the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I was in the garden yesterday, relaxing on my giant bean-bag and allowing my mind to wander and I thought of ‘furlough’. Now maybe its just me but the word ‘furlough’ was one that had never crossed my path before. I had no idea what it meant and all of a sudden, its everywhere, but nobody has taken the time to explain exactly what it meant, it was just assumed everyone did.

I didn’t know. If someone had said that they were going to ‘furlough’ someone, I’d have thought of some sexual act, involving some ropes and pulleys, a a horse and possible serious injury.  ‘Furlough’, furlong, you can understand why I might think it. Think of Catherine the Great.

Sadly though, it isn’t. According to the government,

If you and your employer both agree, your employer might be able to keep you on the payroll if they’re unable to operate or have no work for you to do because of coronavirus (COVID-19). This is known as being ‘on furlough’.

Your employer could pay 80% of your regular wages through the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, up to a monthly cap of £2,500

Essentially working tax credits for people who aren’t working. On super strength steroids. Not the people. The tax credits.

And did you spot the cunning use of the loophole word, ‘could’. I ‘could’ climb Mount Everest, I ‘could’ do all manner of things, some more likely than not, but all are theoretically possible. You can’t theoretically pay for things, you’d get short shrift at a checkout if you tried that stunt.

Then I thought of all the people who can’t be ‘furloughed’, and also that there isn’t any indication of how long this largesse might last. I then thought of how the government is ready to splash the cash when it benefits big business -– corporate welfare costs £92billion a year – but not the little people, those who are in the gig economy, people on zero-hours contracts and those in the creative industries. I know how precocious this world is, having briefly had my toe in the murky world of advertising a long time ago now. Thats a tale for another day.

I thought that someone well connected in the entertainment world could get all their showbiz pals and they could get all their showbiz pals, not to do a telethon or release another charity single, not to do sponsored something. But rather to just put their hands in their pockets and donate some cash. With enough schmoozing and publicity, they could get charitable status and with that not only could they say it was a charitable donation and write it off against tax, it would qualify for gift aid from the government.

That Ricky Gervais, him with a laugh like a hyena, I hear he’s a nice chap, I’m sure he’d do it.

Because it was Thursday night last night, the tedious inevitability the air was rent asunder by the sound of ‘The Happy Clappers’. As any reader that has being paying attention to my misanthropic ramblings I have no time whatsoever for this absurdity, finding it both self-serving and a bit creepy. ‘Sappy Clappers’ more like. And it struck me that if somehow you were manage to combine this, the panopticon,

From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can’t see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched.

This was introduced by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It was a manifestation of his belief that power should be visible and unverifiable. Through this seemingly constant surveillance, Bentham believed all groups of society could be altered.

If you added to this a bit of the 1970’s talent show ‘Opportunity Knocks’, where the gimmick was the ‘Clapometer’, which supposedly measured the applause an act would generate from the audience. The winner was the one who garnered the most applause and got to appear on next weeks show.  So no possibility of a fix then. You thought talent show fixes were a modern thing? That the only scandal on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ was the scandal about text votes and not, as seems far more probable, having judges with no discernable talent whatsoever? Apart that is, for shameless self-promotion and pandering to the crowd?

And just for good measure, throw in a bit of ‘The People’s Postcode Lottery’ , which works, as the name implies, by choosing a random postcode and households that have singed up, win some cash. Combine that with the Clapometer and the panopticon and you’d have people clapping for hours to win some cash. They’d be too scared not too. Obviously for this to work there’d have to be some kind penalty, not to severe at first, so as to let them get used to the idea. But eventually one household in the least enthusiastic postcode would be chosen at random and be dragged off, never to be seen or heard from again. Isn’t my mind a joyful place!

But you don’t want to read about that! No, you want to know about the mousetraps, you want to know how we’re getting on with them, you want to know about this morning. Well, boys and girls, come close and I’ll tell you.

