Month: April 2020

P is for Pandemic Dramas…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Déjà vu

I haven’t been to America but I always imagine I would be constantly beset by déjà vu – so much have we seen on screen – tv and films. I find it is much the same with the present crisis, there have been so many films set in a post-apocalyptic world following a pandemic. So here is a personal and very partial selection.

Friends tell me that Netflix’s new docu-drama series eponymously named Pandemic, bears a striking resemblance to current events but not having seen it yet – for me, the classic series is the 1975 The Survivors in which feral survivors fight for survival in a body strewn world. The credit sequence in black and white begins with a scientist dropping a flask in some Porton Down like place and then passport stamps chart the progress of the virus across the world intercut with shots of the airliners carrying the people spreading it.

Even earlier from 1972, The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, which I saw when I worked as a projectionist at the Ritzy Cinema, Brixton (best ever job),
might be the one of the sources of zombie movies – Heston plays the sole survivor of a plague and desperately searching for a cure…

Another “search for a cure for out of Africa/ animal crossover/ conspiracy” movie is 1995’s Outbreak – an edge of the seat killer virus thriller also given the full Hollywood star treatment.

Twelve Monkeys also contains star performances from Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt in a time-traveling meets virus conspiracy theory. But though superbly if complexly made by Terry Gilliam, this was inspired by an odd, shortish film form France, made up of a narration over still photographs La Jetée. Twelve Monkeys takes a couple of viewings to fully grasp it (but worth it because of the superb performances) but if you get the chance to see La Jetée – don’t miss it.

Finally, a very European film (read too slow and not enough action for most American audiences) -2017’s Bokeh. Filmed in Iceland, a young American couple find that everybody else, seemingly in the whole world, has vanished and the film charts the gradual breakdown of their relationship under the pressure of being “(If) you were the only girl in the world, and I was the only boy…”


O is for Oxford

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


Oxford – The Bridge of Sighs


Oxford is my city of birth and this photograph is from my last visit in 2017 to meet up with school friends. Due to the wonders of the internet, we have been connected by a Yahoo group for over twenty-five years. We used to meet up in Oxford and play the current boys at cricket, but now the youngest of us is 65, that doesn’t quite work! We should have been meeting up again this month but Covid 19 has put paid to that. So this photograph is a reminder of the last time but also of growing up in the iconic city. There is something special about growing up in a place that so many people visit, recognize, attend university at – it is yours but it is everybody’s…
Although this is called the Bridge of Sighs due to a resemblance to the bridge of that name in Venice, it actually bears a closer resemblance to the Rialto Bridge – also in Venice. It is part of Hertford College.

N is for Neo-Liberalism…

humanist55

This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


What the heck is neo-Liberalism and why should I worry about it?

Don’t worry – it’s not so long ago that I had to look it up because I had seen it mentioned in so many articles as if it was a given that everyone understood. Sadly it is not and the people who espouse it do not want you to know about it, because it is not a good thing!

You can find a full definition of neo-liberalism here but in a nutshell – it is a revival of 19th-century ideas about free-market economics – that allows the market to determine economics – government should not interfere – in fact, the government should de-regulate wherever possible as regulations just get in the way of productivity. This is sometimes called laissez-faire capitalism.

De-regulation

Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan (or more probably his advisors) became taken with the works of Friedrich Hayek on neo-liberal policy and it has dominated British and US not to mention European and many other countries’ politics ever since. I say politics rather than policies because neo-liberalism is a favourite of the right-leaning political parties – for which you can read – “supporters of the rich”.  Even New Labour under Tony Blair went so far as to embrace it, because superficially, it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Look at the butter mountain of Europe – a result of governmental interference in the form of agricultural subsidies. Let the market sort out the price and if farmers can’t get the price they need for butter – let them grow what the market says it really needs instead. Who in their right mind wants unnecessary paperwork due to overbearing bureaucratic governance? Ditch those pesky regulations!

However! It is the de-regulation of banking – allowing banks to have both a lending branch and an investment (gambling on an unimaginable scale) branch with only their own promise that they would keep the two halves separate. Another story, but that is what led to the financial crisis of 2008. De-regulation in neo-liberal terms means removing all the regulations that restrict how the rich can get richer – pesky things like worker’s rights, health & safety, environmental protection – can you see where this is leading? Well for Britain it led to Brexit, softened up by stories penned by our now Prime Minister, about the EU calling for Straight Bananas (a complete fiction), the Europhobes who hate all those great areas of regulation which have built up in the EU, sold Brexit to the public on the strength of “taking back control”. The only people taking more control as a result of Brexit, are the rich supporting right.

