Oh No it’s not

Well, that cultural rescue package went down well.

Enough money to save the ‘crown jewels’ (which I think means the places like the Royal Opera House, National Gallery, etc) and the provincial theatres and galleries, so that even if you can’t get to London, you will still be able to watch a panto.

Obviously it’s not enough. Thousands of people will still lose their jobs and a lot of culture will die (or reinvent itself) but it’s something and anyway that’s not what people are cross about.

Oh yes it it.

Oh, no it’s not. Surprisingly, they are just furious about Panto, Hamilton and lefty liberals who deserve nothing from a government they’ll never vote for.

I understand that the last point but even if people won’t vote for you, they might still be a large part of the economy. Remember there is a whole government department dedicated to culture. I think it contributes 11% of GDP. They had to do something, even if they were reluctant.

Hamilton has triggered the usual suspects. How dare you have a slave trader played by a black man? Personally, it’s those aspects of theatre I love - the fact that it can challenge you to think in a different way. Nothing has to be real. A story can help you explore so much more.

Then there’s Panto. Wow! Slap my thigh! Who knew this particular form of theatre could get people so cross?

It’s got everything we need to get us through these difficult times: singing, dancing, jokes, cross dressing. One of the best things I’ve ever done in my life is Panto. I did 5 of them and wrote 4 (one is still in the drawer because teacher workload became too much) to raise funds for the school. The teachers and parents acted, the children danced, the PTA sold sweets to the rest of the school who booed and hissed and invested everything in the triumph of good over evil. Being evil, in the style of Ann Robinson, while my Dad was in hospital having another heart attack was one of the most therapeutic things I’ve ever done. Fighting giants has reminded me that I can be brave, even in my lowest moments.

Making sure I had 5 ticks per page as I re-read my scripts and ticked every possible chuckle or groan, reminded me of how important laughter is.

What we really need now is Panto. We need to be able to have Corona Eileen as the villain to be bested.

I was going to write about how important Panto was to saving the economy but you’ll have to excuse me because I’ve got an idea. I’m sure this is going to be the best way to spend the rest of my day.

Oh no it’s not.

Life at the End of the Tunnel

Boris Johnson is back. We have a Prime Minister again, who can paint pictures with words, give us hope and jolly us all along with a few cheery bon mots.

Whatever your political persuasion I think we can all agree that Boris Johnson is a very skilled writer. A writer is an artist that uses words to paint a picture in your mind. Having a Prime Minister with such skills can be quite manipulative and it will be interesting, when we have the benefit of history, to look back and see whether we were pushed in the right direction.

Before he came on the screen to lead the much anticipated daily briefing the news anchor said, “We hope that the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, will discuss ending lockdown and at least give us some hope of  life at the end of the tunnel.”

Life?

I know we have become a nation obsessed with death but surely it’s meant to be light.

Light at the end of the tunnel!

I shouted at the TV.

The breaking news jingle cut my rant off and the holy trinity of medicine, patient and science appeared on the screen. Patient appeared breathless but that could have been excitement from the birth of his xth child.

He went on to paint a beautiful word picture. He transported us to one of those mountain tunnels in the Swiss Alps. We’ve been driving under the mountain very slowly and we have just gone past the peak. If we keep a steady pace then soon we will be close to the end of the tunnel. We will be able to see green grass, blue sky and little animals bouncing around at the ends.

Aha. There is life at the end of the tunnel!

I shouted at the TV again.

But, he continued painting, if we move too fast we will get to another mountain and we will have to use another tunnel.

I like climbing mountains. There’s life on mountains.

I know that’s irresponsible of me. Not everyone is capable of climbing a mountain. I might not be capable of climbing it but when you are talking about being stuck in a place with no life then mountaineering sounds like a challenge worth taking.

I had to take a step back and remember that there is life in the tunnel too. It might be smaller. No bunnies and deer frolicking on the grass verges but mice, rats, bats and several insects can be found in these places. (I hope)

Looking for these small signs of life is what has kept us going, so far, in lockdown.

Yesterday was the first day of the Japanese micro season of Peonies bloom (Botan Hana Saku)  and we have two goldfinches nesting in our garden.  There is life in the tunnel, you just have to look a bit harder for it.

Satta Mountain Pass by Shotei Takahashi

The Box

The evolution of the television has happened almost entirely in this lifetime. Not completely in my lifetime but people only a little older than me will tell you they grew up without one. My parents used to tell stories about the Queen’s coronation in 1953. Hardly anyone had a TV until then and whole streets crowded into one person’s front room to watch it.

