Time and money to burn

This morning we were tempted to order breakfast in bed from one of Antigua’s leading hotels. 

This is actually a thing. And it is SO wrong. 

At one point yesterday morning pretty much the only vehicles on the streets around us were motorbikes delivering impulse nibbles. Some sported backpacks, others were trying to ride the bike whilst holding heavy plastic bags with one hand. 

As the alcaldes of other townships have resorted to sealing (soldering in fact) potential quarantine violators inside their own homes, Antigua’s own Mayor gave an address from his sofa (said to be in Cayalá) that lasted less than half a minute. He looked sheepish. 

There’s no doubt he’s been sipping from the poison chalice and that he can expect little gratification now from a four year term that began with so much expectation. 

There have been some token gestures, such as the new rubbish collection protocols. But if these workers are now forbidden from entering and engaging in up close personal contact with homeowners, what of all the couriers?

A friend in Ohio reports how his local vets are now operating: "Credit card only, call in the parking lot and they hand the meds over on a tray through your car window." 

Here there is a general imprecision still in the measures and the language being used to implement them which will tend to foster pandemic pandemonium. 

Businesses that were from the outset set up to serve international visitors are turning inward and seeking out local consumers in order to survive and this is going to impact the lives of those who were already just about getting by in servicing the local market. 

Historically the most lasting impact of plagues has been a set of changes in the balance of power at many levels of society.

As I noted yesterday, Antigua may soon recover, but it won’t be the same place. 

If the current free-for-all persists unmoderated, then it is inevitable that the comparatively weak will be eased aside by the politically and economically stronger. 

Just here in our village I can see how our local shops and panaderías in particular are struggling against new competitors prepared to operate at a loss like Silicon Valley start-ups. 

Speaking of which, Uber proposes to operate right up to the moment the curfew alarm sounds. Though I guess if you order one just before 4pm, you're going to have to show the driver your spare room. 

Caught in the middle of this power struggle are those whose economic power is time-limited. They are almost certainly operating at a loss right now, but don't have a pack of optimistic shareholders ready to chuck them a load of cash to burn whenever they need it. 

And fairly soon people are going to realise that this is not a short term thing. Trump may be dangling the possibility of an ah fuckit approach in 15 days, but the UK government has asked for emergency powers in law for two whole years (with a review in six months). 

Soon the novelty of breakfast in bed will wear off as the community as a whole starts to tighten its belt. And the croissants will be getting staler. 

El lugar de los hechos...

My Corona

And to think, only a month ago we thought pigeons were a problem...

Cookies to go...

Come to Guatemala (sometime soon) to study selfishness, both rational and irrational. 

Yet there is also selflessness of the sort that will ultimately deny the likes of Gloria Álvarez a serious tilt at the presidency. 

This Cambrian explosion of motorcycle couriers we are witnessing in Antigua right now might be characterised as a rebaño of rational egotists, but surely not all the voluntary bomberos, nurses, doctors and so on who are working around the clock to prevent a real catastrophe here fit the category. 

Even Giammattei, clearly exhausted, is acting out of the sort of altruism and public-spiritedness that Ayn Randites cannot explain away. 

The President was right to devolve final responsibility of implementing his measures to the alcaldes and right now Victor Hugo needs to GET A GRIP. 

There is nowhere in Guatemala with the same per capita level of different food options and this undoubtedly presents a special challenge. 

What's the point of staying indoors if you are going to start receiving half a dozen different deliveries a day? 

Even the churro parlours are offering home delivery now FFS. 

Our Mayor needs to dictate what is essential food and what isn't. Everyone else gets to offer collection/takeaway-only, which is the default position in London for example. 

And the existing high volume food deliverers should surely have been given first dibs at this new 'opportunity', being allowed to reach capacity before a limited number of additional restaurants serving stuff of actual nutritional value were permitted to join in. 

Con los calzones a media asta...

Reset the clock, whispers my inner Bond villain. 

