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A Walk In Spain

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes
A yellow flower

We cannot always walk around in circles during a pandemic around where we live. I spent over a year walking around in circles near home in Switzerland but this Christmas I travelled.

I didn’t travel because I wanted to. I travelled because sometimes we need to see family. I also travelled to escape all of the Christmas rubbish in Switzerland.

We are in a pandemic. I haven’t socialised in over two years. If you want me to value Christmas give me a reason to celebrate it. Spending two years in pandemic solitude does nothing to enhance my indifference to Christmas.

I am safer in Spain than I would be in Switzerland. People wear masks in the street, and ffp2 masks at other times. The rate of vaccination is higher and the government stood up to populists. Children, at a young age wear masks. Switzerland saying that children do not want to wear masks is wrong, and shows cultural bias. England has the same problem.

I didn’t wear a mask as I passed people on the walk today but there was plenty of air around. The image you see as a thumbnail has Ibiza in the background. I think that on top of a cliff, in the afternoon, there is enough air to keep virus concentrations to a minimum, not that people on this walk, would make it if they felt bad.

I am demoralised by Switzerland and their indifference to the pandemic, the lack of effort to end it. With the current Swiss attitude the pandemic will last for decades. Migration could still be worthwhile. To a nation where health is valued rather than capital.

If I thought the pandemic had a chance of ending in Switzerland I wouldn’t have left. I would have stayed put. I stopped being like Rieux this year, by travelling twice. Why wait? Nothing will change until those in power are booted out by moral people.

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When Rain Doesn’t Show Up
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When Rain Doesn’t Show Up

Byrichard

They forecast rain and I looked forward to going for a walk and having clean shoes as shoes are washed by the rain keeping shows slick. The rain didn’t come so my shoes got muddy and I stood by the tap trying to get the mud to drain away from between the tread, without much luck. Tomorrow if I run down the stairs as I always do I will leave thick clumps of mud from my apartment down to the garage


Apparently the cleaner doesn’t like seeing clumps of mud that has fallen off shoes. If I was a cleaner I’d be happy. I’d ask if they want to increase the frequency of my visits, or alternatively I would ask for a shoe brush to be placed at the front door, so that people may clean their shoes before coming in.


Of course, in the 21st century shoes never get muddy because they are worn from the car park, for the walk and back. People never go for muddy walks without the car so they never have muddy shoes by the time they get home. By that time their shoes, and the mud has dried, and fallen off inside the car.


It is absurd that someone would go for a walk straight from home. Who in their right mind would do something so quaint and old fashioned. I write this as a joke, but also with seriousness. If people did go for walks from home, rather than taking their cars, walking paths would be more prominent, and easier to find.


It’s only during the pandemic that paths were worn out from villages and back in. During the pandemic people went for local walks, especially during lockdown. Now that people have their freedoms to burn petrol to go for a 40 minute walk, away from home, they do. People haven’t learned not to use their cars for everything.


I don’t make stairwells and halls muddy on purpose. I make them muddy because it’s hard to walk locally, without using a car, without walking where it’s muddy. If everyone was like me then you would need those taps and grates, like you see at football stadiums, where shoes can be brushed clean before going indoors. That will be my next purchase. I really need such a brush.


Puddles and rain would do the same, but for some reason, despite the ground being wet and muddy it never rains at a time, to prevent me from going for a walk.


I Don’t Need to Go For A One And a Half Hour Walk

I Don’t Need to Go For A One And a Half Hour Walk

Byrichard

“I don’t need to go for a one and a half hour walk. I said that to a neighbour before my walk. I could have cut it short, if it started to rain too heavily. Paradoxically for most of the walk it was grey and drizzling. Nothing to worry about. I was almost dry for almost the entire walk.


It’s as I walked the last one and a half kilometres that it started to rain heavily. Within a few minutes my trousers were soaked, and within a few more minutes my shoes and socks were soaked. Luckily the walk ended before it started to whick up through my t-shirt. The rain was so strong that when I took off my trousers my legs were soaked, as if I had just come out of the shower. I had. It was a rain shower.


