The Coronavirus Diaries, 19th March 2023, of Cat, Talks, and Inhumanity

First of all Cat. The title of this blog is a give away, although I didn’t consciously realise that Cat, real name Freddy (the Gorgeous Boy) would play such a large part in it when I began. But he had a large personality and a way of being centre stage most of the time. As some of you know, I never intended to have a cat, but Freddy decided I had a vacancy I knew nothing about and moved in. He saw me through some very difficult times as well as good ones. He kept me company while I studied for new qualifications, made freelance journalism from home something of a challenge as he regarded the phone as love rival and would steal my pen as I tried to take notes, cost me a small fortune in vet bills as a result of his territorial fights. Tomorrow it will be twelve years since he died.

The date must be engraved somewhere in my heart as I have found myself thinking of him a lot in recent days, my eyes filling with tears at inopportune moments. I had absolutely no idea I could love a cat as much. Dogs yes, but I had never lived with a cat. Never truly understood how much they gave, how companionable they could be, how funny, loving, and also demanding. I shall be forever grateful that he lived with me for fourteen years. Mother and Aunt both loved him and he knew it, basking in their admiration.

So tomorrow night I shall light a candle to him when I get home. His ashes are still in the airing cupboard, a place he was not allowed in life, because I couldn’t when it came to it, bear to scatter them.

But the candle lighting will have to wait until after tomorrow evening’s talk, and maybe even after that. Celia has been away at her daughter’s in Wales, helping to pack up for the family’s imminent move to Stratford-Upon-Avon. Tomorrow she returns. We will have catching up to do. Charlie (Mr Celia) and Michèle, are coming to the talk too, so we shall be a little social bunch. Michele and I thoroughly enjoyed Hew Locke’s talk last Wednesday. He come across as a very thoughtful, highly intelligent, perceptive man. So interesting, honest and engaging, which come through in his art. I loved his comment about statues. This was in relation to the pulling down of Colston’s statue, a statue Locke had dressed in fake gold in a photograph back in 2007. There’s a lot more to it than that, but best you read about it here. There has been much talk about removing Cecil Rhodes’ statue from Oxford. Oh no, said Locke, not before I’ve had a go at it. Maybe that is what we should do, not just add explainers but add to statues of people lauded who profited by exploiting others.

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The Coronavirus Diaries, 8th March 2023, Small Boats

Until eighteen months ago, I had a small boat. It was twenty five foot long, nine feet wide. There was a roof, a galley, a bathroom, a cabin, heating if needed. I should not have wanted to cross the Channel in it. Yet people risk their lives crossing, or failing to cross the Channel in rubber dinghies. They aren’t gung-ho Dangerous Sports Club types, people who get high on risk and death defying adventure. They are people seeking refuge from intolerable conditions in their home countries. People whose lives are at risk because their politics do not match those of the regime in charge, people whose lives are at risk because they cannot make enough money to live on. I’d call them ordinary, but their situation makes them extraordinary, the risks they take, pushed by circumstances beyond their control, make them extraordinary.

Yet here in my country these people, refugees, are vilified as queue jumpers, illegal immigrants, people wanting to take advantage of our generosity. Generosity is the last thing they are shown. One of the most chilling interviews I saw the other evening on the news was a couple in late middle age saying of course they felt sorry for people fleeing war and worse, but they didn’t think their taxes should be spent on helping them, that the country couldn’t afford to help them. These aren’t the exact words, I was too sickened to write them down when I heard them. What sort of accounting system says we can have safety and shelter but you can’t?

The Coronavirus Diaries, 27th November 2021

I have just read this article, courtesy of a link on Twitter. Alf Dubs articulates so well what is wrong with government policy and the harm it is doing to all of us.

Read it here.

The Coronavirus Diaries, 7th January 2020

Last night I took down the cards, the various decorations and the lights that I only have at Christmas. I have left the flamingo lights, one set of white lights in the hall, and I am still burning candles, though a reduced number. Then I turned on the television to watch the news. It wasn’t quite what I expected. Like much of the world I suspect, I was slack jawed in amazed disbelief at the scenes from Washington. It was like some dystopian film. A mob, really I cannot bring myself to dignify them by calling them protesters, swarming around, threatening, breaking and intimidating; braggarts, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, while inside the building elected representatives were told to reach for their gas masks. Trump, from the safety of the White House egged on his followers, repeating over and over the lies about the election being stolen from him, about voter fraud. It was fascism in action. Ugly, dangerous, deluded.

Where were the police? Apparently close by, the lights of their cars flashing, but as so many have commented already their softly softly approach was markedly different to the one they took against a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in the summer.

Lest We Forget

Last week it was the 75th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. There were a number of programmes I watched on the television. Terrible times. The survivors’ stories never cease to shock and appal. The ritual humiliation, removal of citizens’ rights, rampant propaganda, extreme nationalism gradually increased until no one could be in any doubt what the Nazi attitude to the Jews was.

The television programmes include scenes of concentration camps being liberated by British troops, the words of Richard Dimbleby reporting on what he witnessed at Bergen-Belsen. Ordinary soldiers spoke of the shock and horror they felt. This is a story with which I am familiar: Allied troops as heroes, liberators, saviours. And indeed they were.