It's hard not to empathise with those little fishies suddenly rediscovering the canal waters of Venice. 

Yet, however much my wife and I would like Antigua to go back to being the nice quiet place where we met 31 years ago (and we really would), not even a calamity like the novel coronavirus is capable of such a rollback. 

There’s no doubt that a more eerie form of quietness will be with us for a while. International travel is set for one of those U-shaped recoveries and many businesses in town won’t make it out of the trough of the curve. 

During his online ‘Keeping Antigua Alive’ presentation last week, Blake Thurgood of Pappy’s BBQ noted that even before the current crisis, he and other SME-owners in the city had calculated that a generalised 50% drop in income could knock out around 80% of local businesses, a scenario that must surely now be in play. The look in his eyes as he spoke told me it was so. 

However, that doesn’t mean that all these businesses will vanish and we’ll be transported back to the land of milk and honey. (Moscas y Miel to be exact.) The more likely outcome is that they are resurrected on the far side of the coronavirus canyon, under new, more solvent ownership. Possibly even bigger a-holes to boot.

The likes of Pappy’s and Sobremesa are run by hard-working hybrid families that have gone out of their way to connect with the local community, and although in truth I am yet to visit either of them, they are precisely the sort that I would like to see pull through. 

But too many others have treated Antigua like a bolo lying on the pavement with banknotes sticking out of his back pocket. 

Front end and back end, Antigua has allowed itself to over-commercialise across the board. An the prostitution of the city starts with the local landlords. We’ve been wondering how many of these will now jump in to pick up the pieces and try to run the consumer-facing operations themselves. 

Saying all this does not however make me a paid-up member of the conservative tendency in this city. Just before Semana Santa was called off there was a rising clamour against the commercial initiatives that Victor Hugo and his crew had prepared for Lent: the sale of TV rights, the printing of t-shirts, the advertising banners on lamp-posts etc. 

All rather moot now, but one would have to be naïve to imagine that an impecunious municipality is just what we need at the heart of a rejuvenated urban space. 

Those die-hard panza verde conservatives have been their own worst enemies. They need to shut up a bit about ‘Patrimonio Cultural de la Humanidad’ and focus on proper planning. 

'Preserving' the casco antiguo whilst allowing it to become an open air mall is possibly the main reason Antigua has recently felt like a town that is slowly having the air sucked out of it. 

Casa si, calle no...

Who’s driving the boat?

Bukele just declared a 30 day national 'quarantine' in El Salvador. Sounds a little less goose-steppy than a curfew, but it's basically the same thing and we will soon probably be falling in line. 

Our own toque de queda did seem a bit quantum at first, but just after 4pm the village was inundated by PMT motorbikes and vans ostensibly enforcing it. 

Giammattei is doing it in baby steps, but the direction is clear. 

What colour will his jacket be tomorrow?

Curfew seems to have completely the opposite meaning for cats. 

Que alguién me explíque: If the only people allowed to 'circulate' are couriers delivering medicine and food, who's working back at the pharmacies and preparing the food? (A variant of the 'Who's driving the boat?' conundrum from Act 3 of Taken.) 

WTF with these dudes?

A friend tipped us off yesterday afternoon that the lockdown was about to get more serious, so I ventured out one last time in full Darth Vader to a local tienda to stock up on the things I personally can’t live without (ground coffee not bog rolls) plus pet food, and there encountered a gathering of local cops stocking up on Tabcin and Paracetamol, a sight I found as poignant as I found disturbing. 

Our village is home to most of the city’s fuzz. If anything goes down locally, they politely exclaim that we are outside their remit, but their presence has up to now been fairly reassuring. 

I still have a private number I can call for a PNC response because my oafish Australian neighbour made a death threat against me (on camera) last year. Even he must have more important matters on his mind now. 

When the police were contemplating a move from the Capitanes General we received a visit from the latterly notorious Erwin Sperisen, who was completely charming. He was investigating all fallow properties in the village and at one point we did expect to have the boys (and girls) in black as our direct neighbours. 

