covid19 – The Richard Lyle Organisation

April 19, 2020April 19, 2020

You People Are The Best

After Friday’s post, I have been reminded yet again just how blummin’ amazing you people are. I know that sometimes people, other people, use a particular intonation when they say “you people” that really puts a big distance between them and “you people.” You know those people. You know what I mean. The sort of people who think there are “fine people on both sides” and yet still manage to deny personhood to the people they don’t really like. Nevertheless, you people are the best. You people are my people and you humble me.

(I know that I’ve just othered a bunch of wankers and racists but fuck the fuckers. Seriously, just fuck them. However, the irony of my doing that is not lost on me.)

It’s true to say that life in self-isolation had been getting to me. I was feeling lower and lower and I couldn’t really see a way out. A couple of things changed at the end of last week. They first was being told I could take my car to find a quiet spot in which to exercise and the second was the cathartic brain dump I posted on Friday afternoon. I have had so much support and loving-kindness shown to me following that that I really have to acknowledge it publicly. There’s a difference between knowing that there are people around for you and feeling those people around you. The self-isolation means that the usual hugs and fist-bumps and hand-holding have all gone. Physical touch from my friends is no longer a habit. However, the messages I have received from so many of you have been more than enough to feel your support and I am truly, madly, deeply grateful.

Just to make it clear, we’re fine. We’re well, we’re putting a stash of supplies away not to be touched unless one or both of us falls ill and we will continue to be self-sufficient physically at least as long as Anne can get into a supermarket and I can drive her home afterwards if she needs it. If any of that changes, we know we can count on our friends to help and you already have. I have now lost count of the offers I have had to go and get some shopping or collect prescriptions. Emma dropped round with some of her amazing bread and I thank her with every delicious morsel I eat.

A plate of rye bread and cheese. — Emma’s rye bread with unsalted butter and some very nice cheese. Lunch yesterday.

That I got out and onto the Roman Road for a walk yesterday was very special. It’s just about my favourite place on Earth. It’s just behind my pillow next to Anne at any time we’re both in bed, and the end of the pier at St Andrews but ahead of that wee cafe next to the gates of the Arsenale in Venice where I go for a quiet skulk every time we’re in the city. Somebody had told me the weather was a bit cold so I was wearing far too many layers including a waxed jacket and big scarf and got stupidly sweaty after only five minutes walking. I parked the car near Worsted Lodge and headed out towards Balsham.

A large bush of very pale pink blossom. — Full bloom is amazing.

There’s a reason that cliches become cliches. I usually avoid them like the plague but these are strange times. The banks of blossom along the hedgerow were alive with life itself. They buzzed, bee-filled and beautiful. The blossom itself was white or palest pink. There were blue flowers and yellow flowers spread across the grass beside the wide path, benign Lego bricks to catch the eye and stop your breath with the smallest of joyful gasps. Skylarks sang invisibly above, the only soundtrack after ten minutes as I left the traffic behind. I saw not another soul for almost half an hour and turned back as soon as I did. There was a family out walking their dog coming the other way.

On the way back, a cyclist came down the path towards me very slowly. It could have been a roaring downhill for him but he slowed right down and I made my way up the bank so we could observe a socially-distant three or four metres as he passed. Another couple were coming down towards me as I got close to the car. The woman wished me a good morning at almost three in the afternoon and then giggled in her confusion. I replied saying that nobody really knew what time it was anymore anyway. We were able to give one another room again. I was up on what had been the top of the road 1,700 years ago and they were strolling along the bottom of the drainage ditch. All was well.

All is well, or as well as it can be. Anyone who thinks this will be over in three weeks is deluding themselves or preparing to lie to others. We have weeks of this yet to come but for those of us who avoid infection it won’t be too bad. I have my friends and I love them dearly.

Thank you.

April 17, 2020April 17, 2020

You Don’t Have To Be Mad To…

Trigger Warning: mental illness. Don’t read on if you’re having a bad day. This probably won’t help you today. It’s also a bit self-indulgent in comparison with everyone who is really struggling today.

I’m sitting here on my sofa, arse gently aching from overuse, or underuse, or whatever. It’s sore, is what I’m saying. So, I’m sitting here tapping away at my keyboard while my cat sleeps beside me. She is not an ‘on’ cat. There are ‘on’ cats, who must always be on your lap or your legs when you’re sitting down. They are on your head when you wake up at three in the morning with a mouthful of cat fur. They are on your case All The Fucking Time. That’s ‘on’ cats for you. No, Tilly is a ‘beside’ cat. She sits quietly next to me, allowing whatever is happening inside my head to happen there and stays in her place, one part of her back or her leg touching my hip while my arse gently aches and my whatever it is that is currently living in my head stamps its feet and shouts and screams and.

