Current Affairs

Things that are in the news now…

A Fork in the Road…

humanist55

Three fictional responses to the best and worst possibilities that could grow out of present times…

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


Robert Frost


Devolution 1

Gemma – Transformation

I can hardly believe how life has changed since the Covid 19 crisis. And for the better too. Life used to be a merry-go-round of work, kids, husband, sleep, and then work again. Yes, the kids are back at school again – there’s still the husband – lol, and I do work, but it’s different work now. I’m working for myself now. I used to work in a factory, making rubber gloves and my task was to pack the ruddy things into boxes – all day long – mind-numbingly boring! It was a small firm and when the virus struck and the need for personal protection skyrocketed, the boss thought that we’ld be quids in. He wrote to the government offering gloves at a very good price but we heard nothing back and meantime, most of us were on zero-hours contracts and he couldn’t claim the money the government was offering – he had to let us all go. I saw him the other day – coming out of the Social Security Office after claiming for Universal Credit like the rest of us used to – the crisis wiped him out – bankrupt. He said he heard that the PPE contracts all went to some big firm – he said it came out in the paper that some Tory minister had connections with the company… I never trusted the Tories as far as I could throw them – a lot of people I knew went over to them with Brexit, their heads full of nonsense about immigrants and getting our country back, but as far as I can see, the only people who ever stole our country from us, was the sodding Tory government.Anyway, back to lockdown – I went on universal credit and of course, it wasn’t going to come through for weeks, in fact, it took two months – thank God for Mike, my husband and a delivery man, and YES! – his company actually was quids in with the crisis! He worked all through the lockdown flat out and miraculously, managed not to catch the virus. I love Mike to bits but I was so relieved we didn’t have to be locked down 24 hours a day – him, me and the kids – we wouldn’t have made it. Don’t get me wrong, Mike is a lovely man, but he can’t keep still for five minutes so out on the road was the best place for him whilst I did my best with the kids – home-schooling, painting rainbows to thank the NHS, making up quizzes – I didn’t know I had it in me. Course, there were loads of tips on tinternet and that’s where I first saw about people making scrubs for the  NHS and Care Home workers – weeks before it was on TV news.
I had my mum’s sewing machine – she used to make clothes for me when I was little but when I was a teenager I had loads of arguments with her because I wanted shop-bought clothes – selfish little minx I was ‘cos she couldn’t afford them. Well, I started teaching myself to use the machine from YouTube videos and soon I downloaded patterns for how to make scrubs. You had to use the right kind of material so they were washable and you made a bag for the scrubs to go in so the workers could put the bag straight in the washing machine without touching the scrubs. It took a bit of practice but soon I got it right and the feeling when I had my first pair collected by the co-ordinator in my area – well! You had to pay to talk to me! Then my kids got interested, Lisa and Liam, they helped me by cutting out the pieces and washing the materials my friends and neighbours dropped off. They still had to do their home-schooling but they went at it with enthusiasm so they could get on to the scrubs. Also, they had a bit more respect for me since they seen what I had done – in the early days I was struggling with their schoolwork – I hadn’t been that hot at school meself but with a bit of patience on their part, we figured stuff out together, mostly. Once the crisis was over, they did their own washing and ironing lol! And I – I started making clothes for a living. While we was still in lockdown, Lisa and I got so fed up with not being able to go shopping for new clothes and we used to watch the Great British Sewing Bee where the contestants had to do a Transformation challenge so we decided – since we couldn’t get any nice fabrics – to take one of my old dresses and make one (a lot smaller) for Lisa. She was so thrilled with it, not just because she had a new outfit ‘cos she couldn’t go out in it (though she shared it on Instagram with all her friends) but because I had made it for her. Who’d have thought it! All that fuss I used to make with my Mum and Lisa went for it! Maybe ‘cos she was proud of what I had done with the scrubs – they weren’t just plain blue or green like regular ones because of the fabrics people gave us, they had patterns and even superheroes from children’s duvets. Then again, all her friends thought her dress was really cool too! I’d never done anything like this and I was so proud of myself and my kids, and how many scrubs we managed to make together! So after the crisis, Lisa and I went to a fabric shop once they opened again and though we started by buying and making a few patterns both for her and me, they were a bit naff and soon I started making up my own ideas. Lisa was using the sewing machine by now and together, we started making clothes for her friends. After a while, the local paper, well it was an online thing, did a feature on me and then a local shop asked if they could show one of my “creations”. Then a small firm asked if they could make one of my “designs” and soon I was making enough money that I came off Universal Credit – what a proud moment that was!

So the crisis did me a big favour, lucky enough, no-one in my family died though one uncle was touch and go, but me, I came out of it with a whole new life and according to the mayor, I have “done something to help the local economy” – result!

Revolution

Annie – 1 – Feral…

God knows we never imagined we’d end up hiding in the Scottish highlands, protected by guns, booby traps and subterfuge, and still the question we keep asking ourselves is – how did it come to this?

Was it that first eleven days when the government dithered around the idea of sacrificing unknowable numbers of people to, possibly, arrive at herd immunity? Of course, they knew at that stage that the elderly were affected more by Covid 19 and who knows whether, in the Cabinet meetings, they dared to whisper the idea that culling of the ever more expensive baby-boom generation would solve a lot of problems, reduce the pressure on the NHS costs, liberate inheritance money to the next, less fortunate generation. Of course, there was the unfortunate fact that these were the Tory party’s traditional power base voters, but heck, they had five years till the next election and maybe that next generation would be grateful and pick up the votes…

I am on Guard duty, as usual. Mr McPherson, Jock is tending to his animals with help around the farm from my husband Tom whilst Mrs McPherson, Maggie, is baking bread and making jam from the strawberries that grow well in the sheltered hollow where the farm is nestled. The hollow is completely hidden by a bend at the top of the long straight valley that leads up to it so that you would have no idea that there was a farm here when you look up from the main road below – except for the track leading up the valley. And that was a problem when we arrived with our unwelcome news, two months ago. Tom had been in the army reserves when he was younger so he and Jock worked out a plan to put off anyone tempted to investigate the farm track. We had passed a car whose occupants had been shot at close range where they sat and Tom and Jock loaded up onto Jock big trailer and brought it back to the farm. Carefully positioned in the entrance to the farm track, as if trying to leave, the car with its gruesome occupants, both blocked the track entrance and hopefully suggested that death had already passed this way and there was nothing to be had here. As long as the group who had murdered the car’s occupants didn’t return and recognize their handiwork – it might work, but then again…

