the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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.

I was out taking my morning constitution earlier when across my path fell some men, who were clearly the three sheets everyone talks about in relation to the wind. They were going to see a flat in Shepherds Bush. Now, it may be just me, but they didn’t strike me as the sort of people who held down steady well paying jobs so it followed that the flat they were going to view wasn’t going to palatial. Secondly, it was hard to imagine any of them making a good impression on the ‘phone, so what third-rate lettings agency thought that their commission on placing tenants in the flat was worth more than they’re health, I really wouldn’t want to know

I was going to use them to illustrate just how complicit we all will be in our eventual extinction, how all this nonsense about ‘how things will change/we can never go back’ is utter tosh. Well-meant, sincere and genuine tosh, but tosh nonetheless, but I’ve just thought of a better example. One who also has the benefit of being someone whose been hailed as something or other by people who tell people on Twitter they’ve jumped on the hailing bandwagon. The man of the moment.

Joe Wicks.

Now I have nothing against Joe Wicks personally. I’m sure he’s a perfectly decent chap whom, if I was fortunate enough to know him, would hold in the highest regard. The fact that LMS had fooled Joe and I into believing he is Russell Brands brother is neither here nor there.

No, what bothers me – and I’m sure this is just a happy accident – is the fact that he’s reported to have signed a £1 million book deal on the back of his new found prominence the new Mr. Motivator, albeit with thankfully a less garish wardrobe.

Here’s what bothers me, and here’s why things will go back to not exactly, but very, very, similar to how they were before.

A book deal. That means books. That means cutting down tree’s to make the books. That means having the machinery to cut down the trees, and that means having the machinery to make that machinery. And people to make the machinery. And to turn the paper into books. And the lorries to deliver those books to bookshops. And roads for the lorries to run on and fuel to power them ….and oh you mean the book deal might not be an old fashioned one, but a modern, new fangled one,, an e-book!

It’ll have tips no doubt on healthy eating to assist one in doing more exercise. This will all be packaged as something anyone concerned about adopting a more balanced life, one that’s more environmentally aware, just better will want. But in order to get what you want you’ll have to buy the things that make up that package.

You’ll have to work to earn the money needed to buy them. You may have to travel to work. This will involve some form of transport, which means people to build the transport, which means people making the bits needed to make the transport and factories to make them in.

And the things you make other people will buy, which means they have to work. You see the cycle, don’t you? If they don’t want to buy them they can be persuaded to buy them in ways that don’t seem like persuading at all. And in order to buy them, those things will have to be transported to a shop. Some will be food things, some possibly from far away, some possibly not. Then you’ll need to buy the things that turn these food things into the things that’ll make you the envy of all the friends you brag about it to.

Only you won’t brag, you’ll do it in such a self-deprecating way that other people will only double the praise in protest. They’ll look at you, be all envious, and think ‘If only I had what they have, if only I had all those things I’d look like that. I’d be slim and toned, I’d have a body to be proud of and a partner to match’ And so they’ll buy those things and the cycle will endlessly repeat, a bit like ‘Q.I’ on ‘Dave’

It’ll go on and on until we’re extinct. Lets not fool ourselves things are going to change that much. Yes, easy jet may decided to keep some seats empty on their flights to help with social distancing, yes, yes, all very worthy and feel good. But how exactly can an airline promote social distancing? Isn’t that their raison- d’être, to reduce that? Or am I missing something? Yes, yes, we all want healthier food but we also want it to be healthy for our wallet so there’s a trade-off. Same with clothing. Yes, yes, we abhor sweatshops, are appalled by modern slavery but…well everyone loves a bargain….

This morning we got a home delivery from Sainsburys’ and anyone who read yesterdays post will realise just how much that was needed!

It was hard enough getting through to register with them as ‘Vulnerable’ but it was nowhere near as bizarre of registering itself. They wanted name, address, contact number, basically everything you’d expect. Then they wanted to know why I should be classed as ‘Vulnerable’. Patiently, Marge explained I had a brain injury blah blah mobility issues blah blah benefits.’Aha’, thought I,’Now they’re going to ask if we can email them something to confirm that. But no. Nothing. Nada. Nish

All told, the shop cost us £236, which isn’t bad for 3 adults and 1 child, when you consider that buying food for the weekend for me and my partner costs her sometimes £60. Mind you, I do keep telling her that if she will insist on eating Beluga caviar…

It makes one realise how much cheaper it is buying for more people, especially if you have somewhere to put it all – which isn’t, as LMS remarked the other day, my stomach. I never thought of myself as a huge eater, unlike my brother. He seemingly has to eat every fours he’s awake – not snacks either, but proper meals. It’s now clear to me that we’re more alike than either of us would wish, although if I start to like football or he thinks that Britain needs a socialist government is as likely as unicorns existing. Be that as it may, part of the reason that the shelves were empty a few weeks ago when people were panic buying was in part because they had somewhere to store it all. There’s no point in buying loads of meat, fish, bread, milk, etc, if you’ve only got a tiny freezer. We have a fridge/freezer combo that would comfortably suit the needs of 2 adults and a child, whereas we have 4 adults and a Tasmanian devil living in our house.

