Things change

 

 

I am not going to be coerced into making fatuous New Year Resolutions; I refuse to be dragooned into making a list of aspirations just because everyone else is doing it at the same time.

     Actually, I don’t think that many people actually do make such lists – they are more the preserve of desperate editors on the Today programme on Radio 4, looking for a cheap and easy vox pop to pad out some time.  As if the events of 2021 going into the equally bleak looking 2022 have any lack of ‘real’ news items to sober-up any English (remember all the other nations of the UK have imposed restrictions) revellers who might be thinking of a better way to be after the festivities on an untrammelled New Year’s Eve!

     So, I am merely going to knuckle down again to the task of writing.  I have been remiss for the past umpteen days and, while it is easy to put such indolence down to ‘Christmas Preparations’ it would be a ludicrous overstatement of the amount of time that we actually spent on thinking about the 25^th.

 

     My card writing is now consigned to a single Christmas donation to Oxfam, and Christmas presents are strictly Catalan Family, and usually proscribed by family members in advance, to make things easier.  Food is catered for by a restaurant meal.  All one has to do is turn up.

     Unless, that is, after the traditional Christmas Eve giving of presents (shat out of a log) [it’s a Catalan thing] and returning home to sleep before the Christmas Meal, you happen to have an email on Christmas Day informing you that a swimming friend with whom you had a cup of tea a few days previously had tested positive for Covid.

     Everything changed.

     I was still within the four-day period after ‘last contact with the positive subject’ and so I had to isolate myself.  The test I took was negative, but I would need to take another on the Monday after Christmas to make sure that I was securely negative.

     I therefore I had a solitary Christmas Meal, and I was similarly alone for my Saint’s Day - Boxing Day or Saint Stephen’s Day.  In Catalonia a Name Day is more of a deal than in the UK (where the concept doesn’t really exist) as it usually involves a special meal and presents.

     Before any sympathy is wasted on poor little me, I might point out that I was able to make myself a sumptuous and self-indulgent Christmas Feast and, anyway, I had books to read!

     My name day celebrations will probably be postponed until next weekend, when The Family will come down to Castelldefels and enjoy a walk along the beach.

     A walk, I imagine that will be seen as something as a luxury in the coming days and weeks, when the Super Spreader Events that characterize national fiestas nowadays will inevitably result in a startling (though entirely predictable) increase in Covid infection – and the belated imposition of more stringent limitations on our freedom of movement.

     Admittedly, Catalonia has already imposed a curfew from 1am to 6am and has emphasised the social distance rules and strengthened the public association regulations, but I fear that, as is natural for politicians, it is too little too late. 

     Which makes the lack of action in England all the more startling and worrying. 

     The Tousled Thug who masquerades as Prime Minister has, yet again, abdicated his primary responsibility, which is striving to keep the people of the UK safe.  His ‘masterly inaction’ which in his sick mind he probably thinks is modelled on the behaviour of the late Queen Elizabeth, is rather more reminiscent of the appeasement of Chamberlain as he waves a little piece of paper with his interpretation of “The Science” to justify a cowardly ‘doing nothing’ to keep the semi-evolved dregs of the Conservative back benches quiescent.

     In one respect the woeful responses of our political masters have ‘worked’, in so far as a reasonable number of people to whom I have spoken have a sort of fatalistic acceptance that, “We’re all bound to get Covid at some time or other” which means that more and more people have bought-into the ‘herd immunity’ approach to pandemic management, with a shoulder-shrug to the consequent deaths that this acceptance must entail.

 

As the more observant reader will have noticed, there is a sort of ‘wasn’t that in the past’ sort of vibe about the previous writing.  Which is fair, as it was written a week ago.  Or more.

     In the meantime, I have tested negative again and life of sorts can resume.  Except.

     There is always an except.  My questionable knees have now decided to make a statement about their physical well-being and have opted for the ‘pain and discomfort’ way forwards.

     In what has been a remarkably limited number of days, my right knee has gone from ‘something ought to be done soon’ to ‘basically, not working’.  This has meant that my progress up, down, and along is now only possible with the ostentatious use of Toni’s crutches (a bargain, 12 euros on the internet).  And our house is composed almost entirely of stairs.  Or at least it seems that way to me as I tap and hobble my way around with a complete lack of grace and agility.