Austerity

The greatest tool in the arsenal of neo-liberals which they tell us is for our own good but which is really another self-serving ruse of the rich, is Austerity. Who would not agree that being in debt is a bad thing and that the answer to debt is to tighten your belt and spend less? This might work for an individual, but it does not work in the same way for businesses or nation-states. When a government borrows money to spend on an infrastructural project such as a new motorway, a lot of that money comes back straight away in the form of tax from companies and workers and in the long run, the project creates greater productivity for the country and that allows the debt to be repaid. But this is against the neo-liberal agenda – it is tantamount to interference in the market by the government. If a motorway is really needed,  the market will spot the opening and a consortium will be formed to construct it. Austerity decrees that we save money by cutting spending so the funding to local government is cut forcing them first to become more efficient and then to cut anything which is not absolutely essential. Collecting waste is essential, support for drug or alcohol dependence is not so facilities for them are closed. In the short term, this does not create problems except for individuals, but the long term impact on health services and broken families and damage to the next generation and cyclical problems – you get the picture – costly…
Then there is the stealthy theft of the NHS – it goes like this – first you starve it of cash till it creaks at the seams, then you sell the parts that can make money for private companies (market forces right!) to your rich mates. Result – the underfunded NHS was totally unequal to the task of fighting Covid 19 as it is well into the starvation phase.

The great choice

One of the great lies of Austerity has been exposed by the Covid 19 Crisis. Tories derided Labour plans for increased spending on social welfare and infrastructural development. “There is no Magic Money Tree” they said. Now they are proposing borrowing our way out of the crisis at levels not seen since the Second World War. They are doing some complicated shenanigans with the Bank of England which, however, they deny it, amount to MonetaryFinancing which amounts to a magic money tree. Most people in the Tory party would like to see a return to the good old days of neo-liberal free-for-all which in the wake of Brexit, offers rich pickings for those who have plenty of money already (money comes to money). There has never been a time more urgently requiring the very opposite. Austerity was wrong before the crisis and it will be worse still afterward. We must not be persuaded that the only way to pay off the debt incurred is to tighten our belts for generations to come.

What are the alternatives?
An organization called Sovereign Money has detailed the problems that led to the 2008 financial crisis and what they propose by way of a solution remains valid in the recovery after Cocid 19 – if not more so. They say that there are two sources of money in the economy – money created by banks when they lend money – and money created by the Bank of England on behalf of the government which up to now has been a tiny proportion. Because austerity led governments believe consumer spending is the way forward, they have been happy to see banks lend to individuals which has led to repeated housing price rises (bubbles). At the same time, the banks have not lent freely to businesses – the real economy.

Now that the virus has shut many businesses down and locked-down debt-ridden individuals in enforced unemployment, more of the same must not be an option. The government must use its power to create money via the banks and must return to the real purpose of governance which is to take meaningful decisions about the post-virus world.

You can find much more detail at Sovereign Money – I have only offered a signpost but I urge everyone to quaint themselves with the issues and not allow us to be marched blindly into the same old problems that suit a small minority of the already rich.

M is for Money…

humanist55

This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Where is the money going to come from to get started again?

Individuals, businesses and governments are all moving from the “How can we possibly afford to stop working?” to “How can we possibly afford to start working again?”. Here in the UK, at the daily Press Briefing given by the representatives of government flanked by special health advisors, the awkward questions asked by the press are now including, amongst those on the competency of the UK government to manage the amount of testing required and the supply of personal protection equipment, new and urgent questions on how the government may be starting to envisage how we will restart the economy. There Is some suggestion that the government does not trust us with transparency in this matter for fear we will think its all over and rush back to normal life too soon. Or perhaps they just haven’t got a clue yet…

Largest amongst the issues to be faced is the question of where the money is going to come from and although I am writing from a UK perspective, many of the points will apply across the world. Before I begin, I know I am a day in late posting this challenge piece but in my defense, I only found out about this on the first day of it – those at A to Z 2020 Challenge HQ recently asked the question “Are you a pre-planner or a ‘pantser’?” Necessarily this year I am a seat of the pants writer which at least means that I can react to current circumstances and indeed make them my theme for the challenge. The subject of Money and how we shall find enough to exit the crisis is a big one and needed a lot of research – I have tried to boil it down but there will be links to articles if you want to go deeper.

