Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain*
Life in Spain in the Time of Something Like Cholera- The Don rides to the rescue. See the article below
- Tim Parfitt talks of common sense here.
- And María writes of her Day 50 here.
- The Malaga council has clarified that, should you venture into water, you're allowed to swim (as it's 'exercise') but not 'bathe'. Which I guess is just standing around.
- Will something similar happen in Spain? Britain's police have told the government it shouldn't rely on them to enforce looser social distancing. Relaxed lockdown restrictions will be impossible to police, they say, and will risk damaging their relationship with the public by requiring officers to enforce them. In the opinion of senior police officers, once the public are given greater freedoms, such as seeing more friends and returning to work, they should be relied upon to do the right thing, while officers refocus on crime.
- Meanwhile . . . In the 4 weeks to 27 April, more than 9,000 fines were imposed in England and Wales on lockdown rule breakers. The government is said to be considering almost doubling the fines to £100 for first-time offenders and increasing them to a maximum of £3,200 for repeat offenders. In contrast, Spain - with a much lower population - saw 650,000 fines in the first month of its lockdown, with the amount ranging from €600 to €30,000. On the first day of relaxation - last Saturday - fines levied nationwide totalled 16,400 and the police had to break up more than 30 botellones (street binging parties of young folk) in Madrid alone. Pick the meat out of that. Can any conclusions be drawn about respective cultures?
- Almost (sur)real life again in Madrid
- Reasonable seasonable eating advice.
- The English will probably find it much easier to talk to strangers when the conversation is conducted five metres apart and behind a mask.
- Sounds familiar: Four million Italians go back to work amid confusion and frustration over new rules. Italians are confused by an increasingly complicated patchwork of 'do’s and don’ts' as the rules soften.
- Another nice impersonation.
- And an interesting - if overly optimistic? - Time front cover:-
The Way of the world
- Despite their popularity, international coronavirus league tables tell us remarkably little. Some countries are more urban than others. Some have older populations. Some have more of their elderly in care homes. Some have higher obesity rates. Some are global transport hubs. Some countries, like China, lie about their statistics. Some collect data quickly, while some do it slowly. Some risk overcounting in the pursuit of accuracy, and some undercount. Some were struck by the pandemic earlier than others. This is not the only uncertainty about data. There remain many known unknowns about Covid-19 itself, such as its exact characteristics and symptoms, the nature of its transmission, and how to treat it. Until we have reliable treatments, and ideally a vaccine, the world will have to live with the virus. Until then, precise judgments about which countries did well or badly will have to wait.
- Thought for the Day 1: Everyone, it seems, feels that 'time' has changed its nature during the lockdowns. Maybe it's simply because we've shifted down a gear or two. So that time passes rather as it does when we're only half awake. Faster. Which is ironic, as it surely should drag.
- Thought for the Day 2: Someone told me 25 years ago that, when you're retired Every day is Sunday. Even more true of a lockdown perhaps.
Don Quixote rides to the rescue of Spaniards in lockdown: Isambard Wilkinson, The Times
A nation mourning its loss of liberty is discovering a new appreciation of the freedoms championed by Miguel de Cervantes’s knight-errant
Don Quixote falls into a state of deep shock when, after one of his mad sallies, he is caged and dragged home on an ox cart. He sits silently, not like “a man of flesh and blood, but a statue of stone”.
It echoes his creator’s own experience of captivity: Miguel de Cervantes was seized by Barbary pirates as he returned from military service and imprisoned in the corsair city-state of Algiers for five years. On his return to Spain he was jailed again, several times.
Recently Spaniards, confined to their homes, have returned to Don Quixote, prompted in part by the annual commemoration of the anniversary of Cervantes’s death in April 1616. Traditionally it is marked by gatherings for marathon readings of his masterpiece. This year the festivities were conducted online, with the young Spanish princesses Leonor and Sofía reading aloud from a work that now speaks to a wider readership, and whose theme about the loss of liberty has taken on a whole new significance.
Manuel Vilas, a Spanish poet, joked that he found himself after just five weeks of confinement quoting Don Quixote’s line: “Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that the heavens gave to men.”
The book has long represented the spirit of freedom, with Don Quixote an eccentric emblem of hope in adversity. In it the errant knight encounters a captive whose story is a thinly veiled autobiographical description of Cervantes’s ordeal in Algiers. The captive describes how he was seized during the sea battle of Lepanto in 1571 against the Ottoman fleet — in which Cervantes fought and was wounded several times by harquebus fire, which crippled his left hand. The captive’s tale concludes with his daring flight from Algiers. “The hope of obtaining my freedom never left me,” says the character.
It is apparently, at least in part, an act of wish-fulfilment by Cervantes, whose four insanely brave attempts to escape from the corsairs all ended in failure. Trinitarian monks finally ransomed him for 500 gold escudos, partially raised by his mother, in 1580.
It was not the end of Cervantes’s experience of confinement. The idea of Don Quixote may have come to the author in prison after he was jailed in Seville over accounting irregularities during his work as a tax inspector. In the preface of the first instalment he wrote that the book was “just what might be begotten in a jail”.
Cervantes was imprisoned again when his rackety household was unjustly implicated in a murder a few months after publication of the first part of the book in 1605.
Both author and Don Quixote, though a hard-boiled curmudgeon, demonstrate remarkable endurance and there is a touching fortitude to his unhinged quest. “For neither good nor evil can last forever and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time good must be close at hand,” Cervantes writes.
And so the book resonates, more loudly than perhaps it has done for years, with the crisis in Spain.
A sort of 17th-century On The Road, its characters seem eternal. The picaresque figures whom Don Quixote and his donkey-mounted sidekick encounter on their travels echo those who in recent weeks have broken the restrictions which allow people out only to walk their dogs — by taking goats and chickens for a stroll instead.
*A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.
No comments:
Post a Comment