🍕 now 24-7, potentially. Is this really necessary?
I’m no expert on the local labour laws, but there has to be some potential for abuse here.
Plus we’ll soon be entering the wet season...and many within the customer base have short-circuited their circadian rhythms.
Needless to say, there are already people working for nothing in Antigua.
Monday, April 13, 2020
Hallazgo
Just found a beer at the back of the fridge.
In my head I heard a reprise of those noonday fireworks. 🎆🎇🥳
It’s only a Dorada Ice, but beggars can’t be choosers.
In my head I heard a reprise of those noonday fireworks. 🎆🎇🥳
It’s only a Dorada Ice, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
Hyper-ventilating
Our collective preoccupation with the procurement and stockpiling of ventilators during this pandemic has been compared to the more individual obsession with the buying and hoarding of bog rolls.
And it’s not hard to see why, for neither offers a properly satisfactory solution to the problem at hand.
Ventilators were developed for clinical use in situations where a patient is temporarily unable to operate their own pumps.
A weakened diaphragm can cause this crisis for example, as can conditions within the lungs themselves, such as bacterial pneumonia or even asthma. Air containing oxygen is forced in while the underlying problem is treated with meds and, ideally, reduced.
Yet with covid-19 there is no pharmaceutical treatment...no cure. In the most critical cases it eliminates the lung cells’ capacity to absorb oxygen and transfer it to the blood stream, to the point that no amount of air being forced in by a machine will make a difference.
This is why (in the developed world) around 60% of patients being put on a ventilator as a result of advanced covid-19 symptoms are dying, and we lack the data to tell us if survivors might have recovered anyway, because it would be very hard to conduct a proper clinical test in an ethical fashion.
There are reports from hospitals in New York that although the procedure of inserting the tube poses additional risks of infection to the personnel involved, the patient, once on the ventilator, poses a reduced contagion risk overall at the hospital. And so some patients are being tubed up sooner than they might otherwise have been.
So, when the likes of Al Rojo Vivo mock Guatemala for having 100 ventilators to cover a population of maybe 15m, this really isn’t the worst of our problems.
So, when the likes of Al Rojo Vivo mock Guatemala for having 100 ventilators to cover a population of maybe 15m, this really isn’t the worst of our problems.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Vamos señores...continua la tradición
I republish this almost every year, never more appropriately perhaps than in 2020.
Amazingly, we didn't need quarantine to come up with this concept.
The anda was kindly donated by our kitties. They don't make them any more.
The anda was kindly donated by our kitties. They don't make them any more.
Disease Vectors
There are two groups of people wandering around our villages knocking on doors who should be definitively told to fuck off.
Debt collectors and the fake bomberos of Alerta-3...
Debt collectors and the fake bomberos of Alerta-3...
Los Recuperados
Blood tests conducted in a small town in Germany are reported to have revealed that 14% of the population have been infected and have recovered and are 'therefore immune'.
Meanwhile South Korea reports 91 cases of people who have recovered and become re-infected. (There are different interpretations and many variables > Jung Ki-suck, professor of pulmonary medicine at Hallym University Sacred Heart hospital.)
During his regular addresses to the nation, Giammattei has repeatedly brandished the recuperados stat, now at 17.
I have been uncomfortable with this from the outset. I think anyone who has tested postive, regardless of whether or not they subsequently became symptomatic to any level, should exercise extreme caution in their lives until we have a fuller understanding of SARS-Cov-2. (Starting with Prince Charles...)
The disease itself — covid-19 — is the payload if you will, but it is coded into our species as much as it is into the virus and there is much circumstantial evidence to suggest that its severity is linked to a variety of quite different risk factors, but deep down the viral load and individual exposure would seem to be key. This is one reason why, on average, medical personnel seem to experience more severe symptoms.
It may well be that one 'recovers' from covid-19 when the viral load in one's lungs diminishes, yet at this stage we simply don't know if recuperados remain vulnerable to re-activation, and perhaps more crucially, whether some might become potential asymptomatic spreaders.
(On a separate and largely irrelevant note, when plague broke out in London in the spring of 1665, up to 200,000 people, in the main the wealthier and otherwise more mobile members of the community, hot-footed it to the countryside. Come the Autumn, the pestilence seemed to ease, but in truth what was happening was that survivors in the capital had greater resistance to infection, natural or acquired. So when the 200,000 started to return, it all kicked off again.)
