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.

Isolation IX:Ain't No Sunshine.

"Only darkness every day" sang the recently departed and absolutely brilliant singer Bill Withers. It was a song, of course, about lost love but while the sun is shining in the sky most days now those of us addicted to news, of course, share that sentiment. How could we not?

Since I last wrote about this on Saturday the global death toll has risen from nearly 59,000 to nearly 75,000 and in the UK alone deaths have risen above five thousand. In France more then 8,000 have died, in the US over 10,000, in Spain over 13,000, and in Italy over 16,000. Yesterday the UK death toll (in hospitals alone) due to Covid-19 was reported as between 400 and 500. We live in such a topsy-turvy time that this almost seemed like good news.

Joining Eddie Large, Manu Dibango, and Adam Schlesinger on the list of celebrity deaths is Lord Bath of Longleat (you know, the one with the 'wifelets') and though celebrity lives are no more valuable than any others they do drill home the message that this can kill anyone. As will the news that Boris Johnson is in intensive care. A staggering development and a worrying one too.

The small minority of people wishing death upon him are guilty of showing the same, in fact much much worse, inhumanity as the Tory administration they profess to so detest. Having made it very clear, for over a decade, how much I dislike the man, his disregard for truth, and how much he's done to debase the political debate in this country I decided to kick off my "get well soon" Tweet with a mention that I'm "not a fan" for fear of being accused of being a hypocrite. Turns out this was wrong as well. As were people who wished him well but said they weren't Tories.

Twitter is a harsh, unforgiving place at times. If you don't show an adequate level of remorse, anger, contrition, or condolence a virtual pitchfork waving mob turn up at your virtual house to shame you. Those with the largest amount of followers often seem to be those who lead the largest mobs. Often, with social media, the best policy is to say nothing at all. Which is what I probably should have done. But, I stand by it. I hope Johnson pulls through just as I hope everyone suffering with this deadly virus pulls through.

Campaigning for a political party now would be gross but that doesn't mean people's health is apolitical. People's health is very much political. Now as much as ever. That's why the government has a Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. The political point I made, and stand by, is that Boris Johnson's vital treatment will be provided by an NHS his party have done so much to underfund and it's highly likely the doctors and nurses looking after him will be the foreign nationals who have been at the receiving end of the xenophobia he, personally, whipped up in order to get to be PM in the first place.


I hope he makes a full recovery and I hope, in doing so, he learns to value both the NHS and the good that immigration does for the country. But if the Tories are to change their direction of travel and move towards the middle to fight this those of us on the left must do so too. Centrist has, bizarrely, become an insult in recent years (and I'm not the only one to regularly cite WB Yeats' 1919 poem The Second Coming in reference to the dangers of this) but we need to be united to prevent further spread of Covid-19 and we unite by meeting in the centre and not by shouting at each other across a great divide (even though, ironically, that's what's needed on the health front). Name calling might demotivate your human enemies, viruses don't give a shit.

Trump's performances and behaviour throughout this whole pandemic have, like everything he's ever done, been woeful, pathetic, and amoral. An early draft of this blog, and a previous blog on the subject, wished death upon him. To do so now would negate everything I've expressed in the last few paragraphs but for the good of America, and the good of the world, he should be removed from office and removed from office soon.

Covid-19 looks like it's going to rip through America faster, and more deadlier, than any other country on Earth. With eight states still not on lockdown his policies, if you can call them that, have been a disaster and presage a larger disaster. It's not wise to make predictions in such uncertain times but I can't help thinking that, WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER, many other countries across the globe may want to put in place temporary travel bans for American citizens. Mexico should build a wall.

If you think that's just kneejerk anti-Americanism, it's anything but. I love America. I have wonderful friends there, I've spent three holidays there, my mum spent part of her infancy there and her biological father was American (from Montgomery in Alabama) so I'm a quarter American. Kind of. I love American movies, American music (punk, jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop), American architecture, American design, and I even love the cliches of the American can do spirit. It's just right now what's required from many there is a 'don't do' spirit. Don't go out on long drives, don't go to packed churches, and definitely don't go out buying guns.

