the brilliantly leaping gazelle

It’s pissing it down, it really is, has been doing so for most of the night, and if I was minded to think about it, I might consider that if we’d had this sort of weather on and off for the last month or so, then the lockdown might have been somewhat more effective. As it often said – by me, mainly – rain is a policeman, as in nobody goes out in it unless they absolutely have to. But I’m not in the mood to write about that.

No, instead I want to tell you why I’m in mood such that I can’t remember, why I’m still in bed typing this and why I have no plans to move other than to use my en-suite toilet.

Because it is pissing down, the rear wall of my bedroom resembles one of those horror films with Vincent Price, where the walls leak blood. This has been a persistent problem over the past – I forget how many years exactly – but none of that matters. Neither do most of the solutions to fix the various leaks, so effective have they been that when I hear it rain I think it only a question of when and not if the leaks will start.

At the moment there is a solution that sort of works, given the owners are not going to spend loads investigating it, possibly having to have a new roof put on my room, when the plan to knock it down in less than a year and build an extension. They can easily cope with my discomfort and right on cue, I can hear the relentless dripping sound of a leak falling onto the wooden floor just behind my headrest.

Marge came into my room earlier and aside from opening all of the curtains, was horrified by the state of the wall, so much so that she bought her partner Joe in, so we could discuss what should be done.

Unfortunately, I just don’t care, I mean obviously I care when drips fall on my face and wake me up, obviously I care that I can’t hang any pictures on the back wall and of course I care that I don’t care, but in the scheme of things that bother me, that doesn’t matter.

It should do though. I know that.  I know that most people’s yardstick for how much things bother them isn’t how bad they are is when they’re compared to waking up after a month in a coma and realise you can’t walk.

Referring to my room as ‘my room’ is a misnomer, not because the house belongs to someone else, but because I’ve never thought of it as ‘my room’. Well, not in the sense that I imagine most people think of when they imagine ‘their room’. Yes my bed is in there, yes so are my clothes, some books, some files and my most treasured possession, Bruno, my teddy bear, but I have I tried to make it comfy, to personalize it, put my stamp on it so to speak, to make it recognizably mine? No.

Possibly that’s because I don’t think of this house as home, in fact I’ve only ever thought of three houses as home, and the lyric “A house is not a home’ is true, at least in my case it is. A house is a collection of bricks, mortar, glass and other building materials cunningly arranged into a recognizable structure that looks very much like it could be a home but a home is an entirely different proposition altogether. A house only becomes a home when it embodies certain characteristics. These vary from person to person depending on what is important to them. But in my case to make a house a home one would need to fill it with laughter, happiness, peace and above all love. Good companions and the ever-present potential of cups of tea and buttered crumpets wouldn’t go amiss either. In essence to me a home is a place of sanctuary, one where you metaphorically close the front door once inside and lean back on the door safe in the knowledge that the outside world is just that, outside.

Since waking up from the coma I haven’t felt that and the house I lived in as a child I never felt that, so is essence I’ve only ever felt truly at home somewhere for, all told, less than a third of my life.

So not really a good proportion really.

This isn’t meant to depress anyone or to elicit any sympathy from them. It’s just a bold, factual – maybe too bold, too factual – statement of the facts, certainly as regards my living arrangements and certainly as I see them. Indeed anyone who knows me well would know it’d be impossible for me to think any other way and have thought this for some years. But much like me never having long hair again, never being thirty again, never having voted Conservative, believing in god or aliens, it’s like how Bruce Hornsby has it,

’That’s just the way it is and some things will never change.’

I was out and about yesterday, relaxing in the park, when a couple traversed my eyeline. Normally, the sight of a couple wouldn’t bother me, but actually, there were five of them; the wife was heavily pregnant, the father was carrying a baby in a thing on his chest, and there was a toddler running behind them. And I thought ‘We’re fucked’, although thinking it about it was an apt summation of the wider problem of over population. She clearly had been and so, by extension, is the planet.

