LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 18 – 2nd APRIL

Today saw the delivery of a packet of 10 disposable facemasks from China.  I ordered them at the beginning of the crisis and I was concerned about the projected late delivery date.  How innocent that concern now seems!  I felt that the crisis would probably be over before we got a chance to wear them.  How naïve!  Even the Tangerine Tale-Teller seems to be frantically re-writing his own political history and explaining to the American people that the virus that he downplayed as little more than mild flu is now a merciless silent killer and, far from magically disappearing, will be with us for the foreseeable future: Terminator Trump – how many ‘corporate manslaughter’ deaths does he have on his bloody hands?

     The same question could be asked of the politicians in the UK and here in Spain.  One virus expert stated that the key to controlling and understanding the virus was to “Test! Test! Test!”  And we are told that two thousand out of five hundred thousand health workers have been tested in the UK.  How can this be?  And who is to blame?  Every day’s delay means fewer workers in essential services and a greater threat of infection.

It is with something approaching relief that I turn to the crappy weather we are having in Castelldefels.  I have often said that weather in this country lacks the spitefulness of British weather, in other words, the climate in Catalonia usually means that even on a rainy day we have a portion (sometimes tiny) of sunshine.  Not over the last few days: overcast, miserable and wet.

     My circuits around the pool have now taken on a more drunken appearance as I have decided to ‘weave’ my way around the perimeter to add difference to the monotony of a single direction.  To an observer I must look like a robot cleaner with a faulty coverage pattern as I veer one way and then another.  I think that part of my reasoning for variety is based on half remembered memoirs of prisoners who walked around their cells for exercise, but always remembered to vary their direction in their confined spaces because, because . . . I cannot quite remember why, but there was a good reason I’m sure; dizziness, or unequal development or something.  Anyway, it gives a different perspective and that is essential as I go round and round and round.

     The placid surface of the pool acts as a weather indicator: if there is any rain in the breeze then the expanding ripples let me make a decision about whether I continue my walk or call it a day and have another cup of tea.

     I marched around the pool this morning listening to the panel of In Our Time on Radio 4 talking about the gin craze in late C17th England.  Only on Radio 4!  There truly cannot be another radio station like it anywhere in the world.

We have had yet another period of 24 hours here in Spain where the death toll is a new 'record' of 963, and the total figures of deaths has passed 10,000.  The figures of those infected have passed those in China.  We are in a continuing nightmare – even if that nightmare does not really touch us in our parochial confines in Castelldefels.

     We are reliant on news of the ‘outside’ world from the Internet and continue to feel the anger of the frustrated as we watch inefficiency, duplicity and greed define the parameters of the crisis.

     Respirators seem to be the crystalizing concept of futility in the battle against the virus.  Numbers of machines necessary to cope with the projected number of patients are thrown around with politicians manufacturing plenitude with airy words while the hard reality of machines linked to patients seems to be woefully inadequate.  

   We hear of uplifting stories of companies using their resources to design, prototype and get to manufacture machines in an amazingly short period of time; we hear of major engineering works retooling to meet respirator demand – but then we hear of a depressingly high figure of hospitals saying that resources have not got to them, and that a disaster is developing as they watch and wait.

     In World War II, American shipyards managed to launch three Liberty Ships for the cargo conveys for Britain every two days; have we lost the ability to mass produce what is essential to meet the threats of crises in the last seventy years or so?  

   Given the greater interconnectedness of our world are we incapable of working together in a meaningful way to ensure the equitable spread of equipment and facilities?  It certainly appears that we have learned little from each new viral threat to our planet.

     Without full testing we cannot know what the virus is really doing.  The lack of testing in Spain, Britain and the US is the real 'killer' story.  We obviously need to work to get mass testing in place; but the reasons for its delay must be a key questions to be asked when this pandemic is over. 

     Or perhaps it cannot be left until them.  They are questions that need answers now and it needs those people who have obstructed and obfuscated to be removed to save lives.       

     Every time a selfish, inefficient, mendacious politician speaks, people die.   

     Let’s get rid of them now!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 17th – 1st APRIL

A third day of indifferent weather – something that should be of supreme indifference given what is happening in the world today, but in the confined ‘world’ that one inhabits at present, something that is of irritating importance.

