six months in and still counting…

It’s exactly six calendar since Moira and I self-isolated/shielded (I’m one of those people classified as “clinically extremely vulnerable”!). We’ve taken the coronavirus precautions very seriously and decided from the outset that we would avoid shopping, public transport and, to a large extent, people! We decided to try to walk every day (for both our physical fitness and our mental health – but, still, as far as possible, avoiding people). Even after the shielding rules were relaxed at the start of August, we’ve effectively kept to the same disciplines.
The past six months have been a strange and challenging time for all of us… and, of course, thousands have died or have been massively affected by the virus. In such circumstances, Moira and I regard ourselves as being incredibly fortunate. Schools, shops, restaurants, theatres, sport and jobs have all been hugely disrupted. Yes, it’s been frustrating not to be able to hug our children and grandchildren or to meet freely with our friends… and, yes, for us, it’s also meant being restricted to venturing out only within walking distance from our front door. 
But we’ve all also learnt to adapt. Where it’s been possible, people have worked from home; technology (eg. zoom) has been crucial; people have discovered different ways of doing things…
Who would want to be a government in such difficult circumstances?
Whatever one’s political views, I think there’s common agreement that the UK government performance through it all has been abject. It has been guilty of a whole string of fundamental errors and poor decision-making – all with massively serious repercussions. For example: on 24 January, Health Secretary Mr Hancock dismissed the coronavirus threat to the UK public as ‘low’; PM Mr Johnson missed five vital Cobra meetings (it wasn’t until 2 March that he attended his first virus meeting)… and by then it was almost certainly too late. The Times published an article on 18 April lambasting the government (and in particular Mr Johnson) for its/his failures and what it described as the “five lost weeks”… and the “thousands of unnecessary deaths”, in its estimation, this had caused. Mr Johnson’s spokesman played down the looming threat from the east and reassured the nation that we were “well prepared for any new diseases”. 
Contrary to the official line, scientists, academics, doctors, emergency planners and public officials acknowledged that Britain was in a poor state of readiness for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and gone out of date after becoming a low priority in the years of austerity cuts. The training to prepare key workers for a pandemic had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.
At the beginning of April (I can’t be absolutely sure of the date), I recall watching an interview with a scientist from South Korea (the country had been hit by the virus some weeks earlier and had been relatively successful in containing its spread). She had been asked what advice she would give to European countries now faced with having to deal with the virus. Her reply was unequivocal and brief: effective testing and tracing was absolutely CRUCIAL.
Oh the irony!
So, here in the UK, six months on from when the country first went into ‘lockdown’ in mid-March, we are STILL struggling to provide an effective and reliable ‘test and trace’ system (despite the initial ridiculous claims about the UK having a world-beating system!). Even at airports (most airports around the world had introduced temperature tests for arrivals), the UK lacked action and authority… not to mention an effective policy. A study by Southampton University, for instance, showed that 190,000 people flew into the UK from Wuhan and other high-risk Chinese cities between January and March. The researchers estimated that up to 1,900 of these passengers would have been infected with the coronavirus — almost guaranteeing the UK would become a centre of the subsequent pandemic.
Six months on from the initial ‘lockdown’ in March, it seems as though the government has lurched from one crisis to another… mixed message after mixed message; lack of leadership; lies; Dominic Cummings; lack of trust; Care Home testing fiasco; handing out £1billion government contracts (to ‘friends’?) without tender; abolishing Public Health England;
… and, of course, not forgetting Climate Change; Brexit; proroguing parliament; introducing a Bill that would break international law; the Good Friday Agreement; Russian interference in the election; Grenfell Tower inquiry; refugees etc etc.
 
