Day 45 - "Flies and poolside cocktails"

Day forty five, Flies and Poolside Cocktails. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.  

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Day 45 flies and poolside cocktails

Day 45 of our Spanish Lockdown.  When will it ever end?  Uncle Pedro, the Spanish Prime Minister has issued a very complicated phasing of return to halfway normal life.

No dates, as it will be based on how many deaths have occurred as each day goes by. It is progress but it does look like international air travel will not return this summer.  The best that can be hoped for is that you can travel within your local region.

 

This is also the miserable day that Chris has to go shopping, he has to go to two supermarkets as neither are now stocked well. It is turning into an arduous task to find enough food and cleaning materials.

 

I guess that more than a month of Spanish manufacturing stopped has had an impact on supplies.  Today no bread, but we have potatoes, pasta and rice for carbohydrate.

 

Nothing to wash your hands with, but luckily we have a collection of old hotel soaps and hand wash that I am pressing into action.

 

Nothing to kill ants or flies.. a much harder call this one as we are overrun with ants in the house at the moment, three good legs cat doesn’t help with his twice daily fish tossing, covering the floor with little pieces of fish.. you can see the ants just waiting for their moment to carry off a tasty tossed morsel.

 

The flies I can whack with a handy Chinese shop swatter. But the tiger mosquitos are going to be harder to kill as we have about a week or so of spray left for them. 

 

Whereas Britain suffered with shortages at the beginning, it does seem that we are getting a taste of that now here. 

 

But as my client comedian Rob Deering said on the Running Commentary Podcast today.. “We have just got to suck it up.” As there are more serious things to worry about than getting fly spray and chlorine for your pool.

 

The Running Commentary boys have magnificently carried on running, both separately but together.  Paul runs in one part of London and Rob in another and we sync the two recording devices and their phones.. and it works really well until they get cut off, which is often.. but once I have edited it all together, they a producing a fine and inspirational show. Some sadness this week as they remember the London Marathon that will at best postponed at worst it will have to jump a year.

 

I was doing some charity work for Multiple Sclerosis teaching a Press Officer how to deal with live streaming and that’s how I got to meet Rob and Paul. 

 

You can catch Rob Deering at the weekend on the Isolation Song Contest a kind of indoor Eurovision, check the link in the Podcast description, or go to Just Giving dot com, Isolation Song Contest for more.

 

Day 45 and with the shopping done it has turned out to be a fairly nice afternoon, the sun was shining and the temperature about 20 to 21c, but at about four pm the wind returned yet again.

 

It took us a couple of weeks to get over my mother’s visit to us a few years ago.  Having to keep working and entertain holiday guests is hard work.

 

It seems sublime that family would want to come and visit you when you ‘live abroad’ we were really looking forward to seeing our nieces visit us next week for a few days, they had booked the hotel and we were planning to pick them up from the airport and just let them chill in the sun and sip those much vaunted cocktails by the pool.

 

We are both desperately sad that it is not to be.  But having guests can be joyous but also a burden.  Many of our neighbours curse that they have so many bedrooms and that quite distant members of the family will suddenly descend on them, the children making a bee line for the pool, the adults helping themselves to the booze.. as “It is so cheap over here.”

 

I think if we had stayed in the UK and moved to somewhere like Basildon, not a single family member would consider taking a weeks holiday with us. 

 

We love our family but love privacy too.  It is handy that we have a very fine hotel just five minutes’ drive away, or even closer is a large Spanish hotel that offers bargain rooms in the summer, well they did.

 

I hope the girls will come same time next year if international travel is once again allowed.. and of course there are any airlines left that haven’t gone bust, unemployment figures are going to soar so high I wouldn’t be surprised if UB40 put on a comeback tour.

 

It is far from all doom and gloom and we are very lucky to live where we are, a lack of bread and fly spray can be overcome, and there are much more important things happening right now in the science laboratories of the world.. as Rob Deering says .. “suck it up.”