Isolation XXII:Repetition Repetition Repetition

"Repetition, repetition, repetition. There is no hesitation. This is your situation" - Repetition, The Fall.

A couple of days ago, on my way out for my daily constitutional, I spotted my neighbour Nicki watering the flowers in our communal garden. "How's it going?" I asked. "Alright. Same as ever" she replied, before adding, with a smile "Groundhog Day".

This weekend I was supposed to be heading down to Rye to lead a TADS walk to Camber Sands and back. I've been thinking about the cobbled streets and pubs of Rye, the undoubted ice cream and pint on the beach in Camber, and, more than anything, about how much I'd enjoy the laughter and conversation of my friends.

I've been thinking about how none of that is going to happen now and, instead, as Nicki said, I'll be experiencing another Groundhog Day. I'll wake up, check my emails/Facebook/Twitter, listen to some music, chat on the phone (since I last wrote I've chatted to Adam, Michelle, Mum, and Dad), have something to eat, go for a walk (normally on Peckham Rye), pop in the shops, come home, watch some TV, drink some beers (though I've taken a few nights off from that recently), and endlessly check both the news and the grisly global coronavirus death league (Brazil have knocked Italy off the podium and will soon be breathing down the neck of the proudly 'world-beating' UK).

On good days (Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays) I get to see friends and family on Zoom as we do our regular, and massively enjoyable, Kahoot quizzes and on a bad day, earlier this week, I had a brief bout of gout (swerving the absolute worst of it with extra strength Nurofen and cranberry juice) but, to all intents and purposes, Groundhog Day is a fair assessment of what life in the time of coronavirus feels like and I'm not even complaining about that. At least I'm not working in a hospital or a care home or driving a bus or a tube. At least I'm not dying of the bastard thing.

As far too many people in the UK still are despite the jarringly upbeat message now coming from our government and being interpreted by many as "this thing's nearly over, you can start getting back to normal". About two months ago I'd have estimated the amount of people social distancing to be around 98%. Being generous I'd have to say it's now about half that. Being honest I'd have to say that worries me.

On Wednesday the UK (population:66,000,000) registered a higher daily death toll than all 27 EU nations combined (population 445,000,000) so you might reasonably think that relaxation of lockdown and a casual easing of social distancing etiquette looks a little premature. Or even downright dangerous. You might even ask yourself what's spurred it on and for that you can find the answers with our unloved, and unlovely, government.

Obviously, people want to get back to doing things they like. Visiting friends, riding on trains, going to pubs, shops, and football matches and, in some insane cases, returning to the office. People want to do the things they've always liked doing but most people, despite what you might constantly read elsewhere, aren't stupid and they aren't selfish either. They'll suspend those pleasures for the greater good and that's not just an opinion. We've seen over the last two to three months that it's a fact.

But people need to feel we're all in it together and if someone, say for example a special adviser to the government, was seen to be given a free hand to break the rules then a significant number of people would come to think that those rules don't really need following. At least not by them. Most people breaking the rules probably think, like Dominc Cummings, that the rules need to be followed. They just imagine themselves, like Dominic Cummings, to be exempt. To be special. To be exceptional.

For this misplaced sense of exceptionalism we can lay the blame, yet again, squarely at the door of Boris Fucking Johnson and his boss Dominic Fucking Cummings who have done as much as anyone in recent years to propagate the myth of British (always meaning English) exceptionalism. Much as Donald Trump has done in the USA and Jair Bolsonaro has done in Brazil. The fact that the US, the UK, and Brazil have the three highest Covid-19 death tolls in the world is not coincidental to that. It is both directly and indirectly due to that.

It's an exceptionalism that considers due diligence, preparation, and truth to be the habits of lesser nations and 'girlie swots'. It's an exceptionalism that brands critics, judges, remainers, and the media 'enemies of the people'. It's an exceptionalism that seeks division when unity is required, it's an exceptionalism that claps for carers instead of paying them properly, it's an exceptionalism that responds to 'black lives matter' with 'all lives matter' (the new "I'm not racist but"), it's an exceptionalism that deports people of colour, the Windrush generation, to countries they hardly know, and it's an exceptionalism that brands people who care about the economic future of the country they live in as "citizens of nowhere".

It's an exceptionalism, ultimately, that kills its own people and when it's done killing its own people it lies about how they died and plants the seeds for the next lethal disaster. Boris Johnson isn't easing lockdown because the threat of catching the disease is over, or even low. He's easing lockdown because he was getting bad press over his refusal to sack, or even reprimand, Cummings over his road trip and subsequent lying about road trip.

Boris Johnson is easing lockdown because he needs a boost in the popularity stakes. That's what populism is. Doing things people want in the short term with no regard for the long term. Boris Johnson is easing lockdown because Boris Johnson is, at heart, nothing more than a lying little boy who knows if he tells us what we want to hear there are a significant enough number of us who so badly want to believe him we will believe him.

Boris Johnson has worked out that if he can just give us something that at least looks like good news then enough of us will take it to actually be good news. He's back to full bullshit, bluster, and bully mode. Telling Keir Starmer he's proud of his record (on that very same day that more British citizens died of Covid-19 than did throughout the whole EU and a day before Alok Sharma, the Tory Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced he'd contracted the virus) and suggesting Starmer, instead of asking important and timely questions should just whoop and holler a bit. Like Johnson's backbench toadies. The ones Jacob Rees-Mogg is working to get back in the house to cover up the fact that, without them, Johnson looks as exposed as a schoolboy caught with his pants down wanking over the underwear section of the Grattan catalogue.

Easing of lockdown is only good news if the end result proves to be less people dying and all people not just feeling but being safer. By Johnson's own metrics, now - along with the science - conveniently sidelined, we're not there yet. The fact that the government are happy to lie about it and to blame others proves that, yes, we are in a kind of Groundhog Day where the same things keep happening over and over again.

I eat breakfast, listen to music, chat to my mum, go for walks, and write blogs. The government lie, scapegoat, and obfuscate. It is, indeed, very Groundhog Day. But here's the thing. In the film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character gets to live the same day over and over again, thousands upon thousands of time, until he gets that day right. Until he learns [SPOILER ALERT] to do the exact right thing that is required to win Andie MacDowell's heart.

We're after a bigger prize than the fictional heart of a fictional character played by Andie MacDowell. The prize we seek is the lives and safety of our families, friends, and assorted loved ones. There could be no bigger prize and the fact we've now come to realise that is one of the few positive things to come out of this whole coronavirus episode.

Groundhog Day teaches us that repetition doesn't have to be a bad thing. It can be a bad thing but it can also be a very good thing. It depends on what's being repeated. Good acts, acts of kindness, and acts of love get better, not worse, the more they are repeated. A policeman killing an unarmed black man, a government minister lying about a deadly virus, or even some troll trying to debase an Internet debate. These things just get worse the more they're repeated.

We can change some things. Others we must accept. We must accept, for now, the existence of Covid-19 but we can change our response to it and we can, and most definitely should, change the government we have in place to deal with it as soon as we possibly can. Or the only thing we'll be repeating is the same deadly mistake we made by electing them in the first place.