And keep the change for yourself

Spain is bespattered with Chinos, Chinese owned shops. There are two principal types. One is like the old British corner shop where the family work all the time. It opens late, it sells sweets, pop and stuff plus basic food and all sorts of things that seem a bit out of place - piles of flip flops in over brittle and discoloured plastic bags piled on top of the crisp boxes. Here in Pinoso we don't have one of those. Our 24 hour shop, or it may be shops, are Spanish run. 

We do have two Chinos though; ours are the sort that sell everything except food. There are tools, cleaning products, stationery, earphones, phone cases, reading glasses, clothing, cleaning products, photo frames, light bulbs, pet supplies and a trillion other things. We Brits love them. We can hunt around the shelves looking for whatever it is rather than having to mime and splutter to, for instance, the person behind the haberdashery shop counter, "Err, I don't know how to say knicker elastic in Spanish." The two Chinese shops in Pinoso are awash with Britons though they're popular with the locals too.

The Chinos were the first places to close when the pandemic hit. I think there was a fear amongst the Chinese community that there would be some sort of racist backlash - the sort of knee-jerk stupidity beloved of the incoherent Donny Trump. When we moved phase here, when the stranglehold of quarantine started to be relaxed, the shops started to re-open. One of the Chinese shops couldn't because it's bigger than 400 square metres and the regulations said "no" to big shops. The other could though. I couldn't avoid the temptation as I passed on the first day it re-opened and I came away grinning with my haul of paint brushes, hosepipe connectors, car shampoo and whatnot. I hear that the bigger Chinese shop has now re-opened but that it's on a sort of ask at the door process. I've scratched my own itch so I've not been in. I have been to a bookshop though, and an ironmongers and the cold meat and olive stalls in the market. Spreading my paltry wealth around.

It's been good to see the "non essential" shops opening up again. It seems to be much more a hopeful sign of the return to normality, of fewer people dying, of politicians calling each other terrorists and coup plotters, than being able to go for a stroll or do a bit of exercise close to home for a limited period in a delimited time. To tell the truth, with being able to travel in province again, we made an appointment and went down to Torrellano to look at second hand cars. Whilst we were there we went to a bar with a view over the Med. It wasn't the first bar we've been to since the confinement began to ease - the machine coffee and the ice cold beer were great but, even better, it felt just like any old day in Spain for a while.

In general things seem to be getting back on track. This morning I had to get up early to take Maggie to her hairdresser who works a little outside Pinoso. Maggie told me that the appointment queue for the haircutter had been a long one as people made up for weeks of folicular fecundity. I know that my mum, in the UK, is really anxious to get her first professional shampoo and set after weeks of staying at home.

Who knows we may still get a fiesta or a concert or something this year.

Chores

I'm a bit of a list maker. Any job has a validity all of its own. Watching a TV programme, blowing up the bike tyres or even having a beer can all be jobs. So, for instance, completing my tax return or looking through the new book of photos that I've just bought have a similar status. In reality, I suppose, the tax return is probably more pressing but the new book gave me a photo for the blog! The mummified nuns were dug up in Barcelona at the start of the Civil War. One in the eye for the Church.

So, for eight weeks lots of the limiting, delimiting, factors went away. You can't paint a wall if you have no paint and the shops are shut. You can't not be able to do something because it's time to go to the theatre when there is no theatre. This week though the world regained some of its normality. Watching the scenes on the telly of people getting together I tend to think that we may have a bit of a rebound to the killing fields but, by then, the Government will have lost the vote on centralised control and it could all be quite interesting. Like having one of those credit cards in the 1990s living in the countryside has its privileges.

Anyway, Maggie is back at work. Just her usual part time slot from 10 till 2 and I'm driving her in and then coming home. It's amazing how those time limits have played havoc with my ability to complete essential jobs like reading a book, weeding the garden or writing a blog.

Well that's one off the list at least.

Longer than the time in the desert

I've been thinking about the changes that happen slowly. I'm not talking about the sort of time needed to form the Himalayas or even the period of time that the Chauvet Cave was active. I'm thinking about how Marlon Brando, Dan Aykroyd, William Shatner and Alec Baldwin became so much bigger. Really I'm thinking about seven, going on eight weeks. I'm thinking about why so many people were champing at the bit to get to a haircut when the hairdressers re-opened yesterday. I suppose all those weeks is a big slice of the year.