Meanwhile South Korea reports 91 cases of people who have recovered and become re-infected. (There are different interpretations and many variables > Jung Ki-suck, professor of pulmonary medicine at Hallym University Sacred Heart hospital.)
During his regular addresses to the nation, Giammattei has repeatedly brandished the recuperados stat, now at 17.
I have been uncomfortable with this from the outset. I think anyone who has tested postive, regardless of whether or not they subsequently became symptomatic to any level, should exercise extreme caution in their lives until we have a fuller understanding of SARS-Cov-2. (Starting with Prince Charles...)
The disease itself — covid-19 — is the payload if you will, but it is coded into our species as much as it is into the virus and there is much circumstantial evidence to suggest that its severity is linked to a variety of quite different risk factors, but deep down the viral load and individual exposure would seem to be key. This is one reason why, on average, medical personnel seem to experience more severe symptoms.
It may well be that one 'recovers' from covid-19 when the viral load in one's lungs diminishes, yet at this stage we simply don't know if recuperados remain vulnerable to re-activation, and perhaps more crucially, whether some might become potential asymptomatic spreaders.
(On a separate and largely irrelevant note, when plague broke out in London in the spring of 1665, up to 200,000 people, in the main the wealthier and otherwise more mobile members of the community, hot-footed it to the countryside. Come the Autumn, the pestilence seemed to ease, but in truth what was happening was that survivors in the capital had greater resistance to infection, natural or acquired. So when the 200,000 started to return, it all kicked off again.)
Lockdown 1665
In Journal of the Plague Year Daniel Defoe's narrator touched on some of the issues associated with enforced containment:
"If, then, there were cases wherein the infected people were careless of the injury they did to others, this was certainly one of them, if not the chief, namely, when people who had the distemper had broken out from houses which were so shut up, and having been driven to extremities for provision or for entertainment, had endeavoured to conceal their condition, and have been thereby instrumental involuntarily to infect others who have been ignorant and unwary...
"The people broke out, whether by force or by stratagem, even almost as often as they pleased; and, second, that those that did thus break out were generally people infected who, in their desperation, running about from one place to another, valued not whom they injured: and which perhaps, as I have said, might give birth to report that it was natural to the infected people to desire to infect others, which report was really false...
"This is one of the reasons why I believed then, and do believe still, that the shutting up houses thus by force, and restraining, or rather imprisoning, people in their own houses, as I said above, was of little or no service in the whole. Nay, I am of opinion it was rather hurtful, having forced those desperate people to wander abroad with the plague upon them, who would otherwise have died quietly in their beds."
"If, then, there were cases wherein the infected people were careless of the injury they did to others, this was certainly one of them, if not the chief, namely, when people who had the distemper had broken out from houses which were so shut up, and having been driven to extremities for provision or for entertainment, had endeavoured to conceal their condition, and have been thereby instrumental involuntarily to infect others who have been ignorant and unwary...
"The people broke out, whether by force or by stratagem, even almost as often as they pleased; and, second, that those that did thus break out were generally people infected who, in their desperation, running about from one place to another, valued not whom they injured: and which perhaps, as I have said, might give birth to report that it was natural to the infected people to desire to infect others, which report was really false...
"This is one of the reasons why I believed then, and do believe still, that the shutting up houses thus by force, and restraining, or rather imprisoning, people in their own houses, as I said above, was of little or no service in the whole. Nay, I am of opinion it was rather hurtful, having forced those desperate people to wander abroad with the plague upon them, who would otherwise have died quietly in their beds."
Thursday, April 09, 2020
Walk-ins
One of our near neighbours in the village has gone to ground with enough food supplies to provide relief to a small Caribbean nation after a natural disaster, private ventilator machines etc.
Rich people in Guatemala are not generally known for their community spirit.
And one thing we have learned these last few days is that the more selfish elements of the country's elite are more than capable of screwing things up for everyone else.
One exemplar walked into a private hospital and signed in (think of the receptionists, the pen that was used) with a fever and maybe even a persistent dry cough.
