German Orgies

I went on a school German exchange trip when I was 15.

Lippstadt in the 1980s

I have never envied the teachers who took us. They were a young enthusiastic married couple, who had both worked and married in Germany before coming back to England to try and instil a love of the German language into a bunch of ungrateful, hormonal teenagers with terrible Essex accents. Most of the girls (and some of the boys) instantly fell in love with the German boys (because nature insists on improving the gene pool at every available opportunity). The German girls, with names like Anke and Sabine that were pronounced as though they had an a on the end were, not surprisingly, less interested in our boys.
I was less mature and more interested in cracking the puzzle of the rubics cube and being fascinated with how they could stick any words they liked together to make winning scrabble words.
Our poor teachers had to manage the fall out from all of this deeply passionate, life and death love.

I really feel for young people in love at the moment. Every second of your life feels important at that age, especially if you are in love. Asking them to lose this time together to protect people who are close to the end of their life anyway must feel like a cruel joke.

We are coming to the end of six weeks of lockdown, which is an important timeframe because it is the most we are used to. Summer school holidays are enough. We can cope with not seeing all our peers for six weeks but any longer is unimaginable. Therefore, everyone is clamouring for details of when we can go back.

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkle, used the best word yesterday that took me right back to my German Exchange trip. She asked if everyone could stop with this Öffnungsdiskussionsorgien

This is lots of words shoved together in my favourite German style. I chuckled. It has the word orgies in it. The German language student in me is firmly stuck at 15, giggling at rude words. The chancellor wants to stop the orgies of discussion about going out again.

I expect that proper German orgies are very efficient but I was instantly reminded of sweaty basement discos with boys and girls, all wearing scarves, tied in that unique German way that we spent our first 3 days learning, groping and snogging their way through the latest Kraftwerk song.

I really hope that the discussion orgies are fruitful and that teenagers everywhere can get back to doing what they do best very soon.

All Our Fault

There are two types of people in the world.

(Obviously, if you’ve read my blogs before then you will know that I’m very much against this concept, as making people identify with one side or the other causes unnecessary conflict but you all love a binary choice so for the purposes of this blog I’m going to pretend that what I am about to say isn’t a behaviour on a spectrum but a clear either or)

You are either someone who takes the blame or apportions it.

You’ll know which type of person you are by the first thought that comes into your head when something goes wrong. If you think, ‘Who let that happen?’ then you are a blameshifter. However, if the first thing you think is, ‘Oh no, what did I do?’ then you are a buckstopper.

My whole family are buckstoppers. We tend to take blame for things that can’t possibly be our fault. Even my sister, who when she was little you could have been fooled into thinking was a blameshifter.
We could be playing in another room and we might have had a tiff, or broken something, or maybe nothing at all had happened and when one of our parents walked in she would immediately confess without realising she had confessed.
“It wasn’t me,” she would say.
She was only saying that it wasn’t her because her first thought was that she had done something wrong.

I preferred the option of keeping quiet and hoping that no one noticed everything I’d done wrong, so she sometimes got the blame for things I’d done. If anyone had asked, though, I would have said, “Yes, it was me. It was all my fault!”

So, as a buckstopper, I would like to apologise. It is my fault.

The Long Suffering Husband and I were walking the dog in silence on Monday. We had run out of things to say to each other. I assumed I’d done something wrong to make him stop talking to me.
“What is it?” I said, “What have I done? It must be something really awful for you to stop talking to me. I did leave the tap dripping in the downstairs bathroom again but as you know it’s really stiff and that’s normally something you like to talk about.”
The LSH looked confused.
“There’s just nothing to talk about, is there. Nothing happens. Even the weather.”
“The weather?”
“Yes,” he said, “You know, like when you’re on holiday and you’ve got to the ten day point. You’re ready to go home but you’ve got another four days. Every day is the same. Even the sky is the same colour blue. You just wish for rain.”
I had to agree with him. The weather had got boring.
“A little bit of rain would be nice.”

I thought about it for the rest of the day. These were the reasons I thought rain would be nice.

1. The garden needed it.
2. The dog was getting too hot to walk far.
3. Rain would make my regular walks people free again.
4. It would cheer the LSH up and give us something to talk about.
5. It would make people put their Karcher pressure washers away.
6. There might be some other news because I had started to worry that News at Ten was running out of things to report.

So, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I made it rain. The birds loved it too. Pigeons and doves everywhere sat on fences and bathed their armpits in the drizzle.

Unfortunately, the weather didn’t help News at Ten. They really struggled for content last night. They showed us people dying in hospital, people dying in care homes and people dying in hospices. Then they showed us the minute silence that was held for the care workers who have died from Coronavirus, so far. They showed us the whole minute. Twice. Once from a street and once from the Prime Minister’s office. 

“They need more news,” I said to the LSH, “I’ve always wondered what would happen if there really was a ‘No News Day’. What we wouldn’t give for a sink hole or an earthquake now.”

I’m sorry. I thought it. I’ve tried to take it back. I’ve thought that I’d much prefer Huw Edwards to appear on the screen and say,

 “Apart from the deaths that you all know about because you are tuning into the Daily Briefing at five , with your glass of wine and cubes of cheese, there has been no news. Instead we thought we’d play you quarter of an hour of birdsong.”

But I think it might be too late. 

Lyn from Skipton

Lyn from Skipton.
Remember the name. If you like pub quizzes then I guarantee it will come up in the future. It probably doesn’t matter if you spell it Lyn, Lynn, Lynne or Lin for a pub quiz but the Downing Street journalists have consistently gone for Lyn, so they probably saw it written down.

Who asked the first public question on the Daily Coronavirus Briefing in 2020?
Lyn from Skipton.

Beautiful photo of Skipton shamelessly stolen from Heriots Hotel’s twitter feed - note to self: must visit 

If you are a conspiracy theorist then you will have decided that Lyn from Skipton doesn’t actually exist and is just Dominic Cummings’ keyboard-warrior alter ego. If you hate the media, you might have decided that Lyn asked a better questions than any of the journalists. If you hate the government then you probably think that the least offensive/softest question was chosen. If you loved Jeremy Corbyn then you will take this as further evidence that he won the argument and PMQs should contain questions from the public read out from the back of a tatty old envelope.

I think that journalists and MPs are always asking the questions that the public ask them to, whilst protecting their identity. That is their job but it’s so much more fun to be able to ridicule Lyn from Skipton directly.

Whatever you think, it is undeniable that the government asked the public to submit questions. The government website states that questions need to be submitted by 12pm and one will be selected by an independent polling organisation at 3pm. The questioner will be asked if they want to video themselves asking the question or to have the question read out. I can’t say I blame Lyn for choosing the second option.

https://www.gov.uk/ask

I’m not sure why everybody is so upset about the question. One glance at social media will tell you that hugging is in people’s thoughts; that grandchildren are being missed; that people want to know how we will transition out of lockdown even once the five tests are met. Lyn’s question seemed to round up a lot of the questions I’ve seen people asking, so I’m not surprised it was chosen.

