More musing from the point of social isolation

Entering week three of social isolation, I can’t stop thinking about the lack of PPE for front line workers.  I don’t see our government as gods who can solve every problem circumstance throws at them but this aspect – the buying in of equipment - could surely have been foreseen. I really do wish Boris a speedy recovery but I am praying he does not present himself as a victorious general who by virtue of his own vim and brio has overcame the enemy, thereby reducing those who have died to weaklings. My fear of social Darwinism runs deep. The recent talk of 'herd instinct' being a modern manifestation of this way of thinking. As I read of shopkeepers, doctors, nurses and bus drivers taken from those who loved them before their time; it makes me feel quite weepy. 

On a more personal level, a colleague’s daughter is currently trapped in an isolation center in Vietnam and the conditions she writes about are not good. Her mother must be going out of her mind with worry. Another colleague’s grandmother passed away yesterday. My colleague is not sure if it was the result of dementia or the virus.  Our local council are advertising for carers and I think of the brave souls who will take on these roles with the deepest gratitude. One of the care homes needing staff is the same care home whose staff helped to rehabilitate my mother only recently. A friend who lives in Reading and works for a catering agency is driving to London every day to work as chef’s assistant in a care facility, which also involves him dropping off the meals at the elderly residents’ rooms/living areas. He told me how much he enjoys chatting to them at a distance and how much they appreciate the contact as well as the sustenance.  He seemed remarkably sanguine when he told me about it. He needs to work and they pay the transport costs and the rate is good – he’s actually overqualified for the post but thinks it worthwhile.  My step-sister who works in a Chemist has finally been given the PPE the staff have needed for several weeks.   I could moan - and actually have moaned on my Facebook page - about the isolation of working from home but there is a lot to be said for counting one’s blessings. Also, not spending much money I need to remember to spread some of that build-up of income to those who are on the front line and those who are finding this a lot tougher than a forcedly reclusive asthmatic in a professional occupation. 

My biggest fear is that, when I go out again, I will contract the virus and die from it but this is where staying centered, proportionate and grounded really matters. I was talking to my Dad – a bit of a social Darwinist but sweet with it; he would never advocate it as a government policy – and I  had to say that as late baby boomer Western woman, even although I have experienced some difficulties in my life, I have been part of a charmed generation. I’m praying it stays that way for some considerable time longer. 

When I sit at my computer marking students' work, I find my mind wandering at points and encountering bursts of  memories I have unconsciously stored of people I know and places I have been and being flooded with a form of gladness. I see the sunshine lighting a street or a landscape and find myself tapping into the quality of the memory.  A memory of a meal or sitting outside a pub laughing and enjoying the company of loved ones. It’s like I am suddenly unlocking the unexpected quality of the – seemingly very ordinary at the time - experience. The longing to be there again is almost exquisite and as is the acceptance that that time has been and  gone. The opportunity to spend time again with those I love will be most welcome. As will drinking in the atmosphere of places but mostly of just being in the world with others. 

Most of all, I am grateful that I am not alone; my lovely husband is in the house with me and we have our front and back gardens and sufficient toilet paper. The sun shines through the window; I am going to sit in the garden in a few moments and, later, we have been invited to a Zoom party for a friend’s 50^th birthday. Said husband who eschews any form of social media, frowned at the idea of this. I look forward to seeing how he handles it. Let’s hope it works.

An Anglo-Saxon herbal and other tangents

Well, I am just about coping being confined to barracks. Working from home with the uncertainty of this situation is a little stressful but I have to keep going, though having things cut off in their midst is very strange and unsettling as I am quite a hands on person and can lose perspective being stuck in near isolation. Still, I am well. 

Being home I have been reading more and have been picking up again on Spitalfields’s Life, the Gentle Author's  London Blog. The other day there was great post on an Anglo-Saxon herbal, which reminded me of how  I enjoyed teaching a small unit on the History of English quite a few years ago and how I enjoyed reading Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure or English - wide and sweeping -  and David Crystal's guides to the development of the English Language; he has written several. I would advise anyone with an interest in language, history or culture or all three to check them out.

