eat it again.  

      I am alone in that determination in this part of the world!

Unclean! Unclean!

 

 

 

 

In the unfolding sleaze of Johnson’s incumbency at Number 10 (and the flat in Number 11) the suggestion that he tried to get a donor to pay for his childcare costs comes as nothing of a surprise. 

     I assume that he floated the idea of having some sort of By Prime Ministerial Appointment coat of arms that would be affixed to all those aspects of his sordid life that he could get someone else to pay for.  I imagine a coat of arms of Pig rampant on a Mount Or with motto Quod corruption vitae est; supporters: dexter, Tory Donor Lord with flowing cash; sinister, Red Wall Voter with vacant expression, beneath ribbon with motto Semper impune tuli!

     Much though I loathed and will continue to loathe Thatcher and all her god forsaken works, I would never accuse her of the moral vacuum that is the present Prime Minister natural milieu.  And to think that we have years of his corrupt and corrupting “rule” before we even get a chance to vote him to the oblivion that he richly deserves – though he won’t get it, because the Tory “faithful” will keep him in speaking engagements so that he will continue to make money out of his shamelessness.

     Talking of “faithful” brings to mind the description of Lancelot in Idylls of the King by Tennyson, “His honour rooted in dishonour stood, and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”  The fact that illicit love was behind the phrase means that we get an almost perfect description of Johnson, a man whose basic character is so debased that any positive aspect he demonstrates merely means that we haven’t focussed properly on the real low and disreputable reasons for his actions.    

 

Meanwhile the weather is less than wonderful and I have heard no more about a real physical appointment for the vaccine.  But, in spite of our unvaccinated status (and of course, the unvaccinated status of most of the country) we are working towards a loosening of the restrictions.

     This loosening will first show itself in the fact that we can now celebrate birthdays and name days.   The rules governing the number of households and people in bubbles and the total numbers are so complex that it makes finding out the date of Easter each year look like childsplay (and should that word be two words, or be hyphenated and should it have an apostrophe?  I only ask in passing) and no one really knows the exact details.

     It does mean that we will go to Terrassa for a celebration meal during the week and perhaps Terrassa will come to us at the end of it to celebrate another anniversary.  That will be the first out of region event that we will have experienced for the last umpteen months.

     In circumstances where the numbers of vaccinations were high and the number of infections were low, this would be something to celebrate indeed – but as the situation does not seem to be substantially better than it has been for months, it does cause a little concern.  Still, I now walk around with a container of alcohol handwash and I am punctilious about my use of the mask, so, as long as I demand the same degree of protection demonstrated from those whom I am likely to come into contact with, I should be able to consider myself reasonably secure.

     I will feel a damn sight more secure when I have my first jab and Monday will see me taking a rather more pro-active approach to my injection than I have previously.  We will see how receptive the powers that be, will be to my importunities!

 

Meanwhile I continue my daily swim and daily bike ride.

     Last weekend I was stopped by the police on the paseo who informed me that it was illegal to cycle and to prove it showed me the screen of a police mobile phone with a bike symbol with a red line through it.

     I have seen no diminution in bike riding and have therefore made enquiries about the exact regulations for cycle riding.  As you would expect (at least, if you have lived in the country for any time you would expect) exact information about the regulations is opaque.  The Tourist Information Office (situated ON the paseo) knew nothing about any regulations and indeed there is a cycle rack to park your bike just outside the office itself.  Exploration of the council website gave no up to date information, though I did discover a few dated and worrying regulations which stated that no bike should be ridden at more than 10 kph.  As my bike is fitting with a (full colour) digital display, I was able to see just how slow 10 kph actually is, and I can report that not even very small kids travel at that speed!

     I did find references to other regulations that stated that the wide part of the paseo has different regulations from the narrower newer part, and the only place where cyclist could consider themselves totally fitted was in a special bike lane which was removed a few years ago.

     As I was stopped at the weekend, I have reasoned that regulations, if they actually exist, are only going to be enforced during peak visitor times on a sunny weekend and so I will use the road for those two days.  Even though today was somewhat dull, I still took the precaution of going to Gava rather than Port Ginester because there is a clear, marked bike lane for virtually the whole of the route.

