Truth is what you think you can get away with

When in doubt lie.

While this is not really a commendable philosophy, it does appear to be the only one available to the government of Spain as they attempt to deal with the totally negative fallout from the vicious repression of peaceful voters by the Spanish national police.  Voters were kicked, punched, baton whipped, dragged by the hair, jumped on, fired at with rubber bullets, charged into by riot police in full body armour armed and with riot shields. Or not, according to the people who ordered the police into the field

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At the end of the voting period for the referendum there were almost 900 voters who had been injured.  Members of the public, unarmed, trying peaceably to do something that, for the last 40 years in Spain had been considered a right since the end of the dictatorship: casting a free vote without state intimidation.

Well Monday showed that the youthful democracy of Spain was only paper thin and vulnerable to a government which, through complacency and political ineptitude decided to use force rather than negotiation and fairness to resolve problems.

We have been told by our reticent President that his government has the monopoly of ‘democracy’, ‘legitimacy’ ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’ words which are tarnished when they are uttered by the corrupt members of a minority right wing government that has told us that the brutality of the Spanish National police was ‘proportionate’ and ‘serene’.

The violence of the National Police has been explained away by various PP politicians who have also rubbished the reported numbers of voters injured.  They have dismissed the fact of over two million Catalans voting as a ‘farce’ and asserted that PP are the protectors of democracy in Spain.

This evening we had an address to the nation by the king who, until today, has kept a very low profile in the controversy over the referendum.  Among the platitudes that one would expect at a time of national crisis there was a clear indication to the disobedient people of Catalonia that he was dedicated to a united Spain and one that was not going to tolerate any sort of separation

Interestingly people have started to comment more closely on the painting, a fraction of which was visible behind the king as he gave his talk.  It turns out that this is a portrait of Carlos III – not the famous one by Goya where he is pictured with a gun and his recumbent dog, but an altogether more militaristic one with the king in armour holding a baton not unlike the ones used by the Guardia Civil to attack voters in the referendum.  It is also significant that, apart from the one truly well-known fact about the reign of Carlos III that he instituted the National Lottery, he is known for his suppression of the Catalan language in favour of Spanish.

The present king did not choose this portrait specially as a background for the broadcast, it is one that he chose some time ago to hang on the wall behind his desk in his royal office.  What is interesting is that given the sensitivity of the present situation in Catalonia with international condemnation of violence from the Spanish national police and an immanent proclamation of unilateral independence that the king should choose to have this painting as an almost subliminal subtext to his talk.  Or not, of course.

Today, Tuesday, a General Strike was called to protest about the violence shown to voters by the Spanish national police.  Throughout Catalonia there have been demonstrations in all parts of the country.  Here in Castelldefels there was a demonstration in front of the city hall.  We were there being counted!

The political situation seems intractable with both sides firmly entrenched and disinclined to give an inch.

The Catalan government said, before the referendum, that if there were to be a majority in favour of independence then a declaration of independence would be made within 48 hours of the result, irrespective of the numbers taking part in the ballot.  90% of those who voted, voted for an Independent Republic of Catalonia.  48 hours will be up at 8.00 pm on Wednesday – or perhaps a few hours later if you take the time of the last results to comes through.

This is an exciting and uncertain time to be living in Catalonia.

Spanish shame!

So, as we wake up to another brightly dull day where rain is threatening even if it is not actually falling, what have we achieved in Catalonia after the referendum?

Most importantly, a clear indication of the signal failure of Rajoy and his authoritarian government.  They pledged to stop the referendum and it took place.  They used every trick in the book short of sending in the army and it failed to stop 42% of the electorate turning out for what Rajoy called an “illegal” vote.  Given the obstacles put in the way of voting, the fact that over two million people in Catalonia turned out to vote is a triumph of the people over an uncaring repressive central authority.

The actions of the Spanish National Police that have left at least 844 people injured, two seriously, will haunt the popular imagination for years to come.  When you see pictures of armoured baton-wielding policemen laying into young and old alike; women being pulled by the hair along the streets; people thrown down stairs; voters being kicked and thumped, the adjectives to describe such scenes that come to mind are not those used by our ridiculous President of “firmness and serenity”.

Rajoy must resign at once. 

