the brilliantly leaping gazelle

If you’re reading this post, then quite possibly you’ve read some of my other one’s and so what follows won’t come as a wholly unexpected surprise.

Last night at 8pm people gathered on their doorstep or balcony to shout, cheer and clap their support for the NHS and other emergency staff who have steadfastly remained doing their job of keeping us safe and well whilst we stay indoors. As is the modern way of these things, this was initiated and rapidly spread on social media. It even, I found out later, had a name, ‘ Clap for Carers’. I mean, I know the NHS is fucked and all but really? What next, ‘Syphilis for Scientists’? My housemates were going to do it and at 7.55pm, when they told me about it, it was the first I’d heard about it. Was I going to join in, they asked?

I thought about it for, maybe all of fraction of a millisecond before I said ‘No’. With curiosity possibly tinged with a hint of disapproval, they asked why. I could’ve said it would be more meaningful of people had instead of shouting, had donated a packet of toilet paper. A two-roll ‘savers’ pack, not a thick quilted 4 ply Andrex, obviously. Lets not go made here! Or gone online to a medical supplies store and ordered some face masks or protective clothing, and have it sent to their nearest hospital. 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.

I could’ve said that as a rule, I tend not to partake in most communal things such as this for the very simple reason that the only people it benefits are the people who participate in it. They get to feel virtuous; they feel as if they’ve done something, even if they’re not quite sure what that something was. But the main thing is, they did it and that’s something. The people who are meant to take something – again with the something! – from it, get nothing.

Sure the cheering and clapping lasted until people got cold and went back indoors. 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. And the newspapers, who play an increasingly irrelevant role now, but who report on it AS A GOOD THING, and reinforce the idea to their readers that something that had any actual effect on anything actually happened. They were all at it this morning. But aside from that, aside from collective onanism on a massive scale, a virtue signalling gesture as empty as the pasta shelves at Sainsbury’s, they got nothing.

Not in any practical way. It was – to me at any rate – the equivalent of when a work colleague you barely know, finds out your suffered a bereavement, and says “ If there’s anything I can do to help, just call me’ You both know it’s bollocks. But it’s socially sanctioned bollocks. But that’s not easy to get across in a pithy riposte. Not when you’ve a speech impediment anyway.

So instead I settled for the obvious – to me anyway – answer, “It’d make more sense,” I said “ if they just shouted ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore’.” If some tumbleweed had blown across the room at that very moment, shocked I would not have been.

Reading this through, I’m struck by how incredibly cynical I am. It doesn’t make me wrong though and it isn’t a recent affectation either. At any point in my life since I was a teenager if you’d have presented me with the exact same scenario, you’d have got a broadly similar response. Not exactly the same, as my cynicism has been informed by contact with other humans over many, many years. For me to think any way, therefore, would be insane.

I’ve just had an extremely gratifying experience with a nine-year-old girl. Those thoughts you’re having? Proof that you have mind like a sewer!

LMS and I were outside in the garden, enjoying the sunshine and bemoaning the fact that her timetable for home schooling doesn’t, as far as I can tell, have any breaks for fun. There’s fitness with Joe Wicks at 10, maths with Carol Voderman at 11, English with David Williams at 12, dancing with Darcey Bissell at 1…and on it goes. When I was at primary school, it was all making things out of balsa wood, country dancing, kiss chase in the playground and then a kick about after school on the green. There was no homework, well not if you count watching the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ so you could pretend to be Steve Austin the next day in the playground as homework. Last night she was talking about the Vikings doing something on Holy Island. Last moth it was the Egyptians and hieroglyphics. She’s 9 F.F.S!

Anyway, her Mum bough me out some tea. I took a sip. And put it down. It was a defective cup of tea. LMS looked at me. “There’s no sugar in it.” I said wearily, “and a cup of tea without sugar in it, well that isn’t a cup of tea.” She offered to get some, out of politeness I thought or more likely she knows I’ve got a stash of Kit-Kats somewhere, so I was taken aback when she said, after I declined, “No, your life depends on it.” And as she hotfooted it back into the house, I thought ‘Ah, my work here is done!’