 “I am missing my grandchildren so much. Please can you let me know if after the five criteria are met is being able to hug our close family one of the first steps out of lockdown.”

Chris Whitty was chosen to answer the question.

I could have misinterpreted it but I think he said something like: Well Lynn, if you are in a vulnerable group then you are never going to hug your grandchildren again.

I was telling my children about it over dinner. 

“So, if you are over seventy and are probably going to die soon then you can’t hug your grandchildren, even after the risk of a second spike of infections is over?”

“It’s too big a price to pay.”

“What if you spent years not seeing anyone and the day lockdown ends, you step outside the front door and have a heart attack? What was the point?”

Our family think differently about death. 

“I just feel really sorry for Lyn,” I said, “I want to hug my grandchildren before I die.”

They reminded me that I haven’t got grandchildren.

“I know!” I said, “I’m never going to get them if they don’t end lockdown so you can get out there and make me a grandmother.”

Embarrassing your children is something that can still be enjoyed though.

Soap or Crumble

Soap has become a very important part of our lives in recent months. Many of you stocked up on liquid soap, which I always thought was a mistake but I never fully articulated the extent of that mistake.

Scientists have warned that solid soap does a better job of killing the virus and that we should invest in a nail brush. We have been warned that long nails are one of the fastest spreaders of the virus, which can get trapped under the fingernails.

Many of us will be spending more time in the garden and be seeing evidence of this, as even the shortest nails can end up with a dark line of dirt embedded underneath them.

My mum loved gardening and had very long, beautiful nails, which I always envied. When I grew up and started to garden  I wanted nice nails, so I asked her how she achieved it. Her top tip:

 Before you go into the garden, dig your nails into a solid bar of soap. When you come in and wash your hands it will be clean under your nails. If that doesn’t work, make crumble.

I wonder if crumble has Coronavirus killing properties?


I am reminded of Big Nan’s advice:
You’ll eat a bushel full of dirt before you die.

Pick Me. Don’t Pick Me

This weekend the papers are speculating about the end of lockdown again.

Last week they came up with some plans for schools going back that when you read the articles properly were no more than a list of things the ministers had thought about discussing with the Prime Minister. This week someone has made a suggestion that we can extend our social groups. I haven’t read the articles but I will make a prediction that this hasn’t even been discussed at Cobra and is just a thought that Barry from the School of Mildly Infectious Diseases at Lolworth University had, while sitting in his back garden after his fifth G&T.

I can’t be the only one that has heard of these suggestions and come out in a cold sweat.

Barry has proposed that instead of just staying with the family we live with we can pick up to ten other people to hug.

I’m going to make a rash prediction.....this will never happen. Scientists are fairly certain that the greatest infection rate happens through family transmission and through small groups inside. Also, the Cobra group of scientific advisers contains two, excellent, behavioural scientists.

When I heard the suggestion (on Friday from my daughter, who thought it might not be the best one to put in the local paper at the weekend) I was immediately transported back to school PE lessons.
There I was, standing in a white T-shirt and huge, school-issue baggy-grey knickers, on the field with my hockey stick in my hand, waiting to be picked. Unsurprisingly, I was a bit nerdy and not very good at sport, so I was always picked last. The anxiety, thinking about those moments, still feels like a physical ball in my throat and chest.

Just imagine, your family picking 10 people that they could socialise with and those ten not picking anyone else. It’s a etiquette nightmare. What if you picked your brother and he didn’t pick you? What would happen to the people no one picked? Would they have to partner the sadistic hockey teacher, who would hit them round the legs? Would they just get put on the team that groaned as they walked near or would their sense of isolation just deepen further? What if you were picked by someone who only did so to pull off your PE skirt in rounders to cause the most humiliation when you’d forgotten your grey knickers?

I’ve been enjoying wild flowers on my walks. They are full of hope. They can grow anywhere. You don’t need to go to the best wood to see bluebells because there will be an isolated bluebell growing somewhere at this time of year: maybe through a wall or a crack in a pavement but look carefully and it will be there. These flowers, growing in the wrong place, in their isolated way are a reminder that we will find a way.

The temptation to pick them is huge but you shouldn’t.

Naked Gardening

Blooming science; confusing Donald Trump again!

I know we all laughed. Boy, did we need a good laugh. The press conference was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Any woman who has ever had a boss who was less intelligent and more powerful than her will immediately empathise with the female scientist who sat, eyes twitching to prevent them rolling, pulling at her fingernails and trying not to breath in case she said something that  caused her to lose her job.  If you read social media this morning though, you will find that it’s all her fault for not calling him out. Nice to have a woman to blame. When asked about it in the UK daily briefing the politician, rightly, refused to start a war with a volatile president of a country we are going to need post-Brexit and allowed our female scientist to openly laugh at him.
“Never inject yourself with anything,” she said, “It’s important to use properly tested medicines.”
Her eyes twinkled. The politician’s mouth quivered at the corners. They were both safe in the knowledge that most people in the UK think Donald Trump isn’t the sharpest tool in the box.

It has also inspired some absolutely brilliant videos of women drunkenly lip-syncing his speeches, which is the best way of hearing what he said.

https://twitter.com/sarahcpr/status/1253474772702429189?s=21

Maybe I’m too kind but I have some sympathy with him. I mean who hasn’t had a simplistic thought about healthcare? There is no scientist or doctor that understands everything about the human body and the things that affect it. Ideas and practices change all the time.

When I saw the clip I was reminded of the how the Long Suffering Husband used to wonder why someone hadn’t invented a human ‘draino’ to flush out the blocked arteries of people like my dad. It’s the kind of simplistic solution that people who are used to being able to fix things would suggest. The LSH is a Mr Fix-it. If you mention that something doesn’t work very well you look round and it’s fixed - A shelf has appeared, a stack of bricks have been moved or a vegetable bed has been dug.

Donald Trump isn’t a Mr Fix-it but his enormous wealth and power has meant that any time he has come up against a problem he just tells someone and it gets sorted. This could be the first time he has ever come across something that couldn’t be fixed simply. Clearly, this is why we should pick leaders who have faced a struggle but we won’t learn.

Anyway, back to science.

They have been doing some interesting work on transmission. They noticed that in the cruise ship, which saw no sunlight and was left empty and uncleaned the virus droplets had survived on surfaces for 17 days. This was far longer than anyone had thought, so they started to look at what killed it on surfaces. Not surprisingly, disinfectant and sunlight (uv) worked and this led to Trump’s simplistic extrapolation.

I was also quite interested in the sunlight theory. I jumped on it because any excuse to be outside seemed good to me. I could see it as a way of getting back to school: everyone loves outdoor learning.

I know we are all laughing but what if what we all need is a bit of sunshine inside our bodies? Next Saturday is World Naked Gardening Day. As the weather is so nice, we could extend it: have a whole week. I mean, now that we are socially distanced, where’s the harm? We won’t see anyone to offend, it will save on the washing and every time you bend over to pull a weed you’ll get some sunshine where it doesn’t normally shine.

