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.

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.