the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Last night proved my wisdom of avoiding the news, especially now, for the preservation of my mental health, given that it seems to be nothing but bad news at the moment. But I thought I’d watch a bit of Boris’s Johnsons Downing Street daily briefing at 7pm, because I thought he was going to clarify his advice regarding the easing of the lockdown restrictions and also I thought that having avoided news since the start of the year, I’d be fine. That I wouldn’t bellow a load of angry “Oh for fucks sake!” at my computer. How wrong I was.

I tuned in late, in itself a metaphor for Boris’s Johnson’s handling of the crisis, to see three men standing so far apart that I thought that the one the middle had really smelly and uncontrollable flatulence, only to realise the one in the middle was Boris’s Johnson, and that the flatulence was coming out of mouth. When I listened to him, he put me in mind of a schoolboy, who has been given a month to prepare for a book presentation, but has failed to do so and so skim-reads Brodies notes on it in the lunch-break and tries to blag it.

My first fuck, as it were, occurred when he claimed the British people had adhered to the restrictions of the lockdown in superb way. I can’t remember his exact phrasing, as I was attempting to swear and choke at the same time, but the gist of it was that we Brits, we happy few, our brethren, had been some of the best in the world at it. Was he having a bubble? The parks near me would indicate he was, so to would the anecdotal evidence of my partner.

My second fuck followed a few minutes later. He was repeating the advice to go back to work but avoid public transport if at all possible. That would be the public transport that has been decimated in rural communities thanks to government funding cuts to local authorities, and in metropolitan areas apart from London, is a victim of competition and cost-cutting? That public transport, the one its easier to avoid using if it doesn’t fucking exist in the first place!

My third fuck – if only my recovery time in real life were this good! – was when he was answering a question about poorly paid workers having no choice but to go back to work and thus proportionally having a higher death rate than the rich. He said it was a scandal and mentioned a piece of research that was being urgently undertaken to establish the reasons why this was the case. And I thought what bunch of muppets he must take us for. The research is the whole social history of disease, every single pandemic through the ages. Humans always react in the same way, irrespective of time, place, or ethnicity.

We know that the rich fuck off out of densely populated urban area’s at the first sign of trouble to the less crowded countryside, leaving the poorest with little choice but to hope the grim reaper doesn’t come knocking at their door. We know that the poor will have to weigh up the financial benefits of going to work against the health risks that poses. The rich don’t have to make that stark choice and because they’re rich, they’re more likely to have a better diet, have a healthier life-style, to be able to afford better healthcare, in short to have the advantages that wealth allows you to buy. If Boris’s Johnson actually knew poor people – proper poor, not families who can only afford to send their child to a minor public school but families for whom disadvantaged means much more than not having a nanny – he’d know this, he’d know that social inequality is only exacerbated in times of pandemic. He’s meant to be a clever chap, after all.

Mind you, there was one highlight. Chris Whitty, the something of something and who reminds me of the creepy lawyer that Milly had an affair with in ‘This Life’ said something that made me want to cheer. That the vast majority of people wouldn’t get the disease, and a majority of those that did would only have mild symptoms that wouldn’t require hospital treatment at all, mainly because they’re symptoms were so mild, they hadn’t noticed they’d had it in the first place. Of those that did need hospital treatment, most would need some form of respiratory treatment, nothing more, and only a very small minority of those would need intensive care and some of them might die.

And now for some really great news, well I thunk it great. Yesterday LMS decided to take a break from literacy lessons and to some exercise on my exercise bike. I lowered the seat, set the controls and when she was about to start, asked her if she wanted to listen to anything as she did it. She thought for a few seconds and then said, “The one you like with the funny woman on it”. I knew exactly what she meant, so cued it my computer, turned on the Bluetooth, turned on the hi-fi, turned up the volume, and we began.

Its both odd and gratifying to see a 9 year old child have exactly the same response at exactly the same time, as you remember seeing 4,000 other people having in a tent at Tribal Gathering in 1995.

Although I had to bite my tongue earlier, when LMS declared herself to be “soooooooo bored” with Marge repeatedly trying to teach her how to measure the area of a rectangle. And I thought, ‘ When in all my adult life has the ability to correctly measure the area of a rectangle ever come un handy’