     The daily morning tasks being completed (up to and including the Guardian ‘quick’ crossword) it was a pleasant surprise to have a phone call from a Cardiff friend, Hadyn, informing me that he had purchased one of Ceri Auckland Davies’s[1] paintings in a recent auction.  This hawthorn is one from a series Ceri painted of trees in bloom, and a good choice!  The tree fills the picture space and is set against a moody sky-filled background rising from a low horizon – a dramatic and lively painting.

     From where I sit typing I can see two more examples of Ceri’s work: an atmospheric print of a night view of a lamp lit façade of a Venetian palazzo[2] painted in a freer style than the meticulous detailed manner that he usually adopts, and a large charcoal drawing of a rock cleft in which the quasi-abstract depiction of the faceted rock face encourages pareidolia in a busy surface that always engages my attention as it is directly opposite where I usually sit. 

     As a striking contrast to the ‘face-filled’ rocks, the focus of attention is nothing.  Literally nothing, whiteness, blankness.  The far opening of the rock cleft is onto sea or sky and that is a patch of vibrant white, unworked and blank whereas all around it is the detail of charcoal sketching. 

     I am endlessly fascinated by this work and, like the best Giles cartoons (and that is a signal honour of comparison from me!) there is always something new to find in the detail of the draftmanship and the juxtaposition of light and shade.  Each time I look at it, I highlight different sections and let my eye slide through the confined landscape in alternative ways.

     What has all of that to do with the current crisis?  Everything. 

     Our lives have been thrown into total confusion; the economy of the world is in free-fall; our individual freedoms are being compromised; millions are being forced into greater poverty; domestic violence is on the rise; we are being turned into ourselves, a forced introspection; and survival, for most of us in the wealthy west, usually a concept rather than an ever present threat, has now become visible, palpable struggle.  It is exactly at times like these that one needs to consider the worth of a painted tree!

     It used to be said that a society could be judged by how it treats the poorest and least advantaged in a community: the disabled, the imprisoned, the dispossessed, the mentally ill, the criminal, the refugee, the old, the homeless etc.  The point being made is that it is easy to look after those who are already able and keen to look after themselves, but what about the others?  In the same way, bare survival is obviously essential, but we must, we have to be concerned with the quality of survival as well.  It is to the everlasting credit of the wartime government in Britain that, at the same time that it was struggling to keep the effort to free the world of the threat of fascism, it was also working to ensure that there were clear plans for the betterment of society after the conflict was ended.  The 1944 Education Act was a gesture, no, much more than a gesture, of defiance and belief that something positive must come from something so negative.

     The Arts in all their forms are the way that quality of life can be guaranteed, in a way they encourage us to believe that there is something beyond mere survival.

     I am not so idealistic that I believe that a painting, or piece of music, or a good book; a well composed photograph or a well directed film are protection against the vicissitudes of this world, especially when they come in microscopic form, but I do think that the creative arts are there to make the struggle to survive worth it and they do, sometimes, provide the solace to make it bearable.

     That all sounds much more apocalyptic than I meant it to sound: I am warm, comfortable and well fed; I am protected from the elements and media to amuse myself surrounds me; I can write and I can speak.  My ‘prison’ is well appointed and I can take exercise outside the walls (just); I can contact friends and read about others; I am freely confined! 

     And yet, especially in a country when the death rate is rising day on day I do appreciate that I am of an age group where my continued life is dependent on my adhering strictly to governmental guidelines and the following of those guidelines by others around me.  For almost the first time in my life, I am directly threatened by a very present moral enemy.

     But, having talked myself into a state of sombre seriousness and existential angst, I can get out of it by merely (and that word is surely justified here because of the ease with which I can do it) looking at a painting, reading a book, listening to a piece of music.

     And, as far as looking at paintings are concerned, my emails have been filled with various institutions urging me to take a virtual tour or plunge into the catalogues and explore the holdings.  Galleries around the world are offering lectures and guides; things to do; things to make; ways to get involved.  Opera companies are offering performances streamed on their sites; books are being electronically offered – to say nothing of the television shows and films that are freely available on line.

     Now is the time to explore, to take a whim and see how far you go and where you end up.  So much is available and only for the cost of the electricity that drives your Internet access.

     When arid introspection threatens; the digital world is available!

