Careful Thinking

Misery loves company.

I have been blogging daily throughout this Coronavirus crisis. I have tried to keep a good perspective and stay positive. I’m happy to acknowledge the difficulties but I generally feel it’s best not to dwell too much on the worries. Yesterday, I gave into misery and wrote my depressed thoughts as a glorious list. People loved it. Twice as many people read it, as normally would. Friends all commented on Facebook, where I posted it. It was nice. I felt loved and supported but although the temptation to keep writing misery for the company is there I’m going to avoid it.

It would be too easy to get stuck in a negative thought pattern.

I think that has happened in this country. A study at Cambridge University has shown that the UK has the highest level of fear about the virus. read It here - it’s got pretty graphs .This is going to be a bigger challenge for our government than anyone could have anticipated because while people remain stuck with the fear they won’t be able to return to normal.

When I woke up yesterday, even after I’d written my list, I was still a bit of a grump. I felt sorry for my family, so before anyone said it I went and got lost.

There’s nothing better than a walk where your intention is to ‘go and get lost’.

I took my camera, thinking that I’d photograph blue things. I intended to treat like with like. I had the blues, so I thought I’d see the blues. I took one photo of a little blue flower and the camera ran out of battery.
‘Damn,’ I thought, ‘I’ll probably see loads of brilliant things now.’

I did: a pair of cuckoos, red kites and a little hare jumped out of the field and stared at me for just long enough to get my phone out but not long enough to take the picture.

‘Oh, why am I so incompetent with my phone?’ I said aloud to myself, startling a pheasant from the hedge.

Then I heard a nightingale and another bird I didn’t recognise. I set my phone to video and pressed play, thinking I would have proof of the nightingale and be able to find out what the other song was.
I had pre-empted my incompetence with my thought and took a nice photo of my feet. The red kites were proved with a nice photo of blue sky.

As I walked, I was thinking about how it would be best not to get stuck with depressing thoughts. If I could make all of those things go wrong then just think what I could do with the things on my list.
So, I thought about my garden.

‘What I need is some old step ladders to put pots on. Then I’d be able to fit more in,’ I said to the ladybird, I’d stopped to talk to on the lilac bush. She didn’t reply. They can be very standoffish, ladybirds.

Then I saw something in the distance.

Yes, you are right. It’s an old broken stepladder. Perfect for the garden.

I didn’t carry it home but I was reminded to practice careful thinking.

Depression of an over-thinker

I didn’t clean the bookshelves. I just had a bad day. I can’t guarantee it’s over and had promised myself a day without any screen time to compensate but daily blog-writing is part of my routine, so I would like to apologise now.

I’m just fed up with it all.

Nobody listens to me.

No matter how much I shout at the telly or Twitter, they just don’t listen. It’s so depressing.
You see, I think a lot. Too much. I want to be happy and cheerful and believe the spin but I just can’t stop thinking about it all and so it gets very difficult.

It’s a shame because I was doing so well. I was quite enjoying the smaller life, my little routines and just one big thing to think about.

Ok. I’m sure you don’t want to hear them either but here are some of the things my over-thinking brain is stressed and depressed about. I’m going to number them. Lists are brilliant for dealing with stress. Once again, I apologise but you can just skip to the end.

1. Care homes - I’ve never worried more about getting old more than I do at the moment. All this talk of care homes freaks me out. Who wants to live in a care home? I know that no one wants their parents to die but if I was 100 years old, sitting in an overly hot room that smells of death and bodily fluids,  could I be certain I wouldn’t be grateful for a quick death from a respiratory illness?
Also, why don’t private care homes have PPE? Why do the government have to provide it, when they are private business? They take so much money and pay their staff (who are usually brilliant in difficult circumstances) minimum wage.

2. Airlines - Some are bullies. Richard Branson is a master manipulator. He didn’t get and stay rich by not knowing which strings to pull.

3. Aeroplanes - You can’t avoid coming into contact with every bug transmitted on the breath carried by every passenger when you are on an aeroplane because the air is circulated. People who travel on them and then take videos of how busy they are and send them to the news complaining that they are not practising social distancing are idiots. If they are frightened of catching the virus then they should  not travel by air.

4. Complaining about people - It is a slippery slope from wondering why someone doesn’t appear to be following the ‘rules’ to reporting them. It worries me that we will come out of this with a licence to busybody.

5. Face masks - I’m very worried about face masks. I can’t wear them. They make claustrophobia worse. Also, the evidence is that they won’t protect you. Some studies say that cloth masks, once they are damp (30 minutes of breathing) make you more susceptible to catching respiratory viruses. They also change behaviour and make people think they are invincible. People wearing face masks are already a nightmare in supermarkets, leaning over you, pulling them down to speak etc. If they were so effective then why are so many doctors and nurses, treating patients, still catching Coronavirus?
The proper disposable masks that they ask you to wear at hospital are always too big and I worry what will happen when I’m bumping into things because I can’t see.