     What is going to happened during the real part of the summer is something that I will have to play by ear – or call into the Tourist Information Office in the Centre of Town to find out a definitive answer.

     One does have to careful because the police are prone to high profile fining for infractions, and ignorance of the law is absolutely no excuse in this country, even if you can point to notices at entrances to the paseo which give specifically different sets of regulations to the ones that you have been accused of breaking.

     And breathe, and exhale!

 

Words are important!

 

 

Still no indication of when I am going to be vaccinated.  My group has been prioritised in so far as we are told that efforts are being made to vaccinate us, but we have also been told to be patient we are at the younger end of the tranche.  Which of course, I am.

     The galling thing is that, had I still been in the UK, I would have been vaccinated by now.  I always told myself that my probable jab date would be in April, but it looks likely that my first jab will now be next month.

     I do have an alternative: to go to one of the mass vaccination centres and I did get as far as filling out an on-line application, until I found that the nearest centre is rather further away than I am comfortable with.  But, I have also decided that if I get no indication of my chance of a jab by the end of the week, then I am filling out the form and going wherever I can get one.

     Next month also sees the relaxation of national State of Emergency rules and even now, people are behaving in a more relaxed way, and given the low rates of vaccination that seems foolhardy to say the least.  It therefore follows that to be safe, it will be worth a boring car ride to some centre outside the region to start to get at least a putative 60% protection from the influx of visitors that we are bound to get as the weather gets warmer.

 

I watched PMQs today and saw Liar Johnson have a whole series of anger management problems with the clinical questioning of the Leader of the Opposition.  Keir was viciously glacial in his contempt for Johnson’s bluster.  And, as usual, I watched the Prime Minister’s performance with a mixture of shame and loathing: shame that such tawdry liar could get to the highest office in the land; and loathing that the burbling semi-coherent venom he spat out abused the language in which I delight.

     When teaching Paradise Lost, especially Satan’s great speeches in Book 1, I always said that politicians could learn a lot from the way that Satan use the form of what he said to cover the truth in what he said.  The Heroic cadences of his words almost masked the reality of defeat.  The speech is magnificent in the way it sounds – but it is all lies, a series of empty rhetorical gestures.  Johnson didn’t even rise to an interesting rhetorical gesture in what he said – but what can you expect from a moral vacuum?  Johnson should read Paradise Lost – not Satan’s speeches, he will never rise to those linguistic depths of mendacity, but rather to read about what happens to someone who tries to live the lies he spins!  Unfortunately, Johnson is clinically and morally incapable of what Satan experiences,

“Abashed the Devil stood

And felt how awful goodness is”

Since Johnson is incapable of feeling shame, there is not even a slim chance that he will ever be “abashed” and as he finds it virtually impossible to appreciate “goodness” without seeing it as weakness, there can be no moment of recognition of a force greater than himself.  He has no moral compass because he is his own loadstone.

     I am not, by the way, comparing Satan with Johnson.  Satan in Paradise Lost is a literary construct, a humanized embodiment of evil and therefore the purity of the depiction is compromised by the very humanity that makes his character able to be appreciated by the reader.  But the concept of the character of Satan is a very useful example to use when comparing what he says and how he says it with the way of looking at and listening to the techniques that politicians use to duck answering questions or to rewrite disaster as victory.

     Time after time, I come back to the failure of the “delete all and insert” technique of formal debate from my time in college, when clever debaters used to think up amendments to motions using the “delete all and insert” to try and completely change the original motion to its opposite.  Sometimes this worked or should I say ‘worked’ and the amended motion was passed, but then it failed when reality came into play and the thing had to work in the real world outside debate.

     Words are tricky things and you play with them at your peril.  In the graveyard scene in Hamlet when talking with the gravedigger who plays linguistic games with what Hamlet is saying, Hamlet says, “How absolute the knave is!  We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.”  Johnson, Gove and the rest of the third-rate lickspittle lightweights with whom they have surrounded themselves are playing the gravedigger and hoping to “‘scape whipping”

     I would remind those worthless attendant lords that Hamlet does not end well and neither will they.