Marge declared herself not best pleased that the traps hadn’t been set, a pronouncement that wasn’t greeted with scorn that statement deserved. Don’t get me wrong, I think Marge is fantastic but sometimes – this being one of them – misguided. Joe was tasked with preparing the traps, something he had as much enthusiasm for as he had choice in the matter. He looked at the trap carefully, played with it, eventually declaring that the spring mechanism needed so much weight applied on it for it to activate the trap, so much so that it rendered it functionally funct.

Oblivious to this frankly unhelpful nit-picking, Marge then began discussing the merits of using peanut butter as bait, as if mice were gourmets with sensitive palettes’. Like they’d take one sniff and turn away in disgust thinking ‘It’s not organic, it’s not fair-trade, its…(sniff)…its….(sniff) SunPat!’ Apparently mice like peanut butter. Don’t ask me how or even why people know this but they do and Marge bought a jar of it specially.

Then where to set the traps was the next issue, because mice being known for their obliging nature, are bound to walk right up into the traps and allow themselves to be caught. I suggested to Joe that if the traps do catch any mice – a big if – then we should watch as it slowly uses up all the oxygen in the trap. Shouldn’t take long. We could have a competition. Obviously the medals would be awarded posthumously. But really is that worse death for a house mouse thanbeing released into the wild to be torn limb from limb and eaten?

Writing of the lottery reminds me that that today is a Bank Holiday, moved from Monday so as to allow us to celebrate something. However, the move hadn’t factored in the lockdown. That being the case, shouldn’t we have a Bank Holiday rollover, for later in the year?

The other night we were sitting down to dinner when Joe suddenly, in one fluid movement, reached down to the table, grabbed a beer bottle lid and threw it at a mouse in the kitchen. Yes we have mice, a situation none of us are exactly happy about, but not all of us take pity on a mouse because of whatever and feed it. Well they did until my mum was visiting one day, saw the mouse, and did what any girl raised on a farm in rural Ireland would do, which is kill it. She thinks they’re vermin and given that they have uncontrollable incontinence – so they shit and piss everywhere – breed prodigiously and are thoroughly disgusting in every way, I’d have to agree.

But then I would. My room is next to the kitchen. That kitchen, the one where the crumbs are, the kitchen that the mice eat their fill in at night, that one. I know they do because I can hear them scuttle about, sometimes knocking things over whilst they keep me awake with their scavenging. I’ve asked politely that my housemates not leave crumbs out, but honestly, when there are veg boxes with food in lying on the dining room floor, well, you can understand why I wrap my duvet up around me like a sleeping bag at night.

So Marge’s solution to this is that she bought some mousetraps. Well, she calls them mousetraps. Not what I would call a mouse trap though, you know ones that actually work by enticing the mouse with some food and then a lever snaps shut, breaking the mouse’s back, killing it instantly.

According to their website ‘ The Humane Mouse trap allows for the easy catch and release of rodents without harming them. The trap is sanitary and animal friendly and can be re-used.’ Well that’s a huge weight off my mind that they’re animal fucking friendly. Am I missing something here? Just to be absolutely clear here, because I’ve got brain damage and I might’ve got it wrong? You catch the mouse. Then you take it somewhere far away and release it there? That is the gist?

To my mind, this is nothing more than sub-contracting out the actual killing element. The probability is that they’ll be unable to adapt to life in the wild and will be killed by another animal slightly higher up the food chain. It’s like the debate over tuna that was caught using nets “Don’t eat the tuna!’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Dolphins are caught in the nets used for tuna fishing and die’ ‘What about the tuna?’ ‘Fuck them, they taste nice.’

Joe then bravely suggested getting an air pistol, to solve the problem. Marge wasn’t massively enthusiastic about the idea of an brutally effective method of pest control but I was dead keen on it, actually. Because, as it turns out, I’m a rather good shot. Of course I would say that, given as how thanks to my brain injury I no longer have any fine motor skills, meaning nobody can prove that I don’t but I do. I know. And how do I know?

