Buffeted

Come oooooon. This is taking the piss. How can it even begin to be allowed under current restrictions? 

Eagle-eyed viewers last night may have spotted that in ‘red zones’ like ours, reopening restaurants seem to be permitted one customer per ten square metres. (Must everyone eat alone?) 

It was all a bit blurry and flashed by pretty quickly. But a buffet adds a level of confusion and avoidable risk that has to be properly discouraged by our municipal authorities e.g. people getting up from their tables, utensils being shared and so on. 

Indeed, buffets were one of the first things stamped out in Singapore for that very reason. OK, they are especially keen on stampings out over there, but they have squished the coronavirus quite successfully too. 

Two weeks ago Dr Giammattei established the principle that activity would be recommenced based on a daily tally of cases. Utter madness. 

So yesterday evening back he comes, having reached — or been helped to reach — the obvious conclusion that his traffic lights would have to be driven by a calculation factoring in a fortnightly account of active cases, the number of tests and the positive test rate. 

In other words the very methodology he should have announced two weeks ago, except back then he was really quite specific about the numerical checkpoints, yet on this occasion he seems to be leaving us to try and figure it out on our own. 

Last time he also left himself with a proper backstop, such that should we experience another major spike, red would actually mean red. 

Red has instead been rejigged to mean pinky orange, such that no matter how many people start to croak, the bleeding Esmeraldas and Orellanas will still be carving each other up on the carreteras.

At this rate we'll end up like Texas en un dos por tres. 

The ex-pat pastel...

Broadly speaking, outsiders putting down roots in Antigua do so to become either a somebody or a nobody.

There are various ways to cut the cake, but this particular distinction between the individuals that settle here is significant, and perhaps never more so than during the present pandemic. 

For those who are here as a retreat from ambition tend to be coping a bit better than that other group dedicated to making this city their theatre of dreams.  

Amongst the retreaters, so to speak, you might expect to find the bulk of those who are literally on the run, people who in their previous existences have been a serious disappointment to themselves, or more awkwardly, to others. 

Yet in practice there appear to be just as many of their sort striving away amidst the more goal-orientated gringos.

Oxford vaccine news...

As a member of Cambridge I have some disclosable lack of objectivity, but I found today’s announcement regarding preliminary trials of the Oxford vaccine underwhelming. 

It’s safe e.g. minimum requirement met. And yet can cause a fever, and so inevitably will create some disruption during rollout and a possibly larger number than otherwise might elect to refuse it. 

We still don’t have a proper sense of how protective it is or, maybe more crucially, if it reduces infectiousness. 

Relic (2020)

First time Aussie director Natalie Erika James has set about trying to do something unwonted with the horror genre, examining the age-related onset of a consuming loss of mental acuity and balanced personality in terms of a haunting. 

I started to develop reservations as I read the synopsis and never really shook them during viewing. The movie has to juggle three elements: the trappings of the genre, a situation in the county outside Melbourne that is almost excessively metaphorical and the very non-supernatural spectre of incipient dementia within a multi-generational family unit. 

During the first half, as the tension builds and the aforementioned elements are blended, the experience is suitably creepy and captivating, but ultimately the mixture doesn't seem to hold together. 

There’s a lot left unsaid in this scenario such as the absence of male partners, the fact that mother and daughter appear to be only-children, and while some of this has a positive dramatic impact, overall the effect is a bit swiss-cheesey. 

I suppose part of the issue here is that the film is better directed (and performed) than it is written. It ventures into extremely interesting territory only to leave one with a sense of having been led into a dead end. And there are times when it feels like a drama of people running around shouting ‘Mum’ a lot. 

It does however pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.

Oddly enough, this is the second haunted house movie we’ve watched during lockdown where the internal dimensions of the home prove somewhat unreliable. 

I’m starting to think that there’s a subset of developing chill features that should be equipped with a dialogue box that pops up three quarters of the way through warning viewers that they might not find the finale entirely to their satisfaction and providing a little button to discreetly bring proceedings to a premature conclusion.

There are horror movie third acts that essentially ruin the whole experience. This isn't one of them, but James had left herself with nowhere else to go other than off the ranch. 

Mission Creep

In a press conference pitched as positive news, Dr Asturias spoke today of Guatemala’s recent success at flattening the curve. 

On a day that Miami ran out of ICU beds, and the pattern of infections across the US broadened noticeably, not an achievement to be sniffed at perhaps, but travelling alongside this announcement there was a more disquieting bit of information. 

Two weeks ago the models guiding local experts like Asturias suggested that the pandemic would peak here during August. Last week this slipped to September. Now it’s October. 

You can no doubt spot the pattern here. 