Oppositions, across the globe, are taking a back seat now and we're not hearing much from either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders in the US. The Labour leadership race was, properly, relegated to a minor story in much of the UK media but I must add I'm happy with the way it panned out. Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner seem to me like a team that mean business. Starmer's promise to not oppose for opposition's sake and to work with the government in their fight against the spread of Covid-19 were the words I wanted to hear and so was his pledge to not let them pass the buck and to criticise governmental policies when they believe that to be potentially harmful.

I voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader and I supported him initially. His non-position on Brexit caused me concern and when my doubts were expressed many Corbynites came forward to tell me to "fuck off and vote Tory" - which, of course, I didn't do. Leaving aside that telling people to vote for your political foes is a suicidal strategy (and proved so in the last general election) I started to feel the bitterness of many Corbynites was rendering the Labour Party a liability to itself and, sure enough, some supporters of Rebecca Long-Bailey are crying 'fix' even now.

Long-Bailey herself presumably doesn't share this view as she's been appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Education. The inclusion of Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry, as well, in Starmer's shadow cabinet shows him to be an inclusive leader and we already know he is decent, hard working, and honest. If the worst people can say about him is that he's a bit dull I can easily live with that.

Labour Party infighting, already an unpleasant diversion, should be brought to an end now. Nobody's even watching that show at the moment. There's other stuff going on and some of it, only a few weeks ago, would have seemed incredible. The Queen making a rare non-Christmas speech was remarkable enough but the fact that I, an anti-monarchist for as long as I can remember, found myself agreeing with everything she said was more remarkable still. For me at least.

A bizarre virtual Grand National was run (this year no horses died so, to me, it's better than the real one and we should stick with it), TV interviews are carried out with lengthy boom mics, and heroes, of sorts, are coming from the most unlikely places. Obviously the doctors, nurses, and other key workers are the true heroes of our time and I'll be out clapping them as long as we're asked to (as well as campaigning and petitioning for better pay and conditions) but in the media, the field I usually choose to write about, two unlikely candidates to link together wrote wonderful things about Covid-19 and our collective responses to it.

Frankie Boyle, in The Overtake, wrote a powerful and darkly hilarious piece about how the word 'herd' is probably not the best way to refer to a population of human beings, how the "villainous kneecap" Toby Young has actually aligned himself with a deadly virus, and, most powerfully of all, how WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER we should not return to the normal of people sleeping in the streets, children living in poverty, and using our taxes to help Saudi Arabia bomb the people of Yemen.

Let's not return to normal, let's return to better. I've long liked Boyle and his writing goes from strength to strength. Former Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee is known to most people as a man with a big cock who was on a leaked sex tape making the beast with two backs with Pamela Anderson. So he wasn't somebody I was waiting to hear from on this situation. But his open letter to Trump accuses The Donald's press conference of being more "a word salad that had a stroke and fell down the stairs" before calling him a "fried dick sandwich with a side of schlongs", "the perfect circus orangutan diaper from Plato's World of Forms", and a "Bible thumping cock socket".

I said earlier calling people names isn't big or clever but I'm making an exception here. This is worthy of Chris Morris in his Brass Eye pomp. Apparently, Lee didn't even write the letter but that doesn't really matter. It cheered me up and it made me laugh and those are no small things right now. The people who went on Twitter to post photos of a packed Brighton beach taken last summer are just malicious but, at least this time, the Twitter mob that corrected them did it with humour and posted pictures like these below with captions like "BRIGHTON BEACH RIGHT NOW"

That cheered me up too. As do my daily chats with Michelle and Evie, Mum, and Dad, and a long call with Shep (who'll be missing getting out walking, pubs, and waterfowl - probably in that order). Music, as with my previous blogs in this series, has lifted the spirits immeasurably. Dan Whaley's Out of Limits show, a regular pleasure, reminded me of the greatness of both Hector Rivera and Vince Guaraldi, Ian Fuller's musical Facebook posts (especially Clarence 'Frogman' Henry) have been fillips too, and, of course, I've been listening to lots of Bill Withers alongside the likes of Pixies, Thelonious Monk, Little Richard, and Michael Vallera. Nina Simone's Ain't Go No, I Got Life had me in tears. Oh, that woman could sing.

