Iffy weather
means easier cycling along the Paseo for me.
Although this morning was bright and clear there were clouds around, and
it was markedly less warm than yesterday.
As I am virtually geared up to set off at a set time I am impervious to
the weather (unless it is raining – there are limits) and so I get to see a
sparser selection of the population on my little jaunts.
I have made a decision that I will not get
grumpy on my ride by noting all the people who are breaking some or all of the
rules about exercise and the times when they are supposed to be doing it. I now cycle along in what passes for Zen
serenity, or as near as I can get to it with the .active supressing of my Victor
Meldrew inclinations.
All of the usual on-beach café/restaurants
(chiringuitos) have now been constructed or are in the last stages of
production and these seasonal edifices will soon be plying their trade – though
with reduced numbers of clientele – at least in this stage of the
lockdown. I do wonder about the economic
reality of these places, where their existence is only for the summer months
and now with a reduced number of patrons, how are they going to make a profit?
Over the next few weeks we are going to
see more clearly which cafes and restaurants, and indeed small businesses have
managed to survive the lockdown. In my
more cynical moments I wonder whether only those places which seem to be
centres for money laundering are going to be able to survive – not that I am
going to make any concrete accusations, I am merely putting it forward as a
possible scenario. Hypothetical, of
course!
We are still nowhere near getting back to
anything resembling normality, and even when more shops and shopping centres
open fully, it is going to be a damn sight later before the attitude of people
get back to where it was.
At least, it will be for those “of riper
years” as the Book of Common Prayer has it.
Some of us who are retired and with one or more of the conditions that
place us ever so firmly in the “at risk” category will need a vaccine or at
least a convincing treatment to be readily available before we return to anything
like pre-Covid behaviour.
The same does not, emphatically not, go
for youth. Although many of the members
of the 14-24 year old groupings wear their masks, they do not wear them with
anything like sincerity. Too often the
mask is on the chin, or in the hand, or wrapped around the elbow or simply not
in evidence at all, when groups of kids are socialising, and that socialising
does not often respect physical distancing.
Don’t get me wrong, I do understand their
scepticism and I only wish I could share their obvious belief that any
infection will be like an infant infection of chicken pox – over in a day or so
with the ‘sufferer’ hardly noticing.
And, let’s face it, statistics are on their side: the vast majority of
Covid infections are mild and only a tiny minority necessitate hospitalization. But as a person who contracted chicken pox in
his forties, rather when he was four months or four years old, I have never
felt so utterly ill and sorry for myself!
Being now a couple of decades older, I do fear what an infection of
Covid-19 might mean for me now. And
indeed for those with whom I may come into contact. The lesson is clear, it is up to the
individual to follow the rules for the benefit of all – but the Cummings Cop-out
seems to be all too ready to be called on by all too many people in this
crisis.
Here in Spain the
government is asking for a final extension to the State of Alarm to keep the restrictions
in place during our transition to a looser approach to the virus. Spain’s economy was not in the strongest of
positions before this crisis and it will be a damn sight weaker after it. The summer is the tourist season and,
considering that the Easter Holidays were a disaster, it will be catastrophic
if something is not salvaged from the summer holidays. Spain is allowing the opening of hotels
(though not their common areas) at a limited occupancy rate and in another week
or so even we in Catalonia will probably be allowed to swim in the sea. It is tantalizing to have the Med at the
bottom of the street and not be allowed to swim in it. I can’t swim in my local swimming pool
either, and I fear that the restrictions that will be placed on public swimming
when finally is allowed will make the experience something of a chore rather
than a pleasure, but it will be interesting to see how our swimming club
interprets the rules!
Johnson’s irascibility
at PMQs when Starmer had the audacity to question him, is a clear sight of his
lazy lack of preparedness and yet another example of his assumed possession of
entitledness. His bumbling non-answers
are embarrassing in the extreme, and the sooner he is dispatched from the dispatch
box the better. I will have to devise an
acronym to express his supreme unfittedness to the post for which he is
paid. Perhaps NAPM (not a prime
minister) or TOAMP (travesty of a prime minister) or BIAL (bumbling idiot and liar)
– they ned some work.
The situation in
the USA is horrific in virtually every aspect: morally, socially, politically,
legally, criminally, judicially – the list could go on and on. As a white man, I do not know what it is to
walk in a black person’s shoes, but I do know that my wholesale support is for
the Black Lives Matter movement and I hope that something real comes from the world
wide revulsion to the poison of racism that limits the development of so many
black lives, not only in the US but also the UK, Spain, Catalonia and the rest
of the world.
My addiction to
the news, no matter how depressing it is, is something that I have mentioned
before, and I can’t fight it. I get even
more depressed if I think that there are news stories that I might have ignored
merely because my fragile sensibility finds it difficult to take. I have to have my fix of Johnson, Trump et
al, but I find that it is easier to take if I take it through the vision of writers
like John Crace, the Guardian political sketch writer. His wry writing lets you know that there is a
voice of reason, articulating your sense of contempt in writing, which is so
much more intelligent and wittier, allowing a Voltarian smile to leaven the
misery of current political events.
Yesterday, before
I went out on to the terrace on the third floor, I grabbed a book at random
from the shelf nearest the door of my ‘library’ and started reading. My choice was Lucia in Wartime by Tom
Holt, which is a ‘continuation’ of E F Benson’s series of ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels
the style of which one admirer described as being as if “the pens of Evelyn
Waugh and Jane Austen had mated”. The
novels are studies in middle class mores and snobbery centred on the rivalry of
Mapp and Lucia for pre-eminence in the small town of Tilling.
There was a superb Channel 4 television
production of three of the novels in 1985 and 1986 with Prunella Scales as
Mapp, Geraldine McEwan as Lucia, Denis Lill as Major Benjy Flint and Nigel
Hawthorne as Georgie. As someone said
about the writing of James Thurber and his cartoons, “If you don’t find them
funny – there is something wrong with you!”
I feel the same way about Lucia.
I urge you to sample any and all of EF Benson’s oeuvre and of Tom Holt
too.
It may seem perverse to single out a book
about Mapp and Lucia which was not written by E F Benson, but rather by Tom
Holt over forty years after Benson’s death, but the book is so well written and
such a tribute to the power of Benson’s creation that it can be mentioned in
the same breath as that of the master himself!
I might add that my copy of Lucia in
Wartime by Tom Holt was a 1986 Christmas present, inscribed by the two friends
who gifted it to me, “An imitation Lucia, for an imitation Lucia”
How well they knew me!
