the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Yesterday’s post about guidelines also caused me to reflect on other non-words. By that I mean words that have a specific meaning when used in a specific context, but can also be used in a non-specific way, in a way that doesn’t commit the speaker to anything.

Goal is a textbook example of this. Used in relation to a specific context – a sports activity – a goal is the specific place that a team has to either attack or defend, lest their opponents manage to pass the ball through that space. If they do, they are said to have scored a goal, or earned a point. Fine. That makes sense. There’s no ambiguity about what a goal is that context. A goal is a goal.  However, when people talk about having a goal, it has an altogether different meaning. It is used to denote a target at which to aim or a point to be reached or an amount of something to be raised. Also if that goal is to achieved by collective endeavour, so much the better. It doesn’t imply that anyone is committed to undertake anything in pursuit of that goal. Nor is there a sense of having failed should that goal not be achieved. The fact that there was a goal is the important thing, not that it wasn’t attained.  

Same with ambition.  You hear a lot of talk about an ambition to achieve something.  Politicians use it all the time. An ambition is a good thing whether or not that ambition is ever translated into actual demonstrable results is another matter.  But it is enough that the ambition was there, the intention to do the thing, regardless if the thing was done or not.

Like is another example of a word having a specific meaning, to be keen on something or generally having positive feelings toward that it. But free of that contextual underpinning, it means nothing at all. Apart from someone feeling that they’ve said the right thing that is, and uttered a socially accepted form of bullshit. An example might be someone saying ‘I’d like to do x’ or ‘I’d really like if it…’ It doesn’t commit them to doing x or indeed ever making any attempts to achieve x.  The point is more that for the few seconds everyone feels good, the bullshitter and the person being bullshat.  The x isn’t important here. It can be anything at all. The fact that someone would life’ to do something is. They probably won’t.

But they’d like to.

I myself have exploited this linguistic loophole for wholly self-serving needs.  In a previous life one of my jobs involved dealing with, amongst other things people’s complaints.  So I quickly learnt that by saying ‘I’d like to say sorry for x’ was a neat way of not saying sorry at all.  Because they heard ‘sorry’ and I would say it with such an earnest and sorrowful look on my face, they never twigged that me saying I would like to do something wasn’t the same as me doing the thing.  I wasn’t saying sorry, just that I would like to say it. I wasn’t. And I had no intention of doing so either. But that was bye the bye, and almost always did pass them by.

So in that context ‘like’ has as much meaning as ‘guidelines’ as does ‘ambition’ as does ‘goal’. 

And wish. 

Not forgetting aspiration. 

Guidelines. It’s such a wonderfully opaque word isn’t it?  Guidelines don’t order, compel, or otherwise enforce compliance.  They’re basically advisory.  You can do this or not.  It’s up to you.  How you interpret them will differ to a greater or lesser extent than someone else. In most cases guidelines are wonderfully apt.

I receive personalisation to pay for my domestic care.  The great thing about this is that there are no hard and fast rules governing what my money can or can’t be spent on.  Yes there are guidelines, but social services haven’t seen fit to furnish me with these despite my continued requests.  Which leaves me with a pretty large grey area with which to play with. After all, if I haven’t seen the guidelines, it stands to reason that I can’t interpret them.

Therefore in some cases, interpreting guidelines according to one’s own needs is fine. As long as it has no detrimental effect on society, that is.

This isn’t true in a pandemic. Our actions are not consequence free. The interpretation of the guidelines by people last summer by vast swathes of people have bought us to this unfortunate yet preventable circumstance; one where yet more guidelines will be issued and which will be interpreted as before. Remember last summer? The crowded beaches? Of course people knew the guidelines said that they shouldn’t travel, but they also knew, they knew, even though it hadn’t been announced, that travel restrictions were going to be eased. Same with ‘Eat Out to Help Out’. The gastro-pub at the bottom of our road took part in this. On balmy summer evenings the street outside was chocca with people eating at tables. There wasn’t much evidence there of social distancing.

We are where we are because people interpret things according to their own needs and see no contradiction in blaming others for doing what they do.

This morning has gotten off to a truly dreadful start.  Appallingly bad, in fact.  I haven’t felt this low since… well I can’t recall but not for a long time anyway. 

I got up this morning and LMS made me a cup of tea.  I write ‘made’ but ‘made’ doesn’t cover the half of what she does. She makes tea in the same way a tailor makes a made to measure suit. Some people when they make a cup of tea turn the kettle on and then make a phone call or are otherwise distracted and then make the tea with water that boiled some minutes ago.  Or they make the tea, add the milk and the sugar, give it a stir and that’s it.  Or even worse, an unholy combination of the two. 

