Day 49 - "Gin and Toksvig"

Spanish Practices

Day forty nine, Gin and Toksvig, Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.

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Day 49 Gin and Toksvig

It is day 49 of our Spanish Lockdown, the start of phase zero and limited outings for exercise both for children and adults. The day is going to be hot so an early start to build some shelves for a cupboard and to finish plastering over the cables I had put in for the wifi. All done by 10am before the sun starts to make things uncomfortable.

10 am is usually second breakfast time for the Spanish, so we had a coffee and a biscuit.

The sudden hot weather has brought with it many, many flies, they get it in the moment you open a door or a window. You can spend a great deal of time chasing them around the place. We have mosquiteros or what the Americans call ‘screens’ and this time of year they are a godsend, that and have persianas or shutters that you can lower to darken a room and finally Toldos – awnings that come down on an electric motor and provide shade for the balcony.

In other words, it is all about opposites, opposite to the British was of letting as much light in, opening every window and sitting outside unprotected by the sun, trying to get some kind of tan before the rain starts again.

It always amuses me on those places in the sun shows, where the voiceover goes.. “and this charming Spanish house has a rooftop solarium.’ Accompanied with a shot of a red painted rooftop. There is no way on gods earth you would want to sit up on a rooftop in the midday sun.. you will die.

Day 49 and we are both getting worried about just how Spain will manage to recover from the pandemic. Not only from a health point of view, but the Spanish economy, which still hadn’t really recovered from the 2008 crisis.

It is quite disconcerting to see the ‘militarising’ of the whole pandemic. Whilst it was sort of reassuring to see soldiers on the streets, it was equally disturbing and you can’t help thinking are the military wondering if this is an opportunity, rather like the 1981 coup d’état when the parliament was stormed by the Guardia who took hostages not before they turned off all the TV cameras.. or so they though. Unfortunately for them, they stupidly left the main camera on and the whole world saw what was going on.

King Juan Carlos denounced the whole affair and although shots were fired, the hostages were released without anyone being killed.

I worry that if Spain does not get some kind of tangible help from the E.U. the country will face bankruptcy, not at all a healthy situation for the European Union, but much worse for the ordinary Spanish who have weathered the storm of financial crisis that has dragged on since 2008, now only to get another even bigger wave of possible poverty and loss of employment and services.

We shall have to wait and see what the response is from the E.U. You always get the feeling that the far right is quietly waiting in the wings for another chance at a more successful coup d’état. This time they will remember to switch all the cameras off in the Congress of Deputies.

Day 49 and the afternoon has been glorious and I have been for a chilly swim with Chris he insists on proper swimming, today 100 six metre lengths.

Then my phone went off, I am trying to make the weekends different by not reading emails or going to much on social media, most weekends I fail, but Lockdown kinda merges all the days into each other – and that isn’t healthy.

The message read ‘have you finished the timecode editing.’ It was from my client Tony, woops, I thought the deadline was Monday, so I have spent an hour or so doing some work for him.

I got into Podcasting by accident, I was working on the Sandi Toksvig show on LBC in about 2005 when we noticed this new thing called Podcasting that was happening in the U.S.

Sandi is an Americophyle and she had noticed that listening to audio files called Podcasts seemed to be growing in popularity in the states and were starting to be listened to in the UK too.

So I made a ‘podcast’ a special episode of her show with a few extra bits in it. Some very bright guys in engineering got it into the iTunes system and we also posted it online.

We expected maybe a few hundred downloads of the special show. We were right we got three hundred downloads – in the first hour! Then hundreds and hundreds more.

That attracted the attention of ‘The Management’ who decided to offer a subscription Podcast service. The software was designed by a brilliant engineer who the BBC quickly poached to write software for their new on demand service the BBC iPlayer.

And I became the Podcast Manager, not only overseeing everybody’s contribution to the service but having to manage all the subscriptions and payments.. what a bloody nightmare that was. In its time it made a good deal of money, a NDC prevents me from saying how much, but it did well.

Now everybody seems to either about to start or have their own Podcast, even the two of us got in on the act with The Campen Players Podcast.. and now Spanish Practices.

Day 49 is ending and a gin and ginger beer with ice is waiting for me, and we look forward to phase 1 starting in a week or so.