Cynically Positive

 I was discussing the state of the world with a friend and we somehow got onto the subject of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s refusal to take part in a pilot scheme. ALW has gone up in my estimations because anyone who is prepared to tell the government where they can shove their rule bending exceptions is to be admired. Despite it not being trendy I quite liked him anyway. I’m not as edgy as I’d like to be. There’s nothing better than a populist musical. As we were chatting I said, “There have been some benefits to theatre because the big shows can’t afford to run socially distantly, it has given the smaller companies a chance. Loads of new shows have been developed.”

She accused me of being able to find the positive in anything. It’s what my mum used to call my Pollyanna Personality. That was never said as a compliment and I always felt a bit ashamed of my need to look for a benefit to every problem so I added heavy cynicism to the mix.

Obviously I’m not Mrs Hancock or one of the three minicocks so my positive cynicism means that I really enjoyed yesterday’s Sun splash. 

I enjoyed imagining how the Sun got the picture and the later dropped vomit inducing video.

Boris: I don’t understand it. Why do they love him? He is my goat. We can’t let him escape.

Junior Civil Servant: What are you talking about?

Boris: He’s my scapegoat, Hugo. Didn’t they teach you anything at Eton? Everyone needs a scapegoat . When this pandemic is over and everyone starts to look at how badly this country has done then they’re going to blame me and I can’t have that.

Hugo: Oh, I see. You mean you don’t want anyone talking about how you didn’t want to lock anything down and how you’d have preferred bodies to pile up in the streets and how you were off writing that book so that you didn’t have to pay back the advance.

Boris: Exactly right, my dear boy. Someone else has to take the blame and I’ve decided it’s going to be Matt.

Hugo: Why Matt? 

Boris: Clammy hands.

Hugo: Of course, why didn’t you say? What can we do?

Boris: Well we’ve been trying to suggest that he’s hopeless for a while but he’s a Teflon cockroach.

Hugo: What about Dom? He must have something. He could knock off a 100 tweet thread or release your personal WhatsApps.

Boris: We tried that but the public just felt sorry for him. No one really likes Dom, so it didn’t work.

Hugo: And he tries hard. The public loves a trier. It’s what they know. They don’t have our connections.

Boris: But his wife’s a fucking osteopath. How can the Health Secretary’s wife be an alternative health practitioner?

Hugo: True. Well, we could try the Queen. The public love the Queen even more than they love you.

Boris: Good idea. The woman is grieving, she’s in the ‘fuck it’ phase. We might be able to get her to say anything. Film the next meeting.

Hugo: Sorry boss. It didn’t work. She called him ‘poor man’ and said that he’s full of good ideas.

Boris: Just release the bit where I interrupt. If the public hear me say beans and not the bit where she adds to it then I’ll look like I’m defending him when she was going to say that he’s full of shit.

Hugo: Genius! That’s positively Machiavellian.

Boris: Hugo? Hugo, where are you? It didn’t work. We’ve got to do more. They still like him.

Hugo: I don’t know then. What else have we got?

Boris: We need a Marmalade dropper.

Hugo: What’s that?

Boris: When I worked at the Telegraph it’s what we used to call a headline that was so shocking it would make the reader’s marmalade fall off their toast.

Hugo: Like what?

Boris: George Galloway and the cash scandal was a good one.

Hugo: But the public know all about that. They know his sister has made a fortune and they don’t care. 

Boris: A tabloid version then. A FMD.

Hugo: FMD?

Boris: You know, working class couple reading the paper with their cup of tea and a cigarette and he reads the headline and says, “Fuck me Doris,  you’ll never guess what Hancock has done now.”

Hugo: Can you give me an example?

Boris: You know, like when Mellor had sex in a Chelsea kit.

Hugo: When was that?

Boris: 1992.

Hugo: I wasn’t even born then but are you sure you want to go down the sex scandal route? It’s a slippery slope. You’re not exactly without history there.

Boris: It’s worth a punt.

Hugo: I’m not sure the public can imagine Matt having sex. They’re still laughing about that interview where he looks at that woman like he’s never seen breasts before.

Boris: That might help but he has had sex. There’s those three minicocks. Proof!

Hugo: Well yes I know. I mean, you’re all at it aren’t you? We’ve got CCTV. 

Boris: I’ve told you to destroy that. The Mrs can never find out. All my indiscretions were before Carrie.

Hugo: Not you. Matt. We’ve got a photo of Matt and his aide. We could give that to the Sun.

Boris: Brilliant, Hugo. There’s a weekend at Chequers in this for you if it comes off. Party central. Loads of snogging. No masks. Access to the wine cellar.

Hugo: Right. Consider it done.

The positive to all this is that it’s given us hours of entertainment and I’m really enjoying it. The memes are particularly entertaining.

 I’m now of to say three ‘Poor Mrs Hancock’s’ as penance.

Sports Day

The government really are slippery little sheepshearers  aren’t they?

Schools are struggling to stay open because regular testing is still a thing and as soon as someone tests positive a whole bubble is down, even if that person is vaccinated and symptomless. Good schools are desperately trying to fit the important rituals into children’s lives. School trips, clubs, plays and sports days are being delivered in new and ever more time consuming ways for the teacher. In real life, people are paid to film and edit a play over about six months. Teacher are currently doing that, for free, in their evenings to have it ready for parents in 6 days. Many schools, especially those in multi academy trusts, where the headteacher just isn’t in the school to see how much these things mean to the kids, are opting to do none of these things. They would prefer to keep maths and English lessons going, so that the schools under their leadership stay at the top of the league tables to justify their large salary. The children probably aren’t happier or well rounded but you can’t have everything (except you probably could if it weren’t for personal greed). Schools that are doing them still have to abide by the rules set out by public health in their area.

