the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I was out walking in the park yesterday, careful to avoid the attentions of the tabard wearing functionaries, whose main function, was it seemed to stop people loitering or sitting on the grass. In this weather. Clearly they had just a little bit too humanity to pass the entrance exam as a traffic warden. I was tempted to find out how slow could I could go before it was considered actually stopping. Or what would happen if they judged that I’d stopped in one place for too long or if the distance between these stops wasn’t sufficiently distant enough. Basic wind up 101.

But I was distracted by a tantalising snippet of conversation I overheard from two people jogging towards me. It was incredibly frustrating only to have heard what I heard and not the before or the after. Both would’ve great, the whole thing just perfect. But they ran past me, leaving me deeply unsatisfied, rather like when you’re finally passed a spliff, only to discover there’s no grass in it, just tobacco. When you hear someone say ‘I’d rather be isolated with a Bengal tiger.’ you want to hear more.

Well I do. I want to know why exactly why she’d rather be isolated with a Bengal tiger. In great detail. Forensic detail ideally. I’d want to hear about all the petty irritations that can quickly escalate into an argument. I’d want to chapter and verse on all of this. I’d be fascinated, as indeed, would most people. Because nothing helps alleviate ones own sense of suffering than hearing that someone has it worse. And I’d also want to ask them ‘If a we couldn’t get a Bengal tiger, what other wild animal would you settle for? Two hyena’s, maybe? A boa constrictor or a black widow spider at a push?’ It has always been a source of great amusement to me that everyone considers themselves to be a bastion of calm and even-temperedness at all times during an argument. That they display remarkable restraint and fortitude in the face of unbelievable provocation and can find nothing in their words or deeds worthy of reproach, but the other person, well…

This made me think how right I was to return back to Camberwell for the lockdown. I mean, yes, I could’ve stayed at my partners house, and for three or four days I’d’ve been quite happy. But then I’d miss the garden, which in this weather has become into it’s own and I’d also miss my music. Those would be hardships, of course. But an incomparable loss would be the absence of LMS. In another world, writing about something entirely different, someone wrote ‘The absence of her means more to me than the presence of others.’ At the time it  seemed arrant nonsense,. Naturally it did. A friend of mine had just been dumped and inexplicably he sought solace from his navel gazing by reading poetry. To me it was the sort of things poets write so that earnest types can quote it to impress someone, but now I know better. As I mentioned on this blog last Christmas,

(LMS) is my favourite person in the whole world, my favourite person possibly because I’ve known her all her life, possibly because of her relentless capacity for mucking about, possibly for lots of other things, but unquestionably because of her wonderful effect on my extremely moody outlook. All the medication I could swallow would be nowhere near mood enhancing as a four year old delight banging insistently on my bedroom door and shouting “Get up, get up, I want to play”, until I did.

Of course me writing that she’s my favourite person in the world might’ve had more currency had I not had a brain injury and had not essentially everyone I known vanished like a virgin on prom night. Although having written that, there is something rather wonderful when I think I’ve snuck quietly out of the house and double locked the door, then to hear footsteps running urgently to the door, the letterbox being flung open and a voice demanding to know where I’m going and telling me I can’t go, because without me the house is boring.

And at this time, when the news is unremittingly grim, I could choose to fill my head with things that would only depress me. So, instead I choose not to, I choose to preserve my mental health so that it doesn’t go mental. I mean, I know the news is bad and it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. Or not better exactly, more less worse. I know this. I just don’t want all the details in my head.

What I do want in my head is to be mightily impressed by the descriptive imaginative power of someone who can say ‘In a dream the air is thick with imagination.’ And not think it of note, but instead we engaged in the more important task of classifying farts. And besides, why would I want to be apart from someone who this morning knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted a cup of tea? And who has just given her opinion that ‘chocolate isn’t a food because its too tasty’

Indeed, too tasty to share, lest I risk her becoming a Bengal tiger.

Yesterday, like millions of other households, we received a ‘vital update from the government’, the purpose of which was ‘to update you on the steps we are taking to combat coronavirus’

He set the tone from the start, by claiming ‘From the start, we have sought to put in the right measures at the right time.’ The key word here was ‘sought’. Anyone can seek anything, but whether they find it or not is anyone’s guess. It continues, ‘We will not hesitate to go further if that is what the scientific and medical advice tells us we must do.’ Even to me, someone who has studiously avoided the news, I find that palpable nonsense. I read “Private Eye’ and it has been especially critical of the governments belated, confusing, and ultimately counter-productive advice.

