Oh deer!

Oh deer, we’ve reached the ungulate portion of history!

Ungulates are animals with hooves and I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but they are everywhere. Unless your metaphor has hooves it’s just not worth making.

We are not just talking about the run of the mill horse metaphors. It’s not that we are all being encouraged to get back on the horse, some of us chomping  at the bit to get back to normal life, to stop eating like a horse to relieve the boredom of  isolation/lockdown. We are not just waiting to hear more about the government’s position from the horse’s mouth and watching his horseplay with an umbrella. 

No. We are in the realms of much more exciting ungulates.

I would have been happy for it to be the time of the cow, as I’m quite fond of a bovine. I find that if life ever gets a bit on top of you then a quick chat with the ladies on the sea wall can put things into perspective. When the Rev Richard Coles posted the news on Twitter that a cow had wandered into the garden at Ely cathedral the resulting pun off was much greater than the holy cow I was expecting.

However, it’s not just stopping at cows. We’ve been through the lambs to the slaughter phase and slipped  into talking about how these politicians get our goat. It’s not easy to separate the sheep from the goats.

While I was catching up on the gymnastics the other day, during the part where Simone Biles came back to cheer on her teammates the American commentator got very excited and said, “And this is why she’s the goat!”

Goat? That sounds a bit rude. I tried to imagine a goat on a balance beam or doing a vault but none of those images worked for me. The only encounter I’ve had with a goat came on the 7th June 1977. It was the Queen’s silver jubilee, a Tuesday and a day off for everyone. We had been given a silver coin in a velvet box. My friend, who lived in a side street over the road was going to a street party, the road was set out with trestle tables, draped with Union jack flags. Women bustled in and out of houses in pinnies and slippers, carrying trays of sandwiches, jugs of celery, bowls of Twiglets and rabbits of jelly. I experienced FOMO for the first time, before it was even a thing. We lived on the main road and so a street party wasn’t going to happen for us. My mum had a plan, however. She had been invited by one of her rich arty friends to a garden party. There were to be games for children (limbo, if I remember correctly) and alcohol for the adults. Looking back, I can see it would have been preferable. Dad was called out to an emergency at the last minute and mum took us on her own, sniffing and complaining about timing. I remember wearing a lilac flared-leg jumpsuit that had a silver coloured metal zip all the way down the front with a metal d-ring that I sucked on anxiously for most of the day.  The garden was huge. It had a wild wood area at the bottom and a petting zoo. Alright, it wasn’t a petting zoo but they had goats. At some point during the day someone let the goats out of their pen and they ate the washing off the line, which was strung between two enormous cherry trees. The pomagne and party seven had been flowing for a while and so the adults all just laughed. I therefore concluded that goats were stupid and funny. So, you can see my confusion about Simone Biles being a goat. I’ve since checked and it’s an acronym Greatest Of All Time, which makes more sense.

Not one to miss out on a metaphor the Prime Minister has tried to get in on the act and has chosen camels as his preferred ungulate. He is apparently wandering round Downing Street, telling anyone that will listen that we have to wait to see what kind of camel Covid is going to be. 

“Wah, wah, bluster, hoy! Who knows? Is it going to be a dromedary or a Bactrian? Ha ha. I’m so funny. Will it have one hump or two?”

Oh deer! We all know it’s much more likely to be a cancerous hippopotamus. Did I ever tell you about the guide a Disney that told us about the evils of the hippo?

I know

 The commentators on the Covid numbers are confused.

“We don’t understand,” they say “The numbers were meant to go up after freedom day.”

But the cases have gone down. Deaths and hospital admissions are still rising. They don’t understand that either but these numbers are always two weeks behind. Also, the rate of increase is slowing so they will also start to come down. 

Maybe the vaccines are working?

Maybe the virus has burnt itself out?

Maybe people aren’t testing? 

They make suggestions but they don’t understand. The numbers of cases has never gone down without a lockdown. This is true (sort of). I say sort of because before every lockdown there was a slow in the rate of rise. It’s almost as though us humans could see what was happening and took steps to deal with it without guidance from the politicians.

I am joking of course.

If you worked in a school, you will have seen that the week before any major lockdown, there were more kids out of school, self-isolating, than in school. Not many of us expected to get through to the end of term , just in the way that all the Christmas events had to be cancelled.  Maybe that was what caused the fall in the rate before the lockdown happened?

I keep notebooks of all the figures and can tell you that the rate of rise of infections started to fall on the 20th of July. This was the day before our last day. Many schools had already broken up.