I suppose the idea of that bed awaiting at the Parque Industrial was sufficiently unappealing to override any sense of personal responsibility.
The end result, fairly immediately, was a pair of resident consultants testing positive, suggesting that they were unprepared for this sort of walk-in. And today, around half a dozen new cases associated with this case of personal exceptionalism.
There really do have to be stiffer penalties for this sort of thing. If any one of the people thus infected were to die, manslaughter charges surely would be appropriate.
Rich people in Guatemala are not generally known for their community spirit.
And one thing we have learned these last few days is that the more selfish elements of the country's elite are more than capable of screwing things up for everyone else.
One exemplar walked into a private hospital and signed in (think of the receptionists, the pen that was used) with a fever and maybe even a persistent dry cough.
I suppose the idea of that bed awaiting at the Parque Industrial was sufficiently unappealing to override any sense of personal responsibility.
The end result, fairly immediately, was a pair of resident consultants testing positive, suggesting that they were unprepared for this sort of walk-in. And today, around half a dozen new cases associated with this case of personal exceptionalism.
There really do have to be stiffer penalties for this sort of thing. If any one of the people thus infected were to die, manslaughter charges surely would be appropriate.
On Pause
There seems to be prevailing view — in the US in particular — that the economic contraction associated with the pandemic is man-made and man-controlled rather than systemic, rather like a pause button effect, and that once the threat to life has diminished sufficiently — ideally during the summer — the button can be un-pressed and everything will more or less start off again where it left off...in a ‘robust’ state.
There’s an obvious political angle to this narrative in the US. And yet it is not to be entirely discounted as many stalled industries are likely to need to play catch-up almost immediately and may tend to kick off again at full tilt.
Yet can 17m unemployed just walk back into their old jobs? Is the US economy such an island that the wider slowdown in global trade, tourism and so on is unlikely to have much of an impact?
What of the likely longer-term absence of large-scale social interaction and its associated psychological impact? Is the new normal really going to so closely resemble the old normal?
Thinking more locally, there are certainly parts of the Guatemalan economy that from the supply side at least will come back online rather like a rebooted server. The demand side could be trickier though.
And the 4/5s of Antigua's economy that used to be funded by foreigners will not magically re-appear in even the medium term.
When the pause button is finally released we may not hear the tune we expected.
There’s an obvious political angle to this narrative in the US. And yet it is not to be entirely discounted as many stalled industries are likely to need to play catch-up almost immediately and may tend to kick off again at full tilt.
Yet can 17m unemployed just walk back into their old jobs? Is the US economy such an island that the wider slowdown in global trade, tourism and so on is unlikely to have much of an impact?
What of the likely longer-term absence of large-scale social interaction and its associated psychological impact? Is the new normal really going to so closely resemble the old normal?
Thinking more locally, there are certainly parts of the Guatemalan economy that from the supply side at least will come back online rather like a rebooted server. The demand side could be trickier though.
And the 4/5s of Antigua's economy that used to be funded by foreigners will not magically re-appear in even the medium term.
When the pause button is finally released we may not hear the tune we expected.
Tuesday, April 07, 2020
Moving goalposts
The rules for ending lockdowns were established by Italy, the first country in the West to impose one: Two whole incubation periods of 15 days have to pass after the last new positive case is detected.
Then there follows a 90-day heightened vigilance period in which many mass or social activities remain restricted.
So, at any single moment one is a minimum of a month away from release. Four from a return to some sort of pre-pandemic normality. Yet in reality, much further.
There were four new cases here in Guatemala today, one a man in his 70s from San Juan del Obispo.
France has seen a rise in fatalities, while Italy, which had appeared to be past the worst, has had a new surge.
In Europe only Spain appears to have peaked. But that just means the number of new cases detected each day has started a slow decline. They remain a long way from that final 30 days.
Even China still reports 20+ new cases a day.
And a strong sense that what is to come afterwards could well be worse has started to take hold.
Then there follows a 90-day heightened vigilance period in which many mass or social activities remain restricted.
So, at any single moment one is a minimum of a month away from release. Four from a return to some sort of pre-pandemic normality. Yet in reality, much further.
There were four new cases here in Guatemala today, one a man in his 70s from San Juan del Obispo.
