Norm is busy

 I’ve been driving myself crazy for the last few weeks. The same question buzzes around in my head, with no answers. That’s not true. There are too many answers and none that feel entirely right.

What shall I do about my little orchestra? 

Government guidance is a confusing minefield and although I am ultimately responsible for making the decisions it just didn’t feel right to be making them on my own. When we started the orchestra, it was me and my dad, driving everyone nuts, discussing our plans constantly, over Sunday lunch, if we met while walking the dogs, when they came over to babysit or just on the telephone. Little problems like, “How can we get the clarinets to know where we are starting from?”, or “Shall we get insurance just in case that boy gets his finger stuck somewhere that isn’t the end of his own flute?” We didn’t always make decision straight away but the constant chat gave us time for our ideas to settle. 

While I have been struggling with this question I have often asked myself, “What would Norm do?” My daughter pointed out that in the current climate WWND wasn’t necessarily the best motto. He certainly wasn’t the one of us who would err on the side of caution.

When he died I felt alone with these decisions. Luckily, however, I have the Wonderfully Bonkers Committee (WBC). 

We have a Facebook messenger chat group but I was finding the written suggestions to be making me feel more confused than before. So I called a virtual meeting. As always happens, one person couldn’t get in on the platform we were using. 

“Why don’t we just use Messenger video,” someone said.

Genius.

Except that I haven’t deleted Dad’s Facebook account or removed him from the committee group. A short while after everyone was in, as I was showing them how I can balance a pencil on my nose (always important not to take meetings too seriously) the words “Norm is busy” flashed up on the screen.

I had to look at the floor. I couldn’t catch my colleagues eyes. I have a huge problem with dark humour. I know you are meant to be sad but it’s funny isn’t it? I didn’t want them to see me laughing. I’m glad he’s busy. I imagine him in a pub somewhere.

I did mention it at the end. 

“It would have been worse if he’d actually joined us,” someone said.

I’m not sure. It might have been even funnier. Maybe it would have been nice, although as the WBC are absolutely brilliant there was no need to find out WWND.

Perfect Procrastination Storm

 So, here we are. The end of August. Eat out to help out is over. Stop enjoying what you love doing and get back to work -safely. Second wave? Who knows. Let’s put some doctors on the telly to explain that the reason cases are rising but deaths are still falling is because social distancing reduces the viral load (note: I’m not saying this isn’t true - I don’t know). Go to the office. Don’t hug anyone. It will be fine but if it’s not then it will be your fault. Teachers and kids get back to school. You’ve had quite enough fun.

For me, it has been fun. The whole lockdown experience was everything I want from life (without the music). It was quiet and stress free and I was encouraged to walk and stay at home. 

Now, we’ve got to think about resuming our old lives. This causes us to panic about paper trimmers and whether there will be enough A3 paper in the stock cupboard. We regret not using this time to write our novel or do our tax return. 

All of those things that you thought you should have done loom large. What you still have to do to prepare for a return to work looms even larger.

This creates the perfect storm of procrastination. When is the house insurance due? That paperwork is a bit messy. I must water the pot plants. Did I already water the orchid? You mustn’t give orchids too much water. What about my poor garden? It’s going to feel neglected now. The tomatoes still aren’t all ripe. I must prune the beech hedge. It must be time to dead head the roses again. Oh, I haven’t harvested the lavender. Can you smell that odd smell? Maybe we should rod the drains. There might be an old potato at the back of the cupboard. Pull out the oven, who knows, a dead mouse could be trapped behind it. Gosh, look how dirty the oven is. What about the filter on the tumble drier? It would be really nice to have the wardrobe organised by colour before I go back to work. The windows are a bit grubby. I don’t even know where my work shoes are.

Enjoy your last day of freedom, I know your oven will enjoy the experience as much as mine will.

Just Thoughtless

 Yesterday teachers were cross. I know that some people will argue that teachers are always cross but those people were probably little wotsits at school and still remember the practised pretend cross face that every teacher presented them with that was aimed to get them to do some work and stop kicking Johnny under the table. Teachers are often cross with the government, though because it’s hard work when your profession is the political ball they use to prove their worth. If you are a politician, playing a game you are not very good at but you still want to win, then cheating is the only option and so school goal posts get moved frequently. This works for the politicians because everyone knows something about school. Everyone has been and there are millions of parents whose children experience school. 

Yesterday, however, teachers were not the victims of a game of political ball, where new cheating rules were implemented but the thoughtlessness of a government that is trying to ‘wing it’ without a brain.

Nobody thought that the virus would still be hanging around. Sorry, I’m wrong about that - Typhoid Mary on Twitter has predicted much worse but scientists, statisticians and doctors all thought that lockdown would have brought us to zero transmission and that life would be going back to normal quite soon. However, we don’t have zero transmission. We currently have the transmission rate under control, still bumbling around just under R=1 but around 1000 people a day are still testing positive for the virus. They do seem to be less sick with it, hospital admissions and deaths are all slowly and steadily falling but it is still a worry that it could get out of control and start up again. Government had to finally face this idea with the knowledge that all schools will be back in September. 

Matt Hancock is so aware of how precarious the situation is, his PR advisors allowed him to be photographed sitting on a fence for the Times by Jack Hill.

We are still in the ‘no one knows’ territory and anyone who thinks they do is just guessing. 

Schools in Scotland went back a couple of weeks ago and schools in Leicester went back last week and it became clear that there were bits of advice the government should have given schools that they forgot. They hadn’t bothered to say who needed to self isolate if someone in a school tested positive or told schools how they should make sure kids don’t fall further behind when they are quarantined. These bits of guidance were important.

However, if they had just thought about the timing of when they issued this they could have avoided making millions of teachers cross. School leaders shouldn’t be surprised though, if they had watched what has been happening in Leicester (still in partial lockdown with no extended help for the businesses there and finding out about changes as an aside to other announcements), or remembered that over a month ago the Prime Minister said that he would give more guidance on seeing our families but never has, or even remembered the beginning of the pandemic where we went from ‘everything is fine to stay in and lock your doors’ during a Prime Ministerial broadcast, then they will have realised that timing isn’t a strong point. The timing is just thoughtless.

Many school leaders will have been working hard to get their buildings and staff ready for reopening on the 1st of September. Some will have left it to the last minute but most will have finished and pushed their overheating laptop to one side and decided to spend the bank holiday weekend with their neglected families, only to be confronted with more guidance to read. Getting angry teachers to comment in the press will have ensured that no one (in our overly connected digital world) could keep their laptop off.  

It may sound as thought I’m defending the government. That I’m taking a, well it’s an unprecedented global pandemic they can’t be expected to do things before they realise that it’s a problem, stance. And I suppose I am but really would it have been so wrong to send it out on Monday night? 

‘Dear headteachers,’ it could have said, ‘Thank you for all your hard work so far. We know that you are ready to reopen your schools and can’t wait to get your pupils back in your buildings. To help you, further, as we go forward, here is some extra guidance. We know that some of you will have already thought about and planned for these things because you are teachers and you plan in your sleep (what sleep?) but just in case....Good luck. We are all keeping our fingers crossed. We’ve got Matt Hancock sitting on the fence with the pigeons, so it’s all going to be fine.’

Oh no, I’m sorry, I’ve run out of that emotion.

There has been a spate of posts on Twitter recently that start with, “I have absolutely no sympathy for....”

These tweets are usually about people dealing with Covid consequences, or migrants but there has been a huge rise in them recently.