The leaflet that accompanies this, with the ronseal inspired title,

CORONAVIRUS: STAY AT HOME, PROTECT THE NHS, SAVE LIVESI

is actually, in contrast with the letter, really rather good. It’s informative in an unambiguous way. Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of English could understand it.  Right from the get go, it’s off, ramming home the governments message,

The single most important action you can take is to stay at home in order to protect the NHS and save lives.

And to be fair to the government, having it emblazoned on the podiums used during press conferences, press conferences which are broadcast live and get prominence on news bulletins, their doing everything they can to get the key message out. No-one can possibly be ignorant of them by now, and by keeping it simple, with constant repetition, it’s working.

But it’s the ‘Reverse Meatloaf Principle ‘ inasmuch as he claimed that ‘two out of three ain’t bad’ and after the abject failure to connect with people of’ Strong and Stable’ and ‘Get Brexit Done’, at a time when we need it the most, the government has finally delivered.

It’s just that had this leaflet been sent out some weeks ago, had the government acted in…well a more governmental way, then where we are now could have been avoided.  It sets out what we need to do and what the government is doing to help us do it. However, the social contract we make with the government is that we accept we are a collection of individuals inhabiting the same land mass and in order to continue to do so, we subjugate some of our rights and freedoms to allow the government to act for the benefit of all. One of those benefits is protection. But if it is the very government charged with protecting us that isn’t, does it mean the social contract is null and void?

I end on a piece of such brazen cant written by a brazen cant.

Boris’s Johnson ends his letter ” I want o thank everyone who is working flat out to beat the virus, in particular the staff in our fantastic NHS and care sector across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.” That would be the NHS that has been systematically hollowed out and underfunded by this and previous governments on the altar of profit? That would be the care sector that is close to collapse because of an increasing demand yet funding cuts. “It has been truly inspirational to see our doctors, nurses and other carers rise magnificently to the needs of the hour.”  That would be the junior doctors who a previous Conservative Health minister was engaged in a long running and bitter dispute with over hours, pay, and working practices. And not content with rattling their cage, thought he’d try again with consultants. That would be the nurse who recently went on strike in Northern Ireland. And the carer’s who barely make minimum wage?

His thanks won’t pay their bills, they can’t be used at a supermarket checkout to buy food or be used as a means of exchange or barter. Basically, his thanks sum up his entire handling of the coronavirus crisis, totally useless.

Yesterday it was reported that so far, the confirmed number of coronavirus cases worldwide now stands at 1.5million. 1.5million? Is that all?

As good fortune would have it, a couple of days earlier a housemate had clarified what exactly a billion is. I’d always thought it meant a million millions but no, it seems that the accepted measure of a billion is a thousand million. So I was wrong by quite a wide margin, some 999,000 millions wrong, it would seem.

Anyway my point is that if a billion is a thousand million, then 1.5 million expressed as a percentage of that is 0.15%. I think. Maths was never my thing. So therefore it stands that if the global population totals over 7 billion, then that percentage becomes smaller still. I know, completely meaningless numbers, cold, factual and boring. So lets try and render it more relatable, something we can all understand.

It’s not likely to happen, but imagine if I presented LMS with a chocolate gateaux, a triple layered one with cream filling and raspberries and said to her “ Right, here’s the deal, if this cake represents the total population of the world, you can have as a slice of it that’s proportionate to the amount of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world.”

Happy she would not be.

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 naive. Of course they’re not! For one thing a child of 8 or 18 has more life in them, more potential than someone who’s 88. It seems blatantly obvious to me, anyway. Just so you know, my Mum is 88 and she freely admits she’s had her life. And given how were constantly reminded of the need to protect the NHS, shouldn’t one the ways we can help it, is 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.

Anyone over the age of, what do they say in the bible, four score and ten? Well however much that is then, anyone over that gets the virus well, lets just hope they’ve made a will!

There’s no getting away from it. I’m in a bad mood, and that’s official. So bad, in fact, that at times I ape Billy Liar. For those of you who haven’t seen the classic British film ‘Billy Liar’ – and you really need to take a long hard look at yourselves if you haven’t – Billy is a fantasist who yearns to escape the drab northern town where he lives with parents to seek fame and fortune in London.

