Nitty-gritty nasty!

 

 

 

DIY in my world has always been self-defence, not self-expression.  Those who can gaze upon an Allen key and dream of technical, self-made, interior design upgrades to their living environment exist in another ‘verse to the one that I inhabit.  Yes, when continuation of the status quo is put in jeopardy I can rise to the occasion and heft an implement of household artisanship not directly related to the kitchen with – maybe, not the best – but certainly with the more satisfyingly mediocre.

So, it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I recently assayed the construction of a domestic tower of shelves and drawers which was supposed to replace the “cake-stand-type” fixture that you more regularly see in bathrooms which lurks by the side of my armchair in the living room.

These suspended containers were themselves a reaction to the arrangements that had to be put in place when I returned from my shock stay in hospital after the unexpected diagnosis of my thrombosis and embolisms.  I was told, strictly, and eye-to-eye by a determined doctor that I was to have a month of almost total rest and that I was furthermore to be ministered unto by Toni!

As it is quite impossible to live any sort of modern life (even in a state of “almost total rest”) without the accoutrements of electronic gadgetry about one, there had to be surfaces to hand on which computers, phones, iPads, mobile phones and cups of decaffeinated tea could be placed.

The immediate solution was to purchase a TV table, the ‘home’ form of the hospital table, and that was sufficient for the immediate problems of enforced immobility – but as soon as I could move around a little the implicit invalid associations of the teak-effect plastic began to pall and disconcertingly define as well, so it had to go.

The “cake-stand” alternative always looked as though it would be more at home in the bathroom and so it went too.

There are few things more depressing that the arrival of a heavy flatpack of potential furniture.  The acrimony started before the thing had even been unpacked and its consequent construction was completed in sullen silence and solitary strenuousness.  But it was eventually completed, it stood firm and the drawers fitted: and that, surely is the acme of technical achievement.

Though, put next to that piece of pre-cut, pre-drilled and pre-packaged purgatory, I can now place a finished piece of technical mechanical installation on the handlebars of my electric bike.

My bike is basically a good buy: sourced from one of those pre-production sites asking for seed money for a good idea, I was duly seduced and parted with a quite surprising amount of money to get a stylist, collapsible electric bike.  The one I have at present in the second iteration of the basic design with fatter wheels and a funkier colour.  But it didn’t have a throttle.

One of the disadvantages of the bike is that it is heavy.  On day last week I allowed the battery to run down and was confident that I could use the bike as an ‘ordinary’ cycle with no electric boost at all.  Wrong!  Very, very wrong!  My stylist nippy bike was transformed into one of those instruments of torture that you can find in the more severe sorts of gymnasia where a bloody huge effort is rewarded with bloody little.  I even toyed with the idea of walking the bike back home rather than peddling frantically in first and creeping along the road in a humiliating display of mismatch of effort and achievement that I had not repeated since a churningly inefficient dogpaddle from my distant youth!

So, actually getting the thing moving is sometimes a difficulty.  On my first bike the throttle attachment took care of stopping and starting on inclines, as my frantic attempts to get to first gear when I really needed to usually resulted in a clunking of cog wheels and a crazily haphazard approach to direction.  My ‘superior’ second bike did not come with a throttle as standard, but I rectified that omission by carefully selecting a throttle as an ‘extra’ when I ordered the bike.

I have had the bike for some time, but the throttle has remained stubbornly unavailable.  I have used, my not unimpressive writing skills, to little effect.  The Customer Service of MATE Bikes is notoriously and internationally awful.  The delivery of the part is over TWO YEARS LATE.  And I didn’t add an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence because a single exclamation mark would be pitifully inadequate to express my contempt for the service that I have had, and my self-respect does not allow me to use two or more in my written work.

After the Long Wait for a simple part to get to me, a sudden email informed me that it was on its way.  And they got the address wrong.  Again. 

Now I have to admit that the original mistake was mine.  When I ordered the first bike, I typed the post code number incorrectly and MATE have, in spite of my repeated explanations, failed to rectify the number.  So, my long-awaited part when to another part of Catalonia.

And do not think for a moment that it was easy to get the delivery company to cope with the mistake.  Contacting the company by email, phone and on the web all failed.  I went to the local depot of the company which is a few towns away and was told that my package was in a different ‘region’ of the company and they had no contact with that particular region and, even if they did, the only people who could change the delivery address were the people who sent the package, i.e. MATE Bikes.

The eventual solution was to accept that the package was in a different region.  Ask for it to be sent to a local shop that was used as a sort of pick-up centre and go there.

At least we sent through part of the National Park of Montserrat to get to the small town (that neither of us had heard of before) and had some spectacular views of the otherworldly rock formations to convince us that we had not wasted the best part of a morning going and coming back.