I’m getting ahead of myself. The first two months of lockdown went better than expected in the UK, the hospitals were not overwhelmed by the rising numbers of patients and the people, by and large, accepted the restrictions imposed on them without complaint and clapped every week in appreciation of the bravery and dedication of first, NHS workers, then delivery drivers and anyone not locked down but continuing to work and support the rest of us who were. Then the problem of people living and working in the care sector became apparent. A bit of the shine went off the NHS when it was realized that the people sent back from hospitals to residential homes without testing, in the early days of the crisis when hospitals were being cleared for action, were probably the reason why the virus decimated those homes so quickly and completely. In turn, this reflected on the government for their failure to prepare for a pandemic and the more specific failures in this particular case as well as the suspicion that they just didn’t care enough about the residential homes’ occupants. Under increasing pressure from the press and the public, the government did what it always did, looked for distraction and scapegoats. 
People, perhaps orchestrated behind the scenes and in tabloid papers, were clamouring to go back to work and the government stoked it by unclear messages about the safety of doing so, sowing confusion so that no blame could attach to them, or rather nothing that would stick. Lots of people had lost their jobs, mainly in the lower end of the job market, the gig economy, the zero hour contract end of the market. There were a lot of unhappy people as what aid there was to be had from the government, came through slowly – food banks grew in importance. Those that did return to, or find new jobs, were forced to accept lower wages – companies claimed they couldn’t afford more after the lockdown and it was “take it or leave it”.
Of course, nobody in government would have dreamed of officially suggesting the affluent old as scapegoats, but the forces on the right have always pulled the strings in a sly way, whether it’s the Nazis, Moseley’s Blackshirts or the National Front – there’s always someone behind the scenes, whispering in the ears of yobs and disaffected youth. Of course, the concept of an age war had been around before the Covid 19 crisis, babyboomers living in comparative luxury and drawing down NHS services in increasing numbers, and as more things became treatable, demanding those treatments. The younger generation was facing the prospect of paying for this older generation on the “strength” of inadequate jobs, unable to get on the housing ladder, which Margaret Thatcher had sold to the nation as the inalienable right of British citizens. But these rumblings and grumblings might never have come to much without the Covid 19 crisis…

I squint down the telescopic sight on my automatic rifle and check that the farm track is clear right down to the road. There are grass and weeds growing up on it now, which is what we want – no indication that anyone travels up it or that there is anywhere to go to at the top of it. We travel a different route to the road now when we need to, and its usually only Jock and Tom who go, driving a four-wheel-drive buggy over the hills surrounding the farm, and down to the road further along from the now disused farm track, and being careful not to leave evidence of their passage. They make occasional, very discrete outings to check up on other local farms, farms not as lucky as the McGregor’s, lucky that we arrived when we did. The friends who were our first destination, were not so lucky. When the troubles threatened us at our home on the outskirts of Newcastle, we decided to visit Pat Tricia and Steve, some farmer friends near Aberdeen who agreed to our plan – safety in numbers and Tom’s military background was reassuring. We loaded our aged camper van with food and anything we thought might be useful, we locked down our house as best we could in the limited time we felt we had. Gangs were already raiding nearby suburbs on a random basis, the rumours were of scores being settled, particularly conspicuous consumption, flash cars, big houses – they were drawing the attention first. We didn’t expect that our friends’ place would be a target at all – remote as it was, but it turned out, the remote farms, far from being safe in their isolation, were easy pickings for the feral gangs, Killing the occupants if they were older and sometimes even if they were younger – the yobs failed to distinguish between landowners and tenant farmers. They robbed whatever valuables they could find, often torched the property, took the odd sheep for celebratory barbeques back in the cities. 
When we arrived at the farm, we could see immediately that there was something wrong – there were a lot of cars parked in the farmyard although we couldn’t see anyone about. Tom parked off the approach track, behind a group of trees. He instructed me to watch the farm from cover, with binoculars and keep in touch with him using our mobile phones on earphone for silent operation. He crept up to the farm along a hedge line. As he made it to the corner of the house, I saw a man with a gun come out of the front door, lean the gun next to the door and wall over to some bushes and start to urinate. Thanks to my silent warning, Tom had flattened himself to the wall and the intruder, wiping some blood on his trousers as he went, passed almost within touching distance of Tom, his Bowie knife already drawn. The intruder didn’t have time to react as Tom cut his throat and fell silently to the ground and Tom dragged his body out of sight. Tom quickly secured the gun – an automatic rifle he told me when he had moved to the cover of a wall on the opposite side of the yard – a position which gave him command of the whole yard. I knew Tom had been on lots of training exercises, but he had never been deployed in an active combat situation – to see him kill a man in cold blood with such decisive efficiency, shocked me to the core. Now he waited until someone else came outside calling a man’s name. A couple of others drifted out, laughing and swigging from a bottle of brandy and joined in the shouting of the missing man’s name. Suddenly Tom started shooting from his concealed position, sweeping the yard with a long burst of automatic fire that dropped all the men to the ground. One other man emerged gun in hand but by the time he had realized all his companions were on the ground, a short burst from Tom despatched him too. He told me he was going around the back of the house to check whether there were any more invaders inside and to keep watch. It was as if I had not known this Tom and yet I realized I that I had always known him – just expressed in different ways – how he packed for a journey, knew where to find things. I felt safe with him – as I always had, but more so. Ten minutes later Tom appeared at the front door and shouted and beckoned to me to come to him. I ran down and into the house and found Tom bent over Patricia on the floor, bleeding. Steve was face down on the other side of the room, not moving.
” You’ll have to go to Jock and Maggie now – warn them, they’re good friends” Patricia was saying weakly “you’ll find their number in my phone, you’ll be safe there -they’re way up in the highlands.” She winced and her eyes screwed shut. “Thank you Pat” I said, “typical you thinking of others first but we will get you to a hospital!” But it was too late, Pat’s body gave a little spasm and she was gone. I turned to Tom and burst into tears, so much had happened, had changed in the last twenty minutes. He held me tight for as long as I needed but then as soon as I let him go, he said, “We must do what she said Maggie – it’s obviously not safe even here – we need to move as soon as possible.” And so it was that we buried Pat and Steve together, left the intruders where they were as some sort of warning, gathered all their weapons and the stash of ammunition from their vehicles, plus Steve’s shotguns “God knows where they got the automatic weapons!” Tom said. We packed them along with more food, into the camper van and left a couple of hours later just as it was getting dark. We had found Jock and Maggie’s number in Pat’s phone, she hadn’t bothered with locking and passwords, and we rang and told them what had happened. I heard Maggie gasp but they said to come on up and gave us their address. We pulled into some forestry off the road and slept in the front seats for a few hours, the back was too full and resumed the journey in the early hours of the morning when we thought we would be less likely to encounter trouble…

