Corona Diary Part 10. Friday June 26th to Monday July 13th

Friday June 26^th

 

Woken to the sound of Lindsay watching the morning news on TV and the unmistakable sound of Scouse accents indicates that last night, by virtue of Manchester City losing 2-1 to Chelsea, Liverpool cannot now be overtaken in the race for the Premiership title.  Brief visit from Katie yesterday who has paddle-boarded with friends from Poole Yacht Club to Arne, a tiny but relatively deserted spot at the back of Poole Harbour.  A wise move in view of the fact that the beaches from Hengistbury Head to Sandbanks were inundated by an estimated half a million visitors.  State of emergency declared.  Cars parked everywhere.  Record number of parking fines imposed, etc, etc.  High temperature at Heathrow >33 deg C.

 

More discussions on site about doors.  Not as hot as yesterday, fortunately.

 

In the car (roof down) I listen to Richard Burton as First Voice in Under Milk Wood, and in my imagination I am back in Fishguard (aged 10 to 13).  Hard to believe that when we moved there from Malta, and I had to go back into the primary school for a year (in order to take grammar school entrance), my parents were instructed to buy a slate for lessons.  Maybe the Welsh were trying to up the sales of the national product?  Ink monitors – who remembers those?  And the special honour of being allowed to make up the ink for the day before it was dispensed into the ink wells.  The worst insult that the teacher could throw at you was that you were ‘twp’, meaning stupid.  ‘You’re TWP J… G……., what are you? TWP’.  ‘Yes, Miss Moodie’.  Poor J… G……., he lived over in Goodwick, son I believe of a railway worker, willing but not the brightest.  I wonder what happened to him.  I will be getting like Captain Cat if I dwell on such things much more.  ‘I’m Dancing Williams; lost my step in Nantucket…’  ‘Come on up boys, I’m dead…’

 

Saturday June 27^th

 

A change.  Two changes in fact.  One: it is pouring with rain, although it clears.  Two, and a subtle change in the diary.  No forcing the regular daily entry.  Our life in lockdown is unlikely to change very much for the foreseeable future.  The new house demands attention almost daily.  Overseas visits are coming but not high priority for us.  We are unlikely to visit theatres, cinemas, restaurants, pubs.  Deaths are coming down but there is uncertainty about a second wave.  Latest figure of Covid deaths in the previous 24 hours is 100, and the tail of the curve looks very flat.  Though it is true that the daily number of cases reported still appears to be falling.  But will the huge crowds on the beaches, the huge crowds celebrating in Liverpool, and the illegal mass gatherings and music events in London mean another disaster around the corner?  In the Times magazine today, Professor Sir David King, a typical figure of an 80-year-old asthenic Cambridge academic, photographed with his bicycle, vents polite but splenetic fury on the scientific establishment and its failure to act early.  He was the previous chief scientific adviser, and it is easy to suggest that his thunder might have been stolen by the highly visible Sir Patrick Valance.  He feels that the evidence was there much earlier than the Government would have us believe, that the pandemic was under way, and needed earlier lockdown.  He feels that Boris Johnson was far too focussed on delivering Brexit, to the detriment of our dealings with Covid-19.  He points to the early response of Greece, which has dramatically limited the number of lives lost.  He and a group of colleagues have an ‘alternative SAGE’ which deliberates on the management of the public health.  He points out that WHO very early on emphasised ‘test, test, test’, and how we failed in that.  In part this failure was not the fault of Government, or at least only so far as a chronic lack of investment and interest in the whole system of the organisation of Public Health England, was a failure of successive governments (my own view in this last sentence).  The so-called ‘wonderful NHS’ did not have the means to protect its workers, the power to isolate and to test, test, test, until very late in the day.  Even now there is no regular testing of asymptomatic NHS workers.

 

Enough.  In conversation with somebody who is non-medical yesterday it is clear that intelligent people throughout Britain now understand what happened.

 

Thursday July 2^nd

 

This is the first section of diary with a substantial gap.  This is because relatively little has changed.  Football is now firmly back with us, and the crowd noise is added in to make it seem more realistic.  A good zoom meeting for our (male) book club, and excellent discussions concerning Rose Tremain’s ‘Restoration’.  Others have also had the feeling that Merivel, the central character, is like a 17^th century Bertie Wooster, but the most interesting contribution came from our gynaecologist (OBGYN) member, who said that the emergency caesarean section described was clearly not a ‘classical’ Caesar, but what is called a LSCS, or lower segment Caesarian section, an operation which is technically more difficult, and which was not described until at least a hundred years later than the period in which the book is set.  He suspects that Rose probably spoke to a gynae friend, or looked up the details of how to perform a Caesar in a textbook.  Another colleague describes Merivel’s behaviour of having sexual intercourse with one of his psychiatric patients as ‘dreadful, terrible’, though I suspect this was said slightly tongue in cheek as he says he knows of ‘only one other psychiatrist who has done this’.  Personally I thought it could be categorized as ‘sex therapy’!  On the sex front, there has been dreadful condemnation of J K Rowling recently who has had the temerity to say that transgender folk are not truly female, and that the definition of a true female is someone who menstruates.  Cue a huge number of outraged politically correct actors, many of them from her Harry Potter franchise.  Right on J K, I say, well done for having the courage to express an opinion.  There are many, many strident voices out there at the moment.  Today it emerges that the leading light of UK Black Lives Matter is essentially a nihilistic Marxist or even anarchist.  ‘Taking the knee’ has however become a hallowed ritual which the FA (of course) are not going to do anything about.  I was momentarily amused by one strident feminist who said that seduction was essentially the same as rape, the main difference being that the initiator of seduction usually bought a bottle of wine first.  Where on earth is this all heading?

 

So finally for the first entry for a while; amusement that the Rolling Stones have issued a warning to Donald Trump to stop playing their songs at his rallies.  ‘You can’t always get what you want’ is his current favourite.  A Third Leader in the Daily Telegraph suggested that perhaps they could allow some of their titles to be played if they suggested that Trump might be just a one term President.  ‘It’s all over now’ and ‘You better move on’ being possibilities.