It was almost enough to banish the awful memory that was yesterday, specifically shopping at my local Sainsbury’s. Sensibly, they’d decided to initiate an hour’s early opening for the elderly, the disabled and NHS staff. In fact, if you were all three, you got a free 24 pack of toilet roll, well that was the rumour doing the rounds in the queue anyhow. Obviously their own ‘Basics’ one, nothing quality. And what a queue it was! Everyone standing what they thought was 2 metres apart and as it moved closer to the entrance, so more people put masks on. A good idea I thought, as some of them made Freddy Krueger look like a model, so hideously grotesque they were. Why can’t ugly people be made to wear masks all the time, to protect us from them befouling our eyes?

Inside it was eerily functional, no looking at the labels to see the sugar or salt content, no loitering in the aisles idly pondering on whether it was organic or not, free-trade, free range, ethically produced or not. None of that visible display of how right on, and superior one is to everyone else, how you’d much rather be shopping in Waitrose but there isn’t one nearby with a car park. None of that! That had gone as fast as the dried pasta. It was a deeply unnerving experience. Soulless. As I remarked afterwards it was as much fun as being a eunuch at an orgy.

The one redeeming feature was a woman I spotted, with her hair scraped back and rolled up on one side at the back. It was the parting in her hair that was so captivating. It was so neat, so straight and so precise. It was as if she signaling that yes, whilst things are bad, with worse possibly to come, nonetheless they weren’t that bad that she was going to stop making the effort.

I know it’s a facile point, but it cheered me right up when I thought of it and hopefully it will do the same for you. Although hopefully not as much as it did me, because otherwise you’d be as demented a wrongcock as wot I am.

Those 105,000 Tory party members who elected Boris’s Johnson Prime Minister must be feeling quite pleased with themselves right about now, given they how foisted a unelected buffoon on us, but seeing how they tend to be older than most, the chances of the grim reaper reaping what they’ve sown is pleasingly ironic.

One of the main problems with this whole self-isolation malarkey is the potentially disastrous effect on people’s mental health and the potential for mass murder on a truly epic scale. Basically you’ve got thousands upon thousands of familial pressure cookers up and down the land, and the longer this self-isolation continues the more the pressure will build up, and eventually something will have to give.

Why am thinking of ‘The Purge’?

Be that as it may, it’s my mental health I want to write about and this desire so to do was bought on by me rather sensibly going through my drug medication to see what I had. You know, to make sure I had enough. Like I wrote, sensible. But as I was doing so I suddenly realized what the drugs were, and I thought ‘How times change.’ Because there they all were, the anti-depressants and blood pressure one’s, all prescribed, all perfectly legal and nothing recreational. It seems to me that we need recreational drugs now more than ever. Well when I write ‘we’ I mean me. I’d quite happily take a gram or an ounce of your share, if for some unfathomable reason you didn’t want yours. Some tea made with magic mushrooms? That’d take the edge of anything. Add a cheeky teenth to well…anything. What about a livener?

I was thinking about how much better things are when recreational drugs are involved earlier on today, when I passed by a young man leaning against a car smoking an impressively large spliff. As some women say, it wasn’t the length of it that mattered, but the width. And the smell, oh the smell, the unmistakable aroma of skunk. Never has a drug been so well named. I wanted to stand downwind of him, to linger and breathe in what I’ve been missing for so long, I really wanted to, but he looked like the kind of chap who wouldn’t bother with asking questions.

Because my brain injury has fucked my fine motor skills, whilst rolling a joint would be an achievement, I didn’t think it wise to have it as one of my goals in my funding review statement for social services. I don’t think they’d look favourably on it if I put ‘One of my goals is to roll a tidy looking joint, one made up of three King Size Rizla’s with a ratio of two parts Drum tobacco to one part skunk, generously and evenly spread throughout, with not too much of a roach’ I can’t see them going for it, much less funding it, can you?