Tonight I'm hosting my first Kahoot quiz over Zoom. Quite a few have said they'd log on for it. As far away as North Wales and even Los Angeles. I'm really looking forward to doing it. Setting it killed several long hours and I enjoyed it so much I got lost in it, forgetting, albeit briefly, why I was doing it in the first place.

But not for long. This terrible virus is not going anywhere fast. We still need to maintain social distancing, we still need to stay in as much as possible, and we still need to keep checking in on family and friends to see how they're coping. I started the blog with words by the dear departed Bill Withers so I'll end it with his words too:-

"Sometimes in our lives we all have pain. We all have sorrow. But if we are wise we know that there's always tomorrow. Lean on me when you're not strong and I'll be your friend, I'll help you carry on. For it won't be long 'til I'm gonna need somebody to lean on".

Peace and love xxxx

Isolation VIII:The Lights Are On (But Everyone's Home).

WHEN!

THIS!

IS!

ALL!

OVER!

How many times have you found yourself saying, or typing, those five words over the last few weeks? An unprecedented amount? That's another one you've been using, or at least seeing, a lot too, isn't it? Unprecedented? As well as challenging, difficult, troubling, and testing? I'm not knocking you for paucity of vocabulary. I'm using them too. They're the right words for what's happening.

I look out of my kitchen window across the great expanse of London and the lights of The Shard, The London Eye, the Gherkin, Battersea Power Station, and Wembley Stadium as well as those of people's house, cranes, and tower blocks are all on. Everything looks normal. But everyone knows it's anything but. Somewhere to the right on the horizon, and not tall enough for me to see, I'm aware that the former ExCel Centre has now opened as Britain's first Nightingale Hospital, a vast field hospital to deal specifically with victims of Covid-19.  The government have done many things wrong (and I will get to them soon enough) but the speed with which this was converted is impressive and admirable. It shows what can be done. It shows most of us do care about each other.

I've not got the skills to do anything practical to help out so I'm staying in, washing my hands, and checking in on my family and friends and I know that's the most useful thing I can do at the moment. Most of those friends and family are in the same boat and the vast majority of them have been absolutely wonderful.

Since my last Isolation blog Ian has hosted two fantastic, and funny quiz evenings (his own girlfriend and kids won the first one and Tony and Alex just pipped Mike in last night's horror quiz), I had a two hour long video call with my friend Jason in Ho Chi Minh City which took in home schooling, friends we've lost, friends we've kept, Guns'n'Roses, Anselm Kiefer, Lemmy, and the song Obsession by Animotion (the call still wasn't long enough and we're going to make Friday a weekly appointment for the foreseeable future), and I've had another video call with Darren and Cheryl in which Darren, remarkably, kept his dad jokes down to a bare minimum.

Mum and Dad have been keeping to their word of checking in regularly (Dad has now scheduled in a daily 4pm call - he's very much a creature of habit) and Bec rang to check in on me and tell me how the Labour Party meetings are going on Zoom (chaotic basically). Michelle's still ringing, and WhatsApping, and sending videos of Evie being sweet and adorable on a regular basis too. Evie even joined in on one call. She'd been learning about arachnids in home school so I showed her a picture of a harvestman and she said "is it poisonous, Dave?". When she said my name my heart melted a little bit.

It's all been a welcome distraction from the news which, as you'll all know, has only been getting worse. Since Wednesday the global death toll has risen from over 43,000 to nearly 59,000, Italian deaths now number more than 14,000, Spanish more than 11,000, American more than 7,000 (rising very steeply, as you'd expect in a country that elected an egocentric, vain, bullying, baby-man as president), French more than 6,000, and, overtaking China and Iran, the UK death toll now stands at 3,605.


