Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain*
HAPPY EASTER DAY OR PASSOVER TO ALL PRACTISING CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH READERS
AND THE SAME TO ALL AGNOSTIC AND ATHEIST READERS ALSO STUCK AT HOME BUT NOT POSSIBLY POINTLESSLY PRAYING FOR AN ESCAPE.
Spain: Three million folk there might already have developed (short-term) immunity. I can't say I really understand how significant this is. But perhaps I read the article too fast.
Sweden: Still testing the theory of 'herd immunity'. On this, Richard North comments today: The Ro of Covid-19 might be higher than forecast, with the US CDC recently suggesting it could be 5.7. That means we will have to achieve a herd immunity in the region of 85% in order to suppress any further infection.
The UK: Richard North again: Eventually, this government will have to rediscover the value of localism, using the untapped skills and resources of local communities. [The German (and Spanish?) model]. Until then, we will see ministers flounder in their fog of ignorance, while the epidemic continues and the economy turns from recession to depression. And again: As for the encouraging articles about a vaccine being ready by September, even at best we are still looking at about a year before any vaccination can take effect and 18 months to two years is still looking more realistic. Not a natural optimistic, Dr North. But very possibly a realist.
Life in the Time of Something Like Cholera
- María's Chronicle, Day 28.
- Some observations from a shopping expedition* of yesterday:-
- - There was a 100m queue to get into the fish and seafood market.
- As María says, life goes on. As here.
- And, less welcomingly, here.
- Everyone was dutifully at least a metre apart.
- The 'guard' letting us in one-by-one was wearing gloves but no mask
- Mercadona now have someone at the entrance telling you to gel-ify your hands and then giving you thin plastic gloves to put on.
- It's impossible to open a thin plastic bag for your veg when you're wearing thin plastic gloves.
- Walking around a busy supermarket in Spain is now like being in the Middle East; a stream of masked women showing only beautiful brown eyes.
- There was nothing in short supply, except very fine, caster sugar, which I don't think they ever stock, as I was directed to icing sugar (azúcar glas). [Damn. I've just seen that translated also as caster sugar!]
- Disappointingly, only 1 of the 6 wines featured in the recent article on Mercadona wines was on the shelves and I've had a lot of it over the years. So there was nothing new to try.
*Usually I do my utmost to minimise these. Now I'm finding excuses not only to make them but also to dawdle once in the shop - not race through with my list as I usually do.
The USA
The Way of the World
- This is Fart at his most ignorant and stupid. And, boy, is that saying something:-
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY TO ALL!
Some nice ripostes here.
- Nice to see the OFC getting a message from the North Korean monster:-
- This, of course, takes us back to the Spanish insult gilipolla, which reader Perry thinks can't mean both dickhead(British) and asshole(US).
- Who's profiting from this crisis? Click here for one view.
- Naturally enough, in the middle of a global crisis there's a spate of articles on how things will soon change for the better. At a macro level, here's one on the widely held view that the pandemic will finally force the current (unacceptable) model of capitalism to be modified for the better.
- At a micro level, the writer of the article below believes forecasts of change are pious baloney.
Spanish
- Word/Phrase of the Day:- Nice: Agradable; Bonito; Bueno. Allegedly.
- Some 19th century English from William Penn, the father of the founder of the eponymous US state: It is an happiness to be delivered from a curious mind, as well as from a delicate palate. For it is not only a troublesome but a slavish thing to be nice. Interesting to see how the meaning of 'nice' has changed. Except, perhaps, in the case of 'nice distinction'.
THE ARTICLE
We say everything will change but it won’t: Matthew Parris, the Times
When the pandemic fades away, all of the guff about social revolutions and binning the 9-to-5 will disappear with it
In commentaries, phone calls and conversations conducted at two-metre range during this coronavirus emergency, it has become almost obligatory to remark that “after this is over”, “nothing will ever be the same again”, and we must “learn the lessons” it can teach us. Each makes a wrong supposition. First, there will never be a moment when we can say that “this” is “over”. Second, in due course and very gradually, most things will indeed be the same again. Third, it’s very doubtful we shall spend time and money learning the Covid-19 pandemic’s lessons.
Experience suggests a gentle slipping back, after much handclapping for the NHS and levels of self-righteousness that I’m beginning to find unbearable, into our bad old ways. A corrective is needed to the conventional wisdom that when the pressure’s off we’ll still want to do all the things we’re resolving to do now the pressure’s on. We won’t. We so rarely do.