Pleasant Pheasant

I had a virtual staff meeting yesterday. It was a strange experience for me. So far, I’ve completely avoided Zoom, Skype, House Party and Google Hangout/chat. I tried them all out to see if I could teach with them but the sound lag was too tricky. I’m easily distracted and so I’m not sure I was properly concentrating. There were lots of people in the meeting and I had accidentally turned on subtitles so spent most of the time chuckling to myself at the interpretations of an Essex accent.

I was a little worried about it before. I always worry that I’m not doing enough or not doing what I do well enough and feared exposure. It was reassuring, though, to see my colleagues onscreen. 

One of the things we are being asked to do is CPD. So far, I’ve concentrated on the child protection stuff (which is quite depressing) and music things. I’ve been trying to learn birdsong. I’m not sure if that’s a valid use of my time but many composers and conductors have been obsessed with birdsong over time. Developing fine listening skills must be good for a music teacher (that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway). I probably do need to start getting back to reality because at one moment I found myself thinking, as the headteacher was talking,

“He’s a very pleasant pheasant.”

Mental health (or men hawl elfs, if you were watching the subtitles) came up as a topic in our staff meeting. How do you look after your mental health in these challenging times? It is a challenge that faces leaders of companies, whose staff are working from home. It’s a tricky thing for managers to manage. The last thing they need is a bunch of nutcases returning to work. It’s also not possible for them to worry about the mental health of their whole workforce and they have to look after their own first.

For me, the daily walk is the most important thing. Sometimes I can feel that my brain is a bit Swiss-cheesy and know it’s time for a walk. As more people have started to walk, I have been pushed to more remote routes and I am reminded of my childhood; roaming edges of country fields, while my mum painted a farmhouse, a kestrel or a field of oil seed rape. You can go out angry, grumpy, confused, sad , anxious or just completely stuck in your head and as you walk you become grounded. Just before you’ve walked enough (and this will be different for everyone, which is why the government hasn’t set a limit on how long you can exercise for) your head fills with cotton wool.

 It is the most bizarre sensation but you have to keep going because then all of a sudden it lifts, you are back to a more pleasant pheasant version of yourself and you can go home.

Before the staff meeting I had taken my daughter with me. She had woken up a bit grumpy and I didn’t want her day off to be spoilt. As we walked, I got more excited about the birds I saw and heard. 

“That’s a big duck,” she said, pointing at a goose.

I’m not sure I’ve passed my love of nature on.

“Oh look! A skylark! I haven’t seen a skylark since 1973!”

“Noisy, aren’t they?” she said, pretending to be interested.

“Chiff-Chaff, Chiff-Chaff,” I sang back at the hedge.

“You really are mad, aren’t you?” she said, rolling her eyes. 

“No. I’m wrong. It sounds like a squeaky wheel. It’s a Great Tit!”

She didn’t say it but I could hear her thinking, “I’m with a great tit.”

We walked along the farm track and watched the farm dog - a black springer spaniel, do its thing, as the farmer walked the wheat. She bounced in and out of the crops, having the best time, flushing pheasants as she went.

“That’s a pleasant pheasant,” I said before bursting into song.

I’m not a pheasant plucker, 

I’m only a pheasant plucker’s son,

I’m only plucking pheasants,

‘til the pheasant plucker comes.

I wonder how that would come out on google hang out’s subtitles?

Earth Day

Yesterday was the most successful Earth Day ever.

The sky was clear.
Pollution reduced.
Birds sang louder than ever
Or they didn’t but people had time to listen to them.
Humans were anxious, fearing death, so they stopped to look at the small things.
When everything they have created to love is forbidden even weeds are hopeful.

The Box

The evolution of the television has happened almost entirely in this lifetime. Not completely in my lifetime but people only a little older than me will tell you they grew up without one. My parents used to tell stories about the Queen’s coronation in 1953. Hardly anyone had a TV until then and whole streets crowded into one person’s front room to watch it.

The telly became important during my childhood. We rented ours from Rediffusion. It was a huge box that took up the whole corner of the room. At first, we couldn’t afford to rent a colour set and watching snooker in black and white was one of my favourite challenges (I wouldn’t watch snooker now because what’s the point if you can see all the colours?). The Rediffusion shop was the place to go if you wanted to see a programme in colour. You could press your nose against the shop window, which contained a bank of boxes showing all three channels. My friend Tim had a colour set and sometimes I would go round and watch Blue Peter just to find out what colour sticky back plastic Lesley Judd had used to make her pencil pots.

There were traditions around the TV that involved the whole family. One of my earliest memories is watching Magic Roundabout with my parents. When it finished it was time for me to go to bed (or maybe have a bath - the phrase, “bath, bottle and bed,” has just popped into my head) and the News at Six would start. The theme song made Tess, our dog, go crazy. She would run in circles; spinning and falling over things; running between my dad and the door. The Six O’Clock News was walk time.
Sunday afternoons were spent in front of a black and white film with a bar of Dairy Milk while the parents slept off the Sunday lunch wine. You knew what day it was by what was on. Monday night: Cold meat and chips and Panorama. Thursday: Top of the Pops. Friday: Magical World of Disney.
Dad would come home from work and ask, “What’s on the box?”
Because we knew that he knew we would joke, “The flowerpot!”

By the time my children were born, programmes were on all the time. You could, if you wanted, use cartoons to babysit your children 24 hours a day. There were dedicated Children’s channels and programmes got better and better. TV screens got larger but their cases shrunk. You couldn’t balance a plant pot on the top any more. The quality of the sound and picture improved. Even Channel 5 stopped being fuzzy. You could watch TV at breakfast and a rat called Roland, with an Estuary accent joined you.

Before Coronavirus, TV was beginning to change. It was no longer a social event. Every person in the family watched their own personal screen. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Stories gave platforms for lay people to make their own programmes and they started to get good at it. Traditional TV struggled to compete but still made excellent high quality drama and showed programmes of people watching the telly.

It is difficult to make good quality drama if you have to be socially distanced. In fact it seems to be difficult to make any good quality TV. Suddenly, we realise how good the YouTubers are. At the weekend Dermot O’Dreary,  Claudia Fringeman and someone else that I hadn’t heard of hosted a concert. They broadcast from a studio that seemed to have been transported back in time, complete with wobbly walls. They showed depressing clips in between to make us feel sad about how awful the world is now. A death toll ran across the bottom of the screen (it probably didn’t but it might as well have done). Performers played from their bedrooms. These performances had heavy post editing but they still weren’t as good as many YouTube channels. On Thursday, they intend to do something similar with comedy.

I think they’ve missed a trick. We don’t want to watch the programmes they are showing. Last night, Holby City was cancelled and the choice was a programme about people giving birth, a home decorating show (when DIY stores are closed), Celebrity Bake Off (no eggs or flour in shops and too much talk of death and cancer) and a documentary about living in lockdown.
“Is it me, or has telly got shit?” I texted a friend.
“Worse than Christmas,” she replied.