 

Saturday July 4^th

 

A very pleasant interlude kneading bread to the accompaniment on Classic FM of Dvorak’s ‘American’ string quartet.  Such a lovely piece.  Very therapeutic way of celebrating US Independence Day.  The ‘Donald’ visited Mount Rushmore yesterday and spoke out against defacing statues and monuments.  For once I agree with him, though just to hear the way he speaks I now find grating and awful.  I get a Pavlovian reaction.  I have the same feeling when I hear the introductory music to ‘The One Show’ on TV.  Talk of dumbing down – the nightly news show, with interesting serious and light hearted stories when I was a child was the ‘Tonight’ programme with Cliff Michelmore.  O Tempora, O Mores…

 

Today is the day for the re-opening of bars and restaurants; how will that go?  Wait for the second wave…  A retired nursing friend posted the following on Facebook today:

 

‘A virologist, an epidemiologist, and an ITU doctor walked into a bar.  Don’t be stupid – No They Didn’t!’

 

Some excellent letters in the Telegraph yesterday, as if we didn’t need reminding, that China is the new threat to the world.  The Donald’s self-absorption with America suggests that he’s abandoning his role as the leader of the free world, leaving a void which China is delighted to fill.  This they are doing in Tibet, and on the border with India.  Most of the signatories on a human rights resolution (at the UN) approving China’s response in Hong Kong, which is blatantly against the UK withdrawal agreement, are from countries which are dependent on China.  Enough said.

 

To happier matters.

 

Early this morning I had a phone call from the golf club.  Although not originally slated to play in the Captain’s Day charity event, I was asked to fill in because a member of one of the four man teams had dropped out.  Our tee time?  5pm.  The last group.  We finished at twenty to ten pm, in the dark.  Unsurprisingly we didn’t rack up too many points.

 

Sunday July 5^th

 

A lovely sunny day with a six mile walk from Badbury Rings up into remote countryside south of Witchampton.  Blustery winds.  Swallows swooping low over the wheat fields.  Iron age tumuli give some perspective to our brief span on this earth.  Even more evanescent, hundreds of butterflies, though I’m sorry I can’t identify many.  Evening is some lovely wine tasting at our walking friend’s – Muddy Water chardonnay, and a 2006 Chateau Calauze Pomerol.  A good finish to the weekend.

A tranquil lane north of Badbury Rings

A different sort of Red Kite

                                                                It's been windy recently...

 

Wednesday July 8^th

 

Anniversary of first performance of Look Back in Anger (no it isn’t, that was May 8^th, but for some reason I’m still writing May instead of July), but no matter, it’s a segue.  A memory from an English lesson at school.  Very dynamic new young English teacher who subsequently went to the Board of Extramural Studies at Cambridge, Mike Allen.  To us he was Mr Cool; when we walked in the snow in the Pennines during CCF arduous training he was the one with ski goggles.  None of us had ever seen these before.  Well, it was about 1966.  His girlfriend was Swedish and studying at the Sorbonne.  Do I need to continue?  Anyway, modern theatre was his bag, and Pinter a particular favourite.  We all read a book called ‘Anger and After’, though in retrospect, perhaps modern theatre should have been dated from ‘En attendant Godot’.

 

This week has been memorable for two trips to the dentist.  The surgery is now up and running with very vigorous preventive and protective measures, a bit like stepping into a Sci-Fi movie.  First filling repair cracked on eating crisps that evening; not even very crunchy crisps.  Today was a revisit.

 

But most interesting, apart from the continued ‘tail’ in the Covid graph (126 deaths yesterday), was a farm walk with some friends who are dairy farmers, on a lovely sunny Monday evening.  A very pleasant meander through the fields which are going to produce dry hay for the animal feed shortly, including a long stretch by the river Stour.  Very impressive maize field, with the crop nearly shoulder high (should be ‘knee high by the Fourth of July’) says my friend.  He mentions that this year has seen the highest UV concentration ever, apparently not completely due to the lack of pollution.  Followed by drinks sitting in their lovely garden, a special hobby for them (the garden not the drinks).  Particularly impressive is the new ‘Roald Dahl’ rose, though the roses are magnificent everywhere.  As we are about to leave I ask what is the magnificent blood red rose planted in a long border leading up to the gate.  ‘Keep in touch’, says Farmer G;  ‘Yes, yes, we will’ I say.  ‘No, no; it’s actually called “Keep in Touch”’.  ‘Oh’.  Feel rather stupid, knowing remarkably little about roses.  But yes, we will.  Oh, yes, there is one thing I can tell you about roses, but you may know this already.  In Victorian and Edwardian times, roses bloomed much better than they do nowadays.  My grandfather in Crosby had some very early colour images of his garden taken in the 1920s.  The roses were magnificent.  The reason?  Coal fires, which were universal, produced large amounts of sulphur dioxide, a wonderful cure for all the fungal and other diseases which afflicted roses.  But not good for lungs.

Herbaceous borders to die for ...

 

Main news today is a mini-budget, or a ‘statement’.  Various tax holidays including VAT down to 5% on hospitality and accommodation.  Criticised by the opposition of course; and indeed by the recently sacked Chancellor, who has clearly had his nose put out of joint by the dynamic and extremely bright Rishi Sunak, a Wykehamist, and therefore a refreshing change from Old Etonians.

 

Friday July 10^th

 

Awake very early, 0530, for no particular reason, and spend some time listening to the mellifluous voiced Donald McLeod, who presents ‘Composer of the Week’ on Radio 3.  Every other week in 2020 he is presenting Beethoven (Born 250 years ago), but this week is dedicated to Henri Duparc and Augusta Holmès, mid 19^th century French composers.  Some lovely works.  Irritatingly a record title and recurrent line from a pop song by Sandie Shaw keeps popping into my head, ‘Monsieur Dupont’ I think it was.  The weather here is pleasant with the promise of high pressure developing, but there is drizzle in Duxford, where Matt, the weather presenter is hoping that a Spitfire might take off and do a flypast to commemorate the 80^th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.  No joy.