     In less than a week we have gone from the ‘something ought to be done’ to the ‘something has to be done – now!’ in a matter of days.  In the middle of a pandemic.

     I do have an appointment for ‘rehabilitation’ – but, at we don’t really know where my knees have been (so to speak) there is little for the medical staff to go on.  We are hoping that my obvious discomfort will prompt the people there to demand a scan, be appalled at what they see, and put me on a list for something.  Anything.  To make what is a fairly intolerable position slightly more acceptable.

     The waiting times for surgery that have been suggested to me, not necessarily from doctors, but from surprisingly well-informed casual acquaintances, has been at the far end of eight or nine months.  And I think, given the backlog thanks to Covid, that is a dewy-eyed optimistic prediction. 

     However.  At present, I have more pain than information, and I am looking forward to the Catalan health service coming forward, scalpel advanced, to my aid.  I have to say from previous experience with the medical services of this country, I have been more than impressed, and I will throw myself on their mercy – before I swallow whatever socialist principles are left to me and go private!

 

On the more positive side of life, the Family did come down to Castelldefels for my postponed Name Day and a good meal was had by all. 

     And it’s not raining. 

     One takes one’s positives where one finds them.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 47 – Friday, 1st May

JOHNSON SHOULD OFFER AN APOLOGY FOR HIS GOVERNMENT’S HANDLING OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS AND RESIGN.

At least then he will be able to spend more time with his various families – though his children from his last divorced wife apparently fully supported their mother in the divorce proceedings, so perhaps not the warmest of greetings from them.  But, who knows, if he actually spent time with them, quality time, perhaps things would be different?

Here in Spain and Catalonia, people continue to die and continue to be infected with the virus, but all of us are looking forward with varying degrees of confidence and optimism to the next stage in the loosening of the restrictions.

     Tomorrow from 6 -10 am and 8 – 11 pm my age group is allowed out for our first walks in the open streets for the last six weeks and more.  In my case I am looking forward to my first bike ride!  Before the sun goes down, I must make sure that I dust off the pine pollen that now encrusts the bike after its weeks of inactivity, and oil the mechanical bits too – and power up the battery.

     It is yet another level of irony that the throttle that I have ordered and paid for from Mate has still not arrived.  More than a year after it was paid for!  Bugger the lot of them.

Well, it appears that Matt Hancock has reached the 100k figure of tests for the virus, in spite of the unlikely jumps in numbers that were necessary to make that happen.

     It may appear like sour grapes on my part that I find the figures difficult to believe, especially as there have been claims of multiple testing of individuals counted and tests counted that have been sent through the post or merely ordered.  I would like to see an independent audit of the figures, but at the same time what effect would there be?  It is obvious that the Government is much more concerned with getting the narrative for the virus in their favour than anything to do with truth – whatever the Conservative government understands that word to mean.

     Numbers of people tested is not the main point – who, when, where are all just as important.  The total set by Beckett was probably missed, but the total was plucked out of thin air, was not “led by science” and acts more as am illustrative function of a immoral bunch of third-rate politicians than as any thing related to the reality of the crisis itself.

     Undoing the lockdown without mass testing in place is almost meaningless.  Unless contacts are followed up and tested we are going into a sort of fatal free for all.  I fundamentally do not trust the politicians who have lied so extensively and comprehensively from the disaster of the Brexit campaign through the general election and in the Covid-10 crisis.  They have lost any faith that I might have had in their moral position.

     The Cabinet of Brexit fanatics can be summed up by their repeating what they regard as their saving mantra for this crisis: “We were only following the science!”  Any comparison to a saying from the mid 1940s is entirely intentional!  And Professor Joad’s continuingly useful comment, “It all depends on what you mean by . . .” is particularly useful here, when you consider what particular science the government is actually using.  They act as though there is a single scientific ‘truth’ whereas there are always conflicting opinions and a choice has to be made and the politicians must take responsibility for what they choose.

     It is fairly obvious that the government is hoping to deflect some of the justified condemnation on to the scientific advisors when the independent inquiry starts.

Let’s see how early I manage to get up to take my bike ride.  Please let it be fine!

