Getting my jab

Not that I expected a marching band or anything but I did expect a bit more of an event. A queue of people waiting for the vaccination would have made it more memorable, serried ranks of desks each one attended by a little group of medical personnel all in purple gloves would have been good. But none of it.

Yesterday I got a phone call on the landline. It was the local health centre and they gave me a time for an appointment today. I left home fifteen minutes before the set time. "I'm here for the jab," I said and I think the person on the door already knew my name rather than reading my name from the health card she asked to see. No temperature check or anything.

I was taken to a chair in the corridor, where people normally wait to see the doctors, and told to wait. I was given a couple of stapled bits of the sort of photocopy where the second copy was made from a copy and the third copy from the second copy and so on for forty generations. Stencil quality. The first sheet told me all the possible side effects. One of those was cefalea. I sniggered. It's the technical term for a range of headaches. Spanish "authorities" have never agreed with Hemingway that there are older and simpler and better words and always choose to use an obscure word to show how much cleverer they are than you. There was a date and time for the second dose too just three weeks away. The second sheet told me that I was getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The paperwork also told me the internet links to get copies of the full prospectus sheet for the vaccine and a certificate of vaccination.

I waited a while. A young woman wearing a white coat and pushing a trolley asked me if I was allergic to anything - I gave my usual answer of bills and taxes - she checked if I was taking some drug, which I wasn't, and pushed a needle in to the top of my arm. The same sort of injection that I've had hundreds if not thousands of times before. She pushed a bit of damp gauze against my "wound" and said to wait for fifteen minutes. I did. Then I left. At the door I made a vague effort to check f it were OK to leave but nobody was the least interested in me and I needed to go to Alfredo's to arrange a haircut while I was in town.

And still no band.

The way it goes

Over the weekend the wind blew lots of branches off our fig trees and uprooted a two metre high aloe vera plant that I've never much cared for. It took me three trips with the wheelbarrow to haul the remains away. At least the wind means that it's not quite as cold.

When we first bought the house one of the few good things about it was the tree lined drive. We still have the trees despite the sport practised by so many visiting vans and lorries of reversing in to them - usually serially. In fact, rather as you would expect, they are somewhat taller now than when we first moved in. I was listening to the two big pointy ones nearest the house creaking in the wind. Culebrón, like Skegness, can be bracing.  The tree alongside the house is at least 10 metres tall, a plumber warned us against it. Roots under the house, blocking up the drains, he threatened. The tree a bit further away, possibly a larch, is even taller and heavier. They probably won't blow over but they might. I can imagine the interrogation from the insurers about our tree care regime.

I suppose of more immediate concern is the virus. A very pleasant chap who worked in one of the offices in the town hall in Pinoso, a bloke in his early fifties, died of it the other day, in some ways his was a more public death than the others in our little town. Our municipal cases per 100,000 figure stands at around 1,300. 

Spain's health service, like those in so many in other countries, is creaking as much as our trees. Every day on the TV and radio there is a procession of medics saying how the hospitals are at breaking point. It's as repetitive as the pictures of police breaking up some after hours party with an apparently incredulous newsreader pointing out that the young people involved were not wearing masks and not keeping apart. The measures to try and keep people from spreading the virus keep changing and tightening as much as they can given the rules of the current State of Emergency. Here in Valencia all the bigger towns and cities will be sealed off each weekend and all bars and restaurants are now closed. Ours were some of the last to go. At home the rules say that you cannot have visitors and out in the street only two people can get together unless they are cohabitees. I presume that means that the Ladybird Book family of mum, dad, daughter and son can go out for a walk together but, if they meet Uncle Billy, then only dad, or mum, or daughter, or son can go to greet him. Then again it may be that the cohabiting group counts as one person. Not that the detail matters much unless you want to have an academic argument and maintain that the virus is a hoax, that the figures are distortions, that it's all a terrible attack on our civil liberties, that the constitution guarantees freedom of movement and that you're not going to put up with a boot stamping on a human face—for ever. Otherwise, keeping yourself to yourself as much as possible seems a remarkably sensible thing to do.