“Why do people have to be so horrible?” my daughter asked, as she read a tweet from an editor of a national online newsgroup.

The tweet said, “I’d love to see some polling on how much public sympathy there is out there for people who went on holiday and got caught up in the quarantine measures. Is there any?”

This tweet sounds like it could be a simple request from a journalist to capture the mood of the public but maybe it was to push a thought this person already had. A thought that you shouldn’t be sympathetic to anyone who went on holiday. 

The replies were almost unanimously that there was no sympathy. How could someone take a holiday in a pandemic, anyway? They shouldn’t have gone. Quarantine was inevitable. 

Then people started to say that they would reserve their sympathy for those that they felt deserved it. Maybe doctors or nurses, or families that had lost loved ones. 

Since when was sympathy a finite resource? You can feel sympathy for as many people as you want to. No emotion is finite. If a mini cut you up on a roundabout immediately after a BMW had pulled out of a turning in front of you then the anger you feel wouldn’t be less. You wouldn’t shout and beep your horn at the BMW but say to the mini, “I would be cross but I’ve used up my quota of anger for today,” In fact you’re are likely to be more angry. You don’t say to your third born child, “Oh I’m sorry, I would love you but there were two before you and I’ve just run out of love.”

All emotions are the same. The more you practise them, the better you get at them.

Now, back to this thorny question of sympathy for people returning from holiday and having to quarantine. Any instinct to say you have no sympathy comes out of fear. Yes, I know, you are feeling cross with me now. I’m not frightened, you think. It’s just that I knew it wasn’t safe to take a holiday so I cancelled mine. I was wise. I made the right choices. But you see, what if you had made choices that you thought were right and they turned out to be wrong? What if you believed the government when they said it was fine to go to Spain? That’s the fear you are feeling that has reduced our capacity for sympathy. We know that, as the pigeons keep telling me, life is precarious. At the moment, it is even more uncertain. With a government that doesn’t seem to have a clear handle on the situation, an already broken health system, a plummeting economy, looming Brexit and a virus that is refusing to just remember it has been in Dominic Cummings and go away, we can see how fragile our carefully crafted lives are. However, if we can just convince ourselves that our good fortune is because we worked hard, or made the right choices then we don’t have to think about how it could all get taken away. 

Practising sympathy will make you a nicer person but it will also make you more fearful. So, now that I’ve written this blog, I now have sympathy for all the people who say they have no sympathy because I know they are just a bit scared, which has made me even more anxious. Oh help! I’ve got to go, there’s a pigeon at my door.

Day of the Pigeons

 “I expect this will make tomorrow’s blog,” the Long Suffering Husband said after smugly rescuing me from my trauma.

“Oh no,” I told him, “I don’t think there’s much in it.”

He was disappointed. “It was funny though.”

You don’t expect a pigeon to fall down your chimney every day. 

That wasn’t what he thought was funny, though. It was my reaction, which is also what I wanted to avoid writing about. None of us really like to own up to our failings and insecurities. Also, people probably don’t want to hear them (look at how irritated we all are to hear the inner thoughts of the Archers characters). However, it turned into a full on pigeon day and this morning when I sat down to write a little fella trotted across the patio, looked in though the French windows and gave me the same look. So, here we go. Just for the LSH, this is what happened yesterday.

I was sitting on the sofa and I heard a scratching noise from the fireplace and some little stones fell into it. I checked out of the window. The weather was fine: no hailstones. Nothing else happened and I turned my attention back to my reading. Twenty minutes later there was a sudden noise from the chimney again and a pigeon landed in the fireplace with a thud. He was trapped behind the fire guard and gave me a shocked look that seemed to say, “Blimey, life is precarious. You just never know when you might fall down a chimney.”

If I had been any kind of rational person, I would have looked at the pigeon sitting in his new cage, stunned but resigned and have realised that if I opened the patio door before moving the fire guard he would free himself. Did I do that? Oh no, of course not. 

I thought, “A bird. A bird. Pigeon. Pigeon. Flappy. Fell. Chimney. Oh God. I could fall down a chimney. Flap. What if he flaps in my face? Panic.” 

Those thoughts were neither rational or slow and were quickly followed by my running up the stairs and screaming to the LSH, “Help! I need your help!” 

After I had explained. “Bird. Pigeon. Chimney. Can’t!” I hid behind the bedroom door while he opened the patio door before removing the fire guard. 

Later, as we were laughing about my extreme reaction, the window cleaner appeared, face fully framed in the pane of glass on the door and I jumped and squealed again. 

“What is wrong with you today?” the LSH asked. 

I didn’t tell him that it was the look the pigeon had given me. The look that said that none of us are safe. Unexpected things can suddenly de-rail your perfect life. One day you are there having flappy sex in your favourite place and the next, with absolutely no warning, you are sitting in a cage looking at a woman in yoga clothes who starts screaming at you.

Our errands for the day included dropping a car off for some repairs. I was driving a few cars behind the LSH when we slowed into a road works traffic jam. I was just beginning to relax into the drive and radio 2 was cheerfully and quietly playing in the background. Despite our direction of traffic being at a complete standstill the road on the other side was empty. I got my phone out and put it on the camera setting, well trained by my ‘breaking-news-daughter’ and remembering the look of the pigeon, thinking that the reason we had stopped might not have been caused by roadworks after all. The birds took the opportunity to check the carriageway for berries and bugs. I watched the sparrows dust bathe, starlings squabble and pigeons strut as if in a fashion show. Suddenly, a police car, flashing blues and twos interrupted their fun. The pigeon, completely confused and panicked, flew into my windscreen and gave me the look. 

“See! None of us are safe,” it said. 

Film Titles

 During the recent months I missed swimming and the Long Suffering Husband missed film. Once the pools were open I was straight back but he didn’t feel the same about the cinema. The problem was that no  new films were released, so while his year’s retirement present subscription was un-paused there wasn’t anything he wanted to see.

A couple of new films have been talked about in the last week. The first is called Tenet, which, by all reports is a twisty timey confusing plot, somehow related to belief in something that doesn’t really exist, or does it? I’m not sure why, based on that description, but this film title isn’t really appealing to the LSH.

This morning, I opened my emails and found one from the cinema.

Dear LSH, it said, come and see our new film, The New Mutants.

Don’t ask why I get his emails. I think it has something to do with him being late to technology. 

This title sounds like it will be more likely to get him back in the cinema. You know what you are going to get with a film called the New Mutants. It will be a superhero type thing, where rejects from society turn out to be the good guys who go on to defeat the evil. 

Yesterday, Boris Johnson, visited a school to perform a ‘schools are safe’ PR exercise. Unfortunately, the only schools that are back are Scotland and Leicester (whose holidays are always a week earlier). The chance of being welcomed with opened arms to the place you forgot about while the rest of the country came out of lockdown was always slim but this was a very funny PR disaster. He spoke to a class, filmed by ITV, and you heard them laugh at him. As he left the room you could clearly hear someone say, “Arseho...” before the clip cut off. He also gave an assembly/speech, where he asked lots of questions. Leicestershire Live reporter Dan Martin, noted that the children were silent. https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/local-news/harry-potter-sexist-okay-sing-4459002?utm_source=linkCopy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar

This is odd behaviour for even impeccably behaved kids when they are being asked questions. During this speech he started to talk about the new film release too. Mutant algorithm: must be a character in the new film. 

Other films out now are Unhinged, Behind You and Trolls. The school librarian did an excellent job of creating these film titles in the background.  https://www.tes.com/news/boris-johnson-and-revenge-school-librarian?amp&__twitter_impression=true 

I’m going to keep an eye out of films coming up in the future. Let’s hope this isn’t the start of life truly imitating art. because the next film on the release list is Antebellum.