As soon as reports of violence against older, richer people began, the government deployed the army and whilst the sight of a few patrols calmed things down in the trouble spots, mostly in deprived northern cities, it soon became apparent that most of the army had moved south and were deployed to protect what used to be called “the Home Counties”. Soon the press reported that the government had lost control of the northern half of the country and formed a protective cordon south of Birmingham and that’s when law and order really broke down – riots, retaliation from the police, all-out attacks on police stations and of course, looting. Once the shops were looted, picked clean, then the mobs turned their attention to individual houses and that’s when Tom and I had decided to leave. Pat and Steve had been longtime friends who we went to stay with most years – being farmers it was harder for them to do the opposite. Jock and Maggie were like them in some ways, not dourer but a bit more reserved. They were shocked by our tale when we arrived but practical, Tom clearly knew how to defend us and he and Jock quickly went off to hatch a defensive strategy and Maggie and I unpacked the food from the van and bonded over the act of stowing it in her pantry and cups of strong tea.
The television was still going then, still showing a semblance of the news, but it was clear that either less was known about what was going on “up north”, or that the government was censoring the news. As the days went on, the untroubled south became less and less real or relevant to us though there was coverage of what was happening in other parts of the world. More right-wing governed countries like Poland and Hungary had suffered worse from the virus, not locking down soon enough, their hospitals overwhelmed and there too violence flared and soon there were no more reports coming out of those countries either. We had the internet for a bit but only by going up onto the hill and connecting Tom’s laptop via his mobile phone – Jock and Maggie were had not bothered with the internet before – but soon the phone network went down just as the landline had done a few weeks before. We cannot contact our children any more though Tom and mine at least know where we are, the authorities do not know about us or our fate. We are completely on our own now.

It’s getting too dark to see now and in the unlikely event that anyone comes past the dead people at the bottom of the track and makes it up to the farm, there are booby traps on tripwires. They are meant to be blank shotgun cartridges to scare foxes and maybe poachers, but we have loaded them with live cartridges – we need the upper hand in the event of an attack. I extricate myself from my hide and walk round the bend to the farmhouse where the lights are on and supper will be ready for us all.

Tom and I used to talk, in the early days of the lockdown, about how the pandemic had not turned out like in the movies and tv dramas – lots of dead bodies everywhere and the survivors going feral in the ruins of civilisation – little did we know. Back then, it all seemed very unreal, the government and the media quickly adopted the language of war, – fighting the virus, the workers on the front-line and so on, but that’s not how it felt, you looked out of the window and the streets were calm and empty and the TV and web were full of diversions to occupy adults and children alike and re-runs of old comedies. It all changed and went downhill so quickly so still we ask ourselves – how did it come to this…

