Get
your recriminations in early, list them, remember them and throw them at the
guilty when the crisis is over and they are brought to justice. As if!
The latest piece of absurdity to surface
here in Spain is that 650,000 Covid-19 test kits have been ordered that are not
fit for purpose, it even says as much on the side of the packs! They were ordered from China from a supplier
not approved by the Chinese authorities who had previously provided a list of
recommended suppliers - ignored by the Spanish health officials.
A plane left Barcelona airport for Malaga
packed with people who were not the regulation distance apart – how was this
allowed?
Couples are walking dogs together. People are coming and going (using the back
entrance) of the house next door as if there is no crisis to limit their
actions in continuing the building work.
There is no uniformity about travel and
keeping a distance. We have death
figures higher than China and many of us fear that the commitment to total
lockdown as the only solution to rising numbers is not entirely accepted by the
government. We MUST remember and hold them all to
account.
Listening
to The Now Show on Radio 4 last
night, we were left in no doubt that the participants had all followed
guidelines and were broadcasting the show from their respective homes.
As it was radio we do not know just how they
were dressed and consideration of that factor is perhaps best left to
imaginations more prurient than mine, but the major difference between the
normal show and the crisis show was the lack of a live audience. With humour this can be something of a
disadvantage when the listener sometimes needs to hear the audience give a more
audible response to the inward chuckle.
But it was a good show, with a few wry digs and a competent set of
comedians.
Other shows are also being broadcast where
the participants are not in studio but are at home and if the show is for
television, that is where the Crisis (capital ‘C’) comes into play. News broadcasts now regularly feature experts
and politicians who are ostentatiously following the rules and self-isolating,
but such exposure presents them with a real problem: what, in a Crisis, to have
in the background.
For most people who wish to present a
professional vision (literally!) of themselves, the problem is solved by having
a background of books. Books add
gravitas, they show knowledge, they are Culture. But.
If I had an HD television and a recorder
and had a way of enlarging the background, I feel it would be very interesting
to see exactly what books these people have chosen to put themselves in front
of. There is a post-crisis PhD thesis there!
Perhaps ‘chosen’ is the wrong word to use
for some of them, in so far as they are perhaps sitting at their desks in their
home ‘office’ and the bookcase is the one that happens to be behind them. Or is it?
There is a low-ish bookcase behind me as I
type and I’ve just turned around to look at it.
It is not the background that I would choose to be televised
against. There is an unsightly
collection of mismatched books on the top shelf (together with a garish money
box inscribed “Para mi gran viaje”) and the other shelves are filled with a
variety of tatty box files with hand written titles and a sellotaped piece of
paper reminding me that Palm Sunday is on the 5th of April this
year. This last is because I write a
poem-a-day during Holy Week. Because I
do.
To my right is another bookcase, one shelf
of which is filled with reference books.
Now these are far more photogenic: not only are they solid looking
hardbacks, but also one of them has the word IDEAS in big capital letters along
the spine. Importantly, the word is
large enough to be read by an appreciative watching television audience, or one that might be subliminally impressed!
The problem with these books is that they
are all too new looking, a little too superficial. You need older books to make it appear that
the shelves' contents have been read; that the books are old companions, not window dressing.
I have a lot of books and, although I have
tried, I have failed to get all of them into a coherent order on my
shelves. Most of my shelves are a voyage
of discovery rather than a pattern for the Dewey Decimal System. There are unexpected juxtapositions so that
(and I have just reached up for a couple of books from another bookcase) The Nations of Wales 1890-1914 by M.
Wynn Thomas is next to Religio Medici,
Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus
by Sir Thomas Browne, both of which are worth reading in their different ways
and whose proximity is pleasing. Give me
time and I will work out why they deserve to be together! But my point is that for most people with a
large book collection the organizing principle is chaos not order. Or perhaps that is only true in the Arts
rather than the Sciences. Or perhaps
it’s just me.
Now some people are chaotic in their
organization and some have chaos thrust upon them and some others play at chaos: the casually strewn and oddly
placed as artful indicator of the eccentric genius.
The Book Backgrounds have ranged from the
pitifully eked out shelves to the deep alcove floor to ceiling plenitude, but I
just wonder how contrived it all is, and how long the ‘players’ in the
television game have thought about how to present themselves.
Now you might well say that I must have
too much time on my hands to be concerned about such things, but what an
individual places behind themself is a clearer indication of how they want to
be perceived than anything they might have to say. I think.
On
television this evening there was a snatch of an interview with a solitary
walker who was accosted and asked why he was breaking the regulations and his
response was that he did not know that there were any regulations to
break! Not only have we have the Spanish
Government paying for ads on the television, we have had the Generalitat in
Catalonia and various advertisers who have tailored their messages to include reinforcement
of the restrictions on behaviour. How
could the man have missed everything?
If, of course, he was telling the truth about his ‘ignorance’! All it needs is a man like that who is also
infected to cause another spike, and kill people. Inconsideration is fatal, not funny.
As
we come to the end of the second week of isolation, it is sobering to think
that we may well have only passed one seventh of the time necessary for the
sequestration to work on the virus. One
hopes that is a pessimistic forecast, but I fear it is a realistic one.
What are we going to be like by the end of
this time? One friend in the UK says
that we are headed for civil unrest and riots; a friend in Catalonia says that
the restrictions are too lenient and if they are not tightened then the
situation will get much worse. As time
goes one and people who are not sick think that the restraints are too irksome,
will they become freer in their actions, and will people who see others
breaking the rules feel entitled to follow them? And then . . .
The real problem for us is that this
situation is unparalleled and we are winging it, following advice from deeply
flawed politicians, with failure illustrating their lack of forthrightness.
One of the free MOOC courses that I am
following at the moment is using some of the writing of Kant and I am sure that
he would say that the restrictions on our behaviour and actions that are the
most satisfactory are those that we would impose on ourselves if we had the
freedom to do so. Are the restrictions
the sort of restrictions that we would think necessary in the
circumstances? I will stick to the rules
come what may because Kant tells me to!
And I have managed to prevent myself from making a jocose comment using
the name and adding an apostrophe and changing the K to a C.
Such restraint in the time of Corona!