Over the past few days there has been an outpouring of emotion from parents on social media about Sports Days. There are all sorts of emotions. That’s going to happen. We’ve all kept our emotions in check, second to fear for so long that now they seem to be tumbling out like stuff from the cupboard you’ve just been shoving things into . No one actually opened the door but it’s now so full of junk the doors burst open on their own. There is a lot of pride and thankfulness. Schools that are sending children home with Sports Day stickers and memories of finally coming second in the egg and spoon race are being praised but there is also sadness. Parents wanted to be there to witness these life events. Honestly, though, as a parent who saw all of my children’s sports days it is one event you can do without. There’s not that much fun in squinting at a whole load of small people, all dressed the same, in the distance to spot your own and only noticing them because they come last, fall over or their PE shorts fall down (you really shouldn’t have insisted they’d grow into them). Your children might be more agile than mine were, so it could be the event you love, I’m not judging. Then there’s anger. People are furious. It does seem ridiculous that football stadiums can be full of drunk yobs, singing and spitting at each other when schools can’t invite all the parents to sports day.

The government have started to take some of the flack for that anger. Rightly so. Consistency is what’s lacking and what we should all be angry about. Don’t let people in from India when you know they are carrying a new variant if you have still curtailed the freedoms of your own population. That’s something to be angry about. Don’t allow football matches to go ahead when one of the players tests positive if whole year groups have to close when one teacher tests positive. It’s these inconsistencies that, rightly, make us cross.

Sometimes, there is misplaced anger and parents get cross with the school. For schools that are trying to still provide fun, interesting things, this is hard. It feels like a slap in the face. Usually, they are following public health guidance or making decisions that will keep their whole school open until the end of term.

The government, the twisty little toenail eaters, have asked Boris Johnson’s official spokesperson to talk to the press. “Sports days can and should go ahead.” The spokesman said, adding in a quiet whisper, “providing all measures of social distancing, staying in bubbles and limiting spectators are maintained.” 

See, nothing has changed. Schools still need to try to keep going until the end of term. The children who  do a sports day will do so within their bubbles, parents won’t be able to watch and it won’t be the same but it will be something.

Flag waving singing

 I love a bit of flag waving singing. I enjoy teaching anthems and have the kids sing God Save the Queen or Rule Britannia whilst waving a flag. It’s a musical skill that is important to develop, not because of any stupid notion of indoctrinated National pride but because it teaches pulse and the ability to sing while performing another task. I ask children, as they get older, to think about the words they are singing and whether, for them, they represent the country they want to live in and we even write our own anthems in upper KS2. That is, the children write their own. In 2017 I was quite shocked at how many wanted to write about Brexit and great independent nations without foreigners. I didn’t stop them though. Just as a few years before I didn’t stop the boy that wrote an anthem worthy of the Sex Pistols that I think he called Kill the Queen. Learning to accept all sorts of views is important and in a class there are all sorts of views. I also enjoyed the group that wrote about food because they thought there was nothing that represented the UK more than pizza, curry and pot noodle.

So, I can’t quite understand why I feel so discomforted by this tweet and the accompanying song that all schools are supposed to teach their children on Friday.

The song became a hot topic of discussion on the music teachers’ forums last night. There was a lot of anger. They did not want to be forced to teach their children a particular song. It felt reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Music teachers with their huge knowledge of musical theatre points to the moment in Cabaret where the children started singing enthusiastically about Hitler as being the point where they realised that the Nazis couldn’t be stopped. Indoctrinate the children first to win the battle. 

After the insistence that all public buildings fly the flag this feels tacky.

I’ll be honest, my problem comes from other reasons. It’s just an awful song. The kids in the video aren’t actually singing it because they are too busy waving flags, being pushed around and made to lie on the floor like a human Union Jack. 

The lyrics that have upset music teachers are, “We are Britain and we have one dream ,to unite all people in one great team. Strong Britain, great nation, Strong Britain, great nation, Strong Britain, great nation, Strong Britain, great na-a-a-tion.”  It also includes the line, “so many faces moving at a different pace,” which is supremely terrible.

It is so bad I actually thought it was a joke but I don’t think it is.

Also, the government have been going around giving the impression that singing is the most dangerous thing you can do for the last 15 months. They’ve hammered the message home so hard that many schools still aren’t singing and nearly all aren’t gathering in big groups for this kind of activity. However, because the government supports this particular political cause we are suddenly meant to drop everything they have been saying and join One Britain One Nation (other racist groups are available) to sing this shit song badly, because with only two days to go there’s not much time to learn to sing it well.

I’m really hoping that this does turn out to have been some kind of joke and I end up looking stupid for ranting about a spoof. I hope you can all say, “Ha ha, you were caught out.” The alternative is that it ends up becoming a kind of Horst Wessel Lied  where were are singing about clearing the streets for the red, white and blue army.

I’m not sure where this will all end but for now, I seem to have Springtime for Hitler from the Producers stuck in my head.

Getting Older

 There’s good news and bad news in the science press at the moment. Now, wait for it. It’s going to come as a shock but scientists have discovered that ageing is inevitable. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. You are going to get older (unless you suddenly die, of course, but that seems to be getting harder to do). The researchers of the study have also concluded that there’s not much you can do about how fast you age either because of biological factors.

There’s even maths to prove it.

This is bad news if you are hoping to sail towards death with perfect eyesight and the joints of a twenty year old. If you were hoping to be an octogenarian that doesn’t ache a bit and say, “ooof,” when you get out of a chair or have to read a book at arm’s length then you are likely to be in for a shock. If you thought your face won’t wrinkle and your upper arms won’t sag then life is going to be tough. If you were hoping to live forever then that’s still a possibility because they are getting really good at keeping people alive. Although, this might not be such good news if you want to actually do anything while still alive.

However, there are benefits of getting older, especially as a woman.

The pressure is off. You’re no longer a ripe peach waiting for the seed of any passing male. Your wrinkles and sagging breasts stop the nutters even considering that you are fair prey. All that stupid menstrual stuff has stopped. Every day is the same, you don’t have three days a month when you just want to hide, eat chocolate and rue the fact that absolutely no painkiller actually works and one day when anyone who wants to live would be wise to avoid you. Obviously, you have to get through the fight your hormones put up to relinquish your fecundity but once you are out the other side the future looks calm and even. All moods from hereon in are your own.