So, what has caused the cases to fall? Now let me think? Could it be that no one is in school? No! Surely not. There’s no spread in schools is there? Children don’t get sick so a school can’t be a festering Petri dish of virus. That would just be stupid.

*whispers* but we all know, don’t we?

Lympics*

 For someone who hates sport it is very surprising that I love the Lympics.

It suits my nature, like eating Tapas, you only get little bits of something before you get a chance to get bored with it.  

The first year I watched was a very special year for many reasons. I had reached an age with some new found freedom. My bike was my best friend and I would ride for miles around the country lanes where I lived, sometimes with my little sister and sometimes with my friend. However, as my sister was young and my friend had protective parents I would often ride on my own. About 3 miles out I would come to a Ford, where boys would stand in the stream beside with their shoes off and trousers rolled up, pretending to be macho but fishing for sticklebacks with a pink butterfly net. If I was with my sister we would always stop and join them. Sometimes we brought our sandwiches and sat on the concrete ledge dangling our feet as we tucked into white bread filled with a pot of Princess sandwich paste (usually chicken and ham), a packet of hula hoops and a glass of squash that we had frozen solid in a plastic beaker with a lid the night before.

If my friend had been allowed out we often rode a bit further and after about 5 miles got to Ingatestone Hall, where we would stand at the gate and tell each other ghost stories and on the way home we would stop and talk to the tramp that lived under the A12. 

However, I loved the days when I was on my own. There was no limit to how far I could go or what I could stop and look at and I often cycled the full 10 miles to where my dad worked. The bull in the field between the pub and the telephone exchange he looked after was my way marker. He was a magnificent black beast with a ring in his nose that snorted with joy when he saw me. If I had known better, I would have been scared but instead I fed him polos from my pocket, covered in special 1970s coat fluff. Dad never minded his offspring turning up out of the blue and always greeted me as though he had been expecting me. Thinking about it, maybe he had? Maybe mum had got on the phone and said, “She’s been gone an awfully long time, expect a visit.” If she did, they never said.

I expect that looking after a telephone exchange in the Seventies was quite a boring job. No one even looks after the big ones any more but in those days an engineer was on site all day to keep everything working. A telephone exchange was a huge room with rows of large metal cabinets filled with wires and switches that gave off a faint electrical smell. Occasionally, a light would flash or turn from green to orange and he would get out his little leather bag, stamped with the word GPO and fix the problem. There was no ringing an automated line to report the problem and waiting 3 days to get it fixed in those days. Most faults were repaired before anyone knew there was anything wrong. I’m assuming, though, that there were more faults as it was new technology. 

The rest of the time was Dad’s own and that’s probably why he was pleased to see me. It broke up the boredom. He taught himself to play the trumpet and how to cook curries. 

In 1976, however, these trips were perfect. The weather was always hot enough to defrost my drink and Dad had the Lympics on the telly in the staffroom. This was at a point in my life where, if I wasn’t roving the country lanes on my bike I was upside down. This was the year of the epic battle between Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci. Olga, in her red leotard, lying on the beam on her front and flipping her legs over the top, like a human scorpion is an image that will stay with me forever. She seemed unbeatable and then this girl, only a few years older than me, in a white leotard with red blue and gold stripe down the side was amazing on every piece of equipment, gaining a perfect 10. She made Olga look like a has-been. 

Although I enjoyed gymnastics and has just gained my BAGA level 2 award, I was very aware that this kind of gymnastics was out of reach for any British competitor. We just didn’t have the discipline (or threat of death from a communist regime).

However, I was wrong. Our fantastic four have just earned a medal and I couldn’t be happier.

The UK is better at the Lympics than we can credit. We have always won medals, which is a fact that doesn’t compute, as we like to think of ourselves as the underdog. Our self-deprecating humour needs something to mock.

If, like me, you are struggling with this lack of humour, then there are always the names. This year we are still able to childishly snigger as Dong Dong swings like a bell from the asymmetric bars, Fanny Horta gets hit between the legs with a rugby ball,Florian Fuchs on the German hockey team stands next to British player Adam Dixon and Lucas Wank is left completely alone on the basketball court. If you aren’t that childish then maybe this brilliant commentary won’t appeal to you either but I think it’s a work of pure genius.

Joe Tracini - brilliant gymnastic voice over

I hope you are enjoying the Limpics  as much as I am. 

*I refuse to believe the O is necessary.

It’s a conspiracy

 What makes someone join an anti lockdown rally when all lockdown restrictions have been eased?

This question has been keeping me awake at nights. I know, most things keep me awake at night but I haven’t come to a satisfactory understanding yet.

