Isolation XIII:Bellringers And Bellends.

How are we gonna come out of this? Not just logistically, not just as a society, but personally. It seems a trite and selfish question to ask but I suspect I'm not the only one that has looked into their own soul and asked that question. Will we be the Tom Moore (raising £26,000,000 for the NHS) or the Jeff Bezos lining our own pockets? Will we be Jacob Rees-Mogg looking at it as a way to make ourselves even richer or will we be Joe Wicks trying to put a smile on kid's faces and get the country to do some keep fit. Will we be the social media troll punching out, or down, at people already anxious and lonely or will we be the person who checks in on their friends at a time of crisis? Will we be bellringers or bellends?

With the hugely honourable exception of frontline workers, not much is required of us to be good people now but, for that brave tribe of Internet trolls and abusers of women, there is work to be done during a crisis. People must be abused online and, under the cover of quarantine, they must be abused, and often killed, in real life too. Why let a toxic virus that has overtaken the world, jumped from continent to continent, and killed over 160,000 people so far affect your own biases, be them xenophobic or misogynist, or change your own toxic behaviour? Now is the time for you to shine, o hater of humanity? The virus that is killing people is not your enemy. Your enemy is the idea that the pandemic might bring people together to at least try and create a better world.

Domestic violence, including murder, has soared during lockdown, Internet trolls long silent have come out of the woodwork, and those calling for an early end to the lockdown are the very same people who earlier this year were, like Daniel Hannan, writing articles about how coronavirus won't kill people. Trump's denialism and scapegoating is now so acute he's tweeting out dogwhistle calls to arms to his supporters in Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia. Trump supporters in these three (perhaps not coincidentally) Democrat led states, the President suggested, could storm the state houses and there was a little reminder in there too for them not to forget they have the right to bear arms.

Trump's behaviour is now so craven and despicable that he's not content with the US being the first country worldwide to top 39,000 COVID-19 deaths, he's now trying to instigate a civil war. What a disgusting useless piece of shit. Compare him to Tom Moore, the British 99 year old veteran of World War II who fought in the Burma Campaign in which over 22,000 British troops died.

Moore's due to celebrate his 100th birthday in eleven days and he'd planned to have a party with one hundred guests (living to one hundred is some achievement, still having one hundred living friends is incredible). Obviously, that can no longer happen. Which is sad. Tom didn't mope. He came up with another idea. Something he could do on his own. He'd walk one hundred laps of his garden in Marston Moreteyne in Buckinghamshire to raise money for the NHS.

Which he did. At time of writing to the value of £26,000,000. Captain Tom Moore seems to be doing a lot more for the NHS than the government and his feat is so admirable, so touching, that it makes your heart swell and your eyes well up. But should the NHS be relying on a ninety-nine year old man walking round and round his garden like a teddy bear or from future donations from planned gigs by the Manic Street Preachers and Liam Gallagher?

Shouldn't the government just pay doctors and nurses properly? As many have commented one good idea would be that if high earners were to make regular donations towards the NHS. It could come out of their wages and we could call it something like, say, tax. But, in Britain in recent years, we - the great unwashed, have, instead of voting for parties that aim to raise taxes to fund public services have, instead, voted for those who lower tax and run down public services. To the point we now have a government so venal, and so proud of their venality, they actually applaud when votes not to increase pay for frontline workers are won. Their Thursday night clapping rings very hollow now as does yours if you voted for this Tory administration.

I found out a good friend of mine's nan died of COVID-19 earlier this week. She was in her nineties and had suffered with pneumonia but that didn't make my friend's loss any less sadder and the fact she couldn't be with her nan at her passing has left her in a state of shock. When I received the text telling me the news I was watching Newsnight and Keetje Gull (the Head of In Patient Services at the Princess Alice Hospice near Wimbledon was talking articulately, and admirably dispassionately and impartially, about how the extra money promised by the government, and, more so, the extra PPE promised by the government was not arriving and how, instead, they were relying on local charitable donations.

Charity is a virtuous thing in society, no mistake, but charitable behaviour and the humanity that underpins it has been exploited by governments far and wide for far too long and the woeful lack in proper public funding for essential services is being exposed right now in ways bleaker than even I'd imagined - and I've imagined some pretty bleak scenarios.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock's promise to have testing 'ramped' (it's always 'ramped' with these guys) up to 100,000 per day by the end of April is looking as shaky as his boss Johnson's promises to spend £350m on the NHS, to build a unnecessary garden bridge in London, to lie in front of the bulldozers to prevent the building of a third runway at Heathrow Airport,  and to get Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe out of an Iranian jail. It's almost as if Hancock and Johnson are grifters, just winging it. Dodgy second hand car salesmen who've fiddled with the clock on a motor in order to flog it to you are not the people you need in charge during a deadly pandemic. Or ever.

Karl Marx spoke of how we'd need to go through the last stage of capitalism before we could live in a fairer, eventually freer, society and, now, we are in that phase. It will be fought against by the minority who have prospered through capitalism. Nobody ever wants to get off the gravy train. We saw this when the global banking crisis hit in 2008. It seemed, at the time, that that would be the start of the end and maybe it was in the long term. But in the short term those who lost their jobs in the banks merely colonised other industries, moved into other spheres.

The capitalist need to constantly find new hosts to exploit so that it can survive reminds me of nothing less than a virus and, like this virus we have now, ultimately it destroys many in its path. The most successful capitalists are the ones who are able to develop an amorality. COVID-19 doesn't need to affect an amorality. It is, by nature, amoral. In that respect it is a perfect analogy for Donald Trump. Something that is incapable of doing anything other than helping itself to whatever it wants. Be it money, Russian interference in elections, or unsolicited pussy.

I got a small personal look at how the greed of capitalism affects and infects everything around it when I worked in the lower echelons of the music industry. It had been a fun, but not well paid, job for years. Everyone (pretty much) got on and, together, we'd get the job done but, following the aforementioned banking crisis, a new tier of middle managers was inserted into the the company I worked for. Many of them had come from the City and, immediately, they set about installing the same management methods that had failed the City so badly. Bullying, incompetence, and misuse of any power they had.

The culture of bullying, more an ideology really, made previously competent 'team leaders' (and what decent person doesn't cringe at that title?) feel they needed to act tough to get on. Anti-Spartacist elements sided with management and soon staff who'd worked together side to side and forged good friendships, even relationships, over the years were set against each other. The dreadful culture of the City dripped down and down into what had been a creative industry until the whole place was swimming in it and many of us felt we could no longer don the metaphorical waders required to walk through the metaphorical sewer the place had become and took redundancy, found other jobs or, in my case, walked out.