I was doing reasonably well at knocking off weight before I was given detention in March. I'd lost about 11 kilos from Christmas but, this morning as I jelly rolled my stomach the distance between the shower and washbasin, ready to shave, apply brylcreem and brush my teeth I couldn't pretend that I wasn't putting it back on again. I also realised that I wasn't wearing slippers. No need for a bathmat on the floor to protect my little tootsies from the cold tiles. Last night, yesterday, we had no heating on anywhere in the house at any time. The pellets I bought for the stove on my first weekly outing in mid March, pellets sold at an incredibly inflated price, are still unused. We've had a very wet few weeks with lots of torrential rain but even when it rains and blows, when the weather definitely isn't nice, it has stopped being cold. We're back to T-shirt weather. In fact my nose is a bit red from the sun and my farmer's tan is returning from the time in the garden.

In those weeks Jess, the cat who was living in the garden, hasn't started to watch the telly with us or claw at the bedhead/sofa/record collection but she does wander in every now and then to see if there is better food down for the house cats than for her in the garden. At the beginning of the confinement she was definitely felina non grata but, 50 days later, Beatriz, Teodoro, Isabel, Fernando and Federico occasionally scream or spit at her but, basically, they tolerate her. We now, definitely, have six cats. In fact sit down to have a cup of tea and read a book in the garden and she's straight up on your knee like a fluffy purring machine. We can only presume that she's a domestic cat that fell on hard times.

Since mid March the garden has gone a luxuriant green, multicoloured actually. Despite tens and tens of man hours (specific not sexist) the weed situation remains unchanged. The little buggers are still everywhere. Outside the house the green is even more impressive and there are reds, yellows, purple and white capped plants everywhere. The explosion of flowers and plants is accompanied by the sounds of all sorts of small flying and crawling beasts. There are birds too, they all make plenty of noise and the swallows leave calling cards all over the car just to remind us that they are back from Africa. Our cats come back covered in ticks - but the ixodida don't dig in and suck blood because the cats were dosed with anti parasite stuff just before quarantine. The ticks do hitch a lift into our living room from time to time. There are thousands of mosquitoes too. The village WhatsApp group has lots of horrid pictures of people covered in bites. We've been affected too, me much less so than Maggie. She always suffers from allergies at this time of year as well but the bites must be infuriatingly itchy. Our guess is that it's all worse because the tractors, the ploughs, the harrows, the pickers and traffic in general hasn't been moving around. Just as the owls are back nesting in the towns, because there's nothing to stop them, that same nothing is not knocking the ticks off their perches and nothing is churning up the puddles and pools to keep the mossies down.

And I won't say anything about the apparently growing stupidity of the Spanish politicians who seem determined to wage their petty little party political wars at enormous potential cost. There is a good chance that the Government won't get the support it needs to extend the State of Alarm for another couple of weeks. My guess is that, with a bit of brinkmanship, they'll get it this time but that will be the last extension following the current model. Once that model goes, and with it the emergency powers, who can say how it will all develop. With a bit of luck all will be calm in Culebrón and the sun will be beating down. My hair may be longer too.

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.

Eating seagull

After 39 days of going nowhere and doing nothing there's also nothing to write about but that's not going to stop me.

We're not really seeing anyone. Occasionally we exchange distant words with our immediate next door neighbour and the arrival of the bread van causes near crowd control problems as the three of us dance around each other. We don't feel at all isolated though. The outside world flows into our lives, as it almost certainly does into yours, through the Internet. Amazing really. Keeping in touch is so easy - a message to friends, a VOIP telephone call, video calls, Zoom based zumba sessions.

Besides the personal stuff the news rolls in in endless torrents through this or that phone or computer application, I have apps that harvest newspaper stories and podcasts. Quite honestly I can't keep up. And the trouble is that newspapers and podcasts lead to recommendations for music or more books. The ordinary broadcast tele and the radio haven't gone away either but the digital platforms are also demanding of our attention. Lots of providers are giving stuff away that they would normally charge for but for some reason that didn't stop me renting my first ever online film the other day. I'm seriously considering subscribing to a sort of arty Spanish film channel too. I'm hesitating there though because when, if, the world gets back to normal I hope that we'll be able to go back to the cinema (though I suspect we'll lose even more of the independent providers). That being the case I'll be able to see films as they should be seen on a big screen. Nonetheless I fear that I'll never quite get around to cancelling that monthly FILMIN subscription.

I know that people are dying but that's not part of our experience. We're reasonably much out of harms way and simply keeping ourselves to ourselves. The consequences of stopping the world are countless and once you begin to think about them it becomes overwhelming. The economic damage being done to every sort of business is obviously going to be devastating. Whether you're Inditex or the bloke with the newspaper kiosk business must just have faded away. The closed restaurants and bars, the bookshops, the car dealers, the petrol stations, the shoe makers and thousands and thousands of other businesses are going to be hard hit and I presume that it will kill some of them off.

