Real reality?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liz Cheney is a hard-right, anti-abortion rights, climate change denier, who supported disgraced Presidential failure Trump over 90% of the time in voting, but . . .

     And at that point I shudder to a halt, thinking to myself that surely I cannot be about to make some sort of concession to a person whose entire set of political beliefs are anathema to me?  Surely that ‘but’ can only be a prelude to something like the apologists’ addendum to the characters of murdering dictators like, “he was good with children” or “he liked dogs” (and I make no excuses for the inclusion of the masculine pronoun as Lucretia Borgias are few and far between) Why would I bother to find an extenuating circumstance for me to express even a modicum of fellow feeling with a political monster?  But (!) we do share a common loathing: a detestation of the Traitor Trump.

     Anyway, back to ultra-right-wing Liz.  She has just lost her Republican nomination to retain her Congressional seat for the witlessly red state of Wyoming, where she has lost out to a Trump supported piece of political slime that believes (Does she? Really?) the Big Lie of electoral fraud in the last presidential election.  Cheney has been an “outspoken critic” (the phrase has been used enough to become a recognized tag for the woman herself) of the Trump Monster and has been especially effective in her membership of the committee looking into the traitorous armed insurrection and invasion of the Capitol.  And it has cost her. 

     No matter in her concession speech that she raised the political career of the Republican (“Who knew?” - Trump) President Lincoln whose way to the White House was anything but easy as a way of threatening a presidential (?) come back, she lost the Republican nomination in a state where her family is political royalty and where the democrats haven’t a hope in hell (or “Trump in 2024” as that demonic morass is known) of taking power- the last time they had the vote was almost half a century ago!

     Trump (or his supporters version of him) is living proof that the bigger the lie the more you can be believed as long as you are all-in to the palpable untruth.  Conway’s “alternative facts” are now the living truth, and reality is a pale imitation, easy to dismiss.

     We live in a world where IDS, Rees-Mogg, Davies, Lord (!) Snow, and other assorted freaks are not only taken seriously but are actually allowed near the levers of government.  Such trash rules and limits our lives.

     The equivalent of the American ‘Big Election Lie’ in Britain is of course Brexit.  To hear the proven liar Truss say that she was fundamentally “undecided” when she was an enthusiastic Remainer, and was terribly concerned about the future disruption from Brexit, but, “as it didn’t happen” (sic.) she has changed her mind.  This is ignoring the facts and reality worthy of Trump.  Just like the shallow Conservative MP for Dover who denied the long, long lines of vehicles waiting to enter Europe had anything to do with the changing of rules because of Brexit, the concept of Brexit being magic-unicorn-positive has become an article of faith for this generation of Conservatives, completely divorced from the various crises that Brexit has precipitated and exacerbated.

     So what role does what one might call ‘real’ politics – a politics that is motivated by coherent ideology that is based on statistics and a concern for the whole of society?

     Both Spain and Britain are glaringly unequal societies where the disparity between those who have the most and those who have the least is the most pronounced. 

     The powerful elite are protected by supine governments and a corrupt press.  People are used to a certain standard of living.  If I think back to my childhood in the 1950s then you can list the things that we did not have that would be regarded as part of normal life now, and the absence of those things would rightly regarded as some sort of poverty: television, telephone, automatic washing machine, microwave, fridge, freezer, the list goes on – most young people (and we older ones too) would go mad if they had to go back and live in the 1950s.  For me, simply the allowing of smoking anywhere and everywhere would be truly nauseating: on busses, trains, trolley busses (a happy Cardiff memory!) cinemas, restaurants, shops, and pubs, everywhere!

     People expect to be able to watch stuff on their televisions, to use the Internet and to use their mobile phones, to live a life surrounded by the electrical impedimenta of every day life.  This winter, unless something radical is done, people are going to experience the most dramatic diminution in their spending power for well over a generation.  They will not be happy – especially as they see the richest and most well protected in society being insulated from the hardships that they will experience.

