Coronavirus lockdown release: phase 2 cotinued

We continue our slow climb out of lockdown here in Spain. It’s a relief, but tinged with anxiety, since there are signs of an increase in infections, and in daily deaths, as the restrictions are lifted.

The other uptick is in Opposition attacks on Government over its handling of the infection in the early stages. The Opposition claims that the government knew a lot earlier about the seriousness of the crisis than it has admitted, making its failure to take action sooner intolerable to the Conservatives.

Personally, I like the administration led by Pedro Sánchez and his Socialist Party. Its handling of the crisis since that early stage has been outstanding. However, I suppose as a supporter of democratic process, I can hardly object to an Opposition holding Government to account for its earlier errors, however much I may prefer the latter to the former.

Otherwise, how could I possibly demand that the Labour Opposition in Britain hold the Cummings government, and its figurehead leader Johnson, to account there? That’s a demand that needs to be made all the more strongly, now that Britain has officially racked up a performance worse than Spain’s, in deaths per million, despite having had the examples of both Italy and Spain to learn from.

At least in Spain we’re continuing to emerge from lockdown. Now, it may not last if infections keep climbing. So we’re taking advantage of freedom today, for fear that it might be curtailed by a new lockdown tomorrow. That means doing as much as possible, as soon as possible.

Museo de las Bellas Artes, Valencia

For instance, after having our first haircuts in three months, we headed for the Valencia Museum of Fine Arts, now visitable again. That’s an opportunity that hadn’t been taken up by many, so we met only one other visitor during our time there.

I’ve been there a couple of times before. However, I realised on this visit that I’d seen only a small fraction of the collection. That’s because previously I started, as one might expect, on the ground floor, which is just room after room of religious art from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Obviously, many people whose opinions I respect love this stuff. I’m afraid I quickly find I’ve had a surfeit of nativities, even more quickly of Mary weeping over Christ’s body, most quickly of all over martyrdoms, flagellations of Christ and crucifixions. In fact, three or four pin-cushion Saint Sebastians are usually about as many as I can stand before I head for the exit.

Why on Earth, in a religion like Christianity, focused as it’s supposed to be on loving one’s neighbour and turning the other cheek, are so many of its followers quite so obsessed with suffering, torture and death?

Still, there were a couple of paintings in this part of the Museum that I enjoyed.

Saint Sebastian cared for by Saint Irene
by Vrancke van der Stockt

I liked a Saint Sebastian who, far from being a pin cushion, seemed to be dying – or, more likely, already dead, given the shock and grief of Saint Irene who was looking after him – from a single arrow wound. A tribute, I felt, to the lethal power of even one arrow. No tribute at all, though, to the shooting accuracy of the Roman legion, a whole execution squad of which had been assigned to dealing with him. Did the rest all miss, then?

Adam and Eve by Matthias Stom

The other one I liked was of a strangely stylised – almost surreal – painting of Adam and Eve holding a fruit, oddly elongated upwards. I wondered whether the artist was perhaps a member of a strange heretical sect of which I hadn’t previously heard, which believed that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree from which they weren’t supposed to eat, was a pear and not an apple?

Was it a pear they tasted?

Look at it. It’s obviously a pear.

Incidentally, while on the subject I can’t resist passing on this thought from the outstanding eighteenth century thinker, Denis Diderot, who commented that the Christian God is a father who attaches great importance to his apples, and very little to his children.

But back to the Museum of Fine Arts. For the first time in three visits, rather than giving up and leaving after having a glut of the religious paintings, I let myself be persuaded by Danielle to take a look at the other floors. And what a joy that was. On the upper floors, I discovered the collections of more recent paintings, that were far more to my taste.

Perhaps the most famous painter from Valencia is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station in the city is even called after him. And the Museum has some excellent examples of his work. One, I thought at first glance was of a cricketer, given his all-white clothes.

Sorolla's painting of a cricketer?
Not, the son of a friend

But cricket has never really caught on in Spain, and this turns out to be a rather eye-catching portrait of José Luis Benlliure López de Arana, son of Sorolla’s friend, the sculptor Mariano Benlliure.

The Fly
A charming surprise to discover it

Even more striking was a painting by a contemporary of Sorolla’s, Cecilio Plá. It’s called The Fly and includes a smile that charms by its cheekiness, within a pose that mystifies by the way it reveals all the more by being partially hidden.

So, all in all, it was a rewarding visit. What can I saw about Phase 2 of our lockdown release? Just ‘so far, so good’.

Of course, that’s what the man said as he passed the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building, having fallen from the top. Let’s hope we’re heading towards a better fate than awaited him.