As anyone familiar with my posts will know, I’m not overly enamoured with the fact that people keep on having more children, when we know we consume too much of the planets natural resources as it is and now’s there’s a new fangled concern with regard to cutting down on consumption. Quite how this squares with people having more children I don’t know. Unless I’m much mistaken, more children means parents will buy more things and then those children will grow up and have more children themselves. To my mind, it’s a very vicious circle, one of our own creation, one which we adding to.

Gordon Ramsey, the grisly faced, potty-mouthed celebrity chef leaps to mind. Apparently his wife has just given birth to their seventh – seventh – child! What level of ego is he deluding himself with if he thinks that his DNA is so important that that the planet needs yet more of it. Same with David Tennant, his wife has just had their fifth. I mean, I know he was good in ‘Dr.Who’ and all, but its Timelords that can regenerate, humans just procreate. But my favourite has to be everyone’s least favourite mockney geezer Jamie Oliver, whose wife has just had their sixth. I only caught a bit of his show by mistake recently, but he was banging on about how important it was to use sustainable fish and to insist on buying organic because he cares, you know. Just not enough to keep his jubbly not so bubbly, or not to bish his bosh.

There should be a mandatory one child only policy, and if people want more children, well orphanages are full of children needing homes. They could have one of Angelina Jolies many rejects. I fail to see why anyone would want to have a child now, not with the state of the world being what it is. It doesn’t fill one with optimism for the future does it? Anyone who has had a child in the last, oh, five years, shouldn’t be too surprised when their child realises how utterly grimola the world they’ve been born into is and sues them.

A few moments ago, Marge received a ‘phone call from one of the owners of this house, that only underlined their sense of entitlement and expectation. They’re so used to people jumping through their hoops, to getting their own way, that even at a time like this, even at a time of an ongoing and worsening national emergency, it’s still a shock for them not to have the usual response, that of immediate compliance.

Some background might be useful here.

A couple of years ago now, the previous owners indicated their intention to put this house up for sale. For various reasons, Marge wasn’t impressed by this, but remembered that people she vaguely knew and lived nearby, had always liked this house, and told them of this. Long story short, they bought it, but as the new owners wife had just got a job with a grace and favour home thrown in – you know you’re doing well when employers throw in a house to seal the deal! – they wouldn’t take possession of this for some time. Which, we discovered last December, was to be December 31^st this year.

Nice!

Anyway, back to today. After the usual pleasantries, well as pleasant as pleasantries can be at the moment, she got to the point of her call. A workman was due to replace the windows on the front of the house and has built the windows. Could he come and fit them, only she’s worried that he might go out of business before he fits them. So she wants to fit us up, so he can fit them? I mean she does there’s a bit of a thing going on now? Of course she does! A lodger in their house has the coronavirus and is in isolation.

She works somewhere that in ordinary times would be less onerous, more of a title than a job, one to impress your friends, if your friends are the sort of people who’d be impressed by that. But now she has to do actual work, the kind of work that’s technically in the job description, but she never did. Until now.

She then followed this humdinger with wondering if it’d be possible for someone to come and do something to one of our garden walls. She does realise that the government is advising people to stay at home? She knows we’re self-isolating so we’re making use of the garden, so in what fucking universe does she think we would want someone turning our garden into a building site.

Oh, her worry about losing the money she’s spent on the windows? Her husband is a barrister who earns £500 an hour. My heart bleeds.

I heard that once on a radio show, and I think of it occasionally but today it seemed really applicable to a wider range of people, who were all actively engaged in annoying me. It didn’t seem as if they were. Trust me, they were.

I was in a bad mood this morning and so needed to be somewhere else, anywhere really so as not to infect others with it. I can’t help it. It’s my default setting. Bad mood? Be selfish. Go somewhere else. So I did.

After a few hours my bladder let me know that it would soon need emptying. Shitting cock, thought I. Then I though that should cut a small – not too small – hole in my pants, match it up with a corresponding hole in some jeans and bingo! Problem solved. Carefully ease the one eyed trouser snake into position and then surreptiously  water the plants.I’m not going to do it, of course! Or am I….

