Different perspectives?

 

 

I remember when I was having a picture window in my house in Cardiff replaced, that I was shocked by the difference in clarity and light through the empty space as opposed to the glazed space.  

     I don’t think that I had realized that the glass in a window makes an appreciable difference to the amount of light getting through, in spite of the fact that windows do open and so you would have thought that the difference would have been plain through extensive experience.  But apparently not.  Because window glass is transparent, the assumption is that all the light gets through – and when you find out that the assumption is false, it knocks your world a bit!

     I am constantly surprised by the fact that little things can change your world – or at least your perception of it, and sometimes, quite literally your view of it.

     I should imagine that I was not alone in having problems with pines.  To be specific those that grew at the bottom of my garden and, while effectively blocking out the unlovely sight of the house that occupied the plot, it also destroyed any view that I could have had from any part of the house.  As my house was built on the side of a fairly gentle valley, I could, in theory have had a panoramic view of the distant city centre of Cardiff from at least one bedroom and the bathroom.  The neighbour’s pines closed off such a possibility.

     And they grew and grew.  As pines will.  A few desultory attempts at ‘legal’ pruning of stray branches that impinged on my property did little to lessen the density of the growth.  And I simmered in (shaded) misery for years.  And then the neighbour cut them.

     The difference was immediate and liberating as light (and sights) were available again.

     Something of the same situation occurred yesterday.

     Along part of the border fence between my house and the neighbours there grew a tree.  At least I have always taken it for a tree, with rather attractive blossom in the season – but I think that it was really an overgrown plant.  If there is such a difference.  It certainly had tree height and in spite of furious pruning along the vertical line of the fence on my side, no amount of rough tearing of branches seemed to affect the health of this vigorous weed.

     New neighbours and new visions of how the garden should look have brought the once mighty tree (or whatever it is) to a series of nicely short stumps.  As you can tell from the picture above, not one of the trunks looks capable of being called a tree trunk, and yet it was 30 ft tall at least.  And now it’s gone.

     And suddenly we have an unobstructed view of the communal pool.  Admittedly, at this time of year there are only yellowing leaves floating in it rather than bronzed bodies, and the only thing that raises ripples on the surface is the wind, but still, an unobstructed view!

     And with the lack of the mass of vegetation there is also, now, a small gap in the trees of the houses in front of us, which give a view of the sea.  Small, it may be, and you might have to be sitting in a particular position, but it is undeniably a fragment of the Med and you can make out real waves thereupon!

      The removal of the tree, which was ornamental if obstructive, is like giving us an extra breathing space, making our view so much more expansive.  All we need now is the weather to enjoy it!

 

 

The use of the Covid passports or certificates in bars, restaurants, gyms etc is a little haphazard at the moment, with the people who have to check not being entirely comfortable with the software that authenticates the digital information.  I assume that these are teething problems and that soon the system will be up and running and people will, by and large, accept it as something which is reasonable giving the growth of the Omicron variety across the world.

     As I understand it, the information about your certificate is loaded into a database of the place in which you are visiting, and you do not have to show it multiple times for each visit.  So, for example, my daily swim, does not require me to represent the information as it is stored.  Allegedly.

     I will be interested to see how diligent bar staff and waiters are as the Christmas season develops, and how much ‘waving through’ there will be.  I remain sceptical about the dedication of people who have, in effect, been co-opted by the government to become unpaid civil servants fulfilling a civic dictat!

 

 

As of today, all our Christmas Plans (or the lack of them) are still in place, and the Christmas Meal in a restaurant is still go.

     What is of interest, is what happens on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day.  Concrete plans for those two days are not, as yet, forthcoming.

     And we have bought no Christmas presents.  Yet.  Sigh!

     Roll on chaos!

Happy Christmas?

 

 

Today marks the real institutionalisation of the pandemic.  I had to show my Covid Certificate or Passport to get into the swimming pool.

     There was the usual failure of the technology when it turned out that the image of my scrambled digital thingy on my mobile phone (you can tell that I have forgotten what they are called) was too small to be read by the mobile phone app that was being used to check entry.  For some reason the phone did not allow me to expand the image to make things easier for the desk staff, but eventually I was allowed in.

