Soul Limbo:Inglan Is A Bitch.

"Inglan is a bitch, dere's no escapin it. Inglan is a bitch, dere's no runnin' whey fram it" - Inglan Is A Bitch - Linton Kwesi Johnson

The problem with hostile environments and the promising/threatening of hostile environments by successive Conservative and Labour governments should be apparent in the name. An environment is something we all share so to make it hostile is self-defeating for everyone. But for some it's far worse. Some feel and experience that hostility not vicariously but directly.

It's a hostility so intense that it could have you questioning the very nature of reality itself, so cruel that it asks you take a paternity test to see if your grown up children are really yours, and so inhumane that it will put you in prison for a crime that has never been committed and threaten to deport you to a country you barely know four and half thousand miles away from your loved ones.

Sitting in Limbo, a TV movie currently available on the BBC iPlayer, tells the story of Anthony Bryan (Patrick Robinson, Ash from Casualty), a youthful looking quinquagenarian grandfather who lives in Edmonton, North London with his long term partner Nadine (Janet Marshall). His children, Eileen (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and Gary (CJ Beckford) clearly love him and his grandchildren dote on him almost as much as he does them.

Anthony's life is an ordinary, honest, and unflashy one. He works as a handyman, he teaches his grandkids how to play dominoes with a West Indian flourish, he dances to reggae (the soundtrack's great - Barrington Levy, Sister Nancy, John Holt, and Jimmy Cliff) at birthday parties and club nights. I don't even begrudge him being a Spurs fan and when we see him visiting the pub, and singing songs about Harry Kane and Maurcio Pochettino, before the game with his lifelong friends Barrington (Andrew Dennis) and Trevor (Jay Simpson) the banter rings as true as the friendship runs deep.

Ordinary people are capable of extraordinary deep wells of emotion and in a masterful and understated way director Stella Corradi and writer Stephen S.Thompson manage to evoke that just by showing us average people getting on with their daily business. But that all changes when Bryan becomes, unbeknown to him, a victim of what would eventually come to be known as the Windrush Scandal.

In 2007, the Labour government first coined the term "hostile environment" in relation to immigration policy, in 2012 David Cameron's Conservative government, with Theresa May then Home Secretary, formed the Hostile Environment Working Group. When May became PM she took both the rhetoric and the reality of the hostile environment even further. In 2016, in Edmonton and many other places, those chickens came home to roost - and it was a complete and utter scandal that should shame May until her dying day.

We see Anthony told by his employer that they've received correspondence from the Home Office that says he's not a UK citizen (despite having lived in the UK for over fifty years, arriving aged eight on his Jamaican's mother's passport) and that they'll have to terminate his employment. As an, overnight, illegal alien he'll neither be able to find new work, claim benefits, or use the NHS and the exorbitant cost of a solicitor means securing the service of one is nothing but a pipe dream.

Anthony's quest, now, is to prove that he belongs in the UK and, despite testaments from friends, family, and even his old head teacher that he's lived in the country, perfectly legally, since 1965 and countless documentation that also demonstrates this fact, it seems that the faceless officials, the morally vacant jobsworths, and the anti-Spartacists that work for the Home Office are determined not to believe him.

These functionaries and their desire to climb the greasy pole in their career are, as ever, the useful idiots that allow the venality and incompetence of higher ranked government officials to go unchecked. When Hannah Arendt wrote about 'the banality of evil' she was talking about the greatest crime of the 20th century but the same structures are in place in all facets of all societies and when people place their personal gain above moral considerations they deny humanity not only to others but to themselves as well.

In an echo of Ken Loach's powerful I, Daniel Blake, we see Anthony's new life as he joins lengthy queues for all too brief chats at immigration reporting centres, we see him being kept on hold on the phone, and we see him struggling to uncover yet more documentation that will help his case. All set against the backdrop of jingoistic Sun headlines about Brexit and Donald Trump talking absolute fucking shit on the television. We see the world going mad both in macro and in micro.

Soon enough, police arrive at Anthony's house to arrest him and take him to a detention centre whose address they refuse to disclose to Janet. We see it's the Verne detention centre in Dorset. Otherwise known as HM Prison The Verne. The Home Office may not be calling it a prison for Anthony's purposes but if it looks like a prison, it feels like a prison, and it's official name is a fucking prison then it's a prison. If you lock somebody up and deny them their liberty then you can't use weasel words to describe what you're doing. What you're doing is imprisoning them.