Land of Hope and Wetness

 Nearly two months ago the Prime Minister said that more details would be forthcoming on relaxing some of the restrictions so that we could see our family and friends in a non-socially-distant way. He said nothing. It is still, technically, illegal to hug your mum or kiss your boyfriend if you live in different houses with more than one person in. Then he went on holiday. Despite a promise to be clearer, he said nothing.

Nearly three weeks ago the A level results came out and potentially mucked up the lives of millions of teenagers. Boris Johnson had hung a huge ‘Do not disturb’ sign around his neck and said nothing.

Then the organisers of the Last Night of the Proms, which is due to be broadcast on the BBC, said that without an audience of flag waving fifty year olds Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory might as well be Orchestra only pieces. It makes sense. Allow the few white middle aged people watching at home to mumble the words without meaning  (possibly incorrectly) and wave their flags. There are conversations that should be had about anthems but this wasn’t one of them. 

Suddenly, the Prime Minister had a lot to say. Oh, don’t get excited. It wasn’t about anything important. Still no word on personal freedoms or whether there is any money for schools to buy soap. No. He wanted to talk about these songs. It was something he ‘just had to get off his chest’. He was very concerned that we are ashamed of our past: Cringing embarrassment he called it and said we needed to stop this wetness.

For years I have been teaching music in primary school and every time we study anthems I ask the children to look at the lyrics and really think about what they mean and whether they represent our country’s values. Invariably they conclude that they like the music but are not so sure about the words. We start with the National Anthem. In a church school they are fine with God saving the Queen and letting her live a long time, they are not so sure about the Victorious line, “She’s called Elizabeth, isn’t she?” Then we listen to some alternatives. Land of Hope and Glory, Rule Britannia, Jerusalem and There’ll Always be an England. All of these songs hark back to our colonial days, where our tiny island fought hard to be an invader rather than be invaded. I think in all of them there is an acknowledgment that slavery is something we do to others to avoid it being done to ourselves. ‘Britons never ever shall be slaves.’ ‘Mother of the free.’ ‘The Empire too, we can depend on you. Freedoms remain.” That’s a hard thought to live with.

These songs don’t represent our current British values but it isn’t ‘wetness’ to want to change them rather than close your ears, suck it up and carry on regardless. Changing lyrics and retiring redundant verses seems a very appropriate thing to do. We did it with the Scotland verse of the National Anthem. It’s still available for historians but definitely never sung. We can’t pretend our past didn’t happen but we can stop pretending that our present/future is the same. 

I love that we live in a country where we can have these discussions. I’m glad that we are able to listen to people who can tell us why these words are not only irrelevant now but also offensive to them.

My summer music concert always ends with a rousing flag waving burst of Land of Hope and Glory. It has become a tradition that everyone loves. This year (if we can have a concert) I will have to think about whether singing these words are appropriate. Maybe I will get the children to change the words to make a celebration song that fits the event. Something like:

Land of Hope and wetness

Sweat on the back of my knees

This concert has been so long

I couldn’t even see

Longer still and longer

All the kids were great

All so brave and mighty

It’s worth staying late

All so brave and mighty

They were really great. 

I think we can all agree that wetness is one word that truly represents this country, whether it’s the sweaty wetness of a warm day or the kind of weather we had yesterday and any anthem for the UK should include the word wetness.

The puddle of life maybe easy may be hard.

Everyone Needs a Holiday

 Apparently, everyone needs a holiday and you’ve just had yours. I didn’t subject you to any of my writing for a few days, while I walked, ate, read and took photos in a place I don’t live. It was nice to have a change of scene and has the added bonus that it’s given you a break.

I’m not sure where this idea that a holiday is a basic human right has come from. The Daily Mail had scoop pictures of the Prime Minister’s holiday in Scotland. People had been complaining that for him to take another holiday, when the country is in crisis was just a little bit negligent. As MP colleague leaped to his defence claiming that everyone needs/deserves a holiday and that being Prime Minister is very stressful, the general public, whose only week away this year to a holiday camp type hotel in Spain, was cancelled, were less convinced. Then in a master stroke of PR he was pictured in a tent with a baby strapped to his chest. 

“Oh look, he’s one of us!” people cried.

Except that his last ‘proper holiday’ was in January to Mustique, he had several weekend ‘do not disturb’ breaks, a spell in hospital (not his fault but followed by travel to his country residence at a time we were not allowed to travel), some paternity leave and has now popped to Greece for his Dad’s birthday. 

Although I’ve written this, I have to tell you that I don’t care. I don’t care how many times people go away or what they do when they go. I’m happy to see their holiday snaps. If MPs want to take a break then that is up to them. If they want to pitch a tent on a Scottish hillside or travel the Greek Islands on a Russian Oligarch’s yacht then let them. However, can we stop pretending that it is a human right or necessity. 

My holiday was a two night stay in a hotel in Richmond, with a picnic brunch. Luckily the weather was on our side. Despite it only being 50 miles from where I live I have never been there. I can thoroughly recommend a visit. The Park is mahoosive. Mahoosive is not a word I would normally use but even for a Royal Park this one is big. It’s on the river at the point where the Thames stops being the smelly city thoroughfare and starts being the plaything of the rich and famous. 

The highlight of my break happened in Richmond Park. I had been up early to photograph the deer and walk, while the Long Suffering Husband nursed a birthday hangover and I came across this wonderful little gate.

It wasn’t until later in the day that I found out more about it. I made the LSH climb to the top of a hill, to King Henry’s mound. This is supposed to have been where Henry the Eighth stood to watch a firework rocket from the Tower of London that told him Anne Boleyn had been beheaded.  We did feel sorry for the poor servants or horse that would have carried him to the top. 

The top of this hill has a protected view of St Paul’s and a view through a telescope gives you the most beautiful magical sight. It’s not a vista that could be captured on my camera but through the telescope you see the gate and floating above it is the blue sky with the famous London skyline and the white dome of St Paul’s beautifully framed by trees. 

After we had seen this we went back to the gate to see if we could get a photo of the top half of the view. When we got there a man had leaned his bike up against the gate. He was looking round furtively. We started to walk on and then stopped, thinking we would wait for him to leave. As we turned back around he had chosen that moment to unzip his fly and have the longest wee known to man. We didn’t have the heart to point out that there was a telescope pointing straight at him.

We did have a nice break but it is always good to be home.

Memory Lane

 For our ‘Freedom Thursday’ trip this week we decided to take a walk down memory lane. 

As you get older, it gets more and more comforting to retreat into the past. This seems especially true at the moment, where the future is so uncertain and unknowable. Once you get to an age where you have less to look forward to than you’ve already done, the past seems a particularly attractive place. This is especially true as you can adapt past memories to suit your own narrative. 

You might have noticed this phenomenons  on Twitter, as people rush to say how terrible their school was. 

“Look at me,” says the famous singer, “I wasn’t even allowed in the choir at school and look at me now. Believe in yourself and you can achieve your dreams.”

You might not be suspicious about this but I knew famous singer’s music teacher, who told me that she was one to watch. She had ‘something’: ‘something unusual but something’. 

I think it was the talk of how the exam grades had been adjusted to reflect, where people were from that made us want to revisit the town where we grew up. The Long Suffering Husband grew up on the council estate and I grew up in a house that firmly placed me in the middle of the town. Because I was in top sets my friends lived in the huge houses that backed onto the park. 