Lockdown disappointment, or why the truth is sometimes hard to bear

What a terrible disappointment those of us who live near Valencia had to suffer on Friday night.

We’re near the end of the eighth week of our lockdown in Spain. Reputedly the toughest in Europe.

As it happens, we’re now in phase zero of lockdown relaxation. That means we’re allowed out for exercise once a day, at specific times, alone, or for walks with one other person from the same household. You can get your hair cut, though only with an appointment. Chlldren can go out with their parents and dog owners can walk their dogs, close to home. Otherwise, we’re only allowed out to shop for food or medication, or attend healthcare centres.

Phase 1 is due to start on Monday, 11 May. That would allow us to travel together by car, and to go anywhere within the three provinces that make up the Valencia Community. We could go to the mountains! Or to the sea!

Cafes and restaurants and more shops would also reopen, with strict social distancing restrictions, and groups of up to ten people could even get together.

It was something to look forward to. We felt sorry for the other Communities, in particular Catalonia, which had decided not to ask for permission to move to phase 1, because they didn’t feel their health situation warranted it yet. As we were astonished to discover that the Madrid Community had asked to transition, despite being the place worst hit. The Madrid director of Public Health even resigned in protest over the local government’s drive for further relaxation.

Then the lightning bolt struck.

Ultimately it was up to the Ministry of Health at national level to decide which areas might be allowed to move to phase 1 and which would have to wait. In the end, only 51% of Spanish residents will be making the transition. Madrid certainly won’t. But even within the Valencian Community, only a few smaller regions will be allowed to, but most won’t, including the city of Valencia itself. That covers us.

Why won’t we be allowed to move to the next phase?

The Health ministry has looked at the trends in infections and compared them with the number of general and intensive care unit beds in the hospitals. They’ve looked at testing and infection monitoring facilities. They’ve looked at a range of factors. Their conclusion? Like Madrid, we’re not yet ready to manage the risks, or to handle a resurgence of cases if one occurs.

That’s not a popular decision. A lot of anger, above all from the Conservative and hard right opposition, has been directed at Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and the Left-leaning coalition government. Even with two parties, it’s in a minority in Parliament and has to depend on smaller groups to get its measures adopted.

That includes the continuation of the state of emergency that’s being used to impose the lockdown. They had the guts to back him when it came up for renewal this week.

Pedro Sánchez battling for his strategy in the Spanish Parliament

It’s not quite clear what his critics expect. Presumably they realise he doesn’t have a magic wand to end the pandemic. Have they perhaps decided that the economic damage of the lockdown isn’t worth the health benefit it’s delivered? That benefit has been considerable, with new cases and deaths both dropping steadily. So do the critics think that money matters more than lives?

The strategy seems to be working

They’re not alone. State after state in the US is opening up. Some, like Nebraska, are doing so at a time when it’s obviously extremely risky. Not only are infections and deaths in Nebraska not falling, they’re rising steeply. But the governor is a strong supporter of Donald Trump, who wants the economy going again to strength his chance of re-election, whatever the cost in lives.

Last week, I wrote about the way lies flourish when people choose to believe them.

The attacks on Sánchez show the reverse side of that same coin. When the truth is unpalatable, people prefer to reject it and attack the bearer of the message. In my earlier piece, I quoted the American journalist H L Mencken. Here’s another view of his which applies just as well outside the US:

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

The truth is that a lot of Spain isn’t ready to move from phase 0 to phase 1 of lockdown relaxation. At least, not without putting far too many lives at risk. Our disappointment is real, but we just have to swallow it.

Otherwise we simply run from the truth. And we belittle human life, like Pete Ricketts, the governor of Nebraska. A far more enlightened governor, Andrew Cuomo of New York, asked recently, “how much is a human life worth?”

Those backing Trump and Ricketts, or attacking Sánchez, probably won’t admit it, but I suspect their answer would be pretty low.

At least, for any life but their own.

Light at the end of the lockdown tunnel

Sunday was a great day.

(Nearly) summertime and the living is easing

It wrapped up week 6 of our lockdown here in Spain and, boy, it’s been (and still is) a tough lockdown. People not absolutely obliged to travel to work are only allowed out to go the shops, the banks, a pharmacy, a healthcare centre or (it may just be me, but I find this amusing) to the newsagent to get a newspaper. Could this be the triumph of the much-maligned Mainstream Media? Of those institutions Trump denounces as purveyors as fake news? Here they have special status.

There are a few exceptions to the lockdown rules. We, by sheer good luck, fall into one of them: dog owners are allowed to walk their dogs, though only close to home. But what exactly is ‘close’? At one time, the suggestion was just 50 metres but, outside the cities, there is slightly more leeway in the definition.

In a spirit of complete compliance with the strict letter of the regulations, I can firmly state that we never go far.