I felt so demotivated my work suffered. I felt so demotivated I wanted my work to suffer. A colleague of mine told me, while being hassled about this, to cover my arse. Others suggested I might like to employ the 'dark arts' of passing the buck. This left me further demotivated and eventually my mental health started to deteriorate so badly that I felt I had no option but to leave. No redundancy. No leaving party. One crappy card sent through the post that was ripped up and put straight into the recycling.

After twenty years at a job I had once loved and been so proud to tell people I had. It cost me financially, severely so, and still does but it cost me emotionally too and I still feel hurt about it but I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I took a stand and I'm glad I prioritised my mental health over financial imperatives. In retrospect, I should have applied for redundancy a couple of years earlier. It might have saved me the night of alcohol and cocaine abuse that led to me lying on my sofa silently hoping to die.

That's just one of the reasons I abhor capitalism. There are many others and I've increasingly felt more and more alone in despising the system it creates. As the last five years have stretched on interminably the model of the City that crept into the West End and other spheres has become the dominant model of late capitalism. Look after yourself, your family, and fuck everyone else - let them die if need be. They're probably just dole dossers or Benefit Street scroungers. Or worse:- those things but foreign. We're finding out what happens when we elect a government that responds to that kind of bullshit. People die - and not just the people some of you wanted to die.

H.R. McMaster (Trump's former National Security Advisor) rocked up on Zoom to say that what's going on is a political crisis (which is true), that the Chinese Communist Party's mishandling of it exacerbated it (very possibly true), that China is using it to try and win a soft war by sending medics out globally to Africa, Italy, and even the US (most likely true), and that America and Europe need to counter it with their own political vision. Which is not true. It's bullshit designed to back up Trump, it's dark arts, and it's arse covering.

Trump continues to attack the WHO and has even stopped vital American funding of it at a time when American COVID-19 deaths are, by a huge margin, the highest in the world. A position that seems likely to not just be maintained for some time but, soon, go ever more stratospheric as the Satan-in-Chief digs in even deeper to cement his power base. To think that those of his power base who don't die of this will more likely than not vote him in again in November is almost the most depressing act of all of this.

But while our attention is diverted to the circus across the 'pond' there are British politicians like Bernard Jenkin (Consverative, Harwich and North Essex) who are, in a very British stiff upper lip kind of way, trying to shift the blame for government inaction on to journalists who have asked questions about that government inaction. It's cause to be very worried. It might not be accompanied by a Trump style meltdown but it is a trick straight out of Trump's playbook and it's one we should call out every time we see it.

It's good that the likes of Piers Morgan and The Times (in a lethally incisive and insightful piece) are now holding this administration up to account for its incompetent and negligent reaction to the pandemic but they should also shoulder some of the blame for being cheerleaders for a government that was cruel, amoral, and insufficiently serious to deal with any crisis, let alone one of this size. The warnings were there but the narrative was, and Gove's words will go down in history alongside Neville Chamberlain's claim that he had in his hand a piece of paper that ensured peace for our time just before WWII, we've had enough of experts. Nothing could have been more wrong. We need experts now more than ever and though this charlatan government, essentially an idiocracy, lack many things (empathy, sincerity, and seriousness) the most deadly quality they're missing is expertise.

While the American and British governments continue to let down their people and look for scapegoats, friends and family continue to shine in their compassion and their empathy. It was my Mum's birthday on Thursday. She was 74. Obviously she couldn't get out to celebrate but she told me she had wine and cake and she seemed in pretty good spirits. Both Mum and Dad have been ringing (for nearly an hour) every day and I've also spoken to Jason (from Vietnam), Shep, Ben, Michelle, Darren & Cheryl, and Mark C since I last wrote one of these Isolation blogs.

I had another fun Kahoot quiz evening which Jo hosted, Owen set, and Tony M won and that was a real tonic. A hilarious piece on The Daily Mash website about a person living alone who's been spending their time wanking and drinking instead of, like her coupled up friends, "being drawn into passive-aggressive arguments about cupboard organisation strategies", rang somewhat true. I have spent time just lying on the couch and wasted evenings drinking beer and listening to music in my pyjamas.

It's heroic now, you know! But it's probably not the recipe for a healthy body or soul. Certainly not when you're on your thirty-sixth day of isolation. Truth is I've not been drinking more (or less) than usual and there's only so many times a day a man can twang his wire once he's the wrong side of fifty so while booze and competing in Onan's Olympics are all fun in moderation it's with the music that I'm really bingeing.

This week chance hearings of Spaceman 3's Lord Can You Hear Me? and Al Green's Let's Stay Together really hit home with an emotional clout. As did the news that the bell of the partially rebuilt Notre Dame cathedral tolled for French health workers. Less happy news came with the death of Leeds Utd and England centre back Norman Hunter died, aged 76, of COVID-19.

Elsewhere it was revealed that the number of Americans unemployed raised to 22,000,000. A figure that certainly doesn't include Amazon chief Jeff Bezos who has made £24 billion from the crisis so far but still treats his workers like shit and incurred a five day ban in France for delivering inessential items. Another who's not joined the huge number of American unemployed is Virginia pastor Bishop Gerald O.Glenn who claimed that God was larger than COVID-19 and continued to hold congregations.

That's because it turned out COVID-19 had different ideas to him about God's power and killed him. Something that seems likely to befall many who have been getting together in large numbers in Louisiana and elsewhere in the belief God will save them. The irony of this (and of those protesting the lockdown with sub machine guns in North Carolina) is that their utter slavish devotion to a non-existent God is a perfect illustration of natural selection.

A for more worrying effect of this belief in a higher power is that four of the family members who survived Bishop Glenn have now contracted COVID-19 and may die and that's the thing that some people still don't get. Daniel Hannan doesn't get it, Donald Trump doesn't get it, and the fucking jogger that ran about five inches away from my face when I popped down the local corner shop earlier still don't seem to get it. The reason they don't get it (or choose not to get it) is that they find it impossible to care about anyone other than themselves and though such people being wiped off the face of the Earth would benefit all of humanity I'm not so cruel as to wish it upon them. Which, again, is where we differ. If these people can't up their game during a global pandemic they will never ever up their game. Which means that the rest of us will have to. Luckily, from the evidence I've witnessed during five weeks of solitary quarantine, we're more than equipped enough to do so. 

Read it in Books:Head-On:Memories of the Liverpool Punk-scene and the story of The Teardrop Exlodes; 1976-1982.

"I've seen it in your eyes and I've read it in books. Who wants love without the looks?" - Read it in Books.