In The Verne Anthony meets with Thaddeus (Leo Wringer), an elderly guy with Trinidadian roots, who's in a very similar situation to him but doesn't even have the safety net of a family (Thaddeus' wife had passed in recent years and they'd never had kids). Thaddeus is alone with, in his words, God and, in his actions, the fraying old tennis ball he constantly bounces on the hard prison floor.

Thaddeus tells Anthony about the "voluntary repatriation" package he's been offered and Anthony, soon enough, is offered the same which, of course, he refuses. Can any financial incentive be worth risking never seeing your family again? Do the people who think up these schemes really imagine we're all as craven in our pursuit of wealth as they are?

On release from The Verne, we see Anthony and Janet move in with one of their kids because they can no longer afford to keep up payments on their own house. We see the huge dent this, and all the other related indignities, gives to Anthony's pride and anyone with a soul, by this time, must surely be asking themselves how can this be allowed to happen? The psychological effects this injustice has on Anthony and his family looks to be creating mental wounds that will never properly heel.

How must it feel to not just have the carpet pulled from under your feet in the form of losing your house but to have the carpet pulled from under your entire life, your entire understanding of what your life is, by a treacherous and deceitful policy dreamed up by right wing politicians to capitalise on middle England's irrational fear of the 'other'?

Not a natural fear but one that has been stoked up for political gain by extreme right wing radical hate propaganda tabloids like The Daily Mail. Successive Labour and Conservative governments courted that vote so single mindedly it seems that it never occurred to them, or they never cared, that actual people would have their lives destroyed by these policies. It seemed like too much effort, too much of a gamble, to, instead, create a more positive narrative regarding the evident and demonstrable benefits of immigration.

Finding enemies, as we see now with Trump and Johnson, is always easier than finding solutions. Eventually Anthony is sent to another detention centre/prison. Campsfield House in Oxfordshire is where they fly deportees out from so things don't look too good for him. I'm not in the business of spoilers so I won't say any more about what happens but we leave the action in 2018 when The Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman is beginning to uncover the scale of the Windrush Scandal and when the Tottenham MP David Lammy is starting to ask awkward questions in the house to Theresa May, then PM, and her then Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

Gentleman and Lammy know the importance of doing the right thing. May and Rudd are moral vacuums who have connived in one of the most inhumane events in modern British history but it's only Rudd who loses her job as a consequence. May, as we all know, stays on to bungle Brexit talks and to divide the nation even further before giving way to a, remarkably, even more incompetent chancer and an even more nastier bastard in the form of Boris fucking Johnson.

Rudd didn't stay away for long. Within seven months, May brought her back into cabinet as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions where she stayed for nearly ten months before standing down as an MP as she could no longer work for the new PM, Johnson. If the person who, with May, oversaw the Windrush scandal thinks Boris Johnson is too amoral a man to work for we're in the very sad position that things have not improved since the Windrush scandal. They've got worse, and 43,414 Covid-19 deaths (the third highest death toll on the planet, despite being an island, despite having advanced warning of the pandemic) should leave us in no doubt whatsoever about that.

Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron, and the final years of the New Labour administration before that have made Britain a small-minded, bigoted, and xenophobic nation whipped up into hate by oily rags like the Mail and the Sun and turned in on itself in a spiralling, and never ending, race to the bottom and, as a country, we need a better, fairer, and more positive message to take us into the future because this attempt to recreate our past, and our imagined past at that, is taking us into very dangerous waters indeed.

Would Anthony Bryan have suffered these injustices and indignities if he was a white man from, say, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand it's asked near the end of Sitting in Limbo and we all know we don't even need to wait for the answer to that one. Of course he wouldn't. Laurence Fox can mouth on Question Time about how Britain's not a racist country but one incident like this, let alone the approximately eight hundred and fifty that happened on May and Rudd's watch, disproves that completely. That's why, for now, the slogan that matters isn't All Lives Matter, it's Black Lives Matter and if you can't see that, or choose not to, you're part of the problem.

Thanks to Adam for the heads up on this powerful, moving, and righteously, though quietly, angry piece of film making.

A Flying Saucerful Of Secrets.

"A flying saucer right inside my head" - Flying Saucer, The Wedding Present.