JOHNSON SHOULD RESIGN NOW!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 13

Get your recriminations in early, list them, remember them and throw them at the guilty when the crisis is over and they are brought to justice.  As if!

     The latest piece of absurdity to surface here in Spain is that 650,000 Covid-19 test kits have been ordered that are not fit for purpose, it even says as much on the side of the packs!  They were ordered from China from a supplier not approved by the Chinese authorities who had previously provided a list of recommended suppliers - ignored by the Spanish health officials.

     A plane left Barcelona airport for Malaga packed with people who were not the regulation distance apart – how was this allowed?

     Couples are walking dogs together.  People are coming and going (using the back entrance) of the house next door as if there is no crisis to limit their actions in continuing the building work.

     There is no uniformity about travel and keeping a distance.  We have death figures higher than China and many of us fear that the commitment to total lockdown as the only solution to rising numbers is not entirely accepted by the government.  We MUST remember and hold them all to account.

Listening to The Now Show on Radio 4 last night, we were left in no doubt that the participants had all followed guidelines and were broadcasting the show from their respective homes.   

     As it was radio we do not know just how they were dressed and consideration of that factor is perhaps best left to imaginations more prurient than mine, but the major difference between the normal show and the crisis show was the lack of a live audience.  With humour this can be something of a disadvantage when the listener sometimes needs to hear the audience give a more audible response to the inward chuckle.  But it was a good show, with a few wry digs and a competent set of comedians.

     Other shows are also being broadcast where the participants are not in studio but are at home and if the show is for television, that is where the Crisis (capital ‘C’) comes into play.  News broadcasts now regularly feature experts and politicians who are ostentatiously following the rules and self-isolating, but such exposure presents them with a real problem: what, in a Crisis, to have in the background.

     For most people who wish to present a professional vision (literally!) of themselves, the problem is solved by having a background of books.  Books add gravitas, they show knowledge, they are Culture.  But.

     If I had an HD television and a recorder and had a way of enlarging the background, I feel it would be very interesting to see exactly what books these people have chosen to put themselves in front of.  There is a post-crisis PhD thesis there!

     Perhaps ‘chosen’ is the wrong word to use for some of them, in so far as they are perhaps sitting at their desks in their home ‘office’ and the bookcase is the one that happens to be behind them.  Or is it?

     There is a low-ish bookcase behind me as I type and I’ve just turned around to look at it.  It is not the background that I would choose to be televised against.  There is an unsightly collection of mismatched books on the top shelf (together with a garish money box inscribed “Para mi gran viaje”) and the other shelves are filled with a variety of tatty box files with hand written titles and a sellotaped piece of paper reminding me that Palm Sunday is on the 5^th of April this year.  This last is because I write a poem-a-day during Holy Week.  Because I do.

     To my right is another bookcase, one shelf of which is filled with reference books.  Now these are far more photogenic: not only are they solid looking hardbacks, but also one of them has the word IDEAS in big capital letters along the spine.  Importantly, the word is large enough to be read by an appreciative watching television audience, or one that might be subliminally impressed!

     The problem with these books is that they are all too new looking, a little too superficial.  You need older books to make it appear that the shelves' contents have been read; that the books are old companions, not window dressing.

     I have a lot of books and, although I have tried, I have failed to get all of them into a coherent order on my shelves.  Most of my shelves are a voyage of discovery rather than a pattern for the Dewey Decimal System.  There are unexpected juxtapositions so that (and I have just reached up for a couple of books from another bookcase) The Nations of Wales 1890-1914 by M. Wynn Thomas is next to Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus by Sir Thomas Browne, both of which are worth reading in their different ways and whose proximity is pleasing.  Give me time and I will work out why they deserve to be together!  But my point is that for most people with a large book collection the organizing principle is chaos not order.  Or perhaps that is only true in the Arts rather than the Sciences.  Or perhaps it’s just me.

     Now some people are chaotic in their organization and some have chaos thrust upon them and some others play at chaos: the casually strewn and oddly placed as artful indicator of the eccentric genius.

     The Book Backgrounds have ranged from the pitifully eked out shelves to the deep alcove floor to ceiling plenitude, but I just wonder how contrived it all is, and how long the ‘players’ in the television game have thought about how to present themselves.