He won’t of course because he and his corrupt party feel themselves to be above the law and indeed they create their own reality.  Rajoy spoke to the nation and explained that, “there had been no referendum today”.  Rajoy is a master of Political Photoshop where uncomfortable reality can be rejigged through his own weasel words into something more in keeping with his distorted world view.

I have just been informed that an older man who had heart failure in the disturbances caused by the Spanish National Police has now died.  While he was being given resuscitation the voters who had formed a protective ring around those giving assistance were attacked by an armoured police officer who smashed his way into the cordon and people fell on the injured man.  All of this was captured on film and it joins a series of unacceptable views of violence.  Perhaps more significantly, I can find nothing on television to suggest that this story (found on Twitter) is actually correct.  The violence towards the man has been captured on film and I have seen it, but the death is perhaps one of those rumours that we are going to have to get used to during the next few days and weeks as what is a volatile political situation feeds on the truth and half truth that has the potential to rip Spain apart.

If you have not seen what violence Rajoy and his PP government encouraged against peaceful voters then check the link below, and then write to your MP demanding that they condemn the behaviour of a WESTERN EUROPEAN NATION, a member of the EU and UNO, against its own citizens!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2017/oct/01/catalan-referendum-hundreds-injured-as-police-attack-protesters-video?CMP=share_btn_link

The Republic of Catalonia?

The rain is falling straight in the breezeless air.  The blue terrace tiles gleam with damp reflected depth.  I can hear the gentle wash of the sea and the occasional car.  The sky, as always, seems to have that particular bright dullness that I have come to expect on rainy days in Catalonia, always offering the promise of a glimpse of the sun some time later in the day.

It may just be me and my over romanticised sensitivity to the ‘significance’ of today, but the rain and the broken silence seem like examples of the pathetic fallacy as the depressing weather reflects the division and tension in what is a day of possible futures in Catalonia today.

Today is the referendum on Catalan Independence, where we have been asked to make a simple choice between the status quo and the proclamation of an Independent Catalan Republic.

The right wing minority government of PP with their leader Mariano Rajoy have been spectacularly inept in their handing of Catalonia, and today has provided yet another vibrant example of their idiocy.

When the President of Spain was forced to come to court a couple of months ago and give evidence in a wide ranging corruption trial he defended himself by saying that he was responsible for the ‘political’ direction of the party and not the financial side of the organization.  Leaving aside the unlikeliness of such a position for a moment, let’s concentrate on what he said he was responsible for: politics.

The one thing lacking throughout the lead up to the calls for a referendum and its implementation was political imagination.  PPs response to anything Catalan is always ‘No!’ 

You could take the dissatisfaction with Catalonia’s position in relation to the nation of Spain all the way back to 1714 and the Treaty of Utrecht when Catalonia supported (with British encouragement) the ‘wrong’ side in the War of the Spanish Succession when the preferred Catalan and British choice of the Hapsburg claimant was defeated by the Bourbon.  The defeat of the Catalan’s choice of monarch led to loss of status, land and independence. 

But the Catalans are a resourceful people and the loss of grain growing lands on the other side of the Pyrenees forced them to reconsider their mercantile basis and they developed the cloth trade, remnants of which you can still see in the corrugated roofs of obsolete factories in cities like Terrassa.

The Civil War in the 1930s changed everything and, while Catalonia fought hard and long for Republican ideals it was eventually defeated by Franco’s fascist forces aided and abetted by the axis powers of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

To the eternal shame of the Allied Powers, at the end of the Second World War Franco was allowed to stay in power as a perceived buttress against Communism and he lived on until the 1970s when he finally died and handed over the state to his preferred heir, the restored king.

Democracy and a new Constitution followed and the country started the transition from Fascism to Democracy.

We have now had some 40 years of democracy and the faults in the Constitution are beginning to show. 

Justice in Spain is political.  The separation between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial is, to put it mildly, hazy.  Too many judges are political appointees and those institutions that should be independent such as Constitutional and Supreme Courts are seen merely as an extension of the ruling party’s demesne rather than defenders of individual citizens rights.