Some years ago I went on holiday with my American girlfriend to America and we stayed for a bit with her sister in New England. Anyway, one evening the sisters husband was taking apart and cleaning a rifle on the kitchen table, and seeing the look of horror on my faced, asked me how I felt about guns. The Guardian would’ve been so proud of me, every liberal, right-on, mung bean cliché about guns I could remember poured out of me. He sat there, impassive, as all my wrongness contaminated the room. When I’d finished he asked ‘Have you ever fired a gun?’ Again with the diatribe! He cut me off with the totally uncalled for ‘Would you like to?’ What a thing to ask!

So the next morning we headed off to the woods behind their place, which to someone who’d seen loads of movies seemed like the kind of woods that two people go into them, but only one come’s out. But Chuck – that’s a good American name because I forget what his was – quite happily trundled an enormous  suitcase full of guns and other things that go bang ever deeper into the woods, while I thought, ‘I’ve seen ‘Deliverance’ and I don’t want to squeal like a pig.’ Chuck eventually decided that this was the spot, although in truth it looked no different to anything else we’d passed in the last few minutes. ‘Perhaps,’ I thought ‘this is where he buries the bodies?’ But because you’re reading this, it’s clear that it wasn’t.

Obviously that’s somewhere else in the woods.

Instead he opened up the suitcase and if Marge had been dismissive of the air pistol idea, one can only imagine her reaction if she’d’ have seen its contents. Remember when people see the contents of the suitcase in ‘Pulp Fiction’, it was like that, only the reverse. It was like he was planning a small war, and misinterpreting my look, he said ‘She won’t let me buy anymore.’ There were handguns, a couple of rifles, a pump action shotgun – wicked! – and a proper hunting rifle, like in ‘The Deerhunter’. If there’d have been an Uzi or an AK47 in there I’d have been well chuffed and no mistake.

He talked me through all the boring safety things, while I just wanted to shoot things, he just went on and on, never do this, always do that, and I’m nodding away, pretending to take it all in but thinking, ‘Yeah yeah whatever, give me the fucking shooter’, in a Ray Winston way. Chuck had bought loads of paper targets and loads of ammo. Clearly we were going to be here for a long time.

The handguns were a bit disappointing, although nowhere near as disappointing as the pump action shotgun was. In the films it always looked to be the ‘go to’ weapon of choice, a statement firearm, the statement being that you weren’t messing about anymore, now you were serious. The rifles were alright, but the real star of the show was the hunting rifle. It had a telescopic sight, and that meant you could aim, I mean really aim. Because Chuck has had the good manners to bring some small blocks that he put on the targets, so that when you hit them, they exploded. Shooting at things that blow up! What next! What next! Oh please let there be something else!

But thankfully there wasn’t because it turns out that not only am – or rather was – I a good shot, but rather more worryingly I enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it. I could see the appeal, if perhaps you lived on a ranch in 1870’s Texas, but in the modern age. Mmm. Not so much.

But an air pistol? An air pistol? Well that’s completely different! It’d help with my hand/eye coordination, be of great  benefit to my fine motor skills as a loaded I pellets…

Well I was this morning.

It’s not much that I’d want to go out necessarily, maybe have a day trip to the seaside, get a train and head to a park, but more the knowledge that I can’t. I understand why, of course I do, but nonetheless I resent it as well.

So it was just as well that I received a parcel from my partner, which she’d drawn on a huge red cross on the back and tied it up with string so it looked like one of those food packages that P.O.W’s would get. You know the feeling you get when you know, you just know, simply by looking at the outside of something that the inside is going to be good? It was one of them.

Inside was a ‘Curly-Wurly’, a bar of chewy nougat, a bag of chocolate covered raisins, two packets of cherry drops and a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch! As a way to revive flagging spirits, it was just what I needed and not a moment too soon either. Eating the Monster Munch immediately, I noticed that the packet said ‘Not to be sold separately’ Hoo-fucking-ray thought I. It meant there were more of them, just waiting to be eaten by me. Goody gum drops.

