LIFE goes on in Catalonia. Of course it does. And when friends and relatives ask me lately if everything is alright here, if the family are safe, if we’re steering clear of trouble, I tell them of course we are. We get up, go to work, go to school, pay our taxes and do the shopping just as we always have done. There’s no police van around the corner full of riot police waiting to give us a violent beating (although some of the private stuff by off-duty Spanish police on social media implies otherwise).

Daily life is largely the same as ever, but something has changed. The indy process is a constant topic, a constant presence, just there, feeding and breeding opinion and sentiments. It never goes away. Many of us can live with that, it’s all part of the deal, but somehow there’s just a bit more to get het up about lately. The December 21 elections amount to the fourth poll on independence in three years. The outcome has been pro-independence every time and the stakes get higher accordingly, this time to the point where the goalposts are now being shamelessly shifted.

The unionists (the ruling PP party, PSOE and their Catalan version PSC, and Cs) repeatedly tell us these are REAL elections, with REAL ballot boxes and democratic “guarantees”. Two-and-a-half million people risking their personal safety to vote on October 1 was about as REAL as it gets in my opinion, but there you go. This time around, by locking up a democratically elected government, censoring media, banning the colour yellow (no kidding), banning international observers and declaring that a pro-indy result will end up with the Catalan Government being taken over by Madrid all over again, it’s becoming clearer that when they talk about “guarantees”, what they really mean is guaranteeing a unionist government in Catalonia.

As if this political game-fixing wasn’t enough, there have been some pretty disturbing turns in recent days as attempts are stepped up to try and discredit the indy camp. Mariano Rajoy and Xavier Albiol, the leader of the PP party in Catalonia, both made public references to a phone call they’d had with a poor family who had supposedly been the victims of an arson attack on their home by violent independentistes, just for hanging a Spanish flag on their balcony.

It turned out later that the householder in question is a far-right thug, linked with an attack on some Catalan hikers recently, and that the arson attack seemed to have consisted of a few papers being burnt outside the front door, presumably by said individual.

In another incident, seven life-sized dummies were strung from a bridge on a dual carriageway with logos of unionist political parties on them (PP, PSC and Cs), emulating Colombia-style mafia killings. This one is still being investigated but it’s uncanny how senior Cs politicians, the SCC unionist movement and pro-unionist papers including El Mundo voiced their outrage with extraordinary haste. The only ones who witnessed this dastardly publicity stunt and managed to a photo of it were from the right-wing blog Dolca Catalunya. Funny that. If the claims are substantiated, this would be a gruesome 180-degree turn in behaviour from independence supporters. It’s worth remembering that the indy movement has put, literally, millions of people on the streets (not to mention the 60,000 who made the trip to demonstrate in Brussels on Thursday) in favour of independence and the right to decide over the last decade and, as many point out, not a single window has been broken in all that time.

Life goes on in Catalonia. Of course it does. But we’re watching what is happening around us, taking note, and hoping others are too.