The biggest surprise about ageing for me has been the steadiness of the world. Nothing seems to change too fast anymore. Actually, things do change fast but they have a familiarity to them.Even weird things like global pandemics feel like someone with whom your are partially acquainted . You have a back catalogue of events that can help you put most things into context.

If you’ve managed to get your children through to adulthood then you can step back. It’s true that you never stop worrying about them but the worries are less frequent. You aren’t in the constant state of just getting used to one phase before the next one starts.  Sometimes they worry about you instead and you look at them like a petulant teenager, roll your eyes and say, “Really?”

You can start to enjoy things that you thought were silly in your youth. River cruises, jigsaws, eating toffees (who had time for toffee in their thirties?) , gardening, rambling, having lunch. 

You can wear slippers and sit with a blanket round your shoulders on a Summer solstice that is colder than this year’s winter one was and know that there have been cold wet Junes before but also be aware that the climate is changing. 

I’ll be honest; I quite like being older. Pass that tin of Werther’s originals, I’ve got knitting to get on with, while watching a gentle murder mystery interspersed with adverts for canal boat holidays.

Dead Cats and Escaping Goats

The Long Suffering Husband and I were discussing the Dido Harding stuff that's currently in the news.

If you've missed it then apparently she has thrown her hat in the ring for the job of CEO of the NHS when Simon Stevens steps down in July.  She seems an unlikely candidate, with no frontline NHS managerial experience and a reputation of royally mucking up the Test and Trace system.  However, I can't seem to find out who actually makes the decision on which candidate gets the job, so maybe it is Boris' decision and he will be happy to appoint someone who is prepared to be the scapegoat when he dismantles the whole thing.  To make matters worse she has then gone on record to say that if she's appointed she will make the NHS less reliant of foreigners.  Has the woman even been to a hospital recently? Apart from a clearly racist dog whistle which will appeal to the old people who are constantly complaining that they can't understand their doctors it does seem a very bizarre thing to say if you want to run a service that has around 170,000 non-British staff.  If she had said that we need to train more British people to be medics we could have all got excited.  An investment would be on it's way but this, well this is just stupid.

Anyway, I suggested to the Long Suffering Husband that she might just be a dead cat.

He had never heard of the phrase.

"You know, a dead cat?"

"No.  I have no idea what you are talking about.  She looks like a woman."

"You know?  You do know!  Don't you?  It's a media thing.  A distraction.  "Here look at this dead cat so you don't notice who we are going to give the job to, who will do a much better job of privatising the whole thing than she could."  Dido is the dead cat.  She can't possibly be a genuine candidate.  Dido is a good cat name, don't you think?"

We agreed on something.

"She does look a bit like the cat that's got the cream."

"Or the Cheshire cat, with the smile that stays beyond it's usefulness."

"She's certainly a cat with nine lives."

"A fat cat."

"The cat amongst the pigeons."

"Oh well, there's more than one way to skin a cat."

After our conversation I started to wonder about the scapegoat and decided that Matt Hancock was supposed to take that role but has turned out to be an escaping goat because we all think he's actually tried to learn how to do his job better.  He might be useless but at least he's a trying escaping goat.

Best Fathers

 Today is the day to celebrate all the best fathers. 

Some people, without the best or one that is dead or absent for another reason will find it hard. Some of those will have been comforted by the emails from Marks and Spencer that said something like, “We’ve noticed that your dad is dead, would you like to opt out of the Father’s Day marketing?” If you are like me, then that will have just amused you. 

It’s nearly 30 years since the Long Suffering Husband has had a father to remember on this summer Sunday and I wonder  if he still minds but his first Father’s Day without his dad was his first as the focus of the day, so maybe it wasn’t so bad. 

Despite the fact that my brilliant dad died a few years ago, I don’t feel sad. I can still go out into the garden and talk rubbish at Dad’s rose, who also enjoys an annual can of Old Speckled Hen. Maybe I regret not making more of a fuss of my Dad while he was alive but at least I’m not missing out.

Dad’s Rose - Blue Moon 

The LSH is a brilliant father. He is celebrating the day under the bath, practising his plumbing skills because we really know how to spoil him.

However you are spending the day I recommend having a glance at social media and just noticing how many brilliant mumsremembered to praise their husbands.

Pessimist

 Normally, a glass half full person, this morning I’ve woken with a general sense of foreboding. It might be because thunderstorms give me headaches but I think it’s because of the Chesham and Amersham by election, Covid and how much there is to fit in before the end of the school year.

We are in a very odd phase with this disease. We are going to have to live with it but until a few more adults are fully vaccinated it could still overwhelm the already overwhelmed hospitals. Because the delta variant is on the rise, we are not dropping the test, isolate and trace system.This system is really only useful if you are trying to control and eliminate a new disease and the government have already decided not to bother with that but yet they persist with this TIT policy. Whole schools are being closed down because one kid has hay fever and tests positive for Covid-19. 

The public are furious with the government for taking away the promised freedom day, so much so that the by election caused a 25% swing away from the conservatives in a safe seat that they have held, since they invented it 47 years ago and have always won with more than a 10,000 majority.

Boris won’t like that.

Will it make him do the right thing?

That’s where my sense of foreboding comes in. He will change his mind. Obviously. It would be political suicide not to, in his mind. Knee jerking his way through all major decisions, he will bring the date forward to before schools have finished but he won’t remove the TIT policy. People who test positive will still have to isolate. A few individuals with the loss of their personal freedoms is more manageable.

Unfortunately, it will be school kids that will suffer. With more unlocking, the cases will rise further. Kids in school will catch it because most of the adults will have vaccine immunity. Kids might not be very ill but the positive test will cause them and their whole class to get a 10 days in jail notice. Do not pass go, do not collect £200, do not finish school.