There was a day, about three years ago when the Long Suffering Husband and I were in London for the day. We walked from Trafalgar Square to the Houses of Parliament, with the intention of coming back up through St James’ Park to have a chat with the pelicans. All the way along Whitehall were groups of people with banners. Their banners all seemed to suggest that the country hadn’t yet voted to leave the EU. There were people further up singing about ‘making plans for Nigel,’ and overall you would have believed that it was just before the Brexit vote. Boris Johnson had been elected Prime Minister and there was a determination in government to get the best deal but that we would leave the EU even without one.

“What do you think this is about?” I asked the LSH, “I mean, they’ve already won. They could go home and put their smug little feet up.”

We concluded that they

1. liked protesting more than they liked the issue.

2. Didn’t understand they’d won

3. Had wanted Brexit out of fear, still felt scared and so were still protesting about their terror.

I think all of these things might be true. 

The same people protesting then could be protesting now. People who just want to be heard and don’t really care if they sound sane. Nigel, Katie, Piers. 

The problem is that a global pandemic has made the fearful even more scared. These are people who don’t really have anything to be scared of. They already have enough, which makes them scared they could lose it all. There must be someone to blame.

Then these huge complex issues arise (Brexit and Covid) and there is so much more that they don’t understand. I’m not being mean, no one understands them. They are unfathomable. 

This isn’t new. It’s how genocides start. Our primal reaction to fear is to look for the tiger and kill it. If there is no actual tiger it won’t stop us looking for one. It could be Bill Gates, 5G, vaccines, government control, masks, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Lifeboat volunteers, or  hapless Chris Whitty.  It is easier for these things to be the tiger because you can see them. A new invisible virus, Russian cyber bots or  absolutely nothing but your own imagination and general anxiety about death can’t be seen and therefore you can’t remove them with a spear.

Laughing at these protesters will only make it worse. If we don’t listen and ask them to define their fears the hunt for the tiger will get more desperate. Let’s just tell them that we know it’s scary but they are safe and that we will pay them more attention when they are calm. That’s a nice idea isn’t it?

They know it’s about fear but don’t recognise their own.

We won’t, though, because we love the drama and it will get worse and worse until the whole of humanity disappears up it’s own bum in a puff of smoke. You see why I can’t sleep now?we are all going to die anyway. Help! Where’s the tiger?

It's always the fault of a Victorian

 Whenever I'm confused about something I try to read around it until I get an answer and invariably find that a rich, white Victorian man is the cause.  This might be because I'm obsessed with Victorian England but it also might be that we haven't bothered to update anything since the late 1800s. Why bother, when it clearly works so well?  I mean nothing has changed since then has it? England rules the waves, slavery is making us all rich, women have no agency, we had a prime minister (Palmerston) known for his 'vigor' and stimulating public support with dangerous nationalism.

So, it's unsurprising that when Dawn Butler was thrown out of the House of Commons for calling the Prime Minister a 'liar', it was the fault of a Victorian. I don't want to jump on the band waggon of saying her treatment was disgraceful.  It was clearly a clever stunt on her part, she knew it would get reported but I did wonder why the word was so offensive.

How people must behave in the House of Commons is set out in a book called Erskine May, which I think sounds like a firm of dodgy solicitors.  However, it is just the name of one, who wrote down parliamentary procedure.

Thomas Erskine May, was born in 1815, educated at the Bedford school and became a lawyer.  He was appointed the librarian of the House of Commons in 1831, called to the bar in 1838 and became the clerk of the HoC in 1871 until shortly before his death in 1886. He was ordered to have a bath (I know, its a joke!) in 1860 and promoted to Knight Commander in 1866. He seems like he might have been an alright guy, donating lots of books to the first free library.  He wrote a about history and at some point decided to write everything down, so that politicians could behave well.

I've searched the book and can't find any specific reference to not calling people liars.  However, paragraph 20.10 states that certain matters (relating to the conduct of certain categories of person...) cannot be debated except on a substantive motion which allows a distinct decision of the House.  critical language of a kind which would not be allowed in speeches in debate may therefore be permitted in motions of this form.

Thomas Erskine May wanted to stop the debate descending into a slanging match. 

There is an old joke that the reason you can't call someone a liar in parliament is because everyone lies. This rule doesn't stop them being mean to each other.  They are basically children who can't resist a game of, "Your mum is smellier than my mum!"

It doesn't make much sense that the Prime Minister can call the leader of the opposition 'Captain Hindsight' but it seems as though they can be as rude as they like about each other providing they are not clear about it.  Benjamin Disraeli, when asked to withdraw his remark that half the cabinet were asses changed the statement to 'half the cabinet are not asses.' Winston Churchill used the phrase 'terminal exactitude' rather than accuse someone of lying. 