No, now my mental health, or rather the thing that keeps it going off the rails completely is my housemate’s nine year old daughter, Little Miss Sunshine (LMS). As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, her effect on my mental health has been the exact opposite of the numerous talking therapies and anti-depressants. There are no words to convey the certain knowledge that the banging on your bedroom door at nine am accompanied by her saying “Get up, get up, I want to play,” won’t stop until you do. It’s wonderful.

Her unshakeable belief in the fact there could be nothing I’d rather be doing than playing with her is endearing. And not too far off the mark, actually. I find her endlessly entertaining, possibly because she see’s me as ‘Mr. Fun’, a benefit of not having to do the more onerous tasks that a parent has to. Last night being a case in point. We were having a communal meal and LMS was sitting next to me. She eventually grew bored of all this boring adult conversation, and rolled up her sleeve. Her father asked her in a tone that said ‘you’d better not be up to no good’ ”What are you doing?” I knew only too well what was about to happen and had just managed to turn my head when she blew the most magnificent sounding raspberries on her arm.

I know it’s not big, I know it’s not clever, but the sound of a fart, especially one that sounds like a Harley Davison starting up, well that’s’ just funny and so I almost managed to stifle a laugh. Almost. A laugh would’ve been better, not the sound an old balloon makes when you let the air out of it in fits and starts. Her parents, as expected, upbraided her for this and our other housemate Paul wryly observed, “Well it doesn’t help if she’s got a big kid sitting next to her.”

Actually, I think that’s exactly what she needs and I need her to be a small kid for exactly the same reason that the government today announced that off-licenses would be classed as essential and allowed to stay open. The last thing the government wants is people going up the walls and having no safety valve. It’s not that you’d want drink necessarily, but not having the choice? The same with me and LMS sort of, inasmuch as her boundless capacity for mucking about is exactly what I need in these uncertain times. Some mucking about. A much overlooked quality in people, I’ve found, mucking about.

Needed more than ever, I’d say.

The self-isolating precaution that we are collectively taking as a household will invariably require certain sacrifices to be made, some temporary curtailment of the norms of everyday life, things we take for granted, for the common good.

I must practice saying that in a sincere voice. This is only day two so there’s every chance I might manage it, in much the same way is it assumed that by constant practising of one’s meditation techniques enables one to attain a calmer equilibrium.

The other night I was treated to a piece of information….’treated’ is on refection the wrong word, because you know that feeling you have when you are told something but wish you hadn’t heard it because you can’t ever unknow it?

It was one of them.

Without going in to graphic detail, the subject was of bottom hygiene, more specifically how one dealt with it. It truly is an indication of how fucked up things are that this seemed a wholly natural thing to be discussing.

It was something of a revelation to learn that one of my housemates practiced the ‘broccoli floret’ method whereby they gather a bunch of toilet paper in the hand like a broccoli floret and introduce this to the area concerned.

I shit you not!

Others however, professed to being adherents of the altogether less wasteful method of folding half the amount of sheets needed for the ‘broccoli method’ flat, folding them over again, and then wiping. This method also has the advantage of affording you the opportunity to wipe again, if needed by just carefully fold it the other way and repeating the process. In these times of a toilet paper shortage any other way seems extremely profligate. Mind you, the shelves in the toilet positively groan under the sheer weight of poetry books, and their groaning is far more colourful, far more immediately understandable than the poetry. I have suggested that the poetry books may have finally come into there own. Oddly enough, this wasn’t greeted as enthusiastically as I’d hoped

Who said poetry has no practical application? I suppose it’s all about how and where you apply it.

Boris’s Johnson has this evening just announced drastic curtailments of individual liberties that he hopes will be successful in preventing a spread of the virus. The why’s and wherefore’s of what he has done, whether or not they are the right package of measures for right now or indeed, could more have been done earlier to prevent this evenings announcement, well others better paid than me will have their view. So will the twaterarti.

I’ll just confine myself – literally – to a few juvenile observations.

This thing about only going out for one bit of exercise per day raises questions. How long is one bit of exercise? Is there an upper time limit? What counts as exercise?