I came back, still in a bad mood, went to the toilet, put on some sun cream, charged up my ‘phone and went out again. This time to a more pleasant park. Well in theory it was, in practice less so. I’d been enjoying the afternoon sun when some dickhead thought ‘ I know, I’ll fly my drone about, no-one’ll mind, in fact they’ll thank me for adding to their enjoyment of the day”

When that waste of oxygen had finally finished, who should take it upon themselves to unite everyone in earshot in violent thoughts that could be visited upon him? A bongo player. There must be special place in hell for bongo players. Why they think it perfectly acceptable to infect their noise on everyone else is a mystery.

He finished – and it’s always a him isn’t it – and then another started and reminded me that there’s one thing worse than a bongo player.

A fucking learner.

They were at it again last night, the happy clappers.

The ones who show their support for NHS and other care workers, not by voting Conservative, not going on any marches against privatisation, but by going the extra yard out of their front door and clapping for a bit. Words alone cannot convey how nauseatingly virtue signalling I find all of this and the fact that it stems from a keenness to show solidarity and support for staff putting our needs above their safety only compounds this. I could hear them, whopping and cheering like it meant something to someone other than themselves.

Is this cynical? I don’t know, but what I do know is that 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. But given that most of her neighbours moved there within the last few years, are young families who earn enough to buy a house in N16 – she is housing association – and have a street party once a year, shock this is not. 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.

How very English!

LMS has drawn a picture, lovely and colourful it is too, spelling out ‘NHS’, which Marge and Joe have put up in our window. In a parallel universe, I’d have put up a sign in big black lettering that said ‘Virtue signalling’ We could then take a ‘photo of it and claim it was deeply ironical, and share it with the Twaterrati.

So, bread and water for me tonight then!

Yesterday afternoon it all seemed so bleak, well in my head anyway.

It just takes me unawares, my depression; it’s like a tsunami of misery, unpredictable and sudden, engulfing me, wave after wave seeming to compound my feelings of utter worthlessness. Sure there’s a pandemic. Sure people are dying. But you didn’t want to wake up from the coma in the first place so why should you care if you live or die? Yes, granted, in your head there’s a difference between wanting to die and wanting to be dead and that’s great and everything but…oh bollocks!

Marge is at the door insisting we go for a walk. I really don’t want to, it’s much more comforting being alone with these thoughts. If I got out I’ll have to pretend to something that I’m not feeling right now, I’ll have to make an effort, and I really don’t know if I can be fucking bothered, actually.

But its Marge and there are certain things in this world that just are, forces of nature that one can’t negotiate with; like the constancy of the tides, or the rising of the sun, one immutable fact is Marge’s confidence in the certainty of her own opinion. An unshakeable belief that one is simply being stubborn in not doing what she’s suggesting, but that soon they’ll tire of this nonsense, stop shilly-shallying about, and just do it. That, by the way, isn’t a bad thing and nor should it be misinterpreted as anything other than praise. When I tell her this and she throws it back at me, I say ‘But I’ve never claimed to be unfamiliar with those feelings.’

So out for a walk we went, in the sun and feeling a tad less miserable than I did earlier, remarking that if weren’t for the ever present threat of death bedevilling us, London without the planes, the pollution but with the clear blue sky and having the quiet only interrupted by birdsong, would be quite pleasant. We ended up at a small nature reserve, well what passes for a nature reserve in this part of South London, essentially a patch of land the size of maybe two football pitches, lots of greenery and tree’s that have been cut down but left in situ for wildlife.

The thing about peace and quiet is that it gives one time to think and if you happen to be thinking about someone else’s problems and not your own, well that’s a good thing, and at that time, in that place it was a very good thing indeed. It was like one of those old silent films, where a girl is tied to railway tracks and there’s an approaching train and then suddenly the train is diverted onto another track. Why am I thinking of the fantastic train sequence in Wallace and Gromits ‘The Wrong Trousers’? The point is that I felt better, although not as better as I did when I spoke to my partner after Marge had left me with my mood much improved.