I am fully equipped to walk in the rain for hours if it is required, but according to the doppler radar I did not expect rain. I was wrong. I got wet. I don’t mind. Humans are waterproof.


Yesterday I mentioned that I was studying WPRig. I finished the course. It looks like a very powerful tool to design wordpress themese but I think there is a learning curve and the course, pushed me beyond what I was comfortable with. The next course I’m studying is WordPress: Custom Post Types and Taxonomies and this looks like it will teach me just what I want to know to convert this website to a fully wordpress experience. When the site is ready I will play with permanent redirections before deleting the old pages forever. One more step into modernising this website.



Routine Happiness

Routine Happiness

Byrichard

Today I’m going to write about happiness, and specifically about routine happiness. During the pandemic I noticed that people with children all looked happy. There is a simple reason for that. Children don’t understand what a pandemic is, so to give them a feeling of normality you distract yourself from the pandemic with children. The result is that all the parents I saw were in their own little happy world. I noticed that parents were laughing, happy, going to parties and more, ignoring the pandemic, despite having the most to lose.


I didn’t have children or a spouse, so I had to find happiness from another source. For months and months I was desperate for zero COVID to be reached but eventually the inhumane head of Switzerland decided to ignore common sense, and that the vaccine was enough. This act doomed me to solitude, because it meant that COVID zero would never be reached.


I value my health, so I still mask to this day, when I am indoors. It makes me both absurd and consistent. It makes me absurd because I’m surrounded by people who are happy to live in COVID denial. They are happy to ignore the inconvenient truth that COVID can result in Long COVID and long COVID can last a lifetime.


I really suffered when I saw that COVID was a new disease that people wanted to make endemic so I had to change where I got my happiness from. That’s when I learned to derive happiness from moving forward, of having a daily routine. My routine is that I write a blog post every single day. By doing this I spend an hour or two being mindful, thinking of topics, and taking the time to elaborate on them, as if I was having a conversation with someone.


The second part of that routine is the daily walk. It is almost always an hour and a half, whilst listening to podcasts or audio books. The third part is to spend an hour or two each day studying IT related topics. Recently I have been practising with the provisioning of Linux systems on raspberry pies. In theory once you’ve set up a system you know how to do it.


As I have learned, through playing with Nextcloud you provision the machine, you get it up and running, but then you find that it can only be accessed via one wifi hotspot, not the other. You find that the device overheats as you try to sync 19,000 pictures from a mobile phone. You also find that you need to adjust the folder permissions so that the phone app can create folders to organise the photographs you’re sending from your phone to your Nextcloud instance. Finally you find that it’s better to use your old mobile phone for these experiments because you can leave it plugged in for hours, or days as it syncs.


You also find the need to learn about cooling, how to plug a fan into a pie, and more. You also realise how noisy that fan is so eventually you turn off that Pi instance.


The point of routine, and working on projects, is that it helps you forget that you’re lonely and isolated, so you don’t feel lonely and isolated. This is an emotion that people with family lives never experienced for real. People who are not alone think they feel lonely, but they haven’t been alone during a pandemic, for months in a row. They will never understand.


Due to the pandemic requiring me to redefine my sources of happiness I derive happiness from reaching my daily goals, not seeing people. People put my personal goals on hold.


Back in 2006-2007 I was working on my dissertation for a few minutes a day, every single day, seven days a week, for months. If I didn’t spend five minutes every day on it, I couldn’t sleep. I needed to move forward with that goal. What amused me in this scenario is that I really enjoyed the process. Other people called it “The D Word” because they had not invested as much time, over as long, as I had, so they were panicked. I was happy.


The point is that I’m happy to see people, once I have reached my personal goals, either for that part of the day, or for the entire day. If I don’t work towards my projects because I’m with people, then I feel unhappy, until I have reached my daily goals.


Once I have reached my goals I am happy to be distracted by other things, but only once I have reached my goals, not before.