    

---

[1] welshart.net; lionstreetgallery.co.uk; www.albanygallery.com

[2] https://www.redraggallery.co.uk/print-ceri-auckland-davies.asp

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!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 15 – 30th MARCH

A thoroughly miserable start to the two weeks of ‘extreme’ lockdown imposed by the Spanish Government. Presumably what we had before was a ‘Lockdown Lite’ and what we have now is a ‘Lockdown Intense!” – complete with exclamation mark. 

     This attempt to be more stringent is a belated response to the truly horrific figures of the dead and the infected that will haunt this government forever.

     The steady rain is a depressing backdrop to a growing realization that this period of two weeks is more than likely to be followed by another, and another, and another.  The Guardian reports one medical expert saying that the lockdown in some form or other could last as long as a year.  I resisted the need to put an exclamation mark at the end of that last sentence because, truly, it would not come as any sort of surprise.

     At the end of World War II in Britain, it took until 1954 for rationing to end: nine years after the end of a conflict that we ‘won’.  It seems unlikely that the number of deaths from this pandemic will come anywhere near the totals of the World War, but the dislocation is perhaps more truly worldwide than that conflict.  And if it took nine years to get back to sub-normal, how long is it going to take this time?

     This time around no infrastructure has been destroyed, the networks of transportation are running albeit in a reduced form and, most importantly, there is not the international conflict that makes communal unity impossible – apart, of course from the various populists around the world who are finding fascist rhetoric is of no use in fighting a real virus.  Countries are generally sharing vital information; people are working together to find solutions.  It will be the micro political divisions that kill us, working against the macro attempts to save us.

Toni, in his hunter/gatherer mode has been venturing out into this new world of increased restrictions to get some food.  We did not indulge in the panic buying frenzy at the start of this madness, so we do routinely need to stock up. 

     We are fortunate that in Castelldefels there is one area where there are five large supermarkets within walking distance of each other, so choice is not a problem.  The only real fear is peoples’ lax social distancing habits when in the confined spaces of shops.

     We had a fairly large list of needs and most of them have been satisfied.  We have made it policy that only one supermarket will be visited and if you can’t get what you want there then it will have to wait for another time.  Our decision to have a few ‘treats’ came to nothing, as the chosen store (Aldi) had no chocolate or ice cream (overtones of “No more mushrooms!” there) but the other items on the list were obtained, more or less.

     The only things that we had actually run out of were eggs and milk; and Toni forgot the eggs (but remembered the milk) and I suspect that he simply missed the chocolate (he lacks my professionalism when it comes to shopping) and everything else he failed to find, but we do have all the essentials. 

     Being without milk, even for a number of hours rather than days, was a pain.  On the principle that it is better to be petty minded over slight inconveniences rather than freak out over major crises: I have to say that missing a late afternoon cup of my tea (50/50 English Breakfast and Earl Grey) was a real loss.      It threw my sense of new routine into chaos and unsettled me.  How, I reasoned, is civilized life to continue without a stabilizing cup of tea? 

     In spite of the horror all around us, we live in a sort of easy stasis where the day starts with the comforting rumble of the robot hoover and a cup of tea, and ends with the computer monitor going black.  During the time in between there are the little domestic things that have taken the place of engagement in the wider physical world, or at least engagement physically in the wider world.  Any disruption there is to the Important Little Things That Keep You Sane – well, the clue is in the last capitalized phrase!

     As befits the gravity of the situation that dictates our lives, I have taken to drinking only camomile tea in the late evenings: look on it as my way of saving milk, and indulging in a gentle quasi-protestant-self-denial.  I cannot really pretend that I like the taste of camomile tea, but I have rapidly got used to it, so that I am able to kid myself that the taste is at least ‘interesting’ and a ‘dis-flavoursome contrast’ to the beverages I usually drink.

     That is the sort of ‘re-branding’ that characterizes a great deal of what we are doing when locked down: a spiritual form of ‘make do and mend’, using what you have to make the most of what you want!

And talking of Protestantism, as I sort-of was in the last but one paragraph, the ‘treats’ that we had from Toni’s shopping expedition were almost perfect examples of the faith: two tone biscuits: Marie biscuit one side and a thin layer of chocolate covering (and overhanging) the other.  Marie biscuits are surely the most uninspiring biscuits in commercial production and delicious chocolate should never be thin. 