 

I suppose if a diary is worth anything, it is to reveal the inner thoughts of the diarist, but I have little profound to say.  One keeps an eye on the lockdown easing; Trump is always newsworthy – the White House is trying to suppress a biography by his niece which accuses him of being a fraud and a narcissist; deaths are down (85); and Allison Pearson has written an excoriating article about the Sussexes.  She comments on the latest, what she calls ‘Cash and Harry’ video, in which they hold forth on ‘righting the wrongs of the “uncomfortable” Commonwealth’.  Ignoring, of course, the 73 years which his grandmother, the Queen, has spent loving and nurturing it.  …’Harry spoke fluent Woke, and Meghan gazed at him with a look of terrifying, moist-lipped sincerity’.  Allison mentions that he was supposedly thinking of living in Africa, to do some good for his causes, but instead ended up living in an $18 million mansion on the Beverly Ridge Estates in Los Angeles.  ‘It is quite a diverse community with a lot of non-white people watering the gardens and cleaning the pools’.  Worth reading in full.  I greatly enjoy the articles from the Telegraph’s female columnists, Pearson, Strimpel, Walden, etc.  Worth catching.

 

But I also suppose that good diarists rarely write about themselves, unless they are deeply into solipsistic self-analysis, and many good diaries are only so because they reflect the world around them, a world which by definition, is now in the past.  Occasionally their breath-taking self-importance and way of life takes centre stage, such as in the first edition of Alan Clark’s diaries; but since I haven’t climbed from Zermatt to Trift in under two hours, nor driven from the stately home to the Albany in the Bentley in under 60 minutes recently, pardon me if I don’t bore you with my own reflections, or at least, very rarely.  My favourite Clark story is of Margaret Thatcher, when asked why she had not promoted Clark to the role of Secretary of State for Defence said, ‘Would you put Alan in charge of a nuclear weapon?’

 

The inner workings of a diarist’s mind can probably be glimpsed from the subjects that he or she selects, and their reaction to them.  But, historically, most diaries are readable because of the illumination that they provide to the time when they were written, some times being more dramatic than others.  Take, for example, the following extracts near the beginning of a diary (journal) by Daniel Defoe:

 

‘It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland…’

 

‘… (It was) December 1664, when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Long Acre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane.  The family they were in endeavoured to conceal it as much as possible, but as it had gotten some vent in the discourse of the neighbourhood, the Secretaries of State got knowledge of it; and concerning themselves to inquire about it, in order to be certain of the truth, two physicians and a surgeon were ordered to go to the house and make inspection.  This they did; and finding evident tokens of the sickness upon both the bodies that were dead, they gave their opinions publicly that they died of the plague.’

 

Punchy stuff, is it not?  Made more real by the knowledge that we can still walk those streets in Covent Garden today.  It is a genuine journal, and at this point in the story, we know nothing of Mr Defoe other than the facts he reports.

 

I have just finished the very worthy autobiography of Michelle Obama, entitled ‘Becoming’.  Over 400 pages of it.  It is extremely well written, and, I suppose (again that verb) worth reading.  But there is something about it…  Read it and tell me what it is please?  I think that the problem is despite the very real memories and thoughts of Michelle coming through, it is ghost written.  Indeed, it is clearly what she calls a ‘team effort’.  But it is useful to have read it because of another news story which has just come through to me.  This is a widely circulated e mail which details extracts from a book by Ronald Kessler, a US journalist, who specialises in inside stories.  The book is ‘In the President’s Secret Service.  Behind the scenes with agents in the line of fire and the Presidents they protect’.  Along with pictures of the Presidents, there are details of their lurid lives.  But when we get to Barack Obama, he says, ‘Clinton’s (sic) all over again.  Hates the military and looks down on the Secret Service.  He is egotistical and cunning.  He looks you in the eye and appears to agree with you but turns around and does the opposite.  He has temper tantrums.  She is a complete bitch who basically hates anybody who is not black, hates the military, and looks at the Secret Service as servants’.

 

Now this is so antithetical to the book I have just read, in which Michelle speaks fondly of the agents appointed to guard them, and clearly makes strenuous efforts to support military wives and injured veterans, that I began to wonder.  Then I noticed that all of the Presidents who are written warmly of are Republicans and I began to smell a rat.  Then I also read the following: ‘Spiro Agnew.  Nice, decent man.  Everyone in the Secret Service was surprised by his downfall.’  In point of fact, Agnew took bribes or kickbacks, and was party to criminal conspiracy, extortion and tax fraud.  He was forced to resign, only the second ever Vice President to do so.  Ultimately in a plea bargain he pleaded guilty only to tax evasion and avoided going to jail.  Of course, the truth is that the entire circulated e mail is a fake.  It’s not hard to guess the source.  By taking a little of Kessler’s book and adding to it, the story seemed convincing, gossipy but real.  In war, the first casualty is the truth, but it seems to be true of journalism too.  Fake news is all around.  As a footnote, during my first ever visit to the USA, when I worked in a hospital followed by the Greyhound bus trip around most of the continent, I bought a slim volume entitled ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro T Agnew.’  Every page was blank.  The foreword had a superb sentence that I remember to this day: ‘When small men cast a large shadow, it is a sure sign that the sun is setting.’