All we know for certain about aliens is that we know nothing. It's seventy-three years since the first reported sighting of a flying saucer in 1947 and our knowledge of UFOs and alien visitation has progressed not one iota over those seven and a bit decades. Almost as if aliens don't really exist. Or at least have never come anywhere close to Earth.

So why does belief in them not just persist but, especially in America in recent years, rise? I was with the London Fortean Society online (for reasons we're all familiar with) to see if I could find out. Science writer Sarah Scoles was Zooming in to us live from her house in Denver, Colorado to deliver an hour long lecture called UFO Culture and Why We See Flying Saucers and following Chris French's brilliant A Skeptics Guide to Aliens (for the LFS in January) and Paula Dempsey's superb Flying Saucers:A Modern Myth for SELFS last November I couldn't help wondering if this was alien overkill.

I was at least worried that too much of the same ground would be covered and I'd find myself losing interest (much easier in the comfort of your home than in a pub surrounded by others). To begin with, as Sarah read fairly long passages from her book - explaining she's more a writer than a speaker, those concerns seemed to be genuine but once the talk got going, once Sarah really warmed to her theme, I found myself fascinated and entranced. On top of that I had some of my existing prejudices overturned.

Which is always good. The systems of belief and structures of thought we build up in our own minds should always be the ones we put most thoroughly to the test. Sarah began by telling us of how, in December 2017, videos emerged showing footage of alleged UFOs and how these videos were said to be filmed from American military jets. Supposed footage of UFOs, often very blurry, is not an uncommon event. Footage arriving from the United States Department of Defense is quite a different matter.

The alleged veracity of the footage was underlined when The New York Times, not the National Enquirer or Fox News, ran the story on its front page with the headline Glowing Auras and 'Black Money':The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Programme. There were even claims that debris from crashed UFOs had been recovered. All this brought about a resurgence of interest not just from already committed ufologists, but from the general public.

But something didn't add up, and soon the Pentagon denied all knowledge of the footage, the debris, and, seemingly - in keeping with modern politics, even their own prior accounts of events. This triggered Sarah's natural tendency towards investigation and even though UFOs weren't, and still aren't, her main interest she delved in to see if she could find out what had gone on. What was going on.

Here Sarah's talk took us back to the early days of UFO sighting and here we did cover much of the same ground as French and Dempsey's earlier talks. It's not that the story of Kenneth Arnold's sighting of the original flying saucer in 1947 and the conspiracy theories that arose following the Roswell incident aren't interesting (they very much are) but they've been covered in some depth before and there are other blogs (linked to above) if you want to read about that.

So I'll rush past that, stopping to add Sarah's idea that from Roswell emerged a belief that the government is some kind of monster that is keeping something from us, the people (something that could help us) and that we, the people, are the heroes in this story and need to do something about it. Something heroic. It's a tale as old as time but with aliens now in the roles formerly played by ogres and dragons.

What happened in Roswell is no longer as important as the mythology that has grown up around it. Or, for the New Mexico city, the tourists that come to visit. In Roswell, you get a lot of bang for your alien buck. Area 51, in Nevada, is not so heavily populated with alien obsessed tourists but it's become equally well known with the belief that it's the place where the US government keeps alien specimens. Are they living or dead? It's a point that's been hotly debated.

Last autumn a college student started a Facebook group advertising an event called Storm Area 51:They Can't Stop Us All and tens of thousands of people claimed they were attending. Or at least 'interested' in doing so. As anyone who's organised a Facebook event knows getting a positive response to an RSVP is very different to people actually turning up, but a few dozen people did turn up at the gate with the supposed intentions of uncovering the secrets inside. 'They can't stop us all' may have been the mantra but, of course, they could. Quite easily too.

It didn't really matter because the event soon become, and probably was always intended as, more of a party anyway. Memes were created, Bud Light made a beer to tie in with it, and a few dozen people got together to chat, drink poor quality booze, make friends, and share highly improbable conspiracy theories.

Some of which may have related to what the US government calls the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme. The fact that title has no mention of aliens or UFOs is, of course, a red rag to the conspiracy theorist bull and the idea that the American government would use easily debunkable claims of alien sightings (Venus, magic lanterns, etc;) as a cover to hush up genuine alien sightings and visitations took hold.

The truth didn't really matter anymore. Belief in UFOs and aliens had become something of a religion and the similarities with the megachurches you see throughout the US are many, obvious, and overwhelming. There was the cult of personality and there was the hope for salvation. All that had changed is that in the place of God there was now an extraterrestrial super intelligent being or beings.

