Animal magnetism- zoos, safari parks and non essential shops. Britain partially re-opens.
Oh well! We're halfway there but not quite. It's the beginning of the week and lockdown could be partially opened as from today but don't bet on any grand opening ceremony with bells and whistles because that maybe a couple of months away. Still, the non essential shops are back up and running, people are beginning to believe in miracles and hopefully society will return to something like its chipper ways in the not too distant future.
The problem we have is that we are still very much in the dark, neither here nor there, waiting patiently for something really unforgettable to happen when the truth is that nobody knows when normal service, as we used to know it, will be resumed with a vengeance. We know where we are at the moment and it does feel encouraging but the fact is that having seen the West End of London this morning there is still something grey, gloomy and nebulous about London that doesn't make you want to dance in the streets and hug perfect strangers in sheer relief and joy.
We are now halfway through June and on the verge of the longest day of the year. Midsummer would normally be the catalyst for thousands of people to descend on Stonehenge and watch the sunrise in all of its amber glory. But this is surely no time to be spiritual or religious so you may prefer to concentrate the mind on more down to earth and practical matters. You can still hardly hear a pin drop outside and that has to be worrying.
Anyway, the next piece of great news is that Britain is re-opening all of its zoos and safari parks which is brilliant news for all of those lonely lions, cheetahs, monkeys, penguins, rhinos, hippos, birds, tigers, camels, elephants and llamas. You could go through the entire list of the animal population but let's keep this one short. Or maybe not. Still, it's a delightful prospect and how we've longed for this day.
The fact is that all the frustrated kids, their parents and grandparents can finally be re-acquainted with the animal kingdom, that magical world of sheep, lambs, cows, bleating, mooing, roaring, swinging from trees, prowling around their pens while hunting big cats and wandering, loitering, sluggish, beautiful beasts of the wild can finally let their hair down.
Soon enough families will take to the road in their highly secure Range Rovers or Land Rovers driving casually through Longleat and every other safari park safe in the knowledge that this could be a very special moment not only for the kids but also for mum and dad, grandma and grandpa. Who cares whether those monkeys, ocelots and lemurs, leap on to the windscreen and try desperately to snap off the wipers? Who cares whether those grumpy, cantankerous lions and lionesses start circling your bumpers or checking out your axles and of course those wheels and tyres. They're only trying to be friendly after all. Or are they? It's safe to say that they've probably missed the human race. The feeling is reciprocal.
And this is probably the point. Does the human race feel as if it should really be grasping the nettle, jumping into our cars, buses and trains when it knows in its heart that this is all very hit and miss, a calculated but scientific gamble that could go badly wrong? Half of the West End of London is privately wondering whether they should while the other half can't wait to buy their first pair of shirts and trousers for at least six months. The dilemma is an obvious one.
The fact is of course the heart of the West End of London is still receiving treatment for deep- seated wounds and injuries possibly requiring even more surgery. That heart though is still on a ventilator and recuperating very slowly. The West End, it has to be said, is still in intensive care and breathing very irregularly. This may sound very exaggerated and overdramatic but we are not where we would like to be.
We are not booking tickets to see our favourite West End musical because we haven't a clue whether we'll be able to see a musical any time this year. We can't sit outside a Costa, Nero, or Pret A Manger coffee and snack shop because the doors are locked, the ominous signs are up in the window and the wonderfully perfumed smell of black coffee, latte or mocha is still a distant memory. Although extortionately expensive, we used to love going into the local cafe for a bite to eat and just winding down for an hour. Now we discover that this treat will have to go on hold for another fortnight or so.
Now though those same cafes and restaurants will have to wait until the fourth of July which still sounds like just a random day. And yet July 4 is American Independence Day so whether this has been deliberately planned to coincide with America's happiest of days is immaterial. The fact is that we can eat and drink to our hearts content as long as the service charge doesn't amount to a small mortgage.
There is a growing reality that we are still half in and half out at the moment. The powers that be keep insisting that we keep 2 metres away when the rest of the world- or a vast majority of it- is only a metre or so give or take a couple of centimetres. Are we being asked to take a tape measure out with us in case it's beyond anybody's calculation? Or do we simply keep us far apart from our fellow human being as it's possible to be.
Sport of course has come flying out of the blocks and there is a feeling of delayed euphoria. Of course we welcome sport's presence. However, the whole potty issue of football's very materialistic rush back to its Premier League multi- million- moneymakers has been frequently discussed on these pages. On Wednesday evening though Manchester City will take on Arsenal at the Etihad Stadium and Aston Villa will be up against Sheffield United at Villa Park.
We all know what's going to happen or not as be it the case. Nobody but nobody will be allowed into any Premier League grounds and what will ensue will be like nothing like we've ever seen in the glory, glory world of football. In fact to call it a spectacle would be a strange kind of euphemism because quite clearly it won't be.
So here goes more or less a month of quite the most extraordinary silence and tranquillity ever to fall upon English football. You suspect that at some point you may hear more noise among Trappist monks in a monastery so chilling and cold will it all feel. It'll probably feel like being stuck in a cave or even an underground chamber for interminable hours, weeks and months. Or maybe another adaptation of Robinson Crusoe where Crusoe runs out of twigs and sticks to keep warm. The Premier League may have to get used to this very remote desert island in the middle of nowhere.
Still, football has, or so it would seem, made a rod for its own back and we hope that this experiment, whether enforced or not, will work out for the best. We look forward to the Premier League restart with great excitement in our hearts. We are counting the hours down until Liverpool deservedly clinch the Premier League title in front of rows of unoccupied plastic seats, a crisp bag fluttering in the breeze or the occasional fog horn of some sea going vessel on the Mersey. The Anfield Kop will become no more than the Anfield whisper. Oh for the overwhelming sense of anti climax of it all.
Then of course there's the cancelled Wimbledon tennis and, above all, the cricket Test matches against West Indies which used to be the definitive sporting fixture during the 1970s. How we used to thrill to the master blaster brilliance of Viv Richards batting, those gorgeously atmospheric steel drums and Gordon Greenidge driving the ball mightily through the covers for either a six or four. Then there was the neat and tidy Alvin Kalicharran, sweetly clipping his shots eloquently off the back and front foot.
Cricket though may not come out to play until the beginning of August which only adds to the lopsided nature of the sporting calendar. It is at this early part of August that the FA Cup Final will be crammed in tightly into what feels like an exceptionally hurried schedule. Everything about the recent developments within sport and everything coronavirus has, quite obviously upset the balance of our lives or maybe it hasn't and you're all doing splendidly in which case apologies are in order.
We are of course being admirably resourceful, more domesticated perhaps than we've ever been and those kids rainbow drawings have been fabulous and very symbolic. But the thought occurs to you that at some point during the summer most of us will be craving proper family gatherings with no private fears or misgivings, shopping in our millions, laughing and singing along with West End musicals, crying and smiling at cinema romantic comedies and generally having a fantastic time.
In the meanwhile let us be grateful for the re-opening of zoos and safari parks because our animal friends just haven't been the same. They've been moody, withdrawn, probably quite depressed if truth be told. You'd be inclined to think that this is the best day of the year for all animals across Britain. But beware those bears because they've probably still got sore heads. Or possibly not.
Monday, 15 June 2020
Saturday, 13 June 2020
It's National Gin and Tonic Day everybody.
It's National Gin and Tonic Day everybody.
It's the news you've all been waiting for everybody. No, sadly not the official end of coronavirus but it will be quite shortly. You can feel it in your bones. The good news though is that today is National Gin and Tonic Day. Yes, it is indeed. Now what about that for a pleasant surprise? You weren't expecting that one, hey? What a boost to our flagging spirits if you'll excuse the pun. After all the gloom and doom, despondency and dejection, you can finally let yourselves go just for today or perhaps you'd prefer to drown your sorrows or celebrate your personal victories with a classic G and T, a quick glass of gin and tonic.
Let's face it. You deserve it. In fact finish off several bottles of gin and tonic although that may not be entirely advisable because if you do get completely drunk you may have to pay the penalty tomorrow morning with that famous feeling of hungover regret and somehow wishing that you hadn't bothered in the first place. But if the mood does take you then please be my guest. This is the time for a good, old fashioned drop of the hard stuff because this is the day to get just a bit tipsy and if you like completely blotto.
Now, after well over three months of fear, indecision, terror and calamitous tidings from all four corners of the globe you'd be entitled to get plastered so you now have my permission to knock back huge quantities of the hard stuff. National Gin and Tonic Days don't come around that often so this is all the more reason for total drunkenness and inebriation. For this is the day to sit back and relax, take the weekend in your stride and remember that after you've finished mowing the lawn you can face a gin and tonic with a clear head and conscience.
Back in those far off and now dimly remembered days of the Georgian age, gin and tonic was one of the many alcoholic choices of the rich and aristocratic upper classes. You must recall those gin soaked palaces where the men and women of the day would waltz the evening away to enchanting piano recitals and then drink the night away quite unashamedly into the wee small hours of the following morning.
