The Tories care about people? Well, some of them don't

If anyone ever tells you that the Conservatives don’t care about people, ignore them. The Conservative and Unionist Party most certainly care about people. 

Or at least, some members of the Conservative and Unionist Party care about some people.

 

Unfortunately, if you fall outside the select band, then it really is a case of ‘screw you’. 

 

And the past few weeks have offered two perfect examples of that.

 

At the end of September, I received an email, ostensibly from the secretary of state for health, Sajid Javid MP, on the basis that I had been advised to shield last year, when the pandemic got into full swing.

 

Let’s be entirely clear: I had cancer in 2018. “Had”, in that I am currently still free of it after major surgery – and a massive thank you to my GP practice and my local hospital for ensuring that checks have continued throughout the pandemic – though it could still come back.

 

I have high blood pressure (only diagnosed in 2019, so I’m going to blame the bleedin’ Tories) and I’m overweight.

 

But not exactly being at death’s door. I have had just two days off sick during the pandemic, continuing to work full time throughout, from home – and indeed, being part of a very small team that has won an external award for the work that we have done during that same pandemic.

 

Though of course, if you read the Express, Mail, Sun, Telegraph or other such publications, you’ve probably been told that nothing like that has happened and that anyone working from home hasn’t been ... well, working.

 

For more clarity: although I live in a very small flat, I’m fortunate enough to be able to work at home with a decent physical set up, as I’ve previously been a freelance journalist, self-employed. The OH, though never freelance, was also in the same position in terms of his ability to work from home, prior to his retirement in June 2020, which was planned 12 months before.

 

But let’s consider Javid’s email advice to those who had been shielding – in other words, those who had been described by their own GPs as “extremely clinically vulnerable” to COVID-19.

 

“You should continue to follow the same general guidance as everyone else,” it declares. This can be found at https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus. But “in addition to any condition specific advice you may have been given by your specialist in recent weeks ... as someone with a health condition you might also want to think about extra things you can do to keep yourself and others safe.”

 

Okay ... so what might those be?

 

“This could include:

• considering whether you and those you are meeting have been vaccinated – you might want to wait until 14 days after everyone’s second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine before being in close contact with others;
• considering continuing to practise social distancing if that feels right for you and your friends;
• asking friends and family to take a rapid lateral flow antigen test before visiting you; 
• asking home visitors to wear face coverings;
• avoiding crowded spaces.”

So, these are things to “consider”, right?

 

To start with, there is no mention of clinically vulnerable people – or members of their family – being expected to travel to workplaces.

 

There is a sense that those who are ‘genuinely’ clinically vulnerable will be old, retired and not with members of their household expected to attend an external workplace.

 

Still, I suppose it made a change from the paper snail-mail letters ‘signed’ by “Matt” [Hancock] and Robert Jenrick.

 

However, it is a total abrogation of any responsibility for public health from the health secretary. 

 

A couple of weeks ago, having been informed that I must be in the physical workplace at least two days a week, I sat in a room for a hybrid meeting, where the social distancing was not what it should have been. Given my personal circumstances, I was very close to freaking, walking away from the physical meeting and joining it online.

 

I have heard the argument that I need to learn to live with the risks. Yet this seems to assume that I need to learn to live with me increasing the risks to my partner too. That is ethically appalling.

And all it would have taken was for the UK government to say that, if you had shielded last year, then if remotely (there's obviously a joke here) possible, it would be best to continue working from home.

 

Instead, people have been put into an invidious situation whereby employers can demand they do something that increases the risk – not only to themselves, but to others in their household who don't get to make that choice.

And of course, at the time of writing, COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths are rising.

 

And nobody saw this coming as a consequence of ‘Freedom Day’.

 

However, this is not the only example of the state of the UK’s government. Just before the start of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was challenged in a television interview on how to measure his promised ‘levelling up’ between the country’s regions.

He answered: “I’ve given you the most important metric – never mind life expectancy, never mind cancer outcomes – look at wage growth.

“Wage growth is now being experienced faster by those on lower incomes. It hasn’t happened for 10 years or more. That is what I mean by levelling up.”

As it happens, the claim about wage growth is a lie – but then again, his lips were moving – but what a thing to openly state: that life expectancy, falling in the UK for those not as well-to-do as the prime minister, and cancer outcomes* don’t matter.

 

It’s almost like the Conservatives ... some Conservatives ... really don’t give a flying one about the masses.

 

* Just a note to say, let’s not forget that, while his then wife was being treated for cancer, Boris Johnson was busy shagging another woman.

** And another note to say that the cartoon used above is from @chrisriddell50, and I hope he forgives me for using it here.