Back in March I mentally wrote off the whole of the year, and that at a time when some around here were planning their big post-covid knees-ups for June. But I remain vulnerable to disappointment in 2021. 

In much the same way the 2020/21 Premier League season seems set to commence just a couple of weeks after the final of the restarted Champions’ League, Guatemala is potentially leaving almost no interval between the first and second waves of ‘ésta maldita enfermedad’. 

Semáforos

Traffic lights are perhaps not as simple as they might first appear. My supervisor for political theory at Cambridge tried to explain the output of every great thinker in this field in terms of ‘traffic light theory’. (Another day...) 

This set was actually part of an artwork, a short walk from our London home. 

Originally located in the middle of a small roundabout at the entrance to the Isle of Dogs, they occasionally caused more confusion than Giammattei’s Sunday speeches, at least amongst those drivers who weren’t already in the know. 

The colour-coded system for regulating our journey down the highway towards the new normal announced by the President tonight has the potential for making this set up look relatively uncomplicated. 

This is due in large part to his failure, so far, to commit to a timeframe for defining the alerts. If this is done on a daily basis, utter chaos will duly ensue. 

The only reasonable decision-making process would involve — at the very least — a seven day rolling average of reported new infections. And the prevalence of testing and the rate of positive tests by department or municipality surely also has to be factored in. 

So in effect you’d need a nested system of traffic lights.

Oh, by the way, a big thank you to all the moronic pelaverguistas around here who have continued to throw (or attend) clandestine fiestas or other social events throughout lockdown. Your collective efforts have lost us half of Saturday now too. 

Half-arsed

We are in the midst of a pandemic of promises that politicians make with barely the minimal intention of following through: testing, tracing, covid-compliance and so on. 

If we can learn anything from the Guatemalan experience of attempting to contain the contagion it is that there are only two broadly valid administrative approaches: Not-arsed (Sweden, Trump etc.) or completely-arsed (China). 

Giammattei’s half-arsed approach just isn’t a contender. 

Meanwhile, the aerosols from Antigua’s Ayuntamiento were back last weekend, engaging in an activity that V has likened to the scientific equivalent of trying to dry one’s clothes outside in a thunderstorm. (At least it was not actually ⛈ on this occasion.)

Let’s just suppose some sneaky little SARS viral particles were lying low in the crevices between the cobbles early on curfew Sunday. They would surely be patas arriba by Monday morning whatever anyone does. In a sense that is the whole point of having one day a week when nobody circulates. 

ERGO, this is a complete waste of time and money. 

To paraphrase the Donald: anyone with 1/100th of a brain can tell that if you really think this might help, the time to do it would be just before curfew concludes, not just as it commences. 

They even brought a woman with them to take pics of them being utterly useless.

Sneaking up on us...

Word reached us yesterday of the first death from covid in our immediate area: the sister of the local ‘MP’, a family that have been our neighbours in the village for decades. It’s right at our doorstep now. 

The location of the affected household suggests to me that the main cluster of small shops is compromised. (We’ve long referred to it the zona roja, yet now it surely deserves the name.)

And yet some of the residents living around the little triangular park out front (two restaurant owners and one former restaurant owner) continue to hold clandestine gatherings during this period of lockdown, as if they owe no responsibility to themselves or anyone else around here. 

All have staff that come and go and some of their recent guests have rather obviously crossed departmental lines to get here as well. Others are over 60 and should not be outside at all. One of these reunions took place last Sunday. 

V’s nephew the epidemiologist said something insightfully non-epidemiological the other day. Introverts are all set to do better in this situation than extroverts.  He himself hails from the smartest, most introverted wing of the family. 

It probably doesn’t help that in my experience extroverts are often not all that bright. (Still if they frolic around outside at least they’ll be getting their recommended dose of vitamin D.)

Meanwhile, another family has to mourn without a proper vigil or funeral. 

The King of Staten Island (2019)

Most of the movies we've been watching during lockdown have been either subtitled or the sort that in the past would have been dispatched down the path known as 'straight to DVD', so what a sense of relief (or indeed release) to finally stumble upon one that would have made it onto the big screen had 2020 not been 2020. 

Judd Appatow directs (and co-scripts) another comedy of a life in crisis, this time with a solidly mature sensibility. 

This crisis in question is something of a 'what if?' extrapolated from the real world biography of the film's star Pete Davidson, who lost his fireman father on 9-11. 

Maybe current circumstances inclined me to like this movie more than I otherwise might have, but I REALLY liked it. It is well written, genuinely funny, undoubtedly touching and quite extraordinarily well cast. 