We chatted for a bit, but what she wanted to tell me, I mean really wanted to tell was about a story was a in ‘The Guardian’

French researchers to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients

Which said to me, as it would do to anyone with knowledge of films, was that life is imitating the Woody Allen comedy ‘Sleepers’ Yes, there was time when Woody Allen made some really funny films and his 1973 one ‘Sleepers’ is one. ‘Take the Money and Run’ being another. Anyway Allen plays a health food shop owner, who in a run of bad luck, goes into hospital, is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in 2173. One of the things he’s given to pacify him is a cigarette. Horrified by this, he’s told that now they realise that cigarettes and other things, which were considered bad in 1973, are in fact good for you.

This cheered me right up, if I ignored all the other stories on “The Guardians’ website, that is. It’s an unrelenting diet of misery now, it’s as if Fergal Keane and Orla Guerin were the editors now. Only the ‘The Guardian wouldn’t have editors, it’s too hierarchical, too them and us, too the old way of doing things. No, instead of editorial meetings attended by a few senior staff, they’d have a workers collective meeting, that’d last for hours and where everyone would sit on bean bags dinking organic fair-trade mung bean coffee and eating nettle and guilt falafels prepared by interns.

Writing of beanbags, my huge garden one arrived earlier and I told LMS she could play with it until I finished this. One more thing before then, last night I had eight hours uninterrupted sleep, and I hardly ever get that here. But I can hear LMS enjoying my beanbag. I’ll put a stop to that. Well I’ll try to…

I was going to post about something else today, something a tad more serious, but then as is so often the case nowadays, events dictated otherwise and here we are. But before we get to the good bit, the pudding, you’ll first have to endure a starter and a main before that happy event.

Actually, I’ve always seen meals in that way; that pudding is a reward for having endured the previous two courses, that you’d stuck it out, a bit of a culinary ordeal with a prize at the end. In fact, I have been known to, when eating out somewhere, to keep an eye on the plate sizes for their puddings, and if I think they’re not big enough, or the portions are mean, order two and make one decent sized one. Or two different puddings. Why ever not? Makes sense to me.

Anyway enough of that, I’ve been thinking about our self-isolation with specific regard to LMS’s mental health. Relax, I think she’s doing fine. But then I’m not a child psychologist. How can anyone intuit the effect on a child of having the constant certainty of routine suddenly whisked away from them? No matter how much school is a drudge to a child – LMS loves it – nonetheless there is a structure that it imposes and which a child gets used to. There’s the start of the school year, then a half term holiday. term begins again, then the Christmas holiday, new term, another half term holiday, term starts and a longer summer holiday and the next school year starts. Everyone reading this experienced it, it may have been a positive or negative one, but nonetheless you very quickly got used to it. I can’t even begin to imagine how utterly disorientating LMS finds all this.

Being cooped up in the house, surrounded by adults, only keeping in contact with her fiends in a virtual way, hearing how food shopping is becoming a big deal and when she does go out, seeing streets emptier than she’s ever seen them…and all the rest. As adults, we can rationalise our self isolation, critically evaluate it, see the bigger picture when all she knows is that its lovely and sunny out, she can’t go to school, can’t see her friends, As adults, we accept this, as we know it’ll end sometime, but to LMS the novelty is beginning to wear off.

Which brings us to last night and more importantly pudding. By the way a big shout out, as they used to say on pirate radio, to Emily in Australia. This one’s for you.

Picture the scene. Dinner last night, Marge facing me, LMS next to me, Joe cooked but a video chat. Got it? Marge is asking LMS about some home schooling thing she did today, a video or lesson by her school about the food chain. Could she tell us about it, what did she learn? Quick as a flash came the reply,

‘A lot of things and some other stuff’

How I managed not to pebble dash Marge’s face with food, I don’t know.