And.

But.

There is a pair of robins nesting in the ivy by our kitchen window. The kitchen in this house is unusual in my experience. It’s at the front of the house so that when I’m standing at the sink, I can see the postie or delivery drivers coming up the path to leave whatever it is they’re leaving. The robins watch them come and go and one of them, I’m not sure which, was absolutely not put on Earth to give a fuck about you or your opinion. It’s the most in your face robin I have ever seen. There are drug lords or medieval kings who would back off from confronting this wee psychopath.

I am not about to take the fucker on.

The self-isolation is definitely beginning to affect me. I have imagined a robin has psychopathic tendencies and I don’t think avian psychopathy is a thing, not a real thing anyway. I have had insomnia since the lockdown started and it’s getting worse. I am remembering more of my dreams when I do manage to sleep and to be honest, I’d much rather I didn’t. I am saving up all the daytime anxiety and it percolates through my brain in the wee, soulless, terrifying hours when the bats, the owls, the rats and the slugs are doing their thing outside. Or mostly outside.

I woke myself up with my somniloquence last night, my mumbling in whatever freak show was running on the I-Max inside my eyelids gradually getting louder and louder until the point I roused myself and I lay there, confused and bereft. Anne was still asleep next to me, as reassuringly there in the night as Tilly is during the day. At least I hadn’t woken her. That was a relief.

There are all the places I cannot go, too. All the small joys of life have gone. The cafes along Mill Road where I would sit for half an hour for coffee and cake. Bumping into a chum and having a gas for a few minutes. I know self-isolation is necessary. I know why I’m shielding myself away. I get it, I really do. I’d be completely fucked if I were infected. I am concentrating on the positives, like the constant presence beside me of cat or wife but it’s not always enough.

I used to see that zany mug, the one that says you don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps, you know, that one. I saw it everywhere and at first it was funny. Years go it was funny. Years ago, I didn’t really know anyone who was mentally ill. I’m not going to tell you about my first encounter with mental illness because it’s not my story to tell. It surprised me and upset me, just a bit anyway because when you’re that age just about everything that happens which isn’t about you doesn’t matter because it isn’t about you. Anyway, the mug thing and the mental illness thing. Do you remember when everything was absolutely mental! A night out, getting pissed and just about not getting into trouble was absolutely mental! Teachers were often absolutely mental! There was often someone in the group who was absolutely mental! It was just words and then I saw someone lose it and they were absolutely mental! And absolutely mental! wasn’t what I thought it was.

Maybe we’re back in the realms of the inadequacy of vocabulary rather than inappropriateness of response. Love is seldom what we thought it would be. It involves a lot less shagging and a lot more listening than I thought it would, for a start. That’s a really good thing, by the way. The language we use to describe emotions and values comes from a culturally limited pool. It’s like having to fix a problem with your plumbing when all you have is a cycle repair kit and half a dozen Ikea Allen keys. Only plumbers really have the toolkit to fix plumbing problems and only people who have dealt with emotional problems or mental illness have the language to express concepts which will make thing better.

I’m not really one of those people. I’m doing the basics. I work my way through the Headspace stuff to try to deal with my anxiety. To be honest, I’m not sure it’s working. I am aware of the negative thoughts and I am not falling into the old habits of not dealing with them but I’m not really going anywhere with it. I’m lazy and I’m not quite uncomfortable enough yet and there is always someone around for when things get bad.

It’s very quiet though. I can hear the blood running through my ears just under the now constant tinnitus. I’m going back in time again for a moment but do you remember when the test card came on television at night and they played music for a bit and then they started playing a tone, maybe because the music got a bit expensive? My ears are playing the tone from the test card.

There is nothing a long walk in the fresh air and plate of soup won’t sort for me now. I can have the soup, no problem. It’ll do for a start. In better but still indoor news, you can watch Alice Fraser’s absolutely brilliant show Savage on Amazon Prime and I wholeheartedly recommend that you do.

April 15, 2020April 15, 2020

Have You Lost Track Of Time?

To take account of our new reality, the days of the week are now to be known as Monday (because Mondays have always sucked and we see no reason for this ever to change), Tuednesday, Wedthursday, Kevin and/or Karen, TFIFday, Tomorrowday, Sitdownday, and That Day When We Don’t Feel Guilty About Not Going To Church Any More Day Day.

Months are also being renamed. We will now have Janruary, Febrarch, Marpril, Surprisingly Cold, Probably Won’t, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, Lies, Boris (in thanksgiving for His miraculous recovery), Remember What Schools Are, Octdumber, Newdumber, Monthy McMonthyface and Presents!