     Now you might well say that I must have too much time on my hands to be concerned about such things, but what an individual places behind themself is a clearer indication of how they want to be perceived than anything they might have to say.  I think.

On television this evening there was a snatch of an interview with a solitary walker who was accosted and asked why he was breaking the regulations and his response was that he did not know that there were any regulations to break!  Not only have we have the Spanish Government paying for ads on the television, we have had the Generalitat in Catalonia and various advertisers who have tailored their messages to include reinforcement of the restrictions on behaviour.  How could the man have missed everything?  If, of course, he was telling the truth about his ‘ignorance’!  All it needs is a man like that who is also infected to cause another spike, and kill people.  Inconsideration is fatal, not funny.

As we come to the end of the second week of isolation, it is sobering to think that we may well have only passed one seventh of the time necessary for the sequestration to work on the virus.  One hopes that is a pessimistic forecast, but I fear it is a realistic one. 

     What are we going to be like by the end of this time?  One friend in the UK says that we are headed for civil unrest and riots; a friend in Catalonia says that the restrictions are too lenient and if they are not tightened then the situation will get much worse.  As time goes one and people who are not sick think that the restraints are too irksome, will they become freer in their actions, and will people who see others breaking the rules feel entitled to follow them?  And then . . .

     The real problem for us is that this situation is unparalleled and we are winging it, following advice from deeply flawed politicians, with failure illustrating their lack of forthrightness.

     One of the free MOOC courses that I am following at the moment is using some of the writing of Kant and I am sure that he would say that the restrictions on our behaviour and actions that are the most satisfactory are those that we would impose on ourselves if we had the freedom to do so.  Are the restrictions the sort of restrictions that we would think necessary in the circumstances?  I will stick to the rules come what may because Kant tells me to!  And I have managed to prevent myself from making a jocose comment using the name and adding an apostrophe and changing the K to a C.   

     Such restraint in the time of Corona!

    

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 11

I am, as I never tire of telling people, a Labrador person: yellow, bitch to be precise.  It therefore comes as something of a personal insult that people (even flat dwellers with limited space) can contemplate providing living area for the various species of rat dogs (goggle-eyed, spindly-legged, yappily-voiced) that abound in this area.  One such grotesquery lives near us, and its emasculated barks cut through the air with the irritation of a domesticated buzz saw.  It is the sort of sound that is intolerable at its first utterance; continuation is torture.

     When I started my solitary walk this morning on the first of many circuits of our communal pool, I was accompanied by the cringe-making sound of the damned dog-insult-creature.  And then I saw why it was making the sound.  Sitting in the lane that runs behind the creature’s house was an entirely unconcerned cat, studiously ignoring the high-pitched hysteria of the so-called dog.

     I am no lover of cats.  While I can admire the liquid beauty of the larger beasts of the category, I find the domestic variety repellent.  I think it’s the tiny teeth and the lazy contempt that I find so uncongenial.  To say the least.  
      I am not entirely negative: some cats are sleek and refined, but that is the sort of thing that you can admire in pictures, not in reality.  Anyway, this cat was obviously glorying in the commotion that it was causing and by unconcernedly licking itself and showing its undying contempt (which I share) for the noisy scrap of canine vulgarity.  However, that same attitude was extended to me when the cat noticed that I was walking about.  I changed my direction at once and made towards it.  Lazily, with that elegant lassitude that only cats can show, it moved away to its ‘home’ and the dog-scrap immediately shut up.  Mission accomplished!

     That was the only point of interest, as I wandered around and around with only the sound of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time programme on George and Robert Stephenson and the birth of the railways filling my ears.  As usual one comes away from programmes like that with snippets of knowledge to keep one sane: did I really know that it was Robert who did the work designing The Rocket and not George? 

     I also picked up on the panel’s championing of the Stephensons as opposed to the showier grandstanding of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (surely one of the few engineers who most people know by his full name) with some withering comments on Brunel’s engineering skills being somewhat partial as opposed to the comprehensive nature of the Stephensons’ skills taking in both the civil and mechanical aspects. 

     Radio 4 and The Guardian are the mainstays of my sanity in a time of confinement. 

     God bless them both!