Then I had to fix the throttle to the bike.

In theory it is simple.  MATE even have a series of how-to videos, one of which is ‘Changing the throttle’ – a video that I have watched a number of times.

There were two problems.  The first was that the horn and rear light indicator (I told you it was a more sophisticated version of the original bike) was perched on the handlebar where the throttle should have fitted.  And the second problem was that the truly astonishing writhing mass of leads and wires that are part of the bike are hidden from view in a zipped sleeve which, once unzipped is entirely disinclined to zip up again.

I do not intend to explain how the problems were (and were not) dealt with.  Suffice to say, the throttle is fitted and, the more extraordinary part, it works.  For the moment – and I am OK with short term gains - it is done!

And the technical elements of my engineering were accomplished with four different types of Allen key.  And what an appropriate verb to use!

 

. . . and other thing

  

 

 

A personal blog is somewhat akin to a home: it always has to let you in.  So, the ‘lost time’ since the last entry is forgiven and forgotten and we carry on where we left off.

Well, not quite.  The last entries were numbered, day by day, in relation to the virus that has changed our lives.  Eventually, as one piece of governmental incompetence and mendacity was replaced by culpability even more egregious, I found that there was a certain similarity in my ranting and, eventually, even I grew a little weary with my impotent rage.

So, where are we now?  In my native land and in my adopted one, there is a depressing similarity in the progress of the response to the virus.  We are now in the Second Wave or Second Spike, and the preventative messaging to a bemused population is just as confused and self-evidently self-contradictory as to make any informed response for survival aleatory, to say the least.  Never has the age-old adage of “To thine own self be distanced, hand washed and masked” been so apposite.  Given the number of mask-less machos and viral assassins (or children, as they are sometimes known) plaguing our public spaces the only reasonable assumption to make is that everyone is out to get you, and that means you have to take the precautions that they seem unable or unwilling to embrace.

It is a constant source of support for me that my partner is compellingly paranoid about Covid and is ever on hand to reinforce my sometimes-casual approach to the liberal application of alcohol sanitizer - which has now replaced as the holy water stoop as a reflex ‘saving’ ritual in public places.

Restrictions come and go, but they seem to have little effect in our general lives.  As most people are generally unsure about what the precise regulations are at any specific time, it is hardly surprising that the approach of most is casually approximate.  I would say that mask wearing is generally accepted in urban areas, although smokers are allowed to flout the rules to indulge their filthy habit.  Bike riders, electric scooter users and skateboarders seem to assume that they are exempt, as do many walkers on the paseo by the beach and virtually all joggers.

The rule of 6 is generally accepted, but restaurants and shops seem to call that rule into question.  The Liceu is due to start its programme of Operas on United Nations Day and, while I have read through their protocols for the safety of patrons, I do wonder about the practical application of rules for the numbers involved.  Still, my first opera is a month away and the potent combination of politics and pandemic has meant that a day is a ‘long time’ in our present existence, let alone a week – so who knows what the situation will be like in another thirty days or so!

Our daily routine is fairly unbroken: we exercise, shop and go out for meals.  True, there is no ‘turn up and swim’ option, so I have to book my place in the pool each day; we wear masks every time we go out (even to and from the beach); sanitizer and plastic gloves are necessary in shops, and I take my own pepper grinder with me when we eat out as shared cruets are a thing of the past, all condiments are in sachets, but our daily life goes on.

I know (and I really do appreciate) that my proximity to the sea is a godsend.  Not only does the paseo give me a long (and level!) expanse for accommodating cycling, but it also allows me to see the horizon, to see out.  I think of those, and there are many, who live in cramped urban flats (sometimes with viral assassins in their living space!) and I wonder how they survive mentally intact with the inevitable physical and psychological claustrophobia that living in small spaces with the wider threat of infection must force on them.  I am lucky that I have an open, healthy release from the encircling encroachment of the Virus.

But the sense of being ‘surrounded’ with a resourceful enemy probing to find the gap in the waggon train circle to kill you does have, if you will excuse the pun, a deadening effect on creativity.  For the last fortnight, for example, my swimming pool has been closed for annual maintenance so I have been denied my early morning swim.  Although in past years during this stop fortnight I have gone to the public pool in the next town, I did not feel inclined to chance my arm (and the rest of my being) to an administration that I do not know and so I have relied just on my cycle ride to provide the exercise that I need.  And what use have I made of the extra time gained from not swimming?  Have I gone through my notebooks and worked up the ideas that I write down each day?  I have not.  Instead, I have indulged myself with what can only be described as a ghoulish intensity of Guardian reading, lurching from Trump to Johnson to Brexit to Covid – appalled but unable to stop myself descending further and further into the depths of despond with every sentence.