 

Sunday July 12^th

 

We are back to ABD weather.  Light breeze only and temperature in the mid 20s.  We’ve done plenty of walking recently so I suggest to Lindsay we should get out on the bikes.  It has been so windy recently that when the sun has shone, there is only one way to exercise, and that is walking.  An image of a kite (the toy kind) flying over Badbury Rings on our last weekend walk comes to mind.  It was shaped like the Fokker triplane of the Red Baron.  Lindsay is enthusiastic.  It’s so long since our last ride that all the tyres have to be pumped up.  Bike rack on the back of the car.  The ride chosen is in Hampshire and includes the Test Valley.  Listed in the book as ‘Easy to Moderate’.  It must have been 15 years since we last did it.  We head for the tiny village of Michelmersh, because I assume that most large car parks will be full.  There’s not much space in Michelmersh, but we manage to park near the church and set off.  The temperature is perfect, 25 degrees, but somehow the ride seems much harder than when we last did it.  Chunky little hills, what to us seems like a puncheur sort of route.  I’d like to call it the ‘Hampshire Downs’, but that would be fanciful.  Nonetheless, the highest point of the route is some 400 feet higher than the Test at Mottisfont.  As we descend into Crawley, a recollection comes of the last time we cycled this.  Beside the beautiful duck pond are lovely thatched houses.  As on the last occasion we stop here for our picnic lunch, but unlike before, the tranquillity is not ruptured by Mister Thatched Cottage gentleman trimming his beautiful yew hedge.  In the middle of the pond is a small island with a lovely duck house, which would do credit to the estate of Sir Peter Viggers, who infamously claimed for one in his MP’s expenses (2009).  As we picnic, a veritable flock of ducks waddle up, no doubt hoping for some bread.  But they don’t press the issue, just settle down for a little nap next to us, some with beaks forward and some with beaks backwards, leading me to marvel at the anatomy of their cervical spines.  Later, two perfectly white doves flutter from tree to tree.  This seems such a rare sight it triggers an earworm, ‘How many seas must a white dove sail…’?  As we leave this peaceful scene my bike judders.  A back wheel puncture.  Easy to identify; a substantial tack right in the middle of the tread.  So Lindsay gets to enjoy some more peace, ducks, doves, and sunshine.  Just after I’ve managed to change the tube and reassemble the bike, a huge posse of the West Surrey Cycle Club pedal up.  All looking suspiciously skinny.  If they had arrived earlier there would undoubtedly have been a couple whose unfulfilled mission in life is to mend other people’s punctures, probably in about half the time I’ve taken.  Later I discover that my mini hand pump can only inflate the tyre to about half its designated pressure, which makes riding more comfortable, but harder work.  Seems like a very long 32 miles, but worth it for some of the views, especially at Wherwell, where we cross the crystal clear stream and the occasional trout flits between the weeds.

Now that's what I call a duck house

Test Valley

The Test at Wherwell

Test Valley

Roses at Wherwell

 

Monday  July 13^th

 

A very good and deep night’s sleep and another pleasant day.  Finish the little book ‘Fat Chance’ by Simon Gray, the playwright, about the ill-fated production of his play ‘Cell Mates’, which became notorious because of the walk out of Stephen Fry.  What emerges from the book is that (my own opinion based on Gray’s observations) Fry is an extraordinarily clever empty shell, and that Rik Mayall was a wonderful man and should have been famous as a very gifted actor.  ‘God Bless.  Bye’, as Fry was fond of saying.

 

Eleven deaths from Covid (remember, post weekend, but at least I can now type the letters of the number rather than the numeral).

 

Briefly back to diaries.  We learn (Daniel Defoe) that he was a saddler, and elected to stay in London because he felt he needed to keep working to earn his living.  So much echoes with our own times.

 

An e mail from a close friend, with whom I have enjoyed theatre going since 1964 (The Bacchae of Euripides; Mermaid Theatre).  He rails against the current trend for gender swapping in every possible role; ‘nor flooding casts with non-white actors playing white characters’.  He mentions the fine non-white actors; Hugh Quarshie, Paapa Essiedu.  ‘But we also saw a Twelfth Night where Toby Belch was a woman and she was dreadful.’  I think he gave up after seeing Mercutio played by a punk female.  Fortunately, Shakespeare can survive almost anything, and no doubt will return in better productions.  He’s pushing at an open door as far as I’m concerned.  A recent newspaper article interviewed several actors who said that they would never consider ‘blacking up’ to play Othello nowadays.  Why not?!  Why not?!  Theatre is artifice.  The whole point of theatre is artifice.  Makeup is a word, but it is also a metaphor.  Behind the greasepaint…  Oh my Pagliacci.  Tonio, Tonio, wherefore art thou Tonio?  How appropriate that today, in these politically correct times, the newspapers refer to J K Rowling’s handprints, which, on view somewhere in Edinburgh, have been daubed with red paint.  I give up too.  But ‘You must go on.  I can’t go on.  I’ll go on.’

 

And on that note…

 

Corona Diary Part 8 - Tuesday May 19th to Saturday June 6th

Readers may ask - how long will this go on?

Tuesday May 19^th

ABD.  Did not write this today, but on the 20^th.  Reason – just dilatoriness I suppose.  We had a long site meeting to talk about electric fittings this morning, and the day seemed to escape after that.  A long walk in early afternoon, returning from the beach via Durley Chine, and West Cliff Green, which is another unexplored area for us.  Then I spent a very long time washing Lindsay’s car.  Too tired for Victoria this evening.  (Sorry this paragraph is so unexciting, but then lockdown life is like that.)

Wednesday May 20^th

A very long sleep.  Perhaps due to taking an antihistamine for what I took to be an insect bite on my leg.  It was either a horsefly or (hopefully not) tick bite that I had scratched off.

I had needed something from a supermarket yesterday, and while there I saw a man in what I would take to be classic ‘Zoomwear’.  From the waist up he was immaculate – neat shirt, well tied tie, sports jacket.  Below he was sporting baggy pink shorts and deck shoes.

Incredible news that President Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine.  I suppose that if he believes everything he says then it must be true that it works.

Today I have golf again – hooray!  Tee time is 1250 hours, a little easier than our struggle to get round in the gloaming last Sunday evening.

Rod Liddle writes well in the Sunday Times – an article pointing out that nobody has the strength or will to take China to task for its appalling record on virtually everything.  Just a couple of sentences and you will get the drift:

“Too many excuses are made for China – again, usually by liberals.  Its tyrannical state capitalist government is dismissed as simply being another variant of that vigorous new thing, ‘Asian Democracy’ – that is, what we used to know as ‘fascism’”.

