This afternoon I heard the most fatuous nonsense I’ve heard in ages, when the newsreader on R4’s ‘The World at One’ said that this was ‘an unprecedented week in our nations history.’ I may be missing something here, but aren’t all weeks that have ever happened unprecedented, or are there lots of weeks held in reserve for when other weeks can’t be bothered, have something more pressing to deal with or just fancy a break? Weeks where nothing much happens and so can easily be switched without anybody noticing. How have I missed this?
If I could swap weeks, I’d swap the week I had my accident for the final week of June 2001. Pet Shop Boys made their debut at Glastonbury on the Saturday and later that same night Orbital played. Or any of the weeks in March 2004, when I was in Australia, where I spent one week on Rottnest Island snorkelling and three glorious weeks in Ningaloo snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.
I’d have those weeks, the ones in Australia, as an annual swap. I’d more than happily do without any month between now and then to relive that one again.
But life isn’t the sweet counter at Woolworth’s, it isn’t a pick and mix. It sucks cocks in hell.
Here is Orbital’s performance of ‘The Girl With The Sun In Her Head’ at Glastonbury 2001 for you to enjoy.
This morning I woke up at 6 am with a feeling of, well it wasn’t exactly foreboding, wasn’t exactly unease either, but more a feeling that was kind of like a strange and unsettling mixture of the two but wasn’t, if that makes sense. It has stayed with me throughout the day but has thankfully abated somewhat, rather like how a really vividly disturbing nightmare gradually fades from your consciousness, but still leaves you feeling uneasy.
One of the things that troubles me is this, something that has long bothered me but current events have brought to the fore. Namely if people are acting irrationally, at what point does irrationality become the norm, at what point does what was considered rational suddenly become irrational?
Then I thought an impending lockdown of London, what with it being by far and away home to the most amount of coronavirus cases and all – and my borough having the single biggest cases in London for good measure. I pooh-poohed the idea as being nothing more than the effects of continued exposure to housemates who read the news – or so I thought. Then I opened up my computer and BBC news is my homepage, saw this:
There is “zero prospect of any restrictions being placed on travelling in and out of London”, the UK government has said.
A spokesperson said there were also “no plans to use military personnel for public order during the coronavirus pandemic”.
Asked to comment on the suggestion only one person would be allowed to leave a house at a time, Downing Street said this was “not true”, according to BBC political correspondent Chris Mason.
It comes after speculation London could face a lockdown by the weekend.
Which of course had the very opposite effect. You know when a government minister is embroiled in some scandal or other, and the PM says they have every confidence in them and enjoys their full support, you know then they’ll be taking a long walk off a short pier. Or when there’s leadership speculation and someone says ‘I have no plans at the present time’, ‘There is no vacancy and the PM has my full support’ and you know, because you’ve heard the same lie again and again, that ‘full support’ in this context means the exact opposite.
Same thing here.
I’m sure there’s a name for it, a denial of something that makes it the thing much more likely. I mean, yes, I’d thought of a lockdown, but the idea that were definitely ’ no plans to use military personnel for public order’ was a bit of a shock, although not as much of a shock as Asked to comment on the suggestion only one person would be allowed to leave a house at a time, Downing Street said this was “not true”,
I think of the Berlin Wall that divided Soviet controlled East Berlin, from the democratic West Berlin. How a ring of barbed wire fences patrolled by armed guards with dogs sprang up overnight without any warning, until a proper wall could be built. Those unfortunate to have been just visiting relatives or friends were stuck on whatever side they woke up on. For nearly over two decades.
The impossible can never happen, until it does, and given the times in which we find ourselves, when does irrationality become rational? As I’m fond of saying ‘Anyone can be wise after the event, the trick is to be wise before the event’
The news goes from bad to worse, with the announcement of schools being closed from Friday, for two weeks initially, but in all probability longer. Much longer.