Into the gloom, however, comes John Crace – the Guardian political sketch writer.  John is quite open about his own mental insecurity and yet the humour and biting wit that he uses to flay the idiocy of our leaders is life-givingly refreshing and mentally rejuvenating!  I hope it works for him too. 

One letter writer in the Guardian suggested that everyone deserves a holiday of some sort to mitigate the effects of the virus – except for John Crace: his writing is too important for the well-being of the rest of us for him to be allowed to stop! 

John has now reached the level once held by the cartoonist Giles, where the work is necessary for the benefit of all, and his writing should be part of our National Health System!

Tomorrow, the pool reopens after whatever it is that they do for fourteen days and so things will be back to what we like to call the New Normal again.  I have begun to think about what Christmas is going to look like this year – that is going to give the New Normal a particular twist, or perhaps I should have said peculiar.  Indeed, the New Peculiar seems to me to be a far better description of what we are now living.

Bring on tomorrow!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 105 – Sunday 28th June

No real pain this morning so I went to the pool as normal and tucked myself in a lane and had it to myself for the whole of my swim.

     Yesterday, my bike ride did not register on my Amazfit app; no problem with the swim, but the bike ride did not save.  And I felt cheated.  It has come to something that exercise is not enough, I have to have it validated by being noted on my app and that analysed with a detail that I don’t understand.

     For once, I had remembered to notify my watch that I was using my bike to get to the pool.  It is not a long journey, but it still counts.  But it didn’t save and my app stubbornly refused to note it.  So, not only was a substantial part of my exercise regime not being added to my good deeds, but the little blue, green and red semicircle of my ‘training load’ indication was not getting enough points to get the little arrow to the ‘optimal’ green part of the curve. 

     Now, obviously, I have no idea what the numbers represent on this particular part of the program, but I like the word ‘optimal’, it sounds positive and I want to stay on the comfortingly green part and feel smug.  And the app not recognizing the distance that I go on my bike was stopping me from complacency.

     Although I am an enthusiastic ‘first adopter’ of any and all technology, and always have been (with the exception of electronic games) I am very much a ‘user’ and even the slightest brush with ‘settings’ tends to make me feel queasy.  I therefore did what any self-respecting User would do in the circumstances and turned my watch off and then turned it back on again.

     And it worked properly.  It really is encouraging that since earliest computer times (i.e. the 60s) to the present day, the on/off/on again approach is the one that works most often.

     My bike ride was gleefully accepted by the app and the little arrow is firmly in the green and I am ‘optimal’.

Lunch, as was traditional, was from the pollo a last; I went early, but not early enough as the queue was already too long for someone with my lack of patience and it is just as well that I was wearing my facemask so that my silently breathed imprecations were not able to be lip read by the other members in the queue.

     The fact that there were so many people there well before the time that Catalans consider is time for lunch is a clear indication of how the rest of the summer is going to pan out.  People are settling in for the long haul in having a good time in a Covid summer and rejecting usual mores and actually queuing before 1pm.  Unheard of.  Previously, my turning up at 12.30 showed a truly British insistence on the proper time of eating and I was usually alone in the non-existent queue.  12.30 is too late and unless I am there earlier then I have no intention of repeating the 40 minute wait for food that was my punishment this morning.

    

     Tomorrow the start of a new week.  We will have to go and get some essential groceries and we might make a trip to the beach and perhaps have our first dips in the sea!

     What larks!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 104 – Saturday 27th June

In spite of the fact that I was still dealing with the spasmodic pain in my left ear, I think that I managed a fairly standard day without too much whingeing.

     I did go for my early morning swim and my bike ride and even went out for lunch back in the pool, but was determined to get something from the pharmacy, anything from the pharmacy that might give me relief.  Having said that, my sleep last night (wracked as I was with pain) was, according to my watch, one of the best nights rest that I have had!

     The pharmacy came up with a little brown bottle with a dropper and that liquid was placed within the porches of mine ear as soon as possible.  Did I read the doses and regularity of application and side effects etc.?  I did not.  Instead I put my blind faith in the little brown bottle and hoped for the best.

     And, of course it worked.  Well, it worked enough for me to say that I felt better and a twinge every couple of hours was dealable with.

The beach was packed and yet largely empty.  In other words the space nearest the sea-line was full, but the spaces behind the front were sparsely populated.  Our beach is not that wide, but it is long and the entire population of Barcelona could be accommodated on the sand without too much problem.  It would not be very pleasant, and the traffic jams and the parking situation would be catastrophic, but as far as space is concerned they would fit.

