Zilch, nada

I was trying to think of what to write. I wondered about something on having to wear masks in public. I thought about the slight loosening of restrictions - being able to get a beer outside a bar or go into a shop. Neither smacked of Herodotus nor even of Stephen King. And the message has all been a bit mixed up too; freer movement promised to people living in small towns, announced last weekend, still hasn't been enacted.

Next I considered the political argy bargy. I have been thoroughly appalled at the way that the opposition parties have been trying to make political capital out of the continuance, or not, of the state of alarm, the constitutional state which allows for a "unified command". Then it turned out that our President had done a secret deal with a political party that has a dodgy, terrorist, background, and kept it from his colleagues. Bang went the moral high ground.

What about the unrest on the streets, the people banging pots and pans to protest about the perceived government mishandling of the situation? To be honest that's not much of a story really. If you've been locked up in your house for going on three months, if the promised government "temporary dole" hasn't materialised and your mortgage is unpaid and everything you like to do has been scrubbed then it doesn't take much of a social media campaign to get a few hundred or even a few thousand people on the streets to moan and groan.

I wondered if there was something in the uncivic attitude of quite a lot of people. I think anti social would be the translation but uncivic seems so much more descriptive. We've spent all this time locked up to find tons of young people flouting the rules and cramming into bars and having beach parties because they're fed up of not being able to. That's not either interesting or particularly Spain related though is it?

What about working with my sources of outside stimulus? The books I've read or the stuff I'm watching on Netflix and Filmin? What about all the podcasts that I'm still listening to? Maybe there's something about the street Spanish I've been picking up from those sources. Boring - and I've done it before. I will though, thanks to the Netflix series Valeria, be off to Madrid as soon as they let me. The city really just looks so brill and what's that beer they drink all the time?

I considered the, hugely commented, Twitter post where someone, presumably British, said they'd made a Spanish omelette. This is one of those things where the failure of two nations to understand the other is a simple failure of translation. Spaniards think that the thick egg omelette with lots of veg., that Brits call Spanish omelette, is a blasphemous recreation of the Spanish tortilla de patatas. Mistreating the tortilla de patatas is nearly as bad, in Spanish eyes, as overcooked rice with things being described by foreigners as a paella. But I realised that unless you live here the fuss about recipes would almost certainly seem like time wasted.

So, nothing then, none of them would make a decent blog. Bother!