The powers that be clearly haven’t though this through, either that or their experience of being a parent was to let a nanny do all the work, leaving them free to do grown up things and have minimal unscheduled interaction with their children. Unless if it was strictly necessary or an emergency. Why am I thinking about Jacob Rees-Mogg?
This plus the Easter Holidays equals multiple mass murders across the country. I’m talking triple figures here. You think the deaths caused by the coronavirus are bad? Wait till the deaths caused the school closure start to mount? That’ll be loss of life on a biblical scale. Not just numbers of deaths, but the sheer depravity of the way they were killed. Holed up 24hrs a day, driving each other increasingly mad, with no food and less respite?Think ofa remake of ‘The Texas Chainshaw Massacre’ directed by Hieronymus Bosch. Think of the Old Testament. You get the idea.
Which leads me neatly on to an incident today whereby I had such an unexpectedly sudden thought out of nowhere I made an involuntarily loud noise, such that my friend remarked on it. ‘It’s just me being misanthropic.’ I explained. For some reason, self isolating made me think of an anchorite who Wikipedia describe as.
someone who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular society so as to be able to lead an intensely prayer-oriented, ascetic, or Eucharist-focused life. Whilst anchorites are frequently considered to be a type of religious hermit,[5] unlike hermits they were required to take a vow of stability of place, opting for permanent enclosure in cells often attached to churches. Also unlike hermits, anchorites were subject to a religious rite of consecration that closely resembled the funeral rite, following which they would be considered dead to the world, a type of living saint.
This was popular in 13th -16th Century Europe. Time for a return?
The news today that many supermarkets will have reserved early morning slots for elderly or disabled customers, in order to ensure the shelves haven’t been emptied by people panic buying is a good thing. I hope all supermarket chains adopt this fair principle and apply it to every day. In no way is there any hint of self interest in this. Perish the thought! I have not though of placing an advert online pimping myself out at £20 or £30 a time, although obviously, having grown up in Thatcher’s Britain, I well understand if the demand for something grows and that things is rationed, the cost of getting that thing will increase. Nor have I checked to see how many supermarkets are near me and if some have different designated slots available well, I could easily make £60 a day cash in hand! The cost might rise for the same basic service, but I’ll refuse to do extra’s. Absolutely. No way.
I might consider a block booking though, if a family want exclusivity so they can have me seven days a week, well that’ll cost ‘em. It’s a sellers market if they want to get to the supermarket.
Hang on! What about a women of a certain age who because of years of beauty creams and such, no longer look it? Will one need a passport to prove how old they are? And how disabled will you have to be? And how do you prove it? And to whom? And would it be like a nightclub, you know, where they stamp your back of your hand so you can get back in, so you can’t visit more than one a day?
As will come as a surprise to absolutely no-one familiar the writings my blog, I do not value the survival of our species as much as other people seem to do. The hysteria and doom mongering that has characterized the response Coronavirus episode is, to me at any rate, as bewildering as it is nonsensical. Yes, by all means be aware of the risks and ways to minimise them, but some perspective please. At the risk of causing offence to people who get offended by logic, all but one of the people who’ve died so far have been over 60 years old and all of them had underlying health problems, so the chances are that a harsh winter would have killed them anyway. Why is this not even mentioned, that we have an ageing population, one that the adult social care system is struggling to cope with so in essence all the Coronavirus is doing is hastening the inevitable.
Yesterday the government announced a raft of financial measures, which they hope will help people cope with the unprecedented economic challenges that necessarily arise following the government’s health advice. Good for them.! Jolly well done! Bravo! Goody gum drops!
However, methinks there is a better, more effective way to spend some of the money, a spend moreover that if properly implemented could easily become a truly innovative solution to the conundrum of footing the bill of an ageing population.
Government sponsored euthanasia.