Ah yes, those gin-soaked palaces where the lords and ladies, the titled and the not so entitled would fling convention out of the french windows, step lightly towards each other under the opulent and gleaming chandeliers and raise a toast to capitalism and luxury. They would bow and acknowledge each other ever so politely while the women curtsied to their menfolk with that gentle femininity.
Throughout the centuries and right up until the present day though, gin and tonic is the one drink that is invariably associated with a severe setback or disappointment. For those who have experienced another stressful day at work or the loss of anything then gin and tonic is the immediate answer, the antidote to all ills and discomforts. How often you have stared into a glass of gin and tonic and hoped that it would soothe your fevered brow and make things temporarily better? Or perhaps you were simply teetotal.
In ancient episodes of Coronation Street- if your memory served you correctly- didn't the likes of Elsie Tanner and Vera Duckworth and occasionally Ena Sharples partake of a sharp swig of gin and tonic and then tell Annie and Jack Walker to keep the change? Pubs are often the first retreat where we need to just calm down, an alcoholic sanctuary where the cares and woes of a quite horrendous day of the office can be offloaded.
In the gentlemen's clubs of London such as the famous Garrick, those with money to spend and wartime stories to re-tell, will slump back into those beautifully upholstered leather chairs, light a Havana cigar, browse through the Financial Times, puff on the said cigar a thousand times and then ponder deeply on their shares in all of their blue chip companies. Then the large glass of gin and tonic will be raised victoriously because last week his Polo team had once again triumphed on the playing fields of England.
But for many of us gin and tonic will always be the drink of reflective contemplation, the drink to take the heat out of a troubled day, the drink to stare at interminably when that crucial business deal may have fallen through at the last minute. Or maybe gin and tonic was that soothing pick me up when the mood may have been desperately low.
And yet those gin- soaked palaces from the 17th and 18th century do sound like a running theme through that period when nobody really cared about getting tipsy and then sloshed because all of those Hooray Henry hedonists were knocking them back one after the other. Gin and tonic may well have been the ultimate solution to all problems and the mind is filled with images of rowdy mobs of men smashing glasses of ale, throwing back gin and tonics in rapid succession, jumping recklessly from already wonky wooden tables and then falling over on a rain soaked pavement when the landlord had clearly had enough. Gin and tonic worked on every level. At least until the following morning.
So there we are ladies and gentlemen, today is Gin and Tonic day and not before time. How long have you been waiting for that day? In the old days Gin and Tonic was just plain G and T with perhaps a packet of crisps and peanuts for company. Now there's Pink Gin, Gordon's Gin, Beefeater, Tanqueray and the more recent Gin Mare. Now before you become alarmed at my extensive knowledge of gins it might be pointed out that you had to do a spot of research in the name of this article.
Apparently the late Queen Mother was partial to a drop of gin and tonic while those eminent members of Parliament were never averse to a glass or two of stimulus when the going got tough. Tory grandee Kenneth Clarke swore by a glass of whisky at his side at Budget time and as the complete stress buster, both whisky and gin and tonic still have the capacity to soften the blow and get straight to the heart of the matter. So please feel free to raid the cocktail cabinet or open up the cupboard and pour yourself a neat concoction of that famous drink that always took pride and place at any party or pub gathering. Cheers folks.
It's the news you've all been waiting for everybody. No, sadly not the official end of coronavirus but it will be quite shortly. You can feel it in your bones. The good news though is that today is National Gin and Tonic Day. Yes, it is indeed. Now what about that for a pleasant surprise? You weren't expecting that one, hey? What a boost to our flagging spirits if you'll excuse the pun. After all the gloom and doom, despondency and dejection, you can finally let yourselves go just for today or perhaps you'd prefer to drown your sorrows or celebrate your personal victories with a classic G and T, a quick glass of gin and tonic.
Let's face it. You deserve it. In fact finish off several bottles of gin and tonic although that may not be entirely advisable because if you do get completely drunk you may have to pay the penalty tomorrow morning with that famous feeling of hungover regret and somehow wishing that you hadn't bothered in the first place. But if the mood does take you then please be my guest. This is the time for a good, old fashioned drop of the hard stuff because this is the day to get just a bit tipsy and if you like completely blotto.
Now, after well over three months of fear, indecision, terror and calamitous tidings from all four corners of the globe you'd be entitled to get plastered so you now have my permission to knock back huge quantities of the hard stuff. National Gin and Tonic Days don't come around that often so this is all the more reason for total drunkenness and inebriation. For this is the day to sit back and relax, take the weekend in your stride and remember that after you've finished mowing the lawn you can face a gin and tonic with a clear head and conscience.
Back in those far off and now dimly remembered days of the Georgian age, gin and tonic was one of the many alcoholic choices of the rich and aristocratic upper classes. You must recall those gin soaked palaces where the men and women of the day would waltz the evening away to enchanting piano recitals and then drink the night away quite unashamedly into the wee small hours of the following morning.
Ah yes, those gin-soaked palaces where the lords and ladies, the titled and the not so entitled would fling convention out of the french windows, step lightly towards each other under the opulent and gleaming chandeliers and raise a toast to capitalism and luxury. They would bow and acknowledge each other ever so politely while the women curtsied to their menfolk with that gentle femininity.
Throughout the centuries and right up until the present day though, gin and tonic is the one drink that is invariably associated with a severe setback or disappointment. For those who have experienced another stressful day at work or the loss of anything then gin and tonic is the immediate answer, the antidote to all ills and discomforts. How often you have stared into a glass of gin and tonic and hoped that it would soothe your fevered brow and make things temporarily better? Or perhaps you were simply teetotal.
In ancient episodes of Coronation Street- if your memory served you correctly- didn't the likes of Elsie Tanner and Vera Duckworth and occasionally Ena Sharples partake of a sharp swig of gin and tonic and then tell Annie and Jack Walker to keep the change? Pubs are often the first retreat where we need to just calm down, an alcoholic sanctuary where the cares and woes of a quite horrendous day of the office can be offloaded.
In the gentlemen's clubs of London such as the famous Garrick, those with money to spend and wartime stories to re-tell, will slump back into those beautifully upholstered leather chairs, light a Havana cigar, browse through the Financial Times, puff on the said cigar a thousand times and then ponder deeply on their shares in all of their blue chip companies. Then the large glass of gin and tonic will be raised victoriously because last week his Polo team had once again triumphed on the playing fields of England.
But for many of us gin and tonic will always be the drink of reflective contemplation, the drink to take the heat out of a troubled day, the drink to stare at interminably when that crucial business deal may have fallen through at the last minute. Or maybe gin and tonic was that soothing pick me up when the mood may have been desperately low.
And yet those gin- soaked palaces from the 17th and 18th century do sound like a running theme through that period when nobody really cared about getting tipsy and then sloshed because all of those Hooray Henry hedonists were knocking them back one after the other. Gin and tonic may well have been the ultimate solution to all problems and the mind is filled with images of rowdy mobs of men smashing glasses of ale, throwing back gin and tonics in rapid succession, jumping recklessly from already wonky wooden tables and then falling over on a rain soaked pavement when the landlord had clearly had enough. Gin and tonic worked on every level. At least until the following morning.
So there we are ladies and gentlemen, today is Gin and Tonic day and not before time. How long have you been waiting for that day? In the old days Gin and Tonic was just plain G and T with perhaps a packet of crisps and peanuts for company. Now there's Pink Gin, Gordon's Gin, Beefeater, Tanqueray and the more recent Gin Mare. Now before you become alarmed at my extensive knowledge of gins it might be pointed out that you had to do a spot of research in the name of this article.
Apparently the late Queen Mother was partial to a drop of gin and tonic while those eminent members of Parliament were never averse to a glass or two of stimulus when the going got tough. Tory grandee Kenneth Clarke swore by a glass of whisky at his side at Budget time and as the complete stress buster, both whisky and gin and tonic still have the capacity to soften the blow and get straight to the heart of the matter. So please feel free to raid the cocktail cabinet or open up the cupboard and pour yourself a neat concoction of that famous drink that always took pride and place at any party or pub gathering. Cheers folks.
Wednesday, 10 June 2020
School and sports day- and early memories of school.
School and sports day- and early memories of school.
Now that the children - or at least some of them- have been given permission to go back to school, this may be an opportune moment to go back to the beginning and our formative years at the one establishment where it all started, that foundation stone of our youthful development, the initiation ceremony where we were introduced to other children of the same age.
It was that vital, life defining moment where education took priority to every other consideration and where you finally discovered that you had to wear a formal shirt, tie and blazer every day for the next 11 years or so of your life or even longer for those who paid attention in class. It was that pivotal turning point in your primary school stage of your life where everything seemed very intimidating, overwhelming and undoubtedly scary.
You still have vague recollections of your mum dropping you off at the school gates in those first, frightening years when a vast Victorian building represented something far more distressing and sinister than anything you'd encountered before. It meant that you were about to step into the fiery furnace of education, learning the basics, tackling the rudiments of the alphabet, letters, words, the construction of sentences, grammar and vocabulary. Simple really. Nothing that was too difficult to understand certainly at that age.