We decided to take a walk to see if our memories matched up. 

As we walked, we told each other stories. We remembered people from the past. We tried not to do this with rose tinted specs.

The LSH showed me the place where he got his one and only speeding fine.

“You must be careful on this bend because there was a fatal accident here,” the policeman told him.

“Oh really?” he replied, “Was anyone hurt?” 

We went to the field where we first met and talked about open air discos and carnivals. 

We saw all the places where we had mis-spent our youth. He was really pleased that there were locks on the gates to the railway tracks where he used to play and I was sad that there were no longer boats on the lake in the park. We were both thrilled that you could still queue for half an hour for a cider barrel lolly.

Most of the memories that came back were those that we told ourselves repeatedly anyway, however there were a few that were specifically triggered by a place.

“That’s where I was when Elvis died,” I told him, pointing at a church hall next to the fire station.

I have not thought about this before, or even why my brain has stored it as an important memory. 

I was at a party on a hot August evening. I have no idea who it was for but I know that both my sister and my mum were there. Dad isn’t in the memory. I have a suspicion that the party was for someone from my mum’s babysitting circle. A woman with a loud hearty laugh, stout legs, a love of white wine, wearing Scholl flip-flops, as if they were the best fashion accessory ever invented (I suppose they were an early Birkenstock).

The food was served on long trestle tables, covered with white paper cloths. There were bowls of salad, crisps and buns and you walked to the kitchen hatch to get your sausage and burger. This was a revolutionary way of catering a party to me and is probably why it has stuck in my head. I particularly remember the relish, which was yellow and had sweet corn kernels in it. Drinks, for children, were dispensed via a self-service soda stream. It really was the most modern party in a church hall.

I was wearing a jumpsuit: a pale blue, all in one affair, with flared trousers and a silver zip with a d-ring up the front. It was a nightmare to go to the toilet. I remember coming out of the toilets, feeling slightly worried that I might have a damp patch on the back of my outfit and walking into a group of distraught boys. Their quiffs bounced as they held back the tears.

“Have you heard?” one of them said, “Elvis is dead. He died in the toilet.”

I wondered which of their friends had been called Elvis but was very grateful that I had just been using the girls toilets. How much harder would navigating a jumpsuit have been if someone had been dying in the next door cubicle? It was only when I returned to the party and Blue Suede Shoes was playing that I realised what had really happened.

Do you remember where you were on August the 16th 1977, when Elvis died? If not, a walk around memory lane might help.

Exam Anxiety

 It never fully goes away, does it? It’s been years since I had to worry about exam results, yet for two consecutive Thursdays in August, every single year, I wake up feeling sick. 

If anything, the sensation is worse this year. 

The anxiety you feel from collecting exam results is peculiar. There is a sense that this is finally the moment you can stop holding your breath. 

It feels as though this is the moment we are at with the virus too. Is this the moment we can finally stop holding our breath? If we stop too early we might drown and if we wait too long we might run out of breath and expire.

It’s not good to hold the breath for too long. The time from taking exams to getting the results is just about at the limit of human endurance, so I want to hope that everyone collecting results today can breathe again properly and doesn’t feel like they are drowning. 

Dido and The Anus

 I did O level music in the early eighties, at a comprehensive school. There were seven people in my class and only two of us played classical instruments. I can’t work out why there were so few, as the school was quite good at music. We had a thriving choir, an orchestra and put on shows like Cabaret. The peripatetic music teachers were all first class musicians (I think the elderly bassoon teacher, Vernon, was Ivor the Engine). The exam had no practical element and was theory and history based, with six pieces that we had to know inside out. We learnt that Giuseppe Verdi, or John Green’s (a we called him) 2 children and wife died tragically early, causing him to write sad music and that Bach’s prolific output was because he had twenty children to support. There was no mention that only half of those children survived to adulthood and that those children were spread between two wives. I suppose that didn’t fit the narrative. Bach didn’t write particularly gloomy pieces. 

The set pieces included printed out extracts of the score that we had to be able to replicate accurately from memory, in an exam room, where singing was banned. Musicians have always despaired about the the assessment of their subject for 16 year olds.

One of those pieces was from Purcell’s opera, which didn’t really speak to the youth of Essex in the eighties. However, when you are forced to listen to something over and over it becomes part of you and so I’ve decided that I am going to sing Dido’s lament at my funeral. 

“Oh, Sir, do we have to do Dido and the anus again?”

“Yes, Smith, we do. You are all still missing the chromatic the baseline.”

“But Sir, it’s so miserable.”

No one ever corrected Smith on his pronunciation of Aeneus, or even laughed about it. I will never know if that’s just what we thought it was called.

Purcell’s opera is based on Virgil’s classical poem about Dido, the Queen of Carthage and her tragic love of Aeneus, son of Athena. (Spoiler: she kills herself when he leaves her). Comprehensive schools didn’t really teach the Classics, so the story was lost on us.

Dido isn’t a name you hear very often. There was the pop singer and now the woman that has been given the job of head of the new National Institute for Health Protection, which is to replace Public Health England. If you thought this government wouldn’t push ahead with privatisation of the health service during a global pandemic then you were wrong. It’s simple. Rename the body, make it responsible for ni(h)p and tuck. Appoint someone with a track record for failure, named after one of the most miserable characters in music or literature. 

Does that make Matt Hancock the anus?

Being Wrong

 As someone who is wrong most of the time, I find this idea that admitting you made a mistake is a failure to be bizarre.

Yes, the A level exam thing is an unholy mess. Yes, they should have seen it coming. No, it’s still not fully fixed for everyone. But should they resign, or stay and fix the mess they’ve created? Maybe even learn from their mistakes?

The man at Offqual took the blame. He was interviewed on the news via Skype and said how sorry he was that they didn’t realise that applying a statistical model (that probably had less significance in a global pandemic) to actual people meant that individuals would be upset. He looked broken. He knows that once he has apologised he will lose his job because in our society no one can be allowed to fail, except students at the bottom end of society’s computer algorithm. You see, you are either at the top or the bottom, there’s no room for movement and you certainly can’t do badly one day and well the next.

Gavin Williamson is being urged to resign too. How could he not have seen this coming? Why did it take him until the weekend when he saw young future Tory voters march in furious protest to realise the mistake? People cry that he should  go! However, no one wants that job, only an idiot would willingly replace him.

The argument goes that when something has been messed up this badly, the person in charge is incompetent and therefore shouldn’t be doing the job. However, I wonder what would happen if we forced them to stay and clear up their mess? The education secretary is a thankless job that no one can be properly qualified for. Would you have to be a teacher? A headteacher? Primary? Senior? Have Specisl needs training? Have worked in a grammar school, an inner city comprehensive, a private school? Education moves so fast (because we have so many different Education Secretaries) then if they had been out of teaching for more than a few years then those qualifications would be irrelevant. Politically, Education is a mess anyway, so what if Gav said, “Hands up, I made a mistake. Totes should have been on it sooner but I’m not going to leave the job. I’m going to stay and learn from my mistakes.”

The alternative is that he leaves, some other idiot gets the job and he gets promoted to a cushy little job as compensation, which feels like a reward and no one ever learns. Also, what kind of message does it send? Teachers are always trying to get kids to develop a growth mindset and not quit every time something goes wrong. 

Fear

 There is a lot of fear around at the moment. If you are up early enough, still and quiet you can smell it in the air. 