And in strict compliance with the spirit of the regulations, we never meet anyone anyway, so we’re exposing neither ourselves nor them to any risk.

Besides, the smaller dog – Toffee – has developed a certain indolence recently. Since we’re only allowed to walk on the streets, and not in the woods, and she doesn’t like the streets, she’s more than capable of lying down suddenly at the end of her lead – we’re not allowed to take them off the lead – and making it quite clear that she intends to go no further.

That really can happen within 50 metres of home.

The option then is to head back or carry her. And, small though she is, I certainly do not enjoy carrying her far. That too helps to keep the definition of ‘close’ to within pretty tight bounds.

The only people allowed out under any of these arrangements were, in any case, adults or kids of 14 or over. The only exception were children with a single parent or carer: when the adult went out, the kids necessarily went with them. But all other kids were stuck indoors. Which is pretty soul-destroying if you think that the lockdown was just coming up to the end of six weeks.

Lovely weather AND the kids are out again

That’s what made Sunday so great. The Spanish government decided that the downward trend in numbers of Coronavirus cases and, above all, of deaths was sufficient to allow a little slackening of the rules. And the big deal was that kids up to 14 would now be able to go out, for an hour a day, to play as they wished, with no particular destination in mind. They could take toys, scooters, skates or even bikes. A single adult could accompany them, taking care of up to three kids.

What made things even better was that the weather had just turned glorious. To me, still retaining British criteria, it felt like summer, with temperatures in the mid-twenties (OK, OK, high seventies if you insist on using that old-fashioned Fahrenheit). No one from around here would call that summery, of course. They’d just say, “just you wait. You’ll see what real summer is like. You’ll be regretting the rain.” And I know they’re right: we were here last summer. Even so, Sunday felt good and raised my spirits, for both the weather and the unusual sight of families out walking.

People did cheat a bit. There were a lot of family groups out, with what looked distinctly like two parents with the kids. And at times different families met up and chatted, not always, as far as I could tell, respecting social-distancing requirements.

In our local city, Valencia, things were worse. The council, unlike its opposite numbers in Madrid, decided to reopen the parks for the first time. A flood of humanity descended into them. The police were nice, though. They announced in the evening that they’d gone round that day telling people what they should be doing and, above all, what they shouldn’t, without fining anyone. But that was a one-off ‘pedagogical experience’. From Monday on, it would be fines again. And they’re not cheap here.

The weekdays have seen a return to something more orderly. People are still out, and the weather’s still good, but social distancing has become the norm again.

Now we’re waiting for the next step. The Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said that the exit from the lockdown will take up to eight weeks, until the end of June. That’ll make 14 weeks in all, which sounds a bit right: Wuhan in China is approaching three months.

The exit will happen in steps, making it a lockdown stepdown, I suppose. The stages will be timed differently in different regions. The first step, however, has already been announced. As of the coming Saturday, we adults will also be allowed out, for the first time since the whole business started, for an hour’s exercise or walking a day. And we don’t even have to go out alone but can walk with others from our household. In my case, that means that I can enjoy Danielle’s company, though if our cat Misty wants to join us, I dare say we won’t object to his coming along too.

That’s subject to things continuing to go well. But yesterday saw the lowest number of new cases registered since the lockdown began, so I’m feeling a little optimistic.

There could be light at the end of this particular tunnel.

Love and bingeing through the lockdown

Lockdown, I’ve discovered, is a good time for a Love binge.

No, no, not that kind. I’m talking about bingeing on TV series about Love. And there are three we’ve been enjoying recently on that theme. One of them goes so far as to take the remarkably original title, Love.

Only one of them is new, so you may know them anyway. But just in case, here are my recommendations.

Johnny Flynn and Antonia Thomas in Lovesick
Having fun (left) and not so much (right)

Let’s start with Lovesick, a British series, jointly produced by Channel 4 and Netflix. It’s based in Glasgow (though you have to work that out for yourselves, and the accents are almost all English). It’s still available on Netflix.

The premise amused me: a young man (Johnny Fynn) diagnosed with chlamydia has to contact all his sexual partners of the last several years, of whom despite his obvious emotional clumsiness and ineptitude in relationship-building, it turns out there are a large number.

He’s surrounded by a diverse crew of friends, including the would-be gigolo (Daniel Ings) who’d rather not be (OK, you have to watch the series to get that), the friend (Joshua McGuire) for whom every relationship is long-term until it blows up in his face, and the young woman (Antonia Thomas) whose attraction for one particular young man (no, no spoilers here) is veiled by a series of attachments that could never prove as satisfactory.