War Debt

Many governments and others are referring to the struggle to contain Covid 19 as a “War” because it helps to conjure the spirit that is needed from everyone to “defeat” the tiny, invisible, senseless thing which is a virus. Economists are now starting to talk about the cost of the crisis to our economies, in terms of productivity lost, unemployment created and of course the borrowing which will be necessary to get things started, so my question is, if all the countries in the world are facing the same situation, then who is going to lend money to who in order to fix things.

One precedent is what has happened in actual wars – the World Wars for example. Britain had to borrow a lot of money, mainly from the US or in the case of the Second World War, the US and in a smaller amount, Canada. In 1945 alone, the UK borrowed 4.33 billion dollars and 1.93 billion dollars from Canada the following year. Suffice to say that the total repaid amounted to twice that which was lent and the final repayment was as recent as 2006. We may have a “special relationship” with America, but it does not come cheap. Furthermore, that war helped cement the Dollar as the world’s leading currency and saw US influence consolidated around the world – facts which are still pertinent in the crisis of today. Whilst Britain floundered under the weight of debt and the need to rebuild its shattered economy after the war, America, increasingly obsessed with fighting the spread of Communism, made satellites of the “frontline” countries using the Marshall Plan to rebuild European countries equally shattered economies in exchange for hosting military bases.

There is another way of raising money to fight wars which may become significant in solving our present crisis, the issuing of the enchantingly titled “Gilt Edged Security Bonds” – so-called because the certificates have a gilt edge to them. This is a way of borrowing money from private investors, individuals, pension companies and the like. Invented by the British as early as 1694 when King William III borrowed 1.2 million to fund a war with France, gilts are low yielding in terms of interest paid but they are very safe hence their attraction to pension funds. King William could not raise the money for his war from taxes and neither will governments following the Covid 19 crisis since the money they will be dispersing to help businesses and individuals, needs to be spent on producing and consuming, there would be no point in just taking it back as tax. There is a really good chart of all the ways governments can raise money here, at Positive Money – an organization for monetary reform – more of them later.

What do we know about the UK Exit Strategy?

The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Riki Sunak unveiled a plan for £330 Billion which he described as an intervention in the economy “on a scale unimaginable a few weeks ago”. This is indeed true since the Tory party have predicated their policies on Austerity, beating up the Labour Party for years for their level of the national debt – before running up even higher levels themselves (which they predictably kept quiet about). Austerity is the central plank of neo-Liberalism which will be the subject of my next post – a sort of part II to this one. But meantime, the £330bn is actually government-backed loans – however, the loans will actually be issued by the banks. If the loans are defaulted on, the government will, then, and only then, have to shell out – so not quite as magnanimous as it first appears. There will be further offers of support from the government and some will require the government to borrow, either from the markets or by issuing gilts and of course, the Bank of England can always print money, “quantitative easing”, as they did after the 2008 financial crisis.

The Big Choice

The scale of the current crisis in financial terms makes the 2008 financial crisis look small by comparison – we are talking levels of borrowing nearer to that of the war, and our government(s) might be tempted to assert that all this has undone the savings from years of austerity and that we must tighten our belts once again, for the long haul. This is not the only choice and so tomorrow I will look at why austerity is an ideological position and what other choices there are…

L is for Love…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Love is in the air
For young lovers in lockdown
While lost loves
Dream of love locked up
Not locked down.

Love is the drug
That takes you to a different place
Consumes you from within
Tricking your cells
To accept false flags
Before breaking your heart.

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Love the time we have
Hate the loss of freedom
Saving money because we can’t spend it
Losing money because we can’t earn it.

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Let me be a survivor
Don’t wanna be a deep-sea diver
Or win a million fivers
Just let me live and love a little longer.

The one who loves you
Hides in plain sight 
You never gonna feel its bite
Covid 19 –
Who loves ya baby…

——————————————————————

Love is in the air
John Paul Young

Love is the drug
Roxy Music

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Annie Lennox

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Juliet Turner

The one who loves you
The Divine Comedy

K is for Karma…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


Karma – (in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.

There are many people who think, and many more who are wondering, whether the Covid 19 crisis is Karma for the human race, whether the fate of our present state and future existence has been determined by our heretofore actions in regard to the way we live in and treat this world. The definition at the top of the page (courtesy of Wikipedia), uses the word deciding in relation to future existences, and it is, of course, referring to the lives, deaths and reincarnations of individuals. You may have noticed that in connection with the collective fate of the human race, I have used the words “determined by”. The religious use of Karma implies that some divinity weighs the action ( for which karma is the Sanskrit word) of a person’s life and as we say in the west – “As you sow, so shall you reap!”