“It is China’s triumph that it has managed to combine the most brutal aspects of communism with the most brutal aspects of capitalism.”

A par three on the tricky 18^th today made me forget some of the golf in-between tee-off and finish; that and the beautiful day.  A lovely supper of fish, fresh English asparagus, and Jersey Royal potatoes rounded off by a return to Victoria.  She and Albert have a lovely time as guests of the Duke of Atholl.  I keep expecting her to nuzzle up to Albert (she does a lot of nuzzling up but then there are quite a few children to get through before his death in 1861), and say ‘Albert, let’s look for a little place in the Highlands of Scotland.’  Albert’s death was allegedly from typhoid fever.  But Helen Rappaport, in ‘Magnificent Obsession’ makes a reasonable case for Albert succumbing to a severe recurrence of Crohn’s Disease.  No post mortem was performed and we will never know.

Thursday May 21^st

ABD.  A lengthy walk today, 8.2 miles, in a loop around Parley and the Stour, once again noting the BA aircraft sitting on the tarmac.  But beautiful summer sights as well – a pair of swans with 8 cygnets, an egret, and roses round the doors of the cottages.  A laburnum tree in full bloom brings a recollection of a friend’s remark of 40+ years ago that they are ‘exam trees’, so called because they are always in full bloom at the usual time of school and university exams.

Catastrophe in the evening when Lindsay knocks her glass of Maçon-Villages over the Jackson Pollock jigsaw.  Now the pieces, when they have dried out, will be even harder to place.  No more wine is served to her until supper, safely sitting in another room…

Friday May 22^nd

An overcast day with a very strong wind.  Cloud clears to sunshine but the wind remains strong, such that driving round the harbour this morning there are any number of kite surfers and windsurfers scudding across the white horses in Whitley Bay.

Victoria last night was deeply involved with Sir Robert Peel and the repeal of the Corn Laws, the import tariffs designed to protect the interests of English landowners and farmers.  The Free Trade which resulted improved the food supply at a lower price for English labourers, but the eventual swamping of the market by American and subsequently Russian grain meant the decline of British agriculture, and a dependence on imported foodstuffs which almost cost us dear in both WWI and WWII.  I labour this point because of the modern day relevance of imported goods from Asia, and particularly China.  Corona virus has resulted in a natural belligerence and antipathy towards most things Chinese.  Indeed, a survey today shows that 40% of Britain believes that China manufactured the virus.  There is an understandable Jingoistic reaction amongst our people, such that many believe we should take care to not become so reliant on imported goods in general, and China in particular.  The installation of Chinese-manufactured Huawei 5G networks is a case in point.

Saturday May 23^rd

Sunny day, but very strong wind.  The weather front has passed by but is assaulting the north west of Scotland and the Hebrides.  Having cycled all the way up the Outer Isles two years ago, I have taken a lively interest in the weather in Stornoway (Isle of Lewis) ever since.  It is rarely pleasant there.  The proprietor of a cycle shop in Stornoway told us that the average windspeed, day in, day out, is 25 miles per hour.

Dominic Cummings, special adviser to the PM, has been criticised in the news today for making a round trip to his family in Durham.  Seems like there was severe family illness, but the facts are yet to come out.  The press really do not like Mr Cummings, and one can see why.  He is usually seen slinking along towards Number 10, looking slightly scruffier even than Jeremy Corbyn, with a rucksack on his back.  He is, I think, regarded as a Rasputin like figure to Mr Johnson, an éminence grise.  He was pilloried recently for sitting in on a SAGE meeting, which is supposed to be restricted to ministers and their special scientific advisers, though we understand it was just as an observer.  In demeanour he is the opposite of the usual Whitehall civil servant mandarin, and he clearly raises antibodies.

My friend Glenys, remarkable seamstress, has sent us two new fetching masks, a bright print for Lindsay and a musical one for me.

This afternoon we finished the Jackson Pollock jigsaw.  It has taken three weeks, with at least some time each day devoted to it.  Now I can get on with ‘Restoration’, the first ten or so chapters being much devoted to bodice ripping.  It reads a bit like Fanny Hill, though the self-deprecating style of the narrator, the 17^th Century Robert Merivel (a fiction), also reads a bit like P.G. Wodehouse at times.  Merivel being the rather dim Bertie Wooster figure, with a rather more shadowy butler or personal servant.  Rose Tremain is obviously buried within the parlance of 17^th Century language, though I am not sure if she is trying to stay completely within period.  The narrator refers to himself as a Renaissance Man at one time, a term not coined until the 20^th Century.

We have been dilatory with exercise for the last two days, but plan a bike ride tomorrow.

Convergence (1952)

Sunday May 24^th

Back to ABD, with some abatement of the wind.  Vigorous bike ride this morning which I termed the Tour de Turlin Moor (a very local reference that I don’t expect overseas readers to catch).  Excellent cycle routes from Poole Bridge into Hamworthy Park and on to Turlin Moor with a return route through Upton Country Park.  The reason for haste this morning is that we are guests (in a public space and distanced) of a friend who has an excellent picnic for us with a very nice Provençal rosé (Ch. Minuty).  In the later afternoon we visit Salterns’ Marina, which is open for socially distanced gatherings on members’ boats, together with a disco from the roof.  Altogether a lovely day.

Canford Cliffs - could be the Cote D'Azur

Monday May 25^th

Bank Holiday.  ABD.  The Prime Minister defended Mr Cummings yesterday in the daily briefing, but the feeding frenzy is in full swing, one Tory MP talking of ‘using up our political capital’.  There are poems, songs and a T-shirt commemorating Cummings’ so-called ‘Lockdown Tour’.  Where will it end?