Devolution 2

Annie – 2 – Reformation

We had always been Tory voters and everyone around us in our posh suburb of Newcastle voted that way too, as far as we could tell. When lockdown happened, we were comfortable enough in our detached house with a big enough garden to walk around in and work on but we started to feel cut off by the high fences and hedge that separated us from the neighbours. We could hear them but not see them and if we wanted to talk to them, we had to shout an invitation and then meet them on the pavement out front – socially distanced of course. Thursday night clapping for the NHS seemed a feeble affair when we were all so far apart – not like the enthusiastic affairs pictured on the news from terrace streets in inner cities.
We did our social duty, of course, surveyed the area to see if there were any older people who needed shopping doing for them, but either they had children nearby or insisted on driving to the shops themselves – masked and gloved. There are no corner shops in the suburbs so it was always a trip to the supermarket and the chances of running into people we knew in the queue to get in, was slim. Our only contact with the outside world then, was via the internet and the telephone. It was lonely.
Newcastle, whilst socially and architecturally vibrant, was still impoverished or rather socially divided into well-off and deprived, affluent suburbs and older inner-city terraces. Years of austerity had whittled away at the local authority provided services, drug and alcohol services, school facilities, hospitals – for people like us, with BUPA and no vices, this was not a problem although the prospect of having to go into an NHS hospital in the event of catching the virus, added to our determination to avoid catching it.  not that we were snobs, but just afraid of being treated in an overwhelmed or failing facility. But for most of the population there would be no choice. London succumbed to the virus first and then spread unevenly, thriving in hotspots which it appeared, were related to areas of deprivation – including Newcastle. Scientists speculated as to causal links, shifted their thinking from a flu-like disease to a multi-organ attacking complaint, from one strategy to another. And the numbers of infections and deaths in Newcastle, rose steadily.
The press started asking more searching questions. What was the government’s exit strategy? When would lockdown end? Did the government accept any blame for the slow start to lockdown, the return of infected elderly patients to care homes and so on? And gradually, Tom and I started to question the government’s record too. I should say that Tom was a retired barrister but who was a member of the Army Reserve and I had used to spend many weekends on my own whilst he went off on training weekends. So Tom was used to both incisive, analytic thinking, and also, to decisive action plans. He moved from default Tory voter to “They couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery!” in about six weeks.
We both watched the daily briefings from the government but Tom started to read far and wide on the internet – seeking answers to the mysteries of the virus which seemed to deepen rather than achieve resolution and to the evaluation of different governments performance in tackling the pandemic. 
My research was rather more prosaic, mostly centred on Facebook and Tom had to disabuse me of a few conspiracy theories and other examples of fake news but Tom had to concede that the articles which were shared showing that countries with women premiers had acted faster and better and got better results – certainly than our own government’s performance. And so between us, our knowledge grew and our views changed.
Furthermore, as time went on, we both grew more and more frustrated at not being able to contribute anything to “the war” on the virus – language you would imagine Tom, as a part-time soldier, would have embraced, but no! He read an article showing how such language is not helpful except for whipping people up with speeches. By the time lockdown ended, Tom and I had sustained a Damascene conversion, we were anti-austerity, anti-centralised government, pro-local sourcing, pro-devolution. When the lockdown ended, in a muddled way that we suspected was designed to prevent blame attaching to the government, Tom and I joined our local branch of the Labour Party but after attending a few meetings, we were disillusioned with them too and turned to local government and Tom decided to try and stand in the next council election. I supported him, acting as his promoter and social secretary until he said that we should both try and stand. 
But then came the second wave of Covid 19 – a much worse one than the first wave – deaths soared – lockdown resumed and all of the government’s dissembling and attempted blame-shifting fell flat – people saw through it! The regions had become increasingly bolshie about the strictures being handed out by central government, they took their own line, tried to obtain information about their own regions in order to base their decisions on. More importantly, they talked to their neighbours, co-operated, shared resources, sourced local solutions. This rebellion against the government was not lost on the government and their five-year, massive majority started to implode. The opposition party eventually called for a vote of no confidence and incredibly, enough Tory MP’s rebelled and the government fell in only the second year of its term. For the first time ever, the recent local elections had attracted a larger turnout than the national election which resulted in a hung parliament which dragged on in useless stalemate and decreasing their role even more. That scuppered the no-deal Brexit that the Tories had plainly been headed for and with all the other problems faced by ourselves and our European neighbours, the whole thing just seems to have slid into inactivity and things between us are changed more by Covid 19 than Brexit.
Tom and I failed to get selected by local Labour Party – still too middle-class looking, but we did become activists working with the councillors who were elected, and in many ways, this proved better for us because we were free to work, liaise and support whatever causes and issues we wanted to – keeping homeless down, encouraging synergy between local businesses. People made unemployed by the lockdown have found new and innovative ways to make a living – we watched a piece about a woman who taught herself to sew scrubs for key-workers during the lockdown and now designs clothes that are made by a local firm and sold in local shops. No transport costs, no foreign sweat-shops or possible child-labour. Farmers markets have returned bigger and better, not just for the middle-class but for everyone. Okay, the vegetables are more seasonal but people are more experimental with their cooking – not in terms of exotic foreign ingredients but home-grown things. It’s not just necessity now, it’s an informed choice by consumers – old-style, growth-based capitalism seems to have died…fingers crossed. Yes we miss travel, foreign holidays, but you can’t argue with the figures on reduced pollution – same with commuting, much reduced as people now insist on working from home and those who have to physically go to work, are gradually moving to be nearer rather than do the big commute – and who ever enjoyed that – really!
From sleepy semi-retirement, we were drawn into a new and active life. We have new friends and we have purpose and meaning. We act as sentinels against the excesses of central government and campaign to keep local government strong – we won’t look back…

W is for Work…

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!

Work in the time of Covid 19

If I was still working at my normal job (General Manager in a Gelato and pudding factory) – I wouldn’t be sitting here blogging! It’s not just the time factor, I struggle to fit in the two-and-a-half hours it mostly takes me to write and promote each piece – no, its the lifestyle. After eleven hours out of the house, I don’t have the energy to sit and blog. Also, my partner is already retired and so, in “normal” times, we need to spend the three days I am not working doing more “together” things.
Covid 19 has changed a lot of things for a lot of people and made them, and certainly me, reassess work, priorities, life.
It has been hard not to be useful when, away from the calm, bird-song filled streets and parks, you know that some people are still working frantically, whether on the “front-line” of the health service or in companies than can do mail-order and delivery -which includes my own place of work. My particular work can’t easily be done from home and because of mine and my partner’s age, I have been furloughed anyway.

 

“Cedar Waxwing, March 25, 2020, Allen Station Park, Allen, Texas” by gurdonark is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I watch the news of apparent government incompetencies in the supply lines, and the management of testing and I itch to get in there and help sort things out. I have had such varied jobs over the years that I think I have the ability to think outside the box and to translate thought into action, whereas it seems to me, most politicians have no experience outside politics and are lacking in any other skills. At 65, I would until recently, have been entitled to my state pension this year, but being part of the post-war baby-boom, it has been necessary for the government to extend working lives…

New Values

Like many people then, I have had the time and opportunity to think about the future, post-crisis, the so-called “New Normal” and personally, I am not sure I want to go back to work as I used to. My job in the factory was hardly a vocation and the things it was promised that I would be able to apply my skills to improve, have mostly not happened. On the other hand, blogging and knocking an allotment into shape, have felt worthwhile. The allotment, we hope, will make a contribution to our and our daughter’s family larder whilst blogging, has I hope, provided food for thought or maybe entertainment. Coming back to a comatose blog with no followers and slowly making friends and readers suggests some small success. Indeed, it makes me think that I would have enjoyed journalism and even, that it is not too late to contribute in some way. 

Because let’s face it, the world was in a sorry state before Covid 19 – the looming environmental crisis, the rise of right-wing governments, the wanton break up that was Brexit, the failure of capitalism, based as it was on constant growth and spurious war mongering. I remember going to a debate whilst a student, and being frustrated at not being able to formulate the questions I wanted to ask the speakers in time. Over the years, the themes and issues that keep me awake at night, have become clearer to me, the links between things, more obvious. I do know the key questions and have some ideas about the desirable direction of travel – if not the full answers.

It might be some time before my age-group are deemed safe to return to work and my partner and I, when we finally examine this month’s spending, may find we can manage without me going back to work, or maybe I can find a new way to bring in a little extra money to keep us ticking over – for me, just as for many people, there are uncertainties and opportunities in the wake of the coronavirus…

Q is for Quality of Life…

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!