France has seen a rise in fatalities, while Italy, which had appeared to be past the worst, has had a new surge.
In Europe only Spain appears to have peaked. But that just means the number of new cases detected each day has started a slow decline. They remain a long way from that final 30 days.
Even China still reports 20+ new cases a day.
And a strong sense that what is to come afterwards could well be worse has started to take hold.
Monday, April 06, 2020
Hyper-local
The staggered nature of the pandemic, across the globe, across the US even, may be creating false expectations of imminent relief.
Responses are still remarkably local and idiosyncratic. Every country appears to have come up with one completely bonkers idea all by itself. Panama has gendered its lockdown, Belize has denied re-entry to its own citizens and so on.
And while the developed world is starting to look forward to 'better times' (Austria is already planning to un-lockdown), the situation in the developing world may be about to significantly worsen, and it would indeed be unfortunate if the moment of greatest need in marginal communities comes at a time when the affluent are collectively breathing a sigh of relief.
Unless the human race as a whole has developed a form of herd immunity in just three months (or untraced infections are running at 50x the levels currently tracked, as some of the billionaire optimists suggest) then we won't be able to let our guard down as a species for some time.
Here in Guatemala we now have our first example of regional community transmission of unknown provenance and our first small town effectively cordoned off by the military. It may be a tipping point.
Patzún is a locale that plays an important role in the supply chain to the market in Antigua, fruit and vegetables in particular, and the developments over the past few days and the new prohibition against inter-departmental travel may entail additional side effects here in terms of the impact on businesses which depend on supplies from outside Sacatepéquez.
Those who only a fortnight or so ago were advocating a 'buy local' campaign as a way of ventilating the local economy probably never imagined how soon this policy would become de facto if not de iure.
A couple of days ago I spotted a marketing initiative put together by a cartelito of eight catering businesses in the city, all claiming to be 'locally-owned' but in truth only two of them really are in the purist sense.
That the promotional scheme was pitched in English both culturally and linguistically and would anyway be unlikely to appeal all that much to many panza verdes shows just how far some have to go to fully understand the new situation here.
Suddenly everyone is in the same boat, chasing the same, far more local customer base. Those that understand this market have a clear advantage, and in these times of contractions and re-alignments, the more effortless natives are almost certainly going to try to put the squeeze on the faux-indigenes, in ways that will be familiar to anyone who's ever been to Cornwall.
So, if you use the word 'local' in your marketing, you are going to have to be absolutely transparent about what you mean. For be warned, Antigueños are not going to accept any BS.
Many seem to feel that they have been actively disrespected for a long time by a portion of consumer facing businesses chasing supposedly bigger fish; some may even be looking for payback.
Responses are still remarkably local and idiosyncratic. Every country appears to have come up with one completely bonkers idea all by itself. Panama has gendered its lockdown, Belize has denied re-entry to its own citizens and so on.
And while the developed world is starting to look forward to 'better times' (Austria is already planning to un-lockdown), the situation in the developing world may be about to significantly worsen, and it would indeed be unfortunate if the moment of greatest need in marginal communities comes at a time when the affluent are collectively breathing a sigh of relief.
Unless the human race as a whole has developed a form of herd immunity in just three months (or untraced infections are running at 50x the levels currently tracked, as some of the billionaire optimists suggest) then we won't be able to let our guard down as a species for some time.
Here in Guatemala we now have our first example of regional community transmission of unknown provenance and our first small town effectively cordoned off by the military. It may be a tipping point.
Patzún is a locale that plays an important role in the supply chain to the market in Antigua, fruit and vegetables in particular, and the developments over the past few days and the new prohibition against inter-departmental travel may entail additional side effects here in terms of the impact on businesses which depend on supplies from outside Sacatepéquez.
Those who only a fortnight or so ago were advocating a 'buy local' campaign as a way of ventilating the local economy probably never imagined how soon this policy would become de facto if not de iure.
A couple of days ago I spotted a marketing initiative put together by a cartelito of eight catering businesses in the city, all claiming to be 'locally-owned' but in truth only two of them really are in the purist sense.
That the promotional scheme was pitched in English both culturally and linguistically and would anyway be unlikely to appeal all that much to many panza verdes shows just how far some have to go to fully understand the new situation here.