Around them is a string of secondary characters with their idiosyncrasies and their peculiar stories which keep the series moving nicely through its 22 episodes in three seasons (originally released between 2014 and 2018). Cleverly, all the characters occasionally do things that are off-putting, but then win their way back into our affections in other, more attractive ways. 

Overall, there wasn’t a character I didn’t feel I liked, at least most of the time. Which is a great relief, since I’ve seen – and abandoned – plenty of series where I feel that no one appeals to me.

Mae Martin and Lisa Kudrow in Feel Good
Charlotte Ritchie is behind them

The second series is new (released in 2020), with only one six-episode season so far. Feel Good is also British, and made jointly by Channel 4 and Netflix. There’s no confirmation of a second season yet, though it would surprise me if there weren’t one (though perhaps delayed by coronavirus).

It’s a semi-autobiographical look at the life of the acting lead and co-writer (with Joe Hampson) of the show, Mae Martin. She’s a Canadian-born stand-up comic, based in Britain since 2011.

Martin’s a good standup and we got some amusing comedy scenes (not quite as many or as extended as in The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, but nonetheless of the same general kind). She’s also an attractively complex individual, who resists being categorised as either bisexual or lesbian, and identifies as either non-binary or a woman, using the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘they’. No problem there, as I’ll use whatever pronoun about them that she wants.

From the first episode, Mae gets into a new relationship with a straight woman (Charlotte Ritchie), ironically called George, and the rest of the season takes us on a roller coaster ride of their relationship, mixed in with the problems of coping with addiction (or with an addicted friend) and of handling the stereotypically awful British family of George’s friends.

Everything’s treated with a deft and light touch, making the even some difficult scenes beautifully comic. There’s also a wonderful performance by Lisa Kudrow as Mae’s mother (she says her own parents are nothing like the depiction in the series, and I can only say, just as well). An unusual, quirky and beautifully funny series.

Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust in Love
Their roller coaster has troughs as well as peaks

Finally, there’s that series with the startlingly distinctive title, Love. That name’s so distinctive that, for the first time ever, I couldn’t use the title to track the entry down on IMDB.

You don’t know IMDB? It’s the best, most comprehensive internet movie database there is. Funnily enough, that’s what IMDB stands for, by the way.

The only way to search for it, I found, was to look for the name of Paul Rust, and then pick the series title from the list of his filmography. That’s quite appropriate, as it happens, since Rust is a highly talented individual, who’s both an accomplished scriptwriter and a fine actor. He’s the co-creator, one of the producers and a star of the show.

His co-star is Gillian Jacobs as the wacky non-conformist with the addicted personality (yep, we get some addiction in this series too), who has a bit of a rocky ride with Rust’s character. Like Lovesick, there’s a large collection of secondary characters, each funny in his/her/their way (see? I’m learning about personal pronouns). And, again like Lovesick, the behaviour of the main characters makes them absolutely unbearable at some moments, though at others they redeem themselves, so you can’t help sympathising with them generally.

I have to confess that we’ve only watched season 1 so far, but we’ve enjoyed it enormously. It’s a Netflix series that ran from 2016 to 2018, with 34 episodes over three series. My suspicion is that when we get to the end, I shall feel as many others have, that it was cancelled too soon.

Still, it has all the qualities one needs to get through some more of the Lockdown with sanity undisturbed…

Getting carried away by the community spirit

I get these enthusiasms, sometimes. I really ought to learn to resist them. They only ever get me into trouble.

Our neighbourhood meets nightly to applaud healthcare workers

In my defence, I’ve been impressed by the way the lockdown has brought out the best in our neighbours, in the little group of houses where we live just outside Valencia. We’ve had gifts of oranges and lemons (no, nothing to do with St Clements) from one neighbour, and we’ve had full meals from others – a paella from one, lentils from another, from a third a rice dish which we were told was absolutely not a paella though to my untrained eye it looked exactly like one (apparently it was made from mountain rice, not rice from the plains where we live, which makes it absolutely, definitely and undeniably not a paella).

From a neighbour: a rice dish (definitely not paella)
and home-made turón (nougat) as a dessert

Danielle responded in the Marie-Antoinette spirit, letting them eat cake. On one occasion she made a lemon drizzle cake, from some of the lemons we were given, and on another an orange cake, from the oranges. Both were delicious and well received.

And that’s when the enthusiasm grabbed me.

“What can I do?” I thought. Followed by a brainwave. “I know! I can cook for everyone.”

“Not for everyone,” said Danielle, incredulously.

“Well, why not?” I replied. “I can do something easy.” And, as an afterthought, I added, “easy and not too expensive.”

That was because I’d first toyed with the idea of doing a smoked salmon kedgeree, one of the dishes I most like preparing, but which costs a small fortune (I’m still paying off the last one).

