I didn’t cope well on Saturday. It wasn’t Saturday’s fault, exactly. I just woke up to a message on our local residents’ facebook group that people were planning a national stand on your front step and ‘Clap for Boris’ on Sunday night at 8pm. And at that moment, my angry inner chimp, ‘Thatcher’, well and truly escaped from her box and went on the rampage.
I had to force myself to leave the group soon after, because what I think I said to them all, upon hearing some of my surrounding neighbours singing the praises of our complete arsehat-clown-scrotum of a Prime Minister, probably came out something like a typed version of what this chap here has to say…
Don’t get me wrong. I’m trying to embrace the potential healing of our fractured, dog-eared nation (post Brexit) to unify against a common enemy in this virus. I applaud looking past the divisions of recent political past and embracing the efforts for the common good. But I draw the line at hailing the buffoonasaurus at Number 10 as some kind of national hero.
In the ever-increasing queue for punches in the face on Punch-in-the-face-Saturdays, Boris is right in the front, and as soon as he’s had it, would need to run round to the back of the queue to line up for another round, on repeat, literally forever.
Last week’s ‘Clap for Carers/the NHS’ that happened on Thursday night at 8pm, by contrast, was so incredibly moving it made a lot of us cry. There was something so poignant about that moment, standing on the thresholds of our properties, hearing our neighbours all along the street clapping, cheering, even clanging little bells or banging pans, in support of the brave and devoted NHS workers, risking their lives daily to try to save us all, often segregated from their very own families to do their duty.
André and I stood on our step, hugging and just looking at each other’s eyes. The shared pain, fear, pride, hope. I’ve never known anything in real life like that feeling. I’ve seen archived footage of the cheering at the end of the Second World War, I’ve watched films where everyone rallied together in faith of saving the day. But I’ve never seen anything like this. I don’t know that many of us ever have.
I have friends who are doctors, nurses, midwives, etc and all of them have been reduced to tears in the recent days at what they’ve witnessed, at the panic and terror that they too feel being exposed to this invisible enemy and not knowing if they are transferring it between patients, or even to their own loved ones.
I’ve heard them crying about lack of testing for people on the front line, lack of PPE (personal protection equipment) and scrubs (their pyjama like uniforms). I’ve heard them crying about how scared they are that they will soon be intubating friends they recognise as more of us go to hospital, or even worse that they may be forced to choose who will get the potentially life saving ventilators and who will die.
It’s hard to imagine a situation outside of full scale warfare where our medics might have to make those sorts of calls on anything other than an occasional basis. But this is the result of years of (many would argue deliberate) underfunding of our beloved NHS, and years of ignoring the warnings of impending pandemics from scientists. Followed by the most recent cockup where our Government apparently turned down the kind offer from the EU to be included in a sharing of ventilators only to change their story a few days later to ‘having missed the email and therefore the deadline.’
This is why Thatcher lost her shit on Saturday. Thatcher is a simple chimp, and she’s usually very easily pacified and soothed on any normal day. But a day when those responsible for exacerbating our current horrific situation and no doubt causing thousands of additional deaths over the next few months are being applauded as modern day Winston Churchills (although as it turns out, he was a bit of a wrongen too to be fair)…no, that was more than she could take. Thatcher was lobbing her shit left right and centre.
I don’t get angry very often. I don’t have a ‘place’ to put that rage when I do feel it and have real trouble processing anger as an emotion. Maybe this is why it helps to have a separate entity in my brain to assign it to. My split personality – I am a sweet natured, firm but fair Mary Poppins type, but have this sub-personality that deals with the uncomfortable things of life that is a sweating, grunting, screaming, marauding Kong-like creature who would rip the heads off its enemies and throw them at the rest of you, breaking windows, breaking wind, breaking social decorum rules without a moment’s pause.
Thatcher wouldn’t just punch Boris Johnson in the face. She’d pull his innards out his neck hole and whirl them around her head like a neanderthal cheerleader. She’d wear his head as a hat. She’d shit in his teacups and smash all his rich tea biscuits to crumbs. And after that she’d smear her primate arse hole along the wallpaper of Number 10 whilst making sustained, lingering, direct eye contact with anyone who watched her, baring her chimpy teeth and growling.
You can probably see why I like to assign my very occasional moments of rage to another entity and not own it myself. It’s not healthy. And André isn’t always around to gently poke a Cadbury’s Flake in my direction and calm me down with soothing words until rage turns to tears, tears turn to sleep in the nook of his arm.