Germany and Belgium have joined the Netherlands with over one thousand deaths and there's over one hundred in  Switzerland, Turkey, Brazil, Sweden, Portugal, Canada, Indonesia, South Korea, Austria, Ecuador, Denmark, Philippines, Romania, Ireland, and Algeria. The abstract element of such large numbers doesn't seem to hit home with some of us as much as tragic, personal testaments of which we've heard many or, even, the news of celebrity Covid-19 deaths.

This week Adam Schlesinger of the geek rock band Fountains of Wayne died at just fifty-two and the comedian Eddie Large at seventy-eight. I quite liked the Fountains of Wayne song Radiation Vibe but I was never a fan as such. Eddie Large, however, I clearly loved in 1980 as you can see from the below piece of classwork I did, aged 12, at school.

The frontline of this crisis is, as we all know, the healthcare system and it, depressingly and predictably, has had its share of victims too. This week saw announcements of the names of the first four medics in the UK to die of Covid-19. Dr Alfa Saadu (68), Amged el-Hawrani (55), Dr Habib Zaidi (76), and Adil El Tayar (64) don't just share a profession. They share what my dad would call 'foreign names' or what The Guardian, more tactfully, calls a BAME background.

It's a tough one for the racists and the Brexit brigade (the middle of that Venn Diagram bulges like Bangerman's pants) but the cognitive dissonance is strong within these groups so I'm sure they'll manage to be able to still applaud the NHS each Thursday at 8pm while continuing to share memes and links to racist websites on Facebook and Twitter.

Feel for the anti-vaxxers too. They've long blamed vaccination for nearly everything and now, as a popular meme has pointed out, they're finding out what the world looks like without just one important vaccine. They'll bounce back though. As soon as there is a vaccine there will people out there spreading lies about and refusing to have their children vaccinated (a possible case of manslaughter?) just as the conspiracy theorists haven't gone away during this crisis. No, they've got louder. The big one doing the rounds at the moment is that, somehow, all of this is caused by 5G. No lesser a medical authority than Text Santa presenter (and ex-wife of Les Dennis) Amanda Holden has spread this bullshit, and dangerous, rumour which, sadly, a whole host of Internet morons have piled on to.

Yes, I'm back on the bad stuff again. Back with what I'm coming to call the corona cunts. Over the last three days we've seen DUP politician John Carson claim Covid-19 is God's punishment for homosexuality (as my friend John wrote, God really must work in mysterious ways), the president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte has changed the law in that country so that police can shoot people dead if they suspect of being out of the house when they're not supposed to be, and Brazilian president, and Trump of the Tropics, Jair Bolsonaro has told his citizens they should go to the beach because coronavirus can't be caught outdoors. Sounds legit!

Many state governors in Brazil have sensibly gone against the president's advice (upsetting him - why are these self-proclaimed strong leaders always so touchy?) but, nonetheless, watch that Brazilian death toll rise. Not everyone upsetting people is a complete waste of oxygen like Bolsonaro and Trump. There are well intended comments that still rankle. That's the nature of the Internet I guess.

Like many I'm offended by those who hypocritically applaud the NHS after spending years or decades voting for a party who are ideologically and philosophically opposed to it and have been doing everything they can to destroy it from within. Nobody was out applauding BUPA on Thursday night.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who I'm on record as saying is one of the better Tories, is a man I'm starting to see through. He can speak fluently expressed bollocks with the best of them but his endless promise to 'ramp' up testing is starting to look very hollow. John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, was on Question Time on Thursday with Hancock and he managed, in just four words, to sum up what is required of the government now:- "Promise less, deliver more".

It's not in the nature of this right wing populist administration built on bluster and buffoonery to do so but if they don't do so soon the folly of their jingoistic talk will result in many more deaths. Nobody wants that but when Hancock talks about the deaths of four doctors and 'some' nurses it doesn't fill me with hope. It seems Hancock, and his party, not only think nurses aren't worth paying properly, their deaths are not even worth counting.

What rankled me nearly as much were Labour supporters (of the Corbynite persuasion) ranting about how clapping for the NHS is 'virtue signalling'. It's not an either/or situation. You can applaud key workers AND want better pay and conditions for them. I had a curry delivered recently and I managed to pay the guy who delivered it AND thank him. We both seemed happy with that arrangement.

