Bad start, got better

Extension of Restrictions, Day x++, Friday.

 

 

 

A catalogue of mishaps to start the day.

     Firstly, I forgot my mask and set off into the darkness, until the coldness across my lower face reminded me that something was missing.  Luckily I have masks secreted about my clothing and so was able to pull into the side of the road and garb myself up.

      There was a police check point set up just after the junction of the motorway exit and the road along the side of the Olympic Canal.  Luckily, as I was in the cycle lane I was not stopped and was able to get to the pool in good time.  To find that, as I started to change, I had left my bathing costume at home.  If I had thought for longer than a couple of seconds, I would have realized that the wet bathers from the day before were still in the compartment for used sporting clothing.  But I didn’t.

     To general hilarity from the centre staff, I left (almost) as soon as I arrived and plunged back into the darkness to go home.  Where, armed with dry bathers I returned to the pool, changed and got to the water much later than usual.

     Before I could plunge in, the lifeguard told me that the spaces for the next hour were fully booked and so I would need to quit the pool as the new folk arrived.

     As I was so late there was no clear lane for me to occupy and so I had to double up with a swimmer (five lanes, 10 swimmers, two to a lane swimming in parallel) and start my delayed efforts.

     As it turned out, not everyone turned up to claim their booked spaces and so, with a few judicious lane swaps, I was able to complete me full swim with the series of exercises that I do at the end of the official metric mile of overarm.

     After my cup of tea and bocadillo I usually set off on my bike ride to Port Ginesta and back, but the gage on my bike informed me that I was down to 20% power and, oddly, when I made my first attempt to come to the pool the screen actually registered 6%!  Only once have I attempted to ride the bike without any electrical assistance and it is an experience that I do not intend to repeat.  To give an equivalent example, without any electrical assistance, it is like driving a car without power steering, something I prefer not to do.

     It did not help that the weather was uncomfortably odd, the sky a funny colour and the temperature low.  I rode down to the paseo and as I met it, I made an executive decision to return home.  Being caught in a thunderstorm is another experience that I do not intend to repeat!

 

 

 

I now have a number of writing projects on which I am working, some of which require a little light research.  Some information is proving hard to find, but I know that it is only a matter of time before I find what is necessary.  Or not.  Sometimes the effort is all!

 

Tomorrow the restrictions on people travelling to other municipalities means that only Castelldefels people should be walking along the paseo.  It is very hard to believe that the strangers that we see are just fellow citizens who have kept themselves to themselves and have finally decided to come out to have a breather.

     We have had police checkpoints on entry points to Castelldefels (especially the beach area) to dissuade ‘outsiders’ from breaking the regulations, but it must be difficult for people close to us from not wanting to make a quick visit.

     The figures for Covid in Spain and Catalonia are not good.  The restrictions have been extended for a further 15 days here in Catalonia which virtually gets us up to the Christmas period.

     The loosening of the regulations and restrictions for Christmas seems to me to be fatal madness.  As experts constantly point out, the virus doesn’t recognize the Christmas period and will act accordingly.  We must expect an increase in deaths in the middle of January if people decide to meet up and try and experience anything but a shadow of what Christmas used to be like.

     As far as I can see, Christmas will be just the two of us.  There may be a way for Toni to meet up with some of his family, but I really do not see the point in taking such a risk when the vaccine is only a few months away.  We will see.

     At least in the New Year the Trumpian Nightmare will have his tiny hands forced away from the levers of power and we can hope for a boring presidency to take its place.

     Pity that the horror of Brexit in some sense or other will be filling the minds of people in Britain.  To think that we have years (o god, years) more of the bunch of viciously and fatally incompetent chancers governing us is depressing.

     And what is more depressing is the Dance of Death that the Conservative Party is doing with the EU in the lead up to some sort of agreement.  I do not see how Johnson is going to be able to spin anything that he manages to get in a positive way.  He truly (as are all the rest of us) in a no-win situation.  Any Brexit is going to be a disaster, it just depends how big a disaster.  Whatever agreement he manages to get, it is going to be construed as a betrayal by whole swathes of his own party and the rest of the country.  God alone knows what Northern Ireland is going to get out of that bumbling fool’s final idiocy.

     If he does manage to cobble together some sort of paper-thin agreement then my pension will go up.  When I arrived in Catalonia the euro was 70p now it’s 90p+, that translates into a 30% reduction in my pension as it is paid in pounds (tax deducted) and then transferred to Catalonia.  If there is any sort of agreement then the value of the pound will go up, I will get more euros for my money right up until the full impact of the idiocy of Brexit comes home to roost and the pound plunges down again.

     And a Happy Christmas to us all!

A Stab to Start the Day

 

 New Lockdown, Day X, Tuesday

 

 

 

Not everyone starts their day by stabbing themselves with their electric toothbrush.  And I mean real stabbing.  With blood.

      Not an easy feat, but I managed it.  The head of the brush somehow or other came away from the main body of the brush and I then was distracted by the perception of distance and I brought the vibrating metal stalk forcibly into in the right-hand side of my mouth, just below the bottom lip!  It certain woke me up, and any lingering drowsiness was jabbed away in a concentrated moment of pain.