This was followed swiftly by the dreaded subject of mathematics comprising as it did the adding up of sums, the memorising of multiplication tables and that petrifyingly complicated network of division and long division. You can still hear the unbearable scratching of those many coloured chalks grating on your nerves, the tap- tapping of the chalk as words and numbers on the blackboard miraculously appeared, lengthy periods of the morning devoted to the incessant soundtrack of hollering teachers, screaming children determined to create a disturbance and then more voices.
You can clearly hear the full- blooded stomping of kids racing headlong through the school gates, stampeding through the corridors and then flooding out into the school playground. To this day you can now see hundreds of kids coats piled up haphazardly on the floor of the cloakroom, the mustiest of smells along the corridor and then being told to quickly change into plimsolls because if you didn't you'd have to miss PE, exercise time, physical fitness time and the moment to get that body into shape by moving.
There was of course a crazy uniformity about our young years, a stern insistence on punctuality, order and obedience at all times. Some of us can still see certain teachers marching down corridors with what seemed like an almost military clip- clop of stilettoes, a commanding presence in an utterly mystifying world. Of course it was all very new and very exciting to some extent but not if you hadn't a clue why you had to go to school in which case the whole experience was painfully harrowing.
The start of the school day would be rudely punctuated by the ringing bell in the playground where large groups of kids would suddenly pull on the brakes, stop what they were doing immediately, look around at their new friends, now aware that the disciplines you would have to go undergo would be so demanding and rigorous that you'd just have to get used to this regime whether you liked it or not.
In ordered formations we would line up in the playground and then troop slowly towards our classrooms and just compose yourself. The sound of a thousand slamming desks, chairs that seem to scrape and creak gratingly at the same table and tables that banged and crashed, were additional audio accompaniments to the whole day in primary school. There seemed a disorganised bedlam about this whole process at first but then we recognised our surroundings and didn't complain that much.
Looking back it was PE that seemed to stick out like a sore thumb in our minds as the one subject that really looked as though it had been made up on the spot. In the large assembly hall, complete with polished brown floor and the oldest record player since the Middle Ages, we would all stand to attention, puffy red cheeks panting, hair now slightly matted and ready to attack those daunting climbing frames, the burning ropes and the very gymnastic brown pommel horse that had to be leapt over with perfect timing and accuracy.
But at this time of the year most schools of course would have been preparing for that inevitable fixture on the school calendar. Now it looks as if most of today's children may have to wait until next June for the school sports day, a glorious fusion of the funny, the mildly competitive and a good excuse for your parents to cheer their siblings home with an egg and spoon wobbling precariously in their hands.
Now school sports day was that one big opportunity to show your mum, dad or grandparents that you could be faster, fitter and stronger than the rest of your peer group. It was that one day when you could flaunt your brand new stringed vest and that flapping shirt that seemed to have a mind of its own. School sports day was the one day in the academic year when writing in books with a studious manner could be temporarily forgotten about just for an afternoon.
We rushed out to our local playing fields, comforting hospital towering over us, grey fence bordering the field and a canopy of trees now in full green bloom. Away in the distance another blackboard would be the frantic scene of much frenzied activity. Our estimable and respected teachers could be found scribbling down the scores both meticulously and conscientiously. Smudges of red, blue, green and yellow would appear and disappear to be replaced with a constant stream of up to date scores.
In the place where everything counted, splendidly painted white lines perfectly illustrated those Olympic style athletics lanes. Then we would crouch down, fingers pointing firmly into the ground, heads poised, bony young shoulders moving and twitching with barely controlled excitement. Then a gentle whistle would blow and the sight of six or seven kids bursting forward into the far reaches of the finishing line would signify that they meant business. It felt like a rite of passage but adolescence was still some way off.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the athletics field, kids would be seen strolling around, boys comparing Pannini football stickers and girls skipping for the best part of two and half hours. Most of the running, egg and spoon and sack races would be staggered and played out in very specific blocks of time. Kids would simply hang around casually as if never sure what exactly they were supposed to be doing next. Then the year group would be called out in a kind of rota system and what followed was a general wandering towards the start lane in a vaguely excited fashion.
And so the mums and dads, grans and grandpas would hurry towards the start of races as their children and grandchildren would climb into some hessian sack that looked as though it had just unloaded potatoes from the local greengrocer. The whistle went and their precious toddlers would set out on those jumping, hopping expeditions that would result in a hilarious heap of exhausted children.
When you think back to those lazy, hazy, crazy days of early summer you'd recall school playtime when nothing seemed to matter and you could be anybody you wanted to be. If you were a boy you may have harboured ambitions of becoming the next Alan Pascoe in the middle distance running events or Mary Peters in her 1972 Olympic pomp if you were a young girl. You'd run up to the bar, arch your back and then hurl yourself over the bar and onto the mat. We were entitled to our dreams
Alas though school sports day may have to be consigned to history- certainly for this year. Now Reception, Years One, Two and Six will be the only years who can be allowed to go back to school even if is until the end of July. The world is still on hold and parents will have to make snap decisions about their children's immediate future. Coronavirus has left a devastating gash in kids lives, a bloody wound that may take ages to heal but slowly there does seem to be a suggestion of good health, that recovery, although not quite complete, may be much closer than we think.
Some of us look back on our school days with a whole mixture of conflicting emotions because in retrospect they should have been the happiest days of our lives. There is a feeling that wherever we are now in our lives the lessons we learned then were more than adequate preparation for the greater challenges that stretched ahead of us in later life. How good is it to wallow in a warm pool of nostalgia since where else are we to look for redemption, that small pocket of hope?
But here we are in the last month or so of the school curriculum and there can be no school sports day because the world is suffering some loathsome disease that some of us would wish had never happened in the first place and can't wait to see the back of . Besides we miss the tumbling tomfoolery of the sack race, the giggling frivolity of the egg and spoon race and those 100 metres of the chest out running just for our parents. Oh how we miss it all.
Now that the children - or at least some of them- have been given permission to go back to school, this may be an opportune moment to go back to the beginning and our formative years at the one establishment where it all started, that foundation stone of our youthful development, the initiation ceremony where we were introduced to other children of the same age.
It was that vital, life defining moment where education took priority to every other consideration and where you finally discovered that you had to wear a formal shirt, tie and blazer every day for the next 11 years or so of your life or even longer for those who paid attention in class. It was that pivotal turning point in your primary school stage of your life where everything seemed very intimidating, overwhelming and undoubtedly scary.
You still have vague recollections of your mum dropping you off at the school gates in those first, frightening years when a vast Victorian building represented something far more distressing and sinister than anything you'd encountered before. It meant that you were about to step into the fiery furnace of education, learning the basics, tackling the rudiments of the alphabet, letters, words, the construction of sentences, grammar and vocabulary. Simple really. Nothing that was too difficult to understand certainly at that age.
This was followed swiftly by the dreaded subject of mathematics comprising as it did the adding up of sums, the memorising of multiplication tables and that petrifyingly complicated network of division and long division. You can still hear the unbearable scratching of those many coloured chalks grating on your nerves, the tap- tapping of the chalk as words and numbers on the blackboard miraculously appeared, lengthy periods of the morning devoted to the incessant soundtrack of hollering teachers, screaming children determined to create a disturbance and then more voices.
You can clearly hear the full- blooded stomping of kids racing headlong through the school gates, stampeding through the corridors and then flooding out into the school playground. To this day you can now see hundreds of kids coats piled up haphazardly on the floor of the cloakroom, the mustiest of smells along the corridor and then being told to quickly change into plimsolls because if you didn't you'd have to miss PE, exercise time, physical fitness time and the moment to get that body into shape by moving.
There was of course a crazy uniformity about our young years, a stern insistence on punctuality, order and obedience at all times. Some of us can still see certain teachers marching down corridors with what seemed like an almost military clip- clop of stilettoes, a commanding presence in an utterly mystifying world. Of course it was all very new and very exciting to some extent but not if you hadn't a clue why you had to go to school in which case the whole experience was painfully harrowing.
The start of the school day would be rudely punctuated by the ringing bell in the playground where large groups of kids would suddenly pull on the brakes, stop what they were doing immediately, look around at their new friends, now aware that the disciplines you would have to go undergo would be so demanding and rigorous that you'd just have to get used to this regime whether you liked it or not.
In ordered formations we would line up in the playground and then troop slowly towards our classrooms and just compose yourself. The sound of a thousand slamming desks, chairs that seem to scrape and creak gratingly at the same table and tables that banged and crashed, were additional audio accompaniments to the whole day in primary school. There seemed a disorganised bedlam about this whole process at first but then we recognised our surroundings and didn't complain that much.
Looking back it was PE that seemed to stick out like a sore thumb in our minds as the one subject that really looked as though it had been made up on the spot. In the large assembly hall, complete with polished brown floor and the oldest record player since the Middle Ages, we would all stand to attention, puffy red cheeks panting, hair now slightly matted and ready to attack those daunting climbing frames, the burning ropes and the very gymnastic brown pommel horse that had to be leapt over with perfect timing and accuracy.
But at this time of the year most schools of course would have been preparing for that inevitable fixture on the school calendar. Now it looks as if most of today's children may have to wait until next June for the school sports day, a glorious fusion of the funny, the mildly competitive and a good excuse for your parents to cheer their siblings home with an egg and spoon wobbling precariously in their hands.