Does Karma always work?

It is clear in life, that neither the good nor the bad always get their just desserts, and whether anyone becomes demoted to a lower animal in the next life, or the opposite, nobody in this life can actually say. Most religions use the threat of some kind, karmic judgment or heaven v. hell, to try to cajole their congregations into behaving better and without intending to be too cynical, the odd natural disaster, especially ones that have a leveling effect on society, does not go amiss in helping religion in its quest. Ironic then that in this present crisis, those western religions at least – I can’t speak for others – who have been languishing with ever diminishing congregations, have had to lock their doors due to social isolating and are unable to offer comfort in the hour of need – at least not in person. They are asking themselves whether their role is going to be even more diminished once this crisis is over, and with many of the elderly members who have remained staunch attendees having “gone to meet their maker” according to their beliefs, churches are asking themselves how they can reinvent themselves now, in new and perhaps digital ways.

Mind you, there have been some religious people who have brandished their belief in God/Yahweh/Allah as a shield which they are sure will protect them – bible belt evangelists going about their business and their worship as usual, Moslems queuing up to lick shrines and as to Yaakov Litzman, Health Minister for Israel, well he said “all LGBT+ people are sinners” (in other words, the virus is a judgment on them) but has since tested positive for Covid-19, his wife has also tested positive for the disease and, being a cabinet minister, he has caused Benjamin Netenyahu and several top government officials to go into quarantine. All those other virus defying groups will probably also learn the error in their thinking.

Free Will and Karma

Lest you think I am wantonly attacking religion, let me tell you an old joke. A flood was building and as the waters rose around the church, a parishioner ran in to the priest and begged him to come away to higher ground. “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” The waters surrounded the church and a boat was sent to collect the priest but he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” As the waters rose the priest climbed up to the roof and a helicopter came to rescue the priest but still he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!”. During the night, the waters washed the priest off the roof and he drowned. Standing before St. Peter at the gates of heaven, the priest asked: “Why did God not save me?” At which, God, who hears everything, rushed up fuming. “What do you mean not save you, you idiot?” God shouted, “I sent a man, a boat and a helicopter to save you!”

The moral of this story is that even for those who believe in God, he has given free will so that you may act well or badly (otherwise there would be no point in judgment) and that means you have to act well and wisely and not expect God to save you from folly of your own making.


The Rationalist’s position…

I don’t believe in God, but I very much believe in free will and folly of our own making, in people who act well and those who act badly and I believe (see C is for Covid 19) that microscopic viruses which are arguably not even alive, have no intelligence and certainly no moral judgment against any of their victims. The very fact and mystery of their pointless existence could be enough to cause a man of faith to question his beliefs…

So can Rationalists, Materialists, Atheists, can they have any truck with the concept of Karma? Very much so – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” is simply cause and effect you can’t get much more “scientific” than that! If you mess up your planet by unrestrained growth, wanton use and waste of resources, unrestrained pollution, you will find yourself in the shit. If you sell live, wild animals that have been infected by disease-carrying bats in a world that is crisscrossed with the airways of the global village, you will get crossover virus events that sooner or later will become pandemics. No moral judgment involved, no Gaia is punishing us with a restorative crisis – just scientifically explainable inevitability!

That is, however, Karma, the consequences of actions chosen – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” So as I have said before in these pages, as we grope towards exit strategies form this crisis – there are past actions to be reassessed, choices to be made,, new ways to be formulated…

J is for Judgment

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

An open letter to Boris Johnson


Dear Prime Minister Johnson

or may I call you Boris since you are now to be perceived as one of the people,” in it together”? I wish you well on your recovery from Covid 19 and I despise those who have made political capital out of your illness and I wish you no harm as a fellow human being.

Whilst I disagree strongly with decades if not centuries of the policies of your party, I know you are not responsible for all that, but you have willingly picked up the mantle. On a personal level, l am given to understand that your position on Brexit had more to do with seeking the highest office in politics rather than conviction and now you have achieved it. Your personal approval ratings are high as the jolly man who promises to “Get Brexit Done!” But this pandemic means that all bets are off, Brexit almost irrelevant for now except that the benefits of international co-operation have never been more needed or more obvious. Furthermore, now that you have experienced the very best treatment by a National Health Service which your party has done so much to wear down under your plans – to change it into an American for-profit system – I hope you have seen the results of those policies, understaffed, under-resourced, yet offering heroic service to the nation in the present crisis.

