Isolation X:The Earth Dies Streaming.

"People lie, eyes closed, no longer dreaming. The earth dies screaming. Like scattered pebbles, cars lie silent waiting, oil-less engines seized by dirt and sand. Bodies hanging limp, no longer bleeding. The earth dies screaming" - The Earth Dies Screaming, UB40.

Tomorrow it's Good Friday (and it's the Good Friday of an Easter weekend that, typically, looks like being one of the sunniest for years). When I was kid I used to go to Ringwood, Matchams race track, with my dad to watch moto-cross on Good Friday, in other years I've used the Thursday start to the weekend as an excuse to go clubbing or get absolutely twatted and four years ago I went on a lovely walk from Henley to Marlow.

I've had good Easters, I've had bad Easters, and, to be honest, I've had a lot of unmemorable Easters. But I've never had an Easter on lockdown before. No mates. No family. No beer gardens. No picnics. No gigs. No sex. No drugs. No wine. No women. No fun. No sin. No you. No wonder it's dark. Everyone around me is a total stranger. Everyone avoids me like a cyclone ranger. Everyone.

Away from The Vapors, I'd be happy with a Greggs vegan sausage roll and a game of Whack-A-Mole right now but even that's not possible. Better than being nailed to a cross though, eh? As soon as my last Isolation blog dropped I received a message saying the total of hospital deaths in the UK that day was 854. A record that lasted twenty-four hours. Next day saw more than nine hundred dead. Today the figure dropped but only very slightly and to a degree that tells us next to nothing.

In the US, hardly surprisingly - considering their moron-in-chief, things are even worse. For three days in a row their daily death toll has been between one and two thousand. Trump's latest attempt, in a never ending game of shifting the blame, is to attack the World Health Organisation. An unthinkable transgression in normal times. An act of such vileness it beggars belief right now. With Trump in charge it is inevitable that the US will top the table of nations when it comes to death. He'll probably just see a list with USA at the top of it and consider himself to be winning.

I was hoping, in this piece, to write positive things because I feel people would prefer to read them but Donald Trump, Donald Trump in a position of power for fuck's sake, makes it impossible to do so. Not taking this crisis seriously is bad enough, actively making it worse is criminally insane. Trump wants to go down in history as many things but what he will go down in history is, most likely - it's just my view but the facts are backing it up, the first truly evil man of the 21st century.

The 20th century had Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Trump's not at that level, in terms of evil or in numbers of deaths on his hands - and I hope he never reaches that, but his place in history alongside them seems assured. When the world looks back on the great coronavirus crisis of 2020 Donald Trump will be remembered as the villain of the piece. He's on record as saying a quarter of a million dead is what's he's comfortable with and he's still shilling for hydroxychloroquine despite there being no evidence whatsoever that the anti-malarial drug is effective against COVID-19. Or even safe to take.

That's tragic in every meaning of the word. Sad news came when the influential country singer and songwriter John Prine died, aged 73, of complications caused by COVID-19. I wasn't as familiar with his work as I'd liked to have been and listening to some of his songs now has taught me, too late, how good he was. Check out In Spite Of Ourselves for some light relief and a reminder of the things that, until very recently, used to occupy our minds.

Boris Johnson remains in hospital and (almost) everybody in the country is rooting for him to pull through (and the news we're getting sounds positive). That doesn't mean we have to support the Tories or their policies either. It certainly doesn't mean we have to go out to our gardens and balconies and clap him, as we do the NHS and other key workers, like some suggested. By awarding themselves a £10K pay rise for the inconvenience of working from home (like everyone else, who can, is), all politicians lost a bit more public faith in them at just a time when it's more needed than ever.

Many have spoken of Johnson's 'fight' with COVID-19, or his struggle, but, in a wonderful article for The Guardian, Marina Hyde made the timely, but always relevant, point of how these terms are not the right ones to use regarding medical issues. Marina is a brilliant writer, one of the country's finest, and she usually manages to make great hay with the political circus of the UK, giving us something to laugh about and something to think about in equal measure.

She's sharp, she's poignant, and she's funny. But her latest column took a necessarily more sombre tone than normal when she pointed out that talks of fights and struggles, and other such bellicose language, was glib to the point of being an insult. I've been guilty of this in previous blogs about COVID-19 (and elsewhere) and I will endeavour to change that where I can. Habits die hard but saying people have won their fight insults those that succumb to COVID-19, cancer, or any other disease. It suggests they didn't fight hard enough when, as both Danny Baker and Christopher Hitchens have pointed out in the past, the sufferer is not in a fight with the disease. The disease is in a fight with science, the sufferer's body is merely the battleground.