The current crisis has changed the lives of almost every person in the whole world and the following are fictional responses, imagining those changes (albeit with some research) and especially changes, for better or worse, to the quality of life…


Susan, Sex Worker

My working name is Susan and I am a sex worker according to my key worker, a prostitute if you are the pigs, a tart if you are a punter, and I am a drug addict. I got to do heroin because I can’t face working the streets without it and I work the streets because I need to buy heroin. Dealers know this and use it against me and the other girls, they let us have the first score of the night for free but then we have to pay back double plus the next score so we are playing catch up all bloody night. Then when we are ready to finish, they give us some bad shit that makes us feel so ill we need to work again for one more score – bastards.

But things are different now – what with the virus. The week before lockdown, the dealers were selling cheap – afraid they wouldn’t shift their gear – that meant we had an easier week. But when lockdown began the police were all over us girls on the street and we couldn’t go out without risking being locked up properly overnight – not good when you’re dying for a hit. The dealers wouldn’t come out either ‘cos the police were everywhere and stopping cars all the time. Then there was the boyfriend – pimp some would call him, since he was always pushing me out the door to work and score for both of us. After two days without drugs he chipped – not without givin’ me a black eye first – I think he went back to stay at his bro’s so I don’t have to fight with him no more – good riddance!

I can go to the pharmacy in town each day for my methadone but for a few days I was starving for food. I thought about it and then I rang George. George is a punter who I used to visit at home and he is 65 and he give me a home for now and food. Of course we do the business but now I am there all the time, he don’t want too much. Maybe once a week was enuff anyway – I think he is more glad of the company – he can’t go to the pub no more and I don’t mind him neither, an’ he has loads of books which I like. I do the shopping for us – I go out each day for the methadone which I often used to throw up ‘cos I’m bulimic but my life is less stressful than for as long as I can remember so I mostly keep it down.

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 1
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 7 

Freddie, 6 year-old boy

My brother and I live in Stevenage, which is in Hertfordshire, with our parents and during the week, our nanny. Daddy does something with money – I don’t really understand and Mummy is a lawyer but I don’t really understand what that is either. They have explained but I can’t tell them I don’t understand ‘cos then they’ll think I am stupid and they are very strict about being clever at school. Usually, we go to school in the week and our nanny – she is called Jane, she takes us and picks us up and stays with us till Mummy comes home. Jane lets us sing on the way home but we are not allowed to sing at home. We made Rainbow paintings on our last day at school, but we got into trouble because we drew a rainbow on the driveway with chalk, like we saw other children do on the TV. Mummy made us wash it off and Jane and Mummy argued. Jane is fun and now she is teaching us at home because we can’t go to school because of the virus and although Mummy and Daddy are home all the time – they are still working and we mustn’t disturb them. I miss going to school and seeing my friends. We still get to sing when Jane takes us out for exercise – everybody is allowed to go out to exercise for one hour a day. This is the best bit of the day!

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 7
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 6

James 85 year-old in a Residential Home

I am afraid for my life – more even than during the Blitz. My parents wouldn’t let my sister and I be evacuated as we lived just outside London on the hill above Greenwich and when we came out of our shelter after the all-clear, we could see London burning and once a bomber crashed in the High Street but never was I as afraid as I am now. Last year I had a leg amputated which is why I am in here but I was doing okay till this Covid 19 thing. I needed help going to the toilet and in the shower but the staff at this home were kind and brilliant. Now though, they are doing the best they can but still, 12 people in the home have died of the virus and the staff haven’t got all the equipment they need to keep themselves safe or therefore me. I try to call on them as little as possible but sometimes I have to. I know they always liked to help me before because I don’t have dementia, like lots of the residents, and they could have a proper conversation with me – but now they are stressed and afraid both for themselves and for me. I watch the television and I understand what is going on, I may be 85 but I’m not stupid, and it’s obvious that everyone in residential homes has been abandoned – they are not even counting the deaths in homes – only those who die in hospital. The government says that that is how all countries are measuring the course of the disease but it feels like we just don’t count any which way…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 8
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 2

Glen, 10 year-old boy.

We had to sleep on the street last night because Mum can’t work and the landlord threw us out of our flat – Mum told him the government said he wasn’t allowed to but he told her to fuck off and he nearly hit her. Today we went to a hostel and we have got a place to sleep tonight but it’s horrible and we are not allowed to be there till this evening. We sat in the town centre but the police wouldn’t listen to mum when she said we were homeless and told us to move somewhere else. So we are now sitting by the river where there are no police but people keep giving us funny looks ‘cos of all the bags we have with us. I’m hungry…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 5
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 1

George, 65 year-old

I have been furloughed because of my age and my partner Jane’s age and our health. I am pre-diabetic and she has COPD so we are especially vulnerable to Covid 19. My job is such that there is nothing I can do to work from home and I am unlikely to get paid again till this is over though, and for people our age, self-isolation could go on a long time. In the old days, at 65, I would have been receiving my state pension but now I have to wait until next March. We are saving a lot of money, no commuting costs, no going out costs at weekends (I only worked four days a week anyway so we had long weekends) and we are eating less. Even things we might like to buy, like plants for the allotment we started last year, we cannot, because garden centres are closed. Still, we are lucky, we did equity release recently so we won’t run out of money, whatever happens. Our daughter and grandson do the shopping for us each week which I miss because I like to cook and I like to do the food shopping. Jane likes to shop for clothes – she even bought me some new trousers online because I needed some – at least you can still get some things that way…
We thought it would be really difficult spending all our time together instead of three days and evenings, but it is like both of us are retired now, not just Jane who was already retired and we have proper togetherness most of the time and the time seems to fly by – so much so that it would be hard to keep track of the days if we weren’ keeping a diary. Of course, we have our moments, such as when I spend too much time blogging and not enough talking together, or we just get a bit fed up at the things we miss doing and the people we can’t see. But on the whole, we know we are lucky to be alive and to have each other and our health – fingers crossed…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 7
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 8

J is for Judgment

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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…

Postscript to Fighting…

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This morning, after posting F is for Fighting, I read a piece online in the Financial Times by the wonderful writer Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) written five days ago. It tells of the tragic events unfolding in India under the [monstrous] Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister – Narendra Modi. The usual catalogue of bad decisions based on early denial, but in a country of teeming millions of poor crammed into slums, this will be a human disaster of epic proportions.