Catalonia’s attempts to gain a more favourable arrangement with the central government centres on the Statute of Autonomy that was reformed in 2006, endorsed by the Catalans in a referendum and then rejected as ‘unconstitutional’.  This rejection has exacerbated Catalonia’s feelings of injustice and increased support for independence.  Massive demonstrations in Barcelona have left the central minority government of PP unmoved and they have contented themselves with a steady rejection of anything meaningful that the Catalan government has offered as a basis for negotiation.

For PP and their lackeys in the right-wing Cs party, any discussion about a referendum leading to independence was a no-go area.

In spite of clear indications that the movement towards a separate republic of Catalonia was growing, the central government showed itself to be flat-footed, unimaginative, arrogant and profoundly un-political.

PPs solution to the calling of the referendum was to declare that it would be illegal.  They prompted their friends in the other branches of government to pronounce on the illegality and unconstitutionality and then they sat back and proclaimed that the referendum would not take place.

Their complacency, arrogance and unreality merely provided fuel for the movement to free Catalonia from Spain.

I still maintain that this could have been prevented.  A few elections ago, the parliamentary majority of PP was wiped out.  PSOE (the rough equivalent of The Labour Party) and Podemos (a new left wing party) could have formed a government.  Neither of these parties was in favour of a break up of Spain, though Podemos conceded that allowing Catalonia a referendum was reasonable.

In a ‘what if’ situation, the two parties (with a little help from odds and ends of the left in parliament) could have granted a referendum some years in the future and then worked to make the Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia more like that for the Basque Country.  It could then have been put to the Catalan people. 

It has been estimated that around 48% of the voters in Catalonia support independence with 50% against.  Almost 80% of Catalans wanted a binding vote on independence.  I maintain that, given the number of ‘Spanish’ people living and working in Catalonia, together with the large ex-patriot community, it probably would have been possible to present a re-worked relationship to the electorate and manage to get a convincing majority to stay with Spain.

That agreement between the parties did not happen.  The statistics refer to the past.  The actions of PP and the contempt that they have shown to Catalonia mean that the situation now is very different.

The right wing parties of PP and Cs, together with the ‘Labour’ party of PSOE all urged their followers to take no part in the referendum.  They all proclaimed the referendum as illegal and undemocratic.  All the opposition has played into the hands of the independence movement.  I myself (though I have no vote in this national election) have moved from being supportive of a united Spain to moving to a clear preference for the formation of the Independent Republic of Catalonia.

In the lead up to today and the referendum, the government of Rajoy and PP has gone to extraordinary lengths to stop the vote.

They have arrested members of the Catalan government.  They have drafted in thousands of Spanish National Police to Catalonia.  They have raided print works and confiscated ballot papers.  They have searched factories to discover the production points for ballot boxes.  They have closed down web sites.  They have threatened mayors who have indicated that they will hold the referendum.  They have locked schools where voting booths were to be set up.  They have waged a war of disinformation.  They have taken ballot boxes.  They have threatened and blustered and lied. 

And they have failed.

Today I drove Toni to our local heath centre and there he voted and I am proud to say that I drew the cross in the box indicating that we are in favour of the founding of the new country of Catalonia, independent of Spain and a Republic.

We first went to vote at lunchtime, but the scenes outside the centre were crowded and chaotic.  There were police there, but they were doing no more than observing and, as in any election, available to sort out any trouble.  There was no intimidation.

We returned later in the afternoon.  Crowds of people were there and they filled all the floors of the medical centre.  We had to wait a little while for the hidden ballot boxes (they had been moved to prevent their being taken by the police) reappeared and voting was able to go ahead.

That was not the situation throughout Spain and any glance at the news will show you the sometimes horrific scenes that illustrate what appears to be the gratuitous violence of the Spanish National Police against unarmed people queuing to vote.  OAP baton whipped, punched, kicked.  Voters thrown downstairs.  Rubber bullets (illegal in Catalonia) used against voters.  And the government in Spain has said that the actions of the Spanish National Police have been ‘proportionate’.

The silence from the EU has been deafening about what appear to be attacks orchestrated by a government against its own people who are trying to vote.  I fully support those people and organizations who have started proceedings in the European Parlimant against the apparent violence of the Spanish National Police and the actions of the Spanish State.