Now school sports day was that one big opportunity to show your mum, dad or grandparents that you could be faster, fitter and stronger than the rest of your peer group. It was that one day when you could flaunt your brand new stringed vest and that flapping shirt that seemed to have a mind of its own. School sports day was the one day in the academic year when writing in books with a studious manner could be temporarily forgotten about just for an afternoon.
We rushed out to our local playing fields, comforting hospital towering over us, grey fence bordering the field and a canopy of trees now in full green bloom. Away in the distance another blackboard would be the frantic scene of much frenzied activity. Our estimable and respected teachers could be found scribbling down the scores both meticulously and conscientiously. Smudges of red, blue, green and yellow would appear and disappear to be replaced with a constant stream of up to date scores.
In the place where everything counted, splendidly painted white lines perfectly illustrated those Olympic style athletics lanes. Then we would crouch down, fingers pointing firmly into the ground, heads poised, bony young shoulders moving and twitching with barely controlled excitement. Then a gentle whistle would blow and the sight of six or seven kids bursting forward into the far reaches of the finishing line would signify that they meant business. It felt like a rite of passage but adolescence was still some way off.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the athletics field, kids would be seen strolling around, boys comparing Pannini football stickers and girls skipping for the best part of two and half hours. Most of the running, egg and spoon and sack races would be staggered and played out in very specific blocks of time. Kids would simply hang around casually as if never sure what exactly they were supposed to be doing next. Then the year group would be called out in a kind of rota system and what followed was a general wandering towards the start lane in a vaguely excited fashion.
And so the mums and dads, grans and grandpas would hurry towards the start of races as their children and grandchildren would climb into some hessian sack that looked as though it had just unloaded potatoes from the local greengrocer. The whistle went and their precious toddlers would set out on those jumping, hopping expeditions that would result in a hilarious heap of exhausted children.
When you think back to those lazy, hazy, crazy days of early summer you'd recall school playtime when nothing seemed to matter and you could be anybody you wanted to be. If you were a boy you may have harboured ambitions of becoming the next Alan Pascoe in the middle distance running events or Mary Peters in her 1972 Olympic pomp if you were a young girl. You'd run up to the bar, arch your back and then hurl yourself over the bar and onto the mat. We were entitled to our dreams
Alas though school sports day may have to be consigned to history- certainly for this year. Now Reception, Years One, Two and Six will be the only years who can be allowed to go back to school even if is until the end of July. The world is still on hold and parents will have to make snap decisions about their children's immediate future. Coronavirus has left a devastating gash in kids lives, a bloody wound that may take ages to heal but slowly there does seem to be a suggestion of good health, that recovery, although not quite complete, may be much closer than we think.
Some of us look back on our school days with a whole mixture of conflicting emotions because in retrospect they should have been the happiest days of our lives. There is a feeling that wherever we are now in our lives the lessons we learned then were more than adequate preparation for the greater challenges that stretched ahead of us in later life. How good is it to wallow in a warm pool of nostalgia since where else are we to look for redemption, that small pocket of hope?
But here we are in the last month or so of the school curriculum and there can be no school sports day because the world is suffering some loathsome disease that some of us would wish had never happened in the first place and can't wait to see the back of . Besides we miss the tumbling tomfoolery of the sack race, the giggling frivolity of the egg and spoon race and those 100 metres of the chest out running just for our parents. Oh how we miss it all.
Monday, 8 June 2020
The world seems to have lost its way.
The world seems to have lost its way.
Oh for a world that has seemingly lost its way, but also its sober perspective, its moral compass and now finds itself in an utter mess, a shambles, its sense of all proportion now completely off any emotional and psychological radar. There is a sense that if we continue to behave and react to world events in the way we seem to be doing then some of the more trenchant critics and cynics will insist that we are just architects of our own downfall, authors of our destiny.
The weekend's riots, ructions and demonstrations in both America and London are stark reminders of what happens when, given half the chance, a society simply disintegrates, crumbling to the ground, imploding and exploding at the first opportunity that comes its way. The streets of Minneapolis and London were awash with enraged, exasperated, empowered people who have now taken the law into their hands and remain convinced that their voices are just being blatantly ignored.
At some point in the last couple of days civil disorder turned into a fiery anarchy, and a dreadful breakdown in communication. There was a vitriolic hatred towards both the police and those who believe that racial conflict is something that's been with us for far too long. The breaking point has now been reached and this is the time to vent their frustrations, their long held grievances and now there is little in the way of a rational discussion to sort everything out.
But how to explain the incident yesterday in Bristol. Amid the heated tempers there were also explosive clashes, flags and banners displaying messages of defiance, infuriated disgust and vehement disenchantment. In other words they weren't very happy bunnies, blasting out their slogans of fairness and racial equality. It could have been any demonstration that has ever taken place in London's West End but yesterday you began to question the necessity of a big, old boisterous march when so much else of far greater significance was still being addressed.
We have now got to the stage when the minds and senses of London's noisiest campaigners are being warped by things that are seemingly out of their control. Yesterday the irate hordes swarmed across the capital city like bees around a honey pot. They bellowed and bawled, brawled and battled with what they may feel like the perceived enemy. They walked together as one, ran against the very people who were perpetrating the most vicious crimes and were then arrested because they were just being too argumentative.
Perhaps in their saner moments we may all just calm down eventually if only because we may run out of steam. The toppling of a statue in Bristol raised so many pulses and blood pressures that even now on reflection, some of us are still scratching our heads. How did a slavery figure from ancient past come to be recognised as a genuine threat to considered and sensible thinking?
To those of us who would like the current news topics to maintain some semblance of relevance to the more pressing issues of the day. Lockdown has now cut the whole year into completely indigestible pieces, a hotch potch of vague and new fangled phrases, muddled misunderstandings and just utter baloney at times. In fact there have been times when you'd have been forgiven for thinking that the language of the day was more Latin than the Queen's English.
For the last three months we have been subjected to a mass of contradictions, a cumbersome jumble of same old statements of the obvious and a constant stream of promises that didn't seem to be going anywhere. Day after day we were initially told to stay at home because if we had, we'd infect the whole planet and kill off the whole planet. Then we were told that we could go out eventually but only to get loaves of bread and pints of milk at the local supermarket since they were still open.
Then by the same token we were warned not to go out to exercise - i..e. walk up to the top of the road or take the dog for a walk because that was just plain bad and almost treasonable. You were forbidden to do anything for whatever reason but then gently coaxed out of your home when the government considered that now was the right time to feed the ducks and see your grandchildren.
The next pronouncement made it abundantly clear that you would not be allowed to sit on park benches but could stand in different parts of the country. You could remain together in the home you were already in but then warned that you couldn't travel any further than the next town or suburb in case they were virulently viral and ultimately transmitted the lethal Covid 19. Everything was all about geography, location, distance, miles and measurements, inches and centimetres. You'd have been forgiven for thinking that although you'd left school many decades ago, you were still there in spirit.
But now it seems we are edging towards that classical day when s street parties and bunting will shortly become the order of the day and the local mayor or mayoress will declare Britain a celebration zone. The schools are now partially open, people are grouping around in parks, the kids are happy and relieved and shortly those non essential shops selling toys, clothes, furniture and electrical items will be encouraged to fling open their doors for financial transactions.
It does seem that on June 15 the department stores and shops in the West End will be allowed to tentatively creak open their rusty doors, the hallowed portals of commerce and money a very viable proposition. It was all very intriguing and perhaps lacking joined up thinking. We will have access to an approximation of the normal world but not to believe that everything in the garden is rosy. You can have half the cake but not the other. Go figure.
For instance you can forget about a long, cool refreshing sup of ale or beer in your local pub because that's on hold until sometime in July. So there now remains a vast cross section of Britain whose desperate thirsts for alcohol will not be slaked until long after Midsummer's Day. So where does that leave us? Can we finally have our haircut at our local hairdressers or barbers although fortunately some of us have already had their haircut?
The truth of course that we can't converge on our local Pret A Manger, Costa or Nero for a criminally expensive latte, coffee or moccha because they just get impossibly crowded at the best of times. So that's a non starter. You can't devour a burger or pizza because these fast food parlours are too dangerous for words. And you can't go to the cinema because that would constitute a major criminal offence and besides James Bond and Daniel Craig can wait until later on this year. Now where did that bucket of popcorn go? Ah yes it's over there.
Oh for a world that has seemingly lost its way, but also its sober perspective, its moral compass and now finds itself in an utter mess, a shambles, its sense of all proportion now completely off any emotional and psychological radar. There is a sense that if we continue to behave and react to world events in the way we seem to be doing then some of the more trenchant critics and cynics will insist that we are just architects of our own downfall, authors of our destiny.
The weekend's riots, ructions and demonstrations in both America and London are stark reminders of what happens when, given half the chance, a society simply disintegrates, crumbling to the ground, imploding and exploding at the first opportunity that comes its way. The streets of Minneapolis and London were awash with enraged, exasperated, empowered people who have now taken the law into their hands and remain convinced that their voices are just being blatantly ignored.
