Corona Diary Chapter 18 - New Year to January 19th, 2021

 

2021

 

January 2^nd

 

Several days of icy cold have continued more or less since Christmas Day.  At least we are not being deluged with rain any more.  There is worry though that the infamous ‘Beast from the East’ may be back soon.  This is due apparently to ‘stratospheric warming’, causing a polar vortex.  The last one in February and March 2018 brought us very difficult conditions, even in Dorset.  I remember walking round in deep snow to two of my patients to offer food and support.

 

New Year’s Eve was a muted celebration, though remarkably, many firework displays took place, including one dramatic one somewhere towards the harbour from us at 0130hrs.  An excellent view from our bedroom picture windows, which as yet do not have any blinds (long story).  Somebody obviously had ‘money to burn’.

 

One of the highlights for me over the holiday period was the Vienna New Year’s Day concert from the Vienna Musikverein.  This year the conductor (all the conductors are always personal invitees from the orchestra) was Riccardo Muti.  A lovely concert as always, with the intermission a celebration of 1921-2021 as the centenary of the addition of ‘Burgenland’ to the Austrian empire.  This area to the southeast of Vienna looks idyllic, and the sense of yearning to travel again was acute.  It’s very much on the Hungarian border, and is reputed to have the best food in Austria!  A fusion of Austrian and Hungarian cuisines – expect goulash and strudel – can’t wait to go.  The concert was further enhanced as always by the beautiful ballet dancers from the Wiener Staatsballett performing in the Liechtenstein Garden Palace, another exquisite Viennese venue.  I now rarely look at the travel sections of the newspapers, despite their enticing pleas to visit far flung paradises.  ‘Travel Supplement’ seems to me to be an oxymoron at the moment.  I was struck by one photo however, an advertisement for the Maldives.  A drone photo showed somebody doing lengths in a private pool adjacent to their obligatory stilted hut over what looked like a transparent turquoise sea of great beauty.  Presumably the pool is provided for tourists too scared to venture into the big bad sea?  Strange.  To return to Vienna; Riccardo Muti is now 78 and a ‘Grand Old Man’ of conducting.  After the concert he delivered an impassioned speech stating that culture (and music) is one of the essentials of life, and important to preserve in these difficult times.  It was a fine speech.  One is reminded that in 2011, during a performance of Nabucco in Rome, the audience applauded so much at ‘Va pensiero’ that Muti delivered an impromptu speech criticising the Berlusconi government for cutting arts funding, and then conducted the audience in an encore.  A large majority of Italians know the piece by heart – it has become a second national anthem.

 

I have finished Lolita.  A remarkable book.  I don’t think I can improve on my previous comments.

 

Tomorrow is the first real working day of 2021.

 

Monday 4^th January, 2021

 

A rather cold, gloomy, but dry day, at least here in Dorset.  The temperature struggles up to 3 deg C.  The builder and his team arrive as usual at around 0730 and commence work outside on the drive.  In the evening, the Prime Minister announces a total lockdown.  Cases of Covid are hurtling upwards, and some hospitals are very overstretched.  Big fuss made over the first vaccinations with the Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine which take place, naturally, in Oxford.  Southampton beat Liverpool this evening in the football, 1-0.  Quite an achievement.  Now we have a race between vaccinations and an upward spiral of coronavirus cases.

 

Some progress - chandelier, our wall hanging, and LED light strips on the stairs

An article in the Times this weekend stated: Let’s not rush to celebrate 2021 being the end of misfortunes, warns Jonathan Healey, a history fellow at Oxford, who makes his point about the twists of fate with what he claims is a little-known diary entry by Samuel Pepys 355 years ago.  “The Year of Our Lorde 1665 hath been such a terrible one for ye plague,” he wrote.  “I cannot wait for 1666, for which I have especial excitement to trye the newe bakery that hath opened on Pudding Lane.”