 

 

 

A plague on all our houses

Bruised and battered,

Brought low by its own benighted will,

Perfidious Albion crawls toward its golden dawn.

 

The high priests of Brexit now

Preach that, just as

Plucky little Blighty

Won in ’45,

So We Have Won Again.

 

This time the prize

Will not be having played an honourable part

In a defeat of fascism,

But blue passports for all and

Unicorns that frolic on the sunlit uplands.

 

Plague Island

As it has become,

Is governed by clueless clowns;

Corrupt and cronyistic,

Liars every one.

 

A tousle-haired buffoon,

A Ghost of Years Gone West;

A gurning schoolboy who proclaims

This country is ‘the best!’

Let’s not forget the bully,

Who loves being smirkingly cruel,

And all their colleagues who believe

Poor children should feast on gruel.

 

Don’t forget the one who claimed expenses for his stable

Or he who dished out housing deals

To those around his table.

Recall the dolt who didn’t know

That Calais is rather near!

And the cheesy one whose trade deal claims

Bring forth an embarrassed tear.

 

Who voted for this bunch of goons,

Fiddling while the country burns?

 

It wasn’t me.

But have I done enough

To counter all their lies and obfuscation?

Or am I some sort of Vichyite,

Happy to go with the flow,

Avoiding complication?

 

I really don’t have a crib sheet,

I don’t really know what it means.

But I do know we need to be sharper

To think logically and

Not just to dream.

 

For dreams will not bring us progress;

And dreams will not combat the lies.

So put shoulder to the wheel

And hope we might learn to be wise.

                                                                            December 2020

Born to run – or possibly not?

Unlike Joe Biden, I don’t have a running mate. But then, I haven’t run since around – oh, 1986 – and nobody has been waiting around for me to join in.

I liked running – but then I liked sport, even if I had limited opportunities to engage in it. For my first five years at secondary school, we’d only run around a field, since we were near the middle of Manchester. With my second secondary school – in semi-rural Lancaster – I’d missed cross-country PE (though I loved volleyball and particularly badminton). In terms of running, I was inspired by the 1984 Olympic Games.

It almost goes without saying that I was stopped from playing football, which I wanted to do so much that, in my pre-teen years, I prayed to God to make me be a boy so that I could play the game.

I have always been competitive. I can’t resist it. I want to win. I remember playing non-competitive pool in a lesbian bar in Amsterdam in the 1990s and finding myself wondering how you even begin to do that! I mean … how do you endeavour to not pot the ball?

That didn’t win me any friends.

So inspired by top athletes, I bought shoes (Reeboks) and ran circuits around central Lancaster, where my family lived at the time. There were comments from passing drivers. ‘Don’t give yourself a black eye!’ was the wittiest that I remember. Because some people are fecking idiots and I had always had big boobs, irrespective of weight and BMI.

But I carried on running.

I registered for a race – can’t remember how long, but it was the sort of race that saw you sent An Official Race Number to attach to your shorts.

God, I was so proud when I got that, propping it on a shelf to be in view. I wasn’t quite at the distance for the race, but I was on the way and it was an incentive to pump up my training.

And then, in a sporting competition between the Lancaster Footlights (for whom I was the captain that night), the Duke’s Playhouse and the local leisure centre, I tore the lateral ligaments in my left knee: a full-blown ‘Gazza’.

I completed the night’s competition – in agony – and the next day, dragged myself to A&E, where my leg was encased in cotton wool and lots of plaster, and I was given crutches.

I got over it enough to be thrown to the floor by Salieri in the Footlights’ award-winning production of Amadeus that spring (I was playing Mozart’s missus), but I had issues with the knee for years (particularly in damp winters) and, when I moved to London to find work in 1988, discovered that running on uneven London pavements was not fun.

And there my running career ended.

Until now.

For reasons about which I have no clue, at the beginning of this year – before COVID-19 – I started to feel an itch.

Could I run again? For some reason that I don’t particularly understand, I wanted to.

The lockdown intervened and I didn’t do so until 6 August, a day or so after I’d signed up to a charity fundraiser.

Step Up September will raise funds for There for You, a charity from public service trade union UNISON, which helps members in need. In recent months, that’s been affected hugely by the new Coronavirus. Members who clean hospitals, care for the elderly and the vulnerable, and carry out myriad other essential tasks have found themselves struggling too – and There for You is helping.

My running can hopefully help those who have been helping us all.

Because of the pandemic, Step Up September doesn’t carry specific targets. But as an overweight woman of almost 58, who hasn’t run in decades, then if I can manage, by the end of September, to run more than five minutes, it’ll be an achievement built on bloody-minded grit and really quite serious, regular training.