We took in our last delivery from Bedda yesterday. They were already planning to close. Everyone faces an uncertain future, yet I have been cheered to note how locally-owned businesses like los Urquizú have been generally quicker to perceive their social responsibility. 

When the bike arrived, both me and the courier were fully masked up and the expression on the face of one of the streetdogs that we regularly nourish (and have dubbed ‘Brayan’) - was priceless: WTF with these dudes!?!

The ex-pat dirge...

Toque de #quedateencasa

Giammattei was guiltier than ever of vagueness yesterday evening. I had to watch the address twice before I had a proper inkling about what he might have been saying. 

His speech already has more interpretations than quantum theory.

I've heard it suggested that the municipal markets should have been told to open from noon to 4pm, rather than 4am to noon, ‘because the virus doesn’t much like the heat’. 

Although common sense would seem to suggest that limiting opening hours might tend to lead to greater concentrations of people at any one time, this protestation does seem to be grounded in a bit of self-serving logic from the huevón community. 

And frankly, if someone is too huevón to make it to market in the morning, they are probably also huevón with regards to a whole set of public health protocols, so any measure that keeps them indoors is to be commended. 

Guatemala’s markets have a more crepuscular, commercial, al mayor functionality, which can more easily be observed at the break of the day. 

Essential Services

So, the commercial sector, barring essential services and agriculture, is to shut down for the rest of the month...'voluntarily'. In doing so Giammattei is making one of those Jeremy Corbyn-esque fudges that comes across as a bit Schrödinger's statesman, but he really cannot afford to go harder on the informal economy, as it has almost no slack at all. There's a degree of arse-covering involved, but I cannot really complain because only the other day I was recommending against one-size-fits-all policies, and in the context of Guatemala this is what you can do. The local alcaldes probably are the ones best placed to apply this directive.

He also seemed to be saying to the 3000 or so stranded tourists: "Don’t complain that you are stuck, you can eff off to Belize and Mexico." And yet INUAT is meanwhile trying to generate some much-needed income for the hotel sector here by offering them discounted rates.

Go home and spring clean...

No matter how many times Giammattei tells us to paint our walls, tidy our bedrooms...

Social distance...now!

Blaise Pascal > The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he cannot stay quietly in his room.

Ecosystem Invaders

Our local economy is currently being held up by two kinds of workers. Those who cannot afford not to take a risk and those being paid by people hiding at home to take a risk on their behalf. 

The problem I still have with Giamattei is the inexactness of his language.  For example, when he said that citizens of Europe could no longer enter the country, who did he mean precisely? When he apparently extended the ban to my own nation, he referred to it as ‘Inglaterra’. And who exactly is Doña Chonita?

So, when he said restaurants with a take-away or pickup capability could continue to operate, I really don’t think he meant that every Tom, Dick and Harry in Antigua could immediately start trying to flog their stuff to your doorstep. 

A city that had been in danger of turning into the country’s premier open air shopping mall, could now be characterised as a giant drive-thru. In truth I haven’t been into town for over a week, but I have visions of streets that are quiet but for the rattle of scooters and their confused riders. 

Aside from the obvious health and hygiene issues thrown up by this poorly-coordinated outbreak of home delivery offerings, economic sense is also wanting. 

If I were a business owner here who had carefully developed and cultivated a delivery service over several years, I’d be resenting most of this new-fangled competition, largely because it is essentially unfair competition: hardly anybody can be doing this in a cost-effective manner, even if regulations are being waived. Some are not even restaurants by vocation. I saw an offering today for ‘healthy food to your door’ from one of the gyms. 

The once illustrious Welten has started offering chiles rellenos and paches. Surely an instance where Doña Chonita is to be preferred?

Some of the newcomers will be making new friends, others may actually be alienating people. It’s a promotional threat as well as opportunity. I have to say that the one time we used Uber Eats here it was not a huge success. For some reason the app makes use of a different mapping system to the parent and as a result I was unable to pinpoint the precise location of my house and ended up chasing a man who looked like a terrorist with a bomb on his back all around the village. The food itself arrived in poor condition and incomplete. 