The numbers of days in the week or months in the year are liable to change, possibly at short notice, for operational or cost reasons.

There is an outside chance that 2020 will be extended by up to eleventy-seven months if Priti Patel has anything to do with it.

April 13, 2020April 13, 2020

Being Human

There are two seemingly contradictory tendencies in the very act of being human and acting them out leads to conflicts and dissonances that are almost impossible to avoid or to reconcile when or if they are ever acknowledged. The first is the urge to find out our origins and root ourselves in time and space. The second is the urge to explore, to go beyond what we have now and seek out the new. These two tendencies can drive the same person at the same time, or influence them at different times in their lives. They have political and cultural consequences and just one of them is Them And Us.

Some people really, really want to find out who they are. The family historians and the amateur genealogists. They can tell you what their ancestors were doing and who they were doing it to in some remote and rural part of the country when Jack Cade was having his rebellion. They’ve been through census records online, rocked up to local museums and record offices, taken photographs of church yards, caught obscure lung diseases from the dust on long-unread muniments, and all to find documentary proof that some distant ancestor once could have been ignored by Henry VI or something. I don’t know.

Others might want to prove a long-standing connection to a place or a thing. Some families have been in the same area for generations. Even now, when we have a very mobile population and your neighbour can come from the other side of the world, you can still find people living a handful of miles from where they were born and brought up. I don’t know whether people have a deep connection to a place like that. Some might, others just haven’t moved away because it never really occurred to them to do so. I know that we are supposed to be explorers but now we have settled just about everywhere where settlement is possible. Now we prefer to stay put, by and large, if only because there seem to be people everywhere else we might care to go.

The Out of Africa Hypothesis suggests that there were a number of small scale migrations out of Africa, across the Middle East and Asia and up into Europe by our ancestors from 70,000 years ago, give or take. They spread out by about 10 miles per generation along coasts and up rivers. Even when it was possible to go anywhere at all, people didn’t really stray very far from familiar territory, until they had to cross oceans to reach Australia.

(I really would like to know who thought that was a good idea, and even why they thought they should stay there given everything in Australia can bite, scratch, kick, poison or just swallow you whole. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were some fucking vampire butterfly down there waiting to be dredged out of my nightmares and into reality in suburban Perth.)

Anyway, nobody wanted to stray far is my point even if there weren’t many people elsewhere preventing them. I’m assuming that people were able to walk and carry what they needed with them even if they had no pack animals for the first 60,000 to 65,000 years. I am not at all certain that anyone would want to claim ancestry back that far but there have been studies in the UK which have shown descendants of people buried in medieval graveyards in an English village still living locally. You might remember Julian Richards’ BBC series Meet the Ancestors which covered this. I remember the series mostly for the anthropologist who did the facial reconstructions who kept coming back every time anyone on telly wanted a facial reconstruction and they methods she used changing from modelling clay to computer graphics.

Adam Rutherford in his book A Brief History of Everyone Who has Ever Lived said that we’re all related to one another anyway, at least everyone in Europe. I think that’s what he said anyway. It’s a while since I read it and I can’t find my copy to revise so I might have to issue a correction once I’ve had a chance to read the relevant chapters again. Since we all have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-grandparents and so on, the number of ancestors doubling with every generation, it takes surprisingly little time before we find that any two people in the country have the same random ancestor. It’s not quite Six Degrees of Separation, or your Bacon Number or your Erdős number but somewhere in the past 600 years it’s very likely that the same person will crop up in the family trees of both me and my wife and we come from very different parts of the country.

Now this is a bit of a contradiction, given what I said earlier about people tending to stay in the same part of the world but even so, some people chose to move or were forced to move for work, or to avoid famine, imprisonment, oppression or just because they were a bit more restless than the norm. Whatever, it seems that if you come from one part of the country then you come from all parts of the country and if you go back further in time, then you come from all parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Everybody essentially comes from everywhere. That’s not the same as saying that we are rootless and it’s the need to feel rooted to a place or to find our family’s place in the world that the amateur genealogist does their thing.

I’ve mentioned the urge to go beyond where we are geographically. Gene Roddenbury’s “Space, the final frontier” line is one with which nearly all of us have grown up. That urge to boldly go is not one with which I am personally familiar. I’m too comfortable where I am now, although I do like standing at the counter in a cafe in Venice with an espresso doppio hearing but not really understanding the conversations going on around me. Some of us are explorers and without them we wouldn’t have ever left Africa and ended up all over the world.