My first session was on 6 August and saw me using interval training: I could only run for 30 seconds at a time. Two weeks later, I am hitting two minutes regularly, with a maximum time of two minutes and 24 seconds.

Look – I know it’s not exactly Olympic standard, but it requires genuine effort (believe me!), and my own GP is delighted.

And if you can manage to make a donation to a really good cause, then I thank you in advance.

Please help me fund-raise here – it you can, it will be fantastic.

Literary joys in lockdown

Lockdown has been tough for everyone, but from a personal perspective, one of its few high notes thus far has been that I have been reading as though possessed.

The year had already started well on the book front: by mid-March, I’d read 10 titles. About a week later, when I started working from home because of COVID-19 – seven days ahead of the curve – I was about half way through what would be my eleventh book of the year.

Perhaps I should explain a little: for some anal reason or other, I like lists – and I keep ones of books I’ve read, films I’ve seen at the cinema and live performances of various sorts, together with a bit of a rating system.

Additionally, in as much as I ever make new year resolutions, reading more is a perpetual promise I make to myself.

Strangely enough, it’s also the only one of those lists that is thriving this year. Roughly a book a week until I went into lockdown. In the 15 weeks since, the total is 23.

That doesn’t include anything I haven’t finished – and there have been one or two: almost always when I’m struggling to get going again after something that has absolutely grabbed me and refused to let go until the last page.

Some of the books involved are very slender – not least because I started reading poetry quite seriously. But then again, more than one book has been well over 400 pages.

Indeed, the one that I was reading when I went into lockdown was one such example – Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery.

Eco’s The Name of the Rose was the first literary novel I ever read voluntarily. It took me ages, but I loved it. I subsequently spent a long time getting through Foucault’s Pendulum.

Like those, The Prague Cemetery is about conspiracies: Eco is obsessed with them – and he is very good at showing you how they are created and how they grow.

There’s something unpleasant about the taste that The Prague Cemetery leaves in the mouth (albeit less so than after reading pretty much anything by Nabokov), given the nature of the anti-Semitic conspiracies that are created in this book. Almost all the characters really existed and what Eco has done is gloriously written and shines an unforgiving light on the conspiracy industry.

After that, Autumn and Winter, the first two volumes of Ali Smith’s seasons quartet. Written about a Britain in the wake of the 2016 referendum result, these are both are wonderful. Stunningly imaginative, they challenge the reader in unexpected and poetic ways. A joy to read and I look forward to the next two.

If you fancy something a bit more factual, then Hold on Edna! Is the story of the birth of the NHS, from the first baby born in it, Aneira Thomas – and I reviewed it here.

Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party is a classic murder mystery in a closed room. I found it really quite irritating until I metaphorically slapped myself around the chops to remember that most of the characters in Agatha Christie are irritating too.

Foley has created a seriously tense story that will have you turning the pages madly to the end.

And now to Ransom Riggs and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and its sequel, Hollow City.

These are wonderful works of fantasy; beautifully written, and illustrated by the most extraordinary vintage photographs, which both inspired the stories themselves and also give a really different feel to the books. I loved the first one – but the second is even better.

Wonderful stuff – and a perfect illustration that ‘children’s books’ can have plenty to reward adult reading.

On the fantasy front, it took me two goes at it, but I finally made my way through John Gardner’s novella, Grendel.

This entry into the Fantasy Masterworks selection is an alternate take on Beowulf and is short, but dense with ideas and images, and has a wonderful sense of the mythological that makes it very special indeed.

I mentioned poetry, and I’ve been reading a fair few slender volumes, so let me give particular mentions to Wendy Cope’s Serious Concerns, Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover! and Margaret Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House.

In a melding of poetry and prose, I finally got around to reading the very short – but utterly stunning – Grief is the Thing with Feather by Max Porter. Do read – possibly after reading Ted Hughes’s crow poems first.

I’ve already mentioned Atwood, but if her poetry is good, her short story collection, Stone Mattress is, for me, even better. Frankly, it is the sort of dark gothic stuff that has lingered in the mind since.

It hasn’t all been ‘arty’: I’ve also finally read Stephen King’s one vampire novel, Salem’s Lot (and loved it.

But my bookish highlight of the last few weeks is absolutely a literary one.

For various reasons, I got around to James Baldwin and his semi-autobiographical first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain.

It is stunning. I feel a link because, while not personally knowing the Pentecostalism of speaking in tongues, I have experienced other elements of the evangelistic Christianity that he describes.