It ends (or rather it doesn’t; see below) with a press conference in the garden of Number 10.  Having heard Cummings version of events, in what seemed like a reasonable statement of the facts, he was viciously, or should I say, voraciously attacked by the hypocrites of the media.  The plain fact is: they don’t like him and whatever he does will be wrong.  They do not like his disdain and for that he won’t be forgiven.  A press conference and Corona briefing by Boris Johnson and a medical mandarin took place at 7pm, much to my own upset, displacing Paddington 2, the movie which would have brought a distinctly feelgood factor, from our screens.  When again attacked by the newshounds (what an appropriate epithet), the PM fairly justifiably said, ‘Look, you’ve had your chance to question Mr Cummings this afternoon and I haven’t got anything to add!’  Looking at online news and newspapers it would seem that the journos have divided along party political lines over the issue.

I’ve given enough of my own precious column space to this issue.  I can’t believe that Trump, Macron, Moon Jae, Merkel, or Bolsonaro are losing too much sleep over the matter.

We had a pleasant, though warm, walk this evening on Talbot Heath.  Temperatures are set to climb even higher in the next few days.  Lindsay is to return to London.  She is worried about her daughter’s mental state at the moment after her 38 year old husband’s heart attack.  Looking in the guidelines, it is permissible to travel to provide care for a vulnerable person, and this is really what she is doing…

Tuesday May 26^th

The weather (will it continue?) reminds me of the summer of 1976.  This lockdown has made one remarkably reflective.  I wonder if others find that?  The present is so different for me however.  At 28, I had just started work at King’s College Hospital as a Cardiology registrar.  For various reasons, even with only 5 months’ experience in the catheter and pacing labs (they were one and the same in those days), I was already shouldering a large amount of the clinical workload.  Boiling days in a non-air conditioned room in a lead coat and a surgical gown meant that by the evening I was exhausted.  I was living in a flat owned by the late notorious Mr Rodney Ledward, FRCS, FRCOG (qv), naively without a rental agreement (I am sure he wasn’t declaring the income), and this ultimately led to unpleasantness and a frightening dénouement when he and his brother tried to forcibly evict me just before Christmas.  When his cavalier, heartless and unskilled treatment of women in Ashford was eventually exposed in 1996, I mused that I could have told them a long time before that he was a ‘bad egg’.  A bit like James Bond in ‘From Russia With Love’, or at least Donovan Grant, Bond’s would-be assassin, Ledward was very fond of using the ‘Old boy’ preface and suffix to many of his sentences.  Whether he drank red wine with fish I do not know.  But I do know that during that summer, so wonderful for many, I felt tired and lonely much of the time.  No doubt part of the melancholy is due to the content of Rose Tremain’s ‘Restoration’ which I finished this afternoon.  I very much enjoyed this novel, which is essentially a journey through the failings of a man, almost a parable of the seven deadly sins, though I haven’t counted whether she missed any out, with an element of redemption at the end.  It made me reflect on my own mortality and my own shortcomings.  Set in the 1660s with a substantial dose of the Great Plague, and subsequently the Great Fire, so there are certainly echoes that chime with our times.

This afternoon a brisk walk including the beach between Alum Chine and Bournemouth Pier.  Scenes reminiscent of a Bank Holiday in August, temperature 27 degrees.

Wednesday May 27^th

ABD.  It’s hot and it is getting hotter.  Round of golf this morning.  All square on the 18^th so honours even.  Site meeting to discuss landscaping the new house build in the afternoon.  Little else done.  Cummingsgate rumbles on.  Many memes around his decision to try a drive from Durham to Barnard Castle to check if his eyesight was okay for a drive back to London – an eye chart for example, with Barnard Castle written on it line by line with a progressively smaller font.  A picture of Barnard Castle with the ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’ logo on it.  Etcetera etcetera.

The Barnard Castle eye test

Thursday May 28^th

ABD.  How could I have let my diary entry of May 17^th go without mentioning that it was our first hearing of a cuckoo this year?  Numbers apparently declining.  Many chores today, and one feels at a bit of a loose end without the Jackson Pollock jigsaw to do, or indeed ‘Restoration’ to read.  Start in on ‘The Song of Achilles.’  This evening is meant to be the final ‘Clap for Carers’, the woman who started it very wisely saying that it has had its day and should stop after tonight.  Governors’ meeting this afternoon with the use of Microsoft Teams, which gives good reception and fairly clear pictures.  Feel it’s best to leave my camera off and my mike on mute, so allowing the usual suspects to have their say.  Interesting presentations on the Covid situation (improving) and the route back to normality.

'Clap for Carers' cartoon, Telegraph

Yesterday marked the 80^th Anniversary of the Battle of Dunkirk, or at least the evacuation of Dunkirk.  The more detailed investigation of this on TV yesterday evening suggested that the two-day lull which allowed many more to be rescued was due to a power struggle between Hitler and his Panzer commanders.  If the commanders had got their way they would easily have stopped or forestalled the evacuation and many more deaths or POWs would have been the result.

In science news, it does seem that the results with remdesivir now justify its use in attempting at least to ameliorate the disease of Covid-19.  In the UK the official (proven positive) death total is 37,837, with a daily deaths number of 377.  There is something of a tail in the previously steadily falling numbers.  The USA has now recorded over 100,000 Covid-19 deaths.  Although the President is clearly an incompetent loudmouth, the Economist points out that its decentralised decision making has been moderately effective, and its death rate per 100,000 population is no worse than many European countries.

Friday May 29^th

ABD.  May 2020 is on course to be the driest and the sunniest ever in most of Southern Britain.  Brisk breeze.  Site meetings with bathroom designer and kitchen designer.

Having previously been a supporter of Boris Johnson, I am starting to wonder whether my confidence is misplaced.  The Cummings affair suggests bad management and failure to just take control and let him go.  It seems that Cummings came up with the ‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan, which has made roughly half the population hate him anyway.  He is thought to be behind the current Government mantras as well.  I feel that the ‘Stay Alert’ one was poor – perhaps ‘Be Responsible’ would have been better chosen.  A golfing friend tells me that there is a new golf shot called the ‘Dominic Cummings’.  It’s a very long drive which goes way out of bounds, but there’s no penalty.