No, seriously, before you dismiss it as ludicrous, think of the measures announced yesterday and then ask yourself exactly how many of them will have any practical efficacy beyond this present situation? Remember quantative easing and the theory that if the Bank of England printed £billions of new money, the banks would then pass that money onto small and medium sized businesses and this would help revive the economy after the global financial crisis? And, as is so often the case, what works in the theory doesn’t work in practice but what did work was the banks working for themselves and using the money to shore up their losses. Jo and Janet Nobody might get a little bit of help but it’ll be the usual snouts getting their fill at the trough.
Anyway, where we? Ah yes! Government sponsored euthanasia, that’s where!
Given the age group of death victims perhaps that might be hitherto electorally suicidal policy a couple of months ago, but faced with a rapidly changing landscape might the previously unthinkable soon become not just thinkable but eminently sensible.
If the government works out the cost of a patient with certain ailments to the NHS, local authorities and social services et al., per year and then work out the life expectancy on average is for those affected, calculate the total cost to the public purse, then offer them a lump sum of 60% of the sum when their 80 and commit to die within two years. This figure would decrease by 3.5%% every year, so if you were 86 and finally came round to this, you’d get a lump sum of 39% of the average annual cost. That’d be the last age it would apply to. Everyone’s a winner, society, the government and the individual, given as how the average life expectancy for a UK national is 80.96 years. I haven’t yet worked out how this would be enforced but the idea’s sound.
You disagree? Oh grow up! How do you think life insurance companies work out their premiums? Or do you think actuaries are actors who perform Shakespearian tragedies? Why should the state have to pay to prevent nature taking its course? Why, given the challenges faced by the NHS don’t they implement an upper age limit beyond which any type of in-patient hospital care wouldn’t be allowed? Why is an old persons life as equal as a younger persons? Please explain it to me using words of four syllables or less, because this baffles me. The NHS is a resource like any other and like every other resource it isn’t finite.
If people did opt for government sponsored euthanasia it’d be the adult nappies, dementia and soft food years they’d be missing out on remember. Not a trip to Disneyland – the proper one mind, not the one in Paris. It would also put the nails in the coffin of the suspicion that the Tory party have been unduly influenced by their membership, who tend to be old, male, white and comfortably off and not the overwhelming majority of people who voted for them, who are not.
I’ve been as good as my word, insofar as I’ve studiously avoided whenever possible all news reports, news websites and anything else that might distract me from more important concerns. But last night I was struck by the thought that instead of having the pips to herald the imminent arrival of the news on Radio Four, they should instead prepare the listener for the misery to follow with the first few notes of the funeral march. Or better yet, the boom-boom-bo-bo-boom of the ‘Eastenders’ theme. That’d set the mood nicely.
At his Inauguration address as President, Franklin Roosevelt uttered words that today have as much resonance now as they did nearly eighty years ago when he said ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’
Last week my housemate’s daughter’s school was visited by the Coronavirus fear. Not the Coronavirus itself you understand, but the fear of it. This was in the form of a parent of a child had tested positive. No one was quite sure if anyone else in the family was affected but given the current climate the school had decided that they needed to close on the Thursday in order to do a deep clean ready to re-open on the Friday. To anyone trusted enough to write with more than crayons this raises some questions. First of all, how deep is a deep clean going to be if it can be done in one day? Most schools comprise of multiple buildings and so presumably a deep clean would not be a quick process. Why not keep it closed, do a really thorough job of it and re-open for the start of the new school week. Secondly, who would evaluate how effective such a clean would be? Or is it the case of a school marking its own homework? However, much more concerning to me is that no one saw this as an over-reaction, so premature that if it were a foetus, it’d be just past the sperm fertilizing the egg stage.