6. Speculation about the end of lockdown - The government is playing a very tricky game. They have a plan without a time scale for the plan but they are waiting until Sunday to tell us. In a news vacuum.   that can only lead to speculation. I worry that they don’t have a plan and are waiting for newspapers to write bits of leaked suggestions to see how we all react. I worry that no one really knows what to do and they are leaving it to us and we’ve been listening to Bob274 on Twitter.

7. Morality - Why can the Prime Minister get a young woman who worked for him pregnant, while still married to a woman undergoing cancer treatment and everyone thinks it’s brilliant and marvellous, cooing over little Willy Johnson but Professor Lockdown can have a married woman come over to his flat for a bit of consensual nookie and he has to resign? I know that they are saying that the professor didn’t follow his own rules on social distancing but as he explained, he is immune because he has had the virus. Is this more about morality? If so, haven’t we got confused?

8. The science - There isn’t such a thing as THE science. When the government are saying, “We are being led by the science,” they are passing the buck. Those scientists in SAGE should be very afraid. When people look back to what went wrong (and they will because that’s how history works) those scientists are going to be blamed. Science is never unbiased. A scientist has an idea and then it is tested. The idea is biased. The testing should make it less so.

9. Sexual assault - hiding your willy in a Pringles tube so that someone touches it when they are hoping for a potato based snack is sexual assault. Ollie Murs is going crazy in lockdown and his girlfriend might be happy to play this game but really?

10. Why - I have a big question that I can’t seem to find the answer to and it is bothering my brain more than anything.
It’s about SARS and MERS. So, if Coronavirus is behaving like those viruses and not influenza b why aren’t we looking at what happened to them? Neither of those viruses is a problem. No vaccine, or treatment was developed and they both died out? Why? I don’t understand. The world didn’t need to be locked down. It just went away. The countries that experienced these illnesses have a lower death rate. Did experiencing SARS provide some sort of immunity? All viruses mutate, which is why we don’t develop lifelong immunity. The common cold mutates quickly, so we are susceptible to it two or three times a year. No one knows how quickly Covid-19 will mutate. But what if, the fact that it is not a human virus (just like SARS and MERS) when it mutates it can’t do it effectively because of the RNA strands being different? What if it mutates to a less effective form and dies out?
I know that’s a good thought; a positive thought but all this thinking hurts.

Now that I’ve written my list I’m hoping for a better day. My family are hoping for a better day because, quite frankly, I was foul yesterday.

Bookshelves

There are more bookshelves on Twitter at the moment than the British Library and I am suffering from serious book envy. It just seems cruel to have so many books on display without being able to touch them.

I am missing libraries and bookshops, which is weird because I have plenty on my ‘to be read’ shelf but there’s something very soothing about going into a library, running your hand along the spines and having a good sniff, or going to the bookshop to stroke the beautiful children’s picture books that are about to be published, or to find a second hand bookshop full of forgotten treasure.

Every politician is proving how well read they are. None of them have their zoom call set up in front of a set of Catherine Cookson, or their old Enid Blytons that they can’t bear to part with. No, they have biographies, the complete works of Plato and collections of poetry by Milton, Homer and Virgil.
It’s all making me feel quite inadequate.

There is a current row raging on Twitter about Michael Gove’s bookcase. His wife put a picture of the TV with her husband on and wrote ‘surreal’. This seems like a normal human thing to do to me. However, the TV was in front of a bookcase and instead of asking the important question (How do you get to the books behind the telly?) people wanted to know why he had books about Hitler.  It seems that you are not allowed to own books on subjects you don’t agree with.

Author bookshelves seem more pleasing to me. Less war and more stories. JK Rowling has organised her bookshelf by colour, which has sent librarians twitchy. Talking of a twitchy librarians , there was also the story of a library cleaner who, in the new socially distanced world, unsupervised, took all the books off the shelf to clean and replaced them in size order.

Actually, I think I’ve thought of a solution to my problem. It’s not as if I don’t have time. Let’s have a bookshelf organisation day.

I might start with the cookbook shelf.

Childhood

Is it just me, or does this whole period feel like a trip back to the seventies?

I am constantly being reminded of my childhood. The roads are quiet, you can hear birdsong, kids are bouncing balls against the side of their houses and middle aged men are washing their cars on a Sunday morning.

I know we are constantly being told that our mental health is going to suffer from this but I expect that for some people, like me, it will be healing. Modern life is very stressful. We are under so much pressure to do so much; to be busy all the time. There is just so much information for our brains to file that they can easily get overloaded and go a bit holey.

Right now, there is only one thing to think about. Okay, I get that it’s one big scary thing and that most people never give death a moment’s consideration but it is only one thing.

The way we are eating reminds me of my childhood too. Because we are not ‘popping’ to the shops or getting a takeaway our meals are properly planned and follow a routine. Monday: cold meat and salad and Panorama. Friday: Fish and Gardener’s World. Sunday: Roast dinner and a pudding. It helps us with a routine, so that we know what day of the week it is. My daughter had mentioned that everyone seemed to be having old school puddings in lockdown.