 

Friday 8^th January

 

An icy cold but fortunately, on the South coast of England, dry week.  The builders working outside on the driveway, car port, and patio have had a brazier going most of the week.  No golf or gym, and just some local walks to try and keep fit.  Yesterday though we had an atmospheric walk in the freezing fog of the so-called ‘Wareham Forest’.  So called because much of it is open heathland, and some of it, beside the causeways, very boggy as it drains very slowly down towards Wareham north channel, drained by the River Piddle (also called the Trent).  It is almost possible to imagine this as one of Thomas Hardy’s heaths, especially when there is no-one around as today.

 

Atmospheric Wareham Forest in the freezing fog

On the world front, the demagogue Donald Trump has incited his followers to meet and protest, though perhaps he didn’t envisage that they would storm the Capitol building.  As one U.S. commentator put it; ‘We spend $7 billion on defense, and the heart of our government is overrun in two hours led by a guy in a Chewbacca bikini.’  Five deaths resulted.  There is no doubt that Trump has blood on his hands.  His first declaration, when asked to make a public announcement was still ‘This election was fraudulent,’ hardly guaranteed to make the mob go home.  I caught some of the world leaders’ condemnations, but the Iranians must be laughing themselves silly – a loose translation of what some bearded Ayatollah was announcing was ‘See where a non-Islamic western democracy gets you.’

 

Wednesday January 13^th, 2021

 

T S Eliot wrote that ‘April is the cruellest month’ but this year January has a reasonable claim on this title.  It’s dark, it’s cold, and life is restricted to a simple round of ‘stay home, save lives’ and go out only for essentials or exercise.  Slight concerns about the invasion of our house by our contractors, but we try to keep our distance and most of the building work continues outside.  The last few days I have had a cold, a headache, and a bit of a cough, so early Monday morning I drove to the Creekmoor site for a Covid test.  Result last night – negative.  Hope to get out for a decent walk today, though somewhat concerned that two women in Derbyshire were issued with fines by overzealous police after driving to a beauty spot to walk.  We plan to go back to Wareham forest because it is so quiet.  The beach and seafront is impossible – frequented by very large numbers of people doing their daily walks, even in bad weather.

 

Time for a change of topic.  A very old friend of my parents, a widowed lady of 87, lives in a residential complex near Charleston, South Carolina, and wrote a beautifully legible Christmas card to us.  Eventually, after fruitless phone calls to the Presbyterian retirement home organisation, I have managed to be in touch by e mail, and it is such a pleasure to re-establish contact.  Please indulge me by reading the back story…

 

In December 1962, Harold Macmillan met President John F Kennedy in Nassau, Bahamas.  As part of this agreement, Britain agreed to buy Polaris nuclear missiles and to be equipped by the USA with a nuclear deterrent.  A by-product of this was the rage expressed by De Gaulle, who wanted Europe to be independent of America for its defence.  Parenthetically, it seems surprising that France, so singularly ill-equipped to resist invasion on two occasions already in the 20^th Century, could realistically take this view.  Its contemporary relevance is of course that De Gaulle famously said ‘Non’ to British hopes to join the European Economic Community.  One muses that De Gaulle was a real troublemaker: for example, he visited Canada, to attend Expo 67 in Montreal, and uttered the famous ‘Vive le Québec libre’ speech.  Churchill was not a fan of De Gaulle.  One day in Westminster, he was walking with a colleague near Carlton House Terrace when a taxi drew up and an extremely tall figure got out.  ‘Who is that?’ asked his companion.  ‘General De Gaulle’, replied Churchill.  ‘What, the General De Gaulle?’  ‘No’, said Churchill.  ‘A General De Gaulle’. 