But in this current climate of media inflated hysteria, what can one expect? Far from being calming and restrained in its reporting, the media has helped create they very fear that leads people to clear supermarket shelves of toilet paper! Talk about the shits getting people so shit scared they stock up on shit rags! In fact, just a few moments ago one of housemates has just returned from our local Sainsbury’s with nothing more a cabbage, some peppers and loads of ‘photo’s of aisle upon aisle of empty shelves’. On Wednesday, my housemate who seems almost glued to her ‘phone for ever more depressing ‘facts’ showed me a thing on the government webshite whereby you see exactly how many cases had occurred within a specific geographical area and learning that London had the most by quite a large margin, it allowed one to zoom in and see how many cases in each borough.
It is worth bearing in mind that 4 out every 5 people who get Coronavirus will only get a mild illness. The other 1 might die. But as most deaths of any flu occur to those that are elderly, with weakened immune systems and respiratory problems, is it really a ‘killer virus’? Or an inevitable consequence of living far too long? As the BBC reported yesterday;
Ten more people in the UK have died in the last 24 hours after testing positive for coronavirus, bringing the total number of deaths to 21.
The UK government’s chief medical adviser said the patients were all in “at-risk” groups from across England.
The total number of confirmed cases in the UK has reached 1,140 while 37,746 people have been tested.
So hang on! If my maths are correct, less than 5% of those tested for the virus actually have it, and of that 5%, less than 2% had died. That means therefore that not only are the chances of getting the virus smaller, even smaller still is the likelihood of one dying from it. But that was yesterday. Anything could happen between the time I post this – 12.38pm on Sunday 15th March – and the time you read this and quite possibly will. Besides why let pesky facts get in the way of of fear and irrationality.
The media has created a snowball effect of fear which builds and builds, and the more it builds, the more politicians and health officials wish to appear to have some degree of control, whereas in actuality, they can only react to events and increasingly react to the way the media chooses to portray those events. Were can the media go from here?
My mind inevitably turns to Nigel Tufnel, the eponymous guitarist from Spinal Tap, who, when proudly showing off his custom-made amplifier to Marty Diberg, announced that it went up to 11. When Marty quizzed him about why it went up to 11, Nigel replied that when you needed an extra push, and you are on 10, where can you go? Nowhere. But on his custom made one, you could go to 11. It is the same with the media’s coverage of Coronavirus. They need an 11, a 12, a 13….
Remember ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’
On Thursday, the BBC reported that there were now 400 coronavirus cases in Italy, an increase of 25%. Now, an increase by 25% of sounds mightily scary doesn’t it? Only a rationalist would point out the fact that Italy has a population of 92 millions, and that an increase of 25% to make the new total 400, would therefore mean that originally 325 were infected meaning an increase of 75. Doesn’t sound half as scary does it, an increase of 75?
If we apply that kind of percentage methodology – or hyperbollocks – to the increase in UK coronavirus cases from 15 to 16 then an increase of one equates to 7.5%. An increase of a small amount in a small amount to begin with will, when expressed in percentage inflate it. It may well be factually correct yes, but helpful? That was on Thursday night but if I post this on Saturday night the number of cases will have increased, that’s a given, but nowhere near the amount fear-mongering the media are creating, and then reporting on the very phenomena they’ve created.
On Thursday, the bastion of even handed and moderate reporting that is the Guardian carried a story about the governments Chief Medical Officer suggesting that potentially schools might have to close for two months to prevent its spread. I know this only because my housemate told me about this. This was exactly the sort of forward thinking needed, plans to deal with a potential outbreak worsening and exactly what the government should be doing was my reaction. Indeed, how could any adult able to read without moving their lips think otherwise? If only The Guardian could combine supposed government callousness, an already barely coping NHS and Brexit into a story that would cover most pre-existing biases of it readers. If they could just shoehorn something in about the dangers of vaccinations versus the benefits of adopting a vegan diet to ward off ailments, and possibly a fracking angle, and for good measure something about micro-plastics compromising humans immune system, then one
could surf on the rivers of cum gushing out of The Guardians HQ if they could manage that.
