Isolation XXV:One Hundred Days Of Solitude.

The idea that staying in is the new going out has been knocking around for a couple of decades or so now. But it's never been quite so true as it has since the middle of March. But, now, with lockdown, rightly or wrongly, beginning to ease, going out, ever so slightly and to parks and forests rather than cinemas, concert halls, and restaurants, is starting to become the new staying in.

So to call my twenty-fifth, and final, Isolation blog One Hundred Days Of Solitude is a liberty on many fronts. Not just an affront to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's far superior writing but to the idea that I've 'suffered' any real solitude during this time. Or even that I've undergone that much solitude. The phone has been ringing constantly, the Kahoot quizzes keep on coming, and both family and friends have been more valued, and more valuable, than ever before. I've never felt so much love and kindness in the air than I have in these last one hundred days.

Since I last wrote I've had phone and video calls with Michelle, Vicki, Adam, Chris B, Mum, and Dad. I've had a Zoom chat with Valia. I've lost a family sports quiz set by my dad (on Kahoot, obvs) to nephew Dan, I've lost Mike's Kahoot quiz - by one question - to Owen, and I even managed to win a couple of quizzes (one set by Chris D & one by my other nephew Alex, his dad/my brother Andy, and his cousins Megan and Tiler). Best of all, face to face contact always trumps online for me, I've had two long walks down to Brockwell Park where I've spent a couple of long and leisurely afternoons with Clare. The sunset last night was glorious.

As ever with my correspondence, the lovely time I've been having is in stark, jarring, contrast with the experiences others are having. Some of my friends are being worked off their feet, some are struggling with home schooling, some are suffering huge anxiety about lockdown, and some have lost family members and friends to Covid. It's hard to make sense of the enormity, and horror, of it all when you're sat in the park on a sunny day or laughing your way through a quiz with your friends so, as it's the final blog directly addressing the situation here's a list of all nations who have suffered more than one thousand confirmed deaths from Covid. A disease that has, globally, as of writing, taken 466,548 lives.

USA                    121,766
Brazil                    50,659
UK                        42,632
Italy                      34,634
France                  29,640
Spain                    28,322
Mexico                 21,825
India                     13,699
Belgium                  9,696
Iran                         9,623
Germany                 8,961
Canada                    8,430
Russia                     8,206
Peru                        8,045
Netherlands            6,090
Sweden                   5,053
Turkey                    4,960
China                      4,634
Chile                       4,479
Ecuador                   4,223
Pakistan                  3,950
Indonesia                2,500
Colombia                2,237
Egypt                      2,193
South Africa           1,950
Ireland                    1,715
Switzerland             1,680
Portugal                  1,530
Romania                 1,512
Bangladesh             1,464
Poland                     1,356
Saudi Arabia           1,267
Philippines              1,169
Iraq                         1,100
Argentina                1,011
Ukraine                   1,022

So, as predicted by many, the USA, Brazil, and the UK are topping the grisly death toll. Those countries aren't geographically close to each other at all and the populations of China and India are far greater than any of those nations (especially the UK) so what could they possibly have in common? Again, as observed by many, they have small men as leaders. Vain men. Selfish men. Men with a paucity of imagination, a complete lack of empathy, a total disregard for truth, and a wilful ignorance of facts. They are men full of bluster, bigotry, and bullshit. They are men who spoke the language of war in the face of a health crisis. They are men who believed exceptionalism could somehow prevent disease and death. They are men who when they should be looking for solutions instead look for scapegoats. They are men who constantly speak of being world beating but beat the world only in the way they fail their nations. They are men whose names will haunt the history books of future generations to come. They are barely men at all.  

While Boris Johnson shills for Arnott's Tim-Tams, while Bolsonaro tries to hide the wildly escalating death toll from the Brazilian public, and while Donald Trump boasts to a two thirds empty arena in Tulsa (Nigel Farage taking a nine thousand mile round trip to be there - and you thought Cummings was bad?) that he's mastered the art of drinking a glass of water with one hand it is time to realise that the election of these men was a historical mistake that we must start to right as soon as possible.

The damage they have unleashed onto the world will not be cleared up in ours, our children's, or their children's lifetimes. For that we must never forget them and never forgive them. Not just them but the toadies (Matt Hancock/Alok Sharma), amoral vacuums (Grant Shapps/Liz Truss), incompetent buffoons (Gavin Williamson/Dominic Raab) and complete and utter cunts (Priti Patel/Michael Gove/Jacob Rees-Mogg) that make up their accursed administrations.

Marcus Rashford, the twenty-two year old England and Manchester Utd centre forward, a working class lad from Wythenshawe, has shown more moral fibre, more empathy, and more competence than our entire government. His work with food waste charity FareShare has raised £20,000,000 to provide food for those children who, if at school, would be receiving free school meals. His campaigning for change has forced Johnson to backtrack on his intention not to extend this scheme into the summer holidays.