Anyway, back to this morning and the Sainsbury’s delivery. Foolishly I imagined that in the absence of me having to provide any supporting evidence to prove my eligibility that the delivery diver would do some sort of visual check, although what it might’ve been, I don’t know. But neither, it turns out did he, because he fucked off, leaving the shopping strewn in bags down the path rather like the breadcrumbs in ‘Hansel and Gretel’

Thankfully, I live with people that don’t have brain damage – although a belief in homeopathy suggests some kind of impairment! – and so were able to retrieve the bags and bring them inside because Darwin knows I couldn’t, which caused Joe to quip ‘Its like knock down ginger, except we’ve got garlic as well. The when Marge was putting it all away, commenting on the abundance of ginger he said ‘She’s got so much ginger she could be a Spice Girl.’, which was a trifle ambitous

Last night LMS said something just so  damn hilarious, so outrageously funny, which cemented the wisdom of my decision to spend the lockdown here in sunny Camberwell, so as to keep my mental health from going mental.

Picture the scene. We’re about to have a communal meal; me, LMS, Joe and Marge. What the meal was isn’t important, but LMS’s sense of expectation is. Joe is serving it up. Please bear mind that had spent the best part of an hour preparing this.  He prepares LMS’s plate and gives it to her. She looks at it. And looks at it some more, as if by her staring at it for long enough it’ll magically transform into a large chocolate cake. Joe says, wonderfully managing to keep his understandable frustration out of his voice, ‘Please don’t stare at your meal like that.’ And with a sense of timing that wouldn’t be amiss on a West End stage, LMS slowly looked up, and with a voice thick with resigned exasperation, said, drum roll, please……..

‘That isn’t a meal. That’s a disgrace.’

Even writing it out makes me chortle, so imagine the effort it took for me not to explode with laughter.

In his book ‘The Plague’, Albert Camus describes the effects on a small, remote and walled garrison town in French Algeria, set, as I recall in the 1920’s. Possibly, it could be or it could be not, I read it a long time ago and my stubborn pride won’t let me Wikipedia it. What I do remember vividly though, is the sense of growing sense of paranoia the townspeople are gripped by the longer it goes on. They too have chosen to self-isolate, the whole town, that is, for the common good; in a way that would only ever happen in a novel. Unlike the reality, where Londoners wealthy enough to own second homes in the country are fucking off to them.

Hang about, I have to go, LMS has declared adults are boring and therefore I should stop doing this and let her ‘torture’ me instead.

Some considerable time later.

LMS has an imaginative array of ‘tortures’ for me, but her favourite just now wasn’t hitting me with cushions or pressing them against my face while telling me ‘It’s your fault’, in that creepy way that Danny in ‘The Shining’ does when says ‘redrum, redrum, redrum…..’. No her new discovery is first to tap my arms against my chest by sitting on them, then pinching my nose so I can’t breathe which forces me eventually to open my mouth, at which point she ties to shove a sweaty sock in my mouth. She finds all this incredibly entertaining

Thankfully, she’s moved on from ‘Does that hurt?’ which she found an immensely enjoyable way to pass the time. That one involved her hitting or else inflicting some sort of bodily discomfort upon me, gently at first, while asking ‘Does that hurt?’ And when I’d say ‘No’, she’d repeat it progressively harder, asking the same question, and on getting the same answer, repeat the process until she got a different answer. Lest you think she’s a tabloid headline in the making, she is aware that not only am I the only person she can do these things to, but the reason she can do them to me is because I know just how kind, good-natured and playful she is toward me for almost all of the time.

Anyway. Where were we? Oh yes, that’s right. ‘The Plague’. As the book draws ever nearer to the end, the more the fear, the paranoia increases and people begin to see and end in sight, fear they might not survive long enough to see it. It really is worth a read. It really captures the fear that grips you at four in the morning and seems quite rational, but with the morning sunshine comes sanity and you realise those fears were as grounded in reality as any religion.

Yes, I did have uncomfortable sensations in my right leg last night but was this early onset of coronavirus or something I get every now and again? Is a minor ache in my right elbow joint a harbinger of doom or just indicative of me putting too much pressure through both my arms as I use my wheeled walkers inside and out? I mentioned this to my partner earlier and she’s been having the same, jumping immediately to doom ridden imaginariums but then realising they’re just that.

Of course I could look online and check want exactly the symptoms for coronavirus are, were it not for the fact I’m not a bellend but am someone who realises humans have a propensity to focus on symptons into which they can shoehorn whatever supposed maladies they have.