Update - a week and a day into quarantine

So, what was going to be a 15-day stay-at-home order will now be 30 days, on pain of a €600 fine if you're stopped by the police out and about without good reason. Food shopping, going to work if you're a key worker, etc, is OK. Just being a bit stir crazy and needing to get out is not. Seeing the pictures from Bondi Beach and various places in the UK recently are very frustrating when this thing has already taken so many, and is now taking people known to me. My sincerest condolences to M, E and G for the loss of their father in Madrid. And best wishes to P for the recovery of his father, currently in hospital. This is going to get close to home for a lot of people, including some of those who were in those photos in Snowdonia, the royal parks etc. It's fucking horrible. Stay indoors, people. Seriously - they're not saying this shit for nothing.

I said to mates in a (virtual) drink last week that, in times like this, you see the best and worst in people. So looking up, not down, I'd like to beg your indulgence for a moment while I big up my own missus and some other ladies in our village who have been producing masks for staff at local hospitals, old peoples' residences etc. Now I know the score - they're not going to stop the infection on their own. But I defer to the knowledge of medical professionals here, and the nurses here have told us that not only are they helpful in a clinical environment, but there's a chronic shortage of them here. They're using disposable, paper masks, or nothing at all. Against that, cloth masks are an improvement.

My partner Cris, and others, have answered the call. She has produced hundreds of these things - working from 7am on Sunday, I think it was, through the day, pumping them out as fast as she could. The effort continues and others have joined in – shout outs to Minda, Yoli, Marián, ChuChi, Pura and anybody else I've forgotten or am unaware of, to whom my apologies, for doing the same. What started as a few masks for local nurses has spread to the hospital at a much bigger town about 45 mins away asking for them too. Hundreds are needed, pretty much anywhere that they're used.

They come in a range of looks...

Something for everyone.

My admiration for such gestures, and I've seen many others all over the place from good, selfless people who want to do something positive, is rather tempered by the fact that they're necessary at all. 

We call the everyday heroes and heroines behind these masks, and others like them, 'key workers'. They are indeed the keystones on which any functioning society is based. I know this is hardly original thinking but it's medical staff, teachers, cleaners, transport workers, food industry and chain-of-supply workers, and so on, all those people who are still working now when many others have been told not to, who hold our society up. Any structure, whether actual or abstract, is only as strong as its foundation, no matter the riches at the top. You don't build anything by starting with a 300-ton gold roof and then go about supporting it with balsa-wood and flour'n'water glue.

I haven't heard anybody yet wondering when the hedge fund managers, the currency speculators and stock market players are going to step up and keep things running. I've picked on finance but it could just as easy be, I don't know, YouTube 'influencers', fashion designers or footballers. Nothing personal against any of those people – my point is that the money is all in the wrong damn place. Cuts are routinely made to public health services and a lack of basic stuff like masks, soaps, and staff are the inevitable result, for all the lip service they're then paid by the government when they're front and centre of a crisis like this one.

You can't pay your mortgage, or build hospitals, with lip service. I'd love to believe that when (if) western society recovers from this, this imbalance will be addressed and wealth shared a bit more freely with those who have so little of it but make it possible for others 'above' them in the first place. A pipe dream, of course. You only have to look across the Atlantic so see the 'advice' the dolt in charge over there is giving to know exactly how much the people who profit from the work of others with much less money than them really grasp this reality.

Anyway. Be well, everybody. Stay home if you don't have to go out and listen to the advice of the medical professionals, not the divs selling 'cures' and other charlatans.