In her preamble, Arundhati says, and I can’t quote for copywriter reasons and so must paraphrase, but please go and read the full work – that governments who are in charge of the response to the virus pandemic are fond of referring to it as a war and that they mean it literally rather than metaphorically. But if it was really a war, then the US, which has been woefully unprepared for the virus, would be the best prepared with guns and planes, soldiers and bombs.

Arundhati Roy spells out in much more detail than I and with far greater eloquence, the dangers of poor leadership and the human costs that are being engendered. At the end, she describes pandemics throughout history, as portals to a different future where-through we will have choices to make about whether we return to the same old systems which have been revealed  as broken, such as capitalism – or choose another direction…

F is for Fighting…

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!

Fighting a war, fist fighting, fighting for your rights, fighting off an attacker, fighting the good fight, fighting for peace, fighting off an infection, fighting boredom, fighting flab, fighting sleep, fighting insomnia, depression, a sense of failure, fighting old age, fighting for recognition, justice, fighting to be heard, fighting an election, fighting the war on drugs, fighting terrorism, fighting for the environment, fighting for survival, the uses of the word fighting are legion but in this list, and I am sure you can think of more examples, only the first four are literal fights – the rest are metaphorical. When one activity carries such a plethora of metaphors, it must surely say something about our humanity.


It’s not exclusively a human trait to fight, animals do it to win a mate or in defense of territory and in many cases it may not even come to blows – elaborate posturing, special apparatus designed to impress may do the trick although in other cases real and sometimes mortal damage is inflicted. These are legitimate causes for fighting – reproduction and territory are about survival – short and long term but as a species, humans have raised fighting to a planet-wide, all-life-threatening status. For a species that prides itself, defines itself even, on the size of its brain, this activity does not make sense.

The United States of America, of it’s 242 years history, has been at peace with no wars ongoing, external or internal, for just 16 years. Former President Jimmy Carter allegedly pointed this out to Donald Trump in 2019 and added ” We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion [on] military spending. China has not wasted a single penny on war and that’s why they’re ahead of us in almost every way.” One imagines it made little impression on a man whose stance in life is, more often than not, belligerent. I said that animals fight in defense of territory and like the metaphor above, fighting for peace, this sounds a contradiction in terms. Just as the military wing of the government is usually called the Department of Defense or similar – rarely the Department of War as this would imply that waging war was an aim of government – not a response to potential outside aggression.

In George Orwell’s classic novel of a political and dystopian future “Nineteen Eighty-Four” we see how the use of the right terms is vital for the control of the masses by the few. “Great” Britain has become Airstrip One and is a mere province of the superstate Oceania which tells its citizens that is in (perpetual) war and exhorts them to greater effort, greater tightening of the belt (remind you of austerity?). Published just after the Second World War when the Tehran Conference had divided the world up into zones of influence, the book has as many warnings today as ever about the scrutiny we need to place on those who govern…

The other day I heard someone saying on the radio (in the plethora of discussion about Covid 19 I am afraid I didn’t clock the speaker) that we keep referring to the National Health Service workers as the frontline workers in this fight against the virus but that it would be better if the people at large regarded themselves as the front line since it will be the degree of their adherence to not going out that will determine the reduction of deaths at the final reckoning. So we should be the “Home Front” a term that came about during the Second World War to give unity and focus to a population only some of whom were experiencing the direct effects of bombing whilst for those out in the country, there was little immediate evidence of the war raging across the world. Rationing, inventive cooking, improvisation and substitution – all the things we are experiencing under lockdown.

Here is the disconnect at the heart of our mass response to Covid 19 – for most people it is not serious and even if they do catch it it will not feel serious – we can’t see the crisis in the hospitals, only empty streets, shutdown shops and we experience a sense of unreality. Even when we watch the nightly news reports with the climbing death tolls, we do not connect with the reality, over 5000 people in the UK now, that’s a stadium full! If we could have taken it seriously, then we would have started preparing earlier when we heard the reports coming out of China. Logic dictates that if you can pass on an infection before you show symptoms, a pandemic is inevitable but human beings are not notably logical and so the fact that this virus is not evenly fatal fuels the disconnect.

We find ourselves living in the movie set of a post-apocalyptic event (such as a pandemic) but there are no rotting bodies in the streets and no feral gangs of survivors breaking into shut down shops. In this respect, barring some early hoarding of toilet rolls and flour (I blame the Great British Bake-off for making everybody believe they should bake their way through the crisis) the majority of people have responded with the best that humans can be to this strange challenge. Imagine though, how things would have been without the internet to inform and entertain us, to share tips and memes and love.

In the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, things were very different. Coming at the end of the First World War, starting out, it is thought, in a military base in Kansas, the troops heading out to Europe spread it and 20 to 50 million died – more than the 17 million who died in WW1 and this may not be accurate as there was no means of testing the many victims or recording data accurately and even with all of our advanced technology this current pandemic still presents some of the same problems. We do not fully understand why Spanish Flu was so lethal and we have much to learn about why Covid 19 is so lethal for some and not for others. Incidentally, the name Spanish Flu came about because most of the countries involved in WW1 had censorship in place for military purposes and the powers that be suppressed news of the pandemic, afraid of public panic except for Spain which was neutral, had no censorship and freely discussed the disease, including the Spanish King becoming ill. I say this on the day that Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister is reported to be receiving escalating treatment in Intensive Care…

Returning to the metaphorical use of the word fighting – in the world of religion, we have “onward Christian soldiers” and we have Jihad a term which modern Moslems struggle to re-interpret as a metaphorical personal battle for spiritual development and not in its apparent, original meaning of a battle to forcibly convert non-believers. It goes to show how careful we need to be with metaphor – especially those based on images of war and fighting and we need to be especially vigilant that we do not give the latitude to right-wing leaders to take excessive powers under the cover of crisis sending us back to the future of 1984…

I am going to give the last word to that great storyteller and observer of his times – Charles Dickens in his opening to A Tale of Two Cities – almost a perfect metaphor in itself –
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

D is for Death

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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!

Does Death give Meaning to Life?

