I'm guessing there are a lot of people in a similar situation. Here I am on Day Fourteen of my second period of self-imposed isolation due to rampaging COVID-19; this also means thirty days or thereabouts in quarantine since my return from Venice. I am, of course, relieved that I have not developed any symptoms, but how can I know if I am a carrier without taking a proper test? Will I recognise a dry persistent cough? Probably, because I don't normally cough much. I've no idea what feeling hot on my front or back is meant to mean. I hope I never find out. I do feel very sad for those people who are worried about (or who have indeed lost) loved ones. To the best of my knowledge the worst thing that seems to have happened in my family is that one of my granddaughters has very sore hands from washing them so often and so thoroughly. Other friends have not fared so well. At least two have lost close friends or family members. Whatever has happened so far, I still see this experience as a warning shot across our bows. We have abused our world by poisoning it and decimating the variety of species, we continue to abuse each other over our differences and, a few nights ago our smirking prime minister delivered a message I imagine he never expected to deliver when he was metaphorically elbowing his way through the crowd to succeed Theresa May in Downing Street. Taken from the gov.uk website the message was:
“… the government is now (23 March 2020) introducing three new measures.
- Requiring people to stay at home, except for very limited purposes
- Closing non-essential shops and community spaces
- Stopping all gatherings of more than two people in public
Every citizen must comply with these new measures. The relevant authorities, including the police, will be given the powers to enforce them – including through fines and dispersing gatherings.
These measures are effective immediately. The Government will look again at these measures in three weeks, and relax them if the evidence shows this is possible.” New legislation has been rushed through to reinforce this decree. Emergency law has a tendency to become fixed. We’ll have to see where this goes.
Such measures are, of course, unprecedented within the memories of most people I know. I've never taken to the term, “baby-boomer”, but I am of that age. Now, of course, baby-boomer has somehow become “boomer” - a term of abuse for the allegedly avaricious ageing generation that was born during the twenty years that followed World War II, somehow forgetting we were also a generation that fought for and won rights quite unknown before. For certain, there are many people in my generation who enjoyed comforts and social advantage never before experienced. I have been privileged to experience the National Health Service actually being free, before charges for prescriptions, dental treatment and optician checkups were introduced. I received a grant to attend college to train as a teacher. There was no expectation I would ever have to pay it back except the moral one to stay in the job long enough to make a contribution. With twenty-one years service I think I managed that. I was employed in the state education sector until my bosses saw fit to make my job redundant and had it not been for that event I would probably still be in education to this day. Strangely, within weeks of losing my job I was receiving phone calls and offers of work to compensate for the support that no longer existed to maintain the quality of music education in schools. Salaries in education for the frontline workforce were never generous, but we did take home a more modest income in return for the expectation that an occupational pension would be paid at a later time and based on the final salary we had worked up to during our careers. This was also true in health and social care, the civil service the emergency services, the justice system, the armed forces and even the established church and no doubt a number of other occupations that came mainly under the headings of "service".
Successive governments under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher and beyond, worked hard from 1979 onwards to begin the process of dismantling all the important advances that society had made in the post-war years. The police became an arm of state control rather than simply law-enforcement when Mrs Thatcher used them to battle one set of workers after another, stripping away hard-won rights. I don't know, though, that even she foresaw how far the whole process would be taken by the governments that followed hers although none went as far as she did when she declared “there is no such thing as society”. David Cameron did say that “we are all in this together”, but we knew straight away that he didn’t mean it. How could he? It didn't really matter what colour the flags of the post-Thatcher governments were, we were betrayed by all of them to some degree. I have seen this happen gradually over the last forty years. People can now be given on the spot fines for being out in public without being there for one of a very few specified reasons. We are teetering on the edge of martial law. The face of that edge bears the smirk of our present prime minister, Boris Johnson.
I doubt that any government has ever been capable of pleasing everyone, but we have been witness to progressively smaller numbers of people taking a bigger slice of the pie. This, of course, is inevitably and by definition at the expense of the majority. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is greater than it has ever been. Until very recently I was of the opinion that climate change, species depletion, hyper-industrialisation and the subsequent pollution that has resulted would be the causes of our demise as a viable species on the planet. We have certainly squandered the riches we accumulated and handed them over, along with increasing numbers of our rights to multi-national business interests. Somehow we have come to believe that we needed austerity to be able to pay back the banks after the knock-on effect of the madness of selling debt as a commodity that began with so-called "sub-prime mortgages" in the USA. This started the gambling affliction that infected bankers around the world. We were led to believe that the countries that had come together for a common good after the horror of war on a massive scale were moving towards the formation of a super-state that would control every aspect of our lives. For four decades we were subjected to propaganda that has resulted, rightly or wrongly, in the Disunited Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland pulling out of the European Union, a process that has been likened to attempting to remove the eggs from an omelette. I find it hard to embrace the irony of this happening just as the world, and Europe in particular, is itself embraced in the arms of a pandemic, a microscopic virus for which we have no cure, that is seeing people everywhere being subjected to emergency "lockdown" regulations. Just when we need cooperation and kindness on a global scale we are distancing ourselves from our friends and allies. We are out in a metaphorical desert and waiting for the circling vultures to land and pick off the remaining bits of scraggy flesh.