     As we tend to get families on our beach, it is difficult to say how far physical distancing was obeyed, given the large extended grouping that make their way to Castelldefels.  It is a simple fact that ‘households’ are much more extensive than they are in the UK.

     Our communal pool has become the focus of summer life and there are a bloody sight more people around the pool that live inn the houses that the pool is supposed to serve.  Freeloaders are a real problem.  As are the viral assassins (kids) who can only communicate in soul rending screams.  Parental moderation is there none!

We are being informed of hotspots of infection around Spain and there is talk of localized lockdowns.  How those might work when people have now had a taste of new normal freedom is anyone’s idea.

     As foreign holidays are still problematical, there is going to be a real increase in staycations and Castelldefels is the perfect day trip destination for the city.  It is going to be a cramped summer season.

I have decided to have an early night tonight with the hope that the little brown bottle will do its stuff and Sunday will be pain free.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 103 - Friday 26th June

There is something about an earache that makes it more will-sappingly painful than other more various physical irritations.

     Although I always use earplugs when I swim, I have to admit that it was only after a so-called ‘open water swim’ in the communal pool (my watch doesn’t understand different length lengths, or rather I can’t reprogram it quickly) so, ‘open water’ it was.  Admittedly I was swimming though a considerable amount of organic detritus from the surrounding vegetation (and god know what from the other people) so the somewhat polluted water could have had an effect on my ever-so-tender ears.  Whatever, by the time I went to bed I was wondering if I would ever drop off given the exquisitely randomly spaced waves of pain that claimed bitter wakefulness.

     However, as I am fond of saying, when I go to bed I go to sleep.  And that is what I expect to do.  And if the pain is still there tomorrow then I will hie me to the pharmacy and ask for a nostrum.

     And as this sort of pain is truly enervating.  I will not write more.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 102 - Thursday 25th June

The highlight of today was at the end of it, when I tuned in to YouTube to watch the NT Live production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream an experience I urge you emulate by going to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Punzss5sHto

and enjoying a free production.  Though the hope is that you will have enjoyed the production enough to contribute at the end of it.  These productions are only possible because everyone involved has waived their fees and allowed the performance to be freely available for a week.

     Every Thursday that these productions have been available I have joined a virtual audience and enjoyed some superb performances.  Yes, watching on a screen is not the same as being in the theatre, but it is a privilege to be able to see productions that I missed when they were first produced and only experienced through reviews!

     One of the USPs of this production is the playing of Oberon and Titania where Oberon has his eyes anointed with the magic flower and he falls in love with Bottom’s ass (so to speak) rather than Titania.

     Puck is an amazing actor and dominates the stage when he has the opportunity, and he has many opportunities!

     This is a performance ‘in the round’ and it must have been an immersive experience if you were a member of the audience near the stage.

     An excellent, thought provoking, energetic, funny, delight of a performance.

Another beautiful day of sunny weather and heat.  Toni is back from visiting his parents and so to celebrate we went out to one of our favourite restaurants and, as it was Thursday, we had paella.

     We watch people in town and worry about a general laxity about the wearing of masks.  In this country it is an offence not to wear a mask in situations where physical distancing is not possible, and it is mandatory on public transport and in shops.

     There have been localized hot spots on infection and, although we seem set on a trajectory of determined progress to the New Normal, we are constantly worried by the ever growing numbers of infections and deaths throughout the world.

     Spain is set to welcome foreign visitors, and it seems prepared to accept visitors from places like the UK where the virus is nothing like under control.  Ironically, if tourists from the UK come to Spain they will find that they have freer movement in Spain than they do in the UK!

     I do understand that people are desperate to salvage something from the summer as far as tourism is concerned, but I do wonder at the cost that the economic activity will demand.

     All we can do is behave according to the rules and hope for the best.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 101 . Wednesday 24th June

I continue to be frustrated by the Catalan approach to time.

     I have given up trying to work out exactly the logic behind the opening and closing of shops and the continuation of some restaurants in staying open in spite of their cavalier attitude towards economics is mystifying to say the least, but I did think that I had the opening times of my swimming pool securely in my mind.

     Obviously during the more severe stages of the lockdown the pool was not open, and in the transition period from when it was open to the relative freedom of Phase Whatever The Hell We Are In Now there was a certain ad hoc nature of the time when we were let in for our regulated swims.  But the time did settle down to 8 am – the time, in the Old Days BC (before Covid) for the weekend opening times, the normal weekday opening time being 7 am.

     When we reached the present phase the opening time reverted to 7 pm, the showers were available for use and things appeared to be shaping up to be an acceptable New Normal.  Until San Juan.  As a recognized festival, this meant that opening time would be later, delayed until the weekend opening i.e. 8 am.