     Incidentally, when I explained to Toni the correct way to eat these biscuits: by nibbling away the overhang of chocolate round the edges, while trying to prise it away from the biscuit base to see how much of the covered biscuit you could uncover when you had nibbled away at the four sides, he had swallowed his whole.  And there you see the consumer differences between a Lapsed Catholic and an Anglican Atheist!

     And in a most un-Catalan like way, it is still raining and we have not had our customary glimpse of the sun. 

     It’s just one damn thing after another.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 14

The latest figures for the dead in Spain from Covid-19 in a twenty-four hour period are 832.  This is the highest figure of for a day’s deaths in Spain.  This is a catastrophe, and a catastrophe that people here are saying is partially of the government’s making.

   Last night the Prime Minister of Spain went on television and informed the country that there were going to be far more stringent restrictions from next Monday.  For a two-week period taking in Holy Week there will be a total ban on all non-essential travel and all non-essential premises will be shut down.

     It remains to be seen whether the renovators next door who have been (and are as I type) working normally and entering and leaving the workplace as if there was no crisis, will finally knuckle under and obey the restrictions.  These people are perhaps symptomatic of the problem, where some consider themselves outside the range of restrictions that are in place already. 

     The advice is simple: stay in your homes and wash your hands.  And it is frustrating when some people ignore it so openly.

Every evening at 8.00 pm there is the opportunity to show our appreciation for the Health Workers.  I open the kitchen window and clap into the darkness and hear others clapping too.  It is a moment of collective assertion of thanks and a poignant moment of community when we isolates are linked by a small but sincere gesture of thanks for the incredible job that our health workers are doing in circumstances that are less than ideal.

     I am still haunted by pictures of ill patients in Madrid hospitals laying on blankets in corridors; blankets! not even trolleys.  We have been told that many front-line health workers have not been tested; they do not have masks or the appropriate equipment to protect themselves from the virus; some are making their own protective clothing out of plastic bags; the hospitals in Madrid are overwhelmed; there are insufficient ventilators, and so on, and on.  Numbers of health workers have died and more will unless they are properly looked after.

     The government is accused of doing too little too late and is playing catch-up to the situation rather than managing it with any efficiency, and each mismanaged day brings new death, directly attributable to political mismanagement.

     I am not so naïf as to think that a crisis can be managed with anything approaching perfection, “events, dear boy, events” will always frustrate the most meticulous of plans, but some things are inexcusable.  The signalling of the future lockdown of Madrid, giving plenty of time for comfortably off Madrileños to decamp to their costal summer homes and spread the virus was unforgiveable.   And I hope that last word ‘unforgiveable’ becomes the major impetus when the inquiry into the crisis is started, when the virus has been finally vanquished.

Two weeks.  Just two weeks.

     It hardly seems credible that we have been locked in for only a fortnight.  The world where social distancing (a wonderfully evocative phrase) did not exist seems like another era of history, some exotic maelstrom of conviviality where people actually touched and kissed each other, some rumbustious Restoration frivolity, viewed with nostalgia from our Puritan isolationism!

     I suppose that I should be grateful that time, which seemed to be speeding up for me as birthday after birthday flashed by, has slowed down again.  I wonder how many weeks it will take, before this becomes the new normal and time regains its usual velocity!

The days are beginning to lose their character: weekdays are no different from weekends; what is the essential difference between a Tuesday and a Thursday when you are stuck at home? 

     If there seems a sort of stasis in one’s perception of the distinct individuality of the days of the week, there will be a ‘real’ difference in the individual hours, because today is the day when we change the clocks and get an extra hour in bed.  This, of course, is only possible if you are still indulging yourself by keeping to a mythical ‘working day’ timetable giving a façade of normality to the structure of your enclosed temporal existence.

    

I have to say that I truly regret the indisposition of Johnson as it gives an opportunity for the Grotesque Goblin Gove to speak to the nation.  The man truly makes my flesh crawl as his mendacious sincerity constantly deflects questions into a fog of verbiage that comes nowhere close to a specific answer.  I loathe his master, too, of course, naturally, but the Blond Buffoon’s shaggy, unconstructed showiness when it comes to English expression is easier to dismiss.  There is something adhesively repulsive about Gove’s loquacity that is more difficult to brush away.  It needs to be flushed.  And then disinfected.  And then bleached.

Tomorrow a theoretical lie in, but I am sure that my ‘absolute’ body clock will get me up at the usual time, for Day 15 and the start of the third week of Lockdown.

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 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!

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!