All wrong ideas eventually migrate towards the original sin of thinking, the wrongest idea of all time - that of religion - and alien belief is proving no different. Ufologists share beliefs, they share a community, and they focus their attentions on to a higher power to make sense of the confusing and often dangerous, depressing, and unfair world they live in.

Offerings, votives if you like, are even given. But to models of sunglasses wearing aliens instead of gods. To my mind, it's no weirder than the worship of an unproven, and non-existent, omnipotent being. In fact there are many similarities. Not least that they both are seen to come from, or live in, the sky.

I was all ready to launch into a diatribe about the stupidity, immorality, and danger of religion when Sarah Scoles deftly sidestepped and made me think again. Not just about UFO believers, but also about religious people. On a visit to UFO Watch Tower in Hooper, Colorado she met with people, believers, who live there. Many of them had led lonely, difficult lives and find a sense of comfort in the community they have there that they have never been fortunate enough to experience before.

The Colorado Mutual UFO Network, like many churches, mosques, and synagogues, are less interested in history and evidence and are more focused on bringing people together to share their stories with each other in a safe space. I was looking so hard at the demonstrably terrible side of religion I'd not been able to see that many people use it as a force for good.

Sarah's talk was so much better when she introduced these ideas and it opened my eyes up not to belief in aliens or Gods but to understanding those who view the world from a very different perspective to me. To me, it's still complete and utter bullshit but if it brings people happiness, it brings them community, and it makes their lives feel worthwhile (and nobody's getting hurt by it) then even I, an avowed atheist extremist, can say "amen" to that.

A brief coda on SETI (the search for extra terrestrial intelligence) and a Q&A that took in the incredibly precise theory that there are thirty-six contactable alien civilisations in the universe and a question from Paula Dempsey herself (as well as somebody mentioning The X Files and describing it as "a show we may have heard of" - no shit) added little to proceedings but it didn't need to.

Sarah Scoles had, after a slow start, given us a talk that on the surface was about alien visitation but turned out, really, to be about something far more important. People, community, and hope. Thanks to Sarah for that, thanks to the LFS for booking her, and thanks to Conway Hall who, facing an uncertain future due to Covid, hosted once again. Na-nu na-nu.

Isolation XXV:One Hundred Days Of Solitude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spores and spires:The Salisbury Poisonings.

"Putin's gonna get me" - Sergei Skripal

BBC1's three part The Salisbury Poisonings, about the infamous events of two years ago in that cathedral city and "based on first hand accounts and extensive interviews", was, despite the BBC not having the megabucks budget of Netflix and co;, an incisive, comprehensive, gripping, and an often emotional (I cried, obviously) look at a frightening time in the small Wiltshire city.

The fact it aired during the fourth month of the coronavirus lockdown gave it added poignancy. For what the people of Salisbury went through in 2018 the whole country, almost the whole world, is going through now. With bells on. Spore shaped bells. Recession shaped bells.

Talk of locking things down as quick as possible to prevent contagion rang painfully topically while the supposedly comforting line "it's probably just a virus", uttered near the start of the drama, and the regular talk of ICU came from a habit of language now more familiar, and chilling, than we could ever have expected.

The first face we see is BBC newsreader, and now Question Time host, Fiona Bruce and she's talking, on 4th March 2018, about the threat Britain is facing from "the beast from the East". She means the danger of both the freeze and thaw that Salisbury, like much of Britain, was dealing with but there's no doubt that the makers of the show knew we'd be capable of a dual interpretation of that term.

We cut to Salisbury itself and, beneath the spires of that cathedral, we see Yulia Skripal collapsing on to the lap of her clearly very unwell father, Sergei, on a bench in a moderately busy town centre. Sergei, for his part, chucks his guts up. Police are called and the first officer on the scene is DS Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall). Soon we see Nick, at home with his loving family, sweating profusely and struggling with his vision as his pupils do whatever the opposite of dilation is. They get smaller.

The Salisbury of Bailey and Skripal is full of hugely recognisable suburban housing and this grounds the drama, makes it feel like something that could happen to any of us. The grey skies, the mobile ringtones, the kitchens, the doorbell sounds, and the cups of tea at times of crisis. It's all so familiar as to be almost quotidian but it's this, and the use of music like Lily Allen's LDN and The Jam's Start on the soundtrack, that make this a Britain we all know, recognise, and share.

