Called Up

Today, 30th January 2021, one year after the first person in the U.K. died of COVID-19, I received notification that a vaccine is on its way, and I should be receiving a call from my doctor within fourteen days, to go get jabbed. I can't wait. I'm fully aware of the contoversy surrounding the vaccine, and am by no means going to try to persuade anyone to do what doesn't come naturally to them, but here's why I'm getting in line with my sleeve rolled up. 

 I am seventy years old, and I remember the time before vaccines were routine. I remember the harrowing black and white photographs of children in iron lungs, and the depressing death tolls that resulted from recurrent polio epidemics. 

 My first friend was GarySalisbury, the boy next door. We were five and six years old, and were inseparable. That is until the day when my mother told me that Gary couldn't come  out to play, because he was poorly. Then he was in hospital, then he wouldn't be coming home at all, because he had died. 

I remember the last time we played together, in a stream behind the row of shops at the bottom of our road. That's where he contracted polio, and I didn't. 

 I remember the emergency vaccination  clinic set up at the Community Centre. 

I remember the sugar cube that meant my mother would never have to suffer the loss her friend Agnes had. 

 So yes, I'm not allowing myself the luxury of denial. I'm staying home until the epidemic  has subsided, as it surely will: quickly, if 70%+ of us get vaccinated before the virus mutates, or slowly if we don't.

Please don’t let a future cohort of seventy-year olds remember for the young, that COVID-19 killed a quarter of a million British people, because the lessons of their elders had been ignored. 

Death toll to date: 107,807

Newent in Three ..

Church

Snowdrops.

Lake

Telling My own Story

Happy New Year!

 Five years ago I made the only resolution I ever kept - not to make any more resolutions, because I never kept any. I did, however makes one mid -year resolution last year. In March, at the onset of the nation-wide lockdown, I resolved to blog every day, to record for posterity the trials and tribulations of survival in a plague season. 

I envisioned myself a modern Samuel Pepys, diligently scribing a diary that would be poured over by sociologists and historians hundreds of years later, as source material for an inter-galactic docudrama on The Great Pandemic of 2020. Ālmost immediately, I hit a snag. Unlike the estimable Mr Pepys, I wasn’t going into the Naval Office daily, or giving a doxy one in the alleyway. I have insufficient Parmesan to bury, and no servant to chide. I believed I had no story to tell. 

 That’s never true of course. I took up knitting, I made a banner for Church, I recorded stories for my grandchildren and uploaded them to You-Tube I shopped weekly in a face mask and I binge-watched Doc Martin on the telly. I failed to make sourdough bread. These things may indeed be of interest to my notional intergalactic screenwriter, but I have my doubts. 

So, I am listening to an uplifting Ted Talk yesterday, a dialogue between two men about the human tendency to make things up as they go along. I am a little miffed, as I believe this theory originated with me, and I’m getting no credit here. I really must listen again, because I missed much of it, having been suddenly overtaken by the principle thesis: there is no objective reality, we get by through the invention of a story that enables us to make sense in an otherwise chaotic and meaningless cosmos. 

 I am very taken with this. I can look at the tv and watch the absurdities of others and frame it as ‘their story’. Take, for example, the historic unfolding of events in Washington DC this week: the President of the USA is inciting a mob to invade the seat of his own government in what many will rightly call an insurrection. 

 My attention is caught by footage of a young man, distraught at an airport, being refused a seat on a plane as he is now on a no-fly list, branded as a terrorist, and about to confront unlooked-for and very unpleasant consequences. Already the recipient of mocking derision, this man weeps as his heroic myth of a patriot opposing a corrupt system, unravels before his eyes, in front of the world, and he, in this new story, is an extra on the set of the drama of a malignant narcissist desperately trying to cling to power. 

 Will the “hero” ever see it this way? I do not know: only he can write his own ending, and I suspect it will not be a happy one. 

 Pause to reflect on the story I am writing for myself. Unlike the anti-hero above, I am not caught up in the delusions of a despot, and I am self-aware enough to be skeptical of my hopes and dreams. 

 Stuff happens. Much of it beyond my control, it’s the raw material of a narrative I concoct for myself. Maybe I will make a resolution this year, and maybe this will frame that narrative. Or not.

 I think the reality is more like watching Doc Martin. The drama unfolds, I laugh out loud and nod to the Story-maker: This is my cup. I will drink it with gratitude, and when we write the last paragraph together, let us be satisfied.