     Today, therefore, I had the luxury of a lie-in, or at least I would have if my built-in clock had not demanded that I wake up at my accustomed time, and I organized myself by setting off the robots to do the cleaning, making my cup of tea and doing a few of the clues in the Guardian Quick Crossword.  I made good time on my bike and I was at the gate to the pool by just before 8 am.  Unlike everyone else.  I was alone.

    OK, I thought, I will give them a few minutes to open up on the hour by going off on a little bike ride, making sure this time that I remembered to tell my watch that I was doing part of my exercise.  Too often I set off without pressing the right buttons to inform my watch to check my progress.  A little jaunt down the road and back again.  And nobody.

     I therefore made the executive decision that the time-honoured time for festive opening had somehow been delayed by an hour and so I would do my post swim bike ride, pre.  Which I did and made good time to get back to the pool just before 9 am.

     And there was nobody there.

     But at least this time, the gate was open and there were a couple of people sitting around the outside tables of the café.  But there were no people in reception and the café was closed.

     Eventually the shutters of the café opened, and Mario emerged to inform us that the opening time was 10 am for the pool.

     As I had my phone and my notebook (and asked Mario to bring me a cup of tea) a wait of an hour was as nothing and I finished the crossword and wrote a number of pages of quotidian rubbish in my notebook.

     My swim over, I had a second cup of tea and wrote further pages in my notebook and felt well satisfied and smug.  I declined to go on a further bike ride as the battery level on my bike had progressed to the single digit red number and I had no intention of being caught far from home with only pedal power to get me back!

It has been a beautiful day with only the screaming children lessening its beauty.  I truly think that kids have become even more feral with their extended absence from the calming discipline of school to contain their vocal exuberance.  If it were possible for kids to converse in anything less than a scream and shout I think I could become inured to their existence, but as it is, their obstreperous assertion of simply being makes them something Not Wanted on the Voyage of Life.  I’m afraid.

Our communal pool has become its usual magnet for those freeloaders who are not actually people who live in the houses for whom the pool is intended.  Just as the swallows come back to Britain in the summer, so various foreign fixtures take up their positions around the pool.  Shameless!

Tomorrow Toni returns, and I wait to see if he has been able to find any mature Cheddar.  He might have forgotten that he mentioned that he might look out for some, but I most certainly have not!

There are still a few laggard explosions, but as a slept through the ‘Main Battle’ last night, a few bangs are not going to keep me awake.  So to speak.

A pair of rather fearsome black reusable masks have arrived that I ordered via the Internet oodles of time ago.  They are not entirely comfortable to wear, but they do look the business and they have a satisfying seriousness to them.  They look the sort of thing to wear during shopping jaunts.

     The everyday masks are those that are shoved into pockets, and brought out and used because they are obligatory in Reception and the Café.  I am not sure what power they still retain as they have been overused, but I maintain the force of the family wisdom of, “Anything is better than Nothing.” And so they act as a barrier, no matter how flimsy.

     Mask wearing is the only visible element in most people’s approach to the virus.  Yes, we do obey (usually) the strips placed on the floor and there is some attempt at physical distancing with people that you do not know, but the fear of the virus is very much “over there” where “there” is very definitely not anywhere near our here.

     The virus news form around the world is uniformly depressing and there are spikes of infection in all countries.  I agree with Faucci (?) who said we should not look for second spikes of infection because we are still very much in the grip of the first spike.  I also agree with the director of the WHO who said that we are not safe until everyone is safe – and that means that we should all be very worried because there are too many leaders who are acting from economic and political standpoints and not human health standpoints.

I have written to my MP in Britain and urged him to consider aiding a movement to get Johnson and his cabinet charged with Corporate Manslaughter.

     I watched part of PMQs and was, yet again, ashamed by the way that Johnson failed to answer questions and became agitated when his failings were highlighted.  If he had a shred of common decency and humility and admitted the disastrous failures that his government has clearly owned, then I think he would have a certain amount of sympathy from the British people, and they would encourage the government to look at what has gone wrong and prepare for the worst in a more professional way than they have so far.  The government’s concern should be the welfare of the people and not how they look.  Each failure to acknowledge mistakes leads to further deaths.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 100 – Tuesday 23rd June

Perhaps it’s fitting that the 100^th day of Lockdown is on the eve of one of the more anarchic festivals in the Catalan calendar - San Juan.

     I have put down the blinds in the living room to limit the sonic bombardment that will continue spasmodically for hours and hours and hours.

     I decided not to do a tour on my bike this evening I am going to try and emulate the sleep that I had last night that my watch informed me was better than 99% of users!  I don’t remember it being that profound, but perhaps that is the point!