When I kicked off the Read it in Books strand of my blog with an assessment of Peter Ackroyd's London:The Biography it hadn't occurred to me that, soon enough, I might be reviewing a book by the co-author of that song. Julian Cope co-wrote the song with Ian McCulloch a very long time ago and it appeared on the debut albums by both men's bands. The Teardrop Explodes' Kilimanjaro from 1980 and (as a bonus track only) on Echo and the Bunnymen's Crocodiles from three months earlier that year.

Odd really, Cope's highly regarded Head-On:Memories of the Liverpool Punk-scene and the story of The Teardrop Exlodes; 1976-1982 had been on my bookshelves for some years and, though I've often flicked through it, I'd never given it a thorough reading. With my first Julian Cope gig for years in February (it was great and not just because I got to enjoy his new ditty Cunts Can Fuck Off) I realised the time was long overdue for the book to be given my full attention.

I expected stories of out of control acid trips, bitching about other bands, and possibly very of its time treatment of female members of the entourage. I'd mistakenly thought there was a section in the book that painted Courtney Love in an unflattering lights that might, now - twenty-six years later, reflect more badly on the men involved than the young woman.

I don't know where I got that from though as Courtney Love is not mentioned once in a book that was engrossing, often hilarious, and occasionally touching. A book written from the view point of a very specific mind at a very specific time. The first chapter (if you can call them that, some are only a page long), DOPLHINS - ON THE BRINK OF A DOUBLE BUMMER, is set in St Ives, Cornwall in the summer of 1976 and the title alone lets us know we've firmly entered the world of the arch-drude, the man who recorded Kolly Kibber's Birthday, Reynard the Fox, and Out of My Mind on Dope and Speed. In it he describes a dolphin his brother Joss strokes as "a long suede submarine" and the whole experience as a "trip".

Of course. For Julian Cope, it seems, everything is a trip. Often an actual acid trip. Later on in the book, when the floors start to feel like trampolines and women look like hammerhead sharks, Cope, of course, becomes an enthusiastic user and advocate of LSD. Perhaps his most famous trip takes place in, of all places, Yeovil while he lies on  the floor - and imagines himself to be a 'city centre':- "a centre designed to control the traffic's flow. My heart was sending the blood out of the main veins and out into the suburbs".

But, back in St Ives, the eighteen year old Julian from Tamworth had just failed his A-levels and ruined his chances of getting into Oxford and becoming Charles Dickens. Shattering his parents hopes. Not, you imagine, for the first or last time. He wasn't so bothered. He had, his teachers had told him, "potential" but he "wanted only to play music and hang around with the freaks". 

Something it's safe to say he managed reasonably well. Cope's story begins, as many do, with a burning desire to escape a small town. In his case, Tamworth ("population replaced by clones" who called him "queer"). Each week him and his mate would study the Melody Maker looking for news of Patti Smith, The Ramones, Tom Verlaine, and, er, Hall & Oates! Tamworth disappointed. But so did college on the outskirts of Liverpool where everybody wore Fruit-of-the-Loom sweatshirts and real ale badges (back when that was a bad thing).

Cope may start the story around the time he moved from Tamworth to Liverpool but it's not long before he's jumping back to his childhood. Born in the small mining village of Deri, near Caerphilly, in 1957 (his mother had returned to her parents to have him), Cope grew up with a nice posh name (Julian) and a nice posh accent in Tamworth. A confident singer of songs but scared to be parted from his mum even at the age of five.

A role as Oliver Twist in a school play, aged twelve, endears Cope to his teachers, his parents, and the girls at school. But makes him a target for the bullies who, of course, tease him for being gay and ask him for a kiss. When he finally gives in and kisses a bully three years older than him the bullying stops immediately. They're now scared of the weird kid.

It taught him there was a power in being weird and gave him the confidence to be crazy. It was, he relates, a moment that changed his life. As did his later, college years, introduction to the music of Can, Faust, Love, The Doors, Country Joe & The Fish, Tim Buckley, Funkadelic, Nick Drake, Traffic, The Modern Lovers, and Prince Far I. Most of whom were soon deemed "muso", "reasonable", and "hippies" and traded in for punk bands like Television and, with a degree of doubt, The Sex Pistols. Later, The Vibrators and Ultravox will be given much shorter shrift

Cope meets and befriends punks, he gets his right ear ("the gay one") pierced, he shits in a shower he's sharing with a male friend (and breaks it up with a female friend's toothbrush so it goes down the plughole), he enjoys platonic friendships with girls, he pisses in milk bottles and drops them from eighth floor windows, gives and receives head from Julia ("more like a little animal than a young woman"), and goes to see The Damned at Eric's.

Which he loved. The DJ played King Tubby, Jonathan Richman, Patti Smith, Howlin' Wolf, and Captain Beefheart and Cope, the self-proclaimed 'farm-punk', loved being around people even weirder than him. One of whom was the seventeen year old Pete Burns. Described, initially, by Cope as "the faggiest guy I'd ever seen".

A cut above "the weekend dickheads with white suits and old Steve Harley albums". Cope and his friend Hilary start hitching to gigs in Leeds, Birmingham, and London. They hang out in Geoff Davies' Probe Records (Geoff memorably refuses to sell a heavy metal kid a Rush album - "where d'you think you are? Virgin Records?), and he witnesses Ari Up from the Slits kick a beer-hound in the throat for shouting "show us your minge" at her.

The Slits were supporting The Clash (Cope surprised himself by thinking The Clash were "fucking epic") and it was also the first night Cope got to speak to Pete Wylie, a man he'd seen on the scene and, due to a legend on his leather jacket, was known as the Rebel Without a Degree. Wylie had a mate called Duke who looked like an awkward Joey Ramone with shapeless hair and white ankle socks and, laughably, wanted to be David Bowie.

Duke McCool, as Cope misheard the surname, turned out to be Ian McCulloch. Wylie shepherded the three of them into a group, Duke the singer of course, and once McCulloch had got rid of the stage name Arthur Hostile, "it's crap", they became The Crucial Three.  At 2am in the morning, the first time they ever met. Wylie didn't even know if Cope could play an instrument.

What Cope liked about Wylie and McCulloch, and what the three of them shared, was an "unreasonable attitude". They all loved The Velvet Underground but Cope thought Bowie was shit. McCulloch liked Bowie but thought, ironically in hindsight, that Jim Morrison was a "pretentious turd". Their own first song, Salomine Shuffle - with its lyrics about 'zits', doesn't sound great and the only other one they had, ' I'm Bloody Sure You're on Dope', seemed to be nothing more than a title.