Suddenly everyone is in the same boat, chasing the same, far more local customer base. Those that understand this market have a clear advantage, and in these times of contractions and re-alignments, the more effortless natives are almost certainly going to try to put the squeeze on the faux-indigenes, in ways that will be familiar to anyone who's ever been to Cornwall.
So, if you use the word 'local' in your marketing, you are going to have to be absolutely transparent about what you mean. For be warned, Antigueños are not going to accept any BS.
Many seem to feel that they have been actively disrespected for a long time by a portion of consumer facing businesses chasing supposedly bigger fish; some may even be looking for payback.
Westworld, off with S3
In spite of the what the chemtrailers, vegan extremists and 5G mast-obsessed might tell you, SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that is actively resisting attempts to pinpoint its metaphorical payload.
This has left a lot of the content we might now be consuming at home lacking in au courant relevance.
Perhaps not Westworld — now with added Aaron Paul and Susana Asensio — for it is a) set in a sufficiently distant near future and b) can be about whatever you want it to be about really...though the occasionally predominant proposition that some people are under close observation within a simulation without fully realising it, could easily be stretched to fit current realities.
This has left a lot of the content we might now be consuming at home lacking in au courant relevance.
Perhaps not Westworld — now with added Aaron Paul and Susana Asensio — for it is a) set in a sufficiently distant near future and b) can be about whatever you want it to be about really...though the occasionally predominant proposition that some people are under close observation within a simulation without fully realising it, could easily be stretched to fit current realities.
Saturday, April 04, 2020
Cryptic
SARS-Cov-2 has been able to consistently mess with our expectations because culturally at least, these expectations have largely been set by fiction and not by history. (Or 'models' that are abstracted from human realities.)
A reading of the literature for the Great Plague in London (1665) for example, will reveal that pestilence has often spread in ways that are uneven in both pace and extent and more than a little dumfounding.
The apocalypses we imagine and then pay to witness tend to be simple and brutal in premise. Yet I have often wondered why we don't speculate just a little bit more around partial rather than near total apocalypses, calamities where the breakdowns are just a bit more selective, where only one or two key switches in civilisation’s fuse box have been flipped.
The novel coronavirus that has brought the modern world partially to its knees is a very slippery character indeed. Far far more contagious than its predecessor, and potentially lethal to an uncertain number of human beings from a frustratingly imprecise sub-set of the species.
Our current obsession with testing has more to do with pinning the little bugger down than providing a proper solution.
There seem to be just too many ways to cut the cake and one ends up with the suspicion that this indeterminacy is a fundamental part of the MO of the virus and one that it is somehow exploiting.
In this it has almost dream-like qualities: the moment of potential intelligibility turns out to be but a blink away from the collapse into the ungraspable.
Here in Guatemala one might even want to examine the ways in which the contagion co-evolves with the measures taken to suppress it.
About a month ago my wife pinpointed this formally sneaky aspect of the pandemic when she referred to the behaviour of SARS-CoV-2 as 'mathematical'. Then we watched this interview with one Dr Djaballah conducted by the Korea Times, in which his use of the adjective cryptic really chimed with us.
Now, while I am (almost) never a subscriber to conspiracy theories, the patterns we are seeing with this virus would not be that hard to stigmatise as the work of a human agent determined to dick around with the basic settings of SARS-CoV-1.
And yet, back in January, one of the principal arguments deployed against the conspiracy theories was that any cabal of super-villains in a hidden lab would surely have chosen to elaborate a bug that would be far more lethal and in a sense, far more simple. Would they, really?
Like any other conclusions we draw, this one is going to have to be provisional.
A reading of the literature for the Great Plague in London (1665) for example, will reveal that pestilence has often spread in ways that are uneven in both pace and extent and more than a little dumfounding.
The apocalypses we imagine and then pay to witness tend to be simple and brutal in premise. Yet I have often wondered why we don't speculate just a little bit more around partial rather than near total apocalypses, calamities where the breakdowns are just a bit more selective, where only one or two key switches in civilisation’s fuse box have been flipped.
