Covid Days

I had literally just finished teaching the syllabus to my students when my college was closed in mid- March due to the Covid 19 outbreak in the UK. ( Word does not recognise ‘Covid’ incidentally, which I think may soon be amended as it will inevitably be word of the year 2020! ) My students went away with a mountain of past exam papers to work through which we were going to do in some sort of order as part of a revision campaign, but I could see that, for some, the fact that their summer exams were cancelled meant that they could not see the point of doing the work. Teaching online might be easy for a subject based on communication using the written word but the use of maths is a pain in Physics as it means that students can’t easily type their work. Instead, I was receiving phone images of their homework scrawling’s- the pages of which appeared on my screen in random order and …sideways! I was getting a severe neck ache just trying to do my job, or what was left of it. One by one the students stopped logging on. I read that some devious pupils in schools were printing off photos of themselves and sticking them in front of their laptop cameras so that teachers thought they were actually there. They would walk past every ten minutes or so and give the picture a slight wiggle….Those characters  will be the business leaders of the future! Respect.

It was a bizarre end to a 40 year teaching career as things just slowly fizzled out and I eased myself into retirement. In another strange twist, I was hearing from my students that some staff had been furloughed and were no longer allowed to teach them whilst I, a lowly part timer was still being paid ( well there was a month where they forgot to pay the money into my bank account ..but it got sorted out eventually). Furlough is another word that nobody had heard of in February but entirely relied on by April.

If you ignore the story that Covid was a deliberate act by the Chinese government to teach Trump (aka, Donny Darko ) a lesson for placing trade restrictions on Chinese goods, then you have to accept that a few poor Chinese peasants who appear to need to eat bats or snakes or whatever seem to have brought the global economy to its knees. It spread quickly and effectively because we have evolved a species that just needs to travel around the world in shiny silver aeroplanes in order to find a meaning to our lives which we have determined must lie somewhere over the rainbow. Whilst dreaming of next Summer and a fortnight in Sri Lanka or Bali, any excuse for a stag or hen party weekend in Prague or Krakow in November and we’re straight off to passport control via Greggs and the queue at the terminal bar. At the other side of the globe, Chinese, middle class, people brought up in a communist regime but envying a capitalist lifestyle now form a lucrative part of the tourist industry of the western world.  Like mosquitos spreading malaria there we all go, jetting around, thinning the ozone layer and melting the ice-sheets and generally mixing and mingling at airports and other transport hubs. We couldn’t have invented a better Covid transmission system if we had thought about it. Gaia’s turn to begin the fight back.

Now, there is an irony, in that, the people eating the snakes were poor and that they were poor because every country has a class system and that those at the bottom have the least power and are forced to eat strange things to stay alive. (Turkey Twizzler’s being the UK equivalent) But, with Coronavirus, that little power they had, has caused the richest people in the world to lock themselves away in their mansions in fear of their very lives. Covid, is that one sense, is very democratic.

In the UK, people do tend to have a bit of a superiority complex and the initial opinion seemed to be that it might be an issue for Johnny Foreigner but was hardly going to bother us Brits. This was confirmed when we watched northern Italy become engulfed. Well that’s the Italians for you- all those hugs and kisses and sharing bowls of spaghetti – Mama Mia, they were asking for it. But, soon enough, we too, were to find ourselves pretty unprepared for what was about to be unleashed. Inevitably, as it’s death toll numbers began to rise, Britain did what Britain does best – we unfurled the ‘ we won the war’ flag, stiffened up our upper lips and prepared to fight the little germy bugs ‘on the beaches, the hills the street and in the air determined that we were never going to surrender. To this end the British public set out to arm themselves with toilet rolls, eggs and bags of flour and then barricaded themselves behind their 55 inch flatscreens to see what would happen next. They did this because they had to keep themselves busy and take their minds off the possibility that they (or probably Grandma or Gramps) might die. 

Brought up on a diet of Bake Off, Love Island, Gogglebox and Mrs Brown’s boys we had become used to numbing ourselves and we could easily sit this one out for a week or two. Pretty quickly though, disaster struck. Football matches were cancelled. Men slumped on the sofa in disbelief whilst women quietly rejoiced. Schools being closed, parents were forced into the unfamiliar situation of having to communicate with and potentially educate their own children. They had spent years paying taxes to avoid this possibility. TV news channels were quick to point out that poorer families didn’t have laptops. Playstations whirred 20 hours a day however and children had to wait their turn until dad had sated himself on FIFA. 

Kiddies were encouraged to chalk the hell out of any wall space in the street with encouraging messages like ‘keep safe’ or ‘stay happy’.  Teddy bears and crayoned rainbows sprang up in windows everywhere and people went out on a Thursday evening to clap for the NHS and finally get to meet their neighbours. Those whose windows remained rainbowless and who chose to ignore the applause risked being ostracised. As each week rolled by people were able to nod at each other over the garden fence, “Still alive this week then I see? Well done Sharon! Got any spare toilet roll?” 