 

My father was an armaments expert in the Admiralty – later the Ministry of Defence.  Recently appointed to Bath after our three-year sojourn in the wilderness of Pembrokeshire (the armaments base for Milford Haven), he was rapidly seconded to the group tasked with locating and running an Admiralty storage base for the missiles.  Although he was modest about this, his early life in Glasgow, and his love of hill walking was possibly instrumental in the location of the Coulport base on Loch Long.  Ideal for many reasons (deep water; proximity to Faslane submarine base; difficulty to get to for anti-nuclear protesters).  It is hard for people in the third decade of the 21^st century to think back to that time and to realise how real the Cold War was, and how unpredictable and intransigent was the post-Stalin regime in Moscow.  ‘Plus ça change’, I hear you say.  As a part of the Polaris project, some of our friends in the Admiralty were posted to Washington, and similarly, experts in the U.S. Navy and their subcontractors in defence were posted to Bath, and subsequently Scotland.  Some of these experts, such as the Lockheed missile control systems liaison officer, Lyn Jones, were given honorary commands in the U.S. Navy, and sent to Bath.

 

At the age of 15, with O levels, two TV channels in black and white, Radio Luxembourg, and much else on my mind, we were thrust into a world where my parents were expected to entertain the visiting firemen.  This was the era of Americans in Sinatra-style pork pie hats, smart suits, and cocktail parties with exotic drinks suddenly the norm.  Lyn, and his attractive young wife Betty, made a huge impression on an adolescent boy.  Lyn was a no-nonsense archetypal crewcut Texan, with a delightful drawl straight out of a cowboy film.  Betty represented the ultimate in American sophistication; an elegant Southern belle with impeccable manners and a lively interest in us all.  Blonde hair piled in an elegant (of its time) coiffure.  I was dazzled.  She must have been about 30 at that time.  Later, Lyn too was posted to Scotland, and Betty was unusual by American standards in that she cheerfully immersed herself in things Scottish, showing herself to be a true cosmopolitan, and genuinely loved her time in the UK.  They became very close friends of my parents.

 

In 1970, when I left university, with the summer stretching forth for many months, I worked in upstate New York helping a Canadian paediatric haematologist with his research.  At the end of my time there, after a short visit to Hamilton, Ontario, I embarked on the usual 99-dollar one month unlimited Greyhound bus ticket ride across Canada and through the USA.  By this time, Lyn and Betty were back in California, in what subsequently became Silicon Valley.  I had a warm invitation to visit and stay.  Much to my regret, when I reached Cupertino, to the south of San Francisco, Betty was not in town, having gone back to South Carolina to visit friends and relatives.  The upside of this was that Lyn immediately offered me Betty’s car to do my touring in.  The car was a bright yellow Chevvy Camaro, mid 60s style, and nowadays a very desirable classic.  Encouraged by Lyn I drove it all over, visiting the city (San Francisco), Sausalito, Monterey, and the redwoods.  I stopped to watch bronzed bikini clad girls playing Frisbee on Carmel beach, toured Cannery Row, and did the 17-mile drive.  I went to the Golden Gate park, scene of the 1967 ‘Love In.’  Lyn handed me his Exxon card ‘for the gas.’  ‘Just sign ma name; Lyn Dubya Jones.’  At the weekend, he insisted on taking me to the jazz clubs and bars of his youth.  I remember Earthquake McGoon’s for its live jazz, though I don’t remember much else.  Research reveals it was San Francisco’s premier jazz venue, located at 630 Clay Street.  We attended a wedding in a vineyard, and dined with other colleagues of my father’s in Palo Alto, sitting outside in the evening by the pool, drinking mint juleps in the classic iced metal cups.  Having been used to feeding meters with one shilling coins in bedsits in Cambridge, the occasional Mackeson and pint of Cambridge bitter, my San Francisco idyll was a wonderful introduction to the good life, American style.

 

I subsequently kept in close touch with Lyn and Betty.  Years later I enjoyed visiting their lovely home on an old tea plantation outside Charleston, and it was a delight to be back in correspondence with her.