     I do realise that I should have had a glass of Cava and a piece of coca (the bready hot cross bun like cake) to be traditional for San Juan, but I celebrated with yogurt ice cream!  It is also at times like this that I think about my last drink of Cava, or indeed of any alcohol if it comes to that.  It has now stretched into years.  I can’t say that I truly miss alcohol, though a nice glass of decent red wine with a meal is a nagging desire from time to time!  And I always used to like a glass, or even a bottle, of Cava.  Ah, times past!

     Today has been one of those pleasantly ‘nothing’ days where I did more recreational reading of a novel and The Guardian with a little sunbathing with of course my bike ride and swim.

     I also hoovered the stairs and I was horrified at the amount of dirt that the activity produced.  My little robots do the level surface cleaning, and I await with considerable impatience a commercially available robotic stair cleaner!

     Around me the rumbling of explosions is now almost continuous, but I sense that the campaign of noise is not as overwhelming as it has been in years past.  Perhaps it is yet another tradition that is having to cope with the limitations of the virus.

     Tomorrow is classified as a fiesta and so the swimming pool is open an hour later.  I can’t be bothered to change my alarm and so I will have the delight of waking up to go to sleep again – though the danger there is that you oversleep and you also lack the backstop of a later alarm.  I like living dangerously!

      I am now off to bed, no doubt my dreams using imagery from the First World War to work the whizz-bangs into a surrealistic narrative!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 99 – Monday 22nd June

Day 1 of the New Normal in the swimming pool.  We still have to book our time, but more people are allowed during the hour.  How this is going to work out I’m not sure as, today, there were few enough people for one-per-lane as previously.  The difference was that we were given a key for a locker (whereas previously we had to pack our clothes and take them with us to the pool side) which we had to disinfect before use and after we had dressed at the end of our swim.  The showers were open for use.  I assume that, for the foreseeable future, this will be the way that we swim nowadays, with the major difference being that we have to book times rather than simply turn up.

     The weather was good today and there were plenty of people on the beach, but it was noticeably quieter than over the weekend.

     We are building up to tomorrow evening, the eve of San Juan when there will be bangers, drinking and picnics.  At least that was the case in all previous years, it remains to be seen how the pandemic and physical distancing will change the experience of the fiesta.

     There have been a number of explosions during the past few days, with the kids next door seeming to take teatime around 5pm as an excuse to cavort around the streets setting off the sort of fireworks which are sure to get a chorus of dogs barking in distress.  They are completely unsupervised by adults and every bone in my fussy pedagogic body aches to do something and my channelling of Victor Meldrew also aches to shout something admonitory out of the window!

     Tomorrow evening I may well draw down the shutters and retreat to my armchair with a good book, or alternatively I might mosey down the maritime road to see what people are doing!

     San Juan is one of those festivals where slightly rowdy behaviour is encouraged and the throwing of the Catalan equivalent of penny bangers is almost mandatory.  Kids usually equip themselves with what look like the old fashioned Smiths Crisps twists of salt, but in this case they are of gunpowder and they make a most satisfying ‘bang!’ when thrown on the pavement.  There doesn’t seem to be an age limit for this form of anti-social behaviour and parent and grandparents look on approvingly as their kids waltz about in a mist of explosives!  Each to his own!

     Usually the explosions go on for most of the night, there doesn’t seem to be a cut-off at 10 pm – which is the usual time for the stopping of noise making.  This fiesta encourages that petty decency to be ignored and loud explosions go on until the small and sometimes the larger hours!  I wonder, though, if it will be the same this year?  All things are different.

On Wednesday most places will be closed as it is a national holiday, but I intend to go for a swim, perhaps go for an exploratory bike ride to see what the beaches are like after the festivities of the night before and keep myself very much to myself.  I stocked up on food and essentials before the weekend and I don’t need to go out for anything until the end of this week.  Television will have to be my eye on the world – that and Radio 4 and the World Service of the BBC of course.

The tasks that I set myself for the last few days have been completed or compromised with varying degrees of satisfaction.  I rely, yet again on the old family wisdom of “Anything is better than nothing!”

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 97 - Saturday 20th June

[This entry is out of sequence because of the vagaries of my ‘vintage’ laptop where the program froze and nothing worked.  After forcing a ‘quit’ the day afterwards, I discovered that most of the entry had been lost when I eventually started the program up again and tried to find the writing that I had done.

I am going to leave this as I found it, as an example of the tyranny of locking your writing to a machine!]

The day was punctured by explosions as we are reminded that we are working our way towards San Juan when the setting off of petados is encouraged, with kiosks springing up along the paseo selling explosives.  This day and the days around it are the equivalent of Guy Fawkes Day, though with more loud noises than flamboyant fiery inscriptions in the sky.  It is, of course, a nightmare for dogs, though I am (callously) open to the more spindly-legged rat dogs suffering terminal shock as one way of stopping their endlessly squeaky pseudo-barks.