What we need now, is a routine of nice things. We are depressed already. Watching Matt Hancock well up in the Daily Briefing is quite enough. There must be enough old content to give us something to look forward to.

This current crisis could be the final nail in the coffin of television if they don’t step up. The Thursday night depress you with comedy thing is already doomed to failure because we are all going outside to clap for a bit and then doing Jay’s Quiz on YouTube.

Inner Geek

There’s a small autistic boy living in my head who can get very excited about things that no one else would be interested in. Occasionally, he will get fixated on something and I have to remind him that that thing is a waste of our time. Sometimes, I humour him for a bit to see where it goes but as he is only about seven, he’s unlikely to discover anything important.

Don’t get concerned. I haven’t had a childhood filled with recurring trauma that has caused me to develop multiple personalities as a coping mechanism, it’s just an observation about educational development.

The first time I named him (Fred) was when I was at the arcades with my children, a friend and her children. We were playing a horse racing game, where you had to bet on the colour of the horse that would win. My son and I were very interested in this game. We were both looking for patterns. He was only about 5, so he gave up before me.
“I could stay here all day, record the results and make bar graphs and pie charts,” I told my friend who looked at me with a look that said, ‘I’m glad you’re my friend but...seriously?’
I explained that it was Fred speaking.
She rolled her eyes.

Fred was formed during one long hot summer when I was seven. My mum was particularly tired that year,  having just recovered from a gall stones operation that caused an almost fatal infection. She had just enough energy to keep suggesting things we could do to stay out of her hair. Most of these activities involved data collection and looking for patterns. She was a very smart woman, my mum. She worked out that if she asked us to count types of birds that visited the garden, or the different coloured cars we could see from our bedroom window then it could last a significant amount of time. If she added a pattern to look for then it could take all day. Fred loved those days. Most seven year olds love their days.

That year was never repeated and so I didn’t develop my skills and grow up to be a statistician. The following summer I had started to play the flute but it was all about bike rides with picnics in the country and card games when it rained. The year after that was poetry and backgammon and the year after that we made magazines.

Obviously, I was very glad of Fred when I went to University. My classmates were all wandering round with a stunned expression, complaining that they had taken Psychology because they were interested in people and liked writing essays. No one had warned them that there would be so much maths. Fred was happy to be able to extend his skills. Chi-squared distribution became his new best friend. He wanted to sit in the garden and hypothesise that blackbirds would visit at 11am and 3pm, collect the data and then use his new found tool to see how well his hypothesis fitted.

Fred is quite a happy chap at the moment. Every day at 4.45 he turns on the TV to watch the daily briefing. He frantically notes the figures in his nature inspired notebook. Then he puts the figures into a spreadsheet and makes graphs. He compares his graphs to the government graphs. He makes theories and can’t wait for the data to unfold to see if his theories are correct.

Fred thinks that we will be in lockdown for a while yet but he is only seven, so maybe we should take the predictions of scientists and statisticians who developed their skills a bit further.

Too Much

I spent a lot of time yesterday reading the Sunday papers. The Sunday Times headline was a speculation about when schools will restart. The whole article makes it clear that these are just dates that ministers are speculating about. Three dates: May 11th, June 1st and when schools restart in September. It was clear that these were just discussions and that the Prime Minister will make the final decision when he comes back from sick leave.

If you know anything about schools the dates are logical starting points for discussions. Three weeks time, when the government next has to decide whether to extend lockdown and the beginning of the following two half terms. However, these are speculations because we still don’t know if we are past the peak of the epidemic. The problem with a flattened curve is that you can’t tell when you’ve started to go down.  It’s what makes Helvellyn so difficult to climb.

After this headline was published and everyone got their hopes up about getting back to normal in three weeks, or panicked that children would be sent back (as germ fodder) before it was safe, the daily briefing was an announcement that the government would be providing tech for poorer families, that their pals with an academy trust would set up an online school (Oak Academy Trust) and that the BBC were providing 14 weeks of schooling for every subject and every year group. The minister said things about children ‘catching up’

I’m a bit confused about the idea of ‘catching up’. Who are they catching up with? Everyone is processing this situation at the same time. No one is in school. Everyone is muddling through. I wish that, just for once, we could stop seeing education as a race. Our children’s brains are busy processing a national trauma. Hell, my brain is busy processing a National trauma. It’s a trauma that no matter how hard you work you won’t have been able to shield them from.
Since this started I have had Barbara Streisand singing Children Will Listen in my ear.

It’s the perfect song for the times and I do love Barbara. Teachers know that teaching isn’t just about content. They know that they can’t just open your child’s head and pour the knowledge in. They also know that children’s plasticine brains are moulding to whatever influences they pick up.

Different children and different families will cope in different ways. Just as this virus affects different people uniquely. About half never get any symptoms, which honest teachers will tell you is about what happens in any lesson.

As a teacher, I feel completely overwhelmed at the amount of content out there. I was already trying to keep up with the rhythm lessons and choirs and now there are lessons everywhere. If my children were still at school age I would be totally poleaxed by the sheer volume of things they could be doing. I suspect I could be saying, “Shall we do Cantonese or Latin today?” while getting them to run  round the garden 100 times, make me a lasagna for tea and learn the violin while standing on their heads.

I like the advice that is currently doing the rounds on social media about looking after brains.

It really is the most important thing. Find a routine. Be happy and healthy and don’t worry about falling behind or running ahead. Trust me: Swiss cheese brains are no fun.

Sunday Morning Papers

Every Sunday morning it was my job to get on my bike and get the Sunday newspapers before the Archers omnibus started. We didn’t have a regular Daily paper, although Dad would often bring home whatever papers had been left behind. Mum would give me money to get a tabloid  and the Observer . I was allowed to get myself a chocolate bar or packet of crisps with the change. It was one of my earliest routines.

My parents argued that there wasn’t time to properly read the paper during the week, and what was the point if you weren’t going to read every word? I liked the random papers during the week because I noticed how the same story could be written from so many different perspectives. 

This week’s Sunday papers are going to be worth a read. The Sunday Times reporters have moved from the shock phase of grief to the anger phase. They are doing their jobs again and reporting on what is actually going on. They are investigating what went wrong. These things are really important. 

I can’t tell you what I think about these stories yet because I haven’t read them. This hasn’t stopped Bob273 on Twitter and he is probably blaming the press for the things he wouldn’t know if it wasn’t for the press.

I know that I’m not going to enjoy this phase of reporting. I find the anger phase of grief hard. It doesn’t suit my personality to be angry or to look for someone to blame. Knowing what went wrong never helps me to move on and I struggle with the certainty that things would be better if they had been handled differently.

I must go. The sun is shining and the papers are calling.

Tell me something nice

I’ve been struggling a bit for the last few days. I was fine; we were only being asked to do what I love to do anyway. Then I started to get very sad. There just didn’t seem to be any good news to balance out the awfulness.