     In 1848 (The Year of Revolutions) the one major country in Europe that did not have a revolution was Britain.  It has been argued that the ruling class made enough concessions to keep things just about from bubbling over and managed to retain their wealth while letting the vast majority of those who had been exploited to think that the concessions they had gained was enough, something they could live with.

     We are now getting to the stage where the cry of “Eat the rich!” is moving from fantasy to reality – the sort of reality where things actually happen.  When lies are tested by hunger and death, the bloody truth must prevail!

Liquid musing

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pool water has returned to its crystalline clarity in our local pool, but one does wonder just what “product” we have been swimming in that has been used to banish yesterday’s murkiness.  But that way madness lies, and life is too short etc etc to worry (overmuch) about such things.

     In a sign of technological spitefulness because of my forced missed swim yesterday, my smartwatch refused to record accurately my latest swim, only giving about half the meters of each length, but my internal length counter guided me to a satisfactory completion where, in spite of the evidence of the resentful watch, I think that I more than exceeded my usual lengths.

     The local pool is one of the only places in Castelldefels that can supply me with a decent cup of tea (a mixture of Earl Grey and English Breakfast) which is my reward for completing my swim.  Today, they had run out! 

     I had been prepared for this awful eventuality and took an orange juice as an alternative, but an orange juice topped up with ice cold Cava.  I have now entered that select grouping of ageing men who have alcohol first thing in the morning!  Well, not really, the orange juice was the major partner in the drink and freshly pressed too, so the Cava was more of jeu d’esprit than anything else.  Though one I could easily get used to!

    

 

I am beginning to understand that the cost of living I going to be a major problem.  Even casual shops are now costing over 100 euros.  I can still recall my parents have a serious discussion about finance after the weekly shop had exceeded five quid for the first time!  That truly was another age.

     It is difficult to think about winter when all available fans are on full strength to make the heat bearable, but with the rising cost of electricity and gas, coupled with the rise in general prices means that our minds are going to be concentrated.  Given the situations in our respective countries, I feel more secure in my adopted home of Catalonia than I would in the Conservative ridden dystopia that Britain has become.  Let us see how the future works out!

Frustration and release

 

 

 

Most days I get up at 6.15 am to get ready for my morning swim at 7 am in the local pool.  As it is August, I have the luxury of a lie in until 7.15 am as the pool opens at 8 am for that month.

     I would like to say that I feel a sense of smug satisfaction for rising so early and taking physical exercise before many people have stirred from their beds - and I suppose I do.  But, the thing is that I find it difficult to stay in bed after my accustomed rising time.  When I was working I went for a swim before work started and I have sort of continued that regime.  If truth be told, I do not really ‘lie in’ with any degree of sincerity.  At the time that I need to get up, I get up and if I try and stay in bed I feel uncomfortable.  So, my soft, musical alarm on my mobile phone goes off and I get up.

     This morning, my arrival at the pool was greeted by what appeared to be a small meeting at the gate.  It turned out that the increasing murkiness of the water in the pool over the last couple of days had prompted the technical services to Do Something and thus “product” had been added to the water, but for the “product” to work, we swimmers had to be excluded.

     The helpful message from management that the pool was closed was sent to members of the leisure centre via email at 10.10 am today, that is some two hours after we arrived to start our swim.  Sigh!

     I made the best of a bad job and decided to go for an extended bike ride from the pool to Port Ginesta, so that I could tell myself that I had kept up my morning exercise.

     Admittedly the effort of cycling those kilometres was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I have an electric bike and I make full (full!) use of its electric capabilities, but it is still exercise under the meaning of the act and as such it is duly recorded by my Smartwatch and adds to my daily PAI rating (whatever that is) – one of those acronyms linked to health and exercise that, in spite of its meaning being ambiguous (or even unknown) is something I take semi-seriously and try and maintain a rating of 100 or as near as I can get.  Because, yes.