Back in April, I wrote this on my blog:
I desperately hope that we come out of it all determined to make the world a better place.
I desperately hope that we remember the people and the jobs that make our day-to-day lives worth living.
I desperately hope that we truly decide to care for our planet.
I desperately hope that we can move away from the old world of greed and power, of the haves and the have-nots. My fear is that some will have very short memories and revert back (if ever they budged) to lives governed by wealth and influence.
I desperately hope that such individuals and corporations are overwhelmed by the voices of those who know there’s a better way.
Sadly, it’s still not over…
The trouble is that none of us has been through this before. When we first went into ‘lockdown’, the government advised ‘extremely vulnerable’ people like me that we would need to self-isolate for 12 weeks (ie. until mid-June). In the event, this was subsequently extended by a further 7 weeks to the beginning of August. Although the number of weekly deaths in the UK currently seems to have ‘levelled out’ at between 50-100 (large numbers, but nothing compared with the April figures of 4,000-5,000/week), the number of confirmed cases has recently started to increase again – to over 4,000/week. The total ‘official’ number of UK coronavirus deaths is currently shown as approaching 42,000 (although UK statistics agencies claim it’s nearly 58,000).
So we continue to live with huge uncertainties… the worry, with Winter approaching, is that there will be a ‘second wave’ – which, given the more severe weather, would likely result in many more deaths. Sadly, a Winter ‘lockdown’ would almost certainly also have a severe effect on mental health issues.
The UK economy, inevitably, would continue to struggle in such circumstances (the government has already come under criticism of encouraging people back to work – with a resulting boast to the economy – despite the distinct likelihood of a subsequent increase in coronavirus cases).
 
So, to all intents and purposes, we all have to live from week to week… which obviously makes ‘planning’ uncertain and fraught with difficulties. Again, from my April blog post, I wrote:
We’ve learnt so much from this awful coronavirus experience.
Let’s use what we’ve learnt to make the world a better place.
I sincerely hope that this will be the case but, as things stand, I sense that many people are just desperate to ‘get back to normal’ and, indeed, that some have not only abandoned any aspirations that might have had to ‘make the world a better place’, and are prepared to ignore guidelines and rules in pursuit of their own selfish desires.
I very much hope that I’m wrong.
I watched David Attenborough’s “Extinction: The Facts” a couple of days ago on iPlayer and it underlined, for me, that so many of the issues facing the world today – like Climate Change and Pandemics – are interconnected. Our individual lifestyles; what we eat; our carbon footprints etc etc (eg. a UN report identified the key drivers of biodiversity loss, including overfishing, climate change and pollution. But the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss is the destruction of natural habitats).
Disease ecologists believe that if we continue on this pathway, this year’s pandemic will not be a one-off event… and, as Attenborough also pointed out: “This year, we have been shown we have gone one step too far. Scientists have linked our destructive relationship with nature to the emergence of Covid-19”.
PS: Two of the things I’ve done during lockdown are: a) keep a daily diary (which, on re-reading, seems merely boring and repetitive – but, perhaps, it might ‘improve with age’ as a memory-jogger(?) and b) a book of photographs and sketches (see image).

august-september 2020 books…

The Last Days Of The Bus Club (Chris Stewart): This is the fourth book of Stewart’s I’ve read - of his life since buying a remote, hillside peasant farm (“on the wrong side of the river”) in Andalucia 20 year something years ago - so you won’t be surprised to hear that I rather like them! Trying to scrape a living during this period has clearly been fraught with difficulties. In order to get by, they’ve found themselves resorting various schemes and mini-enterprises (including sheep-shearing and, of course, writing) and his books essentially provide an account of their ongoing journey. Rather like the “A Year In Provence” book that I’ve recently re-read, it’s the various local characters who provide a wealth of the book’s charm. The “Bus Club” from the title relates to this final year of their daughter’s schooling, when Stewart and two of his Spanish neighbours used to gather together to meet the school bus… and generally ‘put the world to right’ (as you do!). It’s a very special, hopeful account about living simply - a funny, endearing, observant appreciation of life. My perfect lockdown book.