Every night all the fear collects, as people’s filing-cabinet brains process it all and dump as much as they can into the trash. Every morning, since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve smelt it. It’s a damp, sulphourous, musty smell and it hovers over the grass, waiting to find another victim to jump into. This morning, there was so much of it you could see it. The weather people didn’t predict fog because that’s not what it was. It was fear, looking for a home.

By 8am there were enough people awake and the fear crept into enough brains for the fog to have lifted and the smell to vanish. 

Ron woke up and his first thought was, “What if I lose my job?”

Bert woke up and thought, “It’s still out there. I could die.”

Jane thought, “What if I can’t see my mum in her care home before she dies?”

Simon wondered whether bubbles were going to be enough to protect his children in school.

Lisa thought, “How am I going to get shoes for my Poppy to start school? I’ve seen the queues for Clarkes on Facebook.”

Poppy thought, “Will Mummy miss me when I go back to school.”

Karen went down her list of things she still needed to do to make her school safe before welcoming the children back in September and cringed at the idea of making another video.

Stuart tried not to think about his school budget and how much time, money and effort it was going to take to help the students that had been failed this year.

Ollie thought, “What if my GCSE results are as f-ed up as Will’s A level results were?”

Will’s worries spiralled out of control.

Fear is a dangerous beast. It can make people run away, feel stuck where they are or fight. 

None of these are a good option at the moment.

Just call me Miss T Ache

 I don’t think I’ve been performing very well lately. I’ve made a few mistakes and I can’t decide how to count things. It would be fine but I’m beginning to make other people look bad. That will never do. The only option is to change my name. I was thinking Miss T Ache would work, then you know exactly what you are going to get.

That’s how it works, right? 

The current government are beginning to realise that the general public aren’t too happy. This has been a shock.

“Haven’t we done a good job?” they say.

“Errrrm. Nope.”

“What? Of course we have. Weren’t you listening? World beating.”

“Confused messages, exam cock-ups, half price burgers but lose weight, worst deaths in Europe, Leicester, messages sent by pigeon via Spain, publication of 4 different sets of death figures, cancer services, the jobs lost, theatres, Dominic Cummings, sudden quarantine from holiday destinations, no idea how schools work, failed trace app....actually do I need to go on?”

“Oh yes, there is all that but we’ve done a brilliant job.”

Public picks government up by the scruff of the neck and shouts, “No. Idiot. It’s terrible. So bad that we might not vote for you next time!”

The injection of  self-confidence that conservative ministers received at Eton are suddenly less effective and there is a temporary wobble. There is a moment of self doubt. It is, however, only a moment.

“It’s not our fault,” they cry. “It’s the BBC!”

“The BBC? Don’t you mean the CCD?” a wit jokes, referencing the downgrading of A levels. 

“Did I say BBC? I meant Ofqual.”

“Ofqual, aren’t responsible for the mishandling of the pandemic. That’s your fault.”

“Oh the pandemic. Well that’s down to Public Health England.”

“But PHE are under your control. What about test and trace? That’s been a fiasco too.”

“What a good idea. We could combine the two and rename them.”

“Do you think that would help?”

“Oh yes. We’ll give them another name so that you know what a good job we are doing.”

“What are you going to call them?”

“Service Counting Actual People Earning Government Outstanding Accolades Tracing.”

Old Technology

I am old technology. 

This is what is happening in my life at the moment:

We know that your pupils were booked in for exams in March that we had to cancel, due to unprecedented circumstances.

It was an unprecedented virus.

It’s simple. 

Just record your pupils pieces, in one take, with no mistakes and then upload them to our portal.

Tick here if you’d like to do that. Jump through a hoop, contact your agent, provide bank account details and three copies of your ID and stand on your head if you’d like your money back.

Normal exams? Who can say. Unprecedented times. 

Pieces must be recorded with piano accompaniment. That’s fine. You can work a camera and play the piano.

Social distancing must be maintained at all times.

Your recording must have no outside sounds. Turn your phone to silent, make sure no birds are singing in the recording to confuse the examiner.

Work in a well ventilated room.

Your login details will be sent....soon....can’t say when there has been unprecedented demand. 

The deadline for uploading the videos was yesterday.

Your login will be sent soon.

The deadline was yesterday.

Don’t worry. You will have 7 unprecedented days to upload it from when you get your login.

You must add scans of your music. Copying of music is theft!

All parts of your pupil’s instrument must be able to be seen by the examiner at all times, swaying flute players notwithstanding.

The music stand must never block the examiner’s view of the pupil.

Take care when positioning the camera, so that light from a window doesn’t shine on the pupil.

There must be no shake on the recording.

Details of the music played must be uploaded in a separate word document.  

Uploading is simple. Just drag and drop from your phone.

Your pupil must sign the release form. Didn’t we tell you that before. Sorry, unprecedented.....actually, why aren’t they uploading their own video?

Don’t worry you have seven days from when we sent the login. 

It was in your spam box for two days? Oh well. You have five days.

Videos can’t exceed 50 megabytes.

You don’t know what a megabyte is. Ha ha. How old are you?

Details of how to compress videos can be found on this YouTube tutorial.

You do speak fluent Cantonese, right?

I am over fifty years old. My laptop is coming up for its tenth birthday. My phone is a version small enough to fit into a pocket. My brain in full of holes. I can’t remember passwords. Hell, my name is a challenge some days. 

When my dad retired from British Telecom in the very early nineties he threw his modern, brick of a mobile phone into the Thames. I’m beginning to see why.

Duvet Day?

 I wonder how many people woke up this morning with the same first thought as me?

Weirdly, it’s  been a long time since I had that feeling of wanting to pull the duvet over your head, and stay there in the hope that the world could reset to a previous time. You would think that would be a common feeling after grief but that wasn’t how I experienced it. I do think it would have been a more restful option but it wasn’t to be. This morning, however, my first thought wasn’t to jump out of bed and release my mind from it’s free-reign thoughts. It might have been because the world had cooled down (the first night under 20C in a week) and grabbing a duvet to pull over your head was an option but there was also the idea that I could pretend that ‘none of this had ever happened.’ 

I imagine lots of 18 year olds, teachers, parents and, hopefully, Gavin Williamson will want to pull the duvet back over their heads this morning.

I wouldn’t blame a single one of those teenagers whose results were downgraded yesterday if they were hoping for a personal Groundhog Day. You could argue that kids often don’t get their predicted grades but when that happens it’s because they mucked up a paper, got confused by a question, didn’t have enough breakfast to concentrate properly or had hay fever so bad they couldn’t see to write. They could understand it. It still might not have been fair. It still might not have been a test of what they can actually do but it was understandable. If they didn’t understand they could appeal and have the paper re-marked or ask to see it. There has always been an admin cost associated with this, which exam boards refund if they find an error has been made. This year, the decision to downgrade them has been made with the sweep of a pen, or computer mouse to turn them into a statistic that fits an algorithm and the £111 admin fee seems unjustifiable.

The article in the Telegraph that has turned Gavin Williamson’s quotes into the funniest and most unfair misquote of all time (please read the article and not just the funny caption someone has put with the tweet!) tried to explain the thinking.  He said that if they had gone with the teacher’s grades then the overall grades this year would have shot up. This, he thought, would disadvantage the children in the future. That sounds counter-intuitive because surely higher grades would help but he seemed to be saying that people wouldn’t be able to trust those grades. He didn’t say that it would mean that people were promoted into positions they weren’t qualified for, even though that is one logical conclusion of his argument. 

There is an obvious reason why the grades are higher. Teachers were not over-inflating the grades. They just couldn’t decide who would muck it up on the day. Can you imagine that conversation? 