Sorry. That’s so pessimistic.

Normally, I’d be really positive. The public realising  that this government is useless is a good thing. I wanted the freedom day, I think if it’s in society then we have to stop testing and only worry about people who get really sick. People (including medics) need to be taught what symptoms should be warning flags, so that timely help can be given, to save lives, just as we do with stroke. It could be a good opportunity to save the lives of asthmatics, who regularly die because no one recognises the signs of low oxygen and poor lung function. It would be nice if we went back to a world where people aren’t expected to carry on through every illness and are actually encouraged to take time off to recover and not spread their germs about. However, I just think the likelihood of making it to the end of term without having to isolate is looking less likely. 

Strange times

 I’m sick of giving my opinion on the state of this country. You are probably sick of hearing it, so today I will write about my other passion.

I say that as though I only have two passions, which, as we all know, is ridiculous. I am Mrs Add a New Passion a Fortnight. Butterfly mind. Flitting from thing to thing but never quite managing to let go of the old thing. Julia of all trades. 

When my mum died I focused on birds for a while. I’d never liked birds before. I thought they were horrible flappy creatures that cats brought in to terrorise or devils that would fall down the chimney, making me scream. However, when my brain was broken, they seemed safer to watch than anything else. I started to feed them properly again, thinking that it didn’t matter if I accidentally fed the rats because, in truth, I think rats are amazing, intelligent creatures and have been passionate about them since I read Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh when I was a child. 

When lockdown happened and it turned out I couldn’t stay in because I’m still a bit claustrophobic I took myself off to very quiet places and listened to birdsong. I heard cuckoos and nightingales and learnt to tell the difference between the tits. However, it wasn’t easy and I wanted Shazam for birdsong.

The other day I stumbled across the perfect app. Warblr. Why to apps have to leave out letters? Are they like posh people in reverse, who put letters in they don’t pronounce? Anyway, Warblr is my new passion. If I can’t tell what bird is singing, I just point my phone, press the button and hey presto. It’s like magic!

This morning, towards the end of the dawn chorus, the twittery birds had finished and the crows and jackdaw’s  cawwwwwwwing had slowed. The magpies were still clacking and the pigeons cooing, which they seem to do all day. Then there came a song I’d not heard before. I was loud and insistent, a burbling, like water through a pipe. I don’t normally want to Shazam the Dawn chorus because it really is too early but this morning I couldn’t help myself.

Warblr identified the rooks, crows, magpies, pigeons and doves but right at the top of the list was a curlew.

These are strange times. There’s a curlew hiding in the trees in my garden. I know they are water birds but my little pond isn’t big enough for a curlew.

The RSPB site says that curlews are in crisis and that you should eat chocolate to save them. I can do that. In fact, I think in these strange times we should all be eating lots of chocolate to help the curlews. There I go, giving my opinions again. Chocolate for curlews.

It’s not dancing

 What have this government got against the arts?

I know that tough decisions have to be made and that if you are going to allow indoor mixing and the cases are rising in a country with a very poorly funded healthcare system then you can’t allow everyone to mix at once. I appreciate that, given the choice between upsetting football fans and theatregoers, it would probably be wise to choose to upset the latter. However, wouldn’t it just be so much more refreshing if there was honesty to it? It’s just bonkers that they are still insisting that arts based events are more dangerous than sports or business based activities.

There are still schools where they won’t let kids sing because they believe it’s unsafe. The act of having lots of people together is unsafe, singing is the same as talking (according to the research) but in reducing thing they’ve made the arts the demon.

For example, hundreds of football fans in an indoor space, singing loudly, proudly and badly is great for our national pride but the idea of a choir of 39 singing in a huge school hall with all the windows open, sitting on their own chair, facing in the same direction is unsafe is still being pushed.

These ideas will have long term damage. 

Boris made his announcement with sparkling clarity and the apology for sieve like borders we have all been hoping for (*heavy sarcasm*if you were confused).

“We will hold off step four openings until July the 29th except for weddings. Err two thirds of adults aged err err err all adults in the company will have had err will have had two doses by the end of errrm by  July by July the errrm July the 19th. We will errm have errr all er adults everybody over by July the 19th. Terminal date. Errm. There you go.”

He said that weddings can go ahead with more than thirty people providing social distancing is observed.

How? Now you may kiss the bride. Oh no sorry, just wave at her from across the room, unless you already live together. I pity the venues that have to enforce social distancing at weddings. It’s just not going to be fun. Then the details started to emerge and eating food spat on by disgruntled waiting staff is safe  and drinking enough alcohol to make you loose all sense of reason is still perfectly fine but dancing isn’t. It’s the dancing that will kill you lads. Whatever you do don’t dance. Inside dancing is banned, categorically. Outside dancing is not advised even though the Prime Minister certainly had dancing at his wedding, music helpfully provided by a band called On the Fiddle (or something similar).

No first dances. No carrying the bride and groom over your heads and stamping on a glass. No pinning money to the bride’s dress dance. All wedding cultures, no matter what religion have dancing as part of the ritual. It’s an artistic expression of love.

There I go. That’s the problem. It’s the art that’s dangerous. We know that because when a journalist asked about Lloyd-Webber’s insistence that he was going to break the law we were told not to worry about that because Cinderella was business not art and so would be allowed to go ahead as a ‘pilot project’. 

I have a solution, though. The answer is obvious. Don’t have dancing, have a workout. I’m sure you could hire a super skinny fitness queen to stand at the front in a leotard. That’ll be fine.

Green Goddess available for weddings (not really)

      

Surprising Boris

 It's no good.  I've had to resort to a second bar of chocolate.  The general feeling of anxiety is getting to me.

There has been speculation upon speculation about whether the Prime Minister would announce that his planned for 'Freedom Day' would go ahead.  Many scientists and data crunchers were concerned.  They were frantically trying to do the maths.  It was like one of those GCSE problems where they haven't given you all the information.