Well he thinks he does.

Anyway, at one point in the film Billy is outling his plans to his parents during breakfast, who in a 1950’s provincial way, pour scorn on his ambition. Billy retreats into his fantasy world, where imagines machine gunning them to death over their boiled eggs and toast. I know how he feels. In my mind, I’ve committed the most unspeakably heinous crimes countless times throughout my life. It’s a sign of just how much of a demented wrongcock I am, that hardly any of my fantasises have ever been about sex. That’s for the unimaginative. There are so many other, darker, more comic, more twisted, more..imaginative ones to play with.

For example;

Last week, the Sunday Sport was reporting that a couple had found a novel way to earn during the lockdown, by streaming online themselves having sex, rather wonderfully on the same day that most of front pages were full of palace press releases telling us how wonderful, how heartfelt and how just utterly brilliant in every way her address to the nation had been the night before. Coincidentally I had just found out that so many people had been flouting social distancing measures that the authorities had decided to close Brockwell Park to enforce them. This got me thinking. In a deeply twisted way, I hope you won’t be surprised to learn.

Just imagine, well no don’t, not if you’ve just eaten that is, that the laughing queen from jollity farm and phil the greek threaten to do a live two hour sex marathon every day until people stop flouting government advice. And don’t think having a screen turned off will help! This is a fantasy, my fantasy, so my rules, so every screen can be remotely hijacked and turned on – unlike the viewers – and so steam the sexathon live. They could even threaten to take requests, you know, like on those ‘adult’ channels that only broadcast after midnight where viewers text in requests for the performers to perform.

After four days of this the streets would be as empty as phil.

Another one concerns anti-vaccers, people who are so set against vaccination for their child, believing that somehow there’s a conspiracy afoot involving the government, the pharmaceutical industry, Bigfoot and the entire medical establishment. That they have pulled back the curtain to reveal the truth, which they share with equally delusional fuckwits on social media. My fantasy is this.

That at some point a vaccine for CO-VID 19 is developed and a nationwide programme of vaccinations is announced and people arrive at testing centres to get it. A somebody armed only with a white coat, ridiculous hair and a clipboard checks peoples names in the queue to get in and every so often, asks a family. Yes, there’s a bit of a problem, they say. The children can be vaccinated, so to can any adults in the family who didn’t post on social media about how they were. They’d have detailed social media evidence, proving that Snowden right to back them up. They didn’t believe in vaccinations then, so what had changed, apart from their desire not to die?

The third – and probably not the last fantasy I’ll have about all this – concerns this new fangled desire to cook for hospital workers and my housemate. Not like that! She cooked something a few days ago, with cabbage and something turned the liquid an unspeakable shade of grey. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 1960’s documentary about the Soviet Gulags. Anyway, she cooks, puts it in some Tupperware, takes it to our local hospital where she gives it to some nurses.

A day later they are all stricken by severe food poisoning, the severity of it depends on my mood.

So some days, like today, its fatal.

Last night during dinner, LMS asked something that only a child can, in that innocently curious yet direct way that children have, one that demanded a simple but unambiguous answer.

“Is Boris Johnson going to die?”

I must confess to being stunned for a second, not because I knew what my answer was going to be and whether or not to sugar coat it, but because parents have consistently spoken of him in the most unflattering terms regarding his handling of Brexit that I was amazed she would care.

“Everyone’s going to die eventually.” I said.

Alright, alright, I know she meant in terms of his being in intensive care because of the virus, but what other possible answer could I give? Her father, not being as blunt as me, or possibly wishing to ameliorate matters or simply not wanting his daughter to have nightmares, quickly added, “We don’t know if he’ll die from this.” which thinking about it is saying the same thing in possibly a more child friendly way.

I mean he will die. You will. I will, a fact that I’m more than a trifle irked by, but as I’ve repeatedly written in my posts, the extinction of the human race is by far the best thing for the planet. In the short time mankind has been about – roughly 3 seconds if the life of the planet is measured as a 24hr clock – we’ve managed to plunder and pollute it, the overwhelming majority of this done in the last roughly 200 years or since The Industrial Reveloution. Since then our destruction has been conducted at a breathtakingly impressive way – impressive in a ironical and  cynical way.