Which didn't seem to matter anyway as McCulloch seemed more interested in lounging around on a sofa than actually singing. When they played their first gig at Eric's with Pete Burns singing and their name changed to The Mystery Girls, Cope was on bass and Pete Wylie had a toilet seat strapped to his back. They supported, of all people, Sham 69, "the latecomers of the revolution" and split up immediately. Cope was turning twenty and considered himself way too old to be starting out. No future!

Elsewhere in Liverpool, mostly in Eric's or the Probe record shop, we're introduced to a pre-Frankie Goes to Hollywood Paul Rutherford and a pre-Siouxsie and the Banshees Budgie (sharing the stage as part of Liverpool's first punk band The Spitfire Boys), Les Pattinson (bassist for Bunnymen but then lead singer of an imaginary group called The Geoffs and then known as "guy with the Thunderbirds head"), and Bill Drummond who had just formed Big In Japan. A young Holly Johnson performs with that band with 'Dogsex' written in his bleached blond hair.

Mark E Smith of The Fall writes letters to Cope in which he addresses him as Jules Verne and tells him leather jackets are out and v-neck sweaters are in. Cope considers Smith a genius and Una Baines an improvement on Mo Tucker. In 1978 alone, Cope went to see The Fall twenty-eight times. He even played MES his tapes while McCulloch, either shy or worried about appearing uncool, hid in the bogs. Them and Pere Ubu start to become his key influences although Nova-Mob's (Cope's new band) headlining appearance at Eric's (after Penetration failed to live up to their name and pulled out) consists of one fifteen minute song about being "in love with mental health".

A disappointment. McCulloch hated it. Both Cope & McCulloch realised it was time to start writing some songs so McCulloch nicked a bit from The Fall's Stepping Out and Cope added a Stooges riff and they had Read it in Books. The band UH? perform another song, Robert Mitchum, live and Cope (looking like Justin Hayward in a "shit anorak" and McCulloch (wearing a coat given to him by MES) support Wylie's band Crash Course. Both of them rip the piss out of Wylie's choice of band name but McCulloch bottles out of singing and Cope takes over on vocals.

Performing covers of Louie Louie, they change their name to A Shallow Madness. Cope meets David Palmer who's into bands as uncool as The Boomtown Rats and The Adverts and takes him under his wing. Soon David's into The Doors, Pere Ubu, Suicide, Love, Captain Beefheart, Can, and the 13th Floor Elevators. Cope schooled him well and also felt that Palmer would have no friends if the punks didn't look after him. Wylie nicknamed Palmer Yorkie because he was "good and rich and thick" and, better still, his mum (who shrieked like a Monty Python character) had a basement they could rehearse in - and even brought them tea and toast!

Joining The Fall in the new wave of unarguably brilliant bands were an unlikely looking lot from Manchester. Joy Division had previously been Warsaw and nobody, except Will Sargent, had rated them at all. But signed to Factory and playing Shadowplay on Tony Wilson's Granada television show, something had changed. Everybody noticed they hadn't just improved. They were amazing.

Dalek I Love You didn't go on to achieve the same level of success as Joy Division but they had sofas and lamps on stage and sound like fun and they did bring the likes of David Balfe and Andy McCluskey (later of OMD) to the story.  They lost points for having a member with a moustache though. Not cool. Cope's new frenemy Dave Balfe wasn't popular either because he exaggerated his lisp to impress women and, worst of all, it actually worked. It was okay for Wylie to shag every woman on the scene but not Balfe. He was an "ugly plank" and even Jayne Casey, who was sleeping with him, called him "Smurf".

McCulloch, too, becomes far more focused on getting laid than making music. This, along with his constant tardiness and mardiness, irks Cope and he asks McCulloch to leave the band. After a series of woeful names Cope settles on The Teardrop Explodes (from a DC comic story that made no sense whatsoever) and McCulloch and Will Sargent ("the two most emotionally autistic guys") bond over rejection by Cope and get on with forming their own band. Echo and the Bunnymen would support The Teardrop Explodes at a private party in Eric's that November. Debut gigs by both bands.

Within three months The Teardrop Explodes had recorded their first single, Sleeping Gas, and Balfe was sniffing around the band with intent of getting in on the action. Cope hated Balfe and Balfe thought Cope couldn't sing but it seems everyone thought Cope couldn't sing. It didn't stop the band getting single of the week in NME and Sounds and an invite from Tony Wilson to appear on television in Manchester.

There, they're given a tour of the Coronation Street set and Cope and Wylie are excited to meet Geoffrey Hughes who played Eddie Yeats, Stan Ogden's binman sidekick, at the time. Later that evening they supported Wire at Eric's for a princely £5.

Soon the Bunnymen release their debut. The Pictures on my Wall gets single of the week too and the bands start touring together, alternating headline slots. Balfe's finally brought in to The Teardrop Explodes. He's great on keyboards but Cope still hates him. Andy McCluskey, "a hippy that we all called Leo Sayer" forms Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark and Cope suggests he was "jumping on the long name bandwagon" and then Cope marries his girlfriend Kathy partly, it seems, to thwart Balfe who keeps telling him it won't last and partly because, among all the homosexuality and promiscuity of the Liverpool scene, it seems the most non-conformist thing he can do.

Second single, Bouncing Babies, also gets single of the week, they get the cover of Sounds, and they start playing The Factory in Manchester (once supported by A Certain Ratio - "crap but unusual"). Things are moving astonishingly quickly already but soon there's another great leap forward. Seymour Stein of Sire Records wants to sign the Bunnymen, Cope's super jealous and bitter. His wife tells him to improve his look, Bill Drummond tells him to move around more on stage, and Cope rages about Paul Morley's new post-punk bands (the scene he was in) by telling The Monochrome Set to "fuck right off".

Eventually, the Teardrop Explodes go to London to record their third single, Treason. Cope's over the moon but The Bunnymen are getting even more attention and this rankles badly. When Bill Drummond nicks Cope's 'scrim and camouflage' idea for a Bunnymen stage set, Cope wishes "evil and mayhem and destruction" on each Bunnyman individually. A rage made impotent by the fact they were completely unaware of it.

For Cope and The Teardrop Explodes, the tours get bigger (in Glasgow they're supported by Aztec Camera (whose singer, they're told, is twelve years old), the reviews get better, and the fan base keeps growing. But in the midst of all this Ian Curtis of Joy Division kills himself. Cope, on the shocking news:- "one of our peers. He can't die. That's fucking ridiculous".

Depression did for Ian Curtis but the use of drugs in the music scene does for others. Cope starts off so anti drugs that when he spots Mick Finkler smoking a joint he panics that he's in "the Grateful Dead or some shit" like "bloody Hawkwind". On the band's first trip to New York he's the only one who doesn't hoover up a few bags of bugle in JFK airport. But when new band member Alan Gill, a man Cope adores so much he lets him call Julie and doesn't even mind that he has a moustache, offers up him a joint because he's so tense the result is revelatory.