Binary talk isn't a preserve of the far right. The far left are incredibly partial to it as well. It serves both extremes very well but the result, often, is that it enables the far right. It's one of the main reasons (along with the ownership of the press) that the public found Jeremy Corbyn unelectable and we're now saddled with a shower of shitbags like Dominc Raab, Liz Truss, Priti Patel, Michael Gove (even my parents have gone off him), Jacob Rees-Mogg, and, let's not forget all the terrible things he's done just because he's ill, Boris Fucking Johnson.

When Johnson first found out about the impending crisis did he take action or did he appear on television suggesting we could 'bung a bob for Big Ben's bongs'? The brilliant journalist John Crace reminded me it was the latter. Few of us foresaw just how deadly this virus would be but Johnson would have been briefed on it and Johnson, you have to pinch yourself to remind yourself you're not dreaming - still, is the Prime Minister. To paraphrase Stewart Lee, an actual real prime minister of an actual real country.

A lot of Johnson's popularity has been built on courting the right wing press and sending dog whistle messages of racism out to racists. But now even the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail are starting to turn on him. Suggesting it won't be long before many of his supporters do. We all 'rally round the flag' at the time of crisis but WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER there will be a post-mortem not just on the dead bodies but on the actions of Britain's senior politicians and Johnson knows he won't come out well. Dominic Cummings will be lining up scapegoats already. Mark my words.

In (slightly) better news, Shenzhen has become the first city in China to ban eating cats and dogs (a start, let's see that ban extended to pigs, sheep, and cows - and not just in Shenzhen or China but worldwide), and large numbers of Americans (in a country seeing unemployment skyrocketing, the graph looks like the person making it got nudged during its creation) are waking up to the need for social care. Though some of them are still out buying guns. Where are they going to use them? The schools are closed.

The future for Britain and the world is uncertain, the future for America, Brazil, and the world is terrifying but I still live in hope. Dolly Parton has pledged $1,000,000 to help out where she can and, elsewhere, people everywhere - all across the planet, are indulging in small acts of love and kindness. My physical and mental health is holding up, I've had it confirmed to me that my friends and family love me, and the sun is shining so I can look out of the window at it.

As Terry Waite Sez, I'm not stuck at home, I'm safe at home. I hope you are too. I really appreciate all of you who have read or commented on these blogs, contacted me, and have kept my spirits up and, to end, an answer to Evie's question. No, harvestmen aren't poisonous. They're harmless. Just like most of us.

Isolation VII:The Luxury Of Boredom.

"You know me, I'm acting dumb. You know the scene, very humdrum. Boredom. Boredom" - The Buzzcocks, Boredom.

If you're feeling bored now, as many people are, count yourself lucky. Consider yourself to be living in relative luxury. The only real alternatives to being cooped up at home (with only the whole of the Internet, instant and free contact with all of your family and friends, and endless books, records, and television to indulge yourself in) is either being seriously ill, or dying, on a hospital bed or being a doctor, nurse, or other key worker, working painfully long stressful hours while putting your own health on the line.

It's tough for some (it certainly would have been awfully challenging for me in my twenties or thirties) but try and get over it, try and remember how fortunate you are to be well and relatively safe from exposure to the virus. It's April Fool's Day today and it's hardly a surprise that there have been a lot fewer April Fool jokes than normal. Mostly, people wouldn't want to risk appearing insensitive but also, as many have pointed out, life is so bonkers at the moment anyway that any crazy story you'd care to make up couldn't compete.

One guy who's, thankfully, gone quiet on the jokes recently (and not just because he's at home self-isolating) is Boris Johnson. Unfortunately, and I've been giving him the benefit of the doubt so far - against years of evidence, the lies and false promises haven't been filed away with the jokes he uses for less important issues like Brexit and floods.