     In previous years the most worrying aspect of the festivities are kids setting off penny-bangers, the sort of things that have long been banned in the UK, but here are probably regarded as a hallowed tradition that some right-wingers will probably urge should be regarded as part of the Patrimony of Humanity – the sort of designation that PP wants connected to bull fighting and other grotesque practices.

     It will be revealing to see just how many people turn up on the beach of Castelldefels as there is a tradition of staying up all night drinking around a camp fire that has been progressively modified over the past few years.  It is now illegal to light fires on the beach and public drinking is always frowned upon in this country.  During a pandemic what sort of physical distancing should be taking place.  What will the police be doing during the festival?  How desperate are people to get back to what they know and love?  It all waits to be seen.

The app for booking my swim seems to have gone a little haywire.  A previous booking for tomorrow has disappeared though the booking procedures for next week still seem to be in place, but with double or even more places available, but I was told that all restrictions had been removed.  This does not seem to be the case, but I am sure that things will be made a little plainer when I go to my swim in the morning.  Or not of course!

Today has not been as productive a day as yesterday and I even found myself dozing off after lunch!  But I have managed to get some of the more basic tasks done, even though the place is still looking a little dishevelled as I have not tidied up my tidying up, if you see what I mean.

I am re-reading some of Steven Saylor’s Mysteries of Ancient Rome on my Kindle and thoroughly enjoying them.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 98 - Sunday 21st June

Sitting on the spacious terrace of the third floor, warmed by the low summer sun of the early evening, drinking a cup of my brew of English Breakfast and Earl Grey and with a view of three swimming pools in the sort of open quadrangle formed by flats and houses – what could be more pleasant?

     The clue to disharmony is in the “three swimming pools”, no, not the swimming pools, it’s the conjunction of swimming pools and children that take away delight.

     Apart from lunchtime, where I had our communal pool to myself, and in which I was able to do “open water swimming” as the only setting that my watch recognizes the circles that I swim in a pool which is markedly smaller than the commercial pool that I use for my morning swims, these pools attract kids in the same way that lies attract Conservative cabinet ministers: they flock to them as if their very lives depend on them.

     This is all, you might say, very normal.  What child is not attracted to glittering water and in your own backyard?  Indeed, I welcome young people finding delight in the chlorinated waters of their pools, it is the noise that accompanies their delight that irritates.

     Today, for example, there seemed to be some sort of infernal timetable linking all three pools: screaming kids in one pool has no sooner gone than they were followed by shouting kids in another who augmented their lusty voices with explosives, and when their pyrotechnic noisiness eventually diminished their baton of cacophony was passed on to the third pool where very young kids shrieked while belabouring the water with those polystyrene spaghetti floats that make a penetrating slapping sound when applied to the pool’s surface.

     As if this is all not enough, there has been a resurgence of the moronically irritating game (sic) of Marco Polo.  This ‘game’ consists of one person (if children can be called such!) calling out ‘Marco!’ to which all the others reply (you’ve guessed it!) ‘Polo!’  This can go on for what seems like hours and I am convinced that any adult jury would acquit any mature act of infanticide if the ‘game’ had been played for longer than a couple of minutes.

     I think that it is important to have a ready crop of niggles such as the above during a pandemic as they take your mind away from the more pressing problems of life and death that our dear political leaders seem so incapable of managing.

      Here in Spain and Catalonia we have now officially come out of the State of Emergency and from Monday we will be living the New Normal.

     As I now rarely go to the shops and my sphere of geographical wandering is generally circumscribed by the shore to the south and my swimming pool to the north that my observation of humanity is necessarily compressed.  I see thousands of people along the beach as I go on my daily bike rides, but it is difficult to extrapolate from people sitting under parasols to the general population.  Yes, I watch the new on TV, but when did that ever give a balanced view of life!

     Monday will mean, for me, the opening up of the swimming pool.  More people will be allowed to swim and, O Joy!, we will be able to use the showers after we have completed our lengths.  You simply do not feel clean after swimming in a water-treated communal pool.  We will still have to wear masks when we are not 2m distancing, but there will be more of us around.  I think.  I wait to see what real differences there will be.

Today has been (generally) sunny and, as it is a weekend the beaches have been packed.  As far as I can tell, people are sitting in their domestic bubbles and are trying to leave some sort of space around themselves so that there is some physical distancing.

     The age groups that are least likely to practice distancing are also those who have been described as the most likely to be asymptomatic carriers – the age group 20-40, with the age group 20-30 being the most threatening to those who are sheltering or are in the age group that is the most vulnerable to infection.  Like mine!