I‘ve been thinking about yesterday’s post regarding my previous long-standing addiction to news and reflecting on much of a bellend I must’ve been. A bellend with a sense of superiority based on nothing more than watching television, listening to the radio and reading the paper like most adults do. Except, of course, I watched the right kind of television, listened to the right kind of radio and read the right kind of paper. If anyone thought I was a total news snob, they were kind enough not to say it.

For years I was somehow convinced that if I didn’t keep abreast of news and current affairs then something, I knew not what, would happen. It was an obsession, which like most obsessions happens gradually so that one only realises it’s an obsession when its become one. Well I did. But every Christmas for the last few years I made a conscious decision to avoid all news, as both a present to myself, but more to see not only if I could do it, but if I could, would there be any negative impacts on my life.

My first post of 2020 – in late February – started thusly;

I haven’t posted a blog for a while now, partly due to the fact that each post gets on average fewer readers than Boris’s Johnson has children and partly due to the fact that since last Christmas I’ve been avoiding news bulletins and websites. This has been a conscious decision and yet bizarrely my not paying attention to what is going on doesn’t seem to have had a discernible effect on anything.

I knew I was onto a winner just before – or after — New Year, when my partner asked me what did I think about Megan and Harry? Oh, I said, what have they done now? The notion that they’d done something that some people considered news worthy and were talking about it endlessly came as a shock. Although it has to be said, much less of a shock than me not knowing about it and then me knowing about it and still not caring about it. I may continue in this happy state of blissful ignorance regarding events that have no direct effect on me for the foreseeable.

If only I’d done this years ago, I might’ve been happier in my own skin. The anecdote that follows is indicative only of what a total bellend I was, how far the obsession had taken hold. Some years ago, an American woman was staying at our house for a while and was puzzelled by the fact that I always disappeared up to my room at 11.55pm. ‘He goes up to listen to the news’ she was told, and thinking that ‘listening to the news’ was some kind of euphemism, headed up to my room.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, when she got there. When I said I was about to ‘listen to the news’, she asked if she could stay. I said she could, at which point she started talking. And talking. And she never shut up.  ‘Which part of me listening to the news,’ I asked through gritted teeth, ‘involves you chatting all over it?’.

Which did the trick!

I was made aware last night that my post of yesterday might possibly have been open to misinterpretation with regard to my comments about Marge. Certainly, her saying ‘I’ve read your coruscating blog’ and my partner saying pretty much the same thing, didn’t exactly imbue me with warm and fuzzy feelings inside. The last thing I want to do is accidentally offend anyone. It’s as I say to my partner if I bump into her, ‘ I don’t want to accidentally hit you, I want to do it on purpose, get some welly behind it’ She laughs at this.

Thinks I’m joking . Bless.

Anyway the point is that there are infinity better ways to offend Marge. Hang on. is that a wise thing to write when she has just made me a cup of tea? Maybe not. The reason I eschew news now, and don’t want it in my head, is that I know first how addictive it can be. I used to be like Marge, maybe better looking, with unquestionably better dress sense – I really wear a dress -, and have incomparably better taste in music, but in terms of being obsessed by news she is but a vlog with ten subscribers,  whereas I was the BBC.

Many years ago, a good friend and I would discuss politics endlessly as if we both had some personal stake in it. Actually, he sort of did, as he tried to become a Conservative counsellor. When we weren’t talking about politics it was the news and politics. People said we should never have got on, our politics were so different, but the thing was he was willing and eager to talk about them, so yes his conclusions were as wrong as he no doubt thought mine were, but that was but a minor detail.

Even on holiday my desire for news didn’t take a holiday, it came with me, much to the – very thinly veiled – annoyance of my partner. So when we should’ve been on deserted beaches on a Greek Islands, instead I had her traipsing all over for a copy of ‘The Guardian Weekly’. That was a great call.

Even in Australia, I would get up at 3, possibly 4am, to listen to BBC Radio 4’s midnight news on the World Service. Most nights. I even took a portable radio with me. Even on a boat on The Great Barrier Reef, for some incomprehensible reason I thought it a good idea – actually I didn’t even think, it was so automatic – to crash on the deck of the boat and listen to the news under the stars. Looking back at it now, I must’ve been mad!

