' Every day's an endless stream of cigarettes and magazines ', young Simon and Garfunkel drawled musically over fifty years ago. Well, surveying our current, somewhat indifferent state, some of us gave up the ciggies at the time when Paul and Art were philosophising in song and now all current journals and newspapers are uniformly glossy and depressing. So it's become a matter of Every day's an endless stream of wash your hands and pray ' Vaccine '. Dear old Napoleon Bonaparte called us a ' nation of shopkeepers ' which was perhaps more complimentary than he realised but, now that retail outlets [ as we have to call them ] are so rapidly disappearing from the landscape, perhaps our Gallic neighbours will describe us with characteristic generosity as a nation of mitt cleansers.
We've been called worse things but let us turn instead to the seventeenth century Royalist poet, Richard Lovelace, and his immortal words ' Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage '. Of course he was talking figuratively about his emotions but, I'm sorry Richard, for those of us who have been locked up, self-isolating for twelve weeks, brick walls do create a feeling of incarceration and that's even allowing for a courtyard garden and a stroll in Cutteslowe Park with she who must be obeyed at 6.30 every morning. After four decades of resisting entreaties to do the yoga thing, such is the feebleness of my mental state, I have indulged occasionally in this ghastly alternative pursuit while deciding that striding up and down the stairs is much more satisfying. This builds resilience of course to cope simultaneously with the national authorities' next chapter of bungling accidents as listed on the news and verbal forays at the front door with obtuse delivery drivers. There are no dangers here of the heart rate slowing down.
At times I have been tempted to start a petition [ I believe that's all the rage nowadays ] to have the terminology modified from ' lockdown ' to ' lockup '. After all, many fine people have been locked up in the past and if we're here for the duration, let us stop gazing at the gutter and look heavenwards to the stars. We should be heading for the eternal cloudland run by St Peter rather than descending into hellfire with the devil and his pals. You know: Per ardua ad astra; always look on the bright side etc.
And are we learning any more about ourselves as we ponder, philosophise and generally become more mindful [ another silly and vapid concept ]? No? Well how about other people? During this lockup the spouse and I have celebrated -- or rather failed to celebrate, as in every other year -- our forty first wedding anniversary and I wonder whether, in the midst of a state of reasonably harmonious co-existence, the words of Tom Lehrer ever understandably float across her mental field of ponderings: ' Because I know I'll hate you when you are old and grey '. I'm not going to ask; I have been old and very grey for quite a long time anyway and thank goodness for FaceTime and Zoom which help to concentrate minds on the next two generations and prevent the lady of the house from becoming too ' mindful ' or too honest.
We've learnt a lot about Wales, an important place beyond Offa's Dyke, perhaps soon to be the only other country in the United Kingdom. We've seen a good deal of its First Minister [ can you name him? ]; learnt that the folk there have some lovely countryside which we can't access; and been reminded that they're rather adept at the rugby game and singing. And if you've never heard Max Boyce's rendering of The Pontypool Front Row [ probably before your time ], check it out soon.
And occasionally we've paused to pour scorn on those who don't keep the rules but only if we hear about them through the media rather than if we know them personally -- when it's rather different of course. Young men between the ages of 18 and 25 have apparently found it hardest to conform, which is presumably why twice in the twentieth century we sent precisely this group off to be busy, fight and take the deathly consequences in two world wars. It's hardly surprising, having had a let-off from the grim reaper this time round, they are enjoying the occasional snog and sausage amidst the apple blossom.
Meanwhile our pocket [ and they really are rather diminutive in stature ] leaders have decided we would benefit from lessons in the development of the English language and they have given us an inevitable ' road map ' to take us through some novel verbal concepts. Clearly we should all move to Skegness as you will remember from ancient advertisements that it is so bracing there and since March we have been instructed to brace ourselves -- perhaps for our finest hour. We were all invited to appreciate the notion of the furlough, unexpectedly bounced into the nation's language, sounding at once medieval and agricultural. I quite expected this to be followed by a reintroduction of the Anglo Saxon property rights of soc and sac, toll and team and infangthief [ learn a little something with Pyper every day ] but we stayed instead on a war footing with many spikes and much shielding coming to prominence. Then there was / is Track and Trace, a distant newly found cousin of Trick or Treat, whereby the almighty powers tricked us for most of the time then gave us sweeties by way of treats or concessions to keep us happy. And all the while there was ramping ... and more ramping ... and yet more ramping. We don't know who will come out top of the grisly league tables of victims from coronavirus but the UK must have won the ramping competition; there's still a whole lot of it going on.
Strangely, in number 16, we have watched less television rather than the opposite, dwelling on the comforting reassurance provided by nature and gardening programmes, encouraging us that all will be well and a nuclear winter will not necessarily follow a nightmare spring. Perhaps even the world will be left a better place and it will certainly need to be as up to now The Archers has been an unqualified disaster. Recording several months in advance, first Ambridge wallowed even more than usual in an escapist haven of normality, free from Covid, where a fire at Grey Gables and changing the name of the local pub were the only headlines smacking of untoward drama. Then we had three weeks of total silence when the characters [ and perhaps the actors ] were introduced to the horrific concepts of a modern pandemic, and now, from any number of sitting rooms, these titans of the world's longest running soap subject us to a diet of introspective monologues on topics as far reaching as the captaincy of the village cricket team and the quality of silage on Lakey Hill. God is clearly in his / her heaven and all is very much right with the world.