Cope likes himself for the first time in his whole life, all his little devils flew off, and, immediately, it seemed, he wanted more. Which, of course, he got. All the references to LSD in reviews of their music got him interested in trying some acid and it wasn't long before Balfe had scored some and the band convened for their first trip together.

Soon Cope was staring at a milk bottle:- "the milk scared me, it clung to the sides of the bottle and I knew that if I looked away, we'd be in terrible danger" - and beating a pillow to death. Cope and Gary Dwyer become scared of Yul Brynner's tunic in Attila the Hun, "too bright", and hide behind a sofa, Cope pisses in Dave Balfe's baked beans.

When they first appear on Top of the Pops, it seems they're all tripping off their nuts and dancing round Spandau Ballet's Tony Hadley in the corridor, watching "Toyah lisp her way through some piece of kack" and gushing around like "in-breds at a New England dinner party".

On an American tour in Albany in upstate New York, Cope fixates on a beautiful girl in the audience with pink high-heels and pink ankle socks over her stockings. She looks fifteen. When she comes backstage she looks seventeen. Her name's Dorian and Cope has found his ideal woman. Pity he's already married. The band drive back to Manhattan and he knocks one out in his hotel room.

Once he's told his wife about the affair that develops (not an easy task and one Cope mentally struggles with) he's free to be with Dorian and, despite shagging, or rather being shagged by, Lydia Lunch and doing fifteen tabs of acid on a van trip between San Francisco and Boulder, that's what he does.

That trip, in both senses of the word, involves flying VW beetles, a man turning into a dog, and a church sized fibre glass brontosaurus in a town called Dinosaur, Colorado. That last bit being the only thing that existed outside of Cope's acid fried mind. Later trips will include a monkey in a cage playing the drums for the TV Personalities at the New Cross Venue and, most dangerously of all, an occasion when Cope finds himself wanting to join the band Buck's Fizz.

Back in Britain, Cope is repulsed by his fame and his new found audience of "stupid ickle teeny-girls fussing and a-fainting and a-paying no heed to the single-mindedness of our one chord space-grooves". It's one of the rare times in the book he comes across as unlikeable and ungrateful. I suspect he doesn't particularly like himself at this juncture and is merely trying to be honest about the arsehole he was becoming and, sure enough, his out of control behaviour starts to take its toll on both his health and the band's success. When the single Colours Fly Away only reaches number 54 and The Teardrop Explodes don't get invited to play Top Of The Pops, Cope starts to see that his plan to piss of and alienate his teenage fans is working, and he finds he doesn't like it.

The rest of the book follows Cope and The Teardrop Explodes to their inevitable break up but even when describing what sound like pretty heavy scenes Cope's turns of phrases are often exquisitely funny. The conurbation of Whiston was set out "like a patient etherised upon a table", a local thief "looked like one of those Scots footballers who play for Man United", London punks have "johnnies hanging from their ears" and he accuses them of "getting more Rocky Horror and less Stooges every day", and "the October sun would teem through" Cope's "skylight and scatter restlessness on" his "sleeping form like the magic sprinkles from the wands of Disney witches". Finding himself back in his childhood bedroom pondering a failure of the band he describes himself as feeling like "an empty cathedral, after a coronation".

They're very English too. A back-woodsman type he meets in Long Island is "built like a brick shithouse", Queen fans who bottle The Teardrop Explodes during a stadium support slot are described as "heavy-metal bum-boys" who, with no sense of irony, shout "fuck off you queer" at Cope (almost everything was filtered through a homophobic lens in the early eighties), and "plank" is used an insult. One I've not heard much since school. Sometimes they are so peculiar they feel as if they've come out of the mouth of a Chris Morris character. At one point he's "thrust into a dungeonous club full of hip knobhounds".

But he can turn the mood on a sixpence. Following a brief consideration of how wonderful his mother was, he abruptly describes how the Aberfan mining disaster (166 small children killed when a colliery spoil tip collapsed on to a school, just four miles from Deri), which took place on Cope's ninth birthday, turned him into a very serious and sad child. Life, in Cope's words, became "a dreadful and serious thing".

There's also a lovely, unexpected, moment when Cope, after describing the terrible 'fuck off' arguments and terrible break up sex with his first girlfriend Jane, tells her he stills love her. Wherever she is. When he describes the first time he falls in love, and makes love with, his now wife Dorian it's tender and touching and just a little bit funny. Not least when they do each other with their free hands while riding along in her silver Mustang.

The book made me cry tears of sadness (when Mick Finkler is sacked and Cope relates he only saw his former close friend two more times in his life) but, more often, tears of joy. My heart melted when Cope recalls being permanently "drunk with glee" when he was chatting about and making music with his friends. At the same time, I was often thrown back to the puerile, cruel, humour of the school playground. Cope's brother's teenage punk band are called The Flids and have a song called Dirt-Sore-Cat's Fanny and enemies, real and perceived, are often dismissed as bum-boys and knobhounds.

It's how young men spoke back then but, beneath, all the name calling and necking industrial quantities of pharmaceuticals, Cope's passion for music never strays far from the surface and he writes about it way better than most other musicians. Pere Ubu's Final Solution "sounded like it was from deep in the interior of some continent I needed to visit" and The Ramones, quite simply, were "perfect". Like a "paramilitary operation". Or "funny terrorists". The sound of "God" even.

Having, now, read the book I really have no idea why I left it so long. Some sections, incl;uding the final few paragraphs, are extraordinarily powerful, there's virtually no filler, and Cope tells stories in a unique and funny way that makes you feel like (a) you wish you'd been there and (b) you're really glad you weren't there. The book ends with The Teardrop Explodes breaking up and you get the impression that decision may have saved his life. Having seen him put in such a great gig in February I'm more glad than ever he did. So much more interesting than those knobhounds with johnnies hanging from their ears.

Isolation XII:Gaslights Out For The Territory.

It's the 14th April 2020 and it's the 31st day of my isolation. One month ago, 14th March, was the last time I saw either friends or family (except on a computer or phone screen) when I joined Shep, Pam, and Kathy (partially) for a walk along the Capital Ring from Eltham to Streatham. Since then the UK's COVID-19 deaths toll has risen from 21 to 11,329, and that's just deaths in hospital. Deaths in care homes haven't been counted up yet and I can't help thinking there will also be those who have died at home, perhaps still undiscovered. Loneliness is an epidemic in Britain that this crisis will shine a very harsh light on.