At some point in the last couple of days civil disorder turned into a fiery anarchy, and a dreadful breakdown in communication. There was a vitriolic hatred towards both the police and those who believe that racial conflict is something that's been with us for far too long. The breaking point has now been reached and this is the time to vent their frustrations, their long held grievances and now there is little in the way of a rational discussion to sort everything out.
But how to explain the incident yesterday in Bristol. Amid the heated tempers there were also explosive clashes, flags and banners displaying messages of defiance, infuriated disgust and vehement disenchantment. In other words they weren't very happy bunnies, blasting out their slogans of fairness and racial equality. It could have been any demonstration that has ever taken place in London's West End but yesterday you began to question the necessity of a big, old boisterous march when so much else of far greater significance was still being addressed.
We have now got to the stage when the minds and senses of London's noisiest campaigners are being warped by things that are seemingly out of their control. Yesterday the irate hordes swarmed across the capital city like bees around a honey pot. They bellowed and bawled, brawled and battled with what they may feel like the perceived enemy. They walked together as one, ran against the very people who were perpetrating the most vicious crimes and were then arrested because they were just being too argumentative.
Perhaps in their saner moments we may all just calm down eventually if only because we may run out of steam. The toppling of a statue in Bristol raised so many pulses and blood pressures that even now on reflection, some of us are still scratching our heads. How did a slavery figure from ancient past come to be recognised as a genuine threat to considered and sensible thinking?
To those of us who would like the current news topics to maintain some semblance of relevance to the more pressing issues of the day. Lockdown has now cut the whole year into completely indigestible pieces, a hotch potch of vague and new fangled phrases, muddled misunderstandings and just utter baloney at times. In fact there have been times when you'd have been forgiven for thinking that the language of the day was more Latin than the Queen's English.
For the last three months we have been subjected to a mass of contradictions, a cumbersome jumble of same old statements of the obvious and a constant stream of promises that didn't seem to be going anywhere. Day after day we were initially told to stay at home because if we had, we'd infect the whole planet and kill off the whole planet. Then we were told that we could go out eventually but only to get loaves of bread and pints of milk at the local supermarket since they were still open.
Then by the same token we were warned not to go out to exercise - i..e. walk up to the top of the road or take the dog for a walk because that was just plain bad and almost treasonable. You were forbidden to do anything for whatever reason but then gently coaxed out of your home when the government considered that now was the right time to feed the ducks and see your grandchildren.
The next pronouncement made it abundantly clear that you would not be allowed to sit on park benches but could stand in different parts of the country. You could remain together in the home you were already in but then warned that you couldn't travel any further than the next town or suburb in case they were virulently viral and ultimately transmitted the lethal Covid 19. Everything was all about geography, location, distance, miles and measurements, inches and centimetres. You'd have been forgiven for thinking that although you'd left school many decades ago, you were still there in spirit.
But now it seems we are edging towards that classical day when s street parties and bunting will shortly become the order of the day and the local mayor or mayoress will declare Britain a celebration zone. The schools are now partially open, people are grouping around in parks, the kids are happy and relieved and shortly those non essential shops selling toys, clothes, furniture and electrical items will be encouraged to fling open their doors for financial transactions.
It does seem that on June 15 the department stores and shops in the West End will be allowed to tentatively creak open their rusty doors, the hallowed portals of commerce and money a very viable proposition. It was all very intriguing and perhaps lacking joined up thinking. We will have access to an approximation of the normal world but not to believe that everything in the garden is rosy. You can have half the cake but not the other. Go figure.
For instance you can forget about a long, cool refreshing sup of ale or beer in your local pub because that's on hold until sometime in July. So there now remains a vast cross section of Britain whose desperate thirsts for alcohol will not be slaked until long after Midsummer's Day. So where does that leave us? Can we finally have our haircut at our local hairdressers or barbers although fortunately some of us have already had their haircut?
The truth of course that we can't converge on our local Pret A Manger, Costa or Nero for a criminally expensive latte, coffee or moccha because they just get impossibly crowded at the best of times. So that's a non starter. You can't devour a burger or pizza because these fast food parlours are too dangerous for words. And you can't go to the cinema because that would constitute a major criminal offence and besides James Bond and Daniel Craig can wait until later on this year. Now where did that bucket of popcorn go? Ah yes it's over there.
Saturday, 6 June 2020
Has the world gone completely mad?
Has the world gone completely mad?
All it seemed to take was one horrifically worldwide deadly disease to send the world into a ferocious firestorm of madness. Suddenly the streets of America are in flames, a little girl who went missing years ago has now been brought to public attention again and the world, hitherto peaceful but crazy at times, is now in complete meltdown. In a way we should have seen this one coming, totally prepared for even more negativity, bleakness and incomprehensible behaviour. But we didn't and now for another news agenda with equally as mind blowing consequences.
The unforgivably racist killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has once again concentrated all of our thoughts on everyday themes such as revenge, retribution, social unrest, violence and bloodthirsty aggression. This is just another day in the life of a world that just doesn't know what to do with its seething anger, its bleeding hearts and its air of racial injustice.
The events of the last couple of days may just as well have been a heart wrenching re-run of the last 60 years in the American heartland. The burning streets and buildings of Minneapolis are more or less a metaphor for the inexplicable deaths of black men throughout recent decades. They took to the streets in their hundreds and thousands, shouted the odds vociferously, pleaded for their voices to be heard and then discovered that, as usual, nobody was listening to them at all.
Wearing the topical masks of the moment, they gathered together en masse and bellowed out their slogans, their hurt, their flagrant sense of rejection, their understandable bile and bitterness before charging huge ranks of police with giant shields. It could have been a news story from any era of our lives but it was taking place here and now and you shared their grief and their fury. Flames leapt high into the American night sky, an innocent 75 year old was thrown senselessly to the ground and nobody seemed to notice the 75 year old bleeding and prone, the totally unwitting victim of circumstances.
At the beginning of the year we all assumed that 2020 would mark the beginning of not only another decade of a new century but a brightly auspicious new beginning for all of us. We hoped it would be the good one that John Lennon had so touchingly sung about just before he became the most famous public figure and was then assassinated because somebody decided to claim Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame and notoriety. What on earth is happening to this beautiful planet and can humanity save themselves? Oh for our loving and supportive families because some of the screws do seem to be loose in the most senior positions of world officialdom and authority.
For instance our politicians are beginning to behave like those jovial characters in a Punch and Judy show, the health of the world has now taken a complete battering and we're still being asked to remember a little girl who went missing years and years ago in a Portuguese restaurant. There are those who may believe that the parents may have shown perhaps just a little more responsibility or maybe this is too harsh a judgement.
When Madeleine McCann went missing in the early 2000s, Britain was both shocked and appalled without realising that the little girl with an infectious grin had been kidnapped. For what now seems a wild goose chase, the McCann parents have been torturing themselves, crying themselves to sleep and praying for good news. But here we are in 2020 and the longest kidnapping mystery of modern times has been resurrected in the middle of a global disease, a racist killing and much more besides.
The cynics would insist that we should have known better. Your biggest fear and concern is that somewhere in an empty Hollywood studio, an already obscenely wealthy director is collecting all of the information they need, composing the script, designing the set and then piecing together all of the essential details that would inevitably lead to a film called 2020, an epic movie weaving together all of the strands of a vast documentary about this year.
Of course every year brings with it all the trials and tribulations that are somehow unavoidable. We know what's coming but we can never be sure how hard and painful it may turn out to be. This year is becoming so astonishingly eventful and historic that it may take some social historian the best part of the next decade to come up with an accurate and comprehensive record of those tumultuous events in precise chronological order.
At the moment it really feels as though the whole of 2020 has just gone, disappeared into a dark tunnel and left to smoulder in some charred ruin. Some of us would even go so far to suggest that perhaps we should turn the clock back to New Year's Day and just have another go. After the terrible bush fires in Australia at the beginning of January there was a brief lull before, quite literally, the storm. A steady February that was superbly accident free and nowhere near as bad as January, now turned into the March from hell. The rest, as they say, is cliched history.
So here we are on the first Saturday of June and today takes the memory back to the D- Day Normandy landings which will now be beautifully commemorated by a Britain and the rest of the world which still feels as though it's battling another war. You saw the soldiers wading through the war torn waters and you could hardly contain your swelling pride.
More so than ever before you bowed your deferential head to the men and women who laid their lives on the line ,realised quite importantly the soul baring sacrifices they made, the dangers that had to be confronted and then overcome in the time it took for the bombs and bullets to subside. And so they will huddle together in front of their Zoom cameras before wiping away the rivers of tears and remembering.
And so here we are well into the third month of lockdown and the world keeps revolving on its axis. At times you begin to seriously wonder just how much longer the world will have to remain in shackled suspension, shrouded under a cloud of indecision and indecipherable facts, figures and statistics. The hours, months and weeks inch their way forward laboriously and awkwardly but we'll see the back of this. You see.
From Monday Britain will, by the law of the land, have to wear a mask on either train or bus which to some of us feels vaguely disconcerting and, to be honest, extremely worrying. But we won't panic because we'll see through this period with that trusty British stiff upper lip. Freedom of expression and global harmony are just around the corner. It's just taking a little longer than we at first anticipated. Patience will be our redeeming virtue. Hold on everybody we can see the light now.