The telly became important during my childhood. We rented ours from Rediffusion. It was a huge box that took up the whole corner of the room. At first, we couldn’t afford to rent a colour set and watching snooker in black and white was one of my favourite challenges (I wouldn’t watch snooker now because what’s the point if you can see all the colours?). The Rediffusion shop was the place to go if you wanted to see a programme in colour. You could press your nose against the shop window, which contained a bank of boxes showing all three channels. My friend Tim had a colour set and sometimes I would go round and watch Blue Peter just to find out what colour sticky back plastic Lesley Judd had used to make her pencil pots.

There were traditions around the TV that involved the whole family. One of my earliest memories is watching Magic Roundabout with my parents. When it finished it was time for me to go to bed (or maybe have a bath - the phrase, “bath, bottle and bed,” has just popped into my head) and the News at Six would start. The theme song made Tess, our dog, go crazy. She would run in circles; spinning and falling over things; running between my dad and the door. The Six O’Clock News was walk time.
Sunday afternoons were spent in front of a black and white film with a bar of Dairy Milk while the parents slept off the Sunday lunch wine. You knew what day it was by what was on. Monday night: Cold meat and chips and Panorama. Thursday: Top of the Pops. Friday: Magical World of Disney.
Dad would come home from work and ask, “What’s on the box?”
Because we knew that he knew we would joke, “The flowerpot!”

By the time my children were born, programmes were on all the time. You could, if you wanted, use cartoons to babysit your children 24 hours a day. There were dedicated Children’s channels and programmes got better and better. TV screens got larger but their cases shrunk. You couldn’t balance a plant pot on the top any more. The quality of the sound and picture improved. Even Channel 5 stopped being fuzzy. You could watch TV at breakfast and a rat called Roland, with an Estuary accent joined you.

Before Coronavirus, TV was beginning to change. It was no longer a social event. Every person in the family watched their own personal screen. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Stories gave platforms for lay people to make their own programmes and they started to get good at it. Traditional TV struggled to compete but still made excellent high quality drama and showed programmes of people watching the telly.

It is difficult to make good quality drama if you have to be socially distanced. In fact it seems to be difficult to make any good quality TV. Suddenly, we realise how good the YouTubers are. At the weekend Dermot O’Dreary,  Claudia Fringeman and someone else that I hadn’t heard of hosted a concert. They broadcast from a studio that seemed to have been transported back in time, complete with wobbly walls. They showed depressing clips in between to make us feel sad about how awful the world is now. A death toll ran across the bottom of the screen (it probably didn’t but it might as well have done). Performers played from their bedrooms. These performances had heavy post editing but they still weren’t as good as many YouTube channels. On Thursday, they intend to do something similar with comedy.

I think they’ve missed a trick. We don’t want to watch the programmes they are showing. Last night, Holby City was cancelled and the choice was a programme about people giving birth, a home decorating show (when DIY stores are closed), Celebrity Bake Off (no eggs or flour in shops and too much talk of death and cancer) and a documentary about living in lockdown.
“Is it me, or has telly got shit?” I texted a friend.
“Worse than Christmas,” she replied.

What we need now, is a routine of nice things. We are depressed already. Watching Matt Hancock well up in the Daily Briefing is quite enough. There must be enough old content to give us something to look forward to.

This current crisis could be the final nail in the coffin of television if they don’t step up. The Thursday night depress you with comedy thing is already doomed to failure because we are all going outside to clap for a bit and then doing Jay’s Quiz on YouTube.

Routine

By now, many of us are beginning to develop new routines. It’s the routines that can keep you feeling safe; tiny little things that you can control distracting you from those you can’t. Writing a blog became part of my routine a while ago. I wrote it during the night or the early hours when I couldn’t sleep. Bizarrely, when the whole world went crazy, I started to sleep better. It was if my brain relaxed and said, “See, the world is randomly unsafe. Now everyone knows it.”  I felt that I couldn’t stop writing, though. To not write through this part of History seemed negligent, so I made a commitment to a daily blog while this is happening. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up.

Today, I didn’t want to write. I was hoping to write something happy, or funny; to write about birds or      the pink super moon we are expecting but instead the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care. This is a huge moment in history. This virus doesn’t have a good prognosis once it starts to attack the lungs and so the nation is collectively holding their breath, which is the last thing we should be doing. Breathe everyone! Even people who have an ideological hatred of his policies are having to admit that this is not what they wanted.  We are thinking about his family: his children, siblings, Dad and pregnant girlfriend. We put ourselves in their shoes because we understand what it feels like to be family. We fear for our country. We worry about the medical staff who, already under intense pressure, will be feeling that they mustn’t let this one die.

It makes us question our mortality.