Davidson is at the core of what makes it work, but there are great contributions from Marisa Tomei and Bill Burr, and Bel Powley is simply outstanding. 

The in-depth quality of both direction and performance is perhaps best encapsulated by Ricky Velez, who places his character Oscar so perfectly and comically on the line between sinister local sociopath and sad small-town loser.

Racist Fish ad Beer

Is this all getting a bit silly? 

The Guardian thinks so, especially after it was recently accused of being racist for not having openly supported Abraham Lincoln all those years ago. 

The BBC's Countryfile programme also self-flagellated in public last week when it suggested that the entire British countryside might be inherently racist, or at least a place where only whites would ever feel comfortable. 

Yet thanks in large part to Donald fucking Trump, we are all getting used to hearing racist dog whistles a lot of the time, and it does seem that a significant proportion of them are in all probability, non-imaginary. 

If we take the Donald at his word, perhaps he was unaware of the reference when he posted that 'when the looting starts...' tweet, but when it comes to dog-whistling, it doesn't matter whether it begins as intentional or not. 

Here in La Antigua the impulse behind Cervecería Catorce's stance on reggaeton was almost certainly not knowingly racist, rather a kind of smug tribal/musical elitism, but it certainly has the potential to be taken as something a bit more objectionable. 

Just imagine a 'no hip hop' sign above the entrance to a bar in Kentucky, for example, and remember the furore kicked off by Howard Stern's opinions regarding Tex-Mex music following the unfortunate demise of Selena. 

Musical taste is a minefield and quickly gets co-opted into the culture wars. (And culture wars are America's #1 invisible export these days.)

As a ‘funny’ sign behind the bar this wouldn't bother me all that much, but as the basis of a high-viz consumer brand — a proud identity — something to print on a surgical mask in the midst of a pandemic, it is unmindful, shall we say, particularly from a foreign-owned entity. And as such, it does actually bother me, even though I do like those Impunidads. 

You might only listen to Charlie Mingus or Robert Wagner and have high-browed, lowish opinion of reggaeton, but it is currently the music of the street in this part of the world and has a strong association with artists of mixed race. And also with youth, which makes this bit of marketing all the more fusty and 'old', as well as crassly snobbish. 

The image above has seemingly been removed from the Interwebs, so maybe someone had a rather belated attack of common sense. These aren't times when it pays to alienate any potential customers. 

Heaven knows I don't (usually) like banda, but I wouldn't open a bar grounded on an extravagant antipathy towards it here in Guatemala, largely as I might end up dead as a result.

You Should Have Left (2020)

This tale began life as a sort of Krouty sub-Stephen King clone, set in a remote part of Germany. 

The first thing the film-makers did wrong was to relocate it to Wales - shorthand I guess for the sort of back of beyond destination where Old Nick might have a holiday cottage - and then shoot it in New Jersey. 

There's a portentous shopkeeper in a bizarre village store who has the right kind of accent, but really, this is POOR. 

Kevin Bacon stars and also lists himself as 'producer', indicative of the movie's status as a sort of vanity project for the actor, who works to spoil it by never really working out if he is to be hero or villain. 

On the plus side, there's the house, the sort of gaff you'd never come across in the real Wales, and not just because it's a kind of evil TARDIS with enhanced interior dimensions along with visually-interesting aesthetics in both the rooms and the stretchy connecting corridors. 

And there's the appearance of young Avery Essex, laying down one of those performances, like Elle Fanning in 2004's The Door In The Floor, foretelling a worthwhile career beyond childhood. 

Yet overall it's a masterclass in the squandered build-up. 

One review I came across had the waggish remark that, if we had been permitted to see it in cinemas, the title is basically what most audience-members would no doubt have been thinking at the conclusion. 

Bootleg tourists

Having performed better than almost any other nation in the hemisphere in containing the spread of covid-19 —  indeed they logged 50 consecutive days as virus free — Belize now plans to re-open its Phillip S.W. Goldman airport on August 15, and thereafter its tourism sector to a renewed flow of (controlled) visitors. 

The protocols that have been established in advance are interesting; the problems immediately obvious.

"... short flight away from most major US cities."

This is theoretically true, but Belize has not traditionally been connected to 'most' major US cities. Instead, like Guatemala, it has been receiving flights from major (current) covid hotspots like Houston and Miami, the last places from which anyone wants to be taking in travellers just now. 

Indeed, if the local migratory narrative in the last few years has been all about deterring Central Americans from heading north, the polarity of intense undesirability has been resoundingly reversed in 2020. In our pandemic-interrupted world Americans are the new Sub-Saharan Africans, a situation that seems likely to last well beyond the conclusion of this abject year.