My mother served in the Second World War as a signaling Sergeant and she said that over the course of the war, there were six men, any of whom she might have made a life with if they hadn’t gone off to where the action was and never come back. In that sentence, I have not used the word death, but you know what I mean. Death is the elephant in the room. My mother had certainly had enough of it and so, when my grandparents died, the first people I knew who died, my sisters and I were not allowed to go to the funeral – my mother did not want to expose us to death. Those funerals were the proper hole in the ground in an English country churchyard funerals. Soon after that though, funerals in England moved, mostly, to being cremations. A poll in 2016 showed that 75% of people in the UK prefer cremation. Whether it is the cost, £1000 more on average, for a traditional funeral; the move away from religion and thus church burials; the lack of space in churchyards – I don’t know the answer to why we have moved away from burials to cremations. But I do know one of the effects of this switch and that is the waiting list that means it can be three or four weeks between a person dying and the catharsis of a funeral.

Why does this wait make a difference? Well in 1995 I went to live in Ireland and at first I was deceived by the fact that everyone spoke “English”, into thinking that the culture was also similar. I mean if you went to France and had to learn to speak a different language, then you would also expect the culture to be different too. So the first thing that made me appreciate the difference in Ireland, was the way of death, or rather, what happens when someone dies. Firstly the word goes out to all relatives and significant friends. Everyone drops what they are doing, all over Ireland and even abroad and by the evening, everyone is at the deceased’s home in time for a service where the body arrives at the church. The night will be spent remembering the person and the next day, everyone goes to another service and the coffin is processed by all the mourners to the local burial ground. Another difference – the burial grounds are usually multi-denominational and the churchyards are not usually used for graves. The party or wake may then continue for the next night or more… Now the Postmaster whose mother had passed at that first Irish funeral I encountered, told me he had been going to funerals in his village all his life but this was the first time he had been at the receiving end of one. For the first time, he realized how supportive it was to have all the family around him so quickly. Contrast this with the three-week wait in England and a quick service at a crematorium in whatever religious denomination you require and another group of mourners lining up outside as you complete. It might only be my opinion, but I feel that in England, we are particularly detached from death.

My partner, on the other hand, feels that the Irish are naturally more demonstrative and that the English have always been more reserved rather than any effect of the war and that children were not taken to funerals because they were not regarded as mature enough for the experience – take your pick or any other answers on a postcard (comment box)…

So different cultures respond differently or if not differently, then in degree, to death both in terms of emotion, practices of remembrance and of religious rituals – but is there some essential similarity? Well, evidence of burying the dead is often taken to be the sign of transition from ape to hominid – a sign that our big brains had developed to the point of self-consciousness where we could imagine an afterlife or conceptualize the preciousness of the Ancestor or simply identify with a corpse and not wish to leave it unburied and prey to animals. All these things require acts of imagination, feats of language and co-operation, all signs of big brain development or to put it another way, funereal arrangements are fundamental to being human.

The Covid 19 is having a very distressing effect as people are essentially dying alone, being buried without ceremony and as so often, when we are deprived of something, we appreciate what we have lost much more. Will we find new ways to celebrate the passing of relatives and friends and strangers?

At the end of the last post, I suggested that life has no intrinsic meaning and I stand by that, but the way that we treat our dead shows that humans create their own meanings, light their own flames of imagination, art, scientific enquiry and philosophy in the dark vastness of the universe. How long that flame will burn given the way we are treating the planet is open to question but as the warnings of Greta Thunberg are temporarily eclipsed by the Covid 19 crisis, there is a little hope in that crisis. Pollution is down, businesses being re-configured, priorities are being re-assessed at all levels from the individual to governments. We are pausing to draw breath and consider where we find ourselves. It’s not all good news though, the forces of repression are trying to claw more influence through emergency powers but then more people have time to scrutinize everything. Who knows where we will be on the other side of the crisis, but we live in interesting times…

C is for Covid 19

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. Since I didn’t discover the challenge till April 1st. – the first day of the challenge, I missed the pre-challenge post where you let readers know what theme your A to Z will be outlining. As this is day three, I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


What is the point of a virus?

Our lives have been turned upside down by a virus, an object so tiny it is invisible to the naked eye. I say object, because although some commentators have referred to Covid 19, a Coronavirus, as “living” on different surfaces for various lengths of time, a virus is not really alive in the usual sense – it is a parasite that cannot exist long outside its host cell nor reproduce on its own. Scientists still debate whether the many viruses should be included in the “tree of life” for they do contain DNA and/ or RNA which are the building plans for all life and the chances are that they have accompanied us closely on our evolutionary journey. But if they are not really alive and their only capability is replication – in the process, damaging or even killing their hosts – what is the point of them?


Darwin, who gave us the Theory of Evolution, was originally training to be a clergyman but far from debunking the ideas that geology was spreading about the Earth being millions of years older than the Bible indicated, Darwin disappointed the devout Robert FitzRoy, Captain of HMS Beagle by postulating the theory which would explain the progression of life to be found in the rocks. After the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin settled down to marriage, family and working on his theory, holding back from publishing his work until the last minute, when others threatened to get there first, out of a touching desire not to upset his friend FitzRoy’s religious sensibilities. But during this period, Darwin’s beloved daughter – Annie, died of Scarlet Fever (a bacterial rather than viral) and Darwin’s own belief in God took a terrible knock. The final nail in the coffin for Darwin’s beliefs was his learning of species of parasitical wasps that lay their eggs inside a living caterpillar so that when the eggs hatch, the wasp young feed and grow – eating their host from within. For Darwin, the idea that God could create such cruelty not to mention take the innocent life of his daughter, was too much to bear.