Actually, what we need to do is bite the bullet and enact the ‘Herod Solution’, you know, King Herod, him from the bible, the villain in the nativity play, that one. The one who decreed that all new born children in wherever he was king of and Mary was about to give birth in, be slaughtered to prevent the messiah living. Well if as a preventative measure every child under 5 was deemed a potential health risk and for the common good was killed? It might seem to be a bit of an over-reaction, but as an American Major told a reporter after reducing a village to rubble a during the Vietnam War “In order to save the village we had to destroy it.’
Mind you, why stop there? Might combating the spread of the coronavirus yield some unexpected benefits to society? Bear with me. 4 out of 5 people who get it only suffer a mild illness and get better, it’s only the very old who are at the most risk. Why doesn’t every person in the UL over the age of 75 just kill themselves now and put our minds at rest. After all, the longer you live the greater is the likelihood that you’ll die and we know that the cost of adult social care is only going to increase the longer more people live longer. A win win and if they have a house and leave it to their children, it eases the burden on housing. Actually, they should do it anyway as humans live fat longer than is both practical – in 1841 the average life expectancy for a working class male in England was 43 and the human body isn’t designed with longevity in mind – or indeed desirable,
Is this as far fetched as reports in the media that Hyde Park is being considered as the site for mass burials? Mind you, having just typed that I did just sneeze and I am feeling a bit peaky….
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.
However one thing that I have unsuccessfully avoided is news about the Coronavirus and last week a housemate asked me how many people had died because of it, to which I replied, ‘Not enough’. As any reader familiar with this blog will know, this is a fair encapsulation of my view of things – namely that there are far too many people alive for this planet to sustain and therefore we need a drastic and immediate reversal of this situation. At present the world’s population stands at 7.6 billions and everysecond here are two births, so you can work out how many babies have been born in the time it’s taken you to read this post.
Unfortunately, the Coronavirus isn’t the answer to this problem, at least not yet anyways.
I can’t help but notice that there have been very few Coronavirus deaths in Europe but onaverage 600 people a year die from the flu in the UK, but in 2013 13,000 died of it. Yet we’re meant to be concerned about this supposed killer virus? Really? The coronavirus scare reminds me of Jo Swindle, in the sense it was only she that was saying she was a possible PM and it is only the media that are making a huge issue out of this supposed killer virus. According to the BBC, as of yesterdaynearly 78,00 people in China had had the virus, of whom only 3,000 have died. A mortality rate of less than 4% is not commensurate with the headlines, methinks.
Possibly the government should make flu jabs compulsory, legislate to prevent children from attending school unless they’re vaccinated against MMR or better yet, making access to the NHS or private medicine conditional upon one proving their fully inoculated. To ensure we’re all safe.
I know this might seem a tad self serving, but it’s nowhere near as selfish as the people on that cruise liner in Japan wanting to be repatriated back to the UK, making their problem our problem. They’re on board a ship, keep them their and whoever is alive and healthy after four weeks is alive and healthy and able to set foot on dry land. Practical Darwinism.
On a more sombre note, Andrew Weatherall died last week. If you knew who he was, you’ll know this saddened me
But enough of this! Lets have a happy ending instead, well not that kind of happy ending but Ryuici Sakamoto performing ‘Happy End’!
In order to welcome in the New Year, I thought I’d post a blog all about 20/20 vision and I’ll admit it’s not in the fist rank of original ideas. Quite possibly you’ll read other, better-written things using 20/20 vision as a way of interpreting the events of 2020. Or not, depending on whose eyes the writer is seeing those events through.
Anyway I thought it incumbent upon me to first discover what is meant by 20/20 vision, because like most people I’m familiar with the term, yet have only a vague idea of what it actually means. So I did some googling. It’s to do with visual acuity.
No, me neither.
According to the font of all human knowledge for the lazy, Wikipedia,
Visual acuity (VA) commonly refers to the clarity of vision. Visual acuity is dependent on optical and neural factors, i.e., (i) the sharpness of the retinal focus within the eye, (ii) the health and functioning of the retina, and (iii) the sensitivity of the interpretative faculty of the brain.
