A blue sky day after the full moon slipped away not long before dawn, and up to nineteen degrees too, which is lovely. The walls of the house are starting to retain warmth you can feel when passing into shadow. After domestic tasks and chatting early with Clare, I started work on a script for a pre- Easter video message for the church website, which I'll try and do on my Blackberry, following the advice I have received from Ann, one of the Wednesday Eucharist group back in Pontcanna. She's emailed me a couple of times, as have others in the Parish, and she's followed the recordings I have had uploaded to the Ibiza chaplaincy website.
Much to my surprise, Jayne turned up with my grocery shopping order before lunch. She said that there were very long queues at Mercadona, and other supermarkets. A controlled entry policy is now in operation admitting so many people, allowing them space, and not letting anyone in until someone comes out. Heaven help you if you forget anything!
In a flash this took me back to days before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the DDR, when ex-Archdeacon Geoff Johnston and I led a small party of people from Halesowen where we served in ministry to the DDR to inaugurate a parish twinning with Leipzig's Stefanausgemeinde. We were in the East the night Erich Honeker resigned, but that's not the point of the story. We westerners noticed how little there was on offer in many stores, and also noticed queues outside supermarkets and bigger shops.
We asked our hosts what this was all about, and we're told that it wasn't just a matter of scarcity of goods, but social convention. "In the west you queue to pay, then leave with your goods. Here we give people space to buy what they can afford at leisure with no need to queue to get out. If you want something, you queue to get in, like at the cinema. Nowadays this protocol is operated by big fashionable consumer and technology outlets when their latest product is launched.
Ironic that now we just need space to avoid contagion.
I was delighted with my box of supplies, including some fresh salmon for Easter Sunday lunch and a bottle of Faustino VII Rioja to toast Christ's resurrection. Jayne had just done several shopping errands for others and still had to do her own big weekend shop. I felt sorry for adding to her work load, but it's not worth putting myself at risk and maybe causing more trouble if I got sick. Since I last checked over a week ago, the confirmed number of coronavirus cases in Ibiza is 130, and there have been no new cases in 24 hours, just a death, of of eight, and over 50 in hospital.
Proportionally, for a population of 148k, it's the least afflicted place in Spain. The overall Spanish toll is colossal but the new infection rate is levelling out now at last, though the number of deaths will continue to rise, fourteen and a half thousand to date, the highest coronavirus death rate in the world, attributed to strategic errors in allowing large mass gatherings at the outset. It's going to have a huge impact on future political and well as economic impact in the country.
In the Balearics there's mild optimism that the State of Alarm will be scaled down after the 26th April. Maybe this will happen for each island, but I can't see how that would extend to resumption of traffic with the mainland, even with contagion tailing off. There's `
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