But not LMS, oh no. 

She waits by the kettle until it has boiled then a few seconds later she adds the boiling water to the cup.  Then she takes the teabag out and puts some milk in.  She then adds the sugar, which is where most people would stop and think their work here is done.  But no, she’s only just begun.  Like a chemist in a lab she carefully takes a sip of the tea from a teaspoon and decides if it needs more sugar or milk puts, the teaspoon down and if it dies, uses another teaspoon uses another one to add more sugar.  She gives that a stir, and repeats the testing element.  Sometimes, she will put the teabag back in and add more milk.  Her reasoning being that she wouldn’t serve me a tea that she wouldn’t herself drink.  Which is fine and dandy in my book. 

However, the reason I am so appalled this morning is because it has just dawned on me that the maker of consistently outstanding cups of tea will very soon be in a different part of the country to me.  Not an especially good start to the day.

Sherlock Holmes was given to remark that some of his problems were so fiendishly difficult to solve that he’d need three of pipes of cocaine to help him deduce. A three pipe problem, he’d call it. LMS has refined this so that making a cup of tea can become a three teaspoon problem.

If you’re anything like me, by that I mean cynical and not brain damaged, possibly you have occasionally wondered how on earth firms such as Capita, G4S, Serco et al, are continually awarded large government contracts which they fail to deliver on. Wonder no more, for this morning I was ‘treated’ to a front row seat of how to do things. Badly. Granted, it was only LMS having her first online lesson of this particular lockdown. But as a very small, very inconsequential example of how if this was massively up scaled to, oh I don’t know, test and trace, it gave me an insight of the truism I mentioned yesterday, namely ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy’

Any plan that has as a key component technology is already on the backfoot, moreso if it involves untrained people – in this case parents – using computers. The first problem was joining the session in the first place. This took while and I was given to idly contemplate that just because someone says something in a calm voice, it doesn’t make what they say calming. More importantly, I reflected on the fact that the school should’ve foreseen this as a potential problem and sorted this out. After all, it’s not as if they didn’t have any experience of hosting online lessons to call upon. They had earlier this year, when they did the same thing. They could, they should’ve learnt from this. But no.

It reminded me of Joe’s experience trying to give blood the other day. Blood plasma from people who’ve tested positive for cornavirus is valuable in developing a vaccine. Or something. I just know it has things in it that are important things and these things could help lead to other things, which might lead to something important. Anyway, the thing is that given how the government had bestowed some importance on this, and given for the whole thing to work it needed the people to give their blood plasma -incidentally not as straightforward as donating blood – given all that, one would imagine the process would be as simple as they could make it. You might well think it, but thinking it doesn’t make it so.

Joe was contacted and invited to a donation centre. Where they asked him a load of questions, eventually deeming him unsuitable for donating his plasma. Which is fine, there’s nothing wrong with being thorough. But the problem I have is that when they contacted him, there could easily have been given information about an online questionnaire, that could have informed him instantly if he was suitable or not, or if he’d need to turn up and provide additional information. But no.

That would’ve been too sensible and wouldn’t have wasted enough of time. That’s the thing, if the government – basically you and I, the taxpayers – are paying the bill, there’s no incentive do a thorough job. Indeed quite the opposite in fact because the same companies are rewarded for their woefully lamentable performance with yet more government contracts they fail to deliver on.

Granted, a schools ability or not to successfully organize an online lesson for sixty pupils, isn’t in and of itself that important. But the school receives taxpayer’s money and parents might reasonably have an expectation of competence. Same with the blood plasma fiasco.  They’re both indicative of a culture of taxpayer funded incompetence that seems be the single tangible result of outsourcing.

So, we’re in isolation and naturally, we’re following the governments guidelines regarding what you can and can’t do whilst in isolation. Well, we’re following them as most people are and applying to whatever seems to fit in with their lives at any given time, One of my housemates – and there’s a large caveat there – on hearing the news of LMS school closure and that we all in isolation, declared that as he hadn’t been in her company much recently, he was off for the weekend to help his ex with their childcare.

And that, in a nutshell, helps explains why we are where we are. Of course the government should impose regulations that curtail certain civil liberties on people if it will help protect the most fundamental civil liberty of all, the right to life. I mean we can all agree on that, can’t we? Can’t we? Because it seems to me that that whilst that theory works fine in theory, it is when it meets reality things go wrong. A famous Field Marshall once said ‘No plan ever survives contact with the enemy’ and what is true in war is also true in the fight against this pandemic it seems

I myself am not immune from the self-serving application of the rules. When Joe had a positive test for coronavirus a month ago, a week’s holiday suddenly vanished. Chuffed I was not. Although being fair to Joe, he did drive me to have a test and helped me complete it. But once it came back negative that was it. I was out of the house and making the most of the disappearing warm sun, thinking ‘No fucking way am I staying cooped up if I have to”

So whilst in theory we might agree with something, that agreement only applies to other people, not to us, we’re somehow exempt from the opprobrium we dole out to others. Talking about curtailing civil liberties, I’ve been summoned by LMS to inspect her den that she’s made with packing boxes.