So Darwin would have been fascinated but appalled had he been around to see how the development of our understanding of the parallel evolution of viruses and animals, reveals something so pointless and so potentially devastating for the animal kingdom. We sit transfixed by daily news broadcasts announcing death tolls reaching and exceeding thousands in different countries but this is nothing compared to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. We think that 50 million people died worldwide but it could have been up to 100 million – our means of recording the deaths in that pre-global village world was simply not adequate enough to know. Given the ease of the spreading of the virus by modern transport and mass travel, we might think that we are doing very well to have contained the pandemic as well as we have, government failure to act notwithstanding…

So what is the point of virus? Well there simply is no point, they just are because they are. They hone our immune systems but if they didn’t exist we wouldn’t need such defenses. They are not living organisms such as bacteria (though we could do without some of those little critters too). If you believe in God, you would have to ask yourself why he would create such a thing. If you don’t believe in God then and you accept evolution as the roller-coaster ride that has brought species and their attendant parasites, including viruses, to the place we are today, then, ironically, something which is arguably “life”, is a metaphor for life itself. Life appears to have been, likely, accidental though probably inevitable given the inconceivable multitude of planets that exist in the universe. Life, apparently, exists for no purpose other than to exist and reproduce and as the mathematician  Augustus De Morgan, said in his short rhyme “Siphonaptera”, from his book A Budget of Paradoxes (1872), (Siphonaptera being the biological order to which fleas belong)

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
(Wikipedia)

If that analysis seems a little negative, stay with me, it’s not the whole story…

Now to the technical stuff:-
If you want to understand what a virus is, there is a good article here. This excellent article explains the body’s defence mechanisms – in particular B-cells and T-cells. A very technical article explains the body’s immune system over-reaction called the Cytokine Storm which is mostly the cause of death with Covid 19.



The Death of Cash?

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One of the recommendations for businesses operating during the Covid 19 pandemic, is that they should encourage people to pay by contactless debit card. I say encourage, because whilst we and many other countries are rushing headlong towards, if not a cashless society, at least a much-reduced role for cash and yet there are still some obstacles – hence the reason they were recommendation rather than enforced restrictions. Last weekend, before the lockdown was more strident, my partner and I decided to head for Filey and a walk on the beach where we hoped we could be sufficiently socially-distant. Imagine our shock ar finding that everyone seemed to have had the same idea, the weather being fair if breezy and the seafront was almost as crowded as a summer day. Okay, we could keep reasonably distant from other people and the brisk off-the -sea breeze whisked any miasma emanating from others swiftly away. Besides, at this stage, it was a numbers game and the chance of catching the virus seemed but a small percentage as long as we kept our distance and touched nothing. Nevertheless, we risked ordering a cup of tea, paper cups naturally, from a cafe where I paid with a contactless debit card. I remarked that it was fortunate that they had the facility but the woman behind the counter said that the majority of their customers, local, elderly and not enthusiastic about card payments let alone contactless, prefer to use (filthy)cash still.

So there is the first issue – resistance. But in China, a country also well on the way to a cashless economy, the lag is more of an urban/ rural split though this might also equate to an older generation of peasant society since the youth have often left for the cities. This is not just a resistance issue but an internet access issue since all payment systems depend on internet coverage for universal availability. Wait that’s not quite true – on another continent not hitherto noted for financial innovation, things have taken a different direction altogether – in Africa, they have developed mobile phone apps to make payments. Where China has skipped over the whole Debit card stage and gone straight to the smartphone using 3D barcode scanning, in Africa, they have skipped over the whole banking stage because they don’t have enough banks and like China, they especially don’t have enough banks in rural areas. Also, Africa does not yet have enough smartphones to do QR Codes but it has a thriving market in secondhand mobile phones which together with necessity, the mother of invention, has created a uniquely African solution. Africans also demonstrate the highest rate of peer to peer payment – that is paying another person by text.

Top of the league for a cashless society, closely followed by Canada and then the UK, is Sweden where many people cannot remember using cash in the last month. But here another warning note has been sounded, the government has asked the Swedish people to envisage what would happen if there was a prolonged internet outage due to solar storm or more sinisterly, due to cyber warfare and they have suggested that citizens prepare emergency packs including – yes you guessed it – cash.

What Sweden and indeed most societies that are going quickly cashless demonstrate, is that the adoption is people-led – grassroots up not bank or government down. People like using apps for their convenience and if spending money was easy, perhaps too easy, with a Debit or Credit Card – then waving your phone at a terminal doesn’t seem like spending money at all – at least until the bill arrives…
One of the things that accelerates the adoption of whatever form of cashless purchase, is when the associated charges are reduced to the point where small traders, busses and toilet payments, all small, become viable. But there is a downside when, as in Sweden, even banks no longer want to handle cash either in or out, and the number of branch closures increases. This is also due to online banking, but again, the rural, elderly, internet poor and disadvantaged suffer first and most.

Another reason often put forward by those who wish to encourage the race towards cashless, is the potential reduction in crime – no bank robberies, no safes necessary, no pilfering of cash by staff, no money laundering. However criminality rarely goes away – it just shifts to new opportunities so cybercrime includes identity theft, new forms of fraud based around digital payment methods. Like the fight between humans and viruses, each side tries to stay ahead. For example, a new generation of payment cards will incorporate ultra-thin fingerprint readers which means my partner and I will have to stop paying with whichever card is appropriate to our budgetary arrangements. Once again, poor and older people often use cash to physically allocate spending – the rent jar, the shopping jar etc. and these people are the least likely to have time, means, understanding or inclination to use those natty apps offered by banks to assist you to manage your expenses…

Other aspects of crime might be that those who deal outside the law such as drug dealers can hardly use digital payment systems because they leave a trail (though not a paper trail!) and whilst some might cite this as a way of squeezing such activities out of existence, it would more likely create alternative illegal currencies or barter systems. Even the Bitcoin, a virtual coinage much touted as being impregnably secure, based as it is on blockchain technology, turned out to be hackable if criminals could muster sufficient encryption busting computer power. Interestingly, the method for tracking down these robberies was to trace the extreme power consumption required by such computing power.

Another huge area in the debate over the pro’s and cons of cashless is the aspect of control. There are no bank charges for keeping your money under the mattress and at the other end of the scale, once you are totally digital banked, you are at the mercy of bank charges, interest rate changes – once there is no physical cash, the banks don’t need to work so hard to incentivize you to choose their bank to keep it in. Furthermore, it is easier for the government to keep track of citizen spending and indeed the citizen themselves with digital. China’s government are rumoured to be entering the market, currently dominated by two large phone payment apps, with their own offering and where will citizens hide from the police or the taxman then? Of course, the answer given to that one, is if you have nothing to hide…

So. the current virus crisis might push a few more people to finally adopt payment by card and contactless but as a society, we perhaps need to question our unconscious slide towards cashless, be it for fear of solar storms, cyber crime or overweaning government control. Remember, its not for nothing that the rich have always placed their trust in gold and land…