When we have watched the television, we have seen, for the purpose of interview, into too many people's homes where beautifully bound tomes, smart journals and just occasionally a dogeared paperback have been arranged, rearranged or unarranged on bookshelves of generally lowish calibre, apart from one interviewee who admitted that his apparently elegant array was in fact a superior style of wallpaper. Faces appear distorted from below with worryingly expansive jowels and foreheads. You don't see much of Dominic Cummings on your screens, thank goodness you may think, but if you do, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the Mekon -- and if you are unacquainted with that smooth pated green monster, all head and very little else, the scourge of the solar system, opponent of Dan Dare, pilot of the future in the Eagle comic of the 1950s, then you really should get to know him.
And what about our leaders? Pontificating, probably hypocritically, about honour and honesty for almost fifty years, I am now eschewing the temptation to preach about morality [ or science ] except to say there is a danger in society when public servants, having been chosen by the people and made their way to the top of the pile, become self-seeking panjandrums. They too need to refer swiftly to Richard Lovelace, this time To Lucasta, going to the wars, ' I could not love thee ( Dear ) so much, loved I not Honour more '. However lacking in moral fibre it may be, you can at least partially forgive the spin, the spooks and the spanking of the Borgias or Mussolini, if there's bread on the table and the trains run on time. You may be a shyster; you may be the shiny suited loud mouthed type who's eliminated in the first round of The Apprentice, but please, please can you at least aspire to a basic level of reliability and competence: work out what needs to be done; tell us and then do it.
Perhaps to understand the scene a little better, we should travel to Greyfriars. This has nothing to do with Bobby in Edinburgh but the school [ single sex male variety of course and I always told you that was a dangerous and outdated concept ] where Billy Bunter, the owl of the Remove, was the central character in books and comics through most of the twentieth century.
' Hello, chaps, I'm Billy Bunter, sometimes known as Boris and, yikes, I'm one of those new fangled right wing libertarians. So long as you have a ' liber ' about your person, people think you're jolly friendly and I am. I thought I would go to Wikipedia and see what they said about Billy B's characteristics as I knew they would apply to me and golly [ not too many of those from faraway places, please] gosh, it describes him -- or me -- as ' obtuse, lazy, racist, nosy, deceitful, slothful, self-important and conceited '. Those are beastly things to say and I don't believe them; nor do any of my fourteen, or is it seventeen, children. I'm trying harder than ever and my awesome boss Dom from the Upper Fifth, says I'm doing OK. He says I have to surround myself with pusillanimous sycophants so that I can see the world through a prism of privilege. I believe in free trade, free love, free falling hair and a free pass to the philosophy of entitlement or how to persuade the populus that you're not an elitist really. Let them drink coke or snort it if they prefer. Yaroo!
Hello, hello everyone; my name's Matthew but you can call me Matt. When people heard I was a Hancock, they said ' That's about right, you'll be out of job in half an hour '. But I'm still here, your totally superficial, overly chirpy and overly promoted Milk Monitor from the Lower Fourth. I have lots of schemes and promises to bring you more and more milk; I use a scatter gun approach and I say you can all have 170 pints a day as that will make me very popular. And then, when you get only half a pint, I'll say that I was really meaning ant size quantities so you're really getting 200 pints -- aren't I clever? I get teased a bit because I don't really know when to laugh and when to cry. Jolly good show, everyone, especially Billy Boris.
Good evening, gentlemen; I am Rishi; Rishi Shortshanks from the Upper Sixth, having already taken Further Maths A level well down the school. I am a socially acceptable Indian because I come out of the very top drawer of society. When it's a matter of caste, you don't need those imprimaturs of class like belonging to the Bullingdon. I just float graciously -- and gracefully, I hope -- over everyone else and they tend to respect a chip off the old Raj block. I've inherited my father's manners, my father's business acumen and trillions of my father's rupees. I'm quite prepared to distribute some of my largesse, the sweeties and the jujubes, in the junior common room, especially to my friends; I'm a little more reluctant when it comes to those working dubiously for themselves. Gandhi transformed India with his salt march to the sea; I don't know much about salt or Universal Credit other than I sit well above both of them. I'm rather good at cricket and I don't have to bother myself with aids; I steer clear of all varieties of that term.