We have been informed that this week that the number of cases of Covid-19 may peak.  The numbers certainly give no cause for complacency as Spain has now surged past China in the number of people with the virus.   
     One town in Catalonia has been put on total lockdown with people banned from coming in and out of the place.  This is because of a spike in the numbers infected.  Catalonia seems to be taking things extremely seriously and there appears to be growing animosity between Madrid and Barcelona, as Madrid appears to be much more lax than Barcelona – with a consequent surge in numbers of infected.

     We are also hearing of incidents of absolute stupidity.  The police stopped one car with five people in it (including one person in the boot!) who were going to visit a family!  Another couple of guys were found in a bar having a drink, claiming that it was a business meeting: that did not impress the police who promptly arrested them!

     The renovations in the house next door have ramped up again.  There are now two vans on the road outside and a variety of people working inside.  The people seem to be taking no precautions at all: no masks, no separation – and nothing happens.

     Toni is very cynical about what is going on and says that the stories that we actually get to hear of people not taking the virus seriously are just the tip of the iceberg and that things are going to get much worse as our period of lockdown continues for the next couple of months.

     As I have not been outside the front gate for ten days now, it is difficult for me to gain any real perspective from a first hand point of view; everything is via the television and the Internet.

     People are becoming lazy in assuming that the only fatalities are going to be the old or those with underlying conditions, but the death of a 21 year-old with no underlying conditions should be a wake up call to those who think that they are not vulnerable.

     We are all at risk, and I am more than prepared to put up with these restrictions if it is a matter of life and death – and it is a matter of life and death!

Last night I was ‘doing’ part of my new course on paintings and watched a series of videoed lectures on Van Eyck and Van de Weyden and, as I watched I could not help feeling a certain sense of dislocation between what was happening in the wider world and my attempting to rationalise my position of normality by studying Art History: when in doubt look at a painting! 

     That hardly seems to be practical advice – but that isn’t the point is it?  At times of instability and upheaval you find whatever ‘still point’ works for you to give the equilibrium you need, and if that is found in daubs of oil on canvas, then so be it.

     It is easy to rationalize turning to Art (capital A) in any of its forms to find placidity.  You are tapping in to a version of western culture, something that has lasted, stood the test of time, something that is generally regarded as important, something which seems to stand for the achievement of humanity that is larger than a single work or a single person, it links to into a continuum, into a story of progressive achievement that welcomes your passive contemplation and encourages your active participation.  Or something.

Toni has resurrected his electric guitar from the chaos that is the third floor and with notepad, Internet and a badly tuned instrument is attempting to drive me upstairs to get away from the more than slightly-off cacophony that learners engender.  This adds a new dimension of horror to our containment!

We have had a talk about how long we really think this form of confinement is going to last and we have come to the conclusion that things are not likely to get back to anything resembling normality until June or July.  God help the US if the man-child governing the country decides that “everyone back to work by Easter and with full churches” is the way forward.  I only hope that our political leaders have a tad more responsibility than that ignorant person (and that last word was my fifth choice!) when it comes to recognizing that a situation has returned to normal. 

     I am sure that there is someone somewhere who is calculating just how many people died to fit in with a political rather than a national methodology when it came to dealing with the virus. 

     CEOs and other executives of businesses can now be accused of Corporate Manslaughter if it can be shown that people have died because of the actions of individual firms. 

     It is not enough that our political leaders can be ‘voted out’ at the next general election; they should be held judicially culpable for the mortality of their political choices.  And I look towards the Civil Service to ensure that the paper proof of decisions by the politicians survive to be considered by the inevitable commission of enquiry that will take place when we are finally out of this crisis.

The weather has been cold and blustery with some periods of sunshine – not really the weather to laze out on the third floor terrace, but each day brings us nearer to the period of unrelenting sunshine that will make the time go more pleasantly.  Please.

Meanwhile, we try and not get too upset at the seemingly deliberate idiocy on the part of those charged with our safety.  Time after time, it seems that the only real safety is in our own hands and the intelligence and patience with which we approach the demands of this situation.

And I miss ice cream!  I really do!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS – DAY 4

It has taken a pandemic to shut our bloody neighbours’ noisy reconstruction efforts.  The silence of their absence is absolutely delightful, though it doesn’t compensate for the intolerable thumpings that have characterised their reformations.

