LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 19 – 3rd APRIL

I brush my teeth carefully and thoroughly each day and night.  With a damn sight more care than I have normally done, I might say.  I have a morbid (the right word I think) fear of getting toothache during lockdown.  Toothache is like headache – one of the debilitating, almost unbearable pains that can’t be ignored.  But, in these strange times, where would I go to have my teeth seen to? 

     When you hear of cancer treatment being delayed because of the medical demands of the virus, a mere toothache would appear to be of less than secondary importance.  Flossing has become a protection against the fear of future oral pain ignored!

     On one web site I saw warnings about those people in confinement being careful about how they approach any do-it-yourself projects suddenly started because of time on ones hands.  Home improvements always come at a cost and the number of accidents from the handling of unfamiliar tools, especially power tools, has ever been a significant way to injure yourself.  Now, the consequences of these accidents have very real costs in terms of the extra pressure on the health services and whether you would actually qualify for attention.

     I have no personal experience of what the medical services in Castelldefels are like at the moment and how those with chronic illnesses are being dealt with.  For example, my next scheduled appointment is in July in a local hospital and is part of the on-going treatment for my thrombosis and embolisms after a blood test in my local medical centre the week before.   

     I have been given no information about delay or cancellation, but I think it highly unlikely that the schedules that we sets six months ago are still going to be kept to.  Everything has changed, and my light touch supervision is more of a confirmation of progress rather than a necessary medical intervention – so my appointment is one that can easily be delayed.  It will be interesting to see exactly how our medical system copes, and I can take a reasonably disinterested view as my hospital visit is now more concerned with checking progress rather than active treatment.

     But one thing is certain; I have no wish to find out just how prepared our emergency services are to cope with any household domestic injuries or how medical centres and dentists are coping.  I want to live an uneventfully contained life in my home with occasional forays to the collective bins my only contact with the outside ‘outside’ world.

Last night I (and a quarter of a million others) watched a matinee performance of  ‘One man, two guvnors’ a reworking of the Goldoni original on the National Theatre Live Facebook site.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, but virtually every moment made me want to be in the audience seeing the performance live rather than looking at it on a computer screen!

     Filming ‘live’ plays produces an odd media type as its end result.  The actors have to play to a full theatre, so many of the exchanges between characters seem over emphatic; the actors are playing a ‘live’ real audience and we watchers are not part of that organic entity; this production had interaction between actors and audience which distanced we watchers even more; some of the stage business was complicated and could easily have gone wrong – all the things that make a live performance ‘dangerous’ were limited by our knowledge that this was a recorded performance.  The artificiality that we saw is something that I would have enthusiastically embraced if I had part of the actual audience.  But, I am grateful that I had an opportunity to see a performance that passed me by and I look forward to the other ‘performances’ over the next few Thursday evenings.

     Although I am grateful for the opportunity to see a much-appreciated performance, the lack of immediacy in a videoed version is more telling with theatre than it is for me with ballet or opera. 

     But, every little helps!

At least the sun came out today and I was able to ‘take’ it on the third floor terrace.   As the terrace is fairly sheltered, it lessened the effect of the breeze that would have made the sunbathing more gesture than pleasure – but for an hour or so I was able to laze around and think that summer was getting closer.

     Please!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 16 – 31st MARCH

For the first time in two weeks I left the confines of the house and pool and ventured out into the silent street world to take the rubbish to the communal bins.  They are about 100m away and I felt that my excursion was an expedition. I met no one and only one car passed, or rather I passed it as the driver was sitting in the car on a zebra crossing, texting – some things never change in spite of the country being in the grip of a crisis!

     A crisis in which the numbers of infected and dying are still going up in Catalonia.  The lockdown has now been in operation for more than two weeks and we should be seeing some sort of change in the numbers.  This must be the high point of the infection of the virus and we should over the next few days see a reduction in deaths, at least.

It is a sign of the times that I was sent a video that shows someone wandering through a packed Spanish warehouse explaining that the wrapped boxes of essential medical equipment we can see are all destined for France because the Spanish government had refused to pay for them.  This video has provoked a storm of outrage, especially when front line workers in hospitals are not properly protected from the virus.

     It turns out, however, that the video is a particularly despicable piece of fake news from Vox the Spanish fascist party, designed to embarrass the ‘socialist’ government of Spain.  What it has pointed up however, is the ready belief of the citizens of Spain that their elected government would actually behave in the way that the video indicates, that the government does not really care about the ordinary citizens.  This attitude has been allowed to develop because of the tardy approach of the government in the early stages of the virus’ spread in Spain.  And there is still great skepticism about the approach of the powers that be that each new death seems to reinforce.

Yesterday was a ‘wasted’ day for me because I lack self-control.  That accusation was more than adequately justified by my surrender to Facebook, Netflix and YouTube with various other Internet Interludes.  There was a terrible logic of consequence as one digression after another led me deeper and deeper into visually enticing indulgence after indulgence and, after a final binge on Sherlock, it was suddenly two in the morning!  I suppose it is one way to take one’s mind off what is ravaging the rest of the country!

The weather has been indifferent for the second day running and rain truncated my daily wandering around the pool; it is tempting to fall in with the climate and sulk the day away, but there is far too much threatened imprisonment ahead to start slacking and fail to make the most of the opportunity that self-concentration affords!  And will go on affording to those who can take make something of it.   

     And I’m doing my best – apart from yesterday!