I seem to have a genetically inherited trait to care about other people and hearing other people’s sad stories always affected me deeply. Dad always used to say, “Tell me something nice,” whenever he noticed that I was getting maudlin about the state of the world. This was a long time before the gratitude journal became fashionable. Actually, Listing 5 things I’m grateful for never really works for me at this point. I have existential angst and guilt that my life is so much better than lots of other people’s, so listing my nice home, loving family, having plenty of cheese in the fridge, books to read and a dog (even if he does leave the room whenever I walk in) only makes me feel more guilty about the tough time other people are having.

There is just so much grief  and fear of death wallowing around and all of our coping strategies are being taken away. Funerals are cancelled, hugs from family you don’t live with are banned, sitting around the deathbed of a loved one as a group is forbidden. The joy and laughter that would normally come out of those moments won’t happen. Even the good things are tinged with a sadness. Love is cancelled (unless you already live together and then domestic abuse is on the rise), weddings are off, teenagers aren’t allowed to climb out of their bedroom window to meet in the woods for an elicit snog (although I think they might still be doing that), babies are being born without partners being present, grandparents have to coo over their grandchildren through a window.

So, with my Dad's suggestion ringing in my ears I thought I’d try to think of something nice.

It was a struggle but I settled on pets.

I trawled the internet for pictures and videos of animals. I saw videos of cats defying the laws of physics.
Cat defying laws of physics
I saw that the mice on the underground had lost it
Underground fisticuffs
This inspired me to revisit my favourite millipede clip
Walk this way
Finally, I fell into the dog clips.
I filled the dog with helium

Suddenly, I became disturbed all over again. People are dressing up their dogs and using them for entertainment their pets never signed up for. I was already feeling sorry for my dog, who is just exhausted by the fact that there are people in the house all the time. This means that he is on duty 24/7 and never gets a moment when he doesn’t have to protect us from unseen forces and pigeons.

Clearly, I need help. Tell me something nice.

Ground Control

It’s weird dream time again. I think there is probably some research that explains why we are having more dreams and why those dreams are suddenly weirder. My understanding is that the brain is like a giant filing cabinet and dreams help us decide where to put things.

So my brain has decided to file Captain Tom Moore’s one hundred laps of the garden with David Bowie and some unusual thoughts about death, drug fuelled dinner parties and inheriting cats that can bark.

It’s a shame really because Captain Moore’s sponsored walk is a good enough story on its own. It’s a story of hope, resilience and how a small idea can turn into something remarkable. Tom will be 100 years old in a few days time, so he is confined to his home by this virus. Many people his age really can’t understand why that is necessary. They are fairly certain that they will die soon anyway. He decided to do a sponsored walk to raise money for the NHS. As I write this blog he has currently raised nearly £18million, which I don’t expect he ever thought possible.

My logical brain thinks it would have been a surprise to him but my dreaming brain told me that he knew. David Bowie explained that it was all part of a master plan and that some people know when they are born to greatness.
“Like Boris Johnson,” he said, tossing his long red hair and smoothing down the huge collars on his brightly coloured space suit.
“Boris?”
“Yes, he knew, didn’t he? That he was going to be history. He wrote about it.”
I snorted and said, “But he thought he was going to command a war not get a cough!”
I was shocked at my dream self’s cynicism.
“We don’t get all the details when we are on earth,” said Bowie, rolling his eyes at me.  “I mean I got it wrong didn’t I?”
I scratched my head.
“Well, Major Tom. Clearly it should have been captain.”
“You think that song was a message to a man who was going to walk round his garden a few times?”
David looked at me.
“Well, duh. Idiot! Of course it was. You didn’t  think I made it up all on my own do you?”
“Yes, actually I did. I think you were a wacky genius.”
Bowie looks cross, stands up and stomps around for a bit on his high platform shoes.
“I even reminded him to take his protein pills.”
It was my turn to roll my eyes.
Bowie flounced off muttering something about being too busy right now with all the incoming to waste time on me.

I watched him attend the dinner party of someone I knew, to sing n the corner and pass drugs round.
The person I knew collapsed and David shouted, “Incoming!” at the sky.
The cat barked.
“You can have the cats,” Bowie said, “Your daughter will love them.”

My brain is weird.

Sew

The Long Suffering Husband has a rallying cry. He strides into the room, purposefully, stands in a super-hero pose with hands on hips and says, “So?!”
This could mean anything from, “It’s time to walk the dog,” or “Have you written the shopping list?”, to “I love you, let’s watch a film together.” The trick is to infer the meaning from this one small word. This happens to couples who have been together for a long time. They don’t need to say very much. They finish each other’s sentences. They just know. Obviously, sometimes they get it wrong and that’s when petty squabbles break out.

I need a rallying cry. I have talked about how routines are important before but variety is also vital. Left to my own devices, I could spend the whole of the day (after blogging, yoga, walking and flute practice) just reading a book, or doing something creative like knitting. Obviously, I am still working but not working and so there are other things I should be doing. There are also the every day things, like cleaning out the fridge or putting the washing on the line, which could easily get ignored in favour of another chapter or row of knit one purl one.

Those creative tasks, like knitting are very soothing. I have always found them very useful for making me stop and slow down and now that I’ve discovered reading and walking they seem to be more important than ever. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to walk and knit. There was a nice article in the Guardian this week, which explains it better than I could.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/the-calming-effects-of-sewing-can-help-people-express-and-calm-themselves?CMP=share_btn_link
When I was looking through my knitting cupboard to decide on my next project I found a cross stitch kit. I had probably bought it, thinking I would make it as a gift for someone’s wedding but I don’t know who and so it must have been sitting there for some time.
Sewing isn’t usually my thing but I am particularly drawn to the work of the Profanity Embroidery Group and so I thought a cross stitch would be a good place to start. It also seemed to me to be a symbol of hope, as my nephew is due to get married in October.

It’s not good but it is nearly finished.

The LSH walked into the room, hands on hips and said, “So?”
He wanted a shopping list but I pretended he was giving me permission to carry on, even though I had reports to write.
“Yes, thank you. I will continue to sew.”

Working but not working

The latest figures from the ONS are out, which are probably more useful than the daily death toll because they include everyone and make a deeper analysis. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending3april2020
Reading this report, it seems that the governments measures, like the rest of us, are simultaneously working and not working.

Social distancing does seem to be starting to flatten the curve; the health service is coping (just). However, there seem to be more people than you would expect dying from other things. This is not what any government wants.

Luckily for me (and probably you) I’m not clever enough to speculate on what choices this gives the government but can tell you how it feels to be both working and not working.

I am working. I’m being paid and there are tasks I need to do. I have reports to write, training to complete, work to set and comment on (remotely). I am arranging music, practising and thinking about how to make my teaching better. However, with the biggest, most important part of my job (jumping around like an idiot in front of thirty small people) missing, it feels as though I’m not working. The not working part makes me sadder than the work I’m doing can compensate for.