     In fact, we now have a silent cordon sanitaire as the neighbours on one side only use their house for the summer holidays and on the other side, the reformations make it unliveable for the owners while the work is going on and the lockdown restrictions make it inaccessible.  If we could only cause the terminal laryngitis of the bloody rat dog of another neighbour, we could even be sort of content.

     Traffic that passes us on the main road is at a minimum and there are few planes overhead.  For Spain, our surroundings are disturbingly silent – not for Britain perhaps, but for us, certainly!

I am missing my daily swim and am getting progressively more worried about the lack of exercise that I am taking.  Normally I would use my bike to get to my swim and back and then use the bike for a few shopping trips or whatever, so this enforced inaction is grating.  This afternoon I was driven to Take Measures.  I ventured out to the communal swimming pool and made a number of stately circuits of the pool leaning on my walking-stick.  I was alone with only the sound of a howling kid to keep me company.  Not literally, this one was in a flat next to our houses and I dread to think what his parents must be going through, his being too young fully to understand why his little life has been so suddenly cramped!  Good luck to them.  I did manage to get to my step goal according to my watch, so I must be very unsettled around the house!

     I will have to make circling of the pool a daily chore because it doesn’t look as though the relaxation of the restrictions on our movement are going to be any time soon.

     If the UK is going to shut the schools and cancel end of year examinations, it doesn’t really look too positive that our little class in Catalan is going to be restarted before Easter.  In theory our class could restart on the 30^th of this month, but that looks remote.  I think that it is unlikely that our class will restart this academic year, but who knows what will actually occur.

The PP and PSOE King (he was created by an agreement between the two political parties and nothing was put to the people) made a broadcast last night.  He said nothing about the continuing scandal that engulfs him and his elephant shooting father about off-shore accounts and kickbacks.  But his shameless broadcast did give the opportunity for right thinking people to show their disgust at the corruption by banging our saucepans.  It is wonderful how much penetrating sound is created by the simple application of wooden spoon to saucepan bottom!  The drive for an independent enquiry into the behaviour of the so-called king and his even more so-called emeritus king father continues.  The first call for an enquiry has been rejected on what I think are obviously spurious legal trickery grounds, but the parties of the real left are not letting a single obstacle stand in their way and are trying again.

     I think that the royal family in Spain has lost a great deal of popular support.  The antics of the king ‘emeritus’ towards the end of his reign before he was forced, by a surge of public disgust, to abdicate really did damage the prestige of the family.  The scandals that have involved other members of the family with consequent jail time have not helped.  I am sure that politicians will not put the continuation of the royal family to a public vote, but if they did, I think that the royal family would loose.  I think it is also getting closer and closer with the British version too, and when QE2 finally dies, the sobering prospect of Charles III will concentrate the minds of a large number of erstwhile monarchists towards the republican cause.  I hope.

I have started putting drafts of my most recent poems on smrnewpoems and that gives me the incentive to write more.  That came out as seeming to be more of a threat than an invitation to read!  But I assure you it is the former.

Toni is getting a trifle stir crazy with not going out, and it has only been four days!  Well, that four days is my computation.  Toni says that last weekend of Saturday and Sunday is actually counted in the lockdown, but I assumed that the lockdown was from Monday of this week.  Toni was with his mother on the Saturday and he came back to Castelldefels on Sunday afternoon, so his time in lockdown is questionable.  I am feeling quite chipper about my enforced detention at home, and I have done a quantity of writing: if nothing else confinement does concentrate the writing impulse. 

    

     Long may it continue.

Deprivation?

A “passenger side air-bag replacement recall” for my car has left me bereft for a day – a whole day - without a car.  My car!

Irritatingly, I had to get back from the garage where the faulty car is now with a not-free taxi.  I think, since the fault is nothing to do with me, the firm could have paid for my return to car-less domesticity.  But they didn’t.  And now I have to endure that terrifying sense of isolation and fixity that a confirmed driver feels without his wheels.

I do still have the two wheels of my bike, my electric bike, but even with electrical assistance the range of operation that I am prepared to consider is remarkably restricted. 