A vaccine could help, but as Dr Fauci says, if a third of Amuricans refuse to take it and it is anyway only 75% effective, herd immunity may not stick, and so his compatriots will remain international pariahs for longer. 

Belize and Guatemala have few 'air bridge' alternatives, having become dependent on short-haul entrants from the US sun-belt. Both nations ought to be doing the legwork now to actively promote themselves to potential tourists from beyond the hemisphere. 

One of the handicaps they suffer is international airports with runways that are technically unsuitable for larger jets. 

Back in the 90s I used to fly ‘direct’ into Guatemala from Amsterdam on the KLM flight out of Schiphol — a supersized, 1/2-cargo jumbo. 

The urban myth about the end of the service goes that eventually one Dutch pilot took a look at the runway at Aurora and chose to abort his final approach before proceeding on to El Salvador. After that the airline didn't dare force their employees to try to plonk a 747 down on that roller-coaster. These days the only people to arrive here in wide-bodied airliners are government officials from the likes of the US and Taiwan. 

So, even given the fact that many airlines have under-utilised fleets, it might be hard to establish in the short term more direct routes which cut out the sickies in the US. (One reason one can expect Cuba to lead the way in the regional tourism recovery, as they have been geared up for this for yonks.)

A European passenger complying responsibly with the Belizean guidelines on testing could have a valid certificate of non-infection before their journey commences and yet still have to run the gauntlet of a few hours in say Houston or Miami's terminals, where there is almost no proper demarcation between domestic and international travellers, plus plenty of mask-less MAGA twats to dodge. And the risk these passengers would run would become OUR risk. 

Guatemala announced its own phased re-opening plan a fortnight ago and from that moment has moved steadily further away from being able to actually commence it. 

There is talk of the main airport reopening in August, but in practice INGUAT is looking at September as a more realistic timeframe, and then at a pattern of local followed by regional in-comers, long before more northerly foreigners are welcomed con los brazos abiertos. 

Mexicans are likely to be a source of worry for a while too, especially if they plan on arriving terrestrially. 

Although Belize appears clean, Guatemala needs to remain especially vigilant in Izabál because the maritime border has a certain informality to it. 

It has recently come to my attention that at least one of the tour firms that sprung up to cater to guiding large groups of cruise ship passengers around our city has still been operating, albeit at lower capacity. Bootleg tourists! 

Where might they have come from? I cannot imagine that these individuals are foreigners that have become trapped here by the pandemic and now imagine that traipsing around Antigua in an amorphous herd is the best way to kill the time. So, that muelle at Puerto Barrios, which can be traversed without immediately flashing a passport, would tend to be the prime suspect. 

Make no mistake, La Antigua's position as both the leader in new SARS-COV-2 infections in Sacatepéquez and as the primary hub for tourist activity in Guatemala portends a particularly painful period ahead. Tourism is second only to remittances in national income terms and usually out-performs anything the country is able to export. 

Underneath the arches...

Just seen a vid on YT shot during an op involving open heart surgery in the moments that the big quake struck Oaxaca this week. Have decided not to share, as it is a little graphic.

It served to remind me that I occasionally find myself making mental lists of the places I don't want to be during major seismic events. (Also not completely shareable.)

Some of these I have unfortunately already experienced, such as 'Inside a capsule located within an onsen located pretty high up in a Tokyo skyscraper'. 

Then there's 'Underneath a big, swaying McDonalds golden arches sign on CA14'. Instead of my whole life flashing before me, every time it was every time I'd ordered a quarter pounder with cheese. 

Imhotep returns...

This Saharan dust is REALLY messing with me. 

Like the plain trees in spring in London or New York.

Like what happens if I put too much Marie Sharp's in my caldo. 

Even our chihuahua is wheezing constantly. 

I get that my covid-resistant mask is just the thing I already have to hand for coping with the situation, but in spite of today's numbers from the Ministry of Health, I had not previously anticipated having to wear it in bed. 

A bunch of aerosols from the Muni...

Who is responsible for these blokes from the Muni and what exactly are they spraying? 

They keep coming around to douse our front gate, the food and water we leave out for the street dogs etc. If this is bleach, this is NOT cool. 

If this is about the coronavirus rather than say the larger kind of bugs, the procedure is basically moronic. 

Has no one at the Ayuntamiento read up on how long these submicroscopic supervillains survive on surfaces, outdoors?

The curfew started at 6pm last night. This means that there will be no pedestrian traffic and almost no vehicular traffic around here until 5am Monday morning.  

No curfew-dodging coronavrius would have made it through last night, let alone persist another 24 hours before the next unsuspecting villager walks past our supposedly pestilent front door. 

