Isolation IV:Silent Spring

"All the time in the world and you never changed a thing. All the time in the world and you stood back and watched the silent spring" - Silent Spring, Primal Scream.

The sun is shining, the birds are singing in the blue skies, and the blossom that I so love and so looked forward to seeing on the trees is starting to appear. It's as glorious a March day as you could wish for but if I ruled the world this isn't the first day of spring that I'd choose to have every day. 

The lockdown continues, the curve rises, and the fear that lingers in the background for most of us becomes ever more real for ever larger numbers, for those who are suffering or those, in the NHS and elsewhere, who are dealing with the suffering. 'May you live in interesting times' they say, but I think most of us would choose boredom now.

Hell, many of us ARE bored. Which seems kind of strange at such a time. Doctors and nurses aren't bored though. They're overstretched, stressed, and have very real concerns for their own health. They're doing an amazing job against a deadly, and mysterious, 'enemy' that we're still not even close to understanding.

My third, and most recent, Isolation blog dropped on Tuesday and now, Thursday, the global death toll has risen from 16,500 to 23,000 and the UK death toll has gone from 335 to 465. Italy has registered over 8,000 deaths, Spain over 4,000, China over 3,000, and Iran over 2,000. Both France and the US are listed as having had more than one thousand deaths. The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and South Korea have seen over one hundred deaths. More than fifty are dead in Indonesia, Sweden, Portugal, Brazil, and Turkey.

The Excel Centre in London's Docklands is being converted into a 1km long hospital with four thousand beds and, terrifyingly, two morgues in preparation for the toll in the UK to rise as steeply as in Italy and Spain. Or, possibly, even steeper. Even more deaths. We don't know. Nobody does. Anybody who says they do should be shamed as the charlatan and chancer they so clearly are.

We were in a time of rising populism but now is not the time for populists. Now is the time for a hard-headed, and truthful, assessment of evidence and facts. The fatal flaw in the approach adopted in the UK, including initially by me, and other nations has been to not listen to the experts. We're seeing what happens when knowledge and expertise are degraded, belittled, and ultimately ignored by politicians and press barons with their own, often financially motivated, agendas.

The people who have put their faith in bigmouths, liars, and populists while asking 'what's the worst that could happen?' are, right now, finding out the answer to that question. It's not a pretty one. Make no mistake, coronavirus/Covid-19 is not discriminating between nations or political styles, it pays no heed to national boundaries, race, or gender. It is, age excepted, an equal opportunities killer. But some nations prepared better for others and some are handling it better than others. That can be in no doubt.

Boris Johnson, I have put it on records many times, is neither a politician I trust nor a man I admire and some of his messaging has been confusing, unclear, borderline jingoistic, and has depended on the kind of slogans he used to hoodwink people into thinking he's already delivered Brexit. But there have been occasions, and it pains me to say this, where he has struck the right tone and his popularity is on the rise.

I believe there are far better people to lead the country than Boris Johnson. In the past, now, and in the future. But trying to get rid of him now as some are? It's a waste of time, it's not going to happen, and it's a waste of effort. We are where we are. In a place where my friend Sanda, as confirmed a Jeremy Corbyn supporter as anybody you could meet, has shared an appeal by Johnson for people to volunteer for the NHS. The only thing as surprising as her sharing it was that I, a Johnson hater for over a decade now, 'liked' it. Strange times.

Maybe if this government, and many previous administrations - let's not let New Labour off the hook here, hadn't been involved in slowly destroying the NHS we'd be more prepared for this pandemic. It's about as out of character as me staying in (12th day in a row now - bar necessary visits to the shops) for me to say nice things about Tories but Matt Hancock and Rishi Sunak can at least string sentences together and give the impression that (a) they're listening and (b) they're at least trying to do the right thing.

The other Tory move I have to say has been a good one is keeping Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel hidden. Rees-Mogg, along with Iain Duncan Smith, is one of the cruellest politicians in the country and Patel matches him in that cruelty and excels him when it comes to stupidity. Where she's on a level with the likes of Chris Grayling and Dominic Raab. The perma-smirking Patel, famously, doesn't know the difference between terrorism and counter-terrorism so imagine the gaffes that would come out of her mouth if Dominic Cummings allowed her anywhere near a television interview now.

Patel and Rees-Mogg are the worst of British. Politicians so shameless they have to be hidden away from the public at a time of a global crisis. Out in that big wide world, though, there are people even more craven and venal and they're in positions of enormous power. Bigly. Donald Trump seems to be suggesting this could all be over by Easter and it's unsure if this idiotic statement is driven by financial imperatives to say this or he's had his ear bent by right-wing Christian fundamentalist zealots.

One thing that is clear about Trump is that he is, as so often, talking out of his arse. Dangerously so. The Trump of the Tropics, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, has taken notes from his idol's playbook too. He's dismissed coronavirus as both a fantasy and a trick and, like Trump, he's blaming the media and suggesting it's all a big conspiracy to stop him getting re-elected.

We shouldn't be surprised. These people have always made everything about themselves. Their narcissism mistaken for confidence and ability so often and so fully that they've risen, lethally, to positions of huge power. Their admirers like them because they don't just bend the rules, they refuse to even acknowledge them. They create new rules, new truths, and new facts.