Welcome, everyone, to my world, as I like to call it. You may be wondering where on earth I've come from; well, we won't bother about that. I'm Robert Kendrick; I use the first person singular of the personal pronoun a great deal and I know exactly where I'm going -- all the way to the top, calling in at few illegal destinations on the way. My current role is I'm the Third Form prefect of Lost Propetty and old property for that matter and I am very proud of my achievements. I am round and cuddly and prosperous and above all pompous. I worship the ground that Boris walks on and I know that, when I get caught with my trousers down, I'll be following his excellent example. Matt spills milk on his trousers when he gets overexcited and Rishi of course has someone else to put his trousers on for him. Dominic's so cool [ if a little unconventional ], I expect he'll stop wearing trousers altogether soon. They say I'm just the sort of useless member of the bourgeoisie the Bolsheviks were after in 1917. I don't know about that; I just think, without any obvious justification, I'm awfully good.
I don't usually speak to mere mortals; I am Dom. I used to be Dominic Cummings but I have now styled myself Raspuvelli as people can't make up their minds whether I'm closer to Rasputin or Machiavelli. This is something of an insult as it is of course those pillars of populist yet elitist government who share some dark and private characteristics with me. I am the shadowy swot of the Upper Fifth, lurking in a corner of the library, producing endlessly boring blogs and then amending them to suit the moment and the mood. Do you remember Cilla Black? Well I am the person to whom she could never sing ' Anyone who had a heart ' as I decided to dispense with that particular organ at quite an early age. That word ' dispense ' reminds me of Hugh le Despenser who succeeded Piers Gaveston as King Edward II's special confidante and favourite. Eventually the nobles decided that Hugh must go and he met an untimely end which involved all sorts of unpleasant things happening to the more private parts of his anatomy. If Boris ever mentions this, I point out that a year later Edward II himself suffered his demise involving the insertion of a red hot poker. This is why I have free rein to invent slogans and bully anyone who's lurking in the nether regions, skills which I honed secretly to a high level in County Durham. Occasionally I do a favour for Billy Boris; last week, after I had given him a rendering of ' I beg your pardon, you always promised me a rose garden ', I agreed to wear a white shirt to meet the media scum. I wasn't keen as this represented weak things like virgins and surrender so I pulled it out semi-scruffily at the waist as I compiled my list of those who may not see winter again. The Mekon is indeed back and, no, I didn't say ' Stay safe ' or even ' good bye '.
Leaving Greyfriars, we steam heavenwards in our lockup state and ponder which silver lined clouds we are passing on the way. Hedgehogs are doing well, we hear, and the environment generally is cleaner than it was. Let us hope D Attenborough, 153, makes another super planetary programme soon as he must be such a happy bunny. For almost four months that interminably tedious Brexit has been rightly consigned to the capacious bin of unimportance in the great scheme of things, while the gavotting and grinding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in downtown LA goes largely unreported -- hooray!
Of greater significance for the future of our society, the people have won through in terms of resilience, common sense and generosity of spirit, qualities enhanced in spite of the muddled endeavours of government. Volunteers have appeared at every corner; essential jobs involving whatever skills, in the country at large as well as in the health and caring professions, have been accomplished to an extraordinarily high standard by millions of committed citizens. Many of the rest of us have shown due appreciation in various ways. Tobias Weller, a small boy with cerebral palsy, has walked and stayed cheerful through many miles and raised much money in the process. Captain -- call me Colonel -- Sir Tom Moore raised over £30 million just before his hundredth birthday and, equally important, persuaded us that it was going to be a good day. Incidentally, those who know their military hierarchy might wonder why this eminent oldster moved straight from Captain to Colonel, leapfrogging through the rank of Major. In fact David Bowie was responsible for this as in 1969 he gave us the definitive Major Tom who eventually lost contact with Ground Control and slipped off into never never land. We could not now besmirch his memory by introducing a rival but can harbour a private thought that Tom Moore might have found a way of walking back to earth rather than floating in a most peculiar way. He deserves all the promotions we can give him.
Finally, as the interviewers are wont to ask those who are entrapped: ' What are you looking forward to when you are eventually released? ' Qualifying the ' when ' with a more realistic ' if ', I look forward to finding seats in church [ especially of course for the ceremony, indeed the event, of the century, the wedding of Sarah Pyper and Tom Bunnell, two of the very best and the very nicest of folk, in God's own country ], at Lord's cricket ground and in Columbia Coffee House in Oxford, though not necessarily in that order. I have learnt so much about dogs from my daughter who looks after them professionally, I hope to see more of them, now two years since dear Poppy passed on and two months since equally dear Benaud decided to skip the lockup and to join Poppy in that great green meadow in the sky for such lovely four legged friends. From the resident horticulturalist and ornithologist in this house I have really appreciated learning more about the natural world [ basic Springwatch level ] and I hope, even at this late stage, I will get to know the birds and the bees better still. And most of all I look forward to seeing the granddaughters; Willow, aged five, and Clarrie, three, before they suddenly find themselves taking A levels or something. We've got to get the world right for it is their home for a hundred years.
We should be optimistic that humankind will rise to the challenge. Over several millennia we have usually come out on top when nature has been a bit nasty but it will take brains, sound governance, a good deal of common sense and more than a sprinkling of human decency.
They gave it the number nineteen,
This Covid, the virus unseen;
There isn't a pill
To take when you're ill;
So just hope; and keep your hands clean.
3rd June 2020
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