State of Alarm - day Forty Five

It's Mayday here, and normally a day of grand fiesta on the island. In the religious calendar it's the feat of San Josep el Trabajador. In fact, the titular feast of the Parish in which I'm residing. In the UK tradition makes this the Feast of St Philip and St James the Apostles, with St Joseph the Worker kept on 19th March, except that in the secular calendar for more than a century Mayday has been Labour Day. I love this cultural messyness, the tension between the local and the universal!

The Spanish government has today published its relaxation of lack-down plan. Church services may resume in the last week of May, just after I am due to leave. People over seventy may walk for an hour between ten and noon, then again between six and seven. Kids and those training for sports get time slots of their own. Nothing is scheduled for between 11.00pm and six in the morning, begging the question - is sleep or staying at home obligatory? Are there sanctions against walking in the dark? I've not seen answers to these questions anywhere. 

It's not clear how any of this will be monitored. It's designed with urban lock-down in mind where CCTV is common, but what about inhabitants of rural areas? Am I meant to walk within a 1km radius of home for one hour a day only? Who is going to check? How will anyone know? Do the authorities have that many surveillance drones en el campo. As ever, the devil is in the detail. At least I can walk out in daylight tomorrow. And if it's safe enough to do that, I can also go to the bank, which is permitted, though it doesn't specify how I should get there, foot, car taxi or bus. It'll all become clear as everyone muddles through, no doubt. 

The farmer opposite came out with his four by four and a trailer today and parked by the pump house. While I was out walking the sound of his chainsaw filled the air, and slowly the trailed filled with logs he'd cut from trees in the arroyo next to the house. I daresay there's some tidying up to be done down there, to reduce the amount of flammable material as a precaution against forest fire, A man with a petrol driven strimmer like the one in the garage downstairs was also out working on the roadside verges for the same reason.

I examined the strimmer downstairs a few days ago and decided it wouldn't be safe for me to try and figure out how to use it and get it working as I'm here on my own. I've done a little manual clearing of vicious spiky growths choking up garden beds but that's painful hard work, to be tackled slowly, with recovery days in between! Accepting one's limitations is part of getting old, I guess.

I prepared most of the material for this weekend's on-line audio service in between usual domestic tasks of the day. The final components will come in tomorrow. I had a two lovely emails, one from Yong locked down in Singapore and another from Fr Rhys, our GP NSM in Canton Benefice. Most of his daily work is now done by phone. Any time he needs to see a patient he has to be kitted out in full PPE gear. And for him it's all so remote from the needs of so many of his patients with chronic health conditions needing to be dealt with. 

While the NHS is coping heroically with the impact of the pandemic, it's a major setback for the objectives of health care as a whole, from which the UK like many other countries will take years to recover. He talked about the shrine created in the closed off porch of St Luke's Parish Church, featuring a votive candle stand in front of a large icon of the Evangelist, emblazoned with an NHS logo. Brilliant cultural adaptation. He was especially pleased that Mother Frances asked him to bless its inauguration. What a super parish I go home to - hopefully!

A wasted bank holiday

The street outside seemed Sunday quiet when I got up this morning and looked outside. Until I went out to get some bread and veg, I didn't realise that today's the Mayday bank holiday. Supermarkets and many other shops, restaurants and bars were closed. Even so, I walked around and found a few small independent shops and greengrocers open, and was able to  buy what I needed.

I couldn't take myself out anywhere during the day, as I had a long incoming call booked with the HSBC business account advisor whose job it is to re-check account holders' identity credentials, and their declarations of trading interest, to make sure that all account activities comply with legislation on money laundering, now imposed on commercial accounts. In order to arrange this Ashley has spent over an hour and a half on two separate occasions in a phone holding queue to understand what is now being asked of him and me, as CBS Limited account signatories and directors, also in my case as the signatory for the CCL account we set up for managing the Crime Manager's salary.

The call was expected at three o'clock, but didn't arrive. Ashley called to check if I'd dealt with it as expected, and was most annoyed to find that the arrangements he'd made hadn't worked, so he spent another half an hour in a telephone queue to the HSBC call centre, only to find there was no trace of the call booked in the register for the day, due to some unnoticed flaw in their diary system, or a mistake on the part of the advisor he'd spoken to. So, he's booked replacement call for 17th May. This has cost him two hours work time. HSBC has millions of UK business clients to whom the new legislation applies. 

It's costly and demanding for them, but in the end clients will be made to pay for this in bank charges. You can be sure of that. The slowness and inefficiency the procedure entails is to my mind symptomatic of an under estimation of the resources required for implementation. Since the great TSB internet banking fiasco of last week, researchers into the security and stability of networked computer banking systems in the U.K. have commented that banking infrastructure is a collection of old (some, very old in computing terms) networks which once served smaller banks and financial institutions which have long since merged with others. The customer web interfaces may look good, but they hide technical disasters waiting to happen. These are a major threat any time a migration of data to a new system is undertaken, as was the case with TSB. 

In the era when banking was labour intensive, it was also highly interpersonal at a local level, so bank clerks and managers knew customers and looked after them. The internet has revolutionised the entire way we do business and look after finances locally and globally. Nowadays the customer constantly has to prove who they are to an impersonal system, often time consuming. This is meant to be progress, but I can't help feeling we've lost the plot somewhere, discarded vital human values.

Anyway, as a result of just hanging around during UK business hours, just in case, I spent time both reading articles and writing all day, but as sunset approached, I went for a brisk speedy walk to the port and back. There were no big cruise ships in today, just the two vessels up for hire, waiting for work presumably. No reason to visit here on a bank holiday, naturally with all the shops and eateries closed down that usually benefit from cruise travellers spending sprees. Even the quays across in the port's industrial zone, occupied by bulk carriers, tankers and container ships lay quiet.