But beyond that, Baldwin, in this gloriously written debut, seems to me to make the lived experience of those with a heritage of slavery to be immediate and understandable to all. I have never seen it, and felt an understanding of it, so clearly.

It is an incredible book and, if I had to recommend just one from this lockdown of reading, that would be it.

I’ve just ordered more Baldwin – so what more can I say?

Freedom Bid

A budgie, pretty in lilac, cream and brown

Perches on the trellis,

Glancing all around and seemingly

Unafraid.

Yet just yesterday,

The next-door blackbirds lost a chick.

Fledging too soon from the shielding hedge,

It dropped from the ledge and once on the ground

Was trapped.

Easy meat for a magpie to peck.

The budgie, charming colours so striking here,

Perches on the trellis

Alongside dowdy sparrows,

Pecking at jasmine flowers.

Ceramic white petals float to the ground.

Forget the local sparrowhawk or passing peregrine.

Staying alert, a black cat leaps

To snatch.

The budgie breaks away with a squawk,

Escaping – this time at least.

But having leapt from some shielding cage

Spread its wings and flown free,

How long can it survive?

The budgie, exotic in its parrot hues

Returns to the trellis,

Glancing all around and seemingly

Still unafraid.

But up and down and all around,

They watch.

And wait.

4 June 2020

Lockdown's creative surge continues

The lockdown brings with it plenty of difficulties, but there can also be opportunities – not least to think about things. 

I’ve already explained briefly here that for me, it has produced an entirely unexpected creative burst, as I have found myself writing poetry for the first time in decades.

In the last couple of days, remembering old family photographs uncovered when clearing my parents’ home two years ago this summer, I found that a couple of the pictures made me want to talk about them.

Or to put another way, I felt that I wanted to write about some of them, to build a picture in a different way. The photographs themselves will be included, because this is – hopefully – one thing complimenting another.

Before

Snow-dumped fells blur

Into snow-filled skies;

Drifts arc up from the road

Like a pitted bobsleigh track.

She stands in the middle distance,

To the bottom left.

Perspective,

deceptive,

has a black hedge tower over her,

Drawing the eye

and accidentally lending the shot

                        good composition.

The slide was colour but

Winter and time have leached that.

Blow it up and there is no trace

of a smile

in the smudge of a face.

Booted, with feet turned out

(Later, she’d say not to stand that way).

Stockings beneath a dress or skirt,

She relies for warmth on a big coat,

collar up

And hands hidden in gloves or overlong sleeves.  

Her hair is tucked away, queen-like, beneath a scarf.

Further off, two men in caps

            clear the road.

It was December ’62 and

The snow that had snowed

            would be followed by plenty more;

And, just a few days later,

            By me.

23 May 2020

The Duchess

Unexpectedly for me at least, the lockdown has produced a surge of creativity that I did not expect.

For the first time since my early twenties, when the results were predictably embarrassing (little experience of the world combined with a restricted worldview, given the restrictions of my home life), I have been writing poetry.

For the moment, I’m grouping what I write under a general banner of Lockdown Lines.

They are not all about the lockdown, but they have all been written while I am in lockdown.

I have posted a few already. This is one of those that is not about the coronavirus, but is about a lady who was in the bed opposite me when I was in hospital two years ago.

No notes or anything like that were taken at the time, but I have never forgotten the incidents I describe below. The section about what her past might have included is entirely from my imagination: all the rest really happened.

My father had died just a week before I went into hospital – a key cause was dementia. Perhaps that’s why Doris remains so clearly in my mind.

The Duchess

Swaddled in zebra-stripe velour she dozes,

Lunch barely touched on the over-bed table.

“Doris,” the time-starved nurse had pleaded,

“You must like fish and chips” ...

As though not eating was entirely a choice.

Broken hips will heal in time once reset;

A mind tick-tick-tocked into the past is gone.

Her son sits beside her, head bowed low;

There’s nothing to say and

He makes no move to disturb her 40 winks.

Next day, Annie and Joan urge her to “Get up!

“Try out your bionic peg!” they cackle.

I call out that the physio’s not here

And at last a nurse comes,                 

Bringing an end to impending disaster.                     

Doris, Doris duchess of The Dolphin,       

Known in the Duke’s Head but never in the Florin;

There you’d sip a stout or a port in a storm

Laughing with the girls and singing until dawn;

Around the Joanna you would croon a bar or two,

You could smoke like a trooper and tell a joke so blue that

You’d set the crowds ahowling and make a sailor blush

But you were always a lady and never just some lush.

On the bedside cupboard there is a bottle,

Gaudy plastic full of liquid pinky red:

‘Cherryade’ or so the label claims.