"If 68% of the population has Covid antibodies from having caught the virus and 79% of the population have had one dose of vaccine with 56% being fully vaccinated and one dose of the vaccine is 33% effective against new variants and two doses are 90% effective, then what's the likelihood that there will be a bed for Susan if everyone who can catch this new virus gets it at the same time?  Give your answer in interpretive dance."

I'll be honest.  I've been watching the data and I'm not sure if they can afford to ease restrictions even more.  I want that to be wrong but wanting it doesn't make it true.  Yes, only a few people are dying at the moment but the hospitalisations are rising, even though people in the NHS are saying that they are determinedly not admitting Covid patients.  It's pants but I think the constant assertions that he, "sees nothing in the data to not keep to the June 21st date," was irresponsible.  

However, this is what I'd like Boris to come onto the TV at 6pm tonight and say.

"I'm sorry.  We messed up.  The Indian/B.17.213/delta variant won't go away no matter how often we change it's name.  We should have shut down flights from India sooner but we didn't and now something has to be done.  The truth is, this is a very clever virus.  Certainly more clever than me.  It's main symptoms in England in June are now exactly those of hayfever.  As I said, it's a slippery little sucker and we have lost all hope of controlling it with any of the measures we have tried so far.  It's too late, the little blighter is here to stay.  We are sorry that we terrified you.  Most people won't even know they've got it, so you don't need to worry.  Yes, you could give it to your 92 year old granny and she might die but you could give her a cold and the same would happen.  She's old, her organs are failing, she's going to die one day.  So, instead of punishing you even further while I have hugging beach parties and dancing at my wedding we are taking a different approach.  We are stopping all flights until everyone is vaccinated.  We are going to dedicate everything to the vaccination programme and sort out some of those snotty receptionists that are making it hard to access for some people.  We're going to put a shed load more money into the NHS and make it fit for purpose.  We're going to stop paying our mates for jobs they don't do.  We are going to get everyone back to doing what they love to do.  Life has been a bit shit for most of you, it's my fault and I'm sorry."

It's unlikely to happen and it is such a shame beacause it's all spoiling my enjoyment of how funny people are when they have been captioning the photos from Cornwall on Twitter.  

Life, Death and Flowers

 Yesterday, before we went out for dinner with friends (hooray the world is getting back to normal) we were watching the football. Well, I wasn’t watching football but I did start watching when I heard what had happened. For many people watching someone collapse will have been very triggering. We don’t see death, we don’t talk about death but it is part of life. 

Although everyone watched, open-mouthed, unable to remove their eyes from the screen, once they were over the shock there was all-round criticism of the BBC. Why did they show us so much? There are laws to stop journalists intruding on shock and grief. It’s just not ok for us to be watching death. However, this was a little bit out of their control, the cameras were watching something else when it happened. They were watching a footballer. Yes, they should have stopped watching but that’s shock for you.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, I’m conflicted about this. It seems that the public have an appetite for death. Fictional death is very popular but that’s different to real death. We are all going to lose people we love to death but we don’t really know what to expect. We pretend that it’s all going to be fine. We think we will glide over it, it won’t affect us but it will. When our loved ones die it will hurt. It will hurt a lot. It will hurt for a long time - maybe forever.  However, if we don’t know what we are in for it could hurt more than is necessary.

We all watched the football pitch, hoping to understand and willing him to be alright. Luckily, he was in a place with a defibrillator and he survived. What we won’t know is what happens next. Some people survive but not for long, others survive to live a reduced life and others make a full recovery. 

We won’t follow this man to find out exactly how his life has changed but his family will. People watching whose loved ones collapsed in circumstances like this who weren’t saved may feel angry. There are so many things in life that can make the pain of grief worse, though. It could have been the jumper department of Marks and Spencer at Christmas or the smell of Lily of the Valley in the woods. We can’t remove all the grief triggers from life.

So, this morning, with death on my mind I’m off to nose around some posh people’s gardens so that people who are dying of cancer can do so in a place where people know what to expect without being told there’s no room for them, so that their relatives can have less grief-triggering moments and maybe even eat, sleep or close their eyes like a normal person.

Oh my, you’ve grown!

 I couldn’t have been in a better mood. I’d been excited all day, waking up super early like a kid at Christmas. I glided through the day with every irritation washing over me. Even a class of howling (rather than singing) year 6s on a hot Friday afternoon at the end of the year in one blighted by Covid , the day before they go on a residential trip only made me smile. Nothing was getting to me because I was getting my youth orchestra back together that evening.

I was almost hysterical with excitement throughout the day. My eyes leaked when someone in the staff room said, “Nice pear.” (They we’re eating a pear)

I think people started to worry about me. 

People don’t understand why, after a week of (sometimes awful) music making, I want to give up some of my Friday to make more. I can’t explain it but I have missed it so much. 

I have understood Covid restrictions but that doesn’t mean they didn’t hurt. Although, as a children’s group , we could have met sooner we decided to wait but the waiting is finally over. We’ve had to change venue but that joy of being able to make music together again is still there.

My excitement didn’t lead to disappointment. Instead, I had the best time. We played our favourites (Children’s March 4 times), ate cake , chatted, reminisced and mourned the loss of a year of Christmas Carols. 

However, I was like a granny. 

When I was a child we used to laugh at my grandparents. It was a family joke. We’d be in the car practising our impressions.

“My! How you’ve grown!”

“How did you get to be so tall?”

“Have you been sleeping in a grow bag?”

“What have you been feeding them, Lin? Potash?” (Grandad was a gardener)

We’d do our impressions with a quavering voice and watery eyes, pretending to press a coin into the other’s palm and whispering, “Get yourself an ice cream. Don’t tell your mum!”

We couldn’t understand it. My recollection is that we saw them most Saturdays but maybe I was wrong. Maybe they hadn’t seen us for 15 months (which is how long we haven’t been able to rehearse for) because it’s very difficult not to get a bit watery eyed and say, “Wow! Haven’t you grown?”