The novel coronavirus that has brought the modern world partially to its knees is a very slippery character indeed. Far far more contagious than its predecessor, and potentially lethal to an uncertain number of human beings from a frustratingly imprecise sub-set of the species.
Our current obsession with testing has more to do with pinning the little bugger down than providing a proper solution.
There seem to be just too many ways to cut the cake and one ends up with the suspicion that this indeterminacy is a fundamental part of the MO of the virus and one that it is somehow exploiting.
In this it has almost dream-like qualities: the moment of potential intelligibility turns out to be but a blink away from the collapse into the ungraspable.
Here in Guatemala one might even want to examine the ways in which the contagion co-evolves with the measures taken to suppress it.
About a month ago my wife pinpointed this formally sneaky aspect of the pandemic when she referred to the behaviour of SARS-CoV-2 as 'mathematical'. Then we watched this interview with one Dr Djaballah conducted by the Korea Times, in which his use of the adjective cryptic really chimed with us.
Now, while I am (almost) never a subscriber to conspiracy theories, the patterns we are seeing with this virus would not be that hard to stigmatise as the work of a human agent determined to dick around with the basic settings of SARS-CoV-1.
And yet, back in January, one of the principal arguments deployed against the conspiracy theories was that any cabal of super-villains in a hidden lab would surely have chosen to elaborate a bug that would be far more lethal and in a sense, far more simple. Would they, really?
Like any other conclusions we draw, this one is going to have to be provisional.
Friday, April 03, 2020
Vivarium (2020)
Cometh the hour, cometh the movie.
If ever there was a psychological-satire to survive the widespread narrative redundancy of these times, this is it.
It falls some way short of being a horror flick, of being science fiction, of either sufficient drama or character development, of possessing a fully satisfactory explanation and of having a big enough conceit for a full feature, yet all these deficiencies are picket-fenced away by the sheer timeliness of it.
That and the excellent casting. Imogen Poots has been a little bit eclipsed by the likes of Florence Pugh, Carey Mulligan and Felicity Jones in recent years, but she remains one of Britain's leading young female film actors. (She and Eisenberg were also great together in The Art Of Self-Defense.)
There's also a stand-out performance from Jonathan Aris, a contemporary of mine from both school and university.
Aris plays Martin, an estate agent — creepy even by the standards of his profession — who leads a slightly reluctant young couple called Gemma and Tom to view the show home at a development called Yonder, which turns out to be a vast, uninhabited, cookie-cutter gated community, with no wall and no gate, so no need to fret about the potential horrors on the outside; instead, this movie is all about the nightmare of suburban introspection.
The property ladder here, and there is one, is much more of a snake.
Of Yonder Martin patters that "It's near enough and far enough. Just the right distance." And that in essence is always the problem with the easy-to-replicate lifestyle of suburban early parenthood that it encapsulates: one is always a bit too near to some things and a bit too far from others. And the sense of being just the right distance from an intimation of being utterly trapped tends to come and go.
Right now in lockdown, just how many are being existentially-excruciated by their constricted domestic existence, squeezed in with the little aliens they have engendered? Suddenly the prison is a lot less metaphorical.
These days people tend to use the Interwebs to escape lab-rat conformity, so it surprised me a little that although we do get the inevitable 'no network' moment of most contemporary horror flicks, neither Gemma nor Tom seem especially bothered by the more general loss of connectivity.
‘Bring up the child and you will be released...’
The Clone Wars
Michael, one of my oldest non-Chapin friends in Antigua, once confided to me how he thought long and hard before opening his shop — La Nube — about the sort of business that could thrive in the city without being almost immediately swamped by clones.
Duck feather pillows have done the job for him in that respect for many years now. They are perhaps also a bit more recession-proof than other available discretionary purchases, like spa treatments, though I imagine that trade is currently suspended. (Fortunately, my friend belongs to Antigua’s diminishing class of hobbyist, gentleman-entrepreneurs.)
Only last week I was noting with admiration how Pappy’s BBQ has significantly adjusted its offer towards the home and even retail markets by vacuum-packing their food. Well now there are already several copycats trill-rauuuuling on the tejados of Antigua.
Here in Antigua the Johnnies don’t even come lately.
Ofertón Pérez of the day.
Fancy breakfast in November? You can pay for it now.
