Isolation II:Saturday Night Cabin Fever.

As I write, and post, this I'm thinking, among many other things, of what I'd be doing right now if the world hadn't changed so drastically, so quickly, and so terrifyingly over the last few weeks. I should be in either the Dove pub in Hammersmith, by the river, or enjoying a dosa in Sagar just down the road from that pub. With friends. Having enjoyed a walk I'd lovingly curated, through the parks of Bushy and Richmond, some time ago. With nothing more troubling my mind than how long it'd take to get home and if a crafty extra pint would be a bit naughty.

Bloody hell. I wish that was how things had played out. Instead, I'm sat at home staring at a computer screen for the seventh day in a row. Other than necessary trips to the shops (I'm neither able to nor willing to stockpile) I've not left the flat. I live alone so I've not seen a single person since I said goodbye to Pam and Shep at the end of our Capital Ring walk this time last week.

But I'm one of the lucky ones. I've got a lot of friends - and they're bloody good friends too. Checking in on me, and each other, via Facebook, text, and WhatsApp. Both Shep and Vicki phoned for a chat, Dad kept good on his promise of upping his calls too, and Michelle and I have made our video call a daily occurrence. Today's was particularly great as her daughter, Evie, put on a puppet show for me. A series of puppet shows in fact. Involving a lonely clown, a t-rex and his grandfather, and a friendly owl. Each story ended with them all living 'happily ever after'. Just as stories should. It really was the most adorable and heart-warming thing.

We're still far too close to the start of this pandemic to have any idea how many of us, or which of us, will get to live happily ever after. Since I wrote my first coronavirus blog, just two days ago, global deaths have risen by 3,500 to 12,900, British deaths are up from 100 to 178, Spanish deaths from 767 to 1,378, and the Italian death toll has gone from 2,978 to 4,825 overtaking the much much larger country of China to top a table no country wants to top. A table no country wants to be on.

But most are. At time of writing there have been deaths in seventy-one different countries and in every continent bar Antarctica. It is, quite frankly, mindblowing. Almost too much to take in. The world is being turned upside down and what remains after this can, surely, never be the same again. Everyone talks about wanting to get back to normal but nobody knows what normal will look like once this is all over.

When the Daily Telegraph is demanding a Brexit extension and those who dress to the left politically are calling for more authoritarian measures from a Tory government we can be sure we are in extraordinary times. When that Tory government is promising huge, unprecedented, cash bail outs, miles bigger than anything Jeremy Corbyn's Labour were offering, we see how the free market can't cope and how capitalism can't cater for a crisis.

We're going to need to think long and hard about how we do things. We can't keep worshipping at the altar of money and GDP, we can't keep treating people as units of productivity that serve no purpose unless they sell their labour, constantly buy things they don't need (often don't even want), and endlessly buy into aspirational anxiety driven dreams that only hurt us as people. It's the kind of thinking that sees people fighting over bog roll instead of just buying as much as they need.

Just because more shit than average comes out of your mouth, it doesn't follow more also comes out of your arse. If you have more than, say, ten rolls of toilet paper per person in your house at the moment do the world a favour, now, and take them back to the shop. Apologise while you're there - and then thank that person working in the shop. They're keeping vital and important services running and you're making both their life more difficult and their death more likely.

Stockpilers, who by leaving some without adequate toiletries are increasing the risk of virus spread, are the common or garden bellends of the coronavirus crisis. But, further up the food chain, some of Britain's highest profile morons have clearly decided they're not going to miss an opportunity like this. Nigel Farage has, of course, ramped up the xenophobia (just like Trump, who appears to be in even more of a complete meltdown than normal), Ant Middleton has told his 275,000 Twitter followers that as it doesn't affect him he's going to carry on as normal (virtually an act of manslaughter at this time), and Tim Martin has appeared on television to insist there is no evidence that coronavirus can be transmitted in pubs.

Especially in his pubs. Wetherspoons. Where, admittedly, most men do sit at least six feet apart and never talk to each other. Tim Martin, a slightly deflated helium balloon of Worzel Gummidge that's been left in a stock room since the mid-seventies, is not a medical expert. Tim Martin runs a large chain of pubs that serve cheap booze to miserable and desperate alcoholics and daytime drinkers. He's probably not the best person to speak to at the time of a major world health crisis.

Neither is Farage. He's the leader of a political party that doesn't have one single standing MP. It's really time he fucked off. Others proving, even in a crisis when we need to support each other more than ever, that they're out for themselves and themselves only include Richard Branson (never trust a hippy) who owns a private island in the Caribbean and has a net worth of US$3.4bn but still thinks the government should bail him out while he lays his staff off.

'Sir' Philip Green is a wanker in anyone's book - and always has been. The chairman of the Arcadia Group (net worth:somewhere between two & three billion US dollars) is also looking for the government to help him out. As the man who all but stole hundreds of millions of pounds of pension money from BHS, it's not even the shittiest thing he's done this decade. Here's a photo taken of him and a friend at an international competition to find the world's very worst man.

Alex Langsam, the owner of Britannia Hotels, is another leading coronavirus cunt. The poor hygiene and maintenance of his company's hotel had already earned his firm a reputation as 'Britain's worst hotel chain' but this week, in response to Covid-19, he fired thirty staff at Coylumbridge Aviemore Hotel in Scotland without notice or redundancy pay. Many of them lived at the hotel so became homeless instantly too.