As is usual for me, this typing is displacement activity for something else.  Through my interest in history and geography, I seem to have sold my financial soul to the National Geographic Magazine – not their famous monthly publication, but rather a series of their archaeological books which detail various famous sites throughout the world.  I don’t know how many volumes I thought the series comprised, but they seem to be never ending, and there is always something interesting enough to make me feel that the money that I am constantly spending is worth it. 

I particularly like the fact that they show imaginative reconstructions of how the wrecked sites would have looked in their original glory.  So, it was fascinating to see what the site at Petra would have looked like when it was a working trade centre.  I know that a further two volumes in the series are waiting for me in the Post Office in the centre of town, but without the car I am loath to make the journey to get them.  So, I type.

-          Later that day –

I obviously did not type with sufficient brio and conviction as the journey to the PO seemed like a logical and necessary thing.  I now have two more books on Tikal (of which I had never heard) and Saqqara (of which I had).  I have to admit that given the breadth and magnificence of the Mayan ruins of Tikal, I really think that I ought to have had that particular location stored somewhere in my brain.  But it wasn’t.  But now is.  It looks like the sort of place that would pass Dr Johnson’s test and actually be “worth going to see”!

As the accompanying text with the wonderful illustrations is in Spanish, I do tend to spend longer looking at the pictures than trying to work out what I am sure is fascinating information contained in the text.  To prove my point, I just opened the book on Saqqara at random and read a paragraph and, while I would be prepared to give a paraphrase of what it contained, I would not like a fluent Spanish speaker to check my summary.

It is true that I live in my own little “Magic Roundabout” world where I, just like Eric Thompson, use visual images to guide my textual understanding.  He made up stories based on watching the French originals of “The Magic Roundabout” and did not bother with a translation to guide him.  In much the same way I use my recognition of ‘pointers’ in Spanish conversations to guide my responses - however imaginative my use of language has been in deconstructing what I have been told. 

There is not always a perfect match between my inspirational appreciation of a foreign language and the poor natives who have to think about what I might have understood them to have said.  But it does lighten my days, even if it darkens theirs!

A real (and vital) test of my understanding of Spanish comes tomorrow when I go back to the hospital which is monitoring my medication for a ‘Control’.  At present I am administering a combination of injections and pills to keep me on the straight and narrow of health.  The future, I hope, holds a regime of medication that will do without the injections of rat poison because, let’s face it, that is what the ‘blood thinning’ agent that I am being given actually is!  So far, according to my rough calculations I have given myself over 200 injections in the war zone that used to be my tummy!  Enough, as they say, is enough and I would dearly love to take back the sharps box that I have borrowed from my medical centre complete with the empties!  But the reality is that I will probably need a few more ‘controls’ to get the medication right and that means that I will have to continue to administer the injections.

Because of my selective understanding I take most of my treatment on trust.  I have seen a few doctors and they have taken time and trouble to explain what is going on with the blood clots, embolisms and thrombosis, but the detail of my treatment is part of an ongoing routine that I do not really follow.  At present, for example, I do not get to see a doctor when I have my controls.  The blood drop test is administered by a nurse who passes on the information to a doctor who then decides what combination of medication I need to take until the next control.  The information comes in the form of a sheet with printed information about the amounts I need to take leading up to the next control.  Given the variety of combinations that I have already been through I do not think that we are getting any nearer to a finalized and regular dosage.  But I live in hope.  I have seen fellow patients with sheets that are obviously for whole months rather than the week that I have, so, probably, even at best, I will have a monthly visit instead of a weekly one.  But I will settle for that rather than the fatal alternative!

I continue to be surprised at the difference between my swimming and walking abilities.  As far as swimming is concerned I am now back to normal, indeed a recent swim was completed in a time that matched and bettered my pre-January times.  My walking is a different matter.

I find that walking more than a couple of hundred yards is a real physical effort and I am more than grateful that I purchased a collapsible shooting stick that is an efficient walking stick as well.  I was talk that the damage to my lungs might well be permanent and so I will have to make do with what is left.  I have also been told that there is no point in my exercising to the point of breathlessness as that could be dangerous and so everything has to be done in moderation – not my natural state!

Back in January my doctor told me that I would have to “find a new life” and I suppose that discovering how much I can do and how to cope with the difference that it makes is part of that discovery.

