It’s
raining.
I am disinclined to go on my circuits of
the communal swimming pool in the pouring rain.
I am further depressed by the reading in
the Guardian about Goblin Gove’s typically mealy-mouthed, unconvincing response
to a series of allegations in The Sunday Times that the Convalescing Clot
missed five consecutive emergency meetings of COBRA in the build up to the
Covid-19 crisis and that the government shipped PPE to China in February.
That would have covered the period when
our part-time Prime Minister was hidden away in Chequers, a prime minister who
notoriously “didn’t work weekends” according to an unnamed senior adviser! Once Bullingdon Club always Bullingdon Club:
the lazy sense of entitlement of the rich and the privileged; let the lesser
breeds without the law do the hard graft while the Johnson jonson sets about
adding another child to the unnumbered brood.
I am more than prepared to believe that
the lingering poison of Brexit mixed with the euphoria of the Conservative
right wing after the crushing electoral victory led the ‘government’ fatally to
mismanage a coherent approach to the Covid-10 crisis.
The typical Tory inhumanity of the ‘herd
immunity’ approach to dealing with the crisis, complacently accepting hefty
deaths will be remembered, together with the astonishing U-Turn when it was
suddenly abandoned in favour of approaches that more nearly matched virtually
every other government in the world.
The
position of the Health Secretary is becoming more and more untenable – or at
least it should be becoming more and
more untenable as more and more avoidable deaths will be laid as a memorial to
his incompetence. Yes, efficient supply
is difficult in times of crisis, especially in a cash and equipment and
personnel starved institution like the NHS that is in its present state because
of the cruel austerity practiced by the Tory government for the last
decade.
The empty platitudes of support that Tory
ministers mouth for Health Workers are cruelly ironic given their attitudes
towards the NHS over the past years.
These are the same vile folk who cheered after a pay increase for Nurses
was defeated in the House of Commons!
They disgust me.
And, as I typed that last bitter sentence,
the rain outside has grown appreciably heavier.
There is nothing like the Pathetic Fallacy to cement misery in place!
In
an effort to escape the gnawing resentment contained in the paragraphs above, I
have turned to something more creative.
My chapbook of poems written in Holy Week called Coasts of Memory. I have
been working on illustration and made a decision to use only photographs taken
within the lockdown confines. This means
that the house, the garden, the communal pool and what I can see from the
terrace and windows are all fair game for my camera!
I spent yesterday evening playing around
with the raw material that I had and started placing individual pictures in
what I considered to be appropriate places in the chapbook. I am constantly frustrated by petty
mechanical problems with images and sometimes it is a case of printing what
fits rather than fitting what I want to print!
There is also the problem of he
disappearing fonts. I save what I do
fairly religiously; I have been caught out too often and too painfully when
documents develop a missing life of their own not to remember to save. But I am often frustrated by the way in which
complex documents do not always retain formatting.
The latest example of this concerns by
choice of a fairly exotic fort used as a title.
This font did not transfer when I sent the document via email rather
than copying it onto a memory stick - in spite of my avowal of the very latest
in technology, I can be whimsically old-school from time to time! The font is space greedy, so when it
transfers as something altogether more prosaic it means that everything else on
the page is out of place and that has a domino effect on all the pages
afterwards. As I was going to use that
particular version of the book for detailed editing, it might turn out to be
self-defeating if I have to redo everything with the ‘correct’ font in place in
the final document. Such things are sent
to try me, and at least I can have a direct effect on what I do there, as
opposed to whingeing on about what my government is doing or not doing in this
crisis!
In
the way in which the petty becomes important: Toni is going out to get
bread! An event for which he dresses up
like an Inuit and wings the desolate abyss between our home and the bread shop
that is a few streets away. I enjoy the
results of these little excursions as we usually have a little treat from the
patisserie as well as mere bread – by which alone, one cannot live!
This time, as well as the bread, Toni is
going to attempt to get some chicken from the pollo a last, this will be our first ‘bought in’ meal since the
lockin began. However, if there is a
queue, or there are too many people there then the meal will be called off and
we will have to settle for the bread.
And treats.
There
are increasing accounts in the media of the possibility of no vaccine being
produced in the short term, or even ever.
We have the example of AIDS, where, in spite of extensive research over a
number of years, we are still without a vaccine. Treatment for the disease, yes; vaccine no. That is a very sobering thought. It means that we will be dealing with the
virus as an ever-present threat well after this initial surge is over and it
also means that for people in my age group the restrictions are going to last
for the foreseeable future.
This is a more than depressing thought!