When I was at Magdalen

 The government are really busy at the moment.  It's tough for them.  They've got the fallout from a global pandemic to deal with.  Oliver Dowden is far too busy trying to save the music industry to be commenting on a decision to suspend an elite sportsman for a tweet.  Gavin Williamson has his hands full trying to address some of the issues that now face millions of school and college children, since they have lost a year of 'normal' education.  There's no way he's got time to wage a culture war over a £2.99 Athena poster.

Oh, wait.  Sorry.  I was wrong.  Plenty of time.  It is so important for the government to manipulated what you think.  Quick, get Julia Hartley Brewer on the case, send the dog whistles out.  None of this is any less important than actually running the country effectively because Boris is in charge with his unshakeable belief that it will be alright in the end.  I mean why wouldn't it?  He has lived his whole life in chaos and it's all fine for him, just like my Grandad who had never had a car accident but had seen loads.

Now it's time to prepare yourself for the tweets and articles that start with, "When I was at Magdalen.."

It's not as if it will be hard to find National Press journalists that went to Oxford.  Several posh people went there (eg Dido Harding).  People who know that you don't have to pronounce all the letters in the word.  Rather than pronouncing it Mag- da- len, like the Mary (please don't tell me she's pronounced differently) Instead, you just miss out all the consonants because your teeth were wired together at birth to stop you getting too fat or saying anything obvious like, "Couldn't we just fix that building we are renting out to poor people for 90% of their wage?"  Missing out the consonants means that it is pronounced as Maudlin, like some ancient grief-stricken aunt.

Re-framing an Oxford college as a den of Marxist activity is a really weird thing to do.  Many of the students at this Oxford college will have benefitted from the past of colonialism and many will go on to benefit from exploiting people because that's how the rich stay rich.  They won't even know they are doing it.  But yesterday they voted to take down a poster that was put up (probably ironically) in the eighties.  

If, like me, you worked hard to go to University, rather than it being something that was expected and you ended up in a Poly (or former polytechnic) then this decision is rather like a corridor meeting in halls where you decide that you no longer want to keep the traffic cone that Billy stole on the night out in Fresher's week, that someone has scrawled 'Warning, wet bitches!' on in marker pen.  For most of us the idea that even common rooms are run like mini governments with debating, shouting and voting is a revelation in itself.  This is why people from Oxford go on to run the country - they've been playing at it their whole lives.

For those of us with better things to do we must realise that this in not 'Breaking News'.  It's only worthy of a front page splash because the government want to distract us from the appalling job they are doing.  Let's try not to be fooled.

One of the very popular posters of the Queen you could buy from Athena in the 1980s

Spoilt Joke

 Yesterday, a nice thing happened.  There was an announcement of the birth of a baby.  Royal babies are usually announced after days of reporters waiting outside a hospital followed by Nicholas Witchell standing on a stepladder.  Covid has broken us all.  What has the world come to?  Poor Nick didn't even have to get his stepladder out of the garage.  The couple weren't even in the UK.  Surely it's possible to live anywhere now.  You could be the King of England and choose to live in Lichtenstein, to enjoy the full benefits of UK touring musicians, and perform all your Royal duties via zoom.  Why not?

But this Royal couple made their own announcement.  There wasn't even a note pinned to the gates of Buckingham Palace.

I understand that they have broken with tradition and are no longer part of the family anyway.  They don't want the press looking at their every move, only the things they want them to see. Everyone is cross with them, there's a war between the sister-in-laws (when isn't there?) and we are all supposed to be furious.  

Except that it's a little baby.  Can't we all be nice for the sake of a little baby?

Apparently not!  No.  We have to be mean and racist and angry.  We have to criticize the choice of name.  We have to be furious that they didn't get permission to name their own child after it's great grandmother and it's grandmother.  We have to post replies on social media and newspaper articles like, "Shameless".

It's a bloody baby, for God's sake.

Also, all these people being mean are spoiling my joke and I'm furious about that.  When I heard the name I said, "Oh, Lilibet Di, sounds like the kind of thing Charles might be muttering in his sleep."

It was a joke.  It would have been funny if everyone wasn't being so mean.

Stop being mean.  Babies are lovely.  Jokes are funny. 

There is no picture with this blog because now that you've all been mean they'll probably never let us see this baby.

The Monsters I’ve Created

 If you enjoy writing then you will know that it is much more fun to create monsters than the good characters. There’s more depth to a monster. 

Now that we are back from our little break and I’ve uploaded my photos, watered the plants, fed the birds and sponsored everyone who did things for charity over half term, I have time to sit and reflect on some of the monsters I’ve created. 

Once the Long Suffering Husband and I were far away enough from Oxford to no longer be able to play, “Bike!” and we had run out of things to spy with our little eye we reverted to some of the more complex games we used to play with the children, that I used to play on wet camping trips with my parents. We looked at the far side of the river bank, where the trees arched to make what could have been an entrance to a lair and we used our imaginations, taking it in turns with the words.

On...the...banks...of...the... Thames.....was....a.....world....known.....to......few...known....as....Neverythia. Nevereythia......was....home....to....a.......strange.....group.....of.....beings. They.....had....webbed....hands......and.....webbed.....feet.....large.....bulbous.....eyes....and.....sharp.....pointed.....teeth. Their....favourite...food...was...stale....cheesy....quavers....stolen......from.....unsuspecting....people..... picnicking. 

We had created a monster. Actually, we had created a whole village of monsters, living in a network of tunnels running the whole 180 miles of the Thames.

Those sort of monsters, the imaginary kind, are fine. However, once I got home I discovered that I have created some bird monsters. Greedy, bird monsters. Before I left, I filled up the feeders. There were 12 fat balls, a suet block, one container full of mixed seed, another full of sunflower hearts, a tray of Nigella seeds, and a mixed plate with porridge oats, peanuts, mealworms and some more seed. As the birds are quite hungry at the moment I was worried that it might not last. However, I wasn’t expecting them to go wild and have a rave in my absence. Every scrap of food had gone, the feeders all knocked over (the sunflower tube is still missing) and there were ruffled feathers all over the place. It seems as though I’ve tuned our nice little garden birds into monsters.