Pickled onion Monster Munch are my favourite crisps and bizarrely so to are they my brother and his two daughters favourites as well. My choice hasn’t been a hasty one either oh no, I’ve put the work in, a lifetime of dedication and unshakeable resolve, even when confronted with the abomination that were ‘Skips’. I don’t know if they still make them, but I hope for the good of children’s taste buds they don’t. Imagine a prawn cocktail flavoured communion wafer and your nearly there. Awful. Although at least you knew where you were with crisp flavours and the coloured bags that they came in. But now? Now it seems like Heston Blumenthal has been put in charge of crisp production. Who in Darwin’s name thought that Marmite flavoured crisps were a good idea? Not anyone over the age of 14 I’ll bet.

Crisps shouldn’t appeal to adults, and as evidence of this I call upon Marge, who when asked what her favourite crisps were, replied that she no longer ate them – shock – but she had been partial to beetroot crisps. Of course she was, one of her favourite foods as a child was kedgeree after all! Lets hope she doesn’t discover that they now make kale crisps.

Yesterday wasn’t a great day for me and not just because it was the first day Joe was back at work and that I had rashly offered to help Marge out with LMS’s home schooling. Despite me having seen LMS in action, swerving like a slalom skier out of anything she doesn’t want to do, despite me having witnessed at first hand how easily distracted she can be and how resistant to attempts to bring her back to what she was doing she can be, despite her knowing all of this, she was convinced that my knowing all this wouldn’t require her to modify her behaviour in any way whatsoever. Which, in a weird way, I quite admire. It shows a self-confidence, a ‘I don’t care what you think, I’m going to do it my way regardless’ that I had as a child – and indeed have now.

As any reader of this blog will know, I think LMS is a bit more than alright and I like to flatter myself that this is reciprocated, but yesterday made me realise that being ‘Mr. Fun’ – the adult who because their not her parent means I don’t have to undertake the boringly necessary tasks that a parent has to, but can be a man-child – makes the sudden switch to being ’Mr. Notsofun’ somewhat difficult for her to process.

At least that’s how my adult mind rationalised it. Marge was very sweet about my efforts though, saying ‘Don’t feel you have to do this every day’, which of course I interpreted as ‘I know you meant well, but no.’ She assures me that this wasn’t the case but yesterday was a day when my mind was a bit off-kilter.

And it wasn’t that my partner finally got her waders on and made it across London to see me. Joe said to me later that it must’ve been quite emotional for me, seeing her after so long apart, to which I replied ‘Don’t go overboard’ Anyone who knows me knows that I have a profound dislike of what I call ‘Hallmark Emotions’; emotions that could’ve come from a greetings card, or else be found in a romcom starring Matthew McGonauhey. It’s only been six weeks and we talk every day on the ‘phone. It hasn’t been six months of no contact whatsoever. She knew what yesterday was, and wanted to see me

Because yesterday was May 4^th and might well be for some sad sacks ‘Star Wars’ day but for me it is the anniversary of my accident, when I went from being someone with a a future, into someone with a past. At least that’s the story I tell myself. The sudden reversal of fortune happened some years ago now but when it was more recent my partner and I would escape to the coast somewhere, so I could just sit and watch the sea, the sunrises and the sunsets, but with the passage of time this has seemed less important thing to do. But this year, falling slap bang in the middle of this lockdown as it does, I miss being by the sea, specifically just gazing a the horizon for hours, lost in one’ s thoughts. Reflecting on the boundless possibility the horizon suggests to me, and equally that I squandered that potential. These are not, surprisingly, unhappy thoughts.

Looking at the horizon helps me realise that just as a sudden burst of sun on the waves transforms them from dull grey to glittering silver and back again in a second, so to my own problems are only problems to me. Helps me put them into a proper perspective, a reassuringly comforting one, that in the scheme of things, they matter not a jot.

The flowers will not bloom because I’m feeling depressed. The waves won’t stop crashing on the beach in show of solidarity for me, neither will the sun go on strike, refuse to rise or set, until I feel better. The changing of the seasons won’t be affected any, the birds will still chirp away, bee’s will – hopefully – still pollinate and make honey and wasps will still do whatever the fuck it is that they do.