     Before you start thinking of wasting any sympathy on me and my injury, I would point out that the puncture is small and it looks more like a shaving nick than anything else – but still a wake-up call to the unwary to beware of seemingly domestic dental devices.

     When I checked the errant brush head, it did look a little worn and perhaps I should have replaced it earlier.

     Toothbrushes (and electric toothbrush heads) are in a category of simple things that could be easily and cheaply replaced but aren’t, until something happens.  This is a category they share with wooden kitchen spoons and spatulas; face flannels; tea towels and coffee mugs.

     Actually, the last item, the mug, is something that I will throw away as soon as I detect even the smallest chip or crack – some things are ingrained in your innermost soul by maternal edict that cannot, dare not be gainsaid.  My mother regarded a chip or crack in pottery and china as being as toxic as a vomiting fly, safe harbours for unmentionable and uncountable germs.  Discard instantly!  And I do.

     But the other things?  I have some wooden spoons (not thrown away) which look as though they were carved from a beam in the ark; tea towels that have only the faintest suggestion of pattern, others delicately threadbare.  Why?  They are so cheap to replace, and I am not known for my thriftiness – indeed, in certain respects I am an eager celebrant at the altar of planned obsolescence.  But you can almost read the history of our family in the tea towels that we use, whereas my purchases of watches or computers brings tears to the eyes of my bank manager, and untold you to manufacturers.

     I have known people (well, one person) who would refuse to go into a café for a cup of tea because of the mark-up on the cost of a cuppa compared with what he knew it cost at home.  He would actually wait outside the café while the rest of us imbibed in feckless luxury and then re-join us when we had finished our squander.  But for other things, he paid the price asked without question, even when the profit margin was just as substantial.  Ah well, one shouldn’t always look to logic to explain how humans work.

 

 

 

The radio in the kitchen is a Roberts and is Internet linked, so, in theory I should be able to get Radio 4 (without which civilized life is not even remotely possible) but the reception is unruly.  Toni has suggested a solution which involves turning the electrical wiring system into some 

 

sort of conduit for the Wi-Fi link to the internet.  All this involves is the purchase of a link from the router to the socket and then another link from the socket to the radio: one of those “plug and play” solutions.

       

     “Ho!  Ho!  Ho!” he laughed hollowly.  It didn’t work.

     The reason it didn’t work is that the link to the router has to be direct to the socket in the wall.  That, in this house is a problem.  Built in the days when a couple of sockets was more than enough for any home, the availability of power is an ongoing quest.  And an extensive use of extension leads.

     The router is in the living room and the radio is in the kitchen.  The area behind the television and almost hidden from view is a writhing mass of cabling for the basic electrical necessities of modern life.  There is no socket available for the frivolity of getting Radio 4 when so much else needs power.

     No problem.  We have another router on the third floor.  The house is built of concrete and is terrifyingly solid, wi-fi needs boosts to get all the computing machines to work, so all I had to do was find the socket on the third floor and we could try that.

     The third floor is my workroom.  It is also a comically unreal picture of cluttered chaos.  Bookshelves line the walls and extension plugs proliferate.

     Finding The Source of The Nile was one of the great stories of exploration and daring, but it pales into vapid insignificance when compared with the Search for the Socket on the Third Floor.

     There is no space.  For anything.  On the Third Floor.  If anything is moved, then something else must be moved to make a space for the thing that has been moved to a new location.  At the moment, when many, many things have been moved, the space looks like a vindictive labyrinth, and my progress from desk to stairs is in a slow undulating slink as I manoeuvre around insecure piles of stuff and am rewarded by sharp book corners biting into ankles and shins.

     Like some demented game, I followed power leads, trying to find their source – only to be frustrated by finding one trailing socket only led to another trailing socket, not to the true source of power.  Crouching, crawling, moving books to move bookcases, shining a torch behind pieces of furniture (and ofttimes being bewitched into reading volumes that I had not seen for some time, but then needed by immediate attention) I felt the full weight of despair.  Indeed, I began to doubt that that there was ‘a’ source of power – it (The Power) was numinous, it was ubiquitous, it was ‘there’ and not to be questioned or assumed to have a simple source: it simply Was.

     Well, that is fine and dandy thinking for Scholastic monks, but I needed the physicality of a plug.  Which I eventually found directly behind me.  A four-socket thing, with leads going off in all directions but, amazingly with one socket free.  End of story.

     No.  The lead supplied with the magic plug is too short to reach the router and the router cannot be moved.  So, in spite of all my misgivings about the pernicious influence of Amazon in the world today, necessity bent my principles (again) and a longer lead has been ordered and will be delivered to the door tomorrow.  When we will discover the next problem to cope with.  Plug and play indeed!

 

 

 

Tomorrow the Liceu is putting on a performance of an early Mozart Opera.  The original date of the performance has been changed twice.  The time of the performance has been brought forward by two hours, and the audience has been limited to 500 people.  Masked, we sit in a circle of empty seats – and are grateful that at least something is being done in the season.