 

Friday January 15^th, 2021

 

Our six mile walk with a friend in Wareham forest was somewhat marred by her car getting a puncture.  She tried to drive it down the road but had to pull off into a holiday park.  Some unpleasant confrontation with the resident park warden who threatened to report her ‘she’s not local, she’s from Poole’, to which I responded that this was a matter for debate.  Ultimately we left the car, despite his grudging reluctance and arranged pickup later.  Our nervousness resulted from the news item about the women in Derbyshire.  The debate centred around whether their 7 mile trip to the walking site was ‘local’.  But they were also clutching cups of coffee and the plods therefore interpreted this as a social meeting rather than an exercise meeting.  The fines were later rescinded.  Boris Johnson was subsequently seen cycling at the Olympic park, quite a long way from Downing Street, and this also occasioned comment.  A nice Matt cartoon showed two Yorkshire farmers standing beside their stone walled fields as a lone cyclist goes by.  ‘That’s Boris on one of his local Land’s End to John O’Groats bike rides’, says one.

 

After a good night’s sleep on Wednesday (post walk), awake at 0430, and unable to sleep.  Listen to a review of recordings of Mahler’s 3^rd Symphony.  Sadly they didn’t mention my Georg Solti/Chicago Symphony recording from the 1970s.  I suspect that you fall in love with the recording you buy and listen to first, so I’m unswayed by their opinion.  Fortunately there is cricket from Sri Lanka to watch, since they are 5½ hours ahead of us.

 

Having focussed on numbers and virology earlier in 2020, I should reluctantly return to the situation in early 2021.  Perhaps prompted by the more transmissible new variant of the virus, there has been a huge surge in cases, with many more in hospital than even at the peak of the first wave in April 2020.  London is severely affected, but even here in Dorset, numbers have gone from a handful of Covid patients in hospital to 250 or so.  Some hospitals have run out of oxygen.  With the latest lockdown there is just the glimmer of a fall in cases, but the peak in deaths is still to come.

 

There is much talk of doctor and nurse burnout.  Staff are obviously stressed and tired.  Around 30% of local hospital staff have now been vaccinated.  My feelings are torn between a sense of guilt at not being there to help, and relief in that I am not exposed to infection.

 

This feeling of guilt at not being involved is not uncommon.  To my knowledge, perhaps the most famous example of this was the Japanese author, Yukio Mishima.  Mishima’s allegorical novel ‘The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with The Sea’ was trendy reading in the 1960s when I was a student.  Mishima was born in 1925 and missed out on the second World War.  When he tried to enlist in 1944, he had a cold and the doctor mistakenly diagnosed it as TB.  He was rejected.  His life subsequently was a permanent attempt to prove himself, a result of his guilt at not being able to serve Japan in the war.  He embarked on relentless weight training; had a mission to restore imperial Japanese values; a wish to live by the codes of Bushido and Shinto; and ultimately formed his own militia.  In 1970 he attempted a military coup, but failing in this committed seppuku.

 

Meanwhile, Joe Root has cruised along to his 18^th Test century, and daylight is here at 0800.  A few weeks ago it was still dark at this time.

 

Saturday 16^th January

 

Rain during the night but a fitful sun with a strong north westerly wind.  Kite surfers are out in force in Whitley Bay in the Harbour.  Walking to the shop for milk and the newspaper I come across the daughter of a friend getting ready for action.  I learned to windsurf on Loch Morlich in the Cairngorms in 1979 and bought my first windsurfer (a Dupont Wing) while living in North Carolina 40 years ago.  Would love to be out with a kite now.

 

Joe Root batted on for a great double hundred.  (I realise my North American friends won’t know what that means).  The match is being played in Gaulle, Sri Lanka, which we visited some years ago.  A lovely place on the edge of the Indian Ocean.  Pondering this and while walking back from the harbour a line from a 60s pop song comes into my head – very apposite for now: “Memories are all I have to cling to”.  The amazing Google tells me that Bobby Darin, writer and singer of this song died of complications of infective endocarditis at the early age of 37.