     Spain has opened itself up for tourists – even for British ones, and that shows how desperate they are to try and salvage something from the ravished holiday period if they are prepared to take people from the European centre of viral mismanagement, infection and death: the UK!  Benidorm is desperate for the Brits to come and drink themselves into insensibility, and the bar owners and the hoteliers are prepared to risk death rather than have empty premises.

     And, to be fair, who can blame them?  Economic activity must restart, the whole of society depends on people earning money, spending money, and paying taxes.  As with so many things, it is a balancing of threats that will point to the way ahead.

     The trouble is that the British government, in spite of their oft repeated mantra of “We are following the Science!” gives the impression of making up their responses as they go along – mainly because that is exactly what they are doing.  The number of rubber-burning screeching U-turns show that they are basically clueless, and the ‘political’ and ‘populist’ are of supreme importance, and certainly of greater significance than the lip service they pay to experts and science.  And morality!

     Still, we are where we are, and we have to deal with what we have rather than what might have been if Johnson and his cabinet of third-raters had been even marginally competent.

     I am still waiting and willing to make a donation to the fund that will enable something like justice to take place so that Johnson and his cabinet are taken to court to face a charge of corporate manslaughter for the way in which the Covid-19 crisis has been mismanaged.

     And when is the Inquiry going to be established?  We need it now, so that the egregious mistakes that accompanied the primary outbreak are not repeated in the almost inevitable second peak.  Johnson and his crew have killed enough and too many, they must not be allowed to career onwards without the information from an exhaustive inquiry to guide them in the future.

     The future, let’s face it, is murky to say the least.  Given how the world has changed in the last 12 weeks, it is difficult and frightening to think about what our world will be like in another 12.

     It is difficult to be depressed in a sunny seaside town where most of the people are having fun and relaxing.  But that last word is also dangerous, at a time like this true relaxation is dangerous and possibly fatal.  By all means enjoy the sunshine; swim, walk, cycle, eat and play – but be aware, be safe.

     ‘Relaxation’ from 12 weeks ago is an historical memory, we have to redefine the word and the world in terms of the New Normal so that it becomes ingrained, a way of life.  A way of Life!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - Day 96 -Friday 19th June

Early morning swim today and I’ve booked another early morning swim for Saturday!  I am getting back into the groove – just in time to be told that the system will be changing on Monday!

     On Monday the pool will revert to the normal opening time of 7 am and the app-based system of booking will end.  You just turn up.  The showers which have been taped off will be open again and this will be the club getting to the New Normal.

     As far as I am aware we will still have to wear masks when we come into the reception, and our temperature will be taken with the non-contact forehead thermometers.  Presumably we will be back to multi-occupancy of the swimming lanes.

     That will be the single largest step towards how this particular aspect of my ‘sporting’ life will be continued in the phaseless future.

     On Monday we will be in Phase 4 probably and that is only a step away from no phase at all.  Statistics still tell us that the number of cases of infection are growing every day and that people are still dying of Covid-19 – but in an age (because every week feels like one) where German tourists have arrived in a holiday resort and where there will be a general opening up of the country to foreign tourists, it is hard not to believe that we are out of the other end of the pandemic.

     I know that we are not and I will continue to take every precaution – unfortunately it is not only the precautions taken by the wary, but also those of the heedless fickle people who believe that they are immortal that will decide how the final results of this pandemic pan out.

     Most of me is looking forward to a more open approach to living, but I have a deep underlying concern about the evidence for the progression that we are living through.

     It seems almost unbelievable that the change in our lives has been concentrated (so far) in about 16 weeks.  Life at Christmas time is nothing like it is now.

     This afternoon there was a large children’s party in one of the houses opposite.  As I type this evening I can hear a large group of adults talking into the night and laughing together.  In a few days time it will San Juan when it is traditional for fireworks, drinking and parties on the beach to take place.  Catalans are a convivial people and they love getting together.  And who can blame them?

     But these days of sunshine and festival are going to be testing.  Asymptomatic people walk among us and opportunities are going to come thick and fast for the spreaders to infect a whole chunk of the population.

     There have not been obvious attempts to take a critical account of what has gone on so far in the approach to the spread of the virus and its treatment.  We are ill-prepared to cope with a second spike in infection any better than we have done with the original outbreak.

     This is a phoney war after the initial disaster and things do not bode well.

Toni has gone to Terrassa to visit his family and I have given myself a list of tasks to fill his absence – those tasks that always seem able to wait for a better time to be completed.  Large and small I have listed them in my notebook and I have made a decent start for a Friday evening.  We will see how far I get before inertia and distaste limit my achievement!