It has windows now

The last couple of days have involved me having the rather disconcerting experience of me not being someone else. And why was I not Doris Svensonn this morning? Well the sound of a harmonica being played while I’m having my first cup of tea, the first cup of tea moreover, that the person playing the harmonica knows I like to enjoy in silence. A thought has just occurred to me: why is a harmonica called a harmonica, when the sound that comes out of it is so patently not?

Anyway, LMS continued on in the vein for what was too long until Joe asked her stop, which she did. Eventually. However, the silence couldn’t last and there were no thoughts of homicide in my mind whatsoever, no idle speculation of which of the items readily to hand could best be used as a murder weapon, when Joe suggested that LMS should try to play scales on it instead in a kind of weird parental amnesia.

This ear bedevilment was soon replaced by Joe suggesting that LMS should play the bongo’s. “Quietly, he said. Yes indeed he did! I had no idea that bongo’s came with volume settings, I just thought there was only one, bloody infuriating. With of course they are, one glorious exception:

From 1:46 on its just aural perfection. It just is.

Anyway, enough about me. How was your morning? Again, another thought has just popped into my head. Mine wasn’t so much a morning as a mourning.

So. We are where we are. And where I am, is back in isolation again. And not in ‘The Mighty Boosh’ surrealist absurdity way either, but an isolation that is increasing feeling like a right royal pain in the gary. Oh, did I not mention the previous two-week isolation? The one I enjoyed after Joe had tested positive for coronavirus? I mean having had the test one might have presumed he had realistic cause to imagine he had it. it. No one has a test if they have no symptoms and therefore expect a negative result, do they?

Or perhaps they do. Hordes of them. Pranksters, the worried well, the bored. The lonely with no-one to talk to, who’ll do anything for some human interaction.

At least then it was just warm enough, and the days were long enough, for me to be in the garden. The nights were balmy too.

Now they’re just barmy.

This morning started well enough.

I was woken up by LMS knocking on my bedroom and asking if I wanted a cup of tea, a question as superfluous as it was disingenuous. Because she knows full well the answer will always be ‘yes’ and I know the question is really her way of saying ‘You know that when you’ve finished the tea you’ll have to play with me.’ With a voice thick with sleep I said ‘Yes’ and then remembered it was a school day and by rights she should’ve been on her way to school and not offering my some working class champagne. I asked her why this was the case, at which point she burst into my room, did a victory dance and announced that school had been cancelled because one of her classmates had tested positive for coronavirus.

Now the correct response of any right thinking person would be one of – adopts serious tone – to express concern for the child, hoping that it wouldn’t be that serious and indicating sympathy for the parents at what must be a difficult and anxious time for them. However, seeing as how I am brain damaged demented wrongcock, I thought ‘Yes! Get in! Result’

Then it got even better.

The tea was washed down with the news that LMS was to be off school for two weeks! Simply wonderful! Some explanation of my reaction to the news that a child had tested positive for what in some cases is a fatal disease might be in order.

We’re moving out of this house next month. The owners are taking possession, a fact which we’ve known about for some time. Joe, Marge and LMS are moving to Swanage and I’ll be moving up to North London. All very boo-hoo, for a number of reasons, but one of the main ones is that I’ll no longer see LMS as often.

As I’ve noted many times on this blog, the transformative effect she has had on my mood is incalculable. Because all the various anti-depressant medications I was prescribed were as much use as glass trampoline. What did work and forced me to get out of bed, emerge from my room and generally stop giving up was a two year old girl banging on my door most mornings and saying ‘Get up, I want play’ Repeatedly, until I did.

A few years later it was time for her to start primary – or junior – school – I’m not a parent, I don’t need to know these things – but the upshot was that LMS would be going there every day for most of her awake time. I know that both her parents were counting down the days until this millstone was lif – oops did I write millstone, so sorry I meant to write milestone – milestone was reached and more people could be permitted to share things with her. Only later did I realise quite how devastating this was for me. Whereas before there had been the sound of exuberant laughter now it was all a bit Simon and Garfunkel. Far too much of it, and not the comfortable kind either, more the kind that’s more redolent of abandoned stately homes or Dickens novels.