Rethinking a life style is not made any easier by the fact that, sitting here typing, I do not feel any different from what I felt before the pulmonary embolism was discovered, and if you watched me around the house you would see no difference: I walk around unaided and go up and down stairs without any noticeable ill effects; I use my bike to go to and fro and I am even marginally thinner!  But I am daunted by a walk through town, something that I would have not thought about for a moment before the illness.

We have a trip to Edinburgh planned for late July and that is going to have to be a very different experience from the other city breaks that we have had in the past.  Gone are the days when I used to enjoy getting lost in a city maze and walking my way back to something recognizable.  Things will have to be planned with busses, trains, taxis and resting stops.  I have even found that walking around a gallery is now something that needs to be thought about, and something that needs my shooting stick!

I do realize just how lucky I am that the embolism was discovered in time and that exhaustive and exhausting efforts are being made to treat me.  But it does not stop me feeling all the frustration that limitations on previous freedom impose.  Just like my car deprivation, so my personal movement deprivation prompts me to explore an area of essential self-reflection for survival.

-          Later that week –

Such is my indolence that weeks go by without my adding to my blog.  But today, today is going to be different.  Although this is being typed on my new computer and there is always a glitch or two before I understand what minor modifications are necessary for a new machine to fit into the old order!  Still, I am determined that this will be on the site today.  And I am further determined that I will get back into the routine of producing a daily blog.

What, you might well ask, am I doing rather than typing?  Well, the gruesome answer is that I am reading The Guardian.  The adjective is appropriate because I am becoming ever more depressed to find that my wishy-washy liberal (with a small ‘l’) pseudo socialist ideals are more and more distanced with what I can se going on in my immediate neighbourhood and indeed in the wider world.

Spanish politics are depressing in the extreme. The so-called Spanish government is characterized by rampant corruption, ineptitude and arrogance in roughly equal measures.  Wait, no, that’s not right: first and foremost, our government is systemically corrupt and corrupting.  If you wish to join me in my depression just Google “Spanish Corruption” and see the wealth of gob-stoppingly astonishing information of what PP and its minority government get away with!

Turning to Britain is hardly a relief.  The full horror of Brexit is getting clearer by the day as the poleaxed government, sorry “minority government” of the “hostile environment” May prevaricates its way towards disaster.  The “Windrush” Scandal has left me with a deep sense of shame and the continuing revelations about the Home Office demean one of the great offices of state.  I have no wish to be associated with such small-minded viciousness or the callous practioners who have engineered it.  And, yes May, I am referring to you and your disgraceful tenure at the Home Office / to say nothing of your awful premiership!

And then I turn to the United States of America - and I instantly look towards the Middle East for a more rational approach to political life!

Wherever I read in my Guardian, it merely fuels my frustration of a right thinking (in a left-wing sort of way) decent person whose reasonable view of the world seems to be at variance with the voting majority.  

 I know it is easy to turn to the plays of Ibsen and take Dr Stockman’s cry in “Enemy of the People” of “The majority is always wrong!” and feel justified in loneliness, but that is not enough.  Everywhere I look people seem to be willingly joining in a global danse macabre towards oblivion in which the dance steps seem to be way outside the normal rules of rhythmic movement!   

Facts now are more than elastic, and prejudice has become the new reality – or perhaps it always was the generally accepted reality, it is only now that supposedly intelligent organs of the establishment rise above factual refutation and demand that their prejudiced views become the accepted norm.  And yes, Donald Trump, I am referring to you.

Perhaps some of my misery is parasitic on the fact that my next ‘control’ is in five days’ time, with the same combination of injections and pills leading up to it.  It seems to me that my medics are no nearer to finding a workable system of user-friendly medication than they were months ago.  However, I live in hope that one day I will be presented with a sheet which covers a whole month of settled medication, rather than the few days at present!

The next control clashes with my Spanish lesson, and I have missed too many classes already to be jocose with missing more.

On the positive side: typing with my new laptop is a delight, and it makes me happy.  And that is a good thing.  And I have bought a new case for it.  And that makes me happy too.  Who truly worries about world destruction and the decimation of my pension through the devaluation of the pound when gadgets and their care can deflect a susceptible mind!