All it seemed to take was one horrifically worldwide deadly disease to send the world into a ferocious firestorm of madness. Suddenly the streets of America are in flames, a little girl who went missing years ago has now been brought to public attention again and the world, hitherto peaceful but crazy at times, is now in complete meltdown. In a way we should have seen this one coming, totally prepared for even more negativity, bleakness and incomprehensible behaviour. But we didn't and now for another news agenda with equally as mind blowing consequences.
The unforgivably racist killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has once again concentrated all of our thoughts on everyday themes such as revenge, retribution, social unrest, violence and bloodthirsty aggression. This is just another day in the life of a world that just doesn't know what to do with its seething anger, its bleeding hearts and its air of racial injustice.
The events of the last couple of days may just as well have been a heart wrenching re-run of the last 60 years in the American heartland. The burning streets and buildings of Minneapolis are more or less a metaphor for the inexplicable deaths of black men throughout recent decades. They took to the streets in their hundreds and thousands, shouted the odds vociferously, pleaded for their voices to be heard and then discovered that, as usual, nobody was listening to them at all.
Wearing the topical masks of the moment, they gathered together en masse and bellowed out their slogans, their hurt, their flagrant sense of rejection, their understandable bile and bitterness before charging huge ranks of police with giant shields. It could have been a news story from any era of our lives but it was taking place here and now and you shared their grief and their fury. Flames leapt high into the American night sky, an innocent 75 year old was thrown senselessly to the ground and nobody seemed to notice the 75 year old bleeding and prone, the totally unwitting victim of circumstances.
At the beginning of the year we all assumed that 2020 would mark the beginning of not only another decade of a new century but a brightly auspicious new beginning for all of us. We hoped it would be the good one that John Lennon had so touchingly sung about just before he became the most famous public figure and was then assassinated because somebody decided to claim Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame and notoriety. What on earth is happening to this beautiful planet and can humanity save themselves? Oh for our loving and supportive families because some of the screws do seem to be loose in the most senior positions of world officialdom and authority.
For instance our politicians are beginning to behave like those jovial characters in a Punch and Judy show, the health of the world has now taken a complete battering and we're still being asked to remember a little girl who went missing years and years ago in a Portuguese restaurant. There are those who may believe that the parents may have shown perhaps just a little more responsibility or maybe this is too harsh a judgement.
When Madeleine McCann went missing in the early 2000s, Britain was both shocked and appalled without realising that the little girl with an infectious grin had been kidnapped. For what now seems a wild goose chase, the McCann parents have been torturing themselves, crying themselves to sleep and praying for good news. But here we are in 2020 and the longest kidnapping mystery of modern times has been resurrected in the middle of a global disease, a racist killing and much more besides.
The cynics would insist that we should have known better. Your biggest fear and concern is that somewhere in an empty Hollywood studio, an already obscenely wealthy director is collecting all of the information they need, composing the script, designing the set and then piecing together all of the essential details that would inevitably lead to a film called 2020, an epic movie weaving together all of the strands of a vast documentary about this year.
Of course every year brings with it all the trials and tribulations that are somehow unavoidable. We know what's coming but we can never be sure how hard and painful it may turn out to be. This year is becoming so astonishingly eventful and historic that it may take some social historian the best part of the next decade to come up with an accurate and comprehensive record of those tumultuous events in precise chronological order.
At the moment it really feels as though the whole of 2020 has just gone, disappeared into a dark tunnel and left to smoulder in some charred ruin. Some of us would even go so far to suggest that perhaps we should turn the clock back to New Year's Day and just have another go. After the terrible bush fires in Australia at the beginning of January there was a brief lull before, quite literally, the storm. A steady February that was superbly accident free and nowhere near as bad as January, now turned into the March from hell. The rest, as they say, is cliched history.
So here we are on the first Saturday of June and today takes the memory back to the D- Day Normandy landings which will now be beautifully commemorated by a Britain and the rest of the world which still feels as though it's battling another war. You saw the soldiers wading through the war torn waters and you could hardly contain your swelling pride.
More so than ever before you bowed your deferential head to the men and women who laid their lives on the line ,realised quite importantly the soul baring sacrifices they made, the dangers that had to be confronted and then overcome in the time it took for the bombs and bullets to subside. And so they will huddle together in front of their Zoom cameras before wiping away the rivers of tears and remembering.
And so here we are well into the third month of lockdown and the world keeps revolving on its axis. At times you begin to seriously wonder just how much longer the world will have to remain in shackled suspension, shrouded under a cloud of indecision and indecipherable facts, figures and statistics. The hours, months and weeks inch their way forward laboriously and awkwardly but we'll see the back of this. You see.
From Monday Britain will, by the law of the land, have to wear a mask on either train or bus which to some of us feels vaguely disconcerting and, to be honest, extremely worrying. But we won't panic because we'll see through this period with that trusty British stiff upper lip. Freedom of expression and global harmony are just around the corner. It's just taking a little longer than we at first anticipated. Patience will be our redeeming virtue. Hold on everybody we can see the light now.
Thursday, 4 June 2020
Covid 19 reaches a peak but when will normal life be completely resumed?
Covid 19 reaches a peak but when will normal life be completely resumed?
We have now been told to remain patient, not to panic because we seem to be much closer to a point of normality and the experts keep telling us that although the breakthrough vaccine is no nearer to fruition the middle of June could mark a pivotal turning point in the immediate future of the whole globe. Covid 19 is a deadly disease pandemic, still hovering around with malicious intent but sooner or later we'll all wake up shortly with a fleet footed spring in our step and bliss in our hearts.
At the moment though this is very much that interim period where something exciting could take place very shortly but where caution should still be very much the watchword. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is still ruffling his blond locks of hair with all the bewilderment of a man who doesn't quite know what to say anymore. He is now fully dependent on the superior knowledge of his chief medical officer and chief scientific officer, both very learned men who keep pointing to graphs in order to illustrate their points.
And this is where it all becomes very vague and ambiguous, a puzzle within a puzzle, the most complicated set of algorithms that remind you of an Open University programme on the BBC. Over 40 years ago the BBC would wake everybody up at a seemingly unearthly hour of the morning just to explain theories, point at eye-popping graphs with neatly drawn lines and carefully calculated figures that may just as well have been an entirely different language. But we forgave the BBC because, to quote Lord Reith, this was their mission to inform, educate and entertain.
The vast numbers of fatalities and deaths do seem to be dwindling rapidly and things are now heading in the right direction but not in the volume that some of us would like. The peak of the coronavirus has now been successfully passed but the doubts linger, questions remain stubbornly unanswered and nobody can be sure when it might be considered legal to stand next to your loved ones, when to gobble up a plate of burgers and hotdogs at that summer defining family barbecue and whether we should hug our families with a moving tenderness.
Of course the parks have never been busier, more vital and lively than ever before. You wouldn't have dreamt of stopping Britain's runners from putting on those trainers and hitting those pavements. On closer inspection this morning you noticed a whole community of joggers, strollers and T-shirted runners pushing themselves to the limit. It was beginning to look very impressive and something like the old days before this all happened.
Then you saw something you hadn't seen for some time. On the public tennis courts, members of the public were swinging their rackets with unbounded confidence. There were some tennis players who looked just relieved to be out on the court after so many months of wondering whether their rackets would just gather dust in the cupboard. That magical crack of yellow tennis ball did send a warm glow through you if only because it was as if summer had been given our consent to start and the coronavirus would shortly be shunted to the tramlines so to speak.
So it is that sport is up and running and not before time or so it would seem. On Monday the good folk of Newcastle could finally watch horse racing once again but only from the comfort of their home. Sadly, the bookmakers, or so we believe, are still closed so that's a tricky one. Then we discovered that the pigeon racing season could return once again as if any of us knew that, rather like the rest of the world of sport, it had started but then stopped for whatever reason. So we could breathe again.
Regrettably cricket may have to wait a little longer for its green light and Wimbledon tennis, as we now know, has been postponed until next summer. The start of the athletics season would also appear to be delayed, cancelled or just not happening. The world of golf, which would seem to be the epitome of self isolation, could be back on the back pages and media outlets who seem to take such inordinate pleasure in the ups and downs, ebb and flow of sporting confrontations, good natured rivalries or perhaps not so good natured rivalries.
Football of course may have lost its Euro 2020 but that could always be left to next year since footballers are very adaptable and if the competition is disrupted by pouring rain, nothing is going to stop England manager Gareth Southgate from donning one of those famous waistcoats. It seems that football will now forge ahead with a comeback date for the Premier League season now scheduled in just under a fortnight now. Opinions are now not nearly as polarised as they were perhaps a month ago since there is a passive acceptance that at some point the crucial relegation and promotion issues had to be resolved one way or the other.
Liverpool will win the Premier League quite handsomely and, more so than ever now, historically because surely there will never be a season like this one. Cut off in their prime after bowing out to Atletico Madrid in this year's Champions League, little were we to know that the crowd that night at Anfield would be a harbinger for a world health catastrophe. Liverpool departed Europe but the world caught the most shocking virus of all time.