It’s how we all feel, really. None of what we are doing can cure death and that makes us sad.

Wild Geese

Today marks the end of the Japanese micro season,  Kōgan kaeru (Wild geese fly north).  There are geese where I live. They are all over the place. 

When my parents got to the age I am now, they did the usual thing of make a bucket list. You get to about fifty and friends start to die. It makes you question your mortality and you think about all the things you haven’t done.  They started to travel to see the places they’d always wanted to go. They took one trip a month for a year and eventually got fed up of it. All they wanted to do was stay at home and not have to pack or unpack anything. I think it probably all started from my Mum’s childhood wish to be able to fly. 

I expect that with the lockdown in place, many people are dreaming where they’d like to go and developing their lists. When we walk, the Long Suffering Husband, not wishing to talk about virus maths or death any more, asks me to name five things. 

“So, your five favourite breakfast cereals?” he will ask.

“What about the five top children’s TV shows?”

“Best five places you’ve been.”

Before he asks the question he really wants to focus on, “What five places would you wish you’d been to if you died tomorrow?”

Unfortunately for him, I’m quite content. It keeps striking me that if I did die tomorrow then I would have no regrets. It’s been a pretty good life, so far. I’m not saying that I don’t want to go anywhere but many of my happiest times have been right here at home. In fact, this lockdown is quite blissful for me. I have my family around me but we have enough space to be apart.  It is the best time of year for walking. I live in a beautiful area with many country footpaths. Lockdown means that you can hear and see the birds, the streams are running clearer and the skies are bluer. There is no pressure to be anything more and there are plenty of things to keep me entertained. 

Like the geese, I will go if I have to but I’m more than happy to stay on my daily back-and-forth flight path. One of the things, closer to home Mum always wanted to do was see the geese fly overhead. She watched them fly over her garden every evening and had heard that in certain places you could have them almost buzz the top of your head. I was always confused about this because if you stand on the sea wall then this happens frequently. 

At the moment, the sea wall is too busy for me. It used to be my favourite place for social distancing but since the government has suggested that daily exercise is better for your brain that sitting in your underpants, eating chocolate, drinking gin and watching Netflix, people have flocked to the edge of the world. This has forced me to explore some of the footpaths and bridleways that the dog has been eyeing up for a while but I’ve refused to take because they seem to be heading out into the middle of nowhere.

We took a path and turned a corner and there was a huge goose staring at us.

“Did you know it’s the Japanese micro season of Wild Geese Fly North?” I asked the LSH. “He doesn’t look like he’s going to fly anywhere.”

“Is he wild?”

“Looks pretty cross to me.”

You see, with comedy like that, who needs to fly anywhere?

Curtains

Three weeks from lockdown and it is becoming undeniable that this virus is a nasty beast. We are getting to the stage where famous people and maybe someone you know have died. The Prime Minister, thankfully (whatever you think of him) didn’t die and has left hospital.

All of this has made me think about curtains.

Curtains, or lack of them, have been a weird feature of our lives lately. We were in the middle of a complete redecoration of our bedroom and went into lockdown before our new carpet could be fitted,  our new curtains were finished and the shops we bought them from are temporarily closed. This has meant flashing the neighbours every time I get dressed and waking with the birds. Weirdly, the Long Suffering Husband, who had wanted blackout lining, is sleeping brilliantly without any curtains. My daughter has been working from the dining room table. At first, she was set up facing the window but was too cold, so turned around to be next to the radiator. Then in conference calls her boss complained that he couldn’t see her because of the light shining behind. We only have a sheer curtain in the dining room, so it wasn’t blocking out any light. The LSH is great at solving problems, so he fixed a navy duvet cover to the curtain pole with some pegs. Unfortunately, her colleagues thought it made her look like she was in a hostage video.

However, these aren’t the kind of curtains I’ve been thinking about. This morning I have been ruminating on metaphorical curtains. Deaths are often talked about with curtain references.
“Catching the virus was curtains for him.”
Businesses get the curtain treatment too.
“The global pandemic brought the final curtain down on already struggling Debenhams.

Social media, this morning, is back to its usual hateful self.  It is full of curtain twitchers, wanting to tell the world about their neighbour that went for a walk of longer than an hour, or who bought and ate an ice cream in the street, or sat on a park bench to throw a ball for their dog.

There is also a lot of disbelief of Boris Johnson’s recovery. There is a suggestion that he was never really sick and that he shouldn’t be travelling to his holiday home. I agree that the second part is not the best example to set but also, resting probably shouldn’t be done in the office. The idea that he was never actually sick is bonkers, though. In times of curtains you should never underestimate a person’s ability to pull themselves together. There will be thousands of people who are sick, hurting or grieving who will put on their brave face and act act though nothing is wrong. This is how we cope in difficult times.

Maybe I am missing my old curtains, even though they were hideous.

Soap

I can’t read the title of this blog without humming, “der der der de de der der de der,” and clicking my fingers to see if I can achieve invisibility. It’s weird, I know. Somehow, an American comedy sitcom from the early eighties has stuck with me so that any time anyone mentions the fatty stuff used to wash hands I’m instantly transported back to my teenage self, watching what I think was probably the best thing on TV. I haven’t watched it since, so maybe the four series wouldn’t stand the test of time but that would make me very sad.

I was actually going to write about soap. Real soap; long chain fatty acid salts, with a hydrophilic head and a hydrophobic tail. Since this new virus hit, we have been encouraged to wash our hands properly and so soap has been hard to get. At first, it was difficult to find anti-bacterial hand-wash and good, old fashioned solid soap bars, that leave a ring around your basin were still in the shops and then the deputy chief medical officer explained that viruses didn’t care if your hand gel was antibacterial because they weren’t bacteria. She said that soap is an emulsifier and so breaks up viruses and that a hard bar of soap used properly was even better. Then the soap flew off the shelves.  It became difficult to get the brand you like.

I’m sure it’s all the same stuff and does the same job but I’m fussy about soap.

 My favourite bar of soap was always Imperial Leather. I like the smell: It’s robust, like an expensive men’s cologne. The bar also comes with a handy little label that acts as a stand to protect your soap dish from scum. Unfortunately, the Long Suffering Husband was never that keen. Eventually, we compromised on Palmolive. Not the green bar because it smells of Lily of the Valley and reminds me of my Nan and Grandad in their sheltered accommodation flat but the white bar. All soaps are probably made with palm oil but it was impossible to keep using Palmolive without thinking about the poor orangutans so we switched to  the Dove Moisture Bar. It worked on many levels. It was white (goes with a grey bathroom), it didn’t leave hands dry and cracked because of the moisturiser and had a light clean smell.

The LSH came back from the supermarket with a hangdog expression. He had found the whole experience rather depressing. Normally, he loves the supermarket and will ‘pop’ there, sometimes twice in a day. “I’m just popping to Tesco,” is my secret middle name for him. To have to save that trip for such a long time and then be confronted by rules and people in masks and gloves was upsetting. And then the pressure to get everything on the list because it would be at least a week before it was seemly to pop in again was the final straw.