As I type, the polling stations have been closed fro two hours.  Results from the smaller settlements in Catalonia are beginning to come in.  People appear to have voted by the million.  If that is the case, then the referendum has produced a result that can be taken further.  Given everything that has been done by the central government to block, hinder and stop this vote any total above a couple of million is a triumph.

Given the apparent violence of the National Police; the failure of the government to stop what they called an illegal referendum taking place; the complete inability of the President to lead his party and the government; the numbers of people who voted in Catalonia - the consequent actions should be:

1              Rajoy must resign.

2              A General Election must be called

3              Catalonia must proclaim its independence

These are very interesting times to be living in Spain and especially in Catalonia.  It is now time to see whether our political masters have the wits and intelligence to live up to a new set of exciting possibilities and remake a broken country.

Beach life

 

An exhaustingly lazy day.

It is not easy sitting on the beach and going in the sea for an occasional swim.   

For a start I have yet to find a truly suitably comfortable, portable beach chair.  I have a long spine and it is not slow in letting me know (the day after) that I have been sitting in the wrong position.  

 Secondly, the weather was a “reasonably sunny with a brisk wind that strips unsuspecting Brits to the bone as they tend not to get too hot because of the breeze and think its safe to go on sitting in the sun” sort of day.  And while the rest of me survive pretty well, the top of my hairless head now has that tingly tightness that does not bode well for skin retention.   

Thirdly, The Crow Road was a truly gripping read and therefore I spent more time in exactly the same position in the sun than I should have.

But, while a day later, I can tell that I have been in the sun, it did not stop me doing exactly the same thing today.  And at least I finished The Crow Road and, although radically different to The Wasp Factory (a book worth reading for its title alone) that I read in the 80s, it is another Iain Banks that will stay with me.  I understand that the novel was made into a television series that passed me by, but I can easily imagine it translating into television and, now that I have read the novel I would be interested to see how they coped with the fractured time frames.  I suppose they went to town on the Scottish location and I must admit that I would have liked to have accompanied the locations finder as an interested observer!

So, having finished the novel, I made some notes about the Visitors poetry sequence and I was generally dissatisfied with what I came up with.   

I think that the whole concept of a sequence is too restrictive and what I will do is merely write poems or notes for poems while the Visitors are with us.  I have mapped out a rough series of ideas for one poem about collecting sea glass and another about water on the beach - never let it be said that I didn’t try and tackle significant moral and ethical problems in my poetry!  I will see where these things lead!

Depressingly for my weight, we have had two substantial meals today.  One was in a restaurant that had slipped down the rankings last week but managed to regain its position with an exceptional meal today.  In a town that is filled with restaurants, we have a depressingly small number of regular culinary destinations.  I think that we suffer from the Teacher University Recommendation Problem, but related to restaurants.

Let me explain. 

Kids ask (or in my retired state “asked”) about which university they should apply to.  And we teachers would reply, usually citing our own universities as places of excellence for the subject that we actually studied and making hazy recommendations about what the other students in other departments looked like.  Our global university outlook was based on reading through prospectuses, long before the age of the internet and remembering from my experience the prospectus for Sheffield trying to assure potential students that that the city was actually far cleaner than they might have thought, and indeed proving it with a series of colourful maps and diagrams!  My detailed knowledge was from the late 60s in what is now a previous century and indeed millennium!  The undergraduate population changes entirely every three years.  Departments come and go.  Lectures do the same.  Buildings pop up and are pulled down.  Things change!  So whatever advice we were giving was based on ageing information about an institution that no longer existed in the way that we remembered it.

The life of restaurants in a busy seaside resort makes the undergraduate life look positively tortoise-like.  So our prejudices and memories are even more inappropriate for our eating choices than our recommendations were for future students! 

Doesn’t stop us of course, but then what does, we are humans after all!

Now for poems.

If you are interested in drafts of previous poetry that I have written then you can find examples at http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/ and I will attempt to post examples from Visitors - if I ever get round to making something of my notes!

The Use of the Ordinary

Although I swim every day, I have never pretended that swimming is anything other than boring.  It is now like brushing my teeth, it is something that is necessary and you do regularly, but is not exactly pleasurable.  If I don’t have a swim, in the same way when I (rarely) forget to brush my teeth before I go to bed, I feel that there is something missing, something is not right.