As you probably know I like going to the pictures and, amazingly, the cinemas are still able to open. Lots of them have closed because they have no audience, same with the theatres, but they can, legally, stay open. I presume that's because not a single outbreak has been linked to them. Again, not that surprising as the audiences are tiny. We went to the pictures on Sunday. The shopping centre where the cinema is was locked shut. We had to ask a security guard to find the one remaining open entrance. A completely deserted shopping centre is a surprisingly eerie place. Sepulchral comes to mind as an adjective to describe something there but I couldn't think of a good way to use it.

I don't really have an opinion

This is a post about Covid. First though one of our cats has been missing for nearly three days. Bea, Beatriz, was the cat that I most expected to die of old age; a bit of a homebody, an easy going girl that gets/got on with all of the other cats. We have no idea where she is - gone walkabout for some reason, carried off by an eagle, poisoned by a wicked witch or squashed by a car. Nothing is too theoretically outrageous because we know nothing. Cats can disappear for days and then re-appear, that's what we're hoping for. Generally though ours don't come back.

I know very little about Covid 19. I have no idea why it is that Spain has incredibly high case figures and Burundi, the Seychelles and Laos have next to none. I've heard lots of "explanations" as to why we're in such a pickle from regional pride and too much hugging to irresponsible young people and an inability to count. I've read how the Swedes handled it well and how the Swedes got it completely wrong. Ask on Facebook or Twitter and you can take your pick from the answers to suit your point of view.

There are obviously lots of ordinary people who know much more about disease control and social planning than I do. They keep telling me little factlets. They tell me the Chinese started it. They tell me it's only winnowing out the weak. They tell me that more people die from falling off step ladders than die from Covid. There is another bunch who tell me that wearing a face mask is tantamount to being beaten on the soles of our feet with sticks and think Human Rights Watch should mobilise. I realise that I'm teetering on the edge of senility, just ask Maggie, but I think I remember that in Catch 22 Doc Daneeka reminded Yossarian of the hundreds of medical conditions that could kill people. I appreciate that, I know that car accidents tear bodies apart and kill and maim thousands each year, I know that measles and bad drinking water kills and kills and kills.  But it's not a comparison is it? People get killed all the time but that doesn't mean that men killing their partners is any less wrong. It's not that the cost of a nuclear submarine would pay for clean water in Mali; it's that killing machines are not a good thing to buy.

We have new figures for Pinoso from 26/10/2020. They say that there have been 211 positive tests in Pinoso since time began and that 54 of those positives were in the last couple of weeks. Two people have died - again since it all began. That means the cases in 100,000 figure is 678. The last time I did the primary school sums necessary to work out the infections per 100,000 number and posted it on Facebook in response to someone else's post somebody laid into me for scaremongering. They said that Covid wasn't anything. Flu - the sort of flu that you take Lem Sip for not the sort of flu that lays continents to waste. Donald Trump got over Covid in 25 minutes after all. So, this time, no comment.

We have a curfew from late evening through to early morning all over Spain, meeting numbers are restricted, the manufacturers of Christmas specialities may as well file for bankruptcy now as the politicians fight over a six month long State of Alarm or a parliamentary scrutiny every two months. It's the sort of stuff that's going on all over Europe. For some it's democracy under attack with ridiculous and pointless controls faced by an intractable enemy and for others it's politicians scrabbling to do their best to keep people alive and save their economies.

Maggie just told me as I came back into the living room that Murcia, the Region just ten minutes up the road from us, is going to restrict movement between municipalities. Live in Jumilla and you have to stay in Jumilla. Lots of people from the three Murcian municipalities that border Pinoso come into Pinoso for their shopping, banking and social life. I wonder if they are going to be turned back at the border?