“There’s still not much soap,” he said handing me four bars of Pears.
“Ooh! Pears! expensive!” I said.
My mum used to get different soaps on her weekly shop and would sometimes treat us to an expensive brand. Pears was one of those that we didn’t get very often. I remembered it a shimmering clear amber bar that smelt of grass and fresh laundry.
He cheered up a bit.
Temporarily.
“What has happened to Pears soap?” I said, emerging from the bathroom sniffing my hands in disgust. “It used to smell like a summer day and now it’s like the boys toilets at primary school. Why have they made it smell like carbolic soap?”
The LSH disagreed. He thought it had always smelled like that.
“I like it,” he said defiantly.

Looks like we are stuck with it for a while but as there are more people in the house who are all washing more often it probably won’t be long before we can try the next bar that is left in the supermarket.

I had been writing about routines and was thinking that ‘Soaps’ are probably part of everyone’s routine that have taken on a surreal quality. Because they are recorded such a long time in advance they can’t reflect what is happening at the moment and a topical insert just isn’t going to cut it.
The two Soaps that I like are Holby City and The Archers. Holby City is, and always has been, the hospital I’m going to if I’m sick. They diagnose and treat you in the same day and now we discover that they have proper working ventilators https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52250706 which they can donate to the Nightingale Hospital because they don’t have a single case of Coronavirus. It’s such a shame that Bernie Wolfe died because she she would have had that new field hospital running like clockwork.

The Archers is part of my Sunday morning routine. The omnibus is slightly shorter than normal, as they try to eek out their recorded episodes and it is all a bit grim at the moment, with Lynda in hospital, wishing she has died and the lovely Kirsty having another awful man in her life. But if you fancy it you can meet me in The Bull at 10 for a pint of Shires and a bag of dry roasted. I will have washed my hands.

This day, that day, Saturday

Have you lost track of time? Lots of people have but it doesn’t matter because time always behaves strangely. Think of all the things you didn’t do before; when you didn’t have time. I bet you still aren’t doing them now. Right now, you are hoping for things to go back to normal but as soon as they do, you will wonder where all that time went. You will kick yourself for not reading that book, or writing the novel, or decorating the front room but you shouldn’t because we all do what we need to.

Actually, maybe those people who think they need to troll journalists on Twitter don’t need to do that. Maybe the people writing angry notes or slashing doctors tyres because they believe they are breaking the ‘going out’ rules don’t need to do that. Maybe the police don’t need to look in people’s shopping bags to see if they have bought ‘unnecessary items.’ And maybe everyone doesn’t need to remember that they own a Karcher pressure washer.

BCV (before corona virus) I used to lie in bed on a Saturday morning and read my book. I would know it was time to get up when we heard my neighbour’s lawn mower start up. Every Saturday at 9.30 we would hear the familiar chug and splutter and the Long Suffering Husband would turn to me and say, “It’s Saturday morning,” as if I didn’t know. The It is too early at the moment to know if my neighbour’s BCV routine is going to be the same as his HCV (hoc Corona virus) routine. I suspect that when this is all over (ACV - ante corona virus) any changes will be reversed very quickly for everyone.

As we settle into our new, temporary, lives, with daily death tolls and threats from unseen forces we must remember to be kind. Not the fake hashtag that was trending from the angry keyboard warriors following a celebrity’s recent suicide but to be kind to yourself. It doesn’t matter if you don’t write a great work of fiction, read Hilary Mantel’s latest work (although as I’m 100 pages in I can thoroughly recommend it), do something creative, get fit, or clap for the NHS every Thursday. You are enough.

It is a very big book (I wonder what is in my exclusive edition?)

It’s going to be a beautiful Saturday. Give yourself some time off from what you ‘should’ do. Do what you want and if what you want is to continue with your routines and cut your grass at 9.30 then that’s fine too. I will be reading my book until then.

Bad Friday, Good Thursday

It’s a bank holiday. If things were normal then you would be waking to the glorious freedom of not having to go to work today, having hot cross buns for breakfast and the inevitable family arguments about what you are going to do today. For several years, I have called this day Bad Friday. I wasn’t the originator of this term but somehow it has stuck.

I run a youth orchestra and we meet every Friday except for those in August and as we meet in a church, religious festival days. This means that we don’t rehearse on Good Friday. A few years ago one of the kids sent me a message to explain how if he couldn’t come to orchestra then it was definitely a bad Friday.

Making music is a human response. In times of crisis it makes us feel better. Playing music together is one of the most sociable but insular things you can do. You keep yourself to yourself; no touching but you connect through the music. The clapping for the NHS is a primitive form of this musical connection. Smarter people noticed this and brought out pots, pans and vuvuzelas. Then a musician, in a music teacher’s forum I’m on, suggested that we join the clapping by playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. There was some discussion over the key (because musicians couldn’t bear the idea that they might play in a different key to their neighbours) and concert G was settled on.
I wrote it out for my orchestra members and suggested that we have a remote rehearsal, every Thursday (sharing videos) until we are able to meet again.

I’ll be honest, even though I had suggested it to them I still felt awkward about actually doing it. Luckily, I wasn’t alone. I live with a violinist and there is an oboist opposite, so we went for it.
“This is weird,” the violinist said.
“Very,” I agreed, waving at the oboist.
We might have been in the same key but keeping in time at a distance was tricky and there were the usual problems of playing outside in the dark, of music blowing off stands and not being able to see the sharps. However, every musician should give it a go.
As Michael Ball said on Twitter after the first Thursday clapping session, “So proud of my street in London. Nearly everyone came out and clapped and cheered. A beautiful moment...mind you I’m so starved of applause I wanted to walk into the middle of the street, bow, wave and thank everyone for coming #needy.
“That was nice, actually,” I said.
“Lovely to be clapped all the way through a performance,” the violinist agreed.

For a while, we will have to put up with bad Fridays but at least we can have some good Thursdays.

Look after your feet

Over the last few blogs I’ve been talking about my routines. I told you that I start the day with a blog, followed by yoga. Before we were all asked to stay inside walking was part of my daily routine but was broken up into several sections. I would walk the dog after yoga then have breakfast, walk to school, have a lunchtime walk, walk home and then go for a long evening walk with the dog or walk to the swimming pool. This is a lot of walking and my feet (and the dog) are confused about having to do that much in one chunk.

The dog is particularly bothered. At first we tried to give him one long walk in the middle of the day but they say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks and he was very confused. He has always walked, where he has his morning poo (by a dog waste bin) then he comes back and we feed him his breakfast. The same routine happens in the evening. When we first tried to do one walk a day, we forgot to feed him. Then we remembered but he wouldn’t eat. He kept nagging us for food and we would show him the bowl but he would flounce around the house saying, “But I haven’t had my walk yet. I’m full of poo, which I know you like to pick up. How can I possibly eat?” I tried to sneak out twice but I saw a neighbour also out with one of her dogs (she has 3 that can’t walk together) and she laughed that she wouldn’t report me. I worry a lot about things like that. The vigilante culture is one I find quite terrifying. The dog does love a long walk and especially liking the fact that he can walk down the middle of the road.