I hope when you return to work after the rest which your father has prescribed for you, that you’ll see things in a different light – you may question the wisdom of your earlier judgments. I know you will be surrounded by a cabinet full of the people who still believe in austerity as the default position, the same people who pressured this country into Brexit and they will not be happy to see you turn your ideas around but I beg you to do so for it is not possible for this country or indeed the world to return to things as they were. Do you endorse your stand-in having said, whilst you were ill, that “this is not the time to be thinking of a raise in salaries for nurses.” Surely you of all people must now agree that there can be no better time…

You may wish to emulate the man I understand to be your hero – Winston Churchill – a man who made many errors of judgment in his career before finding his ultimate role as leader of the country in a time of war, much as you are now, However, remember, despite having led us through the war successfully, Churchill was disappointed to lose the election in a landslide to Labour after the war, because the people knew by then, that they were entitled something better and they rejected those who traditionally felt entitled. This is how the Welfare State was born and the time has come for the government to renew the Social Contract and rebuild the Welfare State for the people, or as Labour would have it “For the Many Not the Few”. After your election victory you realized you had to look after the so-called Labour red wall seats or else you might lose at the next election. None of us could have foreseen that this crisis would spring up so quickly on your watch, but here it is – your Churchill moment. How are you going to play it? You have the chance to be an outstanding leader if you dare to take a radical position as the times call for. Or you can just attempt to restore things as they were with the massive gaps between rich and poor. But will you then succeed at the next election with an electorate who have had unlimited time to understand and consider how we got to this place in such a poor state of preparedness and to watch how you manage to deal with the crisis.

Please! Go for blue-sky thinking, out-of-the-box thinking, make judgments based on new criteria, try something different – make no mistake that is what is required in what will be a new world order.

PS Your senior advisor – the self-styled Disruptor, Dominic Cummings – is he the right man for the job now. Breaking things is so much easier than trying to fix them and Covid 19 has surely given him as much disruption as even he could wish for -just saying…

I is for Internationalism v. Isolationism.

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Lying in bed this morning, trying to think of a subject for the A to Z Challenge 2020, I had a sudden insight that I had never quite grasped before with such clarity. The right-wing Prime Ministers, Presidents, and Dictators, who have slid to power on the back of inflamed Nationalist sentiments, the scapegoating of “the other”, are against Internationalism because they want total control within their fiefdoms – as much as they can grasp without showing their true colours. What were the first things that Donald Trump did after getting elected? He put travel bans on Muslims and made a start on the wall he had used to get elected by whipping up the very people he and his kind routinely neglect. The isolationism of Trump’s US has been ramped up with ill-conceived trade wars – especially with China – this is quintessential Isolationism.



Let us not forget, in this time of distraction, Brexit, pushed by the likes of uber-rich, hedge-fund manager and Member of Parliament Rees-Mogg. His hedge fund no doubt made a huge killing betting on the outcome of Brexit – betting against the good of the country. The European Union is an example of Internationalism – it was set up in the aftermath of the Second World War with the aim, through close cooperation in all areas, trade, education, crime prevention, scientific research, and the freedom of movement for work or simply to live somewhere else. This aspect of the EU was completely ignored by Brexiteers who saw only a body that imposed rules which make it harder for them to exploit society, rules on human rights, on environmental and food standards.

Now, brought together by a greater danger, the Covid 19 pandemic, we are seeing unprecedented international cooperation – at least in the scientific community but whilst we are all distracted, there is a creeping seizure of “emergency” powers by many governments and the question is, will they be relinquished at the end of all this – they are the ones who will decide when it is at an end in any case…

There have been many ridiculous conspiracy theories about the virus and its origins and you may think that these warnings about power-grabs fall into the same league, but if you do take them ln any way, seriously, here is a link to Open Democracy who take these things very seriously and offer a comprehensive list of the implications for democracy around the world.

Sorry to offer more doom and gloom when the virus gives us enough to worry about here in the present, however, we need to think about how things will be on the other side of this pandemic and since the crisis has highlighted many inconvenient truths, the way austerity has run down the heroic National Health Service in Britain – softening it up for privatization US style – the complete and scandalous inadequacy of the “for profit” health service in the US or the way companies have denied the effectiveness of working from home for say, disabled people and which managers are now doing everywhere. People are questioning the way they have been made to live, in all sorts of ways and those on the right are terrified of where it will leave them if the people remember what they have learned including – Internationalism good for solving the crisis- Isolationism (on an International level though very definitely not the personal) bad…

Round Up 3 – Other blogs on the A to Z Challenge 2020

humanist55
As I work my way Though the list of participating blogs (I am up to 117 out of 510) looking for one’s that resonate with me, there are some which I metaphorically swipe whichever way it is, never having been on Tinder I wouldn’t know, in fairly quick order. I am not saying I will never read a site spreading Christian memes, or a personal genealogy quest but they would have to grab my attention in a pretty special way, instantly, either by conveying something about the person or something about the quality of their writing and this next one does that. Deborah Bayer at “Healers Write, Writers Heal” is journalling a physician’s journey into Alternative medicines following an encounter with cancer and for me, she scores on both counts – writing and personality.