“Stay safe,” we write on emails, knowing that that’s not possible. Then we get angry and look for someone to blame. Trust me, blame won’t help you in the long run. It’s not the fault of the man who sat in a park in the sunshine or whoever decided we needed 5G. Eventually, we will all have to accept that this novel virus is just some random piece of shit that is part of life’s rich shittiness.

So, I will be hoping, praying, practising my breathing (because it might help if I get it and does help to keep things in perspective. ) And will be standing outside to appreciate the clear sky, lack of pollution a super big pink moon.

Sociably Isolating

It’s the weekend. Woo hoo! We all look forward to the weekend, don’t we? This one, miraculously, is going to be sunny. However, there are weird adverts going round saying that if you go out, you’ll be attacked by seagulls. Apparently, our is called Uncle Dave and is always up for a ruck.

The point of this bizarre advert is to remind people that the best thing you can do to slow the spread of the virus (and give the health service a chance of coping and saving those that could be saved) is to stay within your community and to keep that community as small as possible. This is not the time to take a day trip. 

I’m never sure that the messaging about what we are doing is clear. The deputy chief medical officer tries her best in the briefings but people stubbornly mis-interpret her. The message changes from: 

Keep your distance

Don’t get close enough to people you are not living with to exchange bodily fluids (even accidentally - coughs and sneezes spread diseases)

Stay as close to home as possible 

Wash your hands 

to:

STAY IN

TOTAL SOCIAL ISOLATION

FOOTPATHS KILL (actually, that’s not new and inspired a story that I’m writing about a cereal killer called Cliff, which is the idea of my B&B owning friend)

DON’T STAND ON THE BEACH

SEAGULLS HAVE ASBOS.

Maybe that’s because we are too stupid to get the nuance of it. If they tell us we can leave the house then we will meet friends we haven’t seen in years and have a too-close-chat, or a hug, or shake their hands. If we can walk along the beach we will drive for an hour and sit in a traffic jam, blocking the ambulance’s route to the hospital, and pack ourselves on our little sunbathing towels like seals on the sand. 

This, however, is not a punishment.

If it were then social isolation would be the most effective form. It’s what the worst regimes save for their political prisoners. Nothing drives you crazy faster than total social isolation.

Stephen Sondheim said something about life being best when what you want to do is what you have to do. I don’t want to brag but for the first time in my life, this is where I’m at. There’s nothing I like better than staying in my own little bubble. I’m a master at fanny-ing around and not doing very much. I prefer my walks to be where I see nobody but if I do see people then a distant smile, nod and maybe a chat, where they usually tell me all their problems is in order. 

Since this all happened I have found that when I do see people when I’m walking the dog need to tell me their problems much more. People apologise and laugh and are desperately sad.

Yesterday, we met a man, who was sighing louder than the Long Suffering Husband. 

The dog was being particularly weird and as we were on the home stretch had decided that if he was going to have to go home then we would have to drag him. 

“At least you’ve got a dog,” he shouted across the field.

We moved to within two car lengths of him so that he didn’t have to shout.

“Uh huh,” I said.

“I’ve just been to the Prom,” he said. “It’s awful. I can’t take this. How much longer is it going to go on?”

“I’m guessing about 12 weeks,” I told him, “Are you OK?”

“No. No, I’m not. I live on my own and I’m going stir fry.”

He felt better for some human connection, rather than seeing terrified people dive out of his way. It is possible to be sociably distant. Please wave and smile at people; talk  to neighbours over the fence; Skype your relatives; do an online quiz together; go outside. Remember what we are trying to do and stay as close to home as possible but let’s be careful that we don’t all get stir fried, or eaten by seagulls.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

They have announced the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics by a year. Tokyo 2020 is now going to be held in 2021 but still called Tokyo2020. This represents the kind of of confusion that we are all feeling. I know that everyone is blaming the Corona virus pandemic but I think it might be my fault. Until yesterday they were still going ahead and then I wrote a blog suggesting alternative games that we are all in training for. The IOC must have got wind of it and decided it would be best to cancel.

It is a shame because I had been training for ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place.’

Being socially distant is my preferred way of living. When they closed social spaces like pubs and restaurants people inevitably flocked to my places. All of a sudden canal banks and sea walls thronged with people. Those people suddenly wanted to talk. Frankly, it was a nightmare. The message of staying away from people hadn’t been given clearly enough and people thought spreading the illness was less likely if you were outside, so they rushed to the seaside and queued to climb Snowdon. Bob273 on Twitter got really cross and so the government made the announcement that scared most people.

