She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain

 I’ve woken up feeling unaccountably anxious this morning. It doesn’t make any sense: Lockdown 2 is fine; not being able to do the extra curricular teaching has given me a bit more time. There’s a vaccine on its way. Biden is making calm sensible announcements and his wife and daughter have set up a DOTUS account on Twitter for their dogs. Work is fine: we are heading towards Christmas is a pared down way. There is absolutely no reason to feel anxious. 

Even yesterday’s Boris wasn’t too bad. He was positive and sounded a little bit like he knew what he was doing. He had an army man and Johnathan Van Tam with him and they sprinkled the world with metaphors. 

The army man showed us the swabs they were using to test the whole of Liverpool and explained that sticking cotton buds up people’s noses is exactly what his men are trained for and no, they wouldn’t be shooting anyone. 

Boris was trying to keep a lid on the excitement over the vaccine, explaining that the ‘distant cavalry was coming over the brow of the hill with their epidemiological arrows in their quiver and the toot was getting louder.’

Jonathan Van Tam tried to reign the excitement in with a train metaphor. It was a good plan. No one can get excited about trains. He told us that we could see the lights of the train coming round the bend a couple of miles down the track. He said we would just have to wait for it. It could still break down before it got to us, get held up at traffic lights, the doors could fail to open and it could already be full without even any standing room. There could also be such a rush to get on that panic and crush injuries could follow. 

Someone asked them if they had plans to help people whose mental health has suffered during these lockdown phases. Van Tam burst into tears and said that he understands; he’s missing his Saturday football watching so much. People sat home on the sofa with crippling depression and no social support will have appreciated his honesty, I’m sure. Boris got excited at the sporting reference and threw in a, “home run, slam dunk, ball to the back of the net,” omne  trium  perfectum, for good measure. 

I went to bed humming, “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.”

Maybe I’m anxious, remembering all those school trips, where the cool kids at the back of the bus, unsupervised, would steal something out of your bag and laugh at you. We would smile through it and sing, “Singing aye aye yippy, we come from Billericay....” and hope they would move onto their next victim quickly or become distracted by a good looking person in a passing car.

I started to wonder if Boris was the cool kid at the back of the bus or the nerd having his copy of the Iliad passed round but then I remembered that he went to Eton and they probably didn’t have to get on a bus because they had all the facilities.