Who enforces all of these measures? The police, whose numbers have been cut, but belatedly restored as an election bribe? The army, whose own recruitment problems are not as well known – well not in the public consciousness anyway – but just as concerning? And what of the NHS, specifically staffing levels and the drain of EU staff returning home?

Who exactly is vulnerable? I mean, we all are, ultimately, from death, either by this or something else. So who decides?

I know. Juvenile.

I know I’m a demented wrongcock, I get that, and what with the state of things, I should try to be less of one, but I’m congenitally incapable of so doing. An example of this occurred earlier on today, when I was out being bothered by other people bring bothersome. And it struck me that the new obsession everyone has with wearing face-masks to avoid catching the virus will prove somewhat difficult to do in Hong Kong, where covering the face was banned recently by the authorities there in an effort to crack down on anti-government protests.

The self-isolating precaution that we are collectively taking as a household will invariably require certain sacrifices to be made, some temporary curtailment of the norms of everyday life, things we take for granted, for the common good.

I must practice saying that in a sincere voice, because this is only Day One and given enough time and with enough practice I might get the hang of it.

Until then, however…

I was out for a stroll yesterday, being as how the sun was out and I wanted to make the most of it. But, as is so often the case, what should’ve been a pleasant experience, wasn’t, because of other people. Whenever I approached anyone, they’d swerve to avoid me. Not in a subtle way either.

No.

What annoyed me was when they would start to swerve some distance away from, to make a point of being seen to do it so I could see them do it, and then continue to swerve lest I tried to jump them. If I could, believe me I would. This got me thinking.

Does anyone know with any degree of certainty 2m, is? I mean we know that it’s 120cm, but not in a practical application of it. We have no idea. I definately don’t and the people that annoyed me so yesterday certainly didn’t. So the government’s health advice about keeping 2m away from people is as meaningless as Boris’s Johnson wedding vows.

This got me thinking. If no-one is sure what exactly 2m is, then there is a gap in the market, which needs to be filled very soon if social distancing is going to stand the slightest chance of success.

The answer? Ruffs. Lie the one’s the Elizabethan’s used to wear only bigger. Much bigger. Huge, fuck off ruffs. They’d just slip over your head, be exactly 2m in diameter, with your head being the axis. If they came in a variety of colours, a flash mob of people wearing them would like a cross between ‘The Umberella’s of Cherbourg’ and a Busby Berkley number.

Face masks. Another gap in the market right there! This morning my housemates popped out to the shops wearing them and was I  thinking ‘What a sensible and prudent thing to do’? Hazard a wild guess. What I was thinking was ‘If you just drew on some vertical lines where the mouth is, you could look like Hannibal Lector’. Remember that scene in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ when he’s all trussed up in large chair with a straitjacket, restraints and everything? Like that. Being a demented wrongcock, I naturally thought that if you bought a hockey mask, with a few modifications it could be worn as a face mask and you’d look like the killer in either ‘Halloween’ or ‘Friday 13^th’

Those horror films being as inditinguishable from each other as the days news is. Not that I see or hear much of it, you understand but I get the gloomy headlines from those who d

Last night my partner drove me back to Camberwell from Stoke Newington, so that I could be at my house in order to allow our house’s collective decision to take place. To do this, we had to drive from North to South London. I mention this only because my partner and I are unusual, she more than me I’d say – a lot more than me actually – but in this instance because we were born here. We’ve lived here all our lives so therefore the sight of a deserted London on a Saturday night– hardly any cars meaning green lights all the way – made London feel both eerily empty and at the same time kind of how we both remembered it as children. Less busy, easier to drive through…just less.

Driving past a deserted Trafalgar Square triggered youthful memories of schlepping down to it after a night of clubbing – well hardly, as clubs would close at 3am in olden times – to get a night bus home. They’d be swarms of people, like small rivers that would form larger ones, all heading for the same place. Because you wanted to get on one – something that had a different meaning for clubbers years later – ideally get a seat but more likely to end standing with your nose in someone’s armpit, as they’d be invariably packed so tight that drivers wouldn’t let half as many people on now. But what with there being only one every hour, a stampede would ensue the moment the doors to the bus opened. Getting onto a night bus was nearly as difficult as getting into ‘The Wag Club”

But they are now memories, like the memory of on one building on the square shining a light onto the South African embassy on the other side of the square, of a swastika.