“I know,” I went on, “given my Italian roots, I’ll make a pollo alla cacciatora.”

I was born in Rome, you see. Still, I guess you can call the dish ‘hunter’s chicken’, given where I got the recipe from. That’s how I cook, by the way. Always from a recipe. I lack the genius to just sort of invent dishes, or improvise them. And in this instance, I was going to use a recipe from the Guardian newspaper.

Well, as the Guardian itself keeps reminding me, ‘trust has never mattered more’. If I turn to the Guardian for reliable information, I might just as well turn to it for my recipes, too. After all, I only have to swallow the information metaphorically; cooking I have to swallow literally.

Got to be sure you can trust the source when you’re going to eat the product.

The sauce too.

Danielle kindly did the shopping. We pretend that’s because I need extra protection from potential carriers of the Coronavirus – men are more inclined to die of it than women, and we suspect Danielle’s already had it anyway, so she may be immune. 

The reality is that her going instead of me has little to do with the pandemic. It’s more that she picks all the things she wants from one supermarket aisle before going into another aisle. I, because I can never remember where anything else is, pick up things from coolers at one side of the supermarket, next go over to the far side to get some fruit, then come back to the freezers, before remembering that I needed vegetables as well as fruit, and they’re right next to each other.

This means that it takes me three times as long as it takes her, and usually I come back having failed to find at least two items from the list.

Finally, the day dawned for my great act of community service. The cooking time was only three-quarters of an hour. I called it an hour to allow for slippage. Another hour would cover chopping carrots and celery and garlic. And then I built in an extra hour just for leeway.

Given that I was preparing a lunch for Spaniards, so for 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, I started work at 11:00.

Do you know, chopping stuff for 16 people takes far, far longer than chopping for three or four? Who knew?

I raced the clock. But when the time got to 2:05 with the 45-minute cooking time still not started, I had to acknowledge the inevitable. Lunch was going to be late even by Spanish standards. It was a depressing realisation. I’d made a commitment. I wasn’t going to keep to it. Honestly, it made me feel like a politician. Really bleak.

That’s the thing with my enthusiasms. I set myself up for failure.

Still, late as it was, in the end the lunch wasn’t a complete washout. Normally you should serve a cacciatora with rice or polenta, but I’m not cooking rice for the connoisseurs in the Valencia region, and I’ve never even tried my hand at polenta. They got mashed potato instead. Well, I fancied it. And it’s not something that gets served much around here.

“Mashed potato!” said one of the neighbours, “just like my mother used to make.”

My Guardian-based pollo alla cacciatora.
And definitely not polenta

I can’t be sure that’s a compliment, but I’ve decided to take it as one.

They all said they liked the meal, anyway. I tried it myself, and it seemed OK, so perhaps they weren’t just being polite. After all, it was made with Danielle’s ingredients, a ridiculous amount of work by me, and the backing of the supremely trustworthy Guardian.

There was no good reason for it to go wrong, right? It just represented a lot more work than I’d hoped.

Me and my bursts of enthusiasm.

A bunch of swallows may make the spring

With Spain moving into week 5 of the coronavirus lockdown, we’re counting our blessings here near Valencia. The chief of which is that spring seems to have come at last.

As the lockdown started, so the weather broke. For the first two or three weeks, Valencia seemed intent on making sure that the reservoirs were all full and the new growing plants well-watered. Hardly a day went by without some rain, and in many cases, several hours of the wearisome stuff.

It was as though the very heavens were weeping out of sympathy for our sad, locked-down state.

The reality, of course, is that nature is entirely indifferent to the disruption to our lives. The first hint of that was when we came downstairs one morning to a veritable racket of birdsong. Honestly, if it wasn’t deafening, it wasn’t far off.

“The housemartins are back!” I called to Danielle.

The housemartins return. And that's their nest under our porch

We went out to check, and there they were. Not just one pair, but two, apparently in some rivalry over the tidy little nest in the porch over our front door. By the end of the morning, one pair had established their property rights over it, though oddly enough they were the smaller birds of the four.

They, it seems, are going to be our guests this summer.

Well, I say our guests. I suspect from their point of view, we’re the lumbering irritants who keep coming out of the great unknown space behind their home, disturbing their peace of mind each time we do so. Still, we like to think of the nest as attached to our house, and of them as our housemartins.

They’d been there to greet us when we first moved in last year. We’d been anxiously awaiting them this year, since the beginning of March, wondering each day what had become of them. After all, the nest was right there where they’d left it, just as the architect who was overseeing the work we had done before we moved in had made clear to us.

“You can’t remove the nest,” he told us earnestly, “it’s against the law.”

