Keep smiling everybody.

Keep smiling everybody.

It could be that we'll be here for some time. Hopefully it'll go sooner rather than later but at the moment there's no telling. So here we are and if we haven't got used to it now would be as good a time as any. Of course we're fretting, of course we're dwelling and of course we're just totally nonplussed. If only we could return to doing the simple things in life but then perspective sets in and fate begins to hover over us rather like some low flying hot air balloon. It just hangs in the sky moving neither forward or backwards, sideways or any way at all.

Sadly and frustratingly everything has quite been literally either postponed or cancelled. In fact this may be the time to declare the whole of 2020 as null and void. It had all the makings of a good, strong New Year, the moon was in the right position, the stars at the right angles to each other, the omens both encouraging and deeply optimistic. It was the start of a new decade, the beginning of a new project and perhaps the start of something brand new.

But now everything has disastrously toppled over like a set of dominoes, crashing onto the table and everything looks very bleak and dire at the moment. We're at the beginning of April and the worldwide disease that is coronavirus is eating away at both the cultural and spiritual fabric of our lives. Or is it? Come on folks we have to keep strong and look on the infinitely brighter side. But nobody could possibly have known that something could be quite as impactful or hard hitting as this. And yet our everyday living seems to have been inexorably changed whether for better or worse. Life is on hold at the moment and for some of us this is both distinctly unusual and strange.

Still folks all is not lost. Next week marks the beginning of Pesach or Passover for the Jewish population and shortly it'll be Easter for the Christian community. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a cause for mass preparations, extensive spring cleaning, matzo crunching and much merriment. But this is now turning into a unique year since everything around us is now shutting up or closing down. There are to be no festivals or family gatherings, no children chomping through vast supplies of chocolate eggs and all of those plans have been left to fall into rack and ruin.

Put simply spring has been more or less cancelled, summer kicked into touch and everything we were looking forward to has been temporarily mothballed because of one terrible and now fatal disease. It is undoubtedly a worldwide catastrophe and never for a moment did we ever think that something like this would ever happen in our lifetime. You keep hoping that somebody will shake you from your sleep, insist that it was indeed some wretched nightmare and once you'd had a shower then all of the nastiness would be washed away in a matter of seconds.

Now though the world will have to be a content with a blizzard of worst case scenarios, barely believable conspiracy theories and nothing but death, illness, thousands of people on the critical list in hospitals and a plague like society. We keep looking at the rest of the world and then we look at ourselves because we keep wondering how long it'll be before the lockdown of lockdowns can find a key, releasing us from the shackles of confinement, limitation, hardship, privation and what feels like complete disconnection from our loved ones and friends.

At the moment we are repeatedly told not to give up, throw in the towel or just disintegrate into some appalling state of inertia and lethargy. We've got to keep living our lives in the way we've always lived them without feeling hemmed in by events beyond our control. Out there in the big world thousands of people are dying although it has never been anybody's intention to state the obvious. But a naked terror has grabbed hold of our mindsets and physical well being that we just couldn't have foreseen two months ago.

In East London a new hospital has just opened up to accommodate the thousands of those who may have just been struck down with coronavirus, beds have quickly been put into place and there is almost a military air about the place. There is very much a First World War aura about the Nightingale hospital and your heart sinks deeper and deeper. You half expect Florence Nightingale to quietly go about her duties with lantern in hand. This is history being made over and over again. But this is quite definitely happening and this is no ghastly hallucination.

This morning Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed Britain with yet darker prognostications about the immediate future, of not going out at all under any circumstances, of sitting tight and doing nothing that could endanger the rest of human society. Shirt buttons open and shirt quite possibly dripping with a sweat filled temperature, Johnson looked as though he just wanted to go straight back to bed with honey and lemon, a lengthy nap and the knowledge that nobody would disturb him for the next three months.

Britain and the world has been traumatised and destabilised, hampered and hindered, broken and speechless, bruised and battered, drained and devastated by the kind of events that could leave the rest of this year in tatters. There can be nothing to look forward to watching on the TV although Netflix could come to our emotional rescue, repeats  rehashed ad infinitum and all we're left with are another bombardment of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s sitcoms and plays we may have thought had been completely wiped by all of the TV channels.

And yet it may be at times like this when we do indulge in nostalgia, revelling gleefully in historic moments of our lives, the resourceful things we used to do but never ever thought we'd do again. Some of us remember the 1970s powercuts when the lights went out upon return from our school labours and the whole family would have to stagger around the house desperately searching for an old transistor radio or another set of candles to guide us around a darkened hallway or kitchen.

It could rightly be asserted that these were indeed austerity times, those severe or straitened periods of our adolescence when thank goodness our parents had a gas oven because otherwise we'd have had to survive on takeaways or just bread and water. It hardly bears thinking about but for what seemed a lifetime the miners and the electricians had created havoc with our family. But even then we summoned the requisite amount of fighting spirit, that indomitable will and that unbreakable spirit.

With every passing hour and day the coronavirus is here and present rather like the proverbial bad penny. At some point the survival rates will increase, the infection quelled and quite possibly by the end of this month - or even earlier - we'll be given the green light to enjoy ourselves, to party for as long as we like, to laugh and smile with family and friends before collapsing on the sofa with a huge grin on our faces. Lockdown though still sounds like some grisly and gruesome expression coined by somebody who was very depressed about this disease and couldn't think of anything more suitable.

Still let's just make it up on the hoof, improvising endlessly, cracking naff jokes to one and all on the street or the park and then making light of the dark. We must not be downhearted, dispirited and forlorn. We have to keep clapping, keep applauding our wonderfully commendable NHS, remaining both brave and benevolent, thankful and moved because this is the one moment in our lives when the human spirit must prevail. Keep going everybody.