“Well yes, Billy, I know you could have got an A but I was assuming that your hamster died the morning of the exam and you just couldn’t concentrate properly.”

“But Sir, I don’t have a hamster!”

“Oh, Jessica, Jessica, if only you hadn’t got the numbers on the dates the wrong way round you would have got that B in History but everyone knows Hitler didn’t die in April 1954.”

“Miss, I do know it was 1945. I wouldn’t...”

“Well someone would have reversed the numbers, we decided that it would be you this year.”

I don’t know why these kids just couldn’t have been given what their teachers thought they deserved. No one will trust this year’s results anyway. Also, haven’t these children had enough to deal with already? No leaving experience, no chance to take an exam to prove how hard you’ve worked, no prom, no meeting friends, no chance to meet a boyfriend/girlfriend, no opportunity to get drunk in a field and have a grope with someone that you’ll regret later, not much hope for the future, constantly being told you are going to kill granny. I could go on. Wouldn’t high A level grades compensate for that a little?

I know many teachers who agonised for days to get the grades right and provide evidence for every student. I don’t know any teacher who wasn’t aware that over-inflated grades could be marked down. Someone I know said, “The worst thing, is those students looking at you as if you’ve done this to them.”

Parents whose children have been affected will definitely be hoping for a duvet day. It’s hard to be the parent of a sad young person.

I hope the education secretary is also feeling like this. He must know that his days in the job are numbered. The Prime Minister has said that he has every confidence in him, which is code for, ‘start packing your bags mate’.  I’d like to think that his wife, a former primary school teacher, told him what he’d done.

“No, Gav. Don’t be stupid. You’ve undermined the confidence and professionalism of every teacher in the country. I’m absolutely fuming. My friends won’t speak to me. I’ve had this text from Cathy. The things they are calling you. I think you should sleep in the spare room.”

“But Jo, it’s not my fault. It’s Michael’s. Gove was wrong. He should never have got rid of continuous assessment.”

That might be something we can all agree on but it doesn’t make it any easier for someone who feels their life has been altered by a global pandemic and a computer algorithm.

Nothing to add

 It’s A level results day.

I feel sick and anxious, with no reason. 

Twitter is full of people writing about how they did worse than expected in 1984 (as if it’s relevant). Facebook is full of parents worried for their children (naturally). Instagram is full of pictures of chocolate cake that’s going to be eaten later (thank God for chocolate cake). Tic Toc is full of weird spasm-filled victory dances.

Gavin Williamson is on the TV being honest about how mucked up the system is this year, which means we are due for another new education secretary.

I have nothing to add. A level results day is always a rollercoaster day. I just hope that everyone survives it and that the parents I know don’t have to clear up too much alcohol induced vomit. 

Educatin, edukation, educashon

 I can barely look. What on Earth are they playing at? 

It was always going to be impossible to, fairly, assess this year’s children in the way we normally do. They couldn’t take exams, they hadn’t finished the work but instead of just writing the whole thing off and giving the Universities the freedom to give places to who they want without the need for formal exams the government decided that a botched system was better than no system.

Last night, at about 10pm Gavin Williamson did an about turn on A level results.

There was already some upset in Scotland as it was found that the regulating body had adjusted grades of the Highers because it seemed that some teachers were being overly ambitious for their students. Some teachers will have been fair and some will have been harsh. Nothing is ever perfect. If exams had gone ahead some kids would have lucked out and got the questions they could do well in, others would have mucked up completely. No system is ever completely fair. However, when they looked at Scottish data it appeared that there was an institutional bias. Poorer schools seemed to have been more lenient in their gradings and given higher grades than their students normally get. This could be because children who go into exams hungry always do less well than they could do. A lot of brain power can be wasted on wondering where the next meal is coming from, or whether your parents are going to lose their job and therefore your home. 

Before you read this and say, “Well, what’s the answer then?” I’m going to confess that I don’t know but pissing off a whole load of 18year olds probably isn’t a good idea. I think it would be better not to keep changing your mind. At least if you stick to the original plan (and let students appeal on a case by case basis, providing evidence) then you look vaguely competent. 

What he has said is that they can’t get a grade lower than their mock result. I’m not sure all schools will have done mocks but if they were anything like mine then they were exams that were set to be so difficult that it would shock you into doing some work. In my school, everyone failed their mocks. Other schools might have felt their pupils needed a boost and they could have set exams to encourage them, “See, you’re not as bad as you thought you were.” I’m not sure this plan is going to be a comfort to most kids. Also, if you don’t want to make a mockery of something you should never give journalists the word mock to play with.

Obviously, if Michael Gove hadn’t insisted that one exam at the end was better and kept the continuous assessment approach things would be fairer but even he can’t be blamed for a global pandemic.

Teachers everywhere are looking out for government announcements on schools like this meme.

It hasn’t been the most relaxing holiday. 

We were hoping for guidance, yesterday, on what we could actually teach in music lessons. There seems little point in completely redesigning your teaching plans if you don’t have to. 

Meanwhile, teenagers, already fed up with the fiasco over exam results and the fact that their lives had suddenly being taken away by a virus that didn’t seem to affect them too badly are now being given advice on the ‘new normal’ way to have sex by Newsbeat. To be fair, Newsbeat are only reporting Terrance Higgins Trust’s advice but I can’t look. I may be an old prude but I do think that once you are swapping bodily fluids then you are in a position to catch things off each other, whatever position you swap them in. 

The young people I know are sensible, intelligent people. Maybe we should have asked them because they couldn’t do a worse job.

 

Not just a shop

 When I first moved here nearly thirty years ago everyone talked about a shop in the High Street.

“Oh, you’ll get that in the Emporium.”

“The Emporium. Yes, the Emporium has everything.”

“It’s not just a shop. It’s the Emporium.”

I’ll confess. I didn’t get it. I didn’t think it was a very special shop. Yes, it had a bit of everything but I couldn’t see the appeal. In those days, we still had a Woolworths, so if you wanted fabric dye to make a retro Seventies T-shirt or something to unblock the sink or a bag of pick and mix you were set. As I’ve got older, and crazier this shop has grown on me.

When I was bonkers, after mum died, all I could do was walk. Dealing with people was tricky but going into that shop was a daily grounding experience. I used to walk for hours and end up in the High Street. I liked to be near but not having to interact with people. It was good for me to see that real life continued even though I couldn’t engage with it. 

Any shop called the Emporium has to have magic in it somewhere.  This shop’s magic is the kindness of the staff. 

When I was walking with the dog (in my bonkers days) this shop was impossible to pass. It is my dog’s favourite shop. They have dog biscuits behind the counter and the staff know him by name, have a chat, while feeding him biscuits.

“We’ve got some gravy bones today. You like those, don’t you? What about one of these yellow ones? Ooop, that didn’t last long. You are a hungry boy!”

It felt like a conversation: one that I didn’t have to participate in. I bought bird seed or things to make my garden better or unblock my sinks. I bought a peg bag. “Over fifty years on the planet and this is the first peg bag I’ve bought!” I laughed at myself. At that time, focusing on small things made all the difference. This shop was full of small things.

I liked how much the staff cared about their elderly customers. Every time I went in, I would catch someone patiently explaining how they would drop their bag of compost over after 5, when they finished work and to, “make sure they had the kettle on.” When elderly men, clearly with dementia, got angry about their delivery not having arrived, no effort was spared to explain that he had only been in that morning and had arranged delivery for the next day. They even helped him find the piece of paper they’d written it on by remembering what pocket he’d put it in. They helped the man in the brown egg-stained cardi to count 7 gobstoppers into a paper bag - one for each day of the week and advised the lady in the pinny of the best mousetrap to buy to deal with the (mouthed silently) ‘little problem’.