The pros and cons, the arguments and counter arguments for re-starting the Premier League have been numerous and impassioned. But the fact is that Manchester City will welcome Arsenal on June 17 when some of us were probably looking forward to the tennis at Wimbledon, also off. The match will be attended by 300 members of the respective teams coaching staff and perhaps the odd mask here and there. It will undoubtedly be one of the weirdest and most surreal matches in the history of the Premier League the like of which will hopefully never be seen again in years to come.
The latest suggestions almost belong to the joke shop. There is a strong possibility that fake crowd noise will be pumped through the ground's speakers in an effort to replicate the real thing. The source of this noise, or so we are led to believe will come from the latest X Box game or a FIFA computer device. Is this really happening?
And then finally we must not forget the cardboard cut out people who will generate the most extraordinary atmosphere Premier League grounds have ever heard. If the Edinburgh Festival- which has also gone by the coronavirus wayside - were thinking of a bright new comedy vehicle for any of its stages then it wouldn't have to look any further for material than the Premier League. We are now in the realms of the Whitehall farce where doors are slammed and accomplished actors and actresses become overnight comedians or comediennes.
Still who knows Liverpool will still be jumping up and down with the Premier League trophy, amid a blizzard of confetti and paper streamers. Then they'll release the fireworks, play the triumphant music and Anfield will share its happiest day with a couple of starlings and a magpie from the Albert docks. It will be quite the most unique occasion in the history of football, a silent movie that the likes of Charlie Chaplin or the Keystone Cops would probably have flourished in.
Meanwhile Bournemouth, Aston Villa, Norwich City and, one would like to think, not West Ham will be tussling for points in the Premier League basement in their battle against relegation. Within the space of several hurried weeks we will know for sure that football will have finally flipped. Who on earth came up with the wheeze that home advantage will not count when quite clearly neither side can hope to benefit from any imagined scenario? Oh what have they done to football? The hope is that this arrangement will work on all levels but if ever sport needed a pick me up this is not the medicine it may be looking for. We must hope that football will one day come to its senses.
We have now been told to remain patient, not to panic because we seem to be much closer to a point of normality and the experts keep telling us that although the breakthrough vaccine is no nearer to fruition the middle of June could mark a pivotal turning point in the immediate future of the whole globe. Covid 19 is a deadly disease pandemic, still hovering around with malicious intent but sooner or later we'll all wake up shortly with a fleet footed spring in our step and bliss in our hearts.
At the moment though this is very much that interim period where something exciting could take place very shortly but where caution should still be very much the watchword. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is still ruffling his blond locks of hair with all the bewilderment of a man who doesn't quite know what to say anymore. He is now fully dependent on the superior knowledge of his chief medical officer and chief scientific officer, both very learned men who keep pointing to graphs in order to illustrate their points.
And this is where it all becomes very vague and ambiguous, a puzzle within a puzzle, the most complicated set of algorithms that remind you of an Open University programme on the BBC. Over 40 years ago the BBC would wake everybody up at a seemingly unearthly hour of the morning just to explain theories, point at eye-popping graphs with neatly drawn lines and carefully calculated figures that may just as well have been an entirely different language. But we forgave the BBC because, to quote Lord Reith, this was their mission to inform, educate and entertain.
The vast numbers of fatalities and deaths do seem to be dwindling rapidly and things are now heading in the right direction but not in the volume that some of us would like. The peak of the coronavirus has now been successfully passed but the doubts linger, questions remain stubbornly unanswered and nobody can be sure when it might be considered legal to stand next to your loved ones, when to gobble up a plate of burgers and hotdogs at that summer defining family barbecue and whether we should hug our families with a moving tenderness.
Of course the parks have never been busier, more vital and lively than ever before. You wouldn't have dreamt of stopping Britain's runners from putting on those trainers and hitting those pavements. On closer inspection this morning you noticed a whole community of joggers, strollers and T-shirted runners pushing themselves to the limit. It was beginning to look very impressive and something like the old days before this all happened.
Then you saw something you hadn't seen for some time. On the public tennis courts, members of the public were swinging their rackets with unbounded confidence. There were some tennis players who looked just relieved to be out on the court after so many months of wondering whether their rackets would just gather dust in the cupboard. That magical crack of yellow tennis ball did send a warm glow through you if only because it was as if summer had been given our consent to start and the coronavirus would shortly be shunted to the tramlines so to speak.
So it is that sport is up and running and not before time or so it would seem. On Monday the good folk of Newcastle could finally watch horse racing once again but only from the comfort of their home. Sadly, the bookmakers, or so we believe, are still closed so that's a tricky one. Then we discovered that the pigeon racing season could return once again as if any of us knew that, rather like the rest of the world of sport, it had started but then stopped for whatever reason. So we could breathe again.
Regrettably cricket may have to wait a little longer for its green light and Wimbledon tennis, as we now know, has been postponed until next summer. The start of the athletics season would also appear to be delayed, cancelled or just not happening. The world of golf, which would seem to be the epitome of self isolation, could be back on the back pages and media outlets who seem to take such inordinate pleasure in the ups and downs, ebb and flow of sporting confrontations, good natured rivalries or perhaps not so good natured rivalries.
Football of course may have lost its Euro 2020 but that could always be left to next year since footballers are very adaptable and if the competition is disrupted by pouring rain, nothing is going to stop England manager Gareth Southgate from donning one of those famous waistcoats. It seems that football will now forge ahead with a comeback date for the Premier League season now scheduled in just under a fortnight now. Opinions are now not nearly as polarised as they were perhaps a month ago since there is a passive acceptance that at some point the crucial relegation and promotion issues had to be resolved one way or the other.
Liverpool will win the Premier League quite handsomely and, more so than ever now, historically because surely there will never be a season like this one. Cut off in their prime after bowing out to Atletico Madrid in this year's Champions League, little were we to know that the crowd that night at Anfield would be a harbinger for a world health catastrophe. Liverpool departed Europe but the world caught the most shocking virus of all time.
The pros and cons, the arguments and counter arguments for re-starting the Premier League have been numerous and impassioned. But the fact is that Manchester City will welcome Arsenal on June 17 when some of us were probably looking forward to the tennis at Wimbledon, also off. The match will be attended by 300 members of the respective teams coaching staff and perhaps the odd mask here and there. It will undoubtedly be one of the weirdest and most surreal matches in the history of the Premier League the like of which will hopefully never be seen again in years to come.
The latest suggestions almost belong to the joke shop. There is a strong possibility that fake crowd noise will be pumped through the ground's speakers in an effort to replicate the real thing. The source of this noise, or so we are led to believe will come from the latest X Box game or a FIFA computer device. Is this really happening?
And then finally we must not forget the cardboard cut out people who will generate the most extraordinary atmosphere Premier League grounds have ever heard. If the Edinburgh Festival- which has also gone by the coronavirus wayside - were thinking of a bright new comedy vehicle for any of its stages then it wouldn't have to look any further for material than the Premier League. We are now in the realms of the Whitehall farce where doors are slammed and accomplished actors and actresses become overnight comedians or comediennes.
Still who knows Liverpool will still be jumping up and down with the Premier League trophy, amid a blizzard of confetti and paper streamers. Then they'll release the fireworks, play the triumphant music and Anfield will share its happiest day with a couple of starlings and a magpie from the Albert docks. It will be quite the most unique occasion in the history of football, a silent movie that the likes of Charlie Chaplin or the Keystone Cops would probably have flourished in.
Meanwhile Bournemouth, Aston Villa, Norwich City and, one would like to think, not West Ham will be tussling for points in the Premier League basement in their battle against relegation. Within the space of several hurried weeks we will know for sure that football will have finally flipped. Who on earth came up with the wheeze that home advantage will not count when quite clearly neither side can hope to benefit from any imagined scenario? Oh what have they done to football? The hope is that this arrangement will work on all levels but if ever sport needed a pick me up this is not the medicine it may be looking for. We must hope that football will one day come to its senses.
Tuesday, 2 June 2020
London in lockdown.
London in lockdown.
As if you didn't know already, London is dead. In the small hours of an early March morning, London collapsed with a massive cardiac arrest. It looks though as if it might just come back to life in a couple of weeks time. For now though London resembles the quietest of graveyards, a capital city deprived of all oxygen and waiting for a post mortem that can only be a matter of time. Or is it? The chances are that all is not lost. At the moment though it doesn't look good at all. In fact it's terrifying.
This morning you set out on what will hopefully be the last journey to London in lockdown. You would not believe what has happened to the West End of London although you may have an idea of what it looks like. But to see the heart of the commercial West End in all of its rawness and earthiness was to witness a city that looked thunderstruck, dumbfounded, barely familiar and completely unrecognisable.
It is a London that stopped breathing in March, gasped for air during both March and April and then just vanished without trace. The global pandemic coronavirus had plunged us all into chaotic turmoil and heart wrenching tragedy. There were those of us who were deludedly convinced- and with every justification- that Covid 19 would just blow over in much the way that all seasonal illnesses and viruses pass through and then just go away. How wrong we were.