Words count. Words have power. We have to take care how we use them. WHEN ALL THIS IS OVER there will be big changes in most spheres of the world. Language, too, will be one of them. Another person who used language, and their public profile, exquisitely well this week was Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis.

Maitlis is usually excellent. She's honest, empathetic, sympathetic, and probing when she needs to be but this week she 'broke' the Internet when she kicked off Wednesday night's show with an opening speech that was so good I have decided to repeat a large part of it below. Some times you have to admit others say it best:-

"They tell us coronavirus is a great leveller. It's not. It's much much harder if you're poor. How do we stop it making social inequality even greater? The language around COVID-19 has sometimes felt trite and misleading. You do not survive the illness through fortitude and strength of character whatever the Prime Minister's colleagues will tell us, and the disease is not a great leveller, the consequences of which everyone, rich or poor, suffers the same. This is a myth which needs debunking. Those on the front line right now, bus drivers and shelf stackers, nurses, care home workers, hospital staff, and shopkeepers, are disproportionately the lowest paid members of our workforce. They are more likely to catch the disease because they are more exposed. Those that live in tower blocks and small flats will find the lockdown tougher. Those in manual jobs will be unable to work from home. This is a health issue with huge ramifications for social welfare and it's a welfare issue with huge ramifications for public health"

I was blown away to see, and hear, somebody saying those brutally honest words. The BBC has been attacked from both sides for bias over the last few years, unfairly I believe, but this was the BBC at its very best and a lot of people quickly realised that. The next day 'everybody' was sharing it on their Facebook pages and correctly so. Maitlis didn't just report what people were saying but exposed the lies that have been allowed to prosper in our political debate for far too long.

The show ended with a heartbreaking montage of some of those key workers (doctors, nurses, teachers, and bus drivers) who have lost their life (not their fight) against the virus. I hope it's a new dawn in broadcasting because the way we cover the news and what we amplify and allow to have an audience has a terrible, we're now discovering lethal, effect.

Maitlis speech was as moving as the rainbows in the windows of houses with small children and the regular Thursday applause (and bashing of pots and pans) for key workers and it cut right through all the bullshit to speak, in plain English, truth to power. Not for the first time, and surely not the last, I welled up a bit.

Apart from feeling emotional, though, I'm still feeling ok. Both physically and mentally. I've been listening to lots of Nina Simone, Stars of the Lid, and, now, John Prine, I've been writing blogs, I did a quiz for my friends (which they seemed to enjoy, I certainly did), and I've had nice long chats on the phone with Michelle, Simon, and Mum and Dad. I actually feel I'm getting to know people, even my own parents, better than I've ever known them.

Last night, Wednesday, after not walking further than the local shops for over three weeks I ventured out to Dulwich Woods and Sydenham Hill Wood and completed more than 10,000 steps for the first time since the last Capital Ring walk a week before lockdown began. It was nearing dusk. It was beautiful. There was barely a soul there and those that were observed social distancing sensibly, respectfully, and with a smile on their faces.

Further proving to me what I've long known. The vast majority of people are good and, if they can, they'll help a fellow man. It gave me hope but, today, I'm not ending the blog with hope but with a series of open questions. The forecast for deaths in the UK, and the US especially, in the next couple of weeks is exponential, and terrifying.

I don't know how likely that forecast is to become reality but every grim prediction made so far has, more or less, come true. I feel very little hope this one's wrong. I've been touched by kindness from all spheres, every corner, but now as we dig deep, deeper than before, into the crisis I've started to worry about conspiracy theorists and populists getting their metaphorical running shoes on and making things worse.

My first blog, three weeks ago, talked, alarmingly, about how ten UK deaths had risen to one hundred. They're now over seven thousand and the global death toll, in the same period of time, has gone from 9,000 to 90,000. As the experts suggested, unheard - often because of the very populist leaders we now look to to lead us out of the crisis, the deaths rose and rose until inaction and denial were no longer an option.

What price those initial weeks of inaction? For many, the heaviest of all. It's possible, likely even, that family members and friends of yours will die because of this. COVID-19 is a virus and a virus can happen at, and has happened at, any time in history and in any place in the world. It affects every country on the planet but the USA and the UK are experiencing particularly fast rising death tolls at the moment and we need to ask why.

If you voted for Donald Trump and if you voted for Boris Johnson (apparently now sitting up in bed - must be rare for him to not be lying) you need to ask yourself three questions:-

(1) Did your greed for wealth overcome your empathy for your fellow human?

(2) Did you buy into a myth of nationalism just at the time the world needed to come together?

(3) Would you rather the likes of Trump hold on to power or would you rather your grandparents, parents, and children live?

You'd think the answers would be simple. History has a horrible habit of disproving us.