Hardly a Cherry B,

Never mind a stout or a port (in a storm).

In the middle of the night Doris demands

“Boy! Boy?” Querulous, tremulous and lost.

A nurse tries to calm her. Soothing sounds.

At last she drifts again ...

As though not sleeping was entirely a choice.

27 April 2020

Ten by Eight

Ten by eight is a monochrome film sheet;

Ten by eight is the perfect picture size;

Ten by eight is a Barbara Cartland photo

Ready framed for Grandma – what a lovely pink surprise.

Ten by eight can be a snappy silver snare drum;

Ten by eight can be a model scene of war;

Ten by eight could make a decent garden shed

Or an urban chicken coop with an automated door.

Ten by eight is the size of the patio

Measured in steps – well at least it is in mine.

All around the dryer and the plant pots and the deckchair

I wend my merry way when the sun sees fit to shine.

Say it’s 26 steps for a solitary circuit,

I’d need just under 400 laps in a day

For the gadget on my wrist to spark digital fireworks;

This is lockdown athletics in a most surreal way.

In the private carpark through a gate from the patio

The space measures out at 50 steps by 10;

That’s 93 laps, give or take a little,

To keep up my steps and my mood approaching Zen.

Ten by eight can be the size of a certificate

Stamped and signed and emblazoned with your name;

Will I feel like a winner at the end of this marathon

Or just like a pawn in some dumb god’s game?

1 May 2020

Corona Nightmare

I have started to dream about COVID: or rather,

I dream about Hancock’s half hour.

Where deer-like in the face of the headlights,

Politicians draw straws to cower.

Will today bring forth more pretty numbers

Or some badges they’ve hammered from tin?

Yet another promise on testing, maybe?

Though this spin has all long since worn thin.

Nurses may still need protection,

But Matt swears he’s doing his best;

That panic-bought gowns are all turkeys

Is no proof all his pledges go west.

In the wild, weird world of my dreamscape,

Ministers dine on roast swan,

Toasting the news that care costs

Will have fallen when COVID has gone.

It’s the blow on the chin that Johnson

Had mused that the nation might take:

Any sense that he’s now saddened by it

Is like his fluffed hair – a fake.

Yet still there are so many people,

Whipped on by parts of the press,

Who remain convinced by his bluster,

Unseeing his role in this mess.

At long last the dream starts to fracture;

Reality pours into my mind:

What a time it is that we live in,

When such idiots govern the blind.

8 May 2020

Understandings

‘COVID is our Spanish flu’ is a cliché for our times, and                     

When I think of that

and I think of you        

I feel a guilty relief that I need not stew,                   

Sat here, two hours away,

Fretting about lockdown and Dad and you,

Worrying about just what to do

and how.

But each time I think like this, I start with a mistake.

I’m thinking of you in those last few weeks,

at your frailest;

Exhausted,

Even before sentence of death.

The frailty was not weakness.

You had the strength to demand: “How long?”

Shocking the nurse who’d been sent

to beat about the bush.

I’d warned her before that you were a little deaf.

Not gaga, I said,

And still with a core of steel.

After checking you really wanted to know

(You weren’t sure but told her to go on)

She gave you … “a few months”.

You took two weeks.

Dad was upstairs in another ward,

Raging after his missing razor and demanding

You stop everything to fetch it.

On trips to the house to check the mail and

firefight the finances,

I watered your Japanese maple.

Lying there, you asked me once,

Dryly and half rhetorical,

How long Dad would outlive you.

A creaking gate, he’d creak on a while

I tried to joke.

I wish you’d told me what you

Must have known or guessed.

But why would you have,

When your pride had stopped you before?

You’d had enough and

Slipped away with as little fuss as possible;

Not yet cold when I removed the gold studs

I’d bought in ’81 for your birthday.

In February just gone,

Before we got to know the new coronavirus,

I read your copy of The Secret Garden.

A new edition in June ’42,

Published just right for your 11^th birthday.

A plate inside shows a giant tulip

rising from a bomb site.

“Can spring be far behind?” it asks.

Your mother and father were in their teens in ’18,

Old enough to fear that year’s flu.

Spring’s grotesque and deathly climax,

blooming over the final months

Of the war grinding to a halt.

COVID-19 reminds me of that book plate

In moments when I fear the future too;

Of course there’s going to be a tomorrow:

the only question is …

What will it look like,

when finally it hoves into view?

Were you afraid that morning when you left us?

Gone so quietly, as if just stepping through a door;

Would you think my fears now out of all proportion,

Or is fear always a base note of our being,

Even if we have a steel core?

3 May 2020

On the third anniversary of Mother’s death