As we navigate the new normal

There was a little flurry of activity in the village WhatsApp group on Wednesday afternoon. Someone had died, someone with quite an unusual name. Was it the someone with that name from the village? It turned out to be a false alarm, well a false alarm for Culebrón. There was a Covid death but it was a different person from a village a few miles away. There's no doubt though that illness, and maybe death, is lurking around the corner.

I've just watched a programme on the tele where reporters followed cleaners, ambulance drivers, doctors on emergency admissions, nurses, the people running the logistics for the hospitals, the pathologists and the UCI staff etc. as they did their various jobs at several hospitals across Spain. It was all a very human experience as people going on shift waited while their names were written in thick marker on their protective clothing so they were recognisable through the disguise, as tired medical staff laughed as they drank coffee in their breaks, cried as they said goodbye to people who had recovered, sobbed as bodies were wheeled out to the morgue, showed a gentle pride in a job well done, kept their nerve as the machines monitoring whatever they monitor did that flat-lining thing and cursed under their breaths as the morning round robin video conference between regional hospitals listed the dead from the day before.

It was a programme that made me angry at the armchair pundits and their "what a lot of fuss about something that is killing fewer people than flu does routinely every year", cross at the idiot politicians seeking scapegoats for their own mistakes, cross at the politicians using the current situation for political manoeuvring and cross at the egotistical behaviour of any number of individuals who decide that they know better because the rules and procedures as not really relevant in their case.

It also made me acutely aware of how nice it is to live in a quiet backwater where the cuckoos are still cuckooing and the pain and suffering has, so far, largely passed us by.