I love an old fashioned pudding. You can’t beat a crumble, jam roly-poly, bread and butter pud, a spotted dick or a proper apple pie. However, she really wanted what everyone seems to be making: a cheap sponge with icing and sprinkles plus custard, so that’s what we had.

“Mmm. It’s just like being a child again.”
“I loved school dinners.”
“This is so good.”
“I’ve never really understood before, when people rave about food they ate as a child. I must be getting old.”

In our house, we are all getting old and there is an appeal of a food memory taking us back to the carefree days of our childhood, before we tried to squeeze too much in our brain or thought that we could die.

Inappropriate Material

“What are you going to write about today?” the Long Suffering Husband asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Hmmm. You’ve run out of things to say,” he told me.
“No. I’ve got a couple of rants in me. You know, restarting IVF before dental treatment, the slippery slope of treating the NHS as a charity, or the ethics of making Coronavirus more important than any other disease or illness.”
We agreed that no one wants to read those rants at the moment. People need hope. They need to believe that everything being done is good.

Yesterday, I texted a friend that I’ve neglected. She teased me by telling me about an interesting lecture she had listened to on the ethics of triage that I would have enjoyed but can’t listen to because I’m not foolish enough to be doing a PhD in human rights, as a single parent with a full time demanding job.

Last time I messaged her, she told me that her son had set up a sewing machine on the kitchen table and was sewing scrubs for NHS workers, so I asked if he was still sewing.
She told me that he had run out of appropriate material.

That’s how I feel about my blog today. I’ve run out of appropriate material.

This news did make me fall down a google rabbit hole of what would be inappropriate material for people treating the Coronavirus to wear.

Fabric available from Spoonflower

It’s funny how quickly the inappropriate can seem like the best choice.

This article in the New York Post shows that I’m not the first to have this thought.

mom-wears-penis-face-mask-so-people-keep-their-distance

It’s a great piece of material but will be counterproductive. Instead of keeping people away, they will step closer to see what the print is. I can now see why the government don’t want us using face masks.

I will keep my ranty inappropriate material to myself for now and hope something more cheerful comes to mind tomorrow.

Zoom

Zoom!

You chased the day away.
High noon, the moon and stars came out to play
Then my whole world went zoom
High as a rainbow as we went flying by.

It’s just rainbow season. It’s not a message.

Why didn’t we listen to Fat Larry? So prophetic.

When you are young, you laugh at older people’s struggles to get to grips with new technology. I remember secretly laughing at my father-in-law when he marvelled at my husband’s new stereo stacking system, with graphic equaliser.
“What do you want all those knobs for?”
I thought my parents were more technically competent. My dad completely embraced computers and mobile phones and even taught me how to mute the family WhatsApp while he was dying because the pinging was doing his head in.
However, last night we reached the stage of watching home movies. My parents’ incompetence with technology became clear. We were watching my son’s nursery school sports day. He was very cute, in a top that matched his hair, trying really hard but always coming last. Then the camera switched to show the sky, the grass and the boats on the river before swiping across a line of ladies and then filming the sky again. The sound in the background made it clear that this was the mum’s race and my parents were struggling to use the camera.
“That button is the zoom,” someone said.
And we were suddenly focused in on a tall lady in a blue top.
“Ju came second,” the noise in the background said.
The lady in the blue top was very athletic and did come second but she wasn’t me.

We laughed.

But I have some sympathy because I fear I have become that old and fixed in my attitude to zoom (other video conferencing platforms are available).

So many people are ‘hanging out’ virtually on these platforms. The zoom hangover has become a real problem. My daughter does quizzes, bingo and just drinks and chats with her mates. My son plays D&D and laughs a lot with his deep hearty chuckle. The staff room is virtually open for tea and cake on a Friday afternoon.

I like the idea in theory but in practice it horrifies me: a whole evening of being distracted by your own image. My friends and I have occasionally mentioned the idea of a zoom sparkle club in our texts and messages.
“We could drink wine and chat.”
“Can I have gin?”
“Julia, you could even have bubbles in your water.”

I thought about doing a quiz to make it easier but I’m quite lazy. Sometimes I think you need a focus.
Then I remembered the brilliant game show idea we had when a friend’s husband had brought an endoscope online because he thought it would be ‘useful’.
“We should get together virtually for a game of ‘Whose Orafice’” I suggested.
My friend wasn’t sure he knew where the endoscope had gone but thought it would be a good idea.
“The only problem will be finding a time,” I said, “Because I am very busy now. Thursday is clapping and Jay’s quiz, Friday is Monty time and Saturday is musical theatre night. How about Tuesday? We could do ‘See you next Tuesday for Who Lives in an  Orafice like this.’”

If it ever happens I fear I will be the one who has their camera pointing up their nose, or the one who forgets and takes their phone to the loo with them, or the one who drops a peanut down their top and removes it by lifting up said top and rummaging around the bra on camera because that’s what you’d do if you were at home.

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