That was why when the lockdown was announced earlier this year I decided to come back here, rather than stay in North London. Again I’ve written extensively about this whole period but the one abiding memory, the one that sums up why I choose to return and the wisdom of so doing is the following. One morning, as Joe and Marge were discussing yet another increase in the rate of infections and bemoaning the dismal performance of the government, LMS and I were sitting a few feet away discussing ways to classify farts. The thorny issue being what types of farts made what kind of sound. The kind of silliness that kept at bay all the pernicious doom and gloom, rather like expecto patronum to the dementors!

For this and a great many other reasons I’ll miss living with her. I’ll still see her, it just won’t be the same is all. I would say she’s one of my favourite people but seeing as how nearly all of the people I knew have excused themselves from my life, that isn’t the compliment it once would’ve been. That being unfortunately so, let me write that she is one of my most favourite ever people. Top five easily. I’m reminded of the line I heard somewhere that sums up how I’ll feel perfectly: ‘the absence of her means more than the presence of others’

Which is why two weeks of her is such an unexpected joy, and coming at such a prociptious time to boot. This morning as I was drinking my tea too slowly for her liking, she sat next to me, a stern expression on her face and said, “I’m radiating impatience!” How could I not be charmed by that? I get that it might be considered something by some people to be so thrilled at me finding someone else’s ill heath fortuitous, but really! Have I ever really cared what other people think?  

Yesterday the BBC carried the news that,

More than 500,000 people worldwide have now lost their lives as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University in the US.

 Since the virus emerged in China late last year, there have been more than 10 million cases, Johns Hopkins reports.

You know what I’m going to write about that, don’t you? Of course you do, my blog has been nothing if consistent in pointing out that for a supposed killer disease, coronavirus isn’t killing that many people. I get that some people mind find this the wrong way to interpret the numbers but then those are the sort of people who move their lips when they read, but I’m working on the assumption that whoever reads my blog is a sentient adult capable of critical analysis.

10 million cases resulting in 500,000 deaths, depending on how you look at it means either a 5% chance of death, or a 95% chance of survival.

Mmm, a killer disease with a 95% of survival rate? Really?

And, of course, we know that a billion a thousand million, so therefore we know that half a million deaths equals 0.05% of a billion. Being even more brutal, given that the world population stands at around 7 billions, those 500,000 deaths become an even smaller percentage still. And it’s taken a while to get even to that. Obviously those deaths are a personal tragedy for the loved ones of the deceased but of it had taken weeks to get to this figure, not nearly six months, then I’d be taking things with the seriousness it would deserve.

But I can’t, because the numbers don’t tell me I should.

As I have mentioned many times before on this blog, things that appear shocking to most people are not shocking to me, but the fact that they find them shocking in the first place, now that’s what shocks me. They’re the sort of people who’d be surprised to find someone who looks exactly like them staring back at them in the bathroom mirror every morning.

The beaches on the Dorset coast are crowded. And? In what universe is this in any way shocking? It would be shocking if no one had gone at all, if the beaches were as clear as the waterways in Venice were a couple of months ago. But people flocking to the coast after a prolonged period of lockdown, coupled with increasing hot weather, a perception the worst is finally over and a self-serving attitude that it’s everyone else that is behaving recklessly, but they’re being reasonable? Not shocking or any word conveying a degree of surprise, no.

My first thought on seeing the images of a packed Bournemouth beach was ‘What kind of mental pigmy takes one look at the beach, heaves his bags of beach stuff onto his shoulder and ploughs on through the throng? Might not a helicopter fly overhead and drop sewage on them instead? That’d clear the beaches quick-sharp. Why bother cleaning the beaches of all the rubbish. Don’t encourage them, leave it there’

Better yet, turn the beach into a minefield. That could play to Johnsons desire to appear Churchillian, you know, “fight them on the beaches” and all that.

My second thought was that this kind of idiocy only reaffirms my fear that a second wave of Coronavirus is imminent and also that human beings are complicit in their own eventual extinction. People know the risks, they know that gathering in large groups isn’t advisable, but yet because of their own sense of entitlement, their bloody-mindedness, their arrogantly selfish desire to do whatever they want to do, they do it. Were most of those gathered on the beaches at Bournemouth to get the virus and for some of them to die from it, would that be such a great loss? Or just of natural selection?

Again, as I have repeatedly maintained on this blog, the extinction of the human race would be to the massive benefit of this planet. Because for the brief time that humanity has existed, it has brought nothing but wanton destruction in its wake. Indeed the actions of the people on the beach at Bournemouth all but guaranteed it So it seems highly proper that humanity should experience the same fate as the one we inflicted on the dodo.