We had no intention of removing it. The birds were more fun to watch than some of the TV series with which we fill our lockdown evenings. We saw the pair who were staying with us bring up not one, but two clutches of fledglings. Every time we came in, we’d see the heads sticking out of the nest, until eventually they flew off, only to be replaced within a couple of weeks by some more youngsters.

Eventually, they left us again in the autumn. Which, I feel, rather makes the point of their being guests. After all, we’re here the whole year around. They just turn up when it suits them, treating the place as a motel. I’m surprised they haven’t asked us to do their washing for them.

Anyway, they’re back. It’s said that one swallow – and housemartins are swallows – doesn’t make a summer. But there’s a whole bunch of them now, because it’s not just our house that’s received its visitors, but several of our neighbours too. And the warm weather turned up bang on cue right after them.

Which has come as a great pleasure not just to us, but to the other animals we share this house with.

Misty, now a venerable cat, who takes what pleasure he can from just watching birds and dreaming of the past when he would have quickly converted them into pleasant snacks, enjoys lying on the sun-warmed grass. Luci, the black toy poodle likes the sun too. But of all three, none is a more shining example of what it is to be a fully committed sun worshipper than the apricot toy poodle, Toffee.

She’ll share the pleasure willingly with either Misty or Luci if they care to join her. But if they don’t, that’s fine too. She just flops down on the grass in complete contentment, giving us all an object lesson in what it truly means to relax.

Toffee really understands what it is to bask in the spring sunshine
But she's happy to share it with others if they feel the inclination

Like the swallow, Toffee’s a true herald of the coming summer. Which is a welcome break from all that rain. Why, it may even make the lockdown bearable.

As the lockdown starts to fray

Necessary though it certainly is, the coronavirus lockdown starts to become painful after a time. Especially when the weather turns good.

One of my favourite places for walks
A nostalgic old photo. The place is out of bounds now

We live just three or four minutes’ walk from a stretch of woodland where, at one time, I took great pleasure going for walks, with or without the dogs. In these days of lockdown, however, it’s strictly forbidden to do so. Verboten. I look at it longingly as I take dogs past it – yes, Spain still allows us to walk dogs, though only a short distance from home – but I don’t dare go in.

Not everyone does the same. We’re into the fourth week of lockdown here, and we’ve noticed walkers sneaking in, some – oh horror! – even without dogs. Runners too. Even mountain bikers. The lockdown may just be starting to unravel.

When I say that I personally don’t go into the woods, I don’t mean that I never have. I did take to interpreting the ‘short distance from home’ condition on dog walks a little liberally. But one day I was caught by a forest ranger on one of the main paths through the woodland (oh, why didn’t I stick to the small paths?) and he told me, politely but oh-so-firmly, to stay out.

Well, get out first. Then stay out.

I’m British, with the Brit’s respect for the law. In case you’re from some less enlightened country and don’t know our customs, that means understanding that the crime isn’t actually committing it, it’s being caught. If you get away with it once then, hey, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll get away with it again, so you keep trying your luck.

But having been caught once, you don’t try again. A warning the first time? A lucky break. But the next time? That could mean a fine. And the prospect of that fine ratchets up the Brit’s famous respect for the law in me.

Anyway, the little breaches of the rules in our neck of the woods are pretty minor. If you want a real infraction, you just have to go down the coast a bit of a way from here, to the lovely seaside resort of Dénia. It seems 70 families have quietly moved in to their second homes there, no doubt in time for the Easter break.

Dénia and its many charms. Some, apparently, irresistible

That, naturally, is entirely against the lockdown regulations. It must have taken them quite a bit of ingenuity too, especially any coming from Madrid. The police are patrolling the motorways pretty intensively – there are even helicopters out – so they must have come by back roads, to dodge the checks.

They’re there now, anyway. One can imagine that it would be quite a task to chuck them all out and get them back to where they came from. With appealing pragmatism, the mayor has said they can stay, though possibly with a touch of vindictiveness, he’s added that they can’t go to the beach. But then, nor can anybody, so they’re hardly being discriminated against.

Police checking the authenticity of shopping

Much the best case I came across, though, was the little old lady who the police saw walking along a street. She was carrying a shopping bag with a loaf of bread sticking out of it. OK, fine, the cops thought, she’s been to the bakers. But then they saw her again a couple of hours later, again with her shopping bag and a loaf. Did she perhaps not get enough bread first time and have to pop out again? They let the matter pass.

But when they saw her a third time, with bag and loaf, they decided that this really was going over the top. They stopped her and took a look at the bread. 

You could have hammered nails with it, it was that hard.

Poor thing. All she wanted was to get out for a walk from time to time. I just hope the fine wasn’t too painful.