It had only taken the death of two parents, a couple of friends, PTSD and being a certain age for me to fully appreciate this shop. Then it was put up for sale. The owners want to retire. I didn’t blame them but I was sad.

When a global pandemic hit and all but essential shops closed I thought that would be the end of this spot of magic on our High Street. I thought the owners would take the opportunity to start their retirement, furlough their staff, kick back and relax. 

That’s not what happens in stories about magic, though. Emporiums thrive. They, and everyone else, realised that they are an essential. Everyone needed to feed the birds. The whole world was tie-dying t-shirts. We had time to make our gardens perfect or peg our clothes on the line. Sinks blocked up because everyone was at home. When everyone was eating breakfast together you needed an extra egg cup or two. This little shop allowed a green grocer to open in the garden centre. This business had lost most of its restaurant delivery trade and was probably saved by this gesture.

Obviously, the shop wasn’t busy. Most people were too scared and believed it was safer to get Amazon to allow their overworked delivery drivers (who probably haven’t washed their hands since 2002), to leave parcels on the doorstep. However, for me, the dog and most old confused people it remained a place of relative normality. The staff didn’t stop being kind and you got a free forehead thermometer with your purchase.

Yesterday, buoyed by my swim, I decided that I could go into some shops. 

“I’m just being a snowflake,” I said to myself. “Of course I can wear a mask.”

I was at the till, with my packets of birdseed and some biscuits for the dog (I didn’t think he should miss out just because I was on my own) and the world started to look a little strange. It was like looking through a fish-eye lens. I felt very hot and was beginning to think I had to run.

The girl behind the till looked at me and said, “Take it off!” She gestured opening a flap on her mouth.

I was, briefly, confused and then realised what she was saying. 

“You don’t have to worry. You’re safe here,” she said.

I hope, even though it has only taken a global pandemic, everyone realises just how special this massive shop is. (I was going to write ‘little shop’ but it’s huge in so many ways).

Too excited

 I’m too excited to write this morning.

My Twitter feed has been spammed by the government. It’s full of adverts that say, you “Whatever you’ve missed, now’s the time to get back out there and do it safely.”

Unfortunately, I’ve missed singing in a choir, playing in a band and going to watch live musicals, so I don’t think they really meant to send it to me. That’s the problem with these ads: they might look like they are going to the right person but it could just be completely the wrong time. The targeted ads I’m getting on Facebook at the moment are all about jam making and while this could be something I’d be interested in......have they checked the weather? Who makes jam in temperatures that could be a bra size (34C).?

However, my swimming pool opens today. So, maybe the government only sent the tweet a few days too early. I’ve booked my lane, have my cozzie on under my dress for poolside changing and have even put some antibacterial wipes in my bag just in case. 

I’m very excited.

Book Review

 The Booker prize longlist is out, with 13 books to be judged, whittled down to six by the 15th of September and then finally one by the end of October. Whichever book wins, it will be one that not everybody will like. You would think that Hilary Mantel is a shoe-in with the final of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. I have read it and it’s good. Not a word wasted with beautiful language, full of historical accuracy in all the right places. She won for the other two and it would seem cruel not to give it to her for the final piece of the puzzle. I hope this won’t stop people reading the others.

 I felt like that last year. I read the Testaments and just knew that Margret Attwood had to win the prize, so didn’t read any of the others. I only read Girl, Woman, Other (that shared the prize - we should have known we were heading into unprecedented  times) a few months ago. 

Authors need these prizes (not just for the money, although that helps) but to get us to buy and read their books. It gets their name known, so that publishers pay them something to stay at home and write the next one. The sad fact is that there is not enough time to read every book published.

There is also a ‘Not the Booker’ list by the Guardian, which has over 200 books on the longlist. The UK publishes over 180,000 books a year (obviously not all adult fiction). These numbers are quite overwhelming.  

Every book has taken hours of work, hours of doubt, hours of hunching over a computer/typewriter/notebook. To even get to the stage where someone thinks it os worth being published means that it’s pretty good.  

Yesterday, I read one of the books that is on both the longlists. I thought Such a Fun Age was a cracking story. It marched along and had complex characters and made me think. Thanks to Mrs Thain, my primary school teacher when I was 9, I feel a compulsion to write a review. I used to keep a little notebook but the Goodreads stepped up. I always think that every book deserves 5 stars in a public forum like that. It must help the author but I can hear my (slightly terrifying) school teacher saying, “You can’t like everything. Develop an opinion, girl.”  After I’ve left my review I like to see what other people thought of it.

I was expecting unanimous praise for Such a Fun Age. Lots of people were disappointed. They didn’t like the flawed characters. They wanted the heroine to be more of a hero. They wanted it to give them all the answers to the problem of race. They thought it was ‘just chic-lit’. For me, all these were the reasons why I liked the book. It was easy to read; about, mainly, women; couldn’t fix he problem of racism but observed it well; no character was perfect. We are so lucky that so many people are willing to sit and write for hours to give us so much choice. There are enough stories so that everyone can find at least one that speaks to them. 

Today the YouTube algorithm chose Yoga for Writers and ended with the aphorism, ‘every time I sit down to write my ideas flow out.’ It made me laugh out loud. Everyone knows ideas don’t flow. They clump and fall and get stuck and finally have to be rearranged.

That time of year

 It’s that time of year again.

You’ve all got FOMO. You are looking at the pictures everyone is posting on Facebook. You can see your memories from previous years. Blooming COVID, ruining everything.....unless you grow courgettes and then everything is the same.

The only question is whether to have ratatouille or courgette cake for breakfast.

 

The People of Dedham are Revolting

 This is the year of the staycation!

Some people who write this line to sell holidays in the UK are lying. What they want you to do is vacation in Britain. However, this is the year of the staycation for many people. They are staying each night in their own bed - £100 a night hotel rooms are out of their budget or they are still too frightened to go far.

The weather is helping and local economies (apart from areas heavily populated with offices) are growing. The more rural the better. If this carries on much longer we could see a complete turn around in the fortunes of those poor seaside towns. Money will flow in and everyone will wonder why Felixstowe has the best SATS results.

People are also making the most of the holiday at home experience by putting tents up in their back garden. There has been a massive increase in the sale of camping and outdoor equipment, which has allowed manufacturers to reduce their prices. Someone tweeted a Guardian article about this with the caption, “This really is the summer of discount tents.” I love a Shakespeare related tent pun.

People living in the lovely areas of Britain are a bit cross. They moved to these places to get away from the hoi polloi (or house polio, as my autocorrect tried to insist I typed). Suddenly, their rural idyll has been shattered. There was a lady from Cornwall on the radio, who was incandescent about visitors to her town. We were surprised because Cornwall is always busy in the Summer (is how we settled on Pembrokeshire) but I think there’s a combination of holidaymakers and staycationers. I have seen that locally to us the people who live in Constable country are also weary of the huge numbers of visitors.