We were surprised at how few people we saw on our walking holiday. It wasn’t like walking up Ben Nevis or wandering around the Lake District, where there are all sorts of people to look at. . Outside of the towns the only people you saw were the dedicated charity walkers. They all passed us at some speed. Five men passed, one with a considerably larger rucksack than anyone else. We passed them a little further up the path where they had stopped to have a cheese sandwich (other sandwiches are available, although don’t tell the walkers because they all have cheese). Then they passed us again. The LSH couldn’t help but comment on the backpack.

“Oh no, he’s walked from Leicester,” they told us, “We just joined him at Oxford.”

I wanted to ask him who had died, or what he was grieving for but that sort of thing isn’t done so I just asked about footpaths from Leicester and was told, “Canals!”  He looked quite fresh considering he had already walked about 170 miles. I started to think of charity walkers as monsters who were making me feel guilty for a gentle walking holiday. For a brief moment I caught myself thinking, “I could do a long walk for charity.” However, I’m not ready to create that monster yet.

I do get it. Honestly, I do. It’s just that I’m not a good person. I just want a nice little 8-10 mile walk, without having to raise money. Actually, what I’d really like is a fair world where we all pay enough to help people whatever they’ve got, so that you don’t have to hope to die of breast cancer rather than a little known cancer that lodges itself between your liver and pancreas. Every time I donate to any cause it gives me a moment’s worry that there are so many other things that could use my patronage but as the LSH often points out, I think too much. 

It is only just recently that the LSH has joined me on my long walks. He used to be the kind of person who complained if I suggested walking to Morrison’s. Now, he’ll even walk to Tesco and this walking holiday was his idea. Normally, we go somewhere pretty and I drag him up a mountain and he complains. However, the challenge of the whole of the Thames path broken into sections of 30ish miles over three days is appealing to him. 

“What’s the time?” he asked, as we were nearing Goring.

“Just gone three,” I told him.

“We could carry on the Reading and get the train back to the car,” he said.

I think I have created a monster.

Staying in a haunted room

 Dorchester on Thames is an odd little place. It’s where they filmed Midsommer Murders, which makes total sense. There’s not much here, except chocolate box cottages, a big church, old coaching inns and a wall with a thatched roof. It has the air of a place that used to be something. 

Yesterday’s walk from Abingdon to Dorchester was fairly uneventful. We were lucky and only had light rain, which was refreshing. 

Our room at one of the coaching inns wasn’t quite ready and the man looked at us, puzzled. 

“Why did you book a twin room?”

We hadn’t.

Then a conversation happened between him and a colleague about which room would be better. 

“I like 6.”

“No. Six isn’t the best. 21 is the best room in the house.”

“Oh! Twenty one! You’re right.”

They turned their attention back to us.

“Do you like a bath or a shower? I bet madam likes a bath and you, Sir, prefer a shower. It’s got both and a four poster bed and a big fireplace.”

I don’t know what we had done to deserve the best room in the house for £70 the night including breakfast. 

Rooms have a feeling about them. I’m not sure what it is but this room felt psychically active. There was a chatter about it. Thousands of people had passed through. Deals had been done, scores settled and the energy remained. 

The Long Suffering Husband has just woken up said, “Did you sleep at all? You were awake every time I woke up. It’s an odd feeling It’s like staying in a haunted room.”

I laughed and told him what I have just written.

People have probably died in this room and the clock from the church opposite marks every fifteen minutes of being awake. There’s also a slightly disturbing smell of cherry Bakewell tarts.

“It smell sweet in here,” the LSH has just said. 

Maybe I’m just being a bit over sensitive. 

It’s fine though because no one ever died from oversensitivity.

Except in Dorchester on Thames where a whole essay on the subject is written on a gravestone. When I get home I might need to find out more about Sarah Fletcher and her  martyrdom to excessive sensibility, although my instinct tells me that Captain Fletcher might have some culpability.

Bike

 When the Long Suffering Husband and I planned this little holiday we worried.

We worried about lots of things but one of our big fears was that after 30 years of marriage and nearly forty years as a couple, walking all day down a path that probably looks pretty similar all the way, we would run out of things to talk about.

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the companionable silence that you get in a long marriage but it was a concern that four hours a day walking in silence might get boring. However, we needn’t  have worried. The stretch of Thames path between Oxford and Abingdon that we walked on our first day had a unique feature.

“Bike!”

“Bike!”

“Bike!”

“Watch out! Two bikes.”

The variety was riviting.

Oxford is a biker’s city. Everyone rides bikes. Dog walkers and parents transport their charges in trailers attached to either the back or the front. Toddlers positioned at the front of the bike soon learn not to cry or they’d get a mouthful of bugs. Mothers cycle up and down the path shouting at their Olympic hopeful rower daughters from the bank. Fit, Lycra-clad men rush past and old men dither over which side to take. As you get closer to Abingdon there are teenager celebrating the end of the school year, on their way to a secluded part of the path with their tins of alcohol, sweary girlfriends in pants and Donna Summer blaring from their phones. There are also crusty barge dwellers on rusty bikes smelling faintly of weed.

“I spy something with my little eye. Something beginning with B.”

“Bike!”

“Yes. Well done.”

“No! Really! BIKE!”

30 Days Wild

 “I’m not just wild, I’m furious,” said the gorilla interviewed on Not the 9 O’Clock News in my youth. 

This month marks the start of the 30 days wild challenge, where people are encouraged to get out into nature. This, hopefully, will encourage people to care about the natural environment and take action on climate change.

I’m having a little walking holiday, so I’m certain to bore you all with photos wild things soon but today I feel like that gorilla.

I’m not wild. I’m furious.

What a waste.

