It's being so cheerful as keeps me going

The number of people dying from Covid19 in Spain is dropping. Time to relax the measures. This week youngsters were allowed back on the streets and from May 2nd older people will be able to go out for a walk or do a bit of sport. This relaxation of the quarantine is a part of the several phases that the Government has come up with to slowly remove the siege constraints. I can imagine the "cabinet meeting" where they were trying to work this out. Deciding on rules that work for places that are, still, being scourged by the virus, as against places that have no extra illness whatsoever. Trying to juggle rules that work for rural areas, where butterflies are more common than people, against blocks of flats where leaving your home potentially involves rubbing shoulders with the unwashed masses. Trying to come up with a scheme that allowed businesses to re-open without causing a new outbreak of people dying with compromised lungs, hearts and livers. "Phases! - that's how we'll do it. We'll have rules that only apply when an area reaches certain conditions".

I don't think it's a bad idea but we're now at the complaining rather than forgiving stage of the confinement and some of the proposals are, frankly, stupid. Suggesting that hotels open when customers can't travel to them isn't a good solution. Like most people I could list lots and lots of contradictions and problems in the phasing and opposition politicians, trade bodies and professional associations have been doing just that. Picking fault is much easier than optional solutions though.

Anyway, to the point. So imagine I'm talking to someone - "Maggie and I had a bit of a fight last night; we're not talking".  Now compare, "I was in the pub last night and there was a fight." The same word is key but I hope you think there is a difference. There were no slapping about with Maggie but maybe there was in the boozer. Or consider, "I'm off for a walk" and "On Sunday I'm going walking". Which do you think is the more hardcore? In English then the same word or the same sort of word can have, relatively, subtle different meanings. It's the same with Spanish for Spaniards. I've used the example before where the word comer. Normally comer is the generic verb for to eat but, at lunchtime, it means to have lunch. Ask in a Spanish bar at 4pm, the tail end of lunchtime, if they have anything to "comer" and the kitchen has closed then the answer will be "no". You may be able to see snacks in the counter top display or read the sign that says they do sandwiches but the wording of the question was wrong and it's something dictionaries can't really help with.

So yesterday the Government published it's plan for letting us out for doing a bit of individual sport or going for a walk with someone you live with. Basically they divided the day into slots letting different groups of people out at different times and with a distinction between going for a stroll and doing some serious exercise. Grasping the basic idea was child's play though, as with all rules, there are situations which could be open to interpretation especially as the already established rules for moving about remain largely unchanged.

Shortly after the details were published I saw a couple of translations on Facebook in English. One of those organisations was the Citizens Advice Bureau page. I just looked now. There were 353 comments before commenting was turned off. Another, a Facebook page maintained by the Guardia Civil had nearly two and a half thousand comments. Some of the questions were reasonable enough. For instance, right from the beginning, you've been able to take a dog out to do what dogs need to do but you had to keep close to home. With the new regs. you can walk a kilometre from home but can your dogs walk the kilometre too? I actually think the answer is obvious but I suppose it's a grey area.  Was it correct that people who live together can go out for a walk together but they can't go in the same car? There was another question that made me laugh out loud. The Guardia Civil had chosen to be amusing: "You may use bicycles, scooters, roller-skates, surf boards even!, as long as the sport that you are practising, you do it ALONE. Once a day". The nation famed for its irony has at least one citizen who asked if surf board was a mistranslated skateboard.

Half of the questions though were simply moaning, complaining or to show how clever the questioner was. Others were language or culture related. For instance several people complained about going for a walk or a run at night. The slot in question is between 8pm an 11pm and the comment shows a very "English" attitude. Traditionally Spaniards finish work around 8pm so the Spanish reasoning is straightforward; it allows for a bit of an evening stroll after work.

There was also a lot of mumbling about walking. The word in the regulations for the walks close to home is pasear, un paseo. These words were, reasonably enough, translated into English as to walk and a walk. So lots of Britons got on their pedantic, island-centric hobby-horse "Isn't walking exercise?" In fact the use of pasear is more like the British idea of a stroll, or “to have a bit of a walk”. There are other Spanish words to transmit the idea of a more physical, more exercise orientated walk. An idea that I would have thought would be pretty obvious to anyone who actually lives in Spain.

Ah well, I suppose It's being so cheerful as keeps us going to paraphrase Mona Lott

PS Since I wrote the original post we've actually got out and about. The time slots only apply to municipios of over 5,000 people. Municipio is obvious enough, it means municipality, it's the people you pay your local taxes to, the town hall you use for paperwork. In our case, for instance, Pinoso. But, apparently, this is a difficult concept for lots of Britons.