And that’s just as it should be. We are all going to die at some point and whether its coronavirus, a drunk driver, or being harpooned by a spear of frozen urine jettisoned from a jumbo jet, no matter how tragic or comical our death is, things will continue. That’s what I think of when I look at the horizon. Well that and how glad I am that I’m in the warm looking out at it, than on the sea, being buffeted by blustery winds, freezing my fucking tits off.

One of the reasons why yesterdays post was so angry is because it makes me angry when people who’ve been quite happy to be fellow travellers with the Conservatives when it suited them to be so, have now discovered they have a conscience, and thanks to Twitter and Facebook, they can advertise it.

It’s like the flagrant inequality that began under Thatcher and continued unabated until now never happened. That the pernicious benefits system was something that affected other people, as long as their own cosy, well-ordered life was untouched, it was alright. Alright if others had to pay the price, in blighted lives, thwarted ambitions and potential never realised. Basically, if other people suffer, well it’s better than me suffering.

It’s a bit like that pitiful waste of oxygen in ‘Question Time’ a few years ago, who admitted that she’d voted Tory because she thought it would benefit her and her family but now they were going to take away her tax credits it reduced her to tears. She quite happily admitted to voting Conservative, so she was presumably comfortable with cuts to benefits for the sick and disabled then – as she wasn’t sick or disabled. And very relaxed about cuts to public services – as long as they weren’t the public services her or her family used. Totally unconcerned with a Conservative government trying to create a ‘hostile environment’ not just for asylum seekers, but increasingly for everyone. Because the more people fear losing things, the more they fear.

She was the modern day embodiment of the famous poem ‘First they came..’ by the Pastor Niemolloer, describing the Nazi Party’s gradual takeover of the German state involved removing dissenting views, helping to create a mindset of ‘Take them, do what you want to them, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, just leave me be.’

Until now, of course.

Suddenly they’ve realised the blindingly obvious, that its not hedge-fund managers, footballers or ‘celebrities’ we depend on in a crisis. It’s the nurses and doctors who former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt waged a long battle with over their pay and conditions. It’s the police whose numbers have been cut by over 20,000 – 14%- since 2010. And the UK’s ambulance service, which too has seen over 3,00 jobs cut and it’s budget slashed not forgetting the fire brigade, who when London mayor, Boris’s Johnson oversaw the closure of 10 fire stations. The list could go on and on, but you get my point? People quite happily voted Tory when they thought it would have no negative impact on them. But now they realise how by not voting Labour at every election they’ve been able to take part in, they have fucked us all. Yes, they can “Clap for Carers’, sign whatever online petitions they want or wear badges or T-shirts proclaiming their support, but that will do fuck-all-nothing if they continue voting for the status quo.

It’s like I posted yesterday, it’s about as much use as a cement football being concerned now, now it’s like watching your house burn and wishing you’d got insurance. But back when this could’ve all been stopped, at every election that’s returned a Conservative government, not in the 2000’s so much, as in the 1980’s and 90’s. But Twitter didn’t exist then and if it isn’t shared, talked about or liked on Twitter, then it hasn’t really happened.

The Conservative Party have an ideological obsession, almost pathological belief in the notion that whatever the state does, the private sector could do it both cheaper and more efficiently. We know its bollocks, but inexplicably when people are told they can have lower taxes and better public services, they believe it. They don’t question what ‘free at the point of use’ means when it’s used to conjunction with NHS funding. People don’t ask the questions for the good reason that they know they may not like the answers.

Mind you, the clue is right there in the fucking name!

Con –servative.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

As I get older, one thing I’ve noticed is not that I find most news either surprising or shocking, but that other people do. An example was provided yesterday by the BBC. I manage to avoid most news now, as it isn’t good for my mental health, me knowing the latest this or scandalous that, but when I log online, BBC news being my homepage, I can’t avoid it. I should change it, I know, but it does on occasion provide me with yet another ‘ oh for fucks sake’ moment.