There are a handful of big exceptions. Both 20th-century world wars brought social and technological change. But the great lesson of which everyone talked at the end of both — how to stop the next one — never bore fruit. The post-WW1 League of Nations finally failed, just as the post-WW2 United Nations seems to be failing and the European Union faltering. Will the EU “learn the lessons” of Covid-19, not only in help from its richest members to its most devastated economies but in the sharing of sovereignty in medical research, border restrictions and pandemic control? It looks unlikely. If only the phantom of Brussels power-grabbing that our Brexiteer propaganda conjured up were real. Right across our continent we could do with it now.
In truth, and though it may not feel like that just at present, Covid-19 is a modest wobble when set against the great lurches of history. Its most serious effect will not be the actual virus (which, if we ever calm down, will be seen to have been damaging but less than catastrophic) but our decision to trash our economies in order to flatten but lengthen, perhaps indefinitely, its impact. I hope we don’t turn out to have increased the final death-count by extending the pandemic.
Socially and culturally the lasting legacies will surely be insignificant. Clap together as we may, we are not learning deep lessons in community spirit, or in “all pulling together”. We intone such pieties but the reality is that by far the greatest burden is falling on poorer people in more menial jobs. And as we emerge from this crisis we’ll be hit by waves of bankruptcies and the winding up of businesses: knocks against which poorer sections of society and those in semi-skilled or unskilled jobs will be so much less insulated. It will be back to the same old social and economic structures. The rich in Britain always wriggle out of it, somehow.
I’m encountering what is for me an almost intolerable level of guff about reconnecting with nature, learning the joys of contemplation, home-cooking, realising how much more there is to life than nine-to-five, putting the rhythm of lovely walks and daily exercise back into life, birdsong, etc. Once people need to be in at work for 9am again, it will take a matter of days to disconnect from nature, skip the Zen, head later for a pub or restaurant, and find there just isn’t time for that leisurely walk. As for the joys of close family life, 24/7, parents will run a mile from such bliss the moment government unlocks their gates.
In research conducted in 2009 by Phillippa Lally of University College London, human guinea-pigs were instructed to perform set routines (eating times, exercise, etc) that broke their usual habits. After these “learner-wheel” instructions (as it were) were lifted, the individual was left free to follow their own internal promptings: promptings we call habit. It was remarkable how long the learner wheels were needed before a new-formed “habit” would kick in. Eighteen days was the minimum, but most took much longer, right up to 254 days.
As for the idea that we’ve learnt how social or business meetings can be conducted “virtually” rather than by a physical gathering, I suspect there may be a modest permanent uptake in video-conferencing among business people — by all accounts they work quite well — but virtual drinks will die a death within hours of any lifting of the lockdown. I’ve now recorded two episodes of my BBC Great Lives radio programme where I’ve been in a duvet-lined den at home, and my principal guest, my expert witness and my producers are all in different places. You can do it. But it isn’t the same. Nobody knows how or when to chip in, which is such an important part of human interaction.
I’ve been casting my eye over medium-sized crises in the past 50-odd years, asking what lessons we thought we’d learn, and what lessons we did. We appear to have learnt nothing useful from the 1968 report after the first foot-and-mouth disease agricultural crisis in 1967-68, when 437,000 animals were slaughtered. In the 2001 outbreak some six million animals were slaughtered, it took exactly one day less to contain, everybody talked (again) about vaccination, a subsequent report was critical of the response — and, so far as I can see, has been buried. What’s the betting we carry on now, after Covid-19, as before?
After the 9/11 attack, it was widely believed the future of high-rise office developments in New York would be affected, and some businesses switched to lower-rise premises on the other side of the Hudson River in New Jersey. But a 2006 report found in the longer term there was “scant” if any evidence of an effect on the high-rise office market, and most businesses returned. High-rise office rental and “trophy” towers were in fact less affected than the rest by the 2008 crash.
We too will revert this time. But that is not to say that the Covid-19 emergency will be without consequence as, bit by bit, messily and patchily, we return to normal this and next year. The shadow it will cast will not be over attitudes, lifestyles or values, to which our attachment (and in which our inertia) runs deeper than we know. We’ll just be the same, but poorer and, sadly, somewhat fewer. In a brutal and clumsy attempt to zap a virus, we’ve zapped our whole economy good and proper. I’ll wait with what patience I can muster for this to sink in.
*A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.
We say everything will change but it won’t: Matthew Parris, the Times
When the pandemic fades away, all of the guff about social revolutions and binning the 9-to-5 will disappear with it
In commentaries, phone calls and conversations conducted at two-metre range during this coronavirus emergency, it has become almost obligatory to remark that “after this is over”, “nothing will ever be the same again”, and we must “learn the lessons” it can teach us. Each makes a wrong supposition. First, there will never be a moment when we can say that “this” is “over”. Second, in due course and very gradually, most things will indeed be the same again. Third, it’s very doubtful we shall spend time and money learning the Covid-19 pandemic’s lessons.
