By Robbie Broughton
I managed a good 50-55 minutes on the turbo trainer this afternoon which improved my mood remarkably. We’d woken up this morning to rain and really quite cold temperatures, much colder than we’re used to and very unusual for this time of year in Mallorca.
Espe and I got soaked through when I took her for a walk. With her skinny whippet’s frame and Spanish genes, she hates the cold even more than I do and we turned back when she started shivering. It meant we didn’t get to see her donkey friend, or “Burro” as we have rather unimaginatively called him.
Poor weather and lockdown are a bad combination and I slipped into a despondent mood when we got back and I found it really difficult to get motivated. Twitter, Facebook, news updates and Instagram are terribly addictive at times like this and it’s easy to waste vast tracts of time. As ever, physical exercise was the answer and I really got into my training session on the turbo with some banging tunes from a 90’s House Music compilation. Needless to say I felt a million times better afterwards and wondered why I’d wasted all that time earlier.
We’ve moved on from decorating the basement to working on the garden. Our orange orchard was beginning to look scruffy with patchy grass about a foot high, meaning it was strimmer time this week. Who doesn’t love a good strimming session in an overgrown garden?! I then moved onto attacking the encroaching ivy which was threatening to overtake the bougainvillea we’d recently planted. My gardening skills are definitely more about cutting stuff back, preferably with a power tool. Anyway, I found it immensely satisfying although I was told off for trampling all over some bulbs in the flower bed. Well, there’s always going to be a bit of collateral damage, isn’t there?
Since we last added to the blog the UK has finally come into line with the rest of Europe by imposing a lockdown of sorts. And so much has happened other than this in the space of just a few days. It’s been interesting watching all this going on from afar and having been under a lockdown for a week already. Speaking to friends and family and seeing things unfold, there seems to be a very mixed reaction to the restrictions put on people’s lives: the tubes in London are still packed at rush hour and there seems to be a rising panic coming from health workers. The chaos in supermarkets, people congregating in parks under the spring sunshine and bbq parties being broken up by police while others are ‘shielded’ by locking themselves away for 3 months: there’s some pretty bizarre behaviour out there, not helped, I gather by some mixed messages from the government about who should and shouldn’t still be going to work.
I came across this extract from Samuel Pepys’ diary written while London was under a similar curfew back in the 17th Century because of the Black Death. It seems that things haven’t changed much since those times!
And then I found this by F Scott Fitzgerald when he was also under curfew in Nice, south of France during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1920.
I’ve always admired Hemingway - his involvement during the Spanish Civil War and the books he subsequently wrote about it certainly contributed to my own fascination and interest in this country. And I always knew he was a macho, hard-drinking hellraiser. But reading that with the perspective we have now, he doesn’t seem quite the romantic character anymore. Just a bit of an oaf.