Two weeks ago, the government promised 25,000 tests a day. You'll not have been surprised that that didn't materialise and that, now, the 25,000 tests a day is scheduled for the end of April. Which will be far too late for many. Johnson and his government are kicking the can down the road (one whose length nobody knows) at just the time urgent action needs taking.

Meaningless catchphrases and slogans, too, are back. Get Brexit Done and Unleash Britain's Potential have been joined by vague promises to send coronavirus packing and a seemingly endless pledge to 'ramp' up testing. The only people who still believe this stuff presumably also hold a firm opinion that Carlsberg is probably the best lager in the world and that you can't fit quicker than a Kwik-Fit fitter.

Tobias Ellwood, the Tory MP for Bournemouth East and far from one of his party's worst, appeared on Newsnight to make the seemingly sensible point that Spain went ahead, too quickly, with a flawed system of testing and is now reaping the lethal consequences. The fact he then launched into some jingoistic Brexity bullshit about 'indigenous capabilities' exposed the fact that Ellwood was, in fact, talking what they call 'fluently expressed bollocks'

Britain's testing record is shameful and our recovery rate, so far, is worryingly low. I'm not sure why that is. It could de down to the way different individual states register what qualifies as a 'recovery' so, as with many things, I shall withhold judgement. Withholding judgement does not mean it's not a worrying statistic though.

Sadly, not the most worrying. That's, always, the death toll. Of course that can only get worse (people don't come back to life despite what you might have read in the bible) but it's getting a lot worse. Yesterday's 393 deaths in the UK (taking the total in the country to 1,808) is the worst, by some margin, so far. I fear, and depressingly expect, it won't remain so for long. Italy now has 12,000 of its citizens dead, Spain over 9,000, and both the US (4,000+) and France (3,500) have overtaken China while The Netherlands has joined the UK in the one thousand club with Belgium and Germany bubbling under with over 800 deaths each.

It's morbid to list figures but, right now, I can't help myself and keep returning to the table. It starts to look like an Olympic medal table and the numbers are so huge it takes on an abstract feel. It's easy to forget that each one of the 43,288 people registered dead of coronavirus globally was a human being with a family and friends and with their own hopes, dreams, passions, fears, and anxieties. Each time a human being dies a library of stories burns down. Entire towns of libraries are now ablaze.

In the US the curve has been particularly steep in the last few days and even Trump has occasionally suggested, much too late, they need to take it seriously. Though not seriously enough. He's still suggesting there aren't enough surgical masks available to medical staff because doctors might be stealing them and using his press conferences for product placement for his sponsors. It looks really bad for America. I saw a recent prediction of an eventual quarter of a million deaths in the US alone. Trump wanted to make America top of the world but surely not in this way.

The huge irony being that the list America looks most likely to top is the list of the countries with the most deaths from coronavirus. In another example of the world being upside down, Mexico is said to have closed the borders to prevent Americans from arriving in the country. Then again, everyone's closing the doors right now and even those of us who normally protest at such things are in full support.

In Britain, joining the Dockland ExCel centre as emergency Nightingale hospitals are the NEC in Birmingham, the Central Convention Complex (formerly the G-Mex) in Manchester, the SEC Centre in Glasgow, and Cardiff's Millennium Stadium. These stories are not the only ones that would dominate the news in normal times.

I dare say we'd have heard a bit more about the Italian restaurant chain Carluccio's collapsing putting two thousand jobs at risk and I'd certainly hope, even in a country as insular as the UK, that there'd be more focus on populist leaders using the coronavirus crisis as a chance to make further and unprecedented, to use a word that has becoming a little overused right now, power grabs.

Viktor Orban has made Hungary, essentially, a dictatorship and it's going to be very interesting to see how the EU deal with that once this crisis is over. Expulsion would be my answer. Vladimir Putin has used the crisis to ban mass gatherings (indefinitely, not temporarily as everyone understands is required) and to change the constitution so that he remains in power until 2036. The year he'll celebrate his 83rd birthday. Although only in a small gathering, presumably.