Experience suggests a gentle slipping back, after much handclapping for the NHS and levels of self-righteousness that I’m beginning to find unbearable, into our bad old ways. A corrective is needed to the conventional wisdom that when the pressure’s off we’ll still want to do all the things we’re resolving to do now the pressure’s on. We won’t. We so rarely do.
There are a handful of big exceptions. Both 20th-century world wars brought social and technological change. But the great lesson of which everyone talked at the end of both — how to stop the next one — never bore fruit. The post-WW1 League of Nations finally failed, just as the post-WW2 United Nations seems to be failing and the European Union faltering. Will the EU “learn the lessons” of Covid-19, not only in help from its richest members to its most devastated economies but in the sharing of sovereignty in medical research, border restrictions and pandemic control? It looks unlikely. If only the phantom of Brussels power-grabbing that our Brexiteer propaganda conjured up were real. Right across our continent we could do with it now.
In truth, and though it may not feel like that just at present, Covid-19 is a modest wobble when set against the great lurches of history. Its most serious effect will not be the actual virus (which, if we ever calm down, will be seen to have been damaging but less than catastrophic) but our decision to trash our economies in order to flatten but lengthen, perhaps indefinitely, its impact. I hope we don’t turn out to have increased the final death-count by extending the pandemic.
Socially and culturally the lasting legacies will surely be insignificant. Clap together as we may, we are not learning deep lessons in community spirit, or in “all pulling together”. We intone such pieties but the reality is that by far the greatest burden is falling on poorer people in more menial jobs. And as we emerge from this crisis we’ll be hit by waves of bankruptcies and the winding up of businesses: knocks against which poorer sections of society and those in semi-skilled or unskilled jobs will be so much less insulated. It will be back to the same old social and economic structures. The rich in Britain always wriggle out of it, somehow.
I’m encountering what is for me an almost intolerable level of guff about reconnecting with nature, learning the joys of contemplation, home-cooking, realising how much more there is to life than nine-to-five, putting the rhythm of lovely walks and daily exercise back into life, birdsong, etc. Once people need to be in at work for 9am again, it will take a matter of days to disconnect from nature, skip the Zen, head later for a pub or restaurant, and find there just isn’t time for that leisurely walk. As for the joys of close family life, 24/7, parents will run a mile from such bliss the moment government unlocks their gates.
In research conducted in 2009 by Phillippa Lally of University College London, human guinea-pigs were instructed to perform set routines (eating times, exercise, etc) that broke their usual habits. After these “learner-wheel” instructions (as it were) were lifted, the individual was left free to follow their own internal promptings: promptings we call habit. It was remarkable how long the learner wheels were needed before a new-formed “habit” would kick in. Eighteen days was the minimum, but most took much longer, right up to 254 days.
As for the idea that we’ve learnt how social or business meetings can be conducted “virtually” rather than by a physical gathering, I suspect there may be a modest permanent uptake in video-conferencing among business people — by all accounts they work quite well — but virtual drinks will die a death within hours of any lifting of the lockdown. I’ve now recorded two episodes of my BBC Great Lives radio programme where I’ve been in a duvet-lined den at home, and my principal guest, my expert witness and my producers are all in different places. You can do it. But it isn’t the same. Nobody knows how or when to chip in, which is such an important part of human interaction.
I’ve been casting my eye over medium-sized crises in the past 50-odd years, asking what lessons we thought we’d learn, and what lessons we did. We appear to have learnt nothing useful from the 1968 report after the first foot-and-mouth disease agricultural crisis in 1967-68, when 437,000 animals were slaughtered. In the 2001 outbreak some six million animals were slaughtered, it took exactly one day less to contain, everybody talked (again) about vaccination, a subsequent report was critical of the response — and, so far as I can see, has been buried. What’s the betting we carry on now, after Covid-19, as before?
After the 9/11 attack, it was widely believed the future of high-rise office developments in New York would be affected, and some businesses switched to lower-rise premises on the other side of the Hudson River in New Jersey. But a 2006 report found in the longer term there was “scant” if any evidence of an effect on the high-rise office market, and most businesses returned. High-rise office rental and “trophy” towers were in fact less affected than the rest by the 2008 crash.
We too will revert this time. But that is not to say that the Covid-19 emergency will be without consequence as, bit by bit, messily and patchily, we return to normal this and next year. The shadow it will cast will not be over attitudes, lifestyles or values, to which our attachment (and in which our inertia) runs deeper than we know. We’ll just be the same, but poorer and, sadly, somewhat fewer. In a brutal and clumsy attempt to zap a virus, we’ve zapped our whole economy good and proper. I’ll wait with what patience I can muster for this to sink in.
*A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.
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