And they arrived together in a pickup, like a dozen men crammed together on the cargo bed. 

Open for collection

And in a slightly worrying development, cabinet-makers around here have re-jigged their offer to cater for the more local, 'to go' market...

Haircut 100

After an absence of one hundred days, the Premier League is back.

David Luiz might not have had the chance to visit the barber during lockdown, but now, after a similar hair-atus, our village is being treated to a #1 buzzcut. 

Only yesterday I was noting the markedly Chernobyl-esque aspect of abandon being sported by the children's playground outside the church. 

A Place of Fear

At least we’ve made it to Thursday without the world ending, though a stroll around Antigua right now perhaps reveals that the process is under way in more piecemeal fashion. (Did the ancient Maya have a conceptual equivalent of the slow motion train wreck?)

Here we can see some upbeat urban messaging from a jewellery shop named after their ‘Place of Fear’, that dimly-lit inframundo traditionally known to be accessible via a mysterious cave entrance close to Cobán. Not quite sure what to make of the dark pit of the — non-violently — dead announcing a mass resurgence. 

If not exactly a place of fear, Antigua increasingly presents as a place of uncomfortable uncertainty. 

On some levels it could be said that I have no skin in the game and have generally chosen to keep my distance from the foreign immigrants that do. 

Yet I have several close friends, acquaintances, family even, from the pool of more local business-owners and service providers, many of whom have hit a brick wall in 2020, and I genuinely feel for them, particularly as I cannot see the situation righting itself terribly soon. 

A stroll around town earlier in the week revealed a whole load of new gaps on the 'high street', which coupled with more or less effective presidential measures for halving traffic, left me with profoundly melancholic forebodings. 

Even though I have lately hankered after the less commercialised Antigua of at least a decade (or two) ago, I'm also aware that a global pandemic would surely be a blunt-edged tool for achieving that ideal. 

Current conditions would seem to favour more locally-orientated enterprises. Nevertheless, this week brought the perplexing and perturbing news that Hugo's Ceviches, established over 25 years ago by my wife's late cousin, would be permanently closing all of its restaurants, retreating back to the original proposition of roadside pick-ups. (V remembers clearly the conversation with Hugo in '93 when he said he was either going to return to the US where he had previously been living, or start up his ceviche business here.) 

The family has been hit by a double tragedy in recent years, first the passing of the patriarch, then the death of his young son, leaving Hugo the younger to keep things going. Now this. I suppose like many dine-in outlets in Antigua the money that paid the rent was coming from alcohol sales, and in this respect the advantage now lies firmly with retailers. Hugo's was the picositas pioneer.

Another friend, whose mother founded one of the city's most celebrated traditional outlets, an engineer, has been offering to deliver pepián for forty quetzales on social media. Further indication perhaps that the looming economic crisis won't simply serve to filter away the chingaste, but may be turning Antigua into an altogether more tenuous and insipid sort of venue for life. 

And that rather tenuous coffee metaphor leads me to this, a way to support some of the locally-owned cafés in town, which are collaborating to offer BLOOM, a single-origin bourbon from Finca La Labor. Available at the Fat Cat and other Guatemalan-owned coffee houses. 

Mental Menstruation

It isn’t hate to speak the truth > J.K. Rowling
Good luck with that > Socrates

The distinctions that exist between sex and gender, nature and nurture — and perhaps most relevantly in this instance, between fact and ideology — are reassuringly non-absolute. 

Yet the acknowledgment that a degree of blurriness exists does not invalidate the distinction in itself. 

It is depressing to see stars of the Potter franchise falling over themselves to distance themselves from the author, in effect trumpeting their ideological purity — in much the same way that Pasternak’s peers in the writers’ union did for him in the USSR — especially as J.K. Rowling’s tweet appears to me to have been at least partly intended in jest. 

At Girton there were no single sex washing facilities. This did not apparently cause any problems, but Girton is not the big wide world. 

The College's very existence is testament to the historical issues faced by ‘people who menstruate’, who have tended to struggle in that big wide world, where they are a majority, to enjoy basic rights and protections. 

Women who have never menstruated, a small minority in comparison, are also deserving of respect, rights and protections, but we cannot allow a cultural obsession with this inherently more niche issue to damage the situation of the people who menstruate in any meaningful way. 

This is surely what J.K. Rowling has been trying to say.

Feds Up

My Norwegian business partner used to say that in America if there were no police, everyone would rob banks. 

In fairness he came to this slightly controversial insight as a result of checking out the moral compasses on display at the law firm appointed by the Yanks that were acquiring our company. 

Anyway, Minneapolis may be about to start Phase One testing...