I picked up on the ideas in these books about language, culture and power again when GCSE English was still exploratory and fun and we took our students through the spoken language study looking at speeches and rhetoric, through to multi-modal talk and the relevance of accents and pronunciation. One of my favourite web sites at that time was the British Library's  Sound Archive, where you will find a treasure trove of regional accents from the past 100 years to say nothing of other delights. I will may pay more visits during my time in social isolation.

Also, today I am pleased that Keir Starmer won the Labour Leadership with Angela Rayner as his deputy. The Corbyn experiment didn't work but I hope Starmer does abolish tuition fees and put essential services back in to government hands if he gets into power.

Spitalfields Life - Anglo-Saxon herbal
The Adveture of English
Sounds British Library archive
Keir Starmer wins Labour leadership election

Post election reality check

I am part of a minority. A large minority but still a minority. Rejection of this fact is futile.

Imagined conversation with some family members, friends, colleagues over the next x years:

'Whilst I realise I may be in the minority here, have you ever considered that renationalising the railways would be a good thing/an end to zero hour contracts would create employment stability/a decent minimum wage would protect families/a basic minimum income would help the sick, the unemployed, people who have not worked out how to live their lives yet /the acceptance of transgender/gender fluidity would simply mean acceptance of otherness /that austerity is  causing real problems,/that it's incredible the sixth wealtiest county in the word has citizens relying on food banks, etc.

Oh hum.

Blame

The failure of the Labour Party in this week's election is a massive blow to those of us who believe in a collective approach to running the country.  I am sad but I don't want to be full of bitterness and hatred. I look on social media and see the defeated variously  blaming the press, blaming Jeremy Corbyn, blaming the parliamentary Labour Party, blaming those on the left who called out an anti-semetic tendency, and, perhaps most of all viewing those who voted for Brexit as morons. In the end all this is toxic. In terms of the last point, it is true - for whatever reason - that we live in a country in which a majority of people want to leave the EU. This is a fact. Justifying our position by saying they are deluded doesn't help and dismisses them as somehow less than us, which in turn diminishes us.

We have to move on while keeping faith.

Politics...

Politics - or should I say social media's take on politics - simultaneously engages and annoys me. I have flurries  where I find myself arguing  about transgender issues and  anti-Semitism.  In terms of transgender, I have been surprised by what seems like a reactionary return to biological basics amongst feminists and some on the left. On the anti-Semitic issue, I hate what the Israeli Government are doing: shooting at unarmed Palestinian civilians, putting  people in cages at borders FGS. Yet, still I see the starved faces of people looking through the mesh fences in concentration camps that haunted me as a child back in the 1960s, when I sat and watched All our Yesterdays with my grandma.  How can a persecuted people  not desire and cling to a homeland?  The notion that Jews are at the heart of wicked conspiracies in banking, peddled by some less than subtle souls on the left  is anti-Semitic. It's becoming clearer that some on the left  would like to see an end to Israel and I really can't support that. Sadly, there seems to be little will for a two state solution internationally at a time when it is most needed.  Trump is uber supportive of Israel, which doesn't help.

And as for Brexit...I can't even go there.

Initiation into the magical art of train travel

T for Tuesday is asking for posts with some link to a drink. On the journey below, my Great Aunt Eliza and I drank coffee from a flask. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the coffee and see her pour it from the silver neck of the flask into beige cups. It all felt rather grown up. I learned the art of travelling by train from this aunt. It's been over forty four years since she passed away but her influence on me has been indelible.

Manchester Piccadilly was the biggest and most magnificent railway station I had seen. Its fabulous Victorian iron-girdered ceiling - still blackened from the smoke of steam locomotives - and its long platforms transported me to the same place as the opening pages of a new book: it promised good things to come. Stepping on the long train, holding on to my small suitcase with one hand and my aunt with the other, I knew this was a special journey.