The government believed that a generation’s education have been damaged by this virus. They knew they needed to do something so they employed a sensible education advisor to come up with a plan. Sir Kevan Collins, despite not being able to spell Kevin seemed to understand. In interviews he talked about the ‘other things’ children had missed out on, like social skills, music, drama and dance. He understood that not all children will have fallen behind with English and Maths (which is always a shame for the government because they are the easiest to measure and compare with other countries). He knew that to make a difference funding had to be put in place. He never thought just asking teachers to work longer was going to be possible but instead he wanted to be able to employ people (like sports coaches, drama facilitators and musicians) to deliver extended hours extras. He properly costed this at £15billion.

Gavin Williamson came on the radio and said, “Well, I’m a Yorkshire man a billion seems like a lot of money to me.”

The government had agreed to £1.4bn funding. (£85 per school age child) and Kev resigned. 

Why bother? Why waste money on a consultant you are not going to listen to? Why?

Anyway, it’s a good way to start. Not just wild - furious.

Zero

 Zero is a lovely number. It rhymes with hero. It’s big and round and hopeful. 

There are other names for it too. Nil, zilch, nada, nothing, zip, bottom, nix, cypher, nonentity, nadir, nought, scratch, void, blank and if you are a tennis player or a follower of the Covid figures - love.

Zero is a uniquely human concept. According to mathematicians it’s a magic number and has special properties. 

It is historically interesting. Invented by the Babylonians, who were much better at maths than the Greeks or Romans. They used it as a place holder. For example one hundred and two, written as 12 doesn’t make sense. The Romans had this part of recording numbers sussed. They wrote CII (having a different way of writing one hundred). The Babylonians way of writing 99 didn’t cause any problems but for the Romans writing XXXXXXXXXIIIIIIIII was too clumsy so they made it IC (one less than 100). This made adding CII and IC tricky (who doesn’t prefer column addition?) The Babylonians with their 1//2 and 99 had made life far easier for themselves - it was bound to catch on. 

It was a while, though, before using zero as a single number caught on. The idea of counting nothing is a psychologically complex one that has been a game changer for human life. Without it there would be no computers, mathematically marking the simple ons and offs that make code. 

In nature there is hardly ever nothing, or probably too much of nothing to keep count of. It takes children a while to understand the concept and if you give them two cards with dots on and ask them to pick the one that has the most then most are pretty good at that quite early on, unless one of the cards has no dots. Even by about 7 or 8, about half of the kids, given a choice of two cards, one with a single dot and one with no dot, will get it wrong and even adults take longer to work out the answer than they would if it was a comparison between one and two dots.

Mathematicians like the number zero. When we were looking at universities with my son I lost count of the number of lectures we sat through where they talked about zero. If you add it to a number it doesn’t change the number, if you multiply it with a number the number disappears altogether and if you divide it....hold on, we better not go there, the whole universe could implode. There are mathematical proofs that show that zero is greater than one (although I think someone probably just made a mistake)

Anyway, enough rambling about this number. I was only going to write about it because yesterday the UK, for the first time in this whole shit show of a pandemic, reported zero deaths from Covid-19. The very first time. The only time. We have never reported no deaths before. 

This is huge. 

Or tiny. 

I told you it was a special number. 

I’m suspecting that it doesn’t mean that the whole thing is over, or that there won’t be any more deaths. (There will - 133 people a day still going into hospital and 120 people currently on mechanical ventilation) However, just the hope of a day with no reported deaths is enough for now. 

The realistic pessimists will say that it was a Bank Holiday and so loads of people could have died but there was no one at work to report it. The truly pessimistic will question the idea of only measuring deaths from Covid. “What about all the drunken stabbings?” they’ll say. “What about the huge cancer waiting lists?”

We still have a little while to wait to find out what the government will do next but I’m going to keep hoping for more zero days.

Different kinds of anxiety

 The Long Suffering Husband and I are  anxious people, although we will both deny it. We have our anxiety firmly under control (although there was a period during the great elephant wars when mine was on the surface but we try not to mention that). We have our own ways of dealing with the things that make us scared and fortunately (or maybe unfortunately) they are completely different.

The LSH likes to talk about it and I prefer to pretend it’s perfectly fine unless I’m writing, when I give the impression that I’m the biggest basket case on the planet. He prefers not to write. I like to read to find solutions to things and he prefers people to tell him what to do. People telling me what to do makes me angry. In some ways we complement each other perfectly and in others we clash.

However, it is undeniable that we both worry about things that probably don’t need to be worried about. 

We have a little half term break planned. We are going to walk a little bit of the Thames path. Not for charity or any laudable reason. Not so far each day it breaks us. Not to prove how fit we are or that we are not slowly slipping into our later years, where we share a French Fancy and our house starts to smell of cabbage. We are going because it seems like a nice thing to do. A holiday. Not a staycation because we are going to stay in three different hotels. 

A holiday always makes anxious people a little worse. There are less things you can control. I mean, if keeping your sock drawer tidy helps you fool yourself into believing that you have some control over your life and death then just being away from those neatly folded undergarments can cause palpitations. 

With a holiday it can be difficult to know what to expect and if you don’t know then how can to prepare so that you can stay in control of every situation? The LSH likes to plan well in advance. He talks a lot, packs, repacks, collects things for every eventuality. He always takes more than he needs but we have never been anywhere (including New York, the city that never sleeps) without a torch and a first aid kit. I, on the other hand, prefer not to think about it. I stick my fingers in my ears and go, “La, la, la di dah.” I might, eventually, write a list but often I’ll just go any look at my tidy sock drawer and wonder why we put ourselves through the stress of holidays. This is why I always forget something, once having to buy knickers as my first job of the holiday.

This particular trip is causing a little bit of stress for both of us (although we will  deny it). The LSH has packed and repacked his rucksack twice and I have actually started a list early. It might be an easier trip for me because we have to carry everything with us, although it might be best if I don’t forget anything important.

Breathe.

Excuse me while I just go and look at my sock drawer.