In that time the global death toll has risen from 5,600 to over 120,000. The Conservative politician and keen agitator for Brexit Daniel Hannan's assertion, on a website called conservativehome in February, that there was "no reason to panic", we should "cheer up" and that coronavirus won't be killing people hasn't aged very well. "I am not an epidemiologist, an immunologist or a pathologist. Indeed, I have no medical qualifications whatever" wrote Hannan and that is both the truest part of it and the only part worth reading.

Add clairvoyancy to the list of things he's no longer respected for doing which includes his actual jobs of politician and journalist. The glib manner and fluently expressed bollocks that Hannan typifies is just as lethal in the public discourse as the more performative denialism exhibited by the man everyone with an ounce of decency loathes with every fibre of their being - Donald Trump.

Trump's continuing to lose his shit (blaming the World Health Organisation, threatening to sack his chief immunologist Dr Antony Fauci, and, and this train's never late, passing the blame on to his favourite old enemy the media, specifically the New York Times). A friend of mine, Daina, in Chicago reports that it's widely suspected in the US that Trump is refusing to adequately supply PPE gear for states that didn't vote for him

His inane, and criminally insane, ramblings are now reported, not just in opinions pieces but in the actual news, as those of a "toddler" throwing a "self-pitying tantrum". The actual real news. Not the fake news he so likes to bang on about to those who've drunk the Kool-Aid. An interesting piece has been doing the rounds over the last couple of days in which it's suggested that the countries who have coped best with the pandemic are the countries who have female leaders.

New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern, Taiwan's Tsai Ing-Wen, Angela Merkel of Germany, Denmark's Mette Frederiksen, and Finland's Sanna Marin have all been praised for their deft handling of the crisis in a way that the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro, and Macron most definitely have not been. The theory being that the female instinct is to treat it as a health issue and care for their country as they would their children while the male leaders, as so many men still do, have seen COVID-19 as an enemy that needs fighting. The need to be seen to be 'strong' outweighing, to a lethal degree, the need to be kind or, more importantly still, the need to be effective.

That hit home on an intellectual level. On an emotional level the story of the two NHS nurses who died after contracting COVID-19 hit home even harder. Melujean Ballesteros, 60, died at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington and Raheemi Sudani (I apologise if I've spelt her name wrong - it was on the BBC News but I can't find the story covered anywhere on the Internet) died aged 68 after fifty years of service as a nurse. She had refused to take retirement during the middle of the crisis and her son described her as "a nurse 'til the end".

Sudani had moved to the UK from Trinidad,  Ballesteros from the Philippines, and the two nurses that a now recovering Boris Johnson singled out for praise (Jenny from Invercargill in New Zealand and Luis from near Porto in Portugal) also show the valuable, critical, role that immigration plays in all spheres of British society. It was good that Johnson thanked them but it was notable there was a lot less talk from him about providing adequate PPE for them, paying them properly, or relaxing intended new immigration laws so that those that should follow in their footsteps are able to.

The British government's response, in line with my last Isolation blog, has been found lacking and it's been revealed that they missed three chances to join an EU scheme to bulk buy PPE. It's suspected that's due to the article of faith that Brexit has become and a desire to play to their base which still means identifying scapegoats via the medium of dogwhistling. Keeping voters angry with perceived enemies and thus onside is still more important to this administration than saving the lives of doctors and nurses. When Johnson said the doctors and nurses do the job for love he didn't mean the score of zero in a tennis match but he may has well have done so. Of course they do the job for the love of it. But they also need to eat, pay their bills, and look after their children.

The relationship between the British people and its elected officials is, at heart, an abusive one and it's as complicated as any abusive relationship. The wronged party, the public, often finds itself defending the abuser as much to convince themselves they've not been wronged as to justify their own disastrous political decisions. 'They used to bring me flowers, they used to love me, they used to promise me wonderful Brexits. Just because they're now letting people die it doesn't mean they're totally bad. They're just under a lot stress.'

Thwack! Pow! Another smack in the face to you, the British public. The British government's wife doesn't understand it and so it's out drinking in a club at 2am, eyeing up women half its age, and pouring its heart out to a bartender who's drying the night's glasses out with a resigned look on his face, wishing he could fuck off home. Priti Patel's apology for government inaction wasn't "we're sorry for what we did" but "we're sorry for what you think we did". The lamest lame arse apology in the whole of fucking Lameland. That's probably why Raab and, you'd imagine, Cummings, sent her up there. She's on thin ice with bullying allegations anyway so if she fucks up they can just kick her out. Which would be ironic considering her views on kicking people out.

It's good that Johnson survived and we don't need to oppose for opposition's sake but we do need to question not just the government's tactics but also its morality and its commitment to (not) telling the truth. Those of us who do oppose, however, need to also be careful we're telling the truth. Spreading the rumour that Boris Johnson faked his illness is at the level of nastiness you'd expect of the administration he heads up and as my friend's brother, Damon, correctly pointed out it also suggests that the doctors and nurses that administered care to Johnson were complicit in some kind of conspiracy.

Johnson's a liar, there's no doubt about that, but badmouthing the NHS, now more than ever, is not a good look. One industry I'm happy to bad mouth, now and always, is the meat industry. We've had bird flu, we've had swine flu, and now we've got a flu that seems to have come from eating bats (or at the least from the hugely unsanitary conditions in which animals are kept in Chinese wet markets like the one in Wuhan). We've never had apple flu, I can't recall a carrot flu, and the great Cadbury's Creme Egg pandemic of 2004 is something I've just made as a joke to amuse myself.

If the cruel and inhumane slaughter of billions of animals each year across the planet isn't enough to stop us eating them (and it clearly isn't - people REALLY like the taste of bacon and steak) perhaps the fact that continuing to do so keeps killing us should at least give us pause for thought. Before, during, and, no doubt, after this crisis people in the West will point fingers at China and South Korea for eating cats and dogs. Many of them while chowing down on a dead pig, sheep, or cow. There's no difference. There's nothing morally superior to nibbling on a chopped up bull's ballbag in a Ginsters pasty than there is to eating Rover or Tibbles. They're both equally disgusting.

While I've been continuing to not eat meat and taking the moral high ground to a degree that I'll have just alienated half of my already minuscule readership, I've also been playing Words with Friends on my phone, watching lots of news and even some TV that's not about COVID-19 (University Challenge remains a favourite and last night I watched Romesh Ranganathan galllivanting around Zimbabwe with cheetahs, elephants, and rhinos), listening to more music than ever, and chatting, every day on the phone with Mum, Dad and Michelle and on occasional days with other friends.

