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.

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.