     Not only did I go all the way to the beach in Port Ginesta, but I also went as far as the Gavà bike lane could take me in the opposite direction, which amounts to a total of 17.85 km which, even on an electric bike (for me) is quite a lot.

     Not that the electric bike is my only form of ‘personal’ transport.  The electric scooter was taken out of the boot of the car AGAIN yesterday and I used it to get to our favourite ice cream shop as a jaunt to get out of the house.

     I am not a natural bike rider, but I am semi-professional compared with my shaky progress on the scooter.  On the scooter, like a highly-strung thoroughbred horse, I am spooked by: anything other than a completely level surface, traffic, people, turns, crossings, pavements, other scooter users, hills, slopes and the state of the world.  I do not, I have to admit, exude confidence when I am a-wheel, but it is the only way that I can match Toni’s walking without having to pay the price in pain for days afterwards!

     So far, my two trips on the scooter means that I have paid 150 euros per trip, given the total cost of the purchase.  A sobering thought.

 

 

The weather is a little cooler, I think, but that doesn’t make me particularly happy.  Yes, the sort of heat that we have been experiencing has been of a different quality than in previous years, but I’d still prefer that to the cold of winter – that any diminution of heat now makes me far is almost upon us!  But that is only may paranoia speaking.  I hope.

Heat and Hatred

 

 

 

It actually had the temerity to rain a few drops when I was in the swimming pool, though the weather now is not marked different from the last few days when it has been hot in a way that is not usual for this time of year.  August is traditionally a time of vague disappointment, when the weather is more variable than one remembers from previous years, ironically, even though one expects to be dissatisfied: Schrodinger’s expectations!

     At the moment we only have two fans working in the living room (out of a possible three) as a desperate attempt to mitigate the heat and since we don’t have air conditioning there is little else that we can do to make the living temperature well, liveable.

     There is something about the quality of heat this year that hasn’t been present in past years and if this is a harbinger of what we can expect as the norm for the summer in future years then we are going to have to do something different to cope with the temperatures.

     In a country that has hot and very hot summers and generally mildish winters, there is no talk of hosepipe bans and, in spite of the hot weather continuing for months, there is not talk of proclaiming a drought.  Whereas in the UK, the situation seems to have reached a crisis point.  Again.

     Trump sneered that the FBI raid on his Floridian swamp was turning the USA in to one of the “shitehole” “third world countries” that he has so often dismissed with contempt in the past as a condescending image to cover his own criminality and the eventual, glacial, movement of the institutions of justice finally catching up with him.  His images, as always, are absurd and insulting, but when I look at the situation of the UK then there appears to be an element of truth in the first world status slowly ebbing away.

     With twelve years of Tory misrule and the callous cutting of health, welfare, education and everything else the grasping Conservatives can get their dirty mitts on, the stories that one hears are more suited to a developing country than one of the richest in the world.

     The position of health services in the USA has always been something that has been beyond the comprehension of Western European nations, who generally do not regard providing health care for their citizens as being akin to rabid Communism.  Many Americans are frightened of ill health because of the financial penalties that treatment will entail.  The concept of healthcare free at the point of need is something far beyond the imagination of many American voters who see such a process as rampant Socialism and a denial of the American Way.

     In the UK, the NHS is something in which we can take a justified pride, but a Health Service that has been hollowed out by 12 years of cuts and austerity and one that has been put under almost intolerable strain by dealing with Covid is struggling to cope and, after the last 12 years of Tory Misrule who could possibly believe that the “NHS is safe in our (Tory) hands”?  Such a quotation from a past (and well hated Tory premier) seems like a sick joke.  Private healthcare is rejoicing in the boost that 12 years of Tory Misrule have given them – as well, of course as the illegal boost to their funds by the corruption of the crooked Tory crony profiteers who milked us in the procurement process geared towards Conservative chums.