People living in more deprived areas of England and Wales are more likely to die with coronavirus than those in more affluent places, new figures suggest.

 The ONS studied the 20,283 deaths involving Covid-19 that took place between 1 March and 17 April. In England, it found the mortality rate in the most deprived areas was 55.1 deaths per 100,000 population, while the rate was 25.3 deaths per 100,000 in the least deprived areas.

In what possible universe is this news to anyone? Did anyone read the first sentence of that story and think to themselves ‘Bugger me backwards with a pitchfork, can this be true?’

What did people think was going to happen when shipyards, coalmines and steelworks were closed under Thatcher’s Conservative government?? What did they imagine was going to happen to those workers who were now unemployed, to their children and grandchildren? What did they think would happen to those communities that were decimated, sacrificed on the altar of free market ideology? Did they not stop to consider that there might be a societal cost some time in the future? No of course not. They were too busy wondering who the fuck ‘Sid’ was and would anyone ever find him to give him a message. They were thinking about buying their council flat, or deluding themselves that they were now middle class because they drank Perrier, knew that hummus wasn’t a Greek island and watched mucky films with subtitles on Channel Four.

The same people who were too busy thinking of the benefits to them of Thatcherism, to ponder of the detrimental effect those benefits had on others. They were the voters ‘New’ Labour was after, when it jettisoned it’s commitment to re-nationalising everything Thatcher had privatised, and was no longer recognisable as a political champion fighting for a more equitable society. So much so in fact, that when Mrs Thatcher was asked what her greatest political achievement had been, she replied ‘Tony Blair.’

Is this a surprise?

In a statement, the government said it had commissioned urgent work from Public Health England to understand the different factors that could influence the way someone was affected by the virus and would set out more details in due course.

Not even remotely. Anyone with a scintilla of intelligence knows what it’s what causes those factors to occur that matter, just as surely as they know that the report will take ages to complete and it’s recommendations largely ignored.

That’s why I don’t join in with all this ‘Clap for Carers’ bullshit, and not because my brain injury has bizarrely affected my co-ordination either, but because I’ve always supported the NHS when it matters. Not as part of some meaningless self-aggrandisement bollocks, but in private, at the ballot box, by not ever voting Conservative, or worse, Lib Dem – they’re worse, because the same free market ethos, but disguise it. Think what you will about the merits or otherwise of Jeremy Corbinned, it is inarguable that Labour under him could’ve transformed this country for the better. Well you could argue against that proposition, of course you could, but you’d be an idiot, one of the many idiots who elected the paternity suit in a suit our PM.

The root causes of the inequality so rampant throughout the nation aren’t difficult to fathom, nor do they require flow charts or complicated theories to make sense of them. Thatcher (in)famously said ‘There’s no such thing as society’ and thanks to her zealous pursuit if ideology, it’s more divided than ever.

Yesterday I referenced McCarthyism without stating what I meant when using that term. I just figured that anyone reading my blog would know what it meant. I’m sorry, it was lazy of me, and I offer this by way of an apology.

McCarthyism refers of course to the work of that well-known comedic actor, Melissa McCarthy.

They were at again last night, ‘The Happy Clappers’, showing their support for the tireless work of front-line NHS staff, by er, well cheering and clapping for about five minutes. I know I’m cynical and everything but I can’t be the only one who thinks it smacks of McCarthyism.

By that I mean the ‘if your not with us your against us’ mentality, the suspicion that anyone not displaying the correct values was in some way not one of us or isn’t adhering to social norms. Norms that everyone just understands to be case without the tiresome necessity of having them either discussed as to what they be or what the sanctions might be for not being totally committed to following them. That sort of thing, an osmosis of conformity,  where doing the right thing, and more importantly, been seen to do it, is of greater import than the thing itself.

As I wrote last week

…my partner informed me that they were at it on her street as well and from her first floor window she could see the neighbours checking out who was – and wasn’t – taking part… It’s not enough that you do something, oh no, people have to see you doing it. Then it accrues it’s proper social purpose, that of being well regarded by your neighbours.