There’s loads more, detailed and quite frankly time consuming more to read. Not that my time is so precious, you understand, but it was the last five words of the opening paragraph that resonated. ‘Interpretative faculty of the brain’ neatly sums up one of the challenges I face following my brain injury; for if the way one correctly sees the world is in part dependant on a healthy brain, then it follows that a damaged brain is not best equipped to do this.
I’ve been considering this for nearly a week now, looking at some of my decisions after the brain injury through the prism of this new information. Following the brain injury, the doctors were, in all fairness to them, remarkably honest about their lack of knowledge about how exactly my brain injury would affect me. But one thing no-one ever even mentioned was my its effect on my mood, and if the way I interpret events is flawed, then might this not have consequences on my mood? Might they both create and reinforce the other in a circle of negativity. By no stretch of the imagination have I been Mr. Jolly since the brain injury, but equally I wasn’t always before it either.
It was just never this long lasting, seemingly continuous and all pervasive before. I know that it seems odd when its written down, but I can’t remember what it feels like to feel calm, relaxed or at ease with oneself. I mean I know I must have felt that, I just don’t know how it felt, and worse still, being resigned to never feeling that way again. I hasten to add that I’m not in a state of perpetual anxiety all the time, but more that….okay, here goes. You know the feeling you have when you’ve said to yourself you need to remember to do something but you forget what it was, but know you’ve forgotten what it was? It’s a bit like that. All the time.
So if my interpretive faculty is flawed, and I know it, it seems wholly sensible that I factor this in from now on, and so for 2020 I’ve resolved to try and be less previous me about things and more, well, more.
Well it makes sense to me and that’s the main thing, but how long it lasts for is another. But thankfully, if you’re reading this on New Years Day morning that is, I’ll be paying the price for being champagne-tastic last night so my resolve once I’m awake and had some tea…
I am a misanthrope and the longer I live, the more deeply entrenched it becomes and the greater my conviction that my misanthropy is not just correct, but a wholly inevitable response to the ceaseless bedevilment that other people cause me.
But any reader of my blog knows this. So it is seems entirely fitting that as Christmas is all about miracles, I’d treat you all to an unjaundiced, non-cynical and not critical of anyone or anything post.
What has caused this sudden volte-face? Have I suffered a sudden blow to the head, been kidnapped by aliens and replaced by a doppelganger or is there something in the water?
No.
The reason is this.
A Christmas card made specially for me by 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. And because I did, I still do.
Because I don’t have to undertake the more onerous responsibilities of her parents, such as getting her ready for school or making her go to bed to name but two, being free of these constraints means that I can regress somewhat and become a man-child. I don’t have to pretend that broccoli ice-ice-cream is a good idea or that carrot cake is a cake or that farting is anything other than hugely entertaining. It’s her unshakeable belief that I could want nothing more than to play with her, that whatever I’m doing is merely a stop-gap until she rescues me from that particular tedium.
A Christmas card, it has to be written, the receipt of which was in no way commensurate to its utter wonderfulness or indeed, the effort required to make it so. I am reliably informed that plans for a Christmas shopping jaunt were changed so this magnificence could be created. I am not, outwardly at least, a very emotionally demonstrative person, eschewing what I consider to be rather American effusiveness, in favour of something altogether more composed. But although my face didn’t betray it, I was both thrilled and impressed by it.
To write that she has massively improved the quality of my life would be textbook understatement. Aside from the ‘Peppa Pig’ and ‘Holly and Ben’ phases of her life, I could’ve quite happily done without those. But she’s almost nine now, and as we all are wont to do, looks back with disdain on the follies of her youth, her youth being something she still has lots of. In fact, when her parents saw all her presents under the Christmas tree and comparing her haul to theirs, asked what she had that they hadn’t, I said simply ‘Youth’