This blog seems to have done the challenge for the last two years but although listed for 2020 doesn’t seem to be posting to theme – never mind I like it so its here – The Daily Parker.

Likewise “Life in the Third Dimension” the content and the writing and the personality coming through if not the Challenge posts…

H is for Happiness

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Happiness is a Warm Gun…Momma

This song penned by John Lennon is full of double-entendres. Lennon explained that he got the title from an article in a National Rifle Association magazine and he divided the song into three sections, “the Dirty Old Man”, “the Junkie”, and “the Gunman (Satire of ’50s R&R)”. By the last, he meant his sexual desire for Yoko Ono. That there are those for whom a literal warm gun is happiness, that some apparently find happiness in drugs whilst sexual love is yet another form of happiness shows what a complex thing is our “pursuit of Happiness”.

Getty Stock Images


Can we be happy all the time?

In the practice of Zen (and bearing in mind that those who know don’t say and those who say don’t know) it is said that there is constant attention to carrying out the simplest task of living with perfection. Does this bring happiness? It doesn’t sound full of highs nor lows and most people believe that without the lows, we cannot have the highs of happiness. If this present crisis is doing anything positive for us, it is to give us the chance of reflecting on what makes us happy, either because we are deprived of it, thinks lovers separated by social isolation, or because we are with the source of our happiness – oh to be young and in love and in lockdown – would you ever leave your bed! And no, its not just the young who are happy to be locked down with the one they love…
In nine months time, there is likely to be a baby boom whilst it is from the post-war baby boom that many of the victims of Covid  19 are drawn. Whilst this will undeniably reduce some of the future costs to health services for whom the preponderance of older patients, living longer with increasingly solvable but expensive conditions, it will give civil servants no happiness any more than the loss of migrants and the very poor who are also more susceptible to the disease will give no happiness except perhaps, to the vilest of right-wing politicians.
Meanwhile, we take our happiness in lockdown as we may…

Is Happiness an Instinct?

A friend of mine once told me how, during a search for a friend who it was thought, had drowned himself in a local lake, she went in a rowing boat with her lover, and after a time, they wordlessly pulled into the shore and made love. She described it as somehow instinctual, driven, and it puzzled her that in the midst of sorrow and dread, that this should have been their reaction. Many young women gave themselves to young men about to depart for the fighting during the Second World War (perhaps all wars) and if there was a moment of happiness for each of them, did it result in a happy event nine months later. (Imagine the psychologists trying to devise an experiment to test that hypothesis!) Happiness can be mixed with poignant sadness if the father never made it back or perhaps was not even known – so maybe the urge to procreate in the face of disaster is an instinct rather than the pursuit of momentary happiness. If we are driven by instinct, then where does happiness fit in? We human beings need to stay together for perhaps 21 years in order to raise a family, so the joys of sex are but rarely resultant in pregnancy but can form the glue that holds couples together – if they are lucky, and that is why it is not just the young, who may be enjoying the lockdown in their empty nests.


Do animals feel happiness?

It’s so hard not to be anthropocentric when looking at animals, to see the dog with its head on its master’s lap, to watch seagulls shooting the breeze or lambs leaping as they are in the fields here, and not imagine they feel happy – who knows. When I watch lambs playing, I simultaneously feel happy for the moment and sad because I know that very soon they will no longer be frisky but head down grazing for the rest of their lives with no great appearance of happiness ever again…

So there are my thoughts for the day – gather ye rosebuds in whatever ways you can at this sad/happy time. Listen to the bird-song without the roar of traffic, bask under skies not crisscrossed with con-trails, breath deep in the less polluted air, love the one(s) you’re with, practice Zen or whatever floats your boat (within the confines of the lockdown) and if you haven’t got a boat, your mind can imagine whatever you like and you can be happy with it… 

What has made me happy? Last night I took my new telescope outside for the first time and looked at the moon, large and even though slightly hazy, pure magic and wonder!