That we realise this but seem incapable of undertaking a global effort of collective, urgent and immediate action to remedy this only proves how desirable our extinction is. We’ve been told consistently that a reduction of CO2 levels by 1.5 degrees was possible perhaps, by 2050, but 2030? Well that was just nonsense! Remember how the Green Party was derided for advocating that at the last election? Of course you do! Where all the same bullshit was shit out of the mouths of a more diverse group of bullshitters. ‘We can cut taxes and increase spending on public services. We can create more jobs, create a strong economy because there is such a thing as sustainable development’.  But it was still bullshit, causing me to wonder ‘Who’s worse, the bullshitter or the person who believes their bullshit?’

The point is that in the space of a month there’s been more done– drastic certainly – to prove that concerted global action can be undertaken if the will is there. It seems to me then that people don’t care about future generations, they don’t think in those terms. It’s too nebulous, too abstract, too complicated. Instead they worry about themselves. They don’t want to die.

But just like Boris Johnson, eventually, they will.

..I don’t hate all Jews. I just hate one Jew. My partner.

Oh, don’t think she’s unaware of this fact. I tell her this all this all the time. Basically, to hate and not to tell her often, well, what would the point of that? She’ll sometimes say to me that the day she met me was the worst day of her life. To which I reply – thanks Homer- ‘the worst day of your life so far.’ Because to my mind, to fully commit to an undertaking of this magnitude, you’ve got to be in it for the long haul, you’ve got to be prepared put the time in, to be ever vigilant, to play the long game. Except that this isn’t a game, it’s more like a kind of constantly evolving sadistic improvisation on the biggest stage of all.

Or else, it’s a bit like wine or that smelly French cheese that she likes, except that they mature with age and I, well, I’m a bit like “The Fly’ – “You’re getting worse.” “No, I’m getting better.” I’ve only known her for 30 years, so I think I’ve long way to go yet.

Don’t be thinking this is all one sided, either. Lest you’re tempted to call someone, just let me point out that whilst she has stated many times that she’d wade through vomit for me, she won’t make the tiny 45 minute drive across London to see me.

I know! How selfish! Right?

I worked out today that that it was a month yesterday since I last saw her. Pretty soon all the insults I’ve been saving up especially for her will go off and I can’t have them go off inside me! And they’re not just your common or garden insult either. Oh no! That’s too easy, too lazy, and too not me. The long haul I mentioned earlier? That’s how you create bespoke insults. One’s that’d be utterly meaningless to anyone else, but to her, to her, oh yes! And bespoke insults keep on re-inventing themselves, rejuvenating and being re-incarnated, like a once mighty football team dropping down the league tables and finally becoming non-league and forgotten about. Until she makes the schoolgirl error of reminding me of it and bingo! It’s back in the Champions League of insults

Many times she’s said “Don’t say that, I hate it when you say that’ and I reply “When, in all the years you’ve known me, have you ever said that to me and I’ve gone ‘Right, I won’t say it again.’ Apart from never?”

I don’t hate all Jews for the simple reason that hating any one group of people because of some arbitrary factor that has no bearing on the character whatsoever is patently absurd. The fact that so many do is proof of just how many idiots there are, living among us, looking, sounding and behaving just like us, but fucking idiots nonetheless. By all means hate someone, but hate them because of some deeply personal characteristic, something unique to them, not something out of their control. A Jew can’t help being a Jew anymore than someone can choose the colour of their skin, or sexual preference, but someone can choose what opinions they have, and how they express them,  and a whole range of other things besides. The thing is, the reasons you hate someone should be unique to them and no-one else.

So no, I don’t hate all Jews. I just hate one Jew.

Although nowhere nearly as much as she hates me, she says.

Last night we, as a house, had a communal meal. There’d be nothing noteworthy about that, were it not for the fact that before the house collectively decided up self-isolation amore than two weeks ago now, communal meals were as rare as hens teeth.

Anyway.

Somehow the conversation landed upon Kier Stammer’s election as Labour party leader. This was considered a good thing, not least his decision to almost immediately send a letter to the Board of Jewish Deputies apologising for bullying and anti Semitism in the Labour party. And I thought ‘I must be missing something here, because to me bulling isn’t someone being rude, snide or unpleasant, or making you feel uncomfortable, or ostracising you.?’

To me bullying is about getting the shit kicked out of you on almost a daily basis at school for most of your teenage years. Maybe the definition has changed? Who knows? But one thing I do know is that I’d quite happily have swapped some days where having shit kicked out of me got so unbearable that I wanted to kill myself for feeling a bit ‘oh diddums.’