Duck feather pillows have done the job for him in that respect for many years now. They are perhaps also a bit more recession-proof than other available discretionary purchases, like spa treatments, though I imagine that trade is currently suspended. (Fortunately, my friend belongs to Antigua’s diminishing class of hobbyist, gentleman-entrepreneurs.)
Only last week I was noting with admiration how Pappy’s BBQ has significantly adjusted its offer towards the home and even retail markets by vacuum-packing their food. Well now there are already several copycats trill-rauuuuling on the tejados of Antigua.
Here in Antigua the Johnnies don’t even come lately.
Ofertón Pérez of the day.
Fancy breakfast in November? You can pay for it now.
Bunfight at the O.K. Corral
After a truly epic bunfight in congress last night, which lasted until five in the morning, representatives have approved a decree guaranteeing basic services, Internet included, for three months, ‘or whatever it takes’.
This I think should be taken as the surest sign yet that the fundamental restrictions in place right now are unlikely to be loosened any time soon.
This morning the parque central in Antigua was sealed off like a crime scene and is being guarded by local military reserves.
There were minor grumblings in our household earlier, occasioned by the fact that I have already paid our water bills through to the end of 2020.
However, given that we don’t sit within that class of citizens likely to be seriously inconvenienced by the economic contraction, now is not the time, I believe and would like to append as a piece of advice to others in a similar situation, to partake of available freeloading opportunities.
This I think should be taken as the surest sign yet that the fundamental restrictions in place right now are unlikely to be loosened any time soon.
This morning the parque central in Antigua was sealed off like a crime scene and is being guarded by local military reserves.
There were minor grumblings in our household earlier, occasioned by the fact that I have already paid our water bills through to the end of 2020.
However, given that we don’t sit within that class of citizens likely to be seriously inconvenienced by the economic contraction, now is not the time, I believe and would like to append as a piece of advice to others in a similar situation, to partake of available freeloading opportunities.
The Great Pizza Bubble
So, Giammattei has ordered the beaches and lakes closed for Holy Week.
How exactly is that going to work over at Atitlán?
The imprecision in the measure is once more apparent. Closed for swimming, closed for navigation or closed to outsiders completely?
In the UK the police have been dumping black dye into lagoons that might otherwise remain attractive to swimmers.
Meanwhile, having long debated with friends in Antigua whether or not pizza saturation point had been reached, I think we can all agree that we’re well past that stage now, into something approaching the great pizza bubble.
Even restaurants that never before offered pizza are now competing for customers with the existing horde, many of whom must be feeling a degree of consternation at the unexpected arrival of reinforcements.
The latter must also be regretting that they didn’t offer home delivery before, as experience has to count for something in this situation and in the likely prolonged absence of tourists, it could become part of that over-heralded phenomenon, the new normal.
How exactly is that going to work over at Atitlán?
The imprecision in the measure is once more apparent. Closed for swimming, closed for navigation or closed to outsiders completely?
In the UK the police have been dumping black dye into lagoons that might otherwise remain attractive to swimmers.
Meanwhile, having long debated with friends in Antigua whether or not pizza saturation point had been reached, I think we can all agree that we’re well past that stage now, into something approaching the great pizza bubble.
Even restaurants that never before offered pizza are now competing for customers with the existing horde, many of whom must be feeling a degree of consternation at the unexpected arrival of reinforcements.
The latter must also be regretting that they didn’t offer home delivery before, as experience has to count for something in this situation and in the likely prolonged absence of tourists, it could become part of that over-heralded phenomenon, the new normal.
Thursday, April 02, 2020
Just passing Tower Bridge
Back in the days when we were both living and working mainly in London, my wife would often join me after office hours for social events, at first in Bloomsbury and later on in Soho.
Like any self-respecting Chapin, she tended to struggle a bit with punctuality. I'd call up to see where she'd got to and although she was either still at her own desk in the City or at home about to dip into the shower, she'd tell me she was 'just passing Tower Bridge'.
This became one of our in-jokes. So the other night, when Trump announced that the epidemic in the US would peak in the next couple of weeks, we both turned to each other and exclaimed 'he's just passing Tower Bridge'.
Trump is also hoping large swathes of his audience consider peak a synonym for end.
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