As far as I can see there is no list of words that can't be used and it is up to the speaker to decide if a breech of parliamentary language has occurred. 

Clearly, we all agree that Dawn Butler has a point, so why has no one brought a substantive motion on the subject of the Prime Minister's terminal exactitude? I'm sure there is enough evidence.

Now, I wonder which Victorian I can find to blame for the current decision the government has made to allow boarder control workers to be exempt from isolation if they have been in close contact with Covid?  Logically, their isolation is still in force for anything they might want to do personally, like stand in a meadow ad infinitum but going to work to spread the disease all around the world as fast a possible is perfectly fine.

There is so much I don't understand and the answers aren't always in books written by Victorians.

Distraction Lizard

 Phew! We did it! We made it to the end of term. It looked a bit touch and go there for a while. Some schools will have been Pingdemiced into finishing before the end but we survived. I can’t pretend it’s been easy. A very difficult 18 months of teaching and worrying is over for 6 weeks. We all hope that when we go back in September we will be able to do our jobs in the way we know. None of us are holding our breath on that one but at least we can have a few weeks of not having to worry. The headteacher won’t have to write a new risk assessment for at least 5 weeks.

Last days are always emotional. The leaving assembly had all the children singing together (outside) for the first time in 18 months. There are always tears. Parents are proud and sad and their children flip-flop between being ready to leave and wanting to stay forever. A school on the last day fizzes with unwanted emotion, in the way the air is filled with electrical charge during a thunderstorm. Some overly sensitive people can walk though the corridors and take on those discarded feelings.

School staff then become responsible for keeping those feelings in the right people. This is always a challenge, on the hottest day of the year when they are also trying to clean up the classroom, shred confidential documents, take displays down from walls and wade through their own treacle-like puddle of tiredness. 

This hot weather brings the lizards out to play. In Maldon we have a lot of common lizards in the grass verges. Lacerta vivipara is a small brown lizard that gives birth to live young in August (rather than laying eggs) and enjoys hot sunny days when it comes out to sunbathe. A little known fact* about these lizards is that they are particularly attracted to the kind of fizzing energy I’ve just described. Yesterday, one of these lizards made it into the school.

“We’ve seen a lizard!” 

“There’s a lizard!”

“Go and look. It’s a lizard!”

A corridor of excited children greeted me. The lizard had been taken out to the wildlife area once already, after nearly being flattened by an older child who was struggling to deal with someone else’s discarded disappointment. However, drawn in by the electricity of emotion it had already made it back and was having a short rest, basking in the sun on the wall outside the door. 

“Can we pull it’s tail off?” 

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Once the children go home there is a chance for the staff to relax. Pizza and drinks on the field felt like a huge treat in a year where we have barely been able to see our colleagues, keeping to our bubbles to protect the children’s education. It might have got a little loud and sweary. One of the great difficulties of working in a school is that there is so much that makes you want to say, “Are you actually shitting me?” but you can’t. There’s a build up and then the children leave. Those words have to go somewhere.

Once they were all out of the way there was a discussion about how useful the lizard had actually been in dissipating some of the energy and acting as a distraction. Some wise person then said, “The trouble is, you can’t always have a distraction lizard!”

That is a shame. 

I hope my colleagues and all the children have a fantastic ping-free summer. I’m now going to catch up on the Dominic Cummings interview.

The government’s own distraction lizard

*little known because I made it up.

You couldn’t make it up

Yesterday was freedom day. A vey hot day, where climate change is evident for anyone who cares to look at the wibbly wobbly nature of the jet stream and it was a day where I found myself thinking, “No one would believe this if you wrote it in a novel.”

We had the news that Katie Hopkins was to be deported back from Australia for breaking quarantine rules.  Are Australia finally deporting the real criminals back to us? 

I saw an old woman in the High street wearing a coat and gloves. It was 32 degrees and most people were wishing they didn’t have to wear their flimsy cotton dress. 

Boris gave a press conference on zoom from his toilet at Chequers because on freedom day very many people are self isolating and have less freedom than they had, even on lockdown.

The press are still trying to work out if he broke the law by going there.

Penfold described his shed parties (Please can someone check JVTs shed?) and also said that the best way not to get Covid was to stand in a meadow, which, ironically, is just what I wanted to do and wasn’t allowed to when we had to self isolate. 

Sounds like my ideal life

The freedom day press conference sounded more like a list of things you couldn’t do, now that you are free.