I set myself a metric mile each day and up and down I go for sixty lengths in my local pool and at the end of it I feel that I have accomplished something and like ‘Doing a good turn to somebody every day’ my duty is done.

So swimming in our community pool attached to our house raises another problem motivation.  As our community pool is quite small, the last few meters separated form the main pool by an underwater wall to create a ‘kiddies’ splash around area, the actual straight swimming length is limited.  If the pool is empty I compensate by swimming in circles, but it is not entirely satisfactory.

I have, therefore, devised an approach that combines exercise with the law of the Wolf Cub Pack and make a virtue of necessity and swim around picking up and discarding the rogue pine needles that settle on the surface of the water.

I have discovered that reflection or refraction or possibly both, mean that it is easier to see the floating needles from under the water with a pair of goggles than searching the surface from above.  I therefore must look like a swimmer motivated by Brownian Motion as I jitter my way through the water seeking the double refraction of the needles before they are swept out of the pool and to the side - where I am sure that a gentle breeze will waft them back into the water.  But that is not the point: I swim and feel that I am exercising while performing community service.

From time to time I come across insects that are vainly wing-swimming their way through the water to a chlorinated death.  When I do spy the odd wasp or beetle or fly in their death throws, with a positively Franciscan magnanimity, I scoop them out and deposit them on the pool side and drift away on my hoovering duties feeling quasi angelic and somehow ‘justified’!

Today, I have to admit, I haven’t been to the pool for a swim (for lunch, yes, but not for a swim) instead we went to the beach.  We live one street away from the sea, and yet we rarely go to the beach.  I see it every day because I usually cycle down the paseo and drive past it, but we have suddenly become aware that it is already August and we haven’t really ‘done’ the beach.  So two hours was spent beside the waves.

And waves there certainly were.  People usually assume that the Med is a quiet and domestic body of water - and to be fair, it usually is.  Sometimes, however it can be a little spirited.  Today, for example, a yellow flag was flying which indicates that swimming is not recommended.  That could be for a number of reasons, ranging from the quality of the water, through an infestation of stinging jellyfish to adverse water conditions.

Today the water was rough.  Even the profile of the beach has altered, which certainly indicates the waves and currents have been in a terraforming and sand-sculpting mode.

Castelldefels is a generally safe swimming spot because although currents can be strong, they usually drag you back to shore and along the beach.  And that was true today, with the added excitement of tumbling waves strong enough to knock you over.  Which they did.  And strong enough to remove Toni’s bathing costume - though that was in the shallows and he was able to restore decency in the masking obscurity of sand heavy water!

Most of my time was taken up, not with swimming in the sea, but reading on the beach.  I grabbed, at random, an unread Iain Banks novel called The Crow Road, which has (I am not surprised to find out) a place in the Daily Telegraph’s 30 best opening lines in literature (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/30-great-opening-lines-in-literature/the-crow-road/ ) I cannot say, by the way, that I agree with all the choices made there, but I made the mistake of looking through all thirty and for many I was half inclined to find the book in my library and start reading it again - which is always the danger when you have a snippet of something great to tempt you!

Anyway, I have had this novel for some time and only read the first few pages (as who cannot given the opening line!) and for some reason had laid it aside.  This is not something that I usually do, except for Virgina Woolf’s To The Lighthouse that I did (and did with gusto) on many occasions before I finally bit the bullet and read the whole of the damn thing.  I have decided to keep the novel that I am now gripped by purely as beach reading as that gives me an incentive to engage in the futile and empty pastime of lazing in the sun and gives it a sort of purpose.

Tomorrow the first of our final tranches of summer visitors arrive and I am minded to write a series of poems suggested by visitors, their arrival, response etc.  I have made some preparatory notes and look forward to seek where such an enterprise takes me.  The time period is from tomorrow to the end of the month and into September and the three ‘groupings’ of visitors are very different.  I hope that this blog can also be part of the process either for ideas or responses. 

I can but try!

Though I also fear that such a task is merely displacement activity for the work on my Spanish grammar and vocabulary.  Are both possible?  Should be.

Now, having written it down, it seems like a sort of contract with the future!

A contract easily broken!