A reversal of a decision that Johnson, of course, immediately lied about - and lied about demonstrably. The government are now failing in so many different directions it's hard to keep on top of them. Impossible to, if you like, track and test them for the virus of bullshit they've all been infected with by chief super spreader Boris Johnson.

Talk of world beating track and test systems (instead of ones that, quite simply, work) have, of course, yet again, proven to be utter phooey. The fact that an incompetent and amoral service provider like Serco were tasked with creating the app further underlines the fact that this government, even 40,000+ deaths down the line, are not really taking it seriously.

They're campaigning for 2024 already because they know their mishandling of this crisis has cost them dear in the minds of voters. So the policy now is to downplay the bad news and give the plebs the bread and circuses they so adore. I know. I'm one of those plebs. Queues outside Primark attest to the fact that there's a lot of people wanting some retail therapy right now and the return of Premiership and Championship football has been generally met with excitement.

Which is not something you'd think about watching Aston Villa and Sheffield Utd play out a 0-0 draw on a Wednesday evening in an empty stadium. But I get it. People love football and they want it back. Football's something of a tabula rasa in British society. You can reflect what you want on to it. You can attach huge emotional significance on the result of a game of football or you can dismiss it as a ludicrous display of machismo by overpaid prima donnas that's taken way too seriously by the lower orders.

You can, like Matt Hancock, shift the blame of government failure on to the overpaid players or you can join the Football Lads Alliance and do Nazi salutes in front of statues of Winston Churchill. Or you can, instead, look to the examples of Marcus Rashford and Raheem Starling and use the voice that football has given you to try and change society for the better.

Katie Hopkins tweeted a picture of herself photoshopped into a Man City kit tackling Rashford and Man City responded with "not in our blue". To which Rashford neatly added "a city united". It was one of Hopkins' last ever tweets as, finally - and long overdue, she was banned from Twitter for life for years and years of abusive online hate speech. She's gone over to Parler which seems to be some kind of cesspit for the very lowest dregs of humanity. Let's hope Trump gets banned from Twitter soon and follows her.

The love and support that flowed for Rashford and what he'd said and done was so powerful it brought tears to my eyes and as the far right got on their collective high horse to imagine wake leftie snowflakes speaking ill of the recently departed, at age 103, Vera Lynn, the first among equals when it comes to being a force's sweetheart, it is, perhaps, worth remembering that, in 2009, Lynn sued their beloved BNP for using The White Cliffs of Dover as an anti-immigration anthem.

Woke leftie snowflakes (or, my preferred term, ordinary reasonable people who care about others) weren't celebrating Lynn's death. They saw Vera Lynn and her songs as a celebration of hope over fear, of unity over division. Vera Lynn sang about "love and laughter and peace ever after", she sang about the blue skies driving the dark clouds far away, and she sang, most famously of all, about meeting again one sunny day. 

Vera Lynn knew something the likes of Trump, Farage, and Hopkins will never understand. That though love and hate are in eternal conflict, love always wins in the end. In the last one hundred days it's felt like I've spent more time in the company of Lewis Goodall, Nicholas Watt, Helen Thomas, Gabriel Gatehouse, Katie Razzall, and Mark Urban than I have with friends and family.

I watch Newsnight each evening and I will continue to do so but now I'm beginning to see old friends more often. I'm even, via online events and the Internet, making new friends. While, on one hand, the future to me looks full of trepidation, full of worry, and full of fears about further division, upcoming recession, four and half more years of Tory misrule, and, ultimately, climate change.

But the future, also, even still in the midst of this pandemic, is beginning, in some small ways, to look hopeful. The kindness of family and friends, the innate goodness emanating from the ordinary people of this and all other countries, and the overwhelmingly positive responses to the Black Lives Matter campaign suggests to me that most of us are determined now to strive for a better, fairer, and kinder world. Not just for ourselves but for everyone. We've realised, hopefully, we don't exist in a vacuum or in small self contained units. We are social creatures and if a virus can spread through humanity as rapidly as it has done then so, if we will it, can an idea.

An idea of faith, hope, and charity. An idea that united we are stronger. An idea that love and kindness are the best, not the weakest, traits of humanity. On Thursday 19th March this year I began my first blog of this series by saying that "if we can't come out of this terrifying and unprecedented, in our lifetime, situation with more humanity and more love for each other then love and humanity no longer exist and we'll deserve every single thing that happens to us. Now on Monday 22nd June, in my last blog in this series, I feel proud to say that almost every single person I know has shown themselves capable of that love and humanity and that I now have more faith in the future than I did one hundred days ago. We still have a long way to go but now, I feel absolutely certain, we'll meet again some sunny day. Love you all.