     Last night on the television there was a piece on the long lines of people in the centre of Barcelona who had just realized that their access to bars, restaurants and gyms was going to be ended if they could not produce a valid covid certificate, and so they were desperately queuing to get their jabs.  I suppose that one should think, “Better late than never”, but one can’t quite rid oneself of the bone deep irritation that one feels when thinking about the sheer inconsideration of people who can’t give a hoot for the general good until it impacts on them directly.

     In the armed forces, I remember reading from years ago (and had it confirmed by my Dad) if you suffered from sun burn, it was considered an offence as the ‘injury’ was ‘self-inflicted’.  I feel very much the same from those people now clogging up precious hospital beds, where the vast majority of Covid patients in ICUs are unvaccinated!

     I don’t remember the same degree of vaccine avoidance about other fatal diseases and feel that the political edge given to Covid vaccine reluctance is one left over from the disastrous ‘presidency’ of Trump. 

     His macho idiocy and cavalier attitude towards disease prevention is directly responsible for deaths.  For anyone else you would ask yourself how the hell he manages to sleep at night knowing the damage he has done to families and to institutions – but with such a sociopathic narcissist like himself, where he is the centre of his own sick universe, he is able to redefine responsibility and ignore so-called collateral damage.

     In Catalonia, I take the requirement to show that you are vaccinated to be a clear sign that our government is taking things seriously. 

     Yes, there are contradictions contained in what we understand to be the new rules for socialising and, as things stand at the moment, I will be able to go to my next opera in the Liceu with almost full capacity.  I assume that we will be asked to show a Covid certificate for entry there too, but I have yet to be informed by the House, and the performance is only a week or so away.

     I do understand that, as a retired person, I can afford to take a fairly purist attitude towards restrictions: I do not have to commute, my financial wellbeing is not connected (directly) to the health of any one firm or place of work in the UK, I can afford to be complacent, in so far as my pension is from the government and not from any public company.  Yes, the ability of governments to pay their pensioners is directly dependent on the wealth of the country providing them, and the restrictions on people being able to work has lessened the tax money that the government can spend, but we are still protected in a more direct way than a self-employed actor, or waiter, or salesperson.

     Christmas is the time when some industries make a chunk of their earnings: the Panto season in theatres is essential to the health of the theatre for the coming year; restaurants look to party bookings during this period as a guaranteed source of income to see them through the leaner times in the year.  All computation about what will and will not happen financially has been thrown into disarray by the pandemic.  Nothing is certain.  Rules change on a weekly basis.  Long term confidence is something of a dream.

     Those lucky enough to be on a combination of full, state, and professional pensions are assured of a fixed payment each month.  For the majority of the working population the pandemic has shown how privileged this financial state is as what previously had been thought to be guaranteed proved itself to be not as firmly grounded as hoped.

     I do understand that keeping the economy going is of essential importance, pensions are, after all, paid by the contributions of those still working – but there is also the question of the health and safety of the nation to be taken into consideration too.

     In the UK at the moment, there are wildly differing approaches depending on who you listen to in Government about what you can consider doing this Christmas.  John Crace (the Guardian Political Sketch Writer, and well worth reading) is fond of using the image of Schrodinger’s Cat to illustrate some of the contradictory attitude of government.  Johnson seems to have abdicated responsibility for giving clear advice about what to do this Christmas apart from saying that Christmas Parties should not be cancelled, but he still harps on about personal responsibility where what he is doing is off-loading the burden of accountability on to some sort of mythical inner logician that we all have inside us, that will allow him to claim that any increase in deaths because of faulty precautions taken will be the responsibility of those who die and not the person who has the title of Prime Minister and who should be leading us.

     The corruption, lies, deaths, incompetence, bullying, hypocrisy, and cowardice of this twelve-year-old government makes the “Thirteen years of Tory misrule” proclaimed by Wilson in 1964 look positively prim by comparison!

     Here in Catalonia, we have a government where the equivalent of the Conservatives has little power, but there is a limit to what can be done when the parties we do have are squabbling amongst themselves and hardly living up to the names of the political sections they are supposed to represent.

     Politics seems to be becoming murkier by the month and adds nothing to the confidence with which we can look forward to Christmas and the next year.

     I fear that the imposition of Covid passports is just a step in the process of softening us up to accept far more stringent restrictions when the full import of the growth of the Omicron variant is clear.

     “Happy Christmas” is a fond hope, not a greeting.