 

Returning to the concept of guilt for not mucking in and helping during the pandemic, there isn’t really a clearly defined syndrome for this.  I will term it ‘Mishima Syndrome’.  The nearest one can find is the concept of ‘Civilian Guilt’ – not serving in the military during time of war.  This was exploited in the famous ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy’ poster of the first World War (1915).  Civilian Guilt is subtly different to FOMO – Fear of Missing Out.  According to Keir Hardie (Trade Unionist and leader of the Labour Party 1906-1908), the correct answer to the poster was ‘I tried to stop the bloody thing, my child’.

 

I spent a week at a water ski training camp in Florida in 1993.  This was run by Mike Hazelwood, British former world water ski champion.  There was little to do in rural Lakeland Florida.  The bar next to my motel hosted a Karaoke night.  After a beer or two I was encouraged to solo.  I chose Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue’.  Having run a folk club and sung in Scottish pubs, I regarded this as fairly straightforward.  As my number finished, a long haired Hell’s Angel walked aggressively up the aisle towards me.  He was covered in tattoos and ‘U.S. Veteran’ badges.  On his black denim suit the first thing I noticed was a motto which stated: ‘If you weren’t in ‘Nam you ain’t worth shit’.  In his left hand he carried a bottle of Budweiser.  He pulled his right arm back and I got ready to duck.  His arm came towards me in a flash of lightning, but at the last moment his fist launched toward the ceiling and his palm opened in a ‘high five’ gesture.  ‘Put it there, buddy’ were his immortal words.

 

Tuesday January 19^th

 

Sunday was bright, cold, and clear.  I suggested a bike ride.  Beautiful cold and sunny riding, but ultimately Lindsay got very cold hands and we pedalled back by a direct route from the Stour Valley.  Felt quite tired after 21 miles, but could have gone for longer.  On the same day my daughter cycled 60 miles and her partner 90.  Anno Domini.

 

This week will be drizzly and rainy.  Storm Christoph is expected.  Most of the rain will be in the North.

 

A book which has recently found its way back to me after a near 30 year disappearance is my copy of ‘Catcher in the Rye’.  The neat entry in ink on the flyleaf says ‘Andrew McLeod, January 1973’.  The surprise is that this was the start of the year leading up to final medical school exams – how did I find time to read this in addition to medical textbooks?  Probably as a relief.  It is amazing to think how one’s brain was able to hoover up so much at that age.

 

I mentioned Mishima.  I remember a very urbane friend at Medical School; I think he was from Singapore, reading Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’.  Again, ultra-trendy.  I never read it.  But this friend, I was totally unaware, was gay.  Gaydar was not even on my radar, and perhaps isn’t even now.  When a House Physician, I naively accepted an invitation from the Hospital Chaplain who took me out to dinner.  No significant advance was made.  Perhaps the ‘hetero’ vibes were too strong?  The hospital actually provided a ‘grace and favour’ apartment for the Chaplain.  Hard to believe nowadays…

 

A dip into the papers reveals so many bad stories: the arrest and imprisonment of the Russian critic Alexei Navalny on his return to Moscow, after almost being murdered with Novichok; the continuing infringement of human rights in Hong Kong and the arrest of protesters; an arson attack on a barn which killed six horses; a man and his dog swept out to sea in a storm; China’s treatment of the Uighurs, Chinese Muslims; child obesity; ‘woke’ restrictions on free speech; attempts to rewrite history and remove a magnificent equestrian statue of General Sir Redvers Buller, V.C. located in Exeter because of his involvement in the Zulu wars; deaths in Sudan’s West Darfur province due to tribal violence; female judges shot in Afghanistan by the Taliban; earthquakes and deaths in Sulawesi; the grim state of Yemen; the same in Somalia – and this is just yesterday’s news.  So amongst this all we must carry on, and be grateful for what we have.  Like so many of you, I seek humour everywhere.  So, my final entry: amusement at the tennis players who have travelled to Australia for the January Australian Open.  If one person on any flight into Australia had a positive test for coronavirus, then all passengers have been forced to quarantine in their hotel rooms without emerging, even for exercise.  Movie footage of tennis stars hitting balls against the walls of their rooms ‘Game, Set, and Mattress’ as one wag termed it.