I do feel a bit sorry for them. You don’t spend a million pound on a two bedroom cottage overlooking a river to watch teenagers jumping off bridges into the cow poo soaked water, leave their barbecue remains behind (Well, it is disposable) and have your nostrils invaded by the smell of weed and special brew. You hadn’t signed up to hoards of families cracking out the picnic blanket and tucking into their Billy Bear sandwiches, while the dad takes his top off, proudly displaying his 17 weeks of furlough tan.  (I’m expecting to see this reddish-brown shade all the rage in upper class home design stores next year)

I would like to apologise to those people of Dedham because yesterday I was one of the hoi polloi. We parked at Flatford, walked through Dedham to Stratford St Mary, stopping for a fantastic lunch at Milsoms. Ok. We were middle class hoi polloi. Maybe you didn’t mind us but I really enjoyed seeing people of all classes having fun, even noticing that the corporate lunch, complete with handshake isn’t dead.

I would like people to take their rubbish home with them but that’s another problem. 

It is a beautiful part of the country and worth upsetting the locals if you are staycationing.

Rules

I’m fascinated with how rules affect different people. This lockdown period of history has been great for those of us who like to observe human behaviour. 

The behavioural scientists in the government advisory group were shocked at just how happy the UK public were to follow rules. They thought that we had a bit more gumption to us and would suffer from lockdown fatigue after a few weeks and start to rebel. It turns out that the only person that happened to was the government’s own advisor. The rest of us just accepted what we were told and went with it. Obviously, it helped that they were constantly telling us that we would die if we didn’t stay at home.

Now that the choice to follow rules isn’t so simple, people watching has become even more interesting. Rules now vary from place to place. Each business is being left to decide what ‘rules’ they will have to make the world Covid safe. This causes confusion and forces people to think about what rules they will follow and how they will behave when there is one they are not happy with.

Yesterday, I went to lunch with a friend and recent member of the Dead Mum Club (DMC). It was just what I needed: a long walk, nice food, good company and a discussion about grief. 

The cafe was on the sea wall, next to a caravan park. The sun was shining and an ozone filled breeze strong enough to blow my crisps of my plate, brought the tide in. Kids from the caravan park  were digging in the sand and splashing in the water, while the more upmarket locals zipped past on their yachts and sail boards. The water was packed and it felt like a holiday. 

The cafe, in its attempt to be covid-compliant had set out its outdoor tables at the regulation distance. They had two bigger tables and the rest were small (for parties of 2-3). Those tables were two small ones pushed together. When we arrived there was only a big table free. We asked the waitress how it worked (you sat down and then one of you queued to go inside to order the food, give your name and contact number, and the waitress brings it out to you). 

“Can we move these tables apart, so that someone else can use them?” we asked, thinking of their profits.

“No, the tables have to stay where they are and you can’t sit down until I’ve sanitised.”

We decided to wait until the next small table left. 

Following that rule wasn’t too difficult for us. We understood the reason (2m rule, even though we, from different households weren’t 2m apart). When I went in to order, however, there was a ‘rule’ I couldn’t follow.

A bottle of medical grade 80% alcohol hand sanitiser was on the table.

“Have you sanitised?” staff snapped at everyone entering.

Now, I struggle with this product. I knew I wasn’t going to comply with the rule. It didn’t make sense to me. The member of staff I was dealing with was behind a screen and I used a chip and pin card to pay. My hands pretty much stayed inside my pockets. How people react when they aren’t going to follow a rule is something I find really interesting. I chose to pretend and accidentally got some on my hands, which after I’d payed caused a mini panic attack because of the smell. (This was easily fixed with a trip to the bathroom to wash my hands properly and some breathing exercises).

While we were eating there were several people who couldn’t understand why the tables couldn’t be separated. There were several different responses to this rule. Some people happily accepted it, others tried to argue. The tables were full and there were two ladies already sitting at a big table. Stupidly, in my opinion, they had chosen to sit at one end rather than spread themselves over the two. An extremely large and loud man and his henpecked wife, in a blue floral smock arrived. He saw the two ladies and started to lower his weary body into one of the spare chairs.

Although I didn’t hear it, I assume the ladies told him that he couldn’t sit there, so he started to move the tables apart and make a bit of noise. There was no waitress around to explain the rules.

“I don’t want to get into an argument but they are not going to let you do that,” the woman said.

He started shouting about his rights and how ridiculous it was.

A man on one of the small tables called over, “Its alright, mate, you can have my table, we were about to go anyway.”

The man wasn’t happy. He was prepared to stick to his guns. He thought the rule was stupid and no one was going to change his mind. The wife of the man who had offered his table muttered, “Its his wife you’ve got to feel sorry for,”  as they walked past us.

Eventually, he opted for a spot of topless sunbathing on the sea wall and I was reminded of the seals at Blakeney point.

You have read this and are immediately against this man but if the world is going to change to a new normal, we should be thinking about what rules we are prepared to accept and those we want to challenge. By pretending to use the hand sanitiser have I forever given permission for people to use the word sanitise? Have I given credence to the stupid idea that it’s better to rub yourself in alcohol than it is to wash your hands with hot soapy water?

GP

Do you remember when a little girl was on Saturday morning TV and she read out Grand Prix as grand pricks? It was one of those hilarious moments that gets repeated, probably to her constant humiliation (although maybe not because Melissa Wilkes is still an actress, even after Grange Hill). Anyway, I always think of that whenever I have to contact my GP surgery. There is always a rebellious voice in my head that says, “Well you know what GP stands for and it’s not Grand Prix! Haha Grand Pricks, that’s what it says here!”

I know it’s childish and you would probably argue that they are only doing their best but seriously, if that’s their best then they have to do better. I worry about the people who won’t keep fighting for what they need. Matt Hancock said yesterday that this crisis had shown him that GP appointments don’t need to be face to face, which I was surprised about. I thought it would have shown him just how woefully underfunded the health service is and how it is teetering on a knife edge, so that to deal with a new viral respiratory illness we had to drop everything else.  Cancer consultants who still don’t have their lists back up and running like normal are seriously concerned that we have a terrible amount of unnecessary death ahead of us but people still can’t get appointments with their GP.

I love that theIndependent has illustrated this headline with a picture of Matt Hancock demonstrating how much chance you have of getting through to our GP on the phone.

I say this ahead of a day when I am going to have to ring my surgery. 

The Long Suffering Husband has medication that he needs to take that is on a repeat prescription. He would love to be able to have an online consultation to review that medication but that’s not how it works. 

The prescription can’t be renewed until he has seen a GP in person. At that consultation he will be asked how he is (fine) and sent for a blood test to check that the levels are still right. Supposedly, they will look at the blood test when it comes back (after they’ve prescribed) and call him back if necessary. This has never happened, so I am assuming that would happen. 

So when he was down to the last month’s pills he contacted the pharmacy who told him that the repeat couldn’t be ordered because he needed a review. He rang the surgery. He sat in a telephone queue for half an hour and the receptionist told him he couldn’t book that day because there were no appointments and to try again. The next day was a Wednesday. He plays golf on a Wednesday but called on the way home. It was about lunchtime. He was in a telephone queue for 45 minutes. Eventually, the receptionist told him that all review appointments had gone and that he would have to ring back the following Wednesday because that is the only day review appointments are released. 

“But I can’t ring on Wednesday morning,” he said, wondering what would happen if he ran out of pills.

“You must be able to,” the receptionist said. “You will if you want an appointment.”

“But I can’t,” he said

“Someone else can ring for you,” she said.

He did try again yesterday, just in case the Wednesday information was wrong but it seems as though the appointments for medication review are released at 9am on a Wednesday and are gone by lunchtime.

So, he has gone to play golf and it’s down to me to try to get him an appointment.

I can’t guarantee I won’t be mumbling ‘grand pricks’ under my breath and googling what happens to someone if they stop taking his particular medication.

Wish me luck.