Post Pandemic Craziness

 Last week I spent a day looking through original records of patients at Broadmoor between 1882 and 1910.  From the end of 1889 until about 1891 there were several admissions where their diagnosis was annotated with the word ‘pandemic’. This wasn’t something I knew about but Google tells me that it started in Russia, killed mainly old people, affected more men than women and that modern virological sequencing has suggested that it was a coronavirus. 

Broadmoor 1890

It made me wonder if it’s the type of virus that sends people nuts, rather than the circumstances. 

The world does feel particularly nuts at the moment. 

At the weekend I went into London and a group of about 30 men were being guarded by 8 police officers as they walked through St Pancreas. It didn’t look as though they were under arrest or in trouble in any way. The police officers walked by them, joked and chatted. They looked happier and more relaxed than if they’d been policing a climate change march. The men were singing and wearing a lot of Burberry. 

“That’s unusual,” I said to the Long Suffering Husband, “I wonder why those men are so important.”

A beat later, I realised that they were singing football-type chants and I got angry about the waste of resources. Eight police officers to make thirty men, who should be in jail for their repeated violent acts, feel safe and important. It’s the wrong way round. The world is crazy.

As the day wore on people seemed to be more drunk than usual, devils, ghosts and witches, spilling onto the streets from bars, as early as 5pm.

Then I came home to find another argument raging on feminist Twitter about what being asexual means. A woman had posted a picture of herself dressed in leather dominatrix underwear and captioned it, ‘This is what asexual looks like.” It was funny. I don’t know if she was serious but boy did it wind up the middle aged Twitter feminists. I am now at the stage where I’m fed up of seeing arguments about gender and sexuality and would really like to go back to the days where sex was real and binary, gender was not real and could be freely ignored and sexuality was a private matter that no one talked about. Obviously, that’s my version of how I’d like it to be and I do realise that those who ignored societal norms of gender and sexuality were persecuted when we didn’t talk about it. However, all this talk is just a little crazy.

Then we have the climate. Hundreds of people flew to Scotland to discuss how to save the planet. Boris Johnson fell asleep and the American news channels set up in Edinburgh (rather than 45 miles away in Glasgow, where the conference is actually being held) because the castle is prettier. At the end governments still won’t have done enough but they will have all tried to pass the blame.

As if this wasn’t all crazy enough I then got one of those news push pings on my phone that said,

“HEALTH NEWS: You could be getting too much sleep!”

I told you. Post pandemic craziness.