Salisbury doesn't seem a city wrought by division but a place of community. Even the street drinkers we see are given the courtesy of being fully fleshed out characters with a sense of right and wrong. They are people who live and love in Salisbury and they are people, despite their problems, who are keen to do the right thing. There's no Benefits Street castigation or judgements made about 'chavs' here and, for that, I loved the show even more.

We see Charlie Rowley (Johnny Harris) present his girlfriend Dawn Sturgess (MyAnna Buring) with some fancy perfume he's found in the bin and we see them attack the booze with gusto in the flat they share in Amesbury. We also see Dawn meeting with her parents Caroline and Stan (Stella Gonet and Ron Cook) who have clearly been given custody of Dawn's daughter due to her shambolic lifestyle, problems with addiction, and inability to cope.

But it's neither the shambolic lifestyle nor the booze that puts both Dawn and Charlie in hospital. It's that perfume. Decanted from a bottle that the perpetrators of the poisonings have used to bring the toxins from Russia into the UK and, ultimately, smear on Sergei and Yulia Skripal's doorknob. Novichok (a Russian word for 'newcomer') is so lethal that a spoonful of it can kills thousands of people. It stops the brain from communicating with the body.

Wiltshire's Director of Public Health Tracy Daskiewizc (Anne-Marie Duff) and, sometimes in liaison with, sometimes at tactical loggerheads with, lantern jawed Supt Dave Minty (Darren Boyd, Frank from Killing Eve) sets about both trying to solve the mystery and trying to protect the lives (and businesses - the economy, of course, as has to be weighed up in all this) of the people of Salisbury and now Amesbury.

Daskiewicz's moral dilemmas and sleepless nights make up a fair slice of a drama that is, for the most part, played out in people's front rooms, in nondescript offices, and police station interview rooms. As we see health risks balanced with or played off against the economy we come face to face with the kind of people whose reaction to a major health crisis is how much it affects their daily routine and how much it affects the money in their pocket.

Other's lives are not so much an irrelevance or a distraction as impedimenta to be either circumnavigated or pushed out of the way. The story of a nation divided by the historical own goal of Brexit. Although, thankfully, The Salisbury Poisonings doesn't linger on that as long as I choose to.

Instead, and equally topically, it presents medical staff not as heroes we clap and ultimately sacrifice but as calm, considered, and professional people doing a difficult job in trying circumstances. The juxtaposition of the World Cup footage (in Russia of all places) and Theresa May announcing that Britain won't be sending any politicians or members of the royal family there as some kind of punishment (even though the England team went and did surprisingly well) brings home to us how different that summer must have been in Salisbury to everywhere else in the country.

Something we're all getting a much clearer feel for now. As we lapped up England trouncing Panama 6-1 and Harry Kane taking the Golden Boot before the semi-final defeat against Croatia, it seems the volumes on the TVs of many houses in Salisbury were set considerably lower. There's an almost unbearably heartbreaking moment when Nick Bailey's wife Sarah (Annabel Scholey) tells her kids that daddy's been poisoned and it's far from the only one in a programme that, though often understated in telling the story of what became a global news event, grew in quiet strength with each instalment.

Talk of Porton Down rubbed up against talk of visiting Zizzi as abrasively as the jump cuts between the verdant views around Salisbury's cathedral and the images of people vomiting over their sofas and the quiet, methodical approach to telling the story taken by Saul Dibb was aided by superb, professional, and unshowy performances by the likes of Duff, Spall, Boyd, Burning, Gonet, and Mark Addy as Sergei Skripal's friend Ross Cassidy to create a magnificent three hours television.

No spoilers but right at the end of the series we see (some of) the real people whose lives have been portrayed to us by actors during the last three hours. This underlined the veracity of the drama but it also gave it one last emotional punch and, again, the tears were hard to keep in. I don't even bother trying anymore.

"The truth isn't for people like us" says Dawn's mum to her dad from a seaside bench nearing the end of the drama and while that's sadly true, while state sponsored assassination can go unpunished on foreign shores, while Putin remains in power, and while we have a (now even worse) Tory government in office with no intention of changing that, we'll be subject to a lot more of these tragedies in the next four and a half years. Enjoy the collapse.

Hello Sunshine.