Taking small sips of strong coffee, I gazed through the windows as the train moved through the endless green countryside dotted with churches, cottages and farms, through the suburbs of little boxes and small factories and onwards into the city. As we entered the suburbs of London, hanging from every balcony of every tenement, were rows and rows of washing. When I repeated the journey a year later, a significant change had occured. There was far less washing. As the 60's gave way to the 70's it seemed to me that the population's washing habits underwent a revolution. (I guess more families were buying electric dyers.) On the many journeys from the North to London I have made since then, never again did I seen so much washing decorating the line. Washing lines didn't disappear entirely but the sheer volume of wet shirts, skirts and knickers decorating the edges of the West Coast Line was never again so abudant.

We reached Euston and, in order to reach our destination in Surrey, Aunt Eliza marched us  down the short escalator into the tube station. We purchased our ticket at the wooden window and took a much longer ride down to the platforms.

I stood on the platform full of wonder and half afraid. When the train clattered into the station, I was scared the force of it might drag me on to the live rail, which Aunt Eliza had sternly explained would kill me should I fall upon it.

Inside the train, I was transfixed by the map of the Northern Line on the opposite wall above the heads of the passengers. We passed beneath Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square and Charing Cross and then moved out to Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Oval, Stockwell and North Clapham. At some point we came up from the tunnels and into daylight as I checked each station off against the thick brownish-black line opposite: Balham, Tooting Bec, Tooting Broadway, Colliers Wood, South Wimbledon and finally Morden.

After such a wonderful ride through unknown places, Morden was a dreadful anti-climax; to a child who had grown up in the heartland of the industrial North, South London surburbia seemed incredibly dull. All it had to recommend it was the eerie white light of the street lamps, which illuminated the long avenue where another Aunt, Aunt Rachel, who we had travelled all these miles to visit, lived.

The journey stands out in my mind perhaps because this was where I first discovered the incantational power of place names and first experienced the strange and almost obsessional pull the capital city had on my imagination. It also made me aware of the magical art of train travel and its superiority to any other form of transport.

Farewell icons of my youthful days

In the world of the arts, some artists matter to us more than others, we recognise their talents, we love and appreciate their work. They enlighten us; they disturb us. Three significant artists passed away last week.

First, Hugh Masekela. His jazz was a sound track for the struggle against apartide. That vile system finally toppled in the early 90s when Mandela walked to freedom. His work can challenge but it's rhythmic and sinuous. I listened to some of his music on YouTube and was astonished by its power and complexity but soon found his more commercial 80s hit that I boogied to back then: Don't go Lose it Baby. Obituaries gave the impression of a restless, driven man but one who had reconciled himself to death. Three score years and ten plus a bit more. What more can we ask for?

Next, Ursula Le Guinn, whose marvellous, generously wise stories made me look at the world through different eyes and changed how I thought about it. A long life, well lived: her work a wonderful distillation of ideas and humanity.

Lastly, Mark E Smith. The kind of alcohol fuelled and drugged out geezer and genius you only find in the North of England. Worn out at 60. Leaving a legacy of strange twisted brilliance on vinyl and MP3. A formidable post punk force who spoke to many of my contemporaries. A little too much for me, if I'm honest, though at 21 I danced away to his spitting, snarling, hypnotic vocals and his band's  insistent, swirling, grinding din. One of about six people; everyone else had run off to the bar. Over the years he built a loyal following. One of my colleagues had followed him since he was 15 and had bought every Fall album - and there were many. On Twitter, writer Susan Hill expressed her confusion at not knowing who he was. Was he  pop star? I replied, explaining he was as far from ABBA as South Dakota is from the sea.

Time for bed. I think I will hunt out my collection of Ursula Le Guin's short stories and allow myself to reflect on how the best fantasy is a mirror to reality. I think she was an anthropologist. Her imagined societies are rich and unusual but always believable and never clichéd. I wonder what she would have made of Mark E Smith?