Apartheid, in case you’re wondering why.

Anyway, enough reminiscing. I’m let you know that there’s been an isolated incident of foot and mouth disease, involving me putting both my feet into my mouth. It happened last night, after I was safely in sunny Camberwell and had called my partner for a chat. Ah, how nice, you might think, but read on. We were chatting away quite merrily when she referenced my fears of a Berlin Wall type sudden lockdown of London in a mocking way. Affronted by this, I suggested that by closing the bridges over the Thames the government could effectively cut London in two. Hah! I thought, only for her to come back with “Oh, is that why you wanted to get back, in case you were stranded in North London?” leading me to reply without thinking “No, because all my music is there.” You know the feeling of instant regret you have when you’ve said something you shouldn’t? I had that and she pounced on my comment as if she was a shopper and it was the last toilet roll in the world.

Cue caustic barbs about it being good to know where my priorities were, pointed remarks about not caring, the sort of thing anyone would say after hearing that.

You might’ve thought I’d have stopped there. But no, foolishly, I thought I can still salvage this, but if there was a right combination of words to effect this, they were not, unfortunately, the ones I used. Firstly, I claimed that she was twisting my words – this got a snort of derision – but then “Well it’s not just that, there’s a huge garden here as well.” Then I stopped digging. But it was too late. If I though the previous amount of righteous indignation had been bad, it was as nothing when compared to the response these words elicited.

One of the worst things she said was that while me saying this sort of thing was ‘shocking’, it wasn’t ‘unexpected’. And as disapproving teachers and parents have done to me all my life, I was invited to think about what I’d said, and to tell her today why they were wrong.

But to me they weren’t wrong. Ill judged, tactless, selfish, and other words that mean the same thing, yes. Putting things ahead of her might be construed as crass and insensitive. Might? Would it have been better had I not said them? Undoubtedly! But were they wrong?

This digging malarkey is ruining my clothes. I should stop.

O.K, I’ll put my hands up to it – after I’ve washed them of course – that I may have been guilty of not taking this coronavirus thing as seriously as I might have. Watching the BBC News last night was both sobering and alarming and not just because I hardly ever watch television news, but more that I’ve been consciously avoiding all news since the start of the year, so was wholly unprepared for the entirety of the news to be given over to coronavirus. There were reporters reporting from squares that would normally have been packed on a Friday night, but because of the shutdown were empty. One reporter gave her piece live to camera as the lights in the bar behind her were switched off and plunged the background into darkness. It could’ve been an ominous portent of things to come, had not some maverick genius wearing one of those ‘anonymous’ masks goofed about and made obscene gestures behind her.

Well it made me laugh.

What didn’t make me laugh however was a reporter standing in a deserted Leicester Square reporting something we cold see with our own eyes. The news a reiterated the latest government prediction that 2% of adults under 50 would require hospitalization and that 45% of people of 80 would require hospitalization. Am I alone in thinking this makes no sense whatsoever? We are frequently told that the NHS is woefully underfunded and is close to breaking point. So, at the risk of sounding a completely cold and heartless bastard, what exactly is there to be gained by frittering away money on expensive medical interventions on the old, as the amount by which their life will be extended, frankly isn’t worth the money? And before you bleat on about how you can’t put a price on a life, well here’s some bad news; you can.

Governments do it all the time, most pertinently when assessing which drugs to approve for the NHS to prescribe by working out how long it will extend someone’s life by, the cost of prescribing that to an individual, and calculating how much the total cost will be to the NHS, to help come up with a cost benefit analysis to determine if it represents good value for money.

The problem is that people are reductive – they tend to see things only as they apply to themselves’ and those dearest to them – and tend to have only a fleeting regard for other people. I’d invite you to look at supermarket shelves before peeling an onion.

Consider this; that whilst have been around 11,000 reported world wide deaths from Coronavirus, roughly 4,000 people a day die of malaria.