Late at night I've found myself going down musical YouTube wormholes and, for the most part, I'm listening to tunes from my (much) younger days. Ideally performances from Top of the Pops. It's like I'm reaching the end and my life - in a musical form of course - is passing in front of my eyes. Sunday Girl by Blondie, Alone Again Naturally by Gilbert O'Sullivan, The Air That I Breathe by The Hollies, or Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello have all sent me off down memory lane and I cannot tell you how many times I have listened to Passionate Friend by The Teardrop Explodes. Even U2's 11'o'Clock Tick Tock got a run out. Some of those songs would be considered cool. Others much less so. Taste seems a redundant concept in the face of existential despair and emotions, often provoked by critically disdained music, take precedence. My friend Jason reminded me of one of my 'guilty pleasures',Whitesnake's Here I Go Again, and I welcomed the memory as warmly as a mother embraces their lost child.

OK, not that much but you get the idea. Maybe I'm stupid, maybe I'm a complete fucking arsehole who refuses to change how I feel or what I think about anything, but this pandemic, this coronavirus, this crisis has changed little in the way I view the world. I don't feel emboldened, or strengthened, by that as much as I feel that, after a decade or so of very trying times, I'd been put in a position where I can, somehow, deal with this.

I've lived through the deaths of immediate family members and close friends way before their time, I was arrested for a very serious crime I didn't commit (and, in fact, wasn't even committed) and threatened with, possibly, decades in prison, I've been beaten up so badly I was hospitalised, and I've been bullied out of a job I loved, and, like so many others, I've been made to feel unwelcome in a cruel society that values money more than it does life. In my most ungrateful moments I ponder how this load of shit just brings everyone else down to my level. Welcome to my world. It's not a nice one but you get used to it.

I hate thinking like that (and I'm fully aware I've not always helped myself) but I try to be honest in these blogs and, fuck it, that's how I feel sometimes, more often than I'd probably care to admit. But it's certainly not how I feel all, or even most, of the time. I feel lucky and, sometimes, I even feel I've earned that luck. Like I made enough effort with my friendships that, now, I'm reaping that dividend. I've experienced so much kindness that it's almost overwhelming. As a lachrymose lad anyway, you guys are really piling it on and, for that, I thank you so much.

I'm gonna stay in (because we all have to), finish reading my book (Head-On by Julian Cope - it's great of course), play a few more games of Words with Friends, drink more tea, eat some crisps, check in on some friends, and, on Friday, it looks like Owen's setting up another online quiz. There's also the possibility of 'attending' an online Fortean event this week so I've things to look forward to. What worries me most, apart from the idea of someone I know or love being hospitalised, or worse, by this fucking virus, is returning to the cruelty of the normal world WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER.

There are some signs of positivity with the death toll in the UK dropping over the last couple of days and people (Keir Starmer particularly) beginning to talk about an exit strategy (and other countries starting to relax their quarantines) but it will surely be a long and winding road. I poured my heart out during this blog and, possibly, shone a light on a more ugly side of my character than I'd normally be comfortable with. I hope I'll learn things throughout this that will make me a better person and I'm sure most of you will be thinking that way too. But as for the government - worrying signs are emerging that they're reverting to type. Prepare to pay the price for the fact that when death rode into town they poured it a drink and pulled out a seat.

Isolation XI:Paint A Rainbow

"When the colours change I will chase your sadness away. See it glow when I paint a rainbow" - Paint A Rainbow, My Bloody Valentine.

It's Easter Sunday, my 29th day of isolation, and the global death toll created by COVID-19 is over 111,000. In the UK we've crossed the 10,000 death toll (including former Goodie Tim Brooke-Taylor - not a more important death, but a more recognisable one to many of us) and joined Italy, Spain, and France. Trump's USA has overtaken Italy to top the list and has become the first country on the planet to register more than 20,000 COVID-19 deaths.

Donald Trump likes to boast about having the biggest numbers at his rallies, the biggest numbers in the polls, and the biggest numbers at his inauguration. Even if it's not true. It'll be interesting to see if he boasts about the country he's, absolutely remarkably, in charge of topping this list. As the primary person responsible he's every right to. His criminal negligence, incompetence, and scapegoating, not to mention his complete unsuitability for his (or any other) job has exacerbated the American death toll exponentially. The blood is on hands. 

Here, Boris Johnson is out of hospital and he's recovering. The same cannot be said for the many thousands who have died partly because of his inaction and his reticence to be the bearer of bad news about the need for a lockdown. On Thursday night's Question Time, Darren McGarvey (aka Loki - the Scottish rapper and social commentator) made some great points about how short term thinking in UK politics, and the vast inequality in the country, have led to people not trusting politicians, taking faith in conspiracy theories, and, ultimately, a spread in COVID-19.

It's easy for people who've gone down that path to dismiss statistics but it's a lot harder to dismiss the reality of the situation when it affects your own family as Boris Johnson's father, Stanley, proved this week when he claimed his son being in intensive care brought home to him how serious it is. The man who boasted he'd still go down the pub when advised not to said this AFTER 95,000 people had already dead. If 95,000 deaths don't register with you as serious it's probably best if you don't procreate. Your children may be dangerously idiotic. People could get hurt because of that idiocy. People could die.

Not that The Sun, a disgusting right wing rag that besmirched the memories of Hillsborough victims by printing horrific lies about them and hacked a dead schoolgirl's phone, saw it like that. On Good Friday their front page claimed it really was a GOOD Friday because their beloved Boris Johnson was on the mend. 900+ deaths in a day in the country were relegated to a side story. Cunts.

How we receive our news is important and we need trusted sources. With that in mind I need to make a partial correction regarding my last piece on the crisis. Reuters, very much a trusted source, made it clear that MPs had not awarded themselves a £10K yearly pay rise. The decision was not in their hands but the hands of IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. A public body created in 2009 because MPs could no longer be trusted not to fiddle their expenses.

IPSA said MPs could claim up to £10,000 for equipment needed so they, and their staff, can work from home. It still seems very unfair when hardly anyone else now working from home is reporting such help. I'd like to see a list of which MPs are claiming it, and how much they're claiming. I reckon we can all probably guess some who definitely will be and some who won't and, for the most part, what parties they belong to.

That cleared up, let's not let politicians off completely. Certainly not the ones in power. The Tories. Matt Hancock has suggested that NHS staff are using Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) too illiberally, the odious Jacob Rees-Mogg has told investors in his fund management company, Somerset Capital Management, that the pandemic has created "excellent entry points for investors" and they can look forward to "super normal returns". At a time of a deadly crisis, it seems Rees-Mogg is less concerned about the health of his constituents in North East Somerset and, instead, is choosing to cash in. Never has the term 'disaster capitalism' been so vividly illustrated.