Supermarket delivery vans began clogging up the streets and people harped on and on and on social media about how long the waiting times were becoming and how when they ordered Pot Noodles they got athletes’ foot powder. People began to lose all sense of time and were spotted out jogging at 4am, possibly as a protest.  People cleared Halfords out of bicycles and could be seen frantically pedalling in the wrong gear, wearing the wrong gear before the sun had risen. Covid was beginning to turn people into Lycra vampires. Then there was the ‘two metre rule’. Like a lot of Boris’s proclamations this was a number selected at random or, possibly, based on being a number bigger than the one that the vast majority of countries around the world had chosen.  Two metres was a concept which was difficult for many to get to grips with. Firstly, Brits use feet and inches – metric was a European system and we had voted for Brexit for exactly this kind of reason – our system being the preferred one and used throughout the commonwealth for centuries. Guineas and shillings will be back soon. Secondly, we are a race who finds estimating anything difficult as many people stop using rulers when they are expelled from school. The government were forced into showing people with outstretched brooms, brushing one another down in the manner of a public service broadcast from World War 2. “So, think broom when you enter the room”. It was too big to fit on the Boris’s lectern, so it never took really off and broom sales slumped at John Lewis.

We were subjected to the 5pm daily press briefings which were embarrassing for all concerned. Intelligent scientists were forced to stand behind the lecterns alongside politicians and take the blame for everything as Boris and chums were ‘ Following the Science” It wasn’t their fault that things were going so badly. Each meeting started casually enough with “Hi everyone” but then descended into a total shit-speak fest.  

“We’re leaving no stone unturned”, “we’re ramping it up”, “ we’re working round the clock” “we’re straining every sinew”  all of the aforementioned be followed by “to have the highest possible death rate ‘ or “ to not purchase enough PPE’.  Boris himself rarely appeared but when he did he rambled on from beneath his fringe hopelessly punctuating his gibberish with fist thumping on the lectern and “ Let me make this absolutely clear”  ( and then not) or “I must level with you” (if only you could Prime Minister ) 

Another classic line was “what we have said from the start” Most people had already long forgotten the start by then. I stopped watching early on. It was like watching an old episode of the Fast Show where Bojo had morphed into Roly Birkin. “ But, I have to admit I was terribly, terribly drunk”…..

Politically, the Chancellor of the Exchequer came up smelling of roses immediately by paying millions of workers 80% of their wages. We were all happy to shut ourselves indoors and do what we were told on this basis. Covid was a chance to catch up on Netflix boxsets whilst we waited for the Ocado delivery. Better than having a German Heinkel drop bombs down your street. Most people grappled with how they could twist this into a more dramatic story for their grandchildren. “I ordered Penne and they sent Farfelle – I can tell you, times were tough back then” .

Dominic Cummings knows that Boris has a short attention span and so has come up with this prompt card system to keep him on track. It started with ‘Get Brexit Done’ and morphed seamlessly into ‘Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save lives’ which then became ‘Stay alert, Control the virus, Save lives’ These catch phrases appeared on the lecterns and were invariably in Norwich City colours which was unfortunate as, at the time Premiership football was suspended, they were bottom of the league. The public came up with their own versions of these slogans as Boris’s popularity began to slump as people realised that he was really just the same old idiot as when he was London mayor. “Eat jelly babies. Brush your teeth. Ring the dentist” 

We progressed to a short spell of  ‘Don’t kill your Gran ‘ (which is the one I remember best of all ) but that was just a futile attempt by Matt Hancock to jump on Boris and Dom’s bandwagon.

“Build, build, build’ came next but rapidly went off the radar. Build anything and build it faster and then paint it green. The Conservatives were going to rebuild Great Britain despite the fact that the Furlough scheme was racking up the kind of debt that only Jeff Bezos was going to pay off and only over his entire lifetime. Make Britain build again, starting with a high- speed rail line that nobody wants. HS = Highly Stupid.  Looks like jobs for builders is the Government’s priority but what about the rest of us?  

Current three words as I type  are :  ‘Hands, Face, Space ‘ which I’m pretty sure was the title track of a Sun Ra album back in the 70’s. It’s taken six months but Covid has at least made a lot of people realise that having a country run by a bunch of public- school toffs maybe isn’t such a great idea. If things go wrong, this shower can scuttle back to their farms and businesses, after dinner speaking gigs and consultancy jobs and leave the rest of us begging for a job and scratching a living in some minimum wage service sector backwater.