But that moment that we all clapped for our beloved, courageous NHS workers…THAT was a different story. Suddenly we felt less alone and isolated, we felt comforted and close. And for a moment I put aside my wonderings about which of the neighbours had voted for the Tories in the last couple of elections and therefore voted for the people who actually cheered as they voted down pay rises for NHS workers, firefighters, teachers, police (whilst voting FOR their own pay rises). For that moment I felt such closeness and unity with my fellow humans.
We’re all in this together. We’re all like scared children hoping the grownups can make us safe again. We’re all like the people stuck on the ground huddling, waiting and watching the TV for any snippet of news while our heroes battle it out against an alien life form attacking the Earth.
That’s how it feels. Like a movie. Some sort of unfolding disaster movie where our heroes are not the Bruce Willis or Brad Pitt type but the ordinary nurses, the bin men, the farm workers and shop keepers keeping the country ticking.
Our lives do indeed feel like a movie and we’ve cycled through the initial excitement of the unfolding drama to the feeling that we’d really rather like it to stop now please, we’ve had enough of adrenaline coursing through our bodies, the fear of running out of food or medicine or being contaminated and ‘turned’ a la Walking Dead, the fear of how we’ll entertain our children for months on end or deal with our angsty teenagers sulking about their ruined sex lives or cope within the confines of our quarters with our nearest and dearest.
It’s kind of like there was this giant storm and a flood, and we all swam for the nearest safe island and got stuck there. We can see other people’s islands from where we are, and we can even wave at each other, but we can’t swim to anyone else’s island without risking our death or theirs.
I lucked out that my island is populated by a handsome Tarzan-like man and a cute little sidekick animal for comedic balance. How blessed am I that my island-Tarzan is strong enough to move the giant bag of compost around the garden and plant potatoes for us to eat later on. How blessed am I that he does his share of cooking and housework. How blessed am I that he’s already used to all my annoying habits and I his before we became stuck together on our little island.
But there’s a big problem. My baby, my daughter (OK so she’s a 21 year old baby) is stuck on a completely different island near her university. She stayed to be near her partner, but then her sweetheart swam to a different faraway island to be with their family, leaving my baby completely alone. Anything could happen to her – the virus, choking on a chunk of un-chewed broccoli, tripping over her own feet and falling down the stairs, cutting herself on the lid of a can of pea and ham soup and getting septicaemia. My baby is alone on her island and that’s not OK with me.
While André-Tarzan and I have been playing second-honeymoon and planning our vegetable garden, my baby girl is having to brave the streets of her university town to find food and medicine. And although video chats with her friends and sweetheart are soothing, there is no one there each night to cuddle her. She doesn’t even have a cute animal companion like I do. And the worry about her loneliness and safety churns away in my stomach all day. She says she’s fine. But what if she suddenly isn’t?
Going to get her, having had symptoms ourselves means potentially risking infecting her with whatever we’ve had. Although now we’re almost symptomless our house may well still need a deep clean before it is contaminant free. Deep-cleaning has never really been a strong talent of mine, as anyone who has visited my house can attest to. My mum used to say ‘No man will marry you if you’re undomesticated.’ She never once said, ‘You’ll die of a killer virus if you don’t learn to whip round with the j-cloth and a bit of Domestos once in a while you filthy mucker.’
The bigger risk is actually that WE haven’t had IT (and instead actually had some other Dreaded Lurgy we don’t know the name of) and that she will infect US if she comes home. Without antibody tests how do we know?
We could quarantine her in her bedroom for two weeks. To be fair, when she’s home she almost never leaves her room and communicates via her technology for the most part anyway – just appearing for food and bathroom-needs. But there’s no separate bathroom. No separate kitchen. We would be exposed. And how to get her home? Andre would need to drive to get her and her stuff but then he would be exposed in the car all that time. I’d need to quarantine HIM too. Where to put him? Not enough bedrooms. Not enough bleach. Not enough information!
I imagined sending him in home-made hazmat wear to get her, dressed like some kind of apocalyptic bee keeper. But who can drive in such garb? Who can see in their peripherals whilst wearing any kind of mask? Should I make him steal a bus and sit her up the back of it with the windows wide open? What should I do? I’m a mother. I’m meant to know what’s best. I’m meant to know how to keep my child safe.