As well as the physical explorers, there are the people who have to explore the limits of our understanding of the world. The theorists who come up with new ideas and the experimentalists and engineers who then have come up with ways of testing those ideas, sifting facts and sticking them together. It’s not just scientists and engineers. There are artists and poets and philosophers and athletes and teachers and even priests continually pushing beyond what we know and what we have achieved and showing us that the limits are just a little further away than we had thought.

And in spite of the wonder of it all, the unceasing expansion of What We Know and What We Can Do there are still countless arseholes who can’t see the value in any of it. If you can’t stick a price tag on it then it’s worthless, they think. And if you can put a price tag on it, then it better be a small one unless they are setting the price, in which case add a couple of zeroes before you get to the decimal point. And the people from Over There can’t come Over Here because this is Ours and We don’t want Them because they look different, have funny ideas, smell odd, eat the wrong food and will use up all Our Stuff. It’s all bollocks.

If someone is telling you that a third party is not One of Us, have a look at that person with some criticality. Do we share the same values? How much do we really have in common? Do they express their values in actions you find acceptable? I don’t like the politics of class, really, but I understand why class politics has its place. I’m not a fan of nationalism, in spite of being very proudly Scottish. The history of nationalism is not a happy one, especially in the 20th century. Going back to the start of this paragraph, if someone is telling me that someone is not one of us based on their race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, cultural practices or anything else and yet I have more in common with that third party based on values, aspirations, fellow-feeling, economic status and physical proximity then fuck it, the Us is me and that third party not me and, just for a random example Vote Leave, Leave.EU and Jacob Rees-Sodding-Mogg.

There’s a book in this. There are several, in fact. There are political manifestos and campaigns and all sorts and if we ever find a new kind of normal when all the travel and social restrictions are lifted, I hope I’ll have some to sell. I’ve proven already that I lack the concentration and organizational skills to write more than random, ranting blog posts myself. There will be a life after Covid19 and it will be different. If we allow the politics of Them and Us to continue, it will be a narrower, sadder, much, much stupider life than it could be. This emergency has shown that wherever borders have been drawn, we need to co-operate across them. There really isn’t a Them. We need a more inclusive approach to everything.

April 11, 2020April 22, 2020

Twelve Angry Men*

So, how are you dealing with this unrelenting stream of shit? My Twitter stream has almost ceased to mention anything if it’s not related to coronavirus, social isolation, lots and lots of dead people, crap policing and clapping for the NHS. Last weekend, there was a brief break in the Twitter weather and there was a lot of silliness, #Caturday posts, hashtag games and all sorts of other nonsense but that seems to have passed and we’re now back to Angry Twitter and nothing does anger quite as unremittingly as Twitter after a couple of weeks of confinement.

Anger can be a useful emotion. It can be a driver for necessary change, and God knows we need that. The thing is I don’t have room for anger right now, I’m too busy dealing with fear and trying to avoid despair. I saw a couple of posts yesterday, this one from Siena Rodgers:

…and another from Carole Cadwallader:

…and to be honest, I don’t find either of them helpful right now. The former implies that anyone who doesn’t feel the same as she does just doesn’t understand what is going on or is somehow a moral failure. The latter thinks we’re just lazy.

We’re not. For the most part, we’re terrified, or we’re anxious for the safety of ourselves, our friends and family, or we’re confused or we’re just fed up because we’ve been stuck indoors for what feels like months when spring has finally decided to show up. It’s a really bad idea at the best of times to tell people how to feel, or to dismiss someone who doesn’t feel the same way as you do as lazy or inattentive.

It’s not that I’m content with the way our government has dealt with things, or with the way some of the media has held them to account on our behalf. I’m really not that impressed with the parliamentarians who haven’t done that much to do their job either. However, I just don’t have the bandwidth for it. I have been indoors shielding from this sodding virus for almost two weeks now. I can’t go for a run – which would be my usual mechanism for dealing with stress or distress – because even if social distancing measures were relaxed, I could still contract the virus and end up in Addie’s or Papworth.

There is nothing I can do to change our government’s woeful lack of preparedness for this emergency. I’m not going to get angry about that. There is nothing I can do to ensure that the NHS, the people working in social care, driving buses, delivering food, working in supermarkets, or fulfilling any of the hundred other vital roles in our society get the PPE they need right now and I’m not going to feel guilty about that. I am going to remain grateful that they are there. I will certainly make sure that I don’t forget the work they have done in extraordinarily difficult circumstances when I next come to vote.

And I need to remember not to allow my resentment at being told how to feel by people who don’t know me nor even know that I exist turn into anger at them. Life’s too fucking short as it is.

*Women can be angry too. I only borrowed the title for a blogpost.

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