The lockdown’s necessary, as I said. But it can start to get on your nerves after a while. And it certainly feels, here in Spain, that it may just be beginning to fray a little at the edges.

Great way to binge through the lockdown

Unorthodox. Shira Haas in Berlin’s Wannsee lake

Even at the best of times, Danielle and I enjoy binging on TV series.

Obviously, it helps if they’re good. Or at least that we like them. But I have to admit that there have been occasions when, watching episode four of the third season of a series, one of us will turn to the other and point out:

“This really isn’t very good, is it?”

“No,” replies the other, “I can’t relate to any of the characters and I don’t care what happens to them next.”

Quite a discovery after 28 episodes.

This isn’t the best of times. During a Coronavirus lockdown, binge watching isn’t just an indulgence (OK, OK, if you prefer, an over-indulgence), it’s also an excellent way of spending evenings when you’re obliged to stay in.

For the moment, we’re still being fairly discriminating. If the lockdown goes on long enough, we may well be forced, as we start season 3 of something mediocre, to say, “well, we may not relate to any of the characters or care what happens next but, hey, there’s nothing else on that we haven’t already seen”. But recently, we’ve seen some pretty great things.

Billions was gripping, even if at times I couldn’t bear any of the characters. That, actually, was something the writers pulled off pretty cleverly, making one character or another off-putting for a while, and then making him or her sympathetic again. A smart trick if you can make it work. Which they did.

Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis in Billions
A near-deadly rivalry. Except when it isn’t

For those who don’t know the series, it’s about a successful hedge fund manager (Damian Lewis) whose activities sail close to the illegal, if not right over the edge into the downright criminal, as claimed by a US attorney (Paul Giamatti) intent on bringing him down.

Just like our sympathies for the characters, the show’s writers keep changing the direction of the two men’s antipathies. Now they’re intent on destroying each other, then they turn their animosity onto someone else. Around them, in a first-class cast, stand some extraordinary characters, including an outstanding non-binary figure (“my pronouns are 'they, theirs, and them’”) played by a non-binary actor, Asia Kate Dillon. Just as good is Maggie Siff as the psychiatrist and wife of the US Attorney. All in all, it’s pretty enthralling.

Equally worth seeing is For All Mankind. This is an alternative-reality story, where the space race between the US and the Soviet Union goes on far longer, and extends far further, than actually happened. Again, there are plenty of excellent performances, as well as plenty of fine shots of rockets taking off or of explorers working on the moon, alongside plenty of tense sequences, mostly in space but sometimes also in the homes of the astronauts and other NASA staff we follow.

It’s gripping with its tension, and all the more watchable for the sense of plausibility it manages to create.

Working on the Moon, in For All Mankind

Far better than anything else, however, is Unorthdox. Based in part on Debora Feldman’s autobiography Unorthodox, the Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots, it’s a four-episode mini-series, about a young woman, Esty, brilliantly played by Israeli actor Shira Haas, from an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.

The central concern is whether she’ll be able to get away.

This is the first Netlfix series filmed predominantly in Yiddish, the language spoken by that community rather than Hebrew. Haas had to come over a month early to Berlin, where the series was filmed, to learn the language.

The series shows both the community, with its everyday existence and its rituals back in Brooklyn, in the form of flashbacks to Esty’s life there, spliced into scenes of the life she is now working to build for herself in Berlin. The flashbacks include her marriage and, in some poignant but intensely comic moments, the difficulties she has consummating it, difficulties considerably worsened by the fact that her husband tells his mother everything, and she insists on tutoring Esty on how to steel herself to have sex.

Sex is key because her fundamental obligation is to produce children. To her too, this is a sacred duty. “We’re rebuilding the six million lost,” she declares, “Jews killed in the Holocaust.” But that doesn’t make sex with the husband she married by arrangement any less painful.

Esty (Shira Haas) at the Wannsee, still dressed as a Hasid (left)
and as she begins to forge a new life for herself

In a key scene from the first episode, a group of student friends she has just made takes Esty down to the beautiful Berlin lake, the Wannsee. It’s a place where people go to walk or relax or swim. But in 1942, it was the venue for the Wannsee Conference which took the decision to wipe out the Jewish population of Europe.

When Esty first sees the lake, she’s left speechless. But then Robert, one of the students, says:

“It’s nice, right? But you see that villa? The conference where the Nazis decided to kill the Jews in the concentration camps took place in 1942. In that villa.”

She looks at the villa.

“And you swim in this lake?” she replies.

He laughs. “The lake is just a lake,” he says.

Esty water into the water, still wearing her skirt and one of her two long-sleeved shirts. She takes off the wig that orthodox Jewish women wear after marriage. Under the wig, her head is practically shaved. She drops the wig in the water.