Of course I’m not Jewish and, as is the modern way, if someone feels something, then it’s true for them and no-one can deny their feelings. I mean they can, but then the wrath of social opprobrium would crush them. Just because my idea of what constitutes bullying isn’t theirs doesn’t make either of us wrong. I just disagree.

Anyway. Kier Stammer. What did I think? That it would be interesting to see the way the press treated him compared to Jeremy Corbinned, I replied. No, they pressed, what did I think of him. Well, I did once think him to be a good egg and everything, what with him providing pro bono legal advice for the McLibel Two. You as well? The longest libel trial in British legal history? Really? Google it.

The thing is Kier Stammer reminds me of Tony Blair, and not in a good way, not that there is good way to like Tony Blair. He became Labour leader when Labour had been out of government for nearly ten years and immediately set about ‘modernising’ it, essentially making it Tory light. This got Labour elected in 1997 and we waited. And waited. And then realised there was no socialism in the Labour party anymore, the social change they were effecting wasn’t as harsh as Thatcherism had been but was closely modelled on it. Its impossible to convey the sense of disillusionment I felt when it slowly dawned that Labour only wanted power for powers sake.

Until Jeremy Corbinned was elected leader that is, promising great things, which unfortunately, the British people didn’t want. The fuckers fucked us all.

I could’ve said most of this but instead I settled for ‘Ambivalent’

‘Oh’, remarked someone who’s only known me since my brain injury, ‘That could sum up your entire character’. It could, of course it could, but it doesn’t. There are many words that describe my character before the brain, but none of them apply to the after. I’ve had to subjugate sides of my innate character because I calculated they weren’t especially helpful to me not after a brain injury and not in a shared house. Because of my brain injury, the way I see it, I’ve had niceness foisted upon me.

Anyone who knew me before the accident could attest to my…oh hang on; they can’t, because nearly all of them have fucked off.

This is why I don’t watch or listen to the news, because in space of one ‘phone call to my partner last night, I learned the following; people have been burning down 5G telephone masts – some weird conspiracy nonsense involving the Chinese, radiation and fuckwits –so much so that Michael Gove had to tell people to stop during yesterdays No.10 press conference. Yeah, those telephone masts, the one’s the emergency services use.

Oh and murders have been committed because of the lockdown. And domestic violence is up. By 30%, apparently. I thought it would’ve been more, but you know, early doors.

Not forgetting cruise ships. People are stuck on them somewhere. Quite why they got on them in the first place is beyond me. Most cruises are for either 7 or 14 nights I thought, so who, in the middle of all this would think ‘Sod it; we’re going to go on holiday. It’s all bought and paid for!”

And yesterday there were 3,000 people in Brockwell Park. How the police can magic this number up, when anyone who’s ever been on a march knows that police figures are woefully crap. They plan to close it, to enforce social distancing. If that were the case, the weather forecasters wouldn’t grin like Cheshire cats when they announce that tomorrow was going to be a another glorious day – which it was – yesterday. They’d possibly reinforce government stipulations, which you’d expect the BBC to do, it being a public service broadcaster and all

In an outbreak of common-sense triumphing over stupidity,couple of anti-vaccers have lost their court battle to prevent their daughter from being vaccinated, claiming it represented state control or something. They lost and the daughter who may or may not have already been in care, is now, and will be vaccinated. So they fought a legal battle to prevent state control, lost it and the result is the thing they wanted to avoid? Show me your workings out?

This is why I don’t watch or listen to the news. It’s just so predictable, inasmuch as the events themselves might be new, but the behavioural impulses that create them unfortunately are not. I don’t want my head full of this shit. It’s remorselessly grim, especially now, and too much of it might make you ill. Might?  I’ve got enough to worry about as it is, the mystery of the vanishing tea bags, for one.

As I think I made clear in an earlier blog, my thoughts on tea are well known. So imagine my unbounded joy when this morning, the tea caddy was mysteriously short of the amount my housemate had topped them up with last night. My thoughts on discovering this were not happy ones.