Boris confirmed that at the moment people can go to clubs without showing any negative test or vaccine status. At the moment they can go maskless and not give their details but in September they won’t be allowed in unless they have had two vaccines. 

There was a rally outside Westminster where people protested lockdown. Maybe no one told them it was freedom day. People have been slow to catch on with the new developments and many people are still washing and quarantining their shopping. 

Police attended in full riot gear including Kevlar stab vests in 32 degree heat.

Apparently it’s all a conspiracy and is against the Nuremberg Code and it’s all Bill Gates’ fault.

GB news interviewed people in a park and asked them if they could feel the “hand of the new world order/Illuminati upon us”

Dominic Cummings gave an interview to Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC claiming that Boris said Covid extends life because the average age of death from the virus was higher than the general average age of death.  He said that it’s a mess. 

The met office issued its first ever severe weather warning for heat in the uk.

Prince Harry is writing his memoirs.

Andrew Lloyd Webber has had to cancel his new musical Cinderella because one cast member has tested positive and so they all have to self isolate, despite all testing negative. School leaders pretend not to act surprised.

Jeff Bezos is about to go into space in a penis shaped rocket. 

Patrick Vallance corrected his statement from the press conference where he had said that they expect over 1000 a day to be admitted to hospital and that 60% of those  have been double vaccinated. He said that he should have said that 60% are from unvaccinated people. (I’m not greatly encouraged by that - vaccination still leaves 40% very vulnerable but let’s not dwell)

The weather is set to get hotter until the weekend when a closed loop of the jet stream could hit us, which is what happened in Germany during last week’s floods.

People have stopped calling it a pandemic and have started calling it a pingdemic.

If I didn’t know better I’d say this all sounds biblical, so I’m off to build an ark and stand in a meadow. Please don’t join me.

Personal responsibility

 Okay, let’s talk about personal responsibility.

The government said that we should take personal responsibility then showed us exactly how not to do that. 

Today is the much lauded ‘freedom day’. They were hoping that the virus would be virtually over and that people would be able to go back to normal without too much fuss. Unfortunately, the virus has decided it’s not over and in many (particularly poorer unvaccinated) countries it is devastating. The government have decided to go ahead with the plans, asking people to take personal responsibility.

This should mean that each individual thinks for themselves and decides what is right for them. We all know that this is an unfair approach. For example, as a doubly vaccinated person with a strong healthy immune system I can take the risk and go into crowded, unventilated spaces without fear of getting too ill but if, in one of those spaces there’s an immuno-compromised person, going to work or doing essential shopping then my personal choice adversely affects them. If they are making a personal choice then do they have to stay at home?

Anyway, personal choice means that you have to think for yourself and do what you believe is the right thing. 

This is what Boris and Rishi did when they signed up for the early release pilot scheme.

Unfortunately for them (and possibly all of us) the country didn’t get the message about personal responsibility and because they don’t believe these politicians to be honest and because they are still frightened, there was a huge outpouring of criticism on all forms of media. 

Personal responsibility should mean that you make a decision, stick to it and defend it with logical argument. However, these politicians have shown that there’s no such thing. It’s so much more important to be liked that they let their decisions flop around like a dying fish.

I’m cross about this.

We need politicians to make thought out decisions that they’ll stick to and those that will take personal responsibility.

I’m also cross because we need trials like this. None of us want isolation if it’s not necessary and how do we prove whether it’s necessary if people don’t take part in trials?

I’m cross that it gives the keyboard warriors the power that they shouldn’t have. On freedom day and beyond we are going to see a rise of Covididiot posts, where people who are doing nothing illegal are photographed and shamed on social media. There was a great example of this last night where Richard Osman, nice guy and author of an easy to read but slightly dull book that has sold millions, posted a picture of the litter pickers on Brighton beach sitting round the fire of rubbish they were burning. The outrage was huge. Having a group of 30 people outside has been allowed for a long time. There is misplaced fury and we are all going to suffer for it.

It is right that people should be angry with the government. They should be demanding better communication. However, taking part in the early release study is not a bad thing to do. I fear that the public who are angry they have had to self isolate have just shot themselves in the foot.

When I had the email from test and trace I also had another inviting me to take part in the study. Both the Long Suffering Husband and I applied. We were assigned to our groups by return of email. I believe that does mean it was random. I don’t think anyone had time to look at it. We were both put in the control group (isolate as normal). Thinking about it now, I’m quite glad I wasn’t in the daily release group as I think I would have made some colleagues feel quite uncomfortable but I hope the trials continue so that less people have to isolate because isolation sucks. 