Start in on making some bread.  After boring cleaning of barbecue and high pressure hosing everything, we can do a butterflied leg of lamb outside for our Friday night supper.

Saturday May 28^th

ABD.  Will be playing golf later.  Hooray.  The other day I picked some more elderflowers following a friend’s message that soaking them in gin overnight gives a delightfully different gin and tonic.  Being a better solvent than just water, the gin rapidly takes on a beautiful yellow tinge and the flavour is excellent.  Definitely recommended.

Elderflower gin - wonderful

A friend asks me to get him The Times when newspaper shopping.  Having dipped into some of the writing I am wondering whether to move over to this paper instead of the Telegraph (yes, yes, I know it’s called the Torygraph but I tend to absorb politics, and particularly any left leaning opposition online, and particularly from the BBC).  A little while ago the Times’ 3^rd Leader (the slightly comic leader for those not in the know), led with ‘Romantic Rock Stars’.  I quote:

It is fair to say that the Romantic poets do not have reputation for sporting prowess, even though Lord Byron once swam four miles across the Dardanelles just to prove it could be done.

According to the verdict of popular history, the Romantics were the sort of young men who had notes from their mothers – all, no doubt, in beautiful rhyming couplets – excusing them from games.

Now it seems the verdict of history has been overturned.  A new book suggests that William Wordsworth, John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were pioneers of mountaineering.  Coleridge’s conquest of Scafell Pike in 1802 is thought to be Britain’s first recorded rock climb, and Wordsworth tackled nearby Helvellyn at the age of 70.

If only their verse had reflected this:

“I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er fields of corn

And after that John Keats and I

Made short work of the Matterhorn.”

Good stuff The Times!

Sunday May 31^st

ABD.  Following the gin and elderflower experiment we head to Cranborne in North Dorset.  There are a number of walks one can do up towards Pentridge Hill, and the elderflowers are everywhere.  Brambles are festooned with flowers, suggesting good blackberrying to come.  Wild clematis, and occasionally some honeysuckle covers the hedgerows.  Where once we would see the buzzards circling there is now a solitary red kite, a sign of the times.  It really is a lovely part of Dorset, Cranborne being something of an idyllic country village.  My former colleague’s house, a traditional redbrick manor house of the 19^th century is festooned with roses growing up the walls.  Onwards to the Pentridge bridleway and down through the village of Pentridge, not an easy place to pop around the corner for something from the shop or indeed a pub.  Back via Blagdon Farm, Boveridge, and through the woods to Cranborne, laden with elderflowers which we steep in gin and (separately) in rich milk, for subsequent desserts.

Honeysuckle

Ox-eye daisies

Elderflowers and wild roses

Another culinary experiment this weekend was Paul Hollywood’s rye bread made with beer and a beer batter.  I had been trying to think of a use for some extremely cheap beer which we bought in a French supermarket, namely Kronenbourg.  I certainly didn’t want to drink it, having valiantly consumed a couple of cans.  It has almost no flavour, but the bread is good.

Scientific controversies continue with Covid.  News is leaking out that the test and trace approach was abandoned after PHE (Public Health England) failed to have the capacity to do enough tests.  Another article states that recovered subjects with no antibodies may still be immune because of immune recognition cells in the nose and pharynx (I’ve mentioned that possibility before).  Another couple of scientists suggest that asymptomatic healthcare workers and care home workers are currently the most likely to be a reservoir of infection, and that all such workers should be tested on a once a week basis.  This certainly seems a logical step, and is borne out by the outbreak at Weston-super-Mare hospital, where all staff were tested and 100 (6%) were shown to have the virus.

Over the entire duration of the coronavirus crisis and pandemic, my entries in this diary may have been subtly nuanced, to the extent that readers may feel I am missing being involved in the medical response.  In this they are correct.  Having emphasised at the beginning that one knew it was coming for one’s entire career from entry into clinical medicine in 1970, to not be actively helping in the hospitals at this time is upsetting; as though one had been denied entry into an elite club.  ‘What did you do during Covid, Daddy?’  Well, nothing I’m afraid, son.  It reminds me of a strange novel written by Yukio Mishima, and cult reading during the 1960s, ‘The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea.’  The novel itself is a metaphor for post war Japan, and the concept of Death or Glory looms large.  Mishima, a strange individual, never recovered from being too young to serve in World War II.  Even when he came of age, a doctor misdiagnosed some respiratory signs as evidence of TB and he was rejected.  His preoccupation with this failure underpins his extreme traditionalist right wing views, his espousal of martial arts, his formation of his own private army, and ultimately, in 1970, an attempted palace coup – which failed.  He then committed seppuku.  I hasten to add I am not about to do this because I failed to be taken on at the hospital during the coronavirus crisis.  But it’s frustrating to have missed the call up.  ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour…’, as Rupert Brooke wrote about a different amphitheatre.

The major international news item this weekend has undoubtedly been the killing of a black man in Minneapolis by a police officer who was photographed, and videoed, leaning with all his weight on his knee on the man’s neck and throat.  Riots throughout the USA, some of it possibly inflamed by a tweet from President Trump with the phrase ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’  Large protests even in London and Manchester.  As they say on TV, ‘In other news this weekend…’, Elon Musk’s commercial space rocket took off from Cape Canaveral and has successfully docked with the International Space Station.

Monday June 1^st

ABD.  Ah, the Glorious First of June.  The fourth Battle of Ushant, was claimed as a great naval victory by both the French and English navies, but as ever the truth is somewhere in between, not unlike the daily coronavirus briefings, which I now scarcely watch.  Hard to believe when we hung on every word in the initial press conferences.  Deaths continue to decline; 111 reported yesterday, but if the eased lockdown has an influence it will take weeks for it to become apparent.  Riots continue in the USA.  Little to report at home apart from a golf lesson and several hours of gardening.  We are now in what is promised to be the last two days of the heatwave.