And Finally


If I see people spontaneously I am happy, but if my presence is required I am miserable. People love to say that we can always say no, but we can’t. We can’t say no. “I don’t want to” might be a valid reason for a child, but not for an adult. Mental health is a valid reason but I don’t want to play that card, despite it being the real reason for me not wanting to do something today. I will burn over an hour of petrol to see people who a few days ago said “don’t come over unannounced. That message is the reason I don’t want to do a chore today. I don’t like being told I’m unwelcome, and then told to go a few days later.


There is nothing to gain, by saying no, because I have a favour to do nearby anyway, so it’s absurd to say no, but after today I will take a break from driving to that location. Last month I drove over six hundred and eighty kilometres, not for work, not for pleasure but for a favour.


Last time I went up I left the electric car, because I had no intention of going back up. I want my life to stop being absurd. The last five to six years have been absurd. I want my routine to stabilise once again, so that I reach my goal of feeling employable again, but I want to work remotely because I am not a friend of COVID.

An Entire Day Of Rain
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An Entire Day Of Rain

Byrichard

Due to the lack of rain for a few years, and the lack of opportunities to socialise through sporting activities, I look forward to rain. Yesterday we were lucky. We got an entire day’s worth of rain. I didn’t leave the flat for the entire day and I still slept fine.


Just a few days ago the daily average for new infections per day was 103 per day but it climbed up to 134 or so today. The R-Index went from 0.7 to 1.14 nationally and across Europe the number of new cases is going up again. Governments and civil society don’t mind. If they did then they would put their masks back on and they would continue self-isolating. I see the opposite happening. Regions in Spain that had been green, and relatively clear of infection, are now red. Nightclubs have had to close.


There is a part of me that thought, This pandemic will be one for the history books, and future generations will study it. We didn’t study the Spanish Flu/Influenza. We studied the war, but we never took a real look at the pandemic. Is that because we didn’t care, is it because people wanted to forget it, because it’s within the context of the second world war or is it because the disease does not capture the imagination like Ebola or the plague do?


If you took out the human element, then this pandemic is really simple to eradicate. For the plague you need to get rid of rats, fleas, bacteria in fleas, clothing and plenty of other places where the fleas and bacteria can hide. In the case of COVID-19 an open window and a draft will keep people relatively safe. If people around the world could simultaneously self-isolate properly for two months, the pandemic would be over. We are now many months away from any hopes of the pandemic being over.


I was happy to see that people at the World Health Organisation have the same message as I had. It helped me feel that my views and opinions are justified, rather than just thoughts by an ordinary person. I found the tweets encouraging. I often question why I am certain about my perception of the issue, and to have people at the WHO say something similar was encouraging.


Now we wait, to see when the next lockdown is implemented. I think it could be sooner than anticipated, in the current circumstances.

Day Five of Orca in Switzerland – Next Time We Discuss Shaking Hands We Should Stop and Go Into Self-Isolation.

Day Five of Orca in Switzerland – Next Time We Discuss Shaking Hands We Should Stop and Go Into Self-Isolation.

Byrichard

It’s Day Five of ORCA in Switzerland. Next time we discuss shaking hands we should stop, and go into self-isolation. We had all the signs that a pandemic was coming. We knew about China and we saw what was going on in Italy. We knew that a virus was infecting people at a rapid rate.


When I chose not to go to the Graduate Institute because I knew a Pandemic was coming I was right. It wasn’t worth the risk. If everyone had had the common sense, and forethought to start isolating we wouldn’t have seen such a rapid increase in the spread of the virus.


When I saw people discussing whether to shake hands I thought it was alarmist and stupid and to some degree, I wasn’t wrong. I was wrong to think we should shake hands but I was right to start avoiding large groups. The trick, to avoid pandemics is to follow international news, and see what is happening in other countries, and to see what actions they are taking. we should then take the same actions pre-emptively.


If everyone outside of Italy had taken those actions sooner the virus would have struggled to spread and society might have fewer affected people.


The lesson we should have learned is that when we see a pandemic is coming we should discuss whether to go into self-isolation, rather than whether to shake hands.

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