Because so many people voted for the hate, greed, and lies of these people it's now no longer possible to deprive them of air time but every single utterance they spew forth from their ill informed and bigoted mouths should be subject to televised scrutiny and examination. Each statement made by these men should be clearly followed in the LARGE CAPITAL LETTERS so beloved of those who defend them on the Internet with the disclaimer THIS IS A LIE!

It's time to get serious. Time to prioritise lives over the economy and stop all non-essential work. It's not easy to define what is and isn't essential because our societies are so intertwined but DIY shops and building sites (except for hospitals or ones which would be a danger to leave as they are) don't count, in my mind, as essential right now.

Johnson's message on Monday night wasn't clear enough about this and he needs to come forward and put some flesh on the bones of this policy. The rest of us, those of us still standing when this is all over, need to remember what people like Richard Branson, Mike Ashley, Tim Martin, Rick Stein, and Gordon Ramsay did during this crisis.

They protected themselves and threw their staff under the bus and, in some cases, put lives at risk rather than dip into their own huge piles of cash. Fat dragons sleeping on beds of gold while the peasants starve. Fuck 'em. Don't visit Wetherspoons when this is over (there are much nicer pubs), don't shop at Sports Direct, and don't eat in any of Gordon fucking Ramsay's restaurants. He's a wanker anyway. He probably actually wanks in to your dinner before he serves it to you. He seems the type.

But let's not just focus on the shitbags. Let's hear it for the good guys. The restaurant chain Leon has announced it'll be staying open to provide meals for NHS workers and that any profit made will be directed towards the NHS, the fashion designer Giorgio Armani has pledged 1.1m in Euros to Italian hospitals, an astonishing 400,000 people have signed up as NHS volunteers, a team of Cuban doctors have landed in Milan to help out (Cuba is famous for its excellent health service and it raises important question as to why capitalist states treat their infirm worse than socialist states do), and the comedian Matt Lucas released a video of his reworked baked potato song with the lyrics changed to reflect current medical advice.

A smaller gesture than Armani's for sure but laughter is a medicine we can all do with a bit of now. Like music and, most of all, interaction (but not physical) with friends and family. Mum and Dad have kept their word by keeping their daily calls coming (they must be bored). Ben, an important key worker who is more overworked than ever, still finds time in his day to ring for a chat and my friend Rob in Birmingham has rung several times in calls that tend to take us back thirty years to the days of the Basingstoke music scene of that era.

The best morale boost of all is coming from Michelle's video calls and her videos of Evie (four). She's been doing planet quizzes, learning from Horrible Histories, painting, crafting, and creating an assault course that involved leaping over a pencil. Hardly a challenging task for a jumping bean like Evie who is so full of life and joy, such a ray of sunshine, that she constantly reminds me not to get too down with all of this. When this is all over she'll be getting a very squashy cuddle.

Tonight I had a ticket for Pass Over at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn, last night I was due in The Bell in Whitechapel for a London Fortean Society talk titled John Keel and the Mothman Prophecies. Obviously, and correctly, none of that happened or is happening and instead I'm sitting in with Question Time and Mark Kermode's new series of Secrets of the Cinema. It's not so bad. It's not jail.

I've been filling the rest of the time listening to music, writing these blogs, compiling my reggae top 100, and applying to be an NHS volunteer myself. The other night I ordered a green paneer shashlik, dall samba, and chapati (and a couple of bottles of Cobra) from Zainab Mahal down the road. I paid over the phone and the guy drove out and left it at my door as I shouted my thankyous at him through that door. I posted about it on Facebook and it got twenty-five 'likes' making it the most popular meal, probably, I've ever eaten. It wasn't even hot. But it was tasty.

Days are beginning to take some sort of shape now, some kind of vague routine is coming into being. The weekend, I expect, will be tougher (especially now the sun is out) but, so far, I'm feeling both physically and mentally as strong as I could hope to be and I'm finding writing these blogs to be enormously therapeutic. Hopefully somebody, somewhere, is getting something out of them too. One or two people have said they've enjoyed them and one even said reading it helped.


If you're enjoying, sharing, or finding them useful then that's great, I thank you. I have the luxury, and the time, to write them. Circumstances provided that. Other friends are looking after kids. Others are out doing very essential work or work that is, as I wrote earlier, heavily intertwined with that essential work. They're doing much more important stuff that I'm not qualified, or able, to do. So I get to write. Which I like doing anyway.

I'm fortunate there and I'm fortunate to have great friends and family around me. I've even got some milk in so I can have a cup of tea (I was running seriously low) and as the usual bread I buy wasn't in stock I've purchased a rather tasty looking Romanian loaf that I'm looking forward to trying. I even scored a Cadbury's Creme Egg.

Small pleasures, like a bubblebath or a cup of tea, are becoming big pleasures, things to look forward to, and the few tasks I have to carry out seem to be expanding to fill the time. I realise I'm absolutely one of the lucky ones. Like every single person in the world right now, I have no idea how this is all going to pan out or how long this will last. Of course I'm anxious but I'm always anxious so that's not new. I at least know that people, at least most people, really do come together for the common good when they need to. On my short walk to the shop today it felt like I had all the time in the world but this time, with virtually nobody else about, I really did see that silent spring. The blossom is still beautiful, even when we glimpse it briefly.