I know that everyone is scared but please be nice to people. This is going to be hard enough as it is. If people are allowed to make their own decisions don’t shame them until they make your decision. You never know, they might be right and you might be wrong.

The dog has decided that his Boris can also self isolate in checkers.

It’s a mess

 Double jabbed Sajid Jav. 

  Is not immune the virus has,

Jumped inside and laid him low,

Thinking the health Secretary should know,

Covid 19 has great plans

To continue sweeping across the land.

Every time I talk to my daughter about the current state of affairs regarding Coronavirus she ends by saying, “It’s a mess!”

And it is a mess.

Covid won. We didn’t outsmart it. It killed loads of people, established itself as an unbeatable, here to stay virus that mutates quickly and despite our modern technological ways of working from home looks likely to have ruined the economy for the future.

Commentators act as though they know whether the full unlocking is the right thing. People act as though they are certain wearing  a mask is essential to making the virus go away but the truth is that no one really knows. The scientists and maths modellers that I follow on Twitter are agreed on one thing, though. They agree that there are a range of possible outcomes. These range from ‘it will be fine’ to ‘we are totally fucked.’

With such a large portion of the population double vaccinated the theory is that transmission should break soon. It could be that the remaining people who haven’t been vaccinated catch it, get immunity, the hospitals continue to cope (ignoring the fact that they weren’t coping before) and we will be able to stop testing and treat it like one of the many other bugs that could kill us. On the other end of the spectrum there is a possibility that within a couple of weeks we will discover that the vaccine doesn’t actually work, the health Secretary dies, Boris and the rest of the cabinet are luckily chosen for the group of the trial that can go out with daily testing but are still infectious and pass it on to every hospital and care home they choose to visit to prove, "there's nothing to see here," , the virus mutates again to be deadly to children.  

*Since I wrote this Boris and Rishi have both coincidentally be put into the trial group.  No one will believe that they could both be randomly selected for the same group. However the odds are 1/4 so its not impossible.  The LSH and I were both in the control group and we did get notification of our group by return of email.*

The truth is that it will be somewhere in between.

The truth is that it is going to continue to be messy. It's not going to affect everyone equally and it's not over yet, even though Freedom day starts at midnight tonight.

The truth is that until we have stopped testing there will be lockdown by the back door.  This will be lockdown without financial support.  Last night, I walked through town and noticed that the only bank that stayed open for all of the pandemic has had to close for 10 days, the chip shop has closed and I saw on social media that the tea room that boomed throughout lockdown by opening up their own garden has too many staff being told to isolate to stay open.  The local secondary school has so few children in it's hardly worth being open.  People who have plans are twitchy about doing anything for 10 days before.

A glimmer of hope

 When the Euro final was over the Long Suffering Husband looked at each other with dread.

“Oh no! Why those three boys? This is going to be awful.”

It would have been nice if we hadn’t noticed. It would be great if skin colour mattered at much as eye colour but we did notice and we were worried. My daughter hadn’t. That’s progress, I hope. She just saw three boys not score goals in a penalty shootout. When my generation, that has accepted casual racism as part of life, has gone, maybe things will improve. We grew up on comedy that encouraged us to laugh at the difference in skin colour, we played games where the white hats were the goodies and the black hats the baddies, we sang songs about 10 little people that were put to death one by one. It might take our generation a lifetime to realise that for a lot of people none of that was fun. 

We often have conversations with our friends who say something that makes us take a sharp intake of breath. Conversations where we aren’t sure what was meant. The other day we were talking to someone in the street about football and they suddenly said, “And all this racism stuff. If only they knew what it was like in Belarus.” He might not have said Belarus because I’d stopped listening properly (it was football). We were both a little cross with ourselves that we didn’t call him out on it. However, we’ve been conditioned to stay quiet. Not joining in with the National sport of racism can leave you feeling quite vulnerable.

We thought that the front pages of the newspapers would be full of horrible things. I won’t write them here but you can imagine what a headline would have been in the Eighties. However, social media quickly showed the mood of the whole country. Most of us weren’t angry. People didn’t feel as though they had been let down by three boys whose difference was only on the surface of their skin. The true racists (we will call them idiots for brevity) - the ones for whom it is a sport and a matter of personal identity went early. They sent their messages and monkey emojis directly to the players. The non racists (what I like to call normal people) and the accidental casual racists (who don’t think too well for themselves) responded quickly and flooded the timelines with messages of love and support. That was actually quite a beautiful thing. 

The idiots misread the mood of the room. They must have been so confused. Football has always been a safe haven for idiots. The passion and anger after a loss are usually easy tools for the idiots to use. The right wing press then couldn’t report the way they normally would and instead went with headlines that talked of pride.