Not only is Rees-Mogg reappearing after, seemingly, being hidden from view during the first weeks of the crisis in case he said something cruel and insensitive, Priti Patel's back too. Not only is Patel, like Rees-Mogg, vicious and nasty, she's unbelievably stupid too. It's a lethal mix. Not only does she not know the difference between terrorism and counter-terrorism (which you'd think would be an entry level qualification for the Home Secretary) she's now revealed she can't even read numbers off a page correctly. At a recent press briefing Patel proudly boasted that "three hundred thousand and thirty four, nine hundred and seventy four thousand tests" had been carried out across the UK.

I've looked at that figure several times and I can't even begin to work out what she was trying to say but, hey, why worry about clear messaging at the time of a deadly global pandemic? It's more fun to mix it up a bit. Rees-Mogg and Patel have been let out of Dominic Cummings' grisly dungeon not despite of their venality and ineptitude but precisely because of it. 

They're barely out of the gates of Tory jail and, immediately, they're re-offending. The incompetence is a sideshow. The main event, with predictions of future deaths looking terrifying, is the government's search for scapegoats being initiated and ramped up. My friend John made the pertinent point that ,soon, if one of your family die of COVID-19 it won't be because Boris Johnson didn't take his briefings seriously and preferred to go on telly talking about Big Ben's bongs. It'll be because they were a feckless idler who didn't do as they were told. Patel, along with Foreign Secretary and Johnson's current stand in Dominic Raab was involved with Britannia Unchained, a political treatise that described the British as among the laziest people in the world. That's the same Patel and Raab that got behind Brexit so we can 'unleash Britain's potential'.

Others, too, continue to push the conflicting ideas of British (always English) exceptionalism while, at the same time, telling their compatriots they're idiots. I've seen people, well meaning, claiming British doctors and nurses are the best in the world as if (a) their training didn't matter, the creation of the NHS itself didn't matter, and they're good just because of an accident of birth and (b) conveniently overlooking that over 100,000 members of NHS staff come from over two hundred different nations. From India to Ireland, from the Philippines to Poland, from Ghana to Greece, and from Bulgaria to Bangladesh.

Raab and Patel's idea that Britain and its people are both exceptional and the worst idlers on the planet will find its deadly analogy in this crisis. The doctors and nurses will be praised as heroes and (correctly) applauded while, at the same time, being told they're greedy and selfish for demanding fair pay and adequate PPE. Other key workers will be told what a brilliant job they're doing just as Patel and Raab put in place an immigration points system that will be based on earnings rather than utility, and those who, in time, we'll need to replace them will be denied access to a Britain that thinks it's an island despite a land border with Ireland and maintains the now shattering illusion that it can recast itself as an impenetrable fortress.

The little Englander mentality, the island that believes only bad things come from overseas. These myths, like so many British citizens right now, are lying in hospital with a very very gloomy prognosis. Like those citizens, these myths will soon be buried and, like those citizens, few should attend the funeral. In New Zealand, another island but not one prone to boasts of exceptionalism - except in rugby, the leader Jacinda Ardern took the health advice seriously from the start. New Zealand has seen just four deaths. Not ten thousand.

New Zealand has a population of less than five million so there are other factors but not enough to count for more than ten thousand extra deaths. After a few weeks in which even this government took the pandemic seriously, we're seeing them slowly revert to type like Big Brother contestants who have started to forget the cameras are on them and start picking their noses and bullying each other.

The Overton Window is being gradually prised open and not just so the smell of Patel and Rees-Mogg's rancid mouth farts don't fill the air at a time when we're all stuck indoors. Slowly, gradually, the rich and powerful are seeing how much blame can be placed on the blameless (even the brave and courageous) and shifted away from themselves. It's been a very successful strategy in the past but you'd like to think making doctors and nurses the villains of the piece wouldn't play well in Peoria now - and it won't. But two months, two years, maybe even two decades, down the line let's see how the narrative develops. The seeds of blame are being planted in the gardens of the innocent and if we don't nip them in the bud now they'll grow into mighty oaks of hatred and blame. The shade of them so all encompassing we can no longer see the truth.

These metaphorical trees need cutting down but real trees, and flowers and skies, have kept me ticking over at a time when I'm having to postpone all the walks I organise for friends. I miss them but I've also been thinking about other things I've been missing. Not so much the things I tend to go out to do (gigs, exhibitions, movies, theatre, and those walks) as the peripheral things I do around them. Having a pack of Hula Hoops and a Cherry Coke on the bus down to Southwark, flicking through travel books in South Kensington Books on the way to the V&A, eating an ice cream as I walk up Exhibition Road, walking the New River Walk down in to Canonbury, and simply sitting in the park with a newspaper and a bottle of water and soaking up the rays of the sun which, typically, hasn't so much got its hat on this Easter but has come out with a fucking massive sombrero, a pair of Bermuda shorts, and is cracking open the cold beers while we all hide indoors. Probably Corona too, the cheeky yellow bastard.

We're sacrificing spring primarily to save as many lives as we can but I'm also sacrificing it in the hope that it means I still get a summer. I've got weekend breaks in Abersoch and Chepstow planned with a selection of some of my favourite people in the whole world. Of course those trips might not happen now and I'll be heartbroken if that's the case. But I'll understand. To end lockdown before it's safe to do so would be both criminal and suicidal so I'll stay in.

I love going out more than staying in on the whole but staying in, watching TV on the sofa, and chatting regularly to your friends is not the greatest sacrifice any human is making in 2020. Since I last wrote I've enjoyed long chats with Ben, Vicki, Jason, Shep, and, as ever, Mum, Dad, and Michelle (Evie's Easter Egg hunt melted my heart), I've had a brief walk on One Tree Hill just down the road from my house, I've been out for teabags (I'm British - that's an essential), beer (I'm British - that's an essential), and soap (nobody's gonna argue with that one), and I hosted another Kahoot quiz (Mike won) which I enjoyed a lot and hope others did.

As ever I've been listening to lots of music. Dan Whaley's Out of Limits show keeps my spirits up on a Monday morning and the BBC (an institution that, like the NHS, I cherish) have given me Late Junction, The Freak Zone, Huey, and Nemone. All shows I try to listen to every week. A list to which I've recently added, long overdue, the Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show. He's playing Gil Scott-Heron, Prince, and The O'Jays, and it's sounding great.

The sun's out, there's some beers cooling in the fridge, and I've even got some lemon cheesecake for later. There's soul and funk music blasting out and friends, family members, and even people I've not spoken to for decades are sending me lovely messages. It sounds idyllic, doesn't it? It kind of is. There's just this one thing though. I think you know what it is.