"In honesty it's been a while since we had reason left to smile. Hello sunshine. Come into my life" - Hello Sunshine, Super Furry Animals

Last Thursday night, following the example set by the London Fortean Society, I 'attended' my first SELFS (the South East London Folklore Society) online talk. We all know the reasons the pub wasn't open to host and we all hope that that will change soon (but only when it's safe enough to do so) but, while the threat of the virus is still so strong, these online events are proving a more than worthy substitute.

SELFS had gone a bit more low key than the LFS but the talk suffered not a jot for that. Our host George had lined up what was basically two YouTube videos and a Zoom Q&A for their 'Lore of the Sun' evening. Narrated and hosted by George himself, it told of how different cultures and religions have interpreted what the sun is, what it means, and how it affects our lives.

The yellow dwarf star we call the sun is 92.1% hydrogen and 7.8% helium, it's four and half billion years old, and it's ninety three million miles from Earth - and we would not be able to live without it. It provides us with our heat, with our light, and,  ultimately, with a bit of help from our parents, our lives.

So it's hardly surprising that throughout history humans have tried to make sense of what it is, what it does, and why it does it. Humans have a need to make sense of things and science, in the past, wasn't even close to being able to explain this vast yellow orb that appeared in the sky each morning and disappeared again each night. Some cultures feared that one night it would disappear forever.

Others (Egyptians, Incas, and in ancient India) made up sun gods to explain it. The Egyptian sun god Ra is variously portrayed as a scarab, as a serpent, and as a hawk headed human. Ra travelled, in the form of the sun, across the sky each night in a boat. When Papua New Guinea's 'Mr Sun' (the sun takes both male and female forms in different folkloric beliefs) fertilises the Earth a festival is held to celebrate. In Polynesia it was believed the sun moved across the sky too quickly so his leg was purposely broken to make him move slower and the day last longer. So more work could be done.

People's fear of the sun, or the fear of it not appearing, has often led them to do or, more honestly, imagine acts of great cruelty towards it - and each other. During eclipses ancient Peruvians fired arrows at what they believed to be a monster attacking the sun. Ancient Mexicans named the sun 'he by who men live' and sacrificed animal and human hearts to the sun to give him strength.

The Incas weren't so grisly about all things solar. When one of their own became ill they saw that illness as a blessing sent by the sun so that they could rest with their people. It's not the only time people have ascribed turns of events to the sun that it could surely not have influenced. As if providing all life on Earth isn't enough there was once a belief that sunspots (cooler parts of the sun emitting less light) had a bearing on world economies. Another theory relating to the sunspots is that they were caused when the moon, jealous of the sun's brightness, pelted the sun with mud.

Eclipses were an even bigger deal. It was, and often still is, globally common to be afraid of eclipses. Many felt a cosmic dragon was devouring the source of all warmth and light which, of course, could only lead to the death of every living thing on the planet. Some believed 'sky wolves' had swallowed the sun. Bad vibes, man.

Norse mythology held that the sun was made from the skull of the first man that ever lived and when the sun's not dominating global mythologies it's the source of many superstitions. It's been believed, over the ages, that it's unlucky to point at the sun and for the sun to strike a mourner at a funeral but that it's lucky for the sun to strike a brick. In Hungary, tradition had it that a girl who throws her sweepings into the sun will never marry.

The sun was given character, emotions, and motivations. Some belief systems had it that the sun danced when it rose on Easter Monday, joyful that Christ had risen. I would hold a belief that if the sun had emotions at all, Christianity would cause it to feel anger and resentment. Imagine giving every human on the planet life only to see them flock into churchs, cathedrals, mosques, and synagogues to worship mere men, mere mortals.

Hawkwind and Spiral Tribe at least had the right idea by celebrating solstices and sunrises with festivals, frenzied dancing, and pharmaceuticals. Conflating sun worship with Christian worship doesn't end with mistaken attribution for life giving properties. It was believed that the sun's birthday was December 25th. Because sun worship was so popular, early Christians moved Jesus Christ's birthday from January 6th to what became known as Christmas Day to capitalise on the sun's popularity for their burgeoning, lie based, religion. A bit like Boris Johnson supporting Brexit so he can become PM.

