Day 50 – Monday May 4th
Today was the day certain businesses could reopen only for pre booked appointments. This includes cafes and restaurants serving take away food and hairdressers. Possibly other businesses but I wasn’t paying attention as they didn’t interest me. I went out twice today: once on my early morning hour of exercise and then again about 3pm to do my supermarket shop. Here are my observations of this part of phase zero.
There were a lot less people exercising this morning. I expected that as most will be back at work, all be it at home, and their kids home schooling. This gives then less time to be out and about, which is fine by me. I’m not a morning person but I have to thank the government for forcing me out of bed at the crack of dawn with their time slots. It’s much better to exercise in the morning when it’s nice and cool. This afternoon was seriously hot and muggy. It wouldn’t have stopped me walking but with nowhere near the pleasure.
You’ve all already seen my joy at being able to get a cafe con leche to go. There were in fact two places offering this service on today’s route. This afternoon I also noticed my nearest asian restaurant has now set up a table outside the front door to do take away food. Tomorrow I’ll walk down Carretera de Canillas, another high street near me, and see who is open there. Then on my way back from the supermarket I saw a number of businesses, who aren’t yet able to open, were busy cleaning the premises in preparation for opening hopefully next week when phase one may come into effect. This included my local pub, the Calway Station, so with any luck their terrace will be available.
The local supermarket, Coviran, who I tried to support earlier during this quarantine has now reopened, as has the Chinese corner store opposite the metro station. To be honest Coviran is little more than a corner shop itself, but it is super close which gives me the option of grabbing the odd thing I may have forgotten on my weekly shop, when I pass it during my exercise.
Finally I passed two hairdressers on today’s route: one for men and one for women. There was a queue at the barbers of men just trying to get an appointment slot. Who knew men were that fussed about their hair. The ladies’ hairdresser was relatively empty. Mind you the barbers had the tiniest premises, whilst the hairdresser was much roomier and probably way more expensive.
My final observation is that those bloody masks and gloves we’re supposed to wear are damned uncomfortable in this heat. They’re going to be impossible once the full summer heat hits us. Also I now know why I usually buy food on a daily rather than weekly basis. It’s not just that I don’t like planning weekly meals (which I hate), it’s because lugging a week’s worth of shopping home in your backpack is damned heavy. I think I sweated the skin off my back this afternoon. It’s a good thing we had all that rain in April because I foresee an awful lot of showers in my future.
I leave you with this week’s statistics. I cannot vouch for their accuracy as they keep changing the format. I usually deduct last week’s total of cases and deaths from this weeks to get the weekly number of new cases and deaths. The charts provided by the authorities include a daily figure for new cases. When you add this up over the seven days it doesn’t agree with totals. Using their figures for new cases the weekly total should be 8211 for Spain and 1847 for Madrid, which are lower than mine.
Either way the case and death numbers are definitely going down. This is the important point. It will be interesting to see if we get an increase in 2 to 3 weeks time due to the deescalation. Let’s hope not.