     The provision of NHS dental care is a disgrace with whole swathes of the country described as “dental deserts” where 80% of dentists are no longer taking any new patients.  The stories of people travelling for hours to get to any NHS provider, is one of shame.

     Someone once told me that the worth of a country is found in the way that it treats the disadvantaged, the criminal and the sick.  If we use those criteria to judge the present state of Britain then perhaps we are nearer to a third world (in itself that is a condescending term) country than one that uses its wealthy status to ensure that there is provision for all.

     Inequality is rampant in Britain, crystalized by the grotesquery of a chancer like Johnson being (still) Prime Minister, and is unlikely to be mitigated by the lying equivocator lined up to take over, the woman who John Crace in the Guardian characterised as having grown up in “grinding middle class poverty” with her professor father and her sinkhole school only just managing to squeek her into Oxford.

     Nothing that either of the “candidates” have said to the Neanderthals that are going to elect one or other of them, show a concern for the realities of the situation that the majority of the country is experiencing and is indeed dreading in the near wintery future.  They are mired in the reality that allows such creatures as Rees-Mogg to be in government.  They, like the Republican Party in the USA are now far to the right of the general electorate, but Conservative parties are adroit in the manipulation of the processes of power, in pushing institutions to their will, of gerrymandering and obfuscating in plain sight, while their tools in the right wing press present a twisted version of reality to maintain power and wealth in the hands of the very, very, few.

 

New skills?

 

The electric scooter has been used as it was intended to be used: a way to get me from A to B without having to walk too much.  Result!

     I cannot pretend that I am the most confident user of this mode of transport, but I am a user.  And that surely is a start.  Maybe a shaky start, but start nevertheless.

     My unsteady progress is mocked by the number of teenagers (and there are many) who ride the damn things as thought they were born on them.  I am going to rely on the expectation that continued use will banish my rank amateurism. Possibly.  I live, as always, in hope.

 

The water in our local pool this morning was murky.  It crossed my mind that I had not idea how to translate that into Spanish.  I thought that perhaps ‘oscuro’ might work, but I wasn’t convinced.  I bowed to the inevitable and opened the Google translate on my phone and saw their suggestion, and immediately recognized that I should have known the word.

     There is a sort of Galician wine that, before you serve it, you turn the bottle upside down and tap the bottom.  The wine is called ‘turbio’ and is a reference to the fact that such a procedure mixed up the sediment in the wine and makes it murky.  It is not, as you might have expected an expensive wine, but in the days when I used to drink more convincingly that I do at present I found it a refreshing and inexpensive drink.  It was also a wine that used to disconcert the visiting British wine snobs who looked on askance at the barbaric pre-drink ritual.

 

I am ‘watching’ the opening game of Barça, the first game in the new La Liga season, though I would be hard pressed to say just when the season actually ended as the summer seems to have been filled with football.

     I have decided to make a stand against the obvious corruption of the World Cup being in Dubai.  The absurdity of having the World Cup in a location where the weather is obviously so disadvantageous to the safe playing of the game and where the rights of the foreign workers constructing the stadia and the hotels have been so flagrantly abused is enough to make the celebration of that corrupt state’s holding of a major world competition something to be ashamed of.

     I do not know how realistic a boycott of TV watching is going to be possible in a household where one half of the relationship is looking forward to an orgy of blanket football watching.  I think there has to be a finite limit to the number of times one can flounce out of the living room with one’s moral integrity intact.

     There is also the very real possibility that I might find myself being drawn into the jingoistic fever of supporting the Home Nations that are in the competition.  As Wales has made it to the World Cup for the first time in almost living memory I do feel duty bound to show at least some support, so I am qualifying my disgust well before the kick off, and I am confident that I will succumb to the saturation coverage.

Pushing the boundaries again!