Perhaps the President should place a moratorium on Tripadvisor reviews for the duration of the crisis.

The expert advice released in the UK today is that social distancing will need to continue for the duration of this lost year. It’s not natural behaviour in Guatemala, but I think it is safe to assume that in the absence of tourism, the future for a proportion of Antigua’s eateries, many of which were already in effect charging customers for the empty tables around them, is bleak. Those that were already good at delivery and those that find themselves with that combination of an adeptness for it and an offer that appeals to locals, will possibly make it through to 2021.

Right now though, the need for coordination/aggregation that I wrote of the other day is more than apparent. I’m reminded of an incident that occurred back in the mid 90s when we had recently started our company and there were about a dozen of us working out of an elegant if crotchety Queen Anne-era house in Bloomsbury. 

Someone flagged up the arrival on the scene of a novel online offering that promised to deliver small ‘impulse’ retail items directly to your desk. Around half of us decided to order a CD immediately...and separately, just to see what would happen.

Sure enough, courier after courier was soon ringing the doorbell. Needless to say, this company was gone long before the dotcom crash took out most of the rest of their like. 

Yesterday I overheard one gringo ‘entrepreneur’ asserting rather buoyantly that business was ‘bouncing along’. Rather like one of those bombs dropped by the dam-busters I suspect. 

Meanwhile, I’ve spotted a few novel ecosystem-invaders floating around my area like sharks on the prowl: not motorcycle couriers, but the vans of security companies. On the off chance perhaps that some of the stay-at-homers are casting their thoughts ahead to the social dislocation to come. 

Prepotentes

This, I hasten to note, was not me. My bodyguard is also nice, but he's a cat. 

I am now intrigued to know which of my compatriots here is acting like a licensed bellend. 

Anyway, for anyone lacking a mask who may have read today's announcement by Pricesmart that they will not accept devoluciones of loo rolls, Lysol, rice etc. etc... 

Private Amnesties

Why is there an ice cream cart being pushed around the village by a maskless man, clearly over 65...and exhausted?

Why are so many not-so-hard-up members of the community granting themselves personal amnesties with regard to the basic protocols laid down by the authorities?

Yet further to my recent observation that residents’ meetings tend to get swamped by private obsessions, the coronavirus discussion on our local vecinos' Whatsapp group has started to focus on the clearly all-important matter of whether this is all a dastardly attack on America by the Chinese or vice versa. One guy in particular is sharing entire essays on the subject.

Whilst it surely suits us all now to consider how anything we’re doing could be bettered through (certain forms of) collaboration, we also need to consider how individually or together, we can also make a real mess of things. 

Bread supplies running low? Here's a a tip for picking in a slimmer sort of way. 

On my first trip to the USSR in '84 one of my companions survived for ten days on peanuts, chocolate and vodka. Just saying. 

Anyway, on the subject of vecinos, this did make me chuckle...

April Fool's Day

Only a fool would think things will be getting back to normal after the first of April.

We closed the day on eight detected cases of covid-19, with an additional four hundred people in quarantine. 

Should the eighth turn out to be the last for a full fortnight, Giammattei could, in theory, declare that community transmission has been successfully smothered and that some of his key restrictions on public gathering might be loosened.

The problem is that without effective testing, there is no real way of knowing and the President has made it that much harder for himself by advising people with the milder, 'gripona' symptom set to stay away from hospitals. 

In effect, the mortality rate in the over 70s is going to have to be the canary in the coal mine. 

To be absolutely sure that the virus has not been spread into the general population already, he's going to have to wait (at least) a month. Yet it's highly unlikely that the detected cases will dry up immediately. Indeed, if the woman with a high fever who walked into a hospital in Zona 13 today tests positive, we've already shifted into the next phase. 

El Salvador has had its first confirmed case and Bukele says the virus came over the border from here, also suggesting that his Guatemalan counterpart may be fighting a losing battle. 