Final episode of ‘Victoria’ this evening.  Ends with the Great Exhibition of 1851, and Albert’s sudden collapse.  Series four is being written at the moment, so it will be a while before I can report further.

Tuesday June 2^nd

ABD, but we are promised that it will be the last for a while.  A walk along the beach reveals very little social distancing.  Two card tables of men playing poker or bridge, numerous tents, and many others.  Is this part of Cummings’ legacy?  A very hot day.  I don’t feel able to sit in the sun until after 3pm, and by 4pm, despite an engrossing book, one feels drowsy and lackadaisical.  6pm drinks in friends’ garden – six of us together, as allowed under the lockdown easing.  Perhaps the first social event since March, albeit ‘distanced’.  Reluctantly break up the pieces of the Jackson Pollock jigsaw for onward passage to friends who want to try their patience with it.

Wednesday June 3^rd

Woken by the sound of rain.  During the refurbishment of the house we are living in, no attention was paid to the gables and overhangs, and the open window has allowed the rain to pour in.  Window closed at 0530 hours.  Gentle drizzle continues.  Round of golf this morning.  Feels quite refreshing to play in this light rain.  Bread making this afternoon.  In the evening I persuade Lindsay to start in on the DVD set of ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, from the famed 1980 production by the RSC.  At the time I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen on stage, and I still stand by that, though the other play and performance that stands comparison with it was ‘Jerusalem’ with Mark Rylance.  The opening act is grim and dour, with the awfulness of Dotheboys Hall, and the appalling Wackford Squeers.  Is there anyone nowadays writing novels exposing social injustice?  The only comparison to Dickens I can think of with the same stature is Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  A search of Google reveals a few others, but rarely any consistent oeuvre.

Horse racing has restarted, with wins for Frankie Dettori, but also one of the Queen’s horses.  A cartoon by Blower in the Telegraph encapsulates some of today’s themes, with runners such as ‘Clap the Carer’, ‘Wuhan Avenger’, and ‘Barnard Castle Boy.’

Blower cartoon from the Telegraph

Thursday June 4^th

A bright day, the weather uncertain.  The George Floyd protests continue.  It has emerged that tear gas was used near the White House on Monday simply to clear demonstrators such that President Trump could walk outside to his local church and take a ‘photo-op’ with a Bible in his hand (I almost wrote Bible in His hand).  What an obscenity.

I did want to write about the loveliness of asparagus, and of English strawberries, but realise that this is a sad and bathetic response to the preceding paragraph.  But both will be gone soon.

Friday June 5^th

Discover that the architects have designed the lower staircase window too low for the first six risers, and it will need to be raised up to allow for this.  This is only one of several issues created by design oversight.  At least the underfloor heating pipes are laid, are airtight to 4 Bar, and are now covered irrevocably in screed.

But house worries are not a readable issue for any other than the author, so can only report that a Lowry jigsaw, ‘Market Scene, Northern Town, 1939, has been completed in a day.  Farewell Jackson Pollock.  But the assembling of a jigsaw of a work of art somehow gives one an empathy with the artist, and the creative process.

More Nickleby.  A somewhat lighter mood, with Nicholas and Smike now taken on by the travelling theatre of Mr Vincent Crummles.  Cue for Nicholas’s rewriting of Romeo and Juliet for Mr Crummles’ company, complete with happy ending, which will end the first play of the two.

I have always loved Schubert’s music.  In 1978, the 150^th anniversary year of his death, readers will probably not remember how paltry and parsimonious was the BBC, at least as regards Radio 3 (it might even have still been called the Third Programme at that time).  Broadcasts ended for the evening no later than 11pm.  An inspired producer persuaded them to include a Schubert song every night throughout the year, to extend the broadcasting period.  So, after a hard day of medicine and cardiology at the Brook Hospital (Woolwich), I would lull myself to sleep with this.  Some years ago, at a cello recital, I met the husband of the professional cellist who claimed the distinction of the 1978 Schubert late night feature, against the powers that be (or powers that were) at the BBC.  In its new ‘Armchair Arts’ section, the Telegraph yesterday carried a detailed analysis of the String Quintet in C, with references to a YouTube recording and its timings.  Remarkably, the article details Schubert’s final move, into his brother’s house in Wieden, Vienna, which took place on 1^st September 1828.  By November 19^th Schubert was dead.  Yet in that time, which we might take to sort out a few packing cases, watch some TV, and read a book, Schubert wrote the great last three piano sonatas, Schwanengesang, and the C major Quintet.  All of this while steadily going downhill with tertiary syphilis…

And on such a gloomy note…  Covid-19 deaths now just over 40,000, and yesterday 357 deaths, though the number of new cases is falling much faster, and it would seem that the number of deaths should surely be very much lower within a few weeks.

Saturday June 6^th

A mixed day, with cool temperatures and a colder north wind.  Some rain.  Plant some borage seeds in the hope of decoration for Pimms.  Finish ‘Song of Achilles’ by Madeline Miller.  Enjoyed it a lot.  Affectedly poetic writing, but somehow it works.  Is the purple prose a striving for effect, or is it a device to carry forward what is after all, a mythic story?

Our salt cellar ran out, and we turned to one from the cupboard – Sal Del Desierto De Atacama.  Strange how little mementos bring back holidays; and we are all suffering from a dearth of these just now.  Despite our enjoyment of Dorset, something about travel still creeps in and brings us both remembrance of happy times past, and encourages us to hope for more in the future.  Like Marcel and his madeleines, these memories are generally positive, though nostalgic. I am sure we can also recall things – snatches of music perhaps, a photograph of a place, or a person, which bring more negative associations.  The most powerful, to my mind, are the olfactory memories.

A friend will visit this evening, and we will have ‘Cheat’s Pimms’, which brings back memories of Jane MacQuitty (see entry of 21^st March).

And at this point, I should commit this monologue to cyberspace, with some photographs.