 

 

 

The graph of the usefulness of my knees would look like the inside of a shark’s mouth as the pointed tips of relative pain-free mobility are swamped by the depths of gum deep shitiness.  A rather laboured simile to emphasise that the utility of my knees as working points of articulation in the furtherance of locomotion, is basically low.  I find that I am limiting the length of my walking more and more, and the little that I do is with the aid of a stick.

     Which leads to the question of what I am going to have to do about it.  The obvious solution is to get new kneecaps but, with the backlog of clinical cases given the underfunding of the health service and the horrific demands of Covid something being done in the immediate future seems remote.

     When I finally went to the doctor after the periods of lockdown that we suffered, I was greeted by his saying that the x-rays that he had looked at giving a graphic picture of the state of my knees were among the worst that he had seen.  Nice to see you again too!

     Various (legal!) subterfuges were used to get me on to some sort of list to be seen and I was eventually told that my first visit to a traumatologist would be almost a year in the future!

     To cut a long story short, that “year” is now almost up, and in October I will have my first face-to-face meeting with someone who has the power to do something radical to reduce the pain and to make me fully (?) mobile again.

     Because the state of my knees is so variable, I have, over the last number of months resorted to crutches, sticks, pain killers and highly expensive off-the-shelf powders to bring some sort of relief.  In so far as I am no longer using crutches to move about, I would have to admit that I have made progress.  In so far as I am still in pain and can walk only limited distances, there is much further to go.  So to speak!

     Things were brought to some sort of head when we accompanied my cousin and friend to Sitges for a meal in a restaurant that is situated over the shallows of the sea.  And you can see real fish!

     Our usual parking place in Sitges is far too far for me to walk to get to the sea and so we decided to use the car park under an hotel on the sea front, thereby giving me a fairly flat walk to the restaurant.

     It took me the best part of a week to recover from the walking that I had to do – and the meal was ordinary, over-priced and badly served!  Something had to be done.

     The solution, of sorts involved buying something.  As I am never averse to spending money, especially on gadgets, I was all-in for Toni’s suggestion that the answer may be the purchase of an electric scooter.

     I am well aware that the average age of an electric scooter user is a mere 25% of mine – or less – but I am inured to expressions that look askance at me and what I am doing, so that the only question that arose in my mind was would I be able to balance on it.  And more pressingly, would it fit in the back of the car, as I had absolutely no intention of making it my prime mode of urban transport.

     A further energy depleting walk, and I was ready to buy.

     Although I am given (wholeheartedly) to the concept of the ‘impulse buy’ which my support of various good (and not so good) purchases from sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo can vividly demonstrate, I had to be somewhat circumspect about this purchase as it had to take account of my weight and height and also be something that was not dependent on being sent back to China in case something went wrong.

     Eventually, after yet another bad experience of overestimating how far I could walk, I bought one and awaited its arrival.

     It arrived (via Amazon) very quickly and it was waiting to be unboxed after I returned from my morning swim.

     The amount of construction involved in its formulation was minimal – four screws to keep the handlebars on the stem – but, without Toni it would have been, for me, insurmountable.  Three of the screws went in.  Eventually.  But one was stubborn and now matter how I (or indeed Toni) tried, it would not ‘go home’.

     Far from being downcast (as I was) Toni was jubilant, as this particular problem gave him the opportunity to try out something that he had bought because, “It would come in useful” – a screw thread re-doer.  The thread was re-done and it worked perfectly.

     The machine was charged up and all it then needed was for me to use it.

     At this point, I should point out that I did indeed own a mechanical scooter when I was a single digit child, but I had not tried one since that time.  Over sixty (60) years previously!

     It was therefore with some considerable trepidation that I ventured out onto the road and put foot to platen and pushed myself off.

     While I would not describe myself as a confident, or indeed competent, rider of the scooter, I did not fall off and I managed to return to the house after a trip of a couple of kilometres, with machine and myself undamaged.

     Result!