There’s a glimmer of hope there. After all the ‘kick it out’ campaigns and taking the knee as a protest it looks like some people have finally got the message. Hopefully. The colour of someone’s skin shouldn’t mean that they are treated differently. You don’t have to live in Belarus and fear you are going to be tortured in a gulag to want to protest that you are less likely to get a job, or have the posh kids talk to you at school, or that you are more likely to be arrested when you are innocent, or refused a bank loan or sent horrible messages. 

There is a small glimmer of hope that things are getting better and for that I am very grateful. Let’s try to turn that glimmer into a situation where the light is fully on and there’s nowhere left for the idiots to hide. 

Being Second

 I’ve watched some sport this weekend and so that makes me an expert. 

Obviously, I’m not an expert and I still don’t really understand sport. I don’t have that competitive drive that makes me want to be first at everything. It’s a good job really because I would have been forever disappointed. I learnt early on that in any race the position I’m most likely to take is fifth. Therefore, I find it impossible to understand why being second is such a terrible thing.

I treated the football like Eurovision. Snacks from the countries taking part, falling asleep somewhere in the middle and waking up for the final results. I might have already been full of sport because I’d watched the Wimbledon finals. 

As the expert I have suddenly become my assessment of the match is as follows. The early goal was genius, no one expected it and it made the Italians play aggressively and England play as though they were scared to lose what they thought they’d already won. I thought Italy were the slightly better side but they were well matched. The game was a draw. They should have both got first place but instead they did penalties, which, to me, feels like flipping a coin to see who takes the trophy. 

Oh, how I watched the penalties with my heart in my mouth. What a stupid system. So much pressure, so much theatre, so much drama. Those poor players whose goals were saved, the poor goal keepers who found they couldn’t save them all. Poor Marcus Feed the Children Rashford who came on cold, tried something daring that didn’t quite work but if it had would have made him even more of a hero. 

I understand the disappointment at not winning but how they behaved when they took their medals was disgraceful. They immediately ripped them off, threw them on the floor, stamped and sulked like petulant children. It was a medal for second place and that is something you should be proud of. What an example to set to a country of children, staying up late with the blessing of the Prime Minister. Don’t bother trying kids because second place isn’t good enough. I don’t think it will help the hooligans or racists either. It sends a message that even the team think they were let down by the three young black players. I’m dreading the comments that newspaper editors will spend their day removing tomorrow and the messages that they players will see on their own social media.

Surely, if you are going to enter competitions you have to learn how to lose. To come second gracefully and learn from your mistakes is how you win next time. Watch the interview with Pliskova, who came second in the women’s Wimbledon if you want some tips.

Anyway, that’s quite enough sport from me. I’m going back to not being an expert.

More Football Chat

 The Long Suffering Husband and I had a bit of a tiff yesterday about our memories.  If truth be known, we are a little snippy with each other after 12 days of isolation together anyway, so probably should have decided to do separate things for a while  but as we generally enjoy each other's company we went to the cinema with the grown up kids.  On the way back we were all talking at the same time, as families often do, about the film, football, tennis, Covid and other current affairs. It was when we got the the topic of football hooliganism that we had our disagreement.

Once you get to a certain age and you've seen something happen several times then all those memories roll into one.  For example, if I ask you to describe your childhood Christmas, you might think you are talking about one year but you will roll the memories from several years together to make one perfect celebration.  We appear to have done this with our memories of how people behave after England lose football matches.  

"It was after the 96 Euros when they started to damage German cars because we lost to Germany that I lost it," the LSH informed us.

We weren't quite sure what he'd lost but he seemed very worried about it.

I agreed with him, though.  Since England got through to the finals I've had a gnawing sense of anxiety.  

The violence after the 96 games was legendary and not in a good way.  There were riots in Trafalgar Square, VWs were damaged, the papers were upset about a Russian student who was mistakenly stabbed 5 times, as though it would have been fine if he was German.  

"I was on the Tube home and it's the most scared I've ever been in my life," I told him.

"No, no!" he told me, "There's not way you could have been."

I was confused because I remembered it so clearly.  I remember that it had been a game against Germany and that they tube carriage filled with hundreds of drunk angry men. I tried to make myself small, to shrink against the door and not make any eye contact.  I thought, "They could kill anyone on this train and no one would stop them."

The LSH said that it couldn't have been then because he remembered watching it with some friends so I couldn't have been out as well, as our daughter was only two.  