In 247AD the Roman Emperor Aurelian decreed sun worship as the official religion of Rome and based the Roman form of sun worship on the older Syrian cult of Mithraism. Mithraism still worked its way to London and, in recent years, a Mithraic temple in the City of London was discovered during excavations initiated by William Francis Grimes and Audrey Williams, two Welsh archeologist workings for the Museum of London. I visited last year with my friend Valia and plan to go again once 'this' is over.

George's talk continued to take in myths from around the world. I've not included all of them here (you should really attend the talks, you don't have to even be in London now they've moved online) but I've picked a few of my favourites. In Africa, the Congolese believed the moon had once been a second sun but people got tired of being hot all the time so one of the two suns suggested they both have a bath to cool down (!) but only one did. That sun became the moon.

An Angolan theory on how one sun became a moon is less pleasant. One sun killed all her children and they became the stars we see at night. The sun that let her children live became the sun we now know and there are no stars representing murdered children visible in the sky when the sun shines.

The Mexicans didn't stop at two suns. They had it that there were four suns that preceded our sun. One was drowned by torrential rain (causing everyone on Earth to die except those that turned into fish), the second one was destroyed by fire (those that didn't die became the animals), the third by an earthquake (no creatures seem to have been made by this), and the fourth sun turned all humanity into monkeys. I think I've got that right. It's a bit confusing.

The Chinese saw the Mexicans four suns and they raised them. In China it was once believed that there was a different sun for each hour of the day. One fateful day they all appeared in the sky at once and the heat was so intense it was feared they would burn all living creatues to a crisp. A skilled archer was tasked with shooting nine of them down. A feat, fortunately, he achieved.

There's Indian and Japanese mythologies, there's an Assyrian mythology of scorpion men who open mountain doors from which the sun god emerges to ride his chariot across the sky, and there's the Egyptian theory that the sun is a golden egg laid daily by a celestial goose. It was believed that pharaohs were sun gods reigning on Earth.

Sun gods like Helios and Apollo were placed highly in the Greek pantheon too and as if the being the God of the sun isn't enough responsibility the sun gods were also tasked with being deities for other spheres like music, building, and shepherding. Each morning, belief had it, Helios would rise from an Ethiopian swamp and ascend into the heavens, pulled in his quadriga by four horses, before eventually plunging into a distant ocean and out of sight. Only to miraculously reappear in that Ethiopian swamp the next morning and repeat the feat. A Groundhog Day for Helios.

Slavonic mythology attested that the sun had a golden palace in the East and, as we see so many times, rode a chariot pulled by varying numbers of horses each day to get there. In most cultures it's horse drawn chariots that take the sun/sun-god on their daily journey but in Egypt it's boats. I can't help thinking that's because in most ancient cultures people travelled by horses or horse drawn chariots but in Egypt, because of the Nile, river travel was more popular.

We touched on Celtic mythology, Finnish mythology (the Kalevala), and Roman mythology (Janus, a uniquely Roman god in the pantheon, was initially a solar deity before taking charge of the departments of doorways and gates - a job that having two faces, one to look in to the future and one to look back at the past, made him highly qualified for) before returned for another look at Mithraic beliefs. The followers of Mithraism wanted more purity and as such they venerated light. To create more light it was deemed that Mithra had slayed the sacred bull and sacrificed it to the sun gods.

It's no more bonkers than Christian or Islamic stories. None of it is. It was a fascinating talk that also took in Robert Graves, Newgrange, Stonehenge, the White Goddess, Ragnarok, Dorchester-on-Thames (where I have a TADS walk planned for next April), The Sun Wheel, Tacitus visiting the Baltic coast of Germany) and the sun-wise turn. Passing the port, stirring Christmas puddings, and arriving at funerals should always be done in the direction of the sun's travel apparently.

We learnt how Midsummer was often known as 'fire of heaven' and, in a rather Life of Brian Pythonesque way, the Ancient Druid Order and the Ancient Order of Druids are most definitely not the same thing. A brief Q&A took in Puritans, John Dee, Nicholas Culpeper, Ronald Hutton, the Danish influence on the English language, Kentish barrows, and the time when astrology was considered a science and, as ever with SELFS, the evening became stranger and more fascinating as it developed while always remaining as amiable as a night out in the pub with a group of close friends.

I had a great evening (sat in my front room) and can't wait to do it again on the 9th July when Matthew Hopkins:The Witchfinder General is under consideration. The sun doesn't always shine on TV but when there's a SELFS evening going on there it most certainly does.