The Princess Bride (William Goldman): This is our next StorySmith bookgroup book (we decided on something of a ‘humorous theme’). To be honest, I hadn’t really come across Goldman before; I hadn’t appreciated, for example, that he was the screenwriter for the ‘Butch Cassidy’ film (I also hadn’t seen the 1987 ‘Princess Bride’ film). He died in 2018, aged 87. The book can probably be described as an action-packed fairy tale (with romance and revenge thrown into the mix). As a boy, William Goldman claims (but remember, this is fiction!), he loved to hear his father read the S. Morgenstern ‘classic’ (pure invention, of course), The Princess Bride. But as a grown-up he ‘discovered’ that the boring parts were left out of his Dad's recitation, and only the ‘good parts’ reached his ears… so here Goldman ‘reconstructs’ the book as a ‘good parts version’ along similar lines. I won’t even begin to try and summarise the plot… I’ll just acknowledge that, yes, it’s fast-moving, clever and full of intrigue, humour, love and revenge and an enjoyable, easy read (definitely a welcome change from pandemics and governmental incompetence!). However, I certainly didn’t love the book (unlike the numerous Goodread reviewers I’ve just noted online!). Goldman was much too full of himself for my liking and ended up finding his mocking asides/explanations/observations increasingly irritating! As ever, it’ll be interesting to discover what the rest of the bookgroup think.
All The Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr): I thought this was a wonderful, remarkable novel. It’s set in Germany and France before and during the German occupation of France. Marie-Laure is a little blind, motherless, French girl. She is six years old when the novel begins in Paris in 1934, where she lives with her father, a locksmith and keeper of the keys at the Natural History Museum. Werner Pfennig is an orphan in a German mining town, near Essen. He is a tiny boy of seven with a gift for science (and a fascination for radios in particular). Marie-Laure's father is also the creator of ingenious puzzles and delightful miniatures – of the streets and houses of Paris, for instance. The miniatures teach Marie-Laure, using her fingers as eyes, how to navigate the city. Ultimately she survives the destruction and desolation of the Occupation through the books she can read in braille. Werner's talent brings him to the attention of the Nazis, and he is sent to a national school that trains an elite group of Hitler Youth for the Third Reich. Marie-Laure and her father escape Paris in 1940, and take refuge in Saint‑Malo. Werner's genius is put to work tracking radio transmissions across Russia and Central Europe, until he is sent to Saint-Malo, where Marie‑Laure's great‑uncle uses his radio transmitter on behalf of the Resistance. Their paths ultimately collide… but I’ll avoid spoilers, so will leave it there! It’s a book about the morality and brutality of war; about coming-of-age; about endurance and the human spirit. It’s hauntingly beautiful and, once I’d got into it, I just couldn’t put it down. Wonderfully-written. Remarkable.

Ancestral Vices (Tom Sharpe): I first read this nearly 40 years ago. I used it as another ‘easy-reading-during-difficult-times’ book… on the basis that Sharpe always used to make me smile. Actually, unlike the ‘The Wilt Alternative’ book I re-read back in May, I found this one a little tired and predictable (yes, very funny in places… but also, for me, just too ridiculous and excessive). It felt a bit like a cross between “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em”, “Fawlty Towers” and Miss Marple!! The words on the book jacket summarise matters: “left-wing academics, right-wing capitalists, true blue country gentry, workers, peasants, police and lawyers”. Entertaining, but also excruciatingly farcical (in a bad way). I don’t think I’ll be re-reading any of my other Tom Sharpe books in a hurry.

The Sacred Art Of Stealing (Christopher Brookmyre): I read ‘Ugly One Morning’ (another of Brookmyre’s books) quite recently and, at the time, had commented that I hadn’t altogether been convinced by the plot – which I thought it was a ‘little contrived’. As a result, one of my friends suggested that I should ‘give this one a go’… and so I did… and it was well worth it! So, this is a novel about Dadaist bank robbers and choreographed dancing gunmen in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street (I kid you not!) and a female detective who, in the words of one reviewer, is a ‘connoisseur of crooks’. It took me a little time to get into the book (60 pages of the 400 plus) but, once in, I couldn’t put it down. The plot is intriguing, ridiculous and yet utterly convincing. Very clever, humorous, biting social satire and irreverent. I loved it.