I don’t think we’re anywhere near having to sign loyalty pledges in support of the NHS yet.  Although by the sound of things, there seemed to be more people taking part, and they were noticeably more enthusiastic. with it. And it did make me feel slightly uncomfortable earlier when Marge told me that people had taken to Twitter questioning the actual benefit to anyone other than those doing it. Really? Taking to the very social media platform that helped create this orgy of onanism to doubt it? Aren’t we all meant to be grown-ups here?

Or maybe ‘Clap for Carers’ is a good thing, unless of course one gives carers to clap, in which it isn’t. It’d be as useful as a minute’s silence is to the dead NHS workers it was meant to commerrate.

I know that the last couple of my posts haven’t exactly been a barrel of laughs so in recognition of that, I’m going to lighten the mood considerably, and I find nothing lightens my mood half as much as LMS!

We were all in the dining room the other day, Marge, Joe, LMS and I, when Marge asked LMS which of her friends would she like to chat with on Zoom. LMS is, for reasons known only to her, remarkably resistant to this idea, but in practice less so. Anyway Marge asked again to which LMS replied by singing ‘I think we both know the answer to that one!’ which made me think of a lovechild between Ethel Merman and a barbershop quartet. That isn’t an insult, in case you think it is. LMS then – and I found this incredibly funny – proceeded to repeat this by putting the stress on a different word every time, so ‘both’ for example, became ‘bohohoth’.

Then when Marge tried to join in, LMS sang her displeasure thusly ‘Her voice is pathetic and she has a throat as crooked as witches nose.’ She then combined the two in a bizarre freestyle mash-up, the sort of thing Andrew Lloyd-Webber has made a career out of. Not just the once either, oh no, she belted it out, repeatedly. I laughed, despite myself because the worse thing is, for me at any rate, that LMS has decided that me giving any indication whatsoever that what she’s doing I find in any way amusing is worth pointing out – and that if I’m not finding it amusing, doing it until I do. That by implicating me in whatever she’s doing, it somehow renders her less culpable, ‘Mooky’s laughing, Mooky’s laughing,’ she’ll triumphantly add to whatever mischief she’s up. ‘Mooky’ being her nickname for me and never having had one before, find, to my surprise, that I quite like it.

Speaking of mischief, later that same day LMS jumped into a paddling pool full of cold water. Those who saw her do it laughed heartily at her reaction – understandable shock – and even more when she took requests, ‘get your shoulders under,’ that sort of thing. She eventually emerged shivering but delighted at the response she’d got, that she was once again the centre of everybody’s attention. Then she asked me, in the sweetest, most innocently curious way, ‘Have you ever had a bucket of cold water thrown over you?’

There are moments when you realise instantly that there are only two possible answers; wrong and wronger. This was one of them but I was reprieved by Joe’s laughter and him noting ‘Now that’s what I call a loaded question’ A while later I was sitting in the garden reading, having quite forgotten the earlier entertainment but LMS clearly hadn’t. She snuck into the garden and crept up behind my chair. Startled by her sudden appearance, I was unprepared for her swift move to turn the garden tap on, and then to hose me with cold water, first only the spray setting, but then the full on jet.

As I tried to hurriedly get out of the garden, insisting that she stop, I realised my protestations were rather undone by me laughing as I shrieked them. It was later than I realised that yes, of course I could’ve reacted like a grown-up, shouted and possibly added in some expletives, of course I could, but that would risk undoing all the trust that she has in me. That’s the thing with trust. It takes time to slowly build it yet can be undone in an instant and when it’s gone, well a child’s world is that much colder as a result.

The main reason though is that I want my ten year-old self to think well of me, to be proud that I haven’t taken the easy path, the path that he was used so often by other people treading in his childhood. It’s so instinctive a response, that some of the time I’m not even consciously aware of why I’m behaving the way I do and that’s a good thing.

