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.