There are corona cunts all over the world (I'm not including Kunt and the Gang whose nightly live Korona Kunt Klub sessions are a much needed pick me up) and Britain, of course, is no exception. Not wanting to be left behind by the likes of Richard Branson, Tim Martin, Ann Widdecombe, and Mike Ashley, Toby Young has stepped, unasked as usual, into the debate.

Unlike with Brexit, as my friend Tony pointed out, Young is worried about the economy and wrote a long piece about how we shouldn't be extending the lives of people who may be old and close to death anyway if it damages the economy. He's on record as saying he believes it's worth the economy taking a hit for Brexit so we can only conclude that Toby Young's priorities are in this order:- (1) blue passports (2) the economy (3) human life.

Maybe when you're such a waste of human life yourself you find it hard to realise some people put a value on keeping their loved ones alive. When he's not writing vile abuse to women online or calling working class students 'stains' he's campaigning to get rid of wheelchair ramps ("ghastly"), telling teachers they have an easy job, and advocating for eugenics. Which is odd. Because it would mean he would probably have never been born.

I'd rather be poor and unsuccessful than have controversial and hurtful opinions for money like Toby Young. At least I can sleep at night. Usually. The last couple of weeks (since the isolation began) I've been sleeping very well, surprising myself even. But last night was the first (relatively) bad night of sleep. I had a persistent cough that kept me awake (no other symptoms but these things worry you in the dead of the night) and eventually was at my desk writing by 6am (although I did have a mid-morning nap, another luxury to go along with that blissful boredom).

I'm feeling better now, physically. Mentally, I'm still bearing up. I'll miss not being able to attend the now cancelled Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub talk about Harry Houdini and magic tonight and not being able to go to the Balham Bowls Club for the Cunning Folk Film Club's showing of Andrew Kotting's Gallivant tomorrow night but Ian has lined up another Zoom/Kahoot! quiz and lots of new people are joining us for it so that should be fun. Do I risk going out to get 'essential' beers in? I do need toilet roll as well because I'm using kitchen towel now and everyone keeps telling me that blogs the bog up.

The quiz and, more so, the online get together with friends will perk my spirits up even more but, for now, I'd like to thank Mum and Dad for checking in on me via the landline (old school) on a daily basis, Michelle for her all lovely video calls, and Jason who rang me from Ho Chi Minh City yesterday to arrange a much longer call on Friday. We've got a lot to catch up on before we even get to the coronavirus but, no doubt, that subject will dominate. As I write Vietnam is the second most populous country on Earth (behind Ethiopia) to not register a single coronavirus death.

Jason, Michelle, Mum, Dad, and countless others (on WhatsApp, Words with Friends, text, Twitter, and Facebook Messenger) are making these long days fly by remarkably quickly and I'm so touched I am constantly reminding myself to be eternally grateful. Outside the birds are singing, foxes and squirrels are out during the day. Nature lives on even as the human race, or much of it, pauses. Not all humans will survive this but humanity will and, I hope, become stronger, and more caring, for having done so.

I will, however, die one day and spending this amount of time considering mortality has made me want to tell you what songs I want at my funeral. It's no longer Farewell Farewell by  Fairport Convention (great though that is). It's, in this order (you get 3 I think):-

Sparklehorse - More Yellow Birds
Robert Wyatt - At Last I Am Free
SL2 - On A Ragga Tip

Oh, and no religious bullshit please. If I do die of this, of course, it won't matter what music they play at my funeral because there will be next to nobody there and to think tens of thousands, and maybe more, funerals across the world will be played out that way adds a cruelty to an already unbearably heartbreaking tragedy.

But, as ever, I shall try to end on a positive note - and one I hope is more than a bromide. It certainly comes from the heart. I was thinking about how the virus is spread, how one person can spread it to several others and then those people spread it to more before, in no time, it's all over the planet. It got me thinking that that is exactly the way love is spread. Or at least should be. Now, and when this ends, if someone shows you love then pass that love on to at least two or more people. If everyone does that we start to create a better world. Because there will be future challenges, they may be more or less deadly than this - we can't know, and if we love each other more and more we'll look after each other more and more. The alternative, offered up by the likes of Toby Young, doesn't bear thinking about.