I know that won’t make a lot of sense to most reading this, but do I care? Not really. I know Marge and Joe think I give LMS too much…too much, but I’ve always had moments as an adult where I think, ‘What would the ten year-old me think if I did this?’ and I always do what I think he’d want me to do. I know this is transferrance – kind of – but I think if one good thing comes out of all that..that, well that’s me choosing to turn a negative into a positive.

The BBC today carries the laughably absurd story that,

 Coronavirus: ‘One billion’ could become infected worldwide – report’

 Which then goes onto add, in case you missed it the first time.

One billion people could become infected with the coronavirus worldwide unless vulnerable countries are given urgent help, an aid group has warned.

The IRC’s report, which is based on models and data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Imperial College London, estimated there could be between 500 million and one billion infections globally.

The reason I find this claim laughably absurd is not because I am a demented wrongcock, I am, but that’s not the reason. No it’s because of the use of the words ‘could’ and ‘estimates’. So basically guesswork then. Clever guesswork, to be sure, done by boffins in glasses and sensible shoes, but guesswork nonetheless. How do I know this? Because of this, when it states ‘there could be between 500 million and one billion infections globally.’ That’s some wriggle room they’re giving themselves there.

If I said to LMS that there could be 5 to 10 chocolate biscuits hidden in my cupboard, she’d quite rightly want to know if there were actually between 5 to 10, or only that there could be. There could be more, in which case she’d be delighted but equally there could be less. Words like ‘could’ and ‘estimated’ are like ‘might’, ‘should’ and ‘potential’, things that could just as easily happen as not. Might is maybe, potential is perhaps, and estimated is what a gas bill is. When was the last time you opened a gas bill that calculated the amount based on an estimated reading and thought ‘That seems right.’

The story also carried this

It also said there could be more than three million deaths across dozens of conflict-affected and unstable countries.

“These numbers should serve as a wake-up call,” said the head of the IRC, David Miliband.

Of course they should be. But not in the way our modern day Able thinks. If the global population totals over 7 billion, and a billion is a thousand million, then 3 million something like 0.05%.

On we go with yet another piece of unsurprising news, again from the BBC, that

A third of all coronavirus deaths in England and Wales are now happening in care homes, figures show.

 Office for National Statistics data showed there were 2,000 coronavirus care home deaths in the week ending 17 April, double the previous week.

It brings the total number of deaths in care homes linked to the virus since the start of the pandemic to 3,096.

Whoa, wait, back up there a bit! You don’t mean the care homes that are full of old people, those old people who live in care homes because they need care, the one’s who possibly have underlying health conditions and are therefore much more susceptible to die from this or any other illness anyway. Those ones. What a shock that wasn’t, people who were going to die soon, died sooner!

It does rather astound me, this notion that human life is sacred, that all human lives are somehow equally important. It is both patently absurd, and in this new reality dangerously naïve to assert that, as if it were some inviolate truth, something to never be questioned. Of course they’re not equal. For one thing a child of 8 or 18 has more life in them, more potential than someone who’s 88. And given how were constantly reminded of the need to protect the NHS, shouldn’t one of the ways we can help it, would be not to squander finite resources a finite amount of resources available to the NHS, shouldn’t these prioritised to be used on the most potential for life? This may seem unspeakably harsh to some reading this, but detached and rational thinking is what we need now, not emotion and sentiment clouding our decision-making capability.

If you’ve got this far, you’ll no doubt be wondering what cheerily heart-warming observation he’s going to end on, a bit like Jerry Springer, only without the faux sincerity. The BBC reports that there have been just over 3 million worldwide cases of cornonavirius, of whom nearly 215,00 have died, and almost 870,000 survived. It doesn’t say what the other 1.9 million are doing. Lounging about most likely. The UK fares even better though, with roughly 162,00 cases but only 22,00 deaths. I know my maths are a bit shaky but isn’t that a death rate of less than 10%? And the news just gets better, if we factor into our calculations that a third off all new deaths are happening at care homes. That’s a cause for celebration right there, isn’t it? A killer virus with a death rate of 6 or 7%? Really?

Mind you, if I get the virus and then die, I won’t be so glib then!