Increasing their risk of contagion. If Covid-19 doesn't do for the businesses of Martin, Green, Branson, and Langsam we should all, when this is over, do the very best to make sure we never support any of their businesses again. Their execrable behaviour has been put into such sharp contrast by the simple fact that, elsewhere, so many other people are doing, or trying to do, the right thing.

From high profile, and very wealthy, hotel owners like Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs closing their two Manchester hotels and offering the rooms free of charge for NHS staff to the British nurse, Dawn Bilbrough, who in a widely distributed short video clip pleaded, in tears, for people not to take more food than they need so key workers like her could eat at the end of the day. Further afield I saw a story on the news about a nurse in Iran who was still helping her patients even with a drip attached to her. She continued until she was unable to, before dying of the virus herself.

Even in arenas that have been riven with division recently there has been consensus and listening. Thursday's Question Time (a programme many have turned their backs on in recent years) from Weston-Super-Mare saw Conservative Health Secrtary Matt Hancock and the Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham let each other finish sentences, often agreed, and, when they didn't, patiently explained why they didn't.

It was a tonic to watch. The virus meant there was no studio audience and, as it turned out, that was a vast improvement too. The programme has been so marred by red faced racists screaming ill informed xenophobic rubbish of late that the word 'gammon' has been coined to describe them. With none of that nonsense the panel could actually make their points clearly.

The big political debating point of the last couple of days revolved around Boris Johnson's initial decision to advise people not to go to pubs, clubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, and gyms instead of just ordering those establishments to close. The belief being, as I wrote in my earlier blog, that he was helping his chums in the world of insurance.

Writer and broadcaster Guto Harri appeared on Newsnight to suggest that persuasion rather than direct orders is the way you treat adults and it sounded reasonable enough, but it was fluently expressed bollocks. People didn't stop going to any of those places in anything like large enough numbers and for much of that I blame Boris Johnson, and his cocaine addled homunculus Michael Gove, for spending the last five years encouraging people to believe that feelings are more important than facts, that emotion endures over evidence.

You can't let these genies out of the lamp and expect them to go back in if you ask them nicely. Eventually pressure, a growing death toll, and public opinion, got the better of Johnson and now the pubs and all those other places mentioned are closed. Which makes for a very weird, very surreal, feeling in villages, towns, and cities right now.

It's spring, birds are singing, the blossom is appearing on the trees, but we're hiding away from it for the most part. Apart from family bike rides and solitary walks that's exactly what we need to do now and what we need to keep doing until this pandemic is either in abeyance or is done. Until medical experts, not a jumped up prick like Ant fucking Middleton, tell us otherwise.

It's tough. I have friends who have been in floods of tears, worried about the future for their families and the future for everyone. Staying in can be great when it's not enforced and when it's not accompanied by an apocalyptic dread unsurpassed in at least seventy years. Jon Ronson has proposed a theory that long term anxiety sufferers like himself, and introverted ones especially, are discovering that, quite surprisingly, they have better coping mechanisms than most others.

It's a theory I buy into, at least to a degree. If you spend your whole time catastrophising about what can go wrong and what you'll do when that happens you've probably imagined so many different disaster scenarios that when you're finally faced with a real one you've got at least some idea of what to do. It's like that thing when successful sports people talk about visualing scoring penalties or winning Wimbledon. You play it out in your mind ready for playing it out in real life.

But I'm also getting a bit bored of some smug gits boasting that social distancing comes naturally to them. It stinks of "I'm alright, Jack". I don't like it when extroverted people are rude to introverts and, now the weight on the seesaw has been displaced, I'm not liking introverts being rude about extroverts. It suggests a clearly defined binary, an us and them, rather than a spectrum. Dividing people into two distinct camps is never a good idea. Right now it's a terrible idea.

Physical distance we need. Emotionally, let's get closer. Let's not boast that we're doing social distancing better than others, that our kids are being home schooled better than other kids, or that we're using this time to write amazing novels (or, ahem, blogs). It's not about who can do the most creative and worthwhile things with this time. It's about helping your friends and neighbours out when you can, staying in touch, and not acting a prick like Richard Branson.

For my part, I've been watching TV, writing, having a couple of beers, and making sure I'm keeping in contact with friends and family as regularly as I can or I feel they'd like. I'm trying not to judge people who are coming to different decisions to me about how to approach this (having read this far you'll see I've not totally succeeded with that) and I'm trying to be tolerant when people act out of character because they're stressed or scared.

This is going to be a long and frightening journey and, as much as we can, no person should be left behind to fend for themselves. I've been thinking about friends and family that are no longer here, people like my nan and my brother, and wondering what they'd have made of all this. Last year I lost one of my oldest and most loved friends, Bugsy, to cancer and part of me has been wanting to call him up and say "mate. You'll NEVER guess what the fuck happened after you left".

As if it was some weird incident on a night out that spiralled out of control and that once we'd had a quick laugh about it we could move on to the next thing. But Bugsy's not here anymore and this is not some weird incident we'll be able to consign to history any time soon. This is big. This is most likely the biggest thing the world will have to deal with during my lifetime with the possible exception of an oncoming global climate catastrophe.

I'm not sure if I'll be here for that but hopefully those that are, and who live through this, will realise that we can't deny nature or truth any more, we can't pretend we live unconnected to all others on the planet, and we can no longer go on acting as if thinking something hard enough makes it true. There are no such things as alternative facts. There are absolute truths. We need to realise that and act on it and then there's a chance we'll, most of us, get through this.

If we don't - we're fucked, and my saturday night cabin fever will move on to another Bee Gees song and become a tragedy. Instead of that, let's try stayin' alive!