That gesture reminds me of a Jewish friend of ours who told us of a moment when her children were playing with others in a local park. Another Jewish woman came over to remonstrate with her for letting them play with non-Jewish kids.

Infuriated, she went straight over to a bridge across a stream at the edge of the park and threw her wig in it. She never wore one again.

Throwing a wig into water speaks to me powerfully about bids for freedom.

Haas says that the story is “about the right to have your voice”. It certainly is. Indeed, if you watch it to the end, you’ll discover why that’s a particularly apt summing up.

Unorthodox is an excellent way of spending an evening. A great break from the lockdown. You might even manage to spread it to two, though we went through all four episodes in just one sitting.

It was that compelling.

Coronavirus lockdown and last time enjoyments

Our local sports club, usually a centre for people and pleasure
Now abandoned for the duration

The streets are emptying here in Spain.

We had two friends from France staying with us last week and took them to Valencia’s main station on Sunday, for the first leg of their trip home. That was the day before the start of the full Coronavirus lockdown across the country, but already the streets were deserted.

Valencia, capital of the fiesta, now nearly a ghost tow

Particularly striking was the five-mile long park that runs along the old riverbed. It is one of the city’s most impressive resources, with its football pitches, its rugby ground, its baseball diamond, its running tracks, its cycling paths, its athletics stadium and, above all, its green spaces where people meet to dance or to chat, to party or to sunbathe.

This time there was no one.

That was the culmination of a strange week. Circumstances changed gradually, day by day, but anything but slowly. And we had to adapt to stay in step.

On Monday, we were still expecting the great Fallas fiesta to start on the following Sunday, though anxiety and anger was climbing against the authorities for not cancelling it. Hundreds of thousands thronging the streets? It seemed irresponsible at best.

On Tuesday, the fiesta was cancelled.

Then we had a whole string of ‘last time’ moments. Obviously, we hope they won’t be truly last times, that the epidemic will end and we’ll get through it, so that we can start doing all these things again. But these were the last times before the lockdown.

At that time, Danielle was in the Madrid region. She’s been travelling there weekly for some time now, to look after our new granddaughter Matilda so that her parents could go back to work. What we didn’t know was that last week would be the last time she’d do that until the end of pandemic.

She came home on Wednesday with our French friends. Her last railway trip for the foreseeable future.

On Thursday, we took our friends around Valencia, wandering the streets and popping into various places we felt they ought to see. That might mean somewhere cultural or just pleasurable, such as the Museum of Modern Art, or a restaurant we’ve come to know and love, or the main square with its masked Fallas sculpture, or our final port of call, the glorious Café de la Horas which serves the best Agua de Valencia in the city.

Fallas sculpture dedicated to women
now with an anti-virus mask

Danielle disagrees that it’s the best, but she admits it’s pretty close to the top. And, for those who may not know this fine beverage, let me say that the word ‘agua’ (water) is misleading, as is the fact that it’s made mostly of orange juice. It isn’t the orange juice that provides the kick.

The Cafe de las Horas
Not just splendid for its kitsch but for its outstanding Agua de Valencia

All these visits were last times.

On Friday, we took our friends on a walk with the Community Walks group we belong to, partly for the exercise though mostly for the company. We even began planning another walk for the following Friday, not realising that this too had been a last-time occurrence.

On the way back, we decided to have lunch in a local restaurant. I phoned ahead to book a table. “For now?” they asked and when I confirmed that it was, “oh, then, no problem,” they replied. I realised later why they’d hesitated. The local government authorities had closed all bars, cafes and restaurants throughout the region, from that evening. Lunch had been our last chance to eat out.

And finally, on Saturday we took our friends to one of the local beaches. That was something I didn’t expect to be forbidden any time soon. I was so wrong. The axe of the nationwide lockdown fell the following day, so our walk along the beach – which I’m delighted we enjoyed – turned out to be the last of our last time pleasures.

Last beach walk.
We even had a pair of acrobats to admire

Our friends are back home in France, just in time to beat the lockdown. We took advantage of taking them to the station to pause a moment in the old city. For the last time.

We’re now adapting to an indefinite period of confinement. Apart from work, medical needs or basic shopping including food, the only reason we’re allowed out at all is to walk the dogs, and we’ve even had a loudspeaker van touring the area to warn us that it’s one person with dogs, and it’s take them out, take them back, no more.

It looks like we’ll be catching up on a lot of reading over the next few weeks, and binge-watching a few series. We just have to hope we don’t go stir crazy.

Still, if it minimises the impact of the pandemic and helps us through it, that’ll be a price worth paying. 

Even though it’s a pretty high price.