And yet you wandered through all of the West End's most celebrated landmarks, its winding, twisting roads, its long and lingering thoroughfares, sighing with open- mouthed astonishment. Was this the West End that my late dad would regularly wax lyrical about, the West End with its thousands and millions of tourist admirers from all over the world and now a West End he would have been truly horrified to see?
Walking down Charing Cross Road you were suddenly reminded of its olde world charm, its centre of literary excellence, the second hand bookshops in noble profusion, Foyles, its flagship, world famous book shop. Foyles is still now shut up, shuttered, gagged and locked up for the duration until the government deem it safe to open again which could be any time. Charing Cross Road was frighteningly silent, a morgue, a chilling mortuary, even a mausoleum that has been left to rot with nobody in sight to lift its mood.
You walked down Charing Cross Road and the pavements may just as well have been a sandy desert, a vast concrete bowl of sun kissed pavements but little in the way of human life. Occasionally groups of builders would emerge from somewhere only to then find that the people wearing masks were now outnumbering them. The buses were trundling through the West End almost apologetically but they looked, for all the world, like red ghosts. The sprinkling of musical instrument shops in nearby Denmark Street had now lost both their percussion and woodwind quality. Tin Pan Alley had now forgotten all about its traditionally hypnotic rhythms.
But wherever you looked the West End looked in a state of petrified paralysis, its once healthy heartbeat now gone, stolen and robbed by circumstances completely out of control. For the time being London must continue to function without its supporting actors and actresses, its leading stars of stage and screen, its multi- cultural cuisine, its cosmopolitan food and drink, its histrionic theatre and all of its lovably ostentatious gladrags.
If London were a human it would be weeping and sobbing floods of tears. Oxford Street is still grieving because it has nobody to turn to. The shops and the huge department stores look like lonely individuals with nobody to call a friend. At some point you were reminded of a state funeral procession without the coffin. The tourists, in all their varying states of intrigue, will not be visiting London this year because this is not the time for cheerful revelry and charming comment.
As you stepped off the bus at Trafalgar Square you cast your mind back to the mid 1960s when your wonderful dad would point at Nelson Column in the gathering wintry darkness and introduce you to a world of total escapism, the centre of a capital city that glittered and flickered with its tempting blandishments. The whole of London used to light up in a remarkable show of neon Coca Cola. Now though London is totally without its fascinated humanity, denied the chance to show off, flaunting its party frocks, riding freely in its after theatre rickshaws and then supping a late night pint or two.
Outside the National Portrait Gallery, with its marvellous columns and pillars, there were a sprinkling of people although it was hard to tell why they were at all since there was nothing to look at as such. The fountains in Trafalgar Square were still cascading water with absolute abandon but around them were only the occasional set of passer- byes.
You passed the Garrick theatre, the Trafalgar Studios and JK Rowling's The Cursed Child at Cambridge Circus and wondered whether their seats would ever be full again. The Dominion theatre in London's Tottenham Court Road was conspicuous by a blank screen that told its own story. No tickets will be sold at any time in the unforeseeable future. There is a greyness and solitariness about London that can never be accurately defined because none of us have seen this before. The pavements are no longer echoing to the beat of endlessly pounding feet from all over the world. It probably feels like the end of the world to some but to the eternal optimists we must believe that those feet will once again dance to a happier beat shortly.
For the time being, London will have to be monitored like the sick patient it quite clearly is. Nobody though should bring up any grapes or flowers for London because it just wants time to clear its head before somebody wakes it up from its slumbering state. And yet in a couple of weeks time we've now been re-assured that we will indeed be able to shop until we drop, shopping will become the latest fashion statement and families will once again be able to do the Hokey Cokey with their loved ones.
But then you moved away from the scene of broken hearts, of inexplicable estrangement, of social distancing and lockdown and then took another deep breath because the lump in your throat had just got to you. All of this apartness, solitude and painful alienation had just hit you right there. You convinced yourself that you never wanted to see London like this, that this should be a once in a lifetime experience. No more second spikes of the Coronavirus should ever visit our wonderful planet because we really do miss our loved ones and we hope that Covid 19 never rears its head again. Never.
As if you didn't know already, London is dead. In the small hours of an early March morning, London collapsed with a massive cardiac arrest. It looks though as if it might just come back to life in a couple of weeks time. For now though London resembles the quietest of graveyards, a capital city deprived of all oxygen and waiting for a post mortem that can only be a matter of time. Or is it? The chances are that all is not lost. At the moment though it doesn't look good at all. In fact it's terrifying.
This morning you set out on what will hopefully be the last journey to London in lockdown. You would not believe what has happened to the West End of London although you may have an idea of what it looks like. But to see the heart of the commercial West End in all of its rawness and earthiness was to witness a city that looked thunderstruck, dumbfounded, barely familiar and completely unrecognisable.
It is a London that stopped breathing in March, gasped for air during both March and April and then just vanished without trace. The global pandemic coronavirus had plunged us all into chaotic turmoil and heart wrenching tragedy. There were those of us who were deludedly convinced- and with every justification- that Covid 19 would just blow over in much the way that all seasonal illnesses and viruses pass through and then just go away. How wrong we were.
And yet you wandered through all of the West End's most celebrated landmarks, its winding, twisting roads, its long and lingering thoroughfares, sighing with open- mouthed astonishment. Was this the West End that my late dad would regularly wax lyrical about, the West End with its thousands and millions of tourist admirers from all over the world and now a West End he would have been truly horrified to see?
Walking down Charing Cross Road you were suddenly reminded of its olde world charm, its centre of literary excellence, the second hand bookshops in noble profusion, Foyles, its flagship, world famous book shop. Foyles is still now shut up, shuttered, gagged and locked up for the duration until the government deem it safe to open again which could be any time. Charing Cross Road was frighteningly silent, a morgue, a chilling mortuary, even a mausoleum that has been left to rot with nobody in sight to lift its mood.
You walked down Charing Cross Road and the pavements may just as well have been a sandy desert, a vast concrete bowl of sun kissed pavements but little in the way of human life. Occasionally groups of builders would emerge from somewhere only to then find that the people wearing masks were now outnumbering them. The buses were trundling through the West End almost apologetically but they looked, for all the world, like red ghosts. The sprinkling of musical instrument shops in nearby Denmark Street had now lost both their percussion and woodwind quality. Tin Pan Alley had now forgotten all about its traditionally hypnotic rhythms.
But wherever you looked the West End looked in a state of petrified paralysis, its once healthy heartbeat now gone, stolen and robbed by circumstances completely out of control. For the time being London must continue to function without its supporting actors and actresses, its leading stars of stage and screen, its multi- cultural cuisine, its cosmopolitan food and drink, its histrionic theatre and all of its lovably ostentatious gladrags.
If London were a human it would be weeping and sobbing floods of tears. Oxford Street is still grieving because it has nobody to turn to. The shops and the huge department stores look like lonely individuals with nobody to call a friend. At some point you were reminded of a state funeral procession without the coffin. The tourists, in all their varying states of intrigue, will not be visiting London this year because this is not the time for cheerful revelry and charming comment.
As you stepped off the bus at Trafalgar Square you cast your mind back to the mid 1960s when your wonderful dad would point at Nelson Column in the gathering wintry darkness and introduce you to a world of total escapism, the centre of a capital city that glittered and flickered with its tempting blandishments. The whole of London used to light up in a remarkable show of neon Coca Cola. Now though London is totally without its fascinated humanity, denied the chance to show off, flaunting its party frocks, riding freely in its after theatre rickshaws and then supping a late night pint or two.
Outside the National Portrait Gallery, with its marvellous columns and pillars, there were a sprinkling of people although it was hard to tell why they were at all since there was nothing to look at as such. The fountains in Trafalgar Square were still cascading water with absolute abandon but around them were only the occasional set of passer- byes.
You passed the Garrick theatre, the Trafalgar Studios and JK Rowling's The Cursed Child at Cambridge Circus and wondered whether their seats would ever be full again. The Dominion theatre in London's Tottenham Court Road was conspicuous by a blank screen that told its own story. No tickets will be sold at any time in the unforeseeable future. There is a greyness and solitariness about London that can never be accurately defined because none of us have seen this before. The pavements are no longer echoing to the beat of endlessly pounding feet from all over the world. It probably feels like the end of the world to some but to the eternal optimists we must believe that those feet will once again dance to a happier beat shortly.
For the time being, London will have to be monitored like the sick patient it quite clearly is. Nobody though should bring up any grapes or flowers for London because it just wants time to clear its head before somebody wakes it up from its slumbering state. And yet in a couple of weeks time we've now been re-assured that we will indeed be able to shop until we drop, shopping will become the latest fashion statement and families will once again be able to do the Hokey Cokey with their loved ones.
But then you moved away from the scene of broken hearts, of inexplicable estrangement, of social distancing and lockdown and then took another deep breath because the lump in your throat had just got to you. All of this apartness, solitude and painful alienation had just hit you right there. You convinced yourself that you never wanted to see London like this, that this should be a once in a lifetime experience. No more second spikes of the Coronavirus should ever visit our wonderful planet because we really do miss our loved ones and we hope that Covid 19 never rears its head again. Never.
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