Within a period of days I, like many of my musician friends, have lost all the paid work I had in the diary for the foreseeable future. My diary is quite light, but so are my needs, but one friend saw the unravelling of several sold-out dates on a German tour. All the arrangements, the fine detail, the booking of musicians in the band along with the road and administrative staff and the merchandising operation that makes this sort of thing possible has had to be changed. I'm personally affected because I had booked four trains and an overnight hotel to travel from France to one of the gigs in Bavaria. Thankfully I hadn't yet got round to organising the other ten trains that would get me to my start point of the trip in France. It was to be a birthday present to myself.
So I have no income and no prospect of any. Fortunately I am not destitute and I have managed to live carefully enough for long enough to be able to survive for a while longer. However, the inadequate and overly complicated arrangements being made to compensate people in formal employment are going to prove a very difficult path for me to negotiate as a self-employed sole-trading musician. Being already outside the system it feels like I'm being buried.
It is March. The weather is all wrong. After the floods of winter we have had little rain for a while and I am sitting outdoors to write this. The Farmer tells me the UK will need to find 50,000,000 tonnes of wheat to make up the UK's shortfall later this year. The fields were too waterlogged to be able to plant winter crops. Winter wheat is best for bread flour. Those same fields are now baked too hard to plant the usual spring seeds. We don't have any of the promised "easy" international trading arrangements in place after leaving the EU and we have a government that seems to have been paralysed and incapable of fulfilling its moral obligations to the people and the planet.
I have no idea of how the end of the year is going to look. I don't understand how the new boy chancellor has managed to find the three-figure billion sum when last week we couldn't fund the nurses or the labourers who are leaving or being sent home after "we got our country back". I've been told the voluntary work I started this year for a local homelessness trust has to stop. Once my latest quarantine period shows me likely to be virus free I shall be allowed out for exercise for just a short period once a day, although I cannot meet up with any other people and I can only go out otherwise to shop for necessary items of food. I tried registering online for a supermarket delivery, but the website does not list most of the items I usually buy from its nearest branch and I would starve to death before I could get a slot either to "click-and-collect" or book and pay for a delivery to the farm. Of course that always assumes there is actually anything left on the shelves anyway after the pointed elbows of the shoving crowds, the beaks and claws of the vultures have stripped everything bare. I have seen footage of rampaging crowds smashing their way through stores in Mexico and Sicily.
I don’t think optimism comes easily to me, but I have also seen some extraordinary acts of kindness during this very strange and unsettled period. My near neighbours here on the farm (near being a relative concept) have variously brought and left food for me whilst I have been in isolation. They have checked whether I needed any provisions brought in, they have brought logs for the stove. The Farmer added some books to a box containing a delicious lentil stew and some vegan ciabatti made for me at the weekend by his partner. Even more touching than that he made sure the books were on subjects that he thought might interest me (Rebellion and Tom Waites as it happens). A friend who fears greatly for her two daughters (one a nurse and the other a hospital doctor) has offered spare rooms in her house to hospital staff who need somewhere to stay closer to their place of employment, while they are having to up the number of shifts they work. I was particularly moved by that gesture. A little further afield, a woman I know who runs an online zero waste eco-shop stepped up when she discovered that the scandalous national shortfall in personal protective equipment for health workers was being exploited by more unscrupulous vultures. A friend of hers could not get hold of surgical masks for work, but she did find one on e-Bay for £100! She had no choice, but to buy it. Eco Woman immediately set about finding normally-priced masks through a business contact and set up a crowd-funding campaign. Within twenty-three hours she had raised enough money for 2,600 masks which will go to hospital staff in her area. In the Czech Republic there has been a national effort to make masks for people who need them. Everyone will be aware of many small acts of kindness that have brought out some of the best in our society. Maybe strangest of all, Boris Johnson - in his self-isolation after experiencing apparently mild symptoms of the virus - has also distanced himself from Margaret Thatcher by declaring that there is such a thing as society after all.
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