I’d be risking my sweetheart to get my child. But to not get my child might be risking my child. This is the dilemma so many of us are facing – not just with children, but with elderly parents, partners who were stuck on a work trip when the lock down happened, housemates who had to make a quick decision between staying with their lover or staying with their parents. When the big storm of this health crisis hit us, we all swam for our lives for these little islands, and now we must live with the consequences of those choices, waving via digital technology at each other and hoping everyone stays safe as the storm rises further still.
Each day, just once a day, we are allowed to leave our islands but not to see each other, only to exercise and walk our dogs. Teddy Spaghetti is probably wondering why we no longer take her to the fabulous spacious parks where she can run free, chasing squirrels and romping with other dogs and instead march her locally on a lead, through the spookily empty streets of our home town. She’s enjoying the change of scenery but I wonder how much of our anxiety she is picking up on. She seems a little more on edge herself, but perhaps it is because I keep coming at her with nail-scissors to try and give a much needed haircut. She is probably still traumatised from the first and last time I took it upon myself to do home grooming and did THIS to her:-
Other than her walk locations, Teddy’s little routine hasn’t changed much. She wakes, wees, flooches about, gets a walk, barks to be fed, barks to be given a treat when her bowl is empty (pudding), flooches some more, jumps up on the cuddle chair with her pet monkeys (that’s us) for some evening luvvies, retires to the bedroom, masturbates merrily against her Ikea teddy bear for a good half hour until she is exhausted and sore, goes for another wee, barks for another treat, then sleeps in the little dog-nest next to our bed.
Yesterday as we roamed the streets of Maidstone, weirded out by their apocalyptic emptiness, we came across the Build-a-bear Workshop store. A display of teddies and other plushies wearing fancy costumes lined the windows – mermaid teddies, rollerskating teddies, princess teddies. And we realised that this is something akin to an Amsterdam Red Light District experience for our dog. All those tartily-clad plushies lined up in provocatively welcoming poses to tempt our horny doglet.
We made a mental note of the few shops that remained open in this crisis – food shops, off-licences, pharmacies, a random pound shop with a stack of toilet rolls in the window. And a mental note of all of those shops now closed – nail bars, blow dry specialists, vaping shops, comic shops, housewares and clothes shops. I couldn’t help thinking how much of our time, money and energy is spent on tat we don’t need. How wasteful we are as a species.
How quickly things that seemed important have become completely pointless. It’s easy to see how even money in the conventional sense might suddenly cease to have value in the apocalyptic society. Our proud pound suddenly replaced as the national currency by things that really matter – loo roll and pasta. Trading on local facebook groups has already started taking place. The stock markets are crashing and the money markets in crisis but there’s a steady exchange rate of Charmin to Pot Noodles.
As we wandered back through town we saw a young man striding towards us (thankfully not too closely), carrying a nine pack of bog rolls under his arm. He had a face of pride and smugness on him that I can only imagine is how our caveman ancestors might have looked as they strutted home with a freshly murdered antelope under their arms to feed the starving cave-kids.
We could see how supremely manly that man felt in that moment. He wasn’t just going home with something for his wife to wipe her arse on. He was going home expecting sex for being a hero. He was going home anticipating fanfares and cheering from his children. He had braved the horrors of Poundland in Maidstone and risked his life for those arse-wiping-squares on a cardboard tube and now he was walking home with a trumpeted theme tune powering each step. In the future, his kids would tell their own grandchildren about the day daddy came home with a nine pack. He is the stuff of legend. Netflix will make movies about men like him.
As we returned home from our allotted exercise excursion on Sunday, and got on with our day, we didn’t even notice when 8pm passed by because we were watching a re-run of Doctor Who on catchup. Alien invasion that threatens the world stopped by a hero…a Doctor (how is that for irony and appropriateness).
So when André suddenly realised the moment for the neighbourhood cheering for Boris had passed by in complete and utter silence, we felt united with our fellow man once more. United in a collective disapproval at decisions that may have cost lives and have most certainly added to the stress and risk of our beloved real national heroes. United in an acknowledgment that the likes of Mr Johnson should not be elevated to equal ranking with those who are a genuine national pride at the moment.
Thatcher, satisfied at the peaceful silence, had climbed back into her box in the recesses of my primal brain and gone back to sleep, a snoring, happy chimp once more. Teddy Spaghetti was twitching as she dreamed about tarty plushies in provocative Build-a-Bear costumes, and Tarzan and me curled closer together in the big chair, grateful to be safe in the moment. Wishing so much for a Doctor to come and save us all.
Until a cure is found, please stay safe, sane, keep your chimps in their boxes, and see you on the other side.
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