Mad World

 All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces, going nowhere, going nowhere.

This was the earworm that greeted me when I woke up at stupid O’clock. For some reason I had been dreaming about making pie for Matt Hancock. I was cross with him because he didn’t like any of my suggestions.

“How about Lemon Meringue?”

“Nope. Can’t have that, the topping reminds me of Boris’ hair.”

“What about a normal lemon tart?”

“Lemon tart? Do I look like a lemon tart kind of guy to you?”

“No. You look like a Bakewell Tart. It’s disgusting.”

Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow, no tomorrow, no tomorrow.

We finally settled on a Manchester Tart to remind him of school dinners but he still wasn’t happy.

“Why do you have to keep talking about Manchester? I keep telling Burnham that we’re all in this together and so it’s perfectly reasonable to sacrifice Manchester as well as Leicester. It might be okay if you make it a three tier tart.”

And I find it kinda funny, find it kind of sad, the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.

I’ve always thought of it as a Christmas song. I quite often teach it to my choir during the run up to the festive period because it feels so appropriate. This year, however, I won’t be rushing around like an idiot, trying to provide a year’s worth of live music in just 3 weeks but the song is still with me, feeling more appropriate than ever.

I find it hard to tell you ‘cause I find it hard to take, when people run in circles it’s a very mad world.

Because I couldn’t sleep I decided to read the first in a series of long articles by the Financial Times,  ‘What went wrong in Wuhan,’ and I learnt something that I didn’t know before. Reading is great for that.

I’ve always wondered why this virus won’t burn itself out like SARS did. If they could get on top of that one in the East before it reached Europe then why didn’t they manage to do that again? You might know this already but I’m going to share it with you, just in case you didn’t and are as amazed by it as I am. SARS was a late shedding virus. That means that it wasn’t infectious until people were very sick and in hospital, which makes it easy to control. COVID-19 sheds early. It’s infectious before people are sick and because many people get it without being too ill that makes the spread even more likely. It might just be that in a free society it is impossible to contain. It was much easier for China to shut everything down and order its citizens to stay put than it will ever be for us, even if it took them a bit of time to acknowledge the problem. Reading the article, I’m not even sure if it did originate in China (because France have found cases from November) but was just noticed there because the wet market is an ideal spreading ground (just like our food processing factories in Leicester) and they had the experience of SARS to notice it. Just to be clear, the article makes a much fiercer point that it is all the fault of the communist government for not allowing people to talk about it.

Mad world, mad world, mad world, mad world.

Now, I’ve shared my 2am reading with you. I’m off for a swim before making a 3 tier Manchester tart to be ready for Bake Off later. It is pastry week, so dreams can’t be rather useful and Tears For Fears were genius prophets.