Vera Lynn died and Captain Tom got promoted to Major and then Sir. More excuses to draw comparisons with the fact that we had won the war ( forgetting, as we always do, about the helping hand from the USA and Russia ). Boris really was getting to live out his Churchill fantasy in real time whilst changing nappies at the same time. 

The lockdown didn’t hit me as hard as others because I’m not much of a socialite. I quite like my own company and spent the first 2 months wandering the street on my daily walk photographing those chalk drawings, fading rainbow posters and slumping Teddy bears in living room windows. I’m sure there will be a glut of these images in exhibitions around the globe in the, maybe not so near, future. Pedestrians in face masks, discarded latex gloves, deserted city streets. Having lived the reality maybe people won’t want to rush to fill the galleries though?

The Barnard Castle expedition happened. The toffs could do what they wanted so public discipline began to lapse. The weather was unusually kind throughout May and people wanted to be outdoors and mixing. So, mix they did. Toilet facilities were closed and there were fewer council workers sorting out the waste bins so people piddled freely and left litter everywhere. Holidays abroad weren’t going to happen so, by June, people rediscovered the coastal resorts and yobs made sandcastles topped with broken glass. The sensible people (mainly, those with money, recycling bins and gardens) tut-tutted and feared that social order was breaking down. Not yet though – that will happen after the second spike and when unemployment takes off like an Elon Musk rocket from Cape Canaveral.

With the downside, there came the upside. Pollution levels fell noticeably. Traffic flow reduced. People went to bed earlier and rose with the dawn. It was quiet and you could hear the birds singing. People could enjoy the simple things in life and that daily exercise became a pleasure. Fuel prices fell because we had no use for vehicles. People worked from home and found, to their astonishment, that they could. Easily. All those years of commuting- for what? Zoom became the ubiquitous mode of communication from virtual pub quizzes and choirs, talking to relatives or Zoom Zumba – where did it come from and why hadn’t we used it before? Miraculous. Of course, the poorest people never get a lucky break. They still had to keep working on minimum wage to keep the rest of us in our new middle class Zoom world. Refuse collectors, supermarket staff, healthcare workers- all ‘key’ workers now. ‘Key’ = vital but entirely unvalued. 

What characterises Britain in terms of population characteristics is that a very high proportion of us are actually quite stupid. We’re also becoming less and less religious. This is what differentiates us from other comparable nations in Europe and this is why second, third or fourth spikes are guaranteed. We are the nation who queued up when McDonalds drive -throughs opened. A nation which couldn’t wait to get back into Primark to re-stock their wardrobes with shit, sweat shop, clothing. People who desperately re-dialled telephone lines to pre-order their lattes and then drove gleefully to collect them. We rediscovered our desire for fish and chips which meant that a one hour wait in a line was a small price to pay. As lockdown eased in order to get the economy started again, two metres instantly becomes one and the overwhelming requirement to drink pints to get Britain ‘back on its feet again’ became a prime requisite. Every pint sold is worth 54 pence in tax to the government. ‘Drink faster, Drink harder, Drink better’ might be the next catchphrase on Boris’s lectern. A huge part of keeping Britain going appears to rely on having the money taken from our pockets by the service sector. Easy come, easy go, as long as we have a good time. Nobody seems to be thinking of any type of future or that Covid might just offer a chance to re-boot our systems and do things differently. Folks jumped on aeroplanes again and went to Portugal only to find that they had to spend two weeks in self isolation back home for every one week on the Plaza. Boris and the guys kept switching countries just to make things even more confusing, like a sort of holiday roulette, and also just to make it look like Britain was the safer place to be and so, you might as well spend your money here, 54p at a time.

So here we are, 6 months later and it feels like we are starting from scratch again. Lots and lots of empty promises and failed deadlines be it around PPE, Rings around Care homes, world beating tracking systems, numbers of test centres or ventilators. A country run by a bunch of public- school types who aren’t even old enough to have had a mid- life crisis. Maybe they though Brexit and the aftermath was going to be their mid-life crisis but Covid came along and spoiled the party. Our leader had been shown to be hopeless and the liar and fraud he always was. The ‘world- king ’ has had somewhat of a rude awakening. I’m not sure how he can face getting out of bed in the morning and, some days, it appears that he doesn’t?

Three weeks ago, we were told it was all going to be “back to normal by Christmas” Has anyone told Santa? No- this isn’t going to go away any time soon. The gloom surrounding the recent restriction announcement and the fact that it’s for the next six months has re-punctured the already patched up balloon. As a nation, we are deflating fast. I’m worried that its part of a plan that’s been slowly brewing in Dominic Cummings head since he was six. Make day to day life so terrifying for the masses that the last thing they worry about is how right wing and controlling their Government is. Democracy is looking like it’s on a lone ventilator in a deserted Nightingale hospital at the moment. 

(All images taken by me over the last few months )