Normally at this time of year, at least for the last few years, both me and the missus would be in France. We normally go out to our house there at the end of March/start of April, and spend a pretty intensive month mowing, digging, planting, pruning, power washing, painting, airing and cleaning to get the place looking good after a winter unattended.
It's not all work of course. Life out there settles into a pretty agreeable routine of dog walking (one early morning long, two short ones each day), exercise, garden and house chores, at least one beach or coast path walk each week, a meal out, homemade pizzas and fizz on Friday nights, homemade curry on Saturday nights, and the missus off to a vide grenier ("empty loft", or a car boot) or two on Sunday mornings. If that sounds banal, it is. Conversation can get no more exciting than whether the lights on the wind turbines we can see from our windows have turned from red (night time) to white (daytime) yet, or whether Raymond (84 year old farmer-widower-neighbour) has trundled off to market yet. But it's all immensely relaxing for the most part, and it has its rewards. Here's an example (the view from the back door):
There's none of that this year of course. Goodness knows what the place looks like, but one this that's certain is that it won't look like the pic above. And neither will the veg plot be as pristine as this, nor the grass as short:
But hey ho, it's hardly the biggest problem in the world. We started from scratch in 2015, and we'll do so again. I just hope we can get back there in the second half of June so that we can at least harvest some of the blackcurrant crop.
At the moment, however, we're both at home in Macclesfield. We're among the lucky ones - we're both working, we're healthy, we have outdoor space and great walking both from the front door and within a very short drive for properly spectacular hills and countryside. Day-to-day life, particularly the working at home bit, gets a bit repetitive and claustrophobic intermittently, but on the other hand getting up early and getting dressed properly helps maintain an important sense of routine and order.
For us, there are some good things to come out of this lockdown. Zoom and Microsoft Teams have been a boon to us, as for so many others. I find audio-only conference calls at work really unsatisfactory, but adding video transforms the experience. I'm hoping that the realisation that we can be effective from home endures as life gets back to normal, and the 3-4 days a week I spend in London when I'm working can become 1-2. Less London (and its transport systems), less time in air-conditioned offices, and more nights in my own bed would make continuing to work generally much more tolerable.
Another good thing is that because seeing family is currently impossible, we seem to be making more effort to use technology that properly keeps us in touch - FaceTime in particular is great for that. We're also lucky in that we exist in some great communities, virtual and otherwise. Every Friday from 5 till 6.30 it's the missus' Head of IT doing a DJ set from his Manchester flat, every Saturday from 3 till 4 one of our neighbours hauls his Marshall speakers into the back garden for an hour of 'Uplifting Classics' which everyone round and about seems to enjoy, and there's been online quizzes, yoga and Zoom 'virtual background' competitions.
That's all lovely, but we're very lucky. If we had school age kids to try to entertain and educate, or if we had no outside space, or if our income had dried up, life would, I suspect, feel even harder and more unforgiving at the moment than it does usually.
But there are plenty of aspects of this lockdown that feel bad for everybody, and we'll maybe come back to look at as madnesses of the period, including....
The Police - they seem to be on a mission to break the policing-by-consent model. They've allowed the perception to grow that they a) find it easier to fine and boss-around generally law-abiding people than go after the difficult, awkward cases, which their approach to policing lockdown has reiforced; b) have a role to play in "making society fairer". They probably do, but it lies in ensuring that victims and perpetrators of crime are treated equally, regardless of cause, class or income, rather than pathetic virtue-signalling about how much they care about 'social justice'. Their weekly homage to the NHS is particularly excreable.
Talking of which...the slogan "Protect the NHS". I understand the reasons for this, I do, we don't want the health service overwhelmed, we need to manage the peak, blah blah, but the back-to-front nature of a key government message, if you take a step back, is astounding. The NHS should be there to protect us, and the fact that it wasn't ready to do so must surely represent a massive failure of planning and management. Even worse, the "protect the NHS" message has been taken to heart so literally by the masses that not only are the diagnoses of cancer down from c.30,000 a month to closer to 5,000, but A&E admissions for heart attacks and strokes are much reduced. I have a strong suspicion that when the stats are compiled we'll find that for every CV19 death we saved through hospitals not being overwhelmed, there were two others from late/no diagnoses and lack of timely treatment. But hey, the TV cameras won't be there to record those, so it'll be a much smaller political issue, and the government and its advisors will have been seen to have done ok.
And on that note, the uniformity of the instructions to the public has again seemed nonsensical to me. It's as though people are incapable of understanding more than one childishly simple piece of advice. Maybe they are, but I don't think so. This is what I'd have said:
- regardless of what the stats are around infection rates, country comparisons, it's clear that the vast majority of young people will escape unscathed if they get CV19, and the vast majority of the elderly and those with serious health conditions are at great risk from it.
- so, if you're under 50 with no health conditions, go about life as normal, but when you're in public, wear a mask and keep your distance from others (as well as plenty of hand washing an no face touching)
- if you're 50 to 70 and generally fit you might want to be a bit more careful. Carry on as per the under 50s, but don't mix with anyone outside of your immediate family.
- if you're over 70 and/or have a serious health condition, be bloody careful. Stay at home, don't mix with anyone. And we'll mobilise to bring you everything you need. (It seems lunatic to me, for example, that over-70s have been going to supermarkets because they haven't been able to get delivery slots, while under-50s have been allowed to continue to receive their groceries at home; that's fine if all the oldies are taken of, but direct capacity there in the first instance.
I'd have shut all the places where people come into contact as a matter as course - pubs, restaurants etc. - but to have garden centres, council tips and loads of other businesses closed as a matter of course regardless of their staffing or customer profile seems wantonly destructive to me.
But then it's all about political perceptions and the fact that most people are incredibly bad at understanding and assessing true risk. Not only do they not get the right way to quantify and compare risks is to compare their impacts with the probability of each event occurring, but even more subtly (and this is illustrated by the cancer diagnosis point above), it's possible that by focusing on a single risk and minimising it as much as possible, you actually increase the overall risk load by other risks becoming more likely. Aside from probability theory in statistics, formal education doesn't really get close to touching this stuff, and it should. Not only would it increase the chances of having a more sophisticated electorate, less susceptible to media scare stories but it would also have an impact on how people manage their finances and take significant life decisions. I won't be holding my breath though.
Well that was a bit of a journey, from my back garden in France to what should the on the national curriculum. I'll stop there, with the hope that I'll be able to look back and read this in 2025 with the world sort-of back to normal.
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