Meanwhile, the borders will have to remain closed to foreigners almost indefinitely. I'm allowing for at least six months, which is the timeframe that countries like Australia have set for their own restrictions. One will be able to leave, but I suspect the US airlines at least, won't be flying almost empty planes out here so that ex-pats have a route home, and the land border to the north is totally dependent on the situation in Mexico. (118 cases and counting.) 

Yesterday I watched a short video presentation from Gloria Álvarez (enjoying a temporary, enforced exile in southern Australia) in which she proposed a 'libertarian' solution to the economic problem. 

She seemed happy to make the assumption that the self-isolated/socially-distanced life is essentially less expensive than the one we would otherwise be leading. 

Her thinking seems to be that employers and employees could come up with a figure representing all the things that the latter would no longer need to spend money on, like trips to sporting events, restaurants and cinemas, which would form the basis of a negotiation aiming to reduce salaries accordingly for the duration of the crisis...to mutual benefit. 

And assumption it is, because many people will in fact already be incurring additional expenses by choosing smaller, local suppliers or by getting stuff delivered, for example. 

And, it's also sort of bleeding obvious that the logic starts to crumble for the employers and employees of cinemas, restaurants, sporting franchises and so on. 

We are anyway experiencing a moment when the size of the economy as much as the size of individual salaries will be creating the sort of all-pervasive anxiety in which voluntary downsizing of any sort will hardly appear rational and reasonable in the sense that she is suggesting, for it's near impossible to predict where things are headed right now. 

All of our decision-making is clearly being hampered by this uncertainty. 

A loophole worth expanding...

Guatemala’s government may have the courage and conviction to act even more drastically than its European counterparts. What it won’t have is the budget for the follow up: stimulus packages like the £300bn announced today by the UK Chancellor.  It should also be doubted whether lenders here will be offering any payment ‘holidays’. 

Antigua has some unique issues even within the context of the country around it. There’s a double squeeze, from the local ‘state of emergency’, but also from the condition of the rest of the world,  which has effectively turned off the tourism tap. 

This is a town with a population  of around 30K with something like 250+ (fairly substantial) businesses serving food and drink. For at least two weeks, only those with takeaway or home delivery options are going to remain open. 

Next door President Bukele has had an interesting and possibly helpful idea. He’s contracting some of El Salvador’s idle kitchens to prepare meals for the needy. In the US some restaurants have started to do something similar off their own bat, but my sense is that here, some sort of collaboration between the public and private sectors may work best. 

Giammattei left open the loophole of ‘servicio a domicilio’ and a range of local food operations, such as Joe's Grill and Hugo’s Ceviches, have spontaneously developed this capability. 

Yet many restaurants won’t be able to do this cost effectively on their own. This is where ready-made aggregators like Uber Eats may come in handy. 

The thought I had today was that the Mayor could work either alone or with a firm like Uber to set up a home delivery network, where participating restaurants would be open for 2 or 3 days a week, allowing a greater number to potentially do so in an economically-viable manner. (A handful on Mondays, another group Tuesdays and so on.) 

At present only a small proportion of Antigua’s restaurants will remain open. A system like this would spread the somewhat limited opportunity that the Guatemalan state has left open. 

Of course, you may imagine that the current situation will only last a couple of weeks and that none of this would be worth the trouble, or indeed that any sort of decisive decision-taking is undermined by uncertainty right now. 

There are other potential hiccups. 

A given proportion of restaurants in Antigua don't really cater to the slightly conservative palates of panza verdes and in all honesty, some of these are probably going to have to remain closed for most of the remainder of 2020. When the process of recovery gets under way, the Antigueños I know are likely to focus on patronising businesses they understand to be local, lo suyo. 

And eventually, the pandemic will tend to interrupt food supplies, such as those prawns so vital to Hugo's. In which case, the state might even start asking itself why Antigua needs so many food outlets with significant levels of duplication. 