     The next thing to do is to try and fit it into the boot of the car and then to actually use the thing for the purpose for which it was bought.

     I am trepidatiously confident.

     Future blog entries should show whether such hope was justified or not!

Cartoon Politics?

 

 

 

 

For what now seems like the last twenty-something years of my life, a political organization, formerly known as The Conservative Party, has been putting on a mind-bendingly boring charade of Right Wing Cosplay to try and influence the miniscule audience of voters who will elect one of two cyphers who will replace the last lying narcissist to hold the role of Prime Minister, who in his turn replaced the previous vicious (yet vacuous) semi-alive failure in the role, who in her turn replaced the toff-boy coward who walked away (whistling) from his responsibilities.  So, the cyphers do not have to do a lot to fit right in with the bar of competence set at a Mariana Trench level of profundity.

     Truss, the ex-Remainer, ex-Lib Dem, and born-again Thatcher act and Unicorn Brexiteer is using the Johnson tried and trusted technique of blatant lying and blaming everything on everyone – apart from her semi-articulate self, while talking up increasingly far right policies (on the hoof) to try and get the old, white, knuckle-draggers of the Home Counties to vote for her.  She is risible and contemptible and is, let us remind ourselves, the favourite (sic.) to gain the keys to Number 10.

     Her perky, richer than Croesus, “I have no working class friends” opponent is also spewing nonsense, trying to balance (and failing) the need to appeal to a Conservative Membership that he must regard with little less than loathing, while attempting to voice policies that make at least some nod towards the fact that the UK is facing crises of an existential nature.

     Not, of course that you would get a sense of that by listening or reading about the various quasi-Surrealistic “hustings” of party members as they question these “candidates” who have to try and pretend that they are offering something new and exciting to combat the difficulties that they themselves have been creating for the last decade.

     The level of unreality is so palpable that I am sure that the majority of people trying to make sense of the “Noddy in Toyland” level of political acumen on display have truly forgotten that we have had a Conservative Government (I use the term in its loosest possible sense) since 2010.  Two thousand and bloody ten!  And they are acting as if Cameron, May, Johnson are all “resets” and therefore nothing can be blamed on the future Prime Minister, as they will have had nothing to do with previous administrations, apart from being slavishly voting MPs and actual Ministers in the actual government!

     As a Welshman, albeit living in Catalonia, I can take some comfort from the fact that the Conservatives do NOT have a majority in Wales and that we do not have the political dregs in power.  But the UK is governed from London and the monetary allocations are decided in Westminster and England has by far the largest population in the constituent countries of the UK so, although government is partially devolved, England is still calling the tunes – or rather the tiny percentage of the population that makes up the membership of the Conservative and Unionist Party is.

     So, as prices and inflation go up (and up!) and wages go down (unless you are in The City) we have weeks more of the farce that is the election of our next Prime Minister.  Embarrassments playing with props from the political Dressing Up Box, vividly illustrating just how far below the ludicrous our country has sunk.

     Perhaps the most depressing element in this whole charade of political game playing was summed by the Daily Mail who (seriously) averred that Johnson had bucked the trend of the political truism that, “All political careers end in failure.”  That is a rewriting of reality on a par with the everyday life of Trump, where there is an unlimited number of “alternative facts” to fit in with whatever deranged rearrangement of life unscrupulous right-wing demagogues demand the ever credulous to accept rather than believe the evidence of their own eyes.

     Another truism is, “This too will pass” – however good or bad things are, they will change.  Wars will end.  Things will resolve themselves.  But it doesn’t mean that things will be better when those “things” have “settled down”.  You can look at history through statistics, but statistics are human stories and have human consequences.  The removal of the twenty-five-pound uplift to Universal Credit is a story of human misery and political viciousness.  Real people suffered; it is not just an “economic detail.”

 

This is a bitter way to start again to add to my neglected blog, perhaps tomorrow I will be mellower and allow myself the luxury of hope!