I’m in my garden now, the sun has been warm and shining all day, but I’m not in a good mood because of a conspiracy of bellends, who undermine this otherwise peaceful scene. Our neighbours are cutting their grass with what sounds like  the noisiest lawnmower in the universe but who has thoughtlessly added to the chaos by burning a bonfire for what seems like most of the afternoon. And it doesn’t smell like their burning bits of tree and leaves either; it smells like their either disposing of a body or up to something nefarious and wafting the smell in our – my! – direction.

One wonders at the mindset of people who think ‘Even though it’s a really nice day, even though one might reasonably expect our neighbours to be enjoying it, regardless of all that, we’ll do what we bloody well want because we bloody well want to.’ And these are the people we’re self-isolating for?

Mind you, the day got off to a shitting cock of a day. It’s amazing how quickly one gets used to – and then takes for granted – the absence of the infernal noise that planes. I only realized it when it wasn’t there, I’d gotten used to only hearing birdsong in the early morning, when the sound of distant thunder announced the planes were back. As anyone familiar with this blog will know, I live a) directly under the flight path into Heathrow Airport, b) I think they’ve sneakily lowered it c) my bedroom is stuck onto the house as what seems like an afterthought with a thin roof, d) there’s one flight at 3 am, one at 4 am and then one every 90 seconds or so until midnight.

So no, I haven’t been obsessed with it. Not at all.

Anyway, I was woken by the noise of them this morning at ‘what the fuck o’clock’ and for an all too brief moment was disorientated. Then – hang on, as we speak, LMS is reclining in a hammock and declaring herself cold, wants me to get her a blanket; two chances, slim and none – rather like the with the tedious inevitability of old age, I realized what it was. When I mentioned it to my housemate, questioning what on earth motivated the ground-crew, check in staff, baggage handlers etc, to turn up for work, and when she replied, quite reasonably that the flights might be freight and food, I thought ‘What every few minutes?’

Like I wrote some moments ago, it’s not like I’m obsessed or anything.

Back in my teenage years, when we’d would get stoned and I would pretend like ‘Pink Floyd’, there was a tendency to say the most outlandishly preposterous thing, but if you claimed it was a line from ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ or some equally new agey book, people would nod their understanding, think you incredibly well read all the while hoping that you weren’t bum sucking the spliff.

Of course the fact no-one you knew, or in fact would ever know, had read or would read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, aided this bullshit wonderfully.

One epic piece of drug induced nonsense from this book has lodged itself in my brain with annoying persistence; if a tree falls in a forest but if no-one hears it fall, has it really fallen’ Utter tosh.

I was reminded of this yesterday, when my housemate told me that some enterprising young do-gooders had taken it upon themselves to do cook ups specifically to deliver to hardworking hospital and other frontline staff. Not just because it eerily echoed my post of a week ago, when my housemates asked why I wasn’t joining in with the ‘Clap for Carers’ collective virtue signalling onanism:

I could’ve said it would be more meaningful of people had instead of shouting, had donated a packet of toilet paper…Or cooked a properly healthy and nourishing meal, put it some Tupperware and gifted it to a police station so they don’t have to eat the normal take-away shit they do when on shift.

But because further on I observed that;

Oh, not forgetting the feedback loop of social media, which helps create it, allows people to report on it while it’s happening and then post pictures and films of them doing it afterwards and to share with others who’ve done exactly the same.

This seems to be a 21^st century affliction, whereby if you do something but if there’s no-one to comment on it or like your social media post about you doing it, complete with ‘photos and video’s of you doing, it has it actually happened? What’s the point, it now seems, of doing something and not letting as many people as possible know you’re doing it, before, during and after you’ve done it? Gone, it seems, is the mindset of someone thinking, ‘I’ll do this, and me knowing I’ve done it is enough, I’d rather keep it to myself’

Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. My housemate then showed me ‘photo’s of ambulance staff eating the food. Quite why I thought of Janet Breen I don’t know.

Social media is in danger of making – in this instance certainly, but no doubt others – well intentioned and generous gestures, seem more about the people doing the doing of it, rather than about the thing or the beneficiaries of whatever that thing happens to be. Unless they pose for a ‘photo of them being suitably overjoyed at this largesse, a ‘photo that can be put on social media. Of course.

They were at it again last night, the ‘twatty clappers’, although one can understand why they didn’t clap and cheer for as long, after all it was a bit chilly. Maybe next week, the week after or the week after that, someone will go outside expecting to join in with countless others as usual and hearing nothing, will go back inside.

And tell their followers on social media exactly how it made them feel.