He wasn't wrong about that but I remembered it.  I remembered the hope and the disappointment that was followed so swiftly by anger. I was on the the way home after a very strange evening.  I had been invited to be in the audience of an Esther Rantzen chat show for reasons I can't work out now.  When I'd got there, it turned out that I wasn't needed but instead of going home they made me sit in the bar, watching it on one of the big screens with a foul mouthed children's TV presenter, who was more interested in the screen with the football.  These details helped me place it to a time before I had children.  

"It was the World Cup, 1990!" 

"No, no.  It couldn't have been then.  We watched that at your friend's house, remember?"

I didn't and started to feel as though my brain had finally let me down for good, however, after a walk that involved lots of stopping for him to check his phone, he has conceded. The game he remembers watching was the 3rd/4th place match and I was in fact, fearing for my life, on the Tube after England lost to German in 1990 on a Wednesday night.

I'm just hoping that England win tonight, so that the Italian restaurants, Fiat Puntos and Croatians who are mistaken for their accent can continue unscathed. I hope that no one has to fear for their life tonight because of watching some men run around a field chasing a ball.  I'm even happy with the pre-mortem beatification of Gareth Southgate that will inevitably happen if we win, if it stops the unnecessary and stupid violence.

Like Simon Templar in The Saint

Writing about football to join in

Today is the last day of my self isolation. I didn’t blog during it because there was absolutely nothing positive or funny about the experience. However, last night it got to me so much that I ate a whole bag of popcorn and watched the football.

I know!

Me. Football! 

And I quite enjoyed it. 

Probably not in the same way that you are meant to enjoy football. I didn’t sit on the sofa and shout instructions or get angry about anything. I didn’t leap up and make myself hoarse when a goal was scored but I did enjoy it. 

I loved seeing all the happy faces in the crowd. I enjoyed the terrible singing. It was nice to see that some people can be together and I enjoyed the quiet skill of the actual game. 

“The England team are actually good,” I said to the Long Suffering Husband who had just finished shouting substitution instructions at the telly.

He made a hurumphing noise and said, “They need to score a goal though.”

Now, I don’t know much about football but I even I know that’s the point of the game. Preferably more goals than the other side. 

I was worried that I would jinx it. If they lost it would be my fault because I felt so lonely and cut off I thought sitting in the same room as the LSH while he watched football would be a good idea. I know people are very superstitious about England football games, particularly around the washing of socks, bizarrely. What if my watching a game changed the whole butterfly effect of luck? I texted my daughter for reassurance. I didn’t want the whole world to blame me. The Danes scored a goal and she replied that she had a bad feeling about it. I enjoyed it even more because of the lovely happy smiling faces of the people in red. 

Then England equalised and the LSH said, “See you haven’t jinxed it.”

“What happens if it’s a draw?” I asked, thinking that would be rather nice, everyone would be happy, thinking that they’d all done well. 

“Extra time then penalties and no one wants that,” he told me.

I enjoyed the free kicks, particularly, although the chap at the back having a little kip couldn’t have chosen a more precarious position. I had to ask what he was doing there. That’s really clever. To field a sleeping policeman in just in case it goes under when they jump. The jumping in slow motion is great. Their hair moves in slow motion, like A level results day. 

I continued to text my daughter so that the LSH wouldn’t get too cross with my questions. Most of our conversation was wondering how calm her dad was. I see from Twitter this morning that we weren’t the only ones.

I wasn’t too keen on all the spitting. There really is no need for it. It’s disgusting and if we’ve learnt anything from this pandemic it’s that theatres can’t stay open if footballers spit.

Anyway, it ended well and Gareth Southgate seems like a lovely man.

Now, I don’t want to get picky and I know I’m no expert on football but I do know songs and song lyrics are my thing, so can I just say that football isn’t coming home. Well football might be but the football of the song isn’t because the chorus is Jules Rimet still gleaming, which is the trophy for the World Cup and this is the Euros. I know this because I had to check the lyrics because my smutty mind changed the lyrics to jewels remain still gleaming and assumed it was something to do with how proud footballers are of their balls (Crown Jewels), which I know because they are always  readjusting them during matches. Now, if you want to change the lyrics of the song and sing  Henri Delaunay still gleaming, that might work. Although 30 years of hurt would never be appropriate because it’s another 25 years since Baddeil Skinner and the Lightning Seeds wrote it and England have never won the Euros.

I’m being picky aren’t I?

Sing what you like. It was a good game. Those boys are incredibly talented and well led and I hope they inspire someone to write a proper song about them. 

Now the question is what is the hashtag going to be.: ITAENG or ENGITA? At least it’s not going to be BELITA and cause me to crave cardboard flavoured breakfast biscuits.