We were caught between a rock and a hard place. My son was due to return from University on Friday because his holiday job in a supermarket were desperate for him to come back. My daughter, due to start a new job in Essex in three weeks was sitting in an empty flat in Leicestershire waiting to have the last bits of furniture that she had sold collected and her landlord visit to inspect and collect the keys. What should we do? There was no one to ask. The message was clear: No travel; stay in your own home; only go out once a day for exercise (the dog crossed his legs and farted). Bob273 on Twitter was furious at parents who had asked, “No travel? I want my children.”
He told them in no uncertain terms that they should stay where they were; that if they didn’t they would have personally killed millions of innocent people and that they should be shot by the army who should get put onto the street in tanks. We decided against the hard place and went for the rock. Keeping our family unit together and sane was the most important thing. Luckily, since then journalists have asked the questions for us and fact checked them. It turns out that Bob273 on Twitter was wrong.

As a claustrophobic, the suggestion of one walk a day is very difficult for me and I’m also not totally in control of when I leave the house. It’s only been one day but I’m exhausted and snappy from trying to negotiate this rock. Also, my house is full of people which is a pretty hard place.

At the weekend I was walking a canal path in Leicestershire before the message of keeping a distance and staying at home had been made really clear. It was 8am on a Sunday morning; a time when you rarely see anyone in a place like that but the path was heaving. I was not enjoying it. Eventually, I got far enough away from civilisation to start to feel calm and after a while thought I should head back. There were a family of four on the path ahead of me: a proper middle class Market Harborough family in Joules wellies and striped T-shirts, with blond tousle-haired kids holding a nature trail worksheet. I moved to the edge of the path by the water and they moved onto the bank. We should have been able to keep walking and just about keep far enough apart but they stopped and huddled together on the bank. I looked up, smiled and the mother pushed her children into the hedge.
“Gio! Angus! We’ve talked about this! Keep away! You don’t know who has the virus!”
I laughed at the time, thinking that those children are going to need a lot of therapy when this is all over. Now, I understand that they felt they were caught between a rock and a hard place.

Yesterday, I let the Long Suffering Husband come with me to walk the dog.  We walked to the sea wall and I suggested turning right, which normally takes you to a place with no people but the path was full, so we turned left.  Every time we saw someone come towards us we leaped up onto the bank.
"Are they the rock or the hard place?" he asked me. 

We managed the whole walk without being any nearer that 2 meters to any strangers.  Training was going really well.  It's a shame that the IOC have decided to cancel because I think we would have been medalists.

Coronavirus Update

Warning: This update is being given my someone who is pretending not to have an anxiety/panic disorder. However, in the light of the recent announcements I’m going to be like the BBC and try to answer some questions.

Am I going to die?
Yes. We all are, one day.

I was going to end the blog there but I realised you have more questions.

Am I going to die of the Coronavirus?
Maybe. No one knows what will kill them. It seems to be killing about 0.001% of populations across the world in this outbreak, so you could be unlucky.
Boris Johnson says, “We are all going to lose loved ones in this crisis before their time.” Will I ?
No. None of us know when our time is. We die when we die. We aren’t given an expiry date and anything at any time could kill us.
Is a pandemic worse than an epidemic?
No. They are two words. The first means a bug that affects lots of people at once in several countries and the second is used in just one country.
What about when it gets to be endemic, surely it can’t be stopped then?
Endemic is another word. It means common in a population, like the common cold is endemic in Britain and cystitis is endemic in married women.
Can this virus be stopped?
No.
Why am I washing my hands then?
You should always wash your hands, you dirty beast. Soap breaks down viruses. There are lots more viruses to worry about. You’ll get less colds if you wash your hands.
Can our health services cope with Coronavirus?
No. They weren’t coping before. Staff are on their knees. The service is underfunded and under-resourced and under -respected. It won’t cope with a few more people than expected going to hospital.
If I’m not going to die, why should I change my behaviour?
When governments look at the data and weigh up the evidence they make decisions about what people should do in the best interests of the whole population. Would it really hurt you to just follow their advice for the sake of the population?
Should schools close?
Luckily for me, that’s not my decision. If governments decide to close schools it will be because they have decided, on balance, it’s the best thing for the whole population. I don’t know enough about it and nor do you (probably)
Should I ring up the local paper to report my neighbour who has just come back from Italy?
No. Don’t be a dick. Remember Nazi Germany.
Is it alright to terrify myself and my children by only watching news about Coronavirus or only clicking on the links that tell me how bad it is going to be?
No. Stop scaring your children. They are terrified. Stop watching only the news. Click on links about people who have done nice things (papers write what you want to read).
Do I have to stop touching my face?
It’s impossible. Try it? A child at school tried it yesterday. She had an itchy eye and tried, desperately not to rub it. Eventually, in frustration she shouted, “Oh, my eyeball!”

I have decided to make this my new Coronavirus related expletive.
“The world is going to end.”
“Oh, my eyeball!”