So I know how easy it can be to think that somehow, in some nebulous but vital way, it is imperative one listens to the news. And then discusses it, dissects, tries to fathom out where exactly it fits into the news you’ve already heard, and speculate endlessly – and often incorrectly – as to what might happen next.

It’s rather like ‘Eastenders’ with an ever changing cast of characters, some who disappear only to return years later, some who just vanish, some who are just there since forever– like Ian Beale-, and multiple story lines all at the same time. Its complicated but because you’ve put the hours in, it isn’t. There are things you know, you can’t explain how you know them but you do, and to explain them to anyone else would be both impossible and take too long. And besides, if they aren’t going to stick with it, whats the point?

So yes, I know, but rather, I knew, because I’ve weaned myself off it. It wasn’t easy, because news is more easily accessible now and there’s so much more of it now’ more so now with smart ‘phones but was it worth it? Oh yes!

I admit that yesterdays post was a bit cynical. It doesn’t make the central argument wrong though. And I’m still as certain as I was yesterday that Joe Wicks is a decent chap, and not, as someone so memorably said of Boris’s Johnson, the sort of man let drive your drunk daughter home after a party. No indeed.

But I am firmly of the view that anyone possessed by the belief that somehow the drastic measures imposed by governments worldwide to help combat the spread of the coronavirus, will, by the power of castle greyskull, act as a necessary corrective on global financial institutions and agreements is dangerously ignorant of financial history. The very idea that something as transient as global health crisis might somehow alter the trajectory of financiers concerns is patently absurd. It suggest a fundamental lack of awareness about the basis of capitalism, its historical role in the shaping of society, and the way in which it has enmeshed itself into the fabric of our lives, so much so, that even when people are offered something different, they reject it. Labour’s defeat at the last election, anyone?

But I don’t want to write about that. I’ll park that one for now. Instead I want to tell you about my morning. It started pleasantly enough, with LMS knocking on my bedroom door and asking if I wanted a cup of tea! After I got up, made her some porridge, we then discussed the thorny subject of Marge’s birthday. My take is that we should make a thing of it, for all our sakes, to have it as a landmark, something to look forward to as to help relive the stress we’re all under. LMS then had a stroke of genius by suggesting we should make it cornavirus themed event, to turn negative into a positive.

Inspired.

Immediately we set about thinking of what food and drinks to have.

It was all going so well. A nice, relaxing start to the day. Joe came down, we chatted, just idle banter, nothing of note, and then Marge arrived. After a few perfunctory comments it was straight into giving us details of a Sunday Times article deeply critical of Boris’s Johnson handling of the whole affair. And all I could think was ‘Am I better off for knowing any of this or is it going to stress me out? Can I alter events in any way?’

They used to say that being the England manager was the worst job there was, because everyone thinks they can do a better job of it than you. Imagine being the Prime Minister! Of course he’s going to get things wrong, but then so would we if we were in his shoes. It can’t be helpful, in the midst of a crisis of the most mind-bending complexity, to have people constantly second guessing and criticizing every decision you make, because they read something somewhere by someone and that somehow allows them to do so. Think how easy Churchill would’ve had it during the Second World War, if the internet and social media was available then. We’d all be speaking German, although not my partner. She wouldn’t have been born. Her Dad is Jewish.

It’s hardly a secret that I’m avoiding all news, principally because it increases stress and in so doing helps reduce one’s immune system, but also because the same thing happens in all pandemics. It happened with the ‘Black Death’ in medieval Europe. It happened with Influenza outbreak in 1920 and it’s happening now. The specifics are different, but the underlying factors are the same, incompetence doesn’t change, human nature doesn’t change and hindsight doesn’t either. Me knowing the specifics won’t change a thing, other than make me feel more pessimistic than I do right now. I don’t want this shit in my head. Soon the crisis will be over and if I’m alive, so much the better, and if I’m dead?

Well, we’re all going to die eventually and besides, I’ll be beyond caring.