One-sized

Whilst Guatemalans often appear incapable of complying with even the most simple instructions, and anyone who thinks that 'solidarity' is somehow innate here has never seen how people sweep up the dust and rubbish outside their homes, they do — somewhat fortuitously — appear to have elected just the President they needed for this dire situation. 

Can anyone imagine what would have happened if Jimmy was still in charge?

On the other hand here, as almost everywhere else, we face the trouble that one-size-fits-all approaches are bound to cause, compounded by both populist policy-makers and disjointed application. 

Both the UK and California think the virtual imprisonment of the over-70s is a workable plan. (And El Salvador has shaved an additional ten years off the measure.)

In California they are planning to close all the restaurants. A friend in Ohio says this policy is already being enforced in his hometown, yet he and others have older relatives who'd set fire to their homes if they tried to cook. 

I live in a triangular space in our village lined by a cluster of large properties owned by the proprietors of restaurants (two of which at least are well known and highly regarded) who all — bizarrely — appear to order fast food pretty much the whole time. 

Indeed, directly opposite, there's a Chapin chef of some repute who proudly promotes this ever-so-slightly obscene dish (beef wrapped in gold leaf) on social media and yet, even before the pandemic, did not appear at all averse to a sad bastard Saturday night take-away. 

I just watched a Campero bike driving around in circles (actually triangles) before locating its target and already both the driver and the packaging appeared to be covered in extra protective layers. 

How long will this last? They already seem to sense their status as vectors. 

Lebanese statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously cautioned that one should 'never cross a river that is on average four feet deep'. 

There are perhaps some related pieces of advice. Never trust a government that only knows how to cross the shallow parts, but also one that tries to tell you the entire river is frighteningly deep. 

Populists look at large groups and see only outliers (Mexicans are all murderers and rapists...) or averages. 

The current situation requires political action that encompasses both the big picture and the detail. 

Keeping Antigua 'Alive'

Hoh, hum, this can't be the best way to approach this...even if it were not explicitly prohibited by the state of emergency commencing at 8am tomorrow.

Here in El Panorama we've have an active Whatsapp group for vecinos concerned about security and other matters for a few years now. 

Earlier this month I sold my holding in a company by attending a web conference with an internationally-dispersed group of shareholders. It wasn't perfect, as the discussion did go off on slightly wild tangents, but it eventually worked. 

Given the prevailing concerns about large-ish gatherings of people (and this, in a hotel of all places), there has to be a safer format. 

And the trouble with it, beyond the risk of contagion, is that it is likely to pan out like the residents' meetings I recall in London, where the individual obsessions of participants derailed the consultation process almost from the outset. 

Less real time digital debates filter out the noise a bit. 

Climactic

I believe I owe the relevant authorities a massive mea culpa for my suggestion that even if the zombie apocalypse had kicked off up north, Semana Santa would be celebrated as usual down here. I stand corrected, and somewhat amazed. 

However, I am going to stand by the statement that even the end of the world could not prevent those weathermen on BBC News from being so annoyingly effing cheerful. 

House Imprisonment

My suspicions about Boris’s cunning plan were all but confirmed today when his lackey at the Department of Health announced the plan to place all the over-70s under virtual house arrest for four months from some time in April. 

We were going to watch The Cassandra Crossing tonight, but perhaps Logan’s Run would be even more appropriate. 

In effect the UK government has decided to treat the entire population as if they were middle-class ‘natives’ whose wrinklies conveniently reside independently off-site/out of sight. 

Lawless Roads

For the first time in a long time Christians are acting like there might be an arena full of lions in the vecinity. 

In scenes somewhat reminiscent of Graham Greene’s writing about Mexico in the 30s (The Power And The Glory/The Lawless Roads) our local god squad were moving shiftily and far more individually towards mass this morning, trying not to draw too much attention to themselves, like Carrie Mathison on the streets of Kabul.