My feet have noticed the difference too, so I’ve added daily footcare to my routine. If you live alone I can highly recommend this. Every day (sometimes twice) I rub cream into my feet and massage all the hard knotty bits. Occasionally, I get one of those foot peeling treatments . Yes, it’s gross. No one likes touching feet.

But it is an act of supreme self love.

With Balance There is Movement

I worry.

You’ve worked that out by now if you’ve read my blogs before but specifically, I worry that writing blogs, in real time, about what is happening in the world could seem really stupid if you go back and read them later. In ten years, with the benefit of history doing its twisty thing anything I write now could date really badly. People could look back and accuse me of being capricious; of letting my opinions vacillate (I have loved that word since I read a book called The Vacillations of Poppy Carew). However, this is just something we are all going to have to live with because writing this is the first thing on my new Coronavirus daily routine.

The second thing is yoga. This again, isn’t a new thing for me. I’ve written before about how brilliant yoga is. After my Dad died it got me through the grief. I raved about a YouTube class called Yoga with Adrienne and started her 30 Days with Adrienne programme. I didn’t do it every day but did manage to do each of the 30 workouts. However, after Mum died and my brain broke, yoga wasn’t possible for a while.

30 Days of Yoga with Adrienne

One hundred and fifty days ago, it became possible again and I made a commitment to do the 30days of Yoga programme every single day. I did the first consecutive 30 days and noticed how much it helped. Profound changes happened. Not so much to my body, and there are still loads of shapes I can’t get into, but with my mind. It was quite a ride at first. Then I did her other 30 days series and intend to start them all over again when I’ve finished the most recent one (home). It became a routine that got me out of bed. You can write a blog in bed, or read a book but you can’t do yoga.

The other day was a balancing practice. I am always surprised at how much movement there is in any balancing posture. As you get more experienced, those movement are less noticeable but they are always still there. So, maybe I shouldn’t worry about the vacillations of Julia All Trades. It’s just balance.

Routine

By now, many of us are beginning to develop new routines. It’s the routines that can keep you feeling safe; tiny little things that you can control distracting you from those you can’t. Writing a blog became part of my routine a while ago. I wrote it during the night or the early hours when I couldn’t sleep. Bizarrely, when the whole world went crazy, I started to sleep better. It was if my brain relaxed and said, “See, the world is randomly unsafe. Now everyone knows it.”  I felt that I couldn’t stop writing, though. To not write through this part of History seemed negligent, so I made a commitment to a daily blog while this is happening. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up.

Today, I didn’t want to write. I was hoping to write something happy, or funny; to write about birds or      the pink super moon we are expecting but instead the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care. This is a huge moment in history. This virus doesn’t have a good prognosis once it starts to attack the lungs and so the nation is collectively holding their breath, which is the last thing we should be doing. Breathe everyone! Even people who have an ideological hatred of his policies are having to admit that this is not what they wanted.  We are thinking about his family: his children, siblings, Dad and pregnant girlfriend. We put ourselves in their shoes because we understand what it feels like to be family. We fear for our country. We worry about the medical staff who, already under intense pressure, will be feeling that they mustn’t let this one die.

It makes us question our mortality.

“Stay safe,” we write on emails, knowing that that’s not possible. Then we get angry and look for someone to blame. Trust me, blame won’t help you in the long run. It’s not the fault of the man who sat in a park in the sunshine or whoever decided we needed 5G. Eventually, we will all have to accept that this novel virus is just some random piece of shit that is part of life’s rich shittiness.

So, I will be hoping, praying, practising my breathing (because it might help if I get it and does help to keep things in perspective. ) And will be standing outside to appreciate the clear sky, lack of pollution a super big pink moon.

I’m here for the birds

Wasn’t the Queen lovely? It was a particularly nice broach, I thought and whoever wrote her speech was a genius. It had the perfect tone: not preachy but with enough Churchillian World War Two, we’re  all in this together, we’ll meet again references to keep the angry mob happy. It was genius because any psychologist will tell you that the best way to get people to comply is to point out the people doing what they should, rather than those that aren’t. Thanking us all for doing the right thing was perfect. The Daily Mail pictures and angry people on Social Media are actually making some people say, “Well, if they’re not going to do it, I don’t see why I should.”  It’s the same reason for why they don’t want us to stop and sit. If we see people doing it then it is human nature to do the same thing and people will inevitably share a bench without realising.

This morning, however, the Queen has become a nasty meme. The angry people are still angry, which I understand but hate. Anger is just a response to fear. This response to fear doesn’t help my anxiety and so I’m finding Social Media a fairly uncomfortable place to be.

However, there is a corner of anxious Twitter, where people like me have gathered for a while. It is a place where we tweet about tweets. We are only there for the birds. We share pictures of our bird tables and recordings of the birdsong we are hearing. When you are traumatised (and what is happening right now will feel like a trauma for many) it can help to focus on the small things. Watch the birds, have a pocket full of stones, take your camera out and use the macro setting. Stay small; stay safe; watch the birds.

The blue tit visits the mirror daily to engage the pretty tit in the mirror 

The Japanese are brilliant at this. They have 72 seasons, which help them to focus on the minutiae of life. We know about Sakura (the first Cherry Blossom season) but did you know that Tsubame kitaru is between the 5th and 9th of April? This is the season of the swallows return. It turns out that they are perfectly correct. Last night, I saw my first swallow of the season and so did my corner of social media. We were thrilled. We trilled. The Queen is lovely and the swallows are back.

Next time you feel the fear overwhelm you and the anger rising, I can thoroughly recommend taking a breath and being here for the birds.

Not An Expert

Happy Weird Christmas.

Today, you can stay in, eat a roast dinner, go for a walk, feast on cheese and watch the Queen’s speech. You might like to crack open a jigsaw puzzle or have chocolate for breakfast. If you get really bored then you can get angry on social media.

I’m not an expert and there are lots of things I don’t understand about this virus. There are even more things I don’t understand about the government’s response to it, as I think a lot of the messaging has been confused. I’m sure that if I write some of the things I’m muddled by there will be plenty of people happy to angrily tell me the truth but I suspect that they are not experts either and that even the experts are not entirely sure.

Because I’m not an expert, I’m going to follow the advice I’ve been given. I will not be suggesting that the government do anything to make my life (as a rule follower) worse. I will try not to worry about everyone else or overthink everything.

https://twitter.com/essexpoliceuk/status/1246467566467514368?s=21

I think I’m in the majority and was really happy to see the local Police tweet pictures of empty parks and seafronts. If you looked at the three pictures in the Daily Mail then you might disagree with me but that’s fine because I’m not an expert.