     Because of the re-arrangement the cost of the ticket has been halved, and as I sit in an aisle seat in the front stalls, that is a considerable amount of cash!

     This is a concert version of the opera, which is never a truly satisfying way to see an opera, but it was always going to be a concert version so I have nothing to complain about there.  The countertenor in the piece has a wonderful voice and I only hope that it is enough to keep me interested in a less than convincing narrative – though there are powerful human passions behind those ordered notes!

     It will also give me an opportunity to see at least some of the Christmas Lights in Barcelona, and perhaps I will feel a little more of the spirit of the ‘festive’ time – though the only present that anyone really wants is a double dose of efficient vaccine!

 

The excavations on the Third Floor have revealed more items that will be added to my growing Catalogue Raisonné, including one thing that I had thought was long lost!  It is good to see that there is some gain from the pain of sorting out!

 

 

 

 

 

YOUR life in YOUR hands

 

New Normal or lockdown or whatever, Second Week, Sunday

 

 

 

 

As far as I am aware the restrictions about moving from one location to another during the weekend is still in force, though it was difficult to believe that as I threaded my wobbly way past the masses of people who were thronging the paseo this morning.

     In many ways, it is difficult to blame people wanting what seems like a fairly innocent and safe pastime: wandering in time honoured fashion along the side of the sea.  On the other hand, I also regard every stranger as a possible enemy, and a deadly one at that.

     It is the fatal nature of the disease for many and the lingering serious complaints that are now being registered after surviving the virus for some, that make me question the absurd optimism of so many who live and act as though they do not really need a vaccine because they are so obviously immune.  And they are not.

     On my daily bike ride, I can judge just how seriously people take the fact that we are in the middle of the second wave of infection, and that we may yet see the totals for the first wave overtaken.  Most runners on the paseo do not wear masks.  A minority of cycle riders wear masks.  Some recreational walkers and dog walkers do not wear masks.  Some ‘regulars’ I pass every day have never worn masks, and some of those regulars are obvious OAPs and therefore in one of the most vulnerable categories.

     I have to say that a greater proportion overall of the people I pass now do wear masks, probably (but not unequivocally) a bare majority.  I have no idea what news broadcasts or newspapers these people glean their information from, but they are obviously very different from the ones that I see and read!

     Virtually everything that I hear about the virus frightens me.  Obviously you can’t live a life in perpetual terror, it’s too bloody wearing, but concern (to put it mildly) is never far from the surface: “hands, face and distance” is a sort of mental mantra by which I live my life!

     It looks as though one of the vaccines is likely to be rolled out within the next week or so.  This will be reserved for front line staff and those in immediate contact with virus infected people, but the rest of the vaccines should be available for the rest of us within weeks, though it will obviously take months for the population to be vaccinated.

     As soon as any of the vaccines start being used in the country, I think that will signal one of the most dangerous times in the pandemic, as people take from the application of a vaccine very different messages.

     From what I understand the vaccine will be delivered in two shots some time apart and, when an individual has been vaccinated they will be expected to continue the mask wearing, hand washing and physical distancing that they should have been observing up to the point of their vaccination.  This is going to be a hard ask when people are looking forward to the “freedom” that a vaccination is supposed to give.

     Even after the second shot, defences should not be lowered.  I wish the publicity campaigns that will be flooding our media outlets the best of luck, because they are going to need it.

     Why are we making an exception for the Christian festival of Christmas when we signally did not for festivals of other religions?  The relaxation of the rules for the Christmas period is a political decision and one that will cost lives.  That, together with the woeful approach of Johnson and his no-talent cabinet to tackling the pandemic lends further weight to my insistence that Johnson and co are charged with corporate manslaughter.  The blustering incompetent cannot put off the inquiry for ever, and when it starts taking evidence and delivers its report, then is the time for criminal prosecution to take place.

     In my adolescence, it took “thirteen years of Tory misrule” to show the corrupt, unfeeling incompetence of Conservative contempt for the ruled: it has taken Johnson far less than eighteen months to produce a ‘government’ mired in cronyism, corruption, arrogance, incompetence, dogmatic blindness, viciousness, petty mindedness and mendacity.  I am ashamed that my country is led by such a witless pack – and they should not be allowed to get away with it.  For once in his worthless life, Johnson must face up to his responsibilities, and if he is ‘disinclined’ to do so he must be forced to.

     And when you consider that in little over a month, this bunch of feckless liars are going to take us into the unicorn-filled lands of plenty of Brexit, the only realistic reaction is to weep!

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, my research about the war service of my grandfather progresses slowly.  I have discovered that he was a member of the Royal Field Artillery, in C Battery in the 173^rd Brigade.  What is more difficult is finding out exactly where he would have fought.  My grandfather did not have an easy war and was in some of the most bloody of the conflicts in France and Flanders.  I will persevere and find locations to add to the records that I have at the moment.

     As well as the horrors of being a combatant in The First World War, my grandfather also had to cope with the pandemic too, the Spanish Flu outbreak, which he survived.  We may have a rough year in 2020, but he had a succession of horrors for year after year!  We should be grateful!

 

Having now thoroughly depressed myself, I will turn to Netflix for some mindless amelioration!