Cabin in the Woods

Last week we were up near San Lucas visiting a friend’s tree-covered plot, and right alongside it there’s this near-completed property advertised as a Casa Estilo Americano, though these premium log cabins also tend to be known here as ‘Canadian’ homes.

I suppose you can spice your life up a bit by adding fire to your earthquake risk.

For extra authenticity the developers have probably released a few bears and psychopaths into the woods.

Tercer Domingo de Cua..rentena

So, the whole close the borders and carry on as normal plan lasted less than 24 hours. 

Internal tourism will no longer be encouraged as replacement for the roughly 70% of foreign visitors Guatemala shut the door on yesterday. 

No more school, no more gatherings of a hundred or more and, in theory, no more Semana Santa.

Giammattei must have received new information today he’s not sharing. No way he’d have done a Saturday u-turn otherwise. 

Many will have been caught with stock they cannot now offload (guantes, guantes...) and this afternoon I watched a woman buying a shitload of sawdust from the local carpenter. 

My sympathies are starting to slot into a natural scale, with people who rent out their toilets close to the bottom, currently occupied by the restaurant known to my sister-in-law as ‘aquel del taquasin patas arriba’. 

Altogether now...

I have a pretty heavy duty protective mask I bought for shielding myself from tear gas (having returned from Chile last November a bit fucked up), which I then thought I'd give to my gardener, yet of course it subsequently occurred to me that it could come in handy here during the current pandemic...and now I'm thinking it could still end up protecting me from tear gas. There's almost bound to be a bit of civil disobedience over the cancelled Holy Week processions. I would not put it past Giammattei to send in the riot police! 

Anyone in government who’s not really into civil liberties has surely realised that this is going to be a year to tell their grandchildren about. 

Anyway, even the most humungous andas in the capital are rather conveniently capped at 99 brazos. 

The bells are still tolling in our village in advance of the (just cancelled) procession tomorrow. They'd usually have no trouble keeping attendees below 100. I can hear the band playing marchas solemnes outside the church right now and there’s undoubtedly an additional poignancy in the air. This really is it for 2020. 

Before his own community’s procession was cancelled, the alcalde of Jocotes appeared on the interwebs advising citizens to report anyone they see sneezing suspiciously, and all the while, as the carnitas smoke swirled around him, he was comically containing a cough. 

Meanwhile, back in the UK my cousin Sara has gone into isolation now after attending a dinner party where another guest later tested positive. 

The government's plan back in Blighty also seems to change with disconcerting rapidity. 

In a not entirely transparent manner Boris may be attempting to run a two-tier epidemic, juggling separate ‘curves’ for different age groups. All this ‘herd immunity’ gobbledegook is perhaps a cover for a cunning plan to let the virus pass more swiftly through the younger, working population who, on average, appear to present with more limited, home-treatable symptoms. 

They'd then act as a buffer to slow things down later on. It’s a high risk test case for doing things differently to the EU and the PM possibly thinks the UK has an advantage over places like Italy in terms of connections between the generations and overall social distancing tendencies, but of course this would disfavour many immigrant communities where domestic conditions can be different. 

Semana Santa is suspended...

...in Seville. 

First time since the Civil War and at an estimated cost of €400m. 

Well done Juan Espadas Cejas. It took courage but he must have known what was coming. 

Total lockdown now imminent anyway across the country. 

Last night planes from the UK destined for Spain were turning back in mid-flight. 

It does seem that nations with 'Latin' domestic arrangements tend to lose control far more quickly than anywhere else. 

One bunch of eedjits who may be in for a rough ride are those bogus bomberos of Alerta-3. Only tourists and out-of-towners seem to give them their spare change. The bona fide municipal bomberos do however need as much community support as we can all provide. At present they lack even basic protective gear. 

BTW my own slightly deceptive title here reminded me of some of the truly underhand headlines that the London Evening Standard used to indulge in during my youth. (We all remember the sort: ‘Famous Actor Dies’. And it turned out to be an extra on Crossroads.) 

Sospechosos

Some potential here for Soviet-style snitching. 

Quarantini