I was thinking about the almost unnoticed casualties. Normally I quite like micro-adventures - the local fiesta, a bit of ballet at the theatre in the next town, some up and coming band playing a nearby venue, the book launch and even the occasional sporting event. Watching those events cancel one after the other is sad in itself but I was wondering about the ways that the cancellations must affect people's lives. Doing the Mediaeval Markets or selling helium balloons can't be a secure lifestyle to start with, particularly if there are no markets and no street events. Consider the way that Easter was cancelled. Easter is huge in Spain with processions the length and breadth of the country. The people in the KKK type hats parade alongside hundreds and hundreds of floats decorated with flowers. Will the flower growers and the florists survive? Even more esoteric, in a world lit by LEDs, lots of the Easter penitents carry big candles. I don't suppose those candle makers will be selling many this year. How many more similar examples must there be?

I subscribe to the WhatsApp group run by the Teatro Principal in Alicante. Normally they send me messages to remind me that they have a ballet next week, or an illusionist or a play. Once the Covid19 thing got under way they started to send me the same sort of information but with postponed or cancelled written across it. Strangely one of the things I often think about when I go to a theatre is the odd sort of work that some people have there. The stagehands, the people who show you to your seat, the people who look after the cloakroom, the people who clean up afterwards and so on. The work can't be particularly reliable and it must only be worth a few euros each time. I fear that the people who do that sort of work really need that extra bit of income to make ends meet and now it will all have dried up.

Economic devastation aside it's going to be a sad year without lots and lots of fiestas, fairs, theatre, concerts and festivals. We've had nearly everything we'd booked up for cancelled right through the summer. Just today they announced the cancellation of Sanfermines (the bull running affair) in Pamplona. I'm sure that the economy surrounding that event is enormously important in the city and I can imagine the hundreds of hotel room booking being cancelled as I type. What are they going to do with those thousands of red neckerchiefs? How will the city bars survive without that surge in business? I suppose the silver lining is that, if they were able to work through the complicated thought processes involved, the bulls may at least be happier with the cancellation.

Panic buying

The siege is upon us. For at least a fortnight: no nursery, no school, no university, no cinema, no theatre, no fiestas, no bars, no restaurants, no bingo and no church. Maggie will be working  from home next week. Even my accountant has locked his door. We are nearly in a "State of Alarm" which means that tomorrow the Government will more control than it had this morning. The world as we know it is coming to an end. Markets are crashing, we are locked out of several countries.

Time to panic buy. Obviously. We went into Pinoso. Lots of traffic for a Friday afternoon and the supermarkets were awash with people. The Indian restaurant seemed to be bursting at the seams and I can only assume that some of my fellow Britons were getting in a last vindaloo before the quarantine (it had to be Britons as no Spaniard would consider eating at 6pm). The thought of two weeks sitting in front of the telly to watch Sálvame Banana and Supervivientes had been enough for me to think only of stockpiling. A bottle of brandy (the first since Christmas), a couple of bottles of wine for Maggie and several packets of cat food were our haul. There were people with masks. The cashiers had nitrile gloves and seemed to be drinking water in copious quantities. There were customers with trolleys full of bog roll. I can only suppose they were thinking of the effects of terrible telly too.

It's quite strange how quickly it all crumbled. This morning and for days before it has all been nonstop virus news but I was still expecting to meet my sister tomorrow given that she's on holiday nearby. We'd obviously have eaten out, because that's what one does in Spain. My sister apart it would be an odd weekend when we didn't go to the cinema. There were also a couple of possible events for the weekend including a do at our local restaurant and a charitable walk. Next week the only things on my list were the language club and a trip up to Valencia. Originally I'd been going to Valencia to see some of the (cancelled) Fallas celebration but that had transmuted into an opportunity to take in the Counter Culture exhibition at the Modern Art Institute in the city. Not anymore. The country is closing down. My email and WhatsApp are full of messages cancelling talks, concerts, events and exhibitions that I'd booked up. For one singer that's the third cancellation. She's a young woman; I'm sure she'll survive the virus but who knows if someone as frail and old as I will?

So, from now on, for a while, I'll be trying to remember not to touch my face and to wash my hands thoroughly. And, of course, every cough and every twinge is a sure sign that I'll soon be calling the freephone number to get advice on self quarantine so as not to block up the intensive care unit too early. The more I think about it the more obvious it is that I need to crack open that brandy and get in my last few episodes of a splendid Spanish soap whilst I still can.