I have only recently become familiar with another story, thanks to a meticulously researched biography by Jack Fairweather, of a former Polish cavalry officer Witold Pilecki. He was a member of the Warsaw resistance. When his group learned of the existence of Auschwitz he volunteered to be captured so that he would be taken there so he could learn what was going on and organise a break out. He managed to smuggle a message out and was hopeful help would come. It did not. He persevered, continuing to document and pass on details of the barbarities he witnessed: the creation of the first gas chamber, the creation of a new camp called Birkenau. His comrades in the the resistance passed the information to the Polish government in exile who shared it with the allies, begging them to act. They did not.

Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill believed the genocide of Jews merited a direct response, and one British diplomat even said the Poles wee “being very irritating over this”.

Perhaps it is because we find it hard to believe stories of acts of such evil if we do not see them for ourselves that we can shut our ears and minds to them. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing he writes “He said the wicked know that if the evil they do is of sufficient horror men will not speak of it. That men have only stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.”

But small evils gathered together become large ones. As John Dryden wrote of ill habits, they “gather by unseen degrees, as brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas” until something on the scale of the Holocaust happens.

Liars, Charlatans, and Democracy in Peril

The last few days in Parliament have seen some extraordinary scenes. Boris Johnson, a man who seems determined to drag the office of Prime Minister through the mire, has repeatedly used disrespectful and inflammatory language. He has dismissed the fears of MPs of the death threats, rape threats, arson threats they and their families have received. “Humbug”was Johnson’s response, apparently seeing this as some kind of joke. He even referenced Jo Cox, the MP murdered by a member of the Alt Right who shouted “Britain first” as he killed her, and said she would have wanted us to ‘get on’ with Brexit. BS.

Others have suggested riots if we do not leave the EU on 31st October. Suggested these riots almost as a threat, almost as a call for riots.

I have been on a number of pro EU marches since June 2016. They have been characterised by good humour, politeness, warmth. They had a family feel. There have been dogs and children, wheelchair users. They have made me proud to be British at a time when my country, which I love, has been tearing itself apart.

I stood at Trafalgar Square over a year ago and, as I waited for the friends I was hoping to join, struck up a conversation with a a French family visiting London. They were warm in their admiration of the way this huge crowd was behaving. I have been with Americans who have taken photograph after photograph, and then decided they wanted to join in, be part of this. These marches, these demonstrations, have fostered such good feeling, such warmth from foreigners who had wondered whether London was a safe place to visit in these febrile times.

There have been no arrests. At the largest march over one million people of all ages walked together, calm, courteous even when abuse was shouted by the odd Brexiteer who had turned up to jeer. Some people tried to engage with the Brexiteers, to speak to them. They were repaid with swearing and threats, not dialogue.

I have only witnessed a Brexiteer demonstration by accident. There were only a small number of demonstrators, but they were loudly aggressive, threatening. One wore a Donald trump mask while others sang “We love you Donald, oh yes we do.” As a Remainer, I would not have liked to challenge them. The outcome would almost certainly have been violent. More than one person has said that Brexit has become like a religion, a particularly fundamentalist religion, where questioning and discussion, let alone disagreement, is treated as blasphemy and quickly suppressed, the questioner demonised.

This is a dangerous development. Democracy is a delicate creature. Look at history and see how many times people who thought they were secure were forced to flee their homes with nothing when anti-democratic, often populist, movements silenced debate and demanded adherence to a particular ideology; when the people comes to mean only people who belong to a certain group.

Shambolic and Terrifying

Weeks are passing and I’m not posting. I can blame work, blame a social life, but overall I blame Boris Johnson. I have never found clowns funny, but BoJo is terrifying, the clown of nightmares. He has a cohort of cronies who are equally awful. And some of the press… OMG. The usual suspects: the Express, the Mail, the Sun somehow spinning that Parliament is being anti-democratic, when to the meanest intelligence, Parliament is trying to do its job. The same papers, and the cohort, are telling people that the Supreme Court is biased, that the decision of the eleven judges was due to undue influence by the EU. This isn’t just nonsense, it’s dangerous nonsense.

Back to Brexit

You would think that there had been no march on Saturday, no five million plus signatures on a petition asking for Article 50 to be revoked. Europe is talking about it, the world is talking about it, the UK government isn’t. No. The day after the march our esteemed Prime Minister met renowned Brexiteer MPs, people who would be quite happy to leave the EU with no deal. The Prime Minister followed this meeting up with a speech where she spoke about the British People (yep, they’re being evoked again but apparently my birth certificate lies and I am not one of them) and how they would not countenance not leaving the EU. No mention of the march, the petition, the fact that the referendum was advisory and not binding, and had it been binding it would have been declared void because of illegal activity by the Leave campaign.
Not. A. Word.
There’s the usual baloney about respecting the ‘will of the people’ respecting ‘the result of the referendum’. Nothing about respecting those who march peacefully, who follow the rules, who do not threaten civil disruption, public mayhem if this goes ahead, who engage in debate not rhetoric and meaningless slogans.

The Wheel Will Turn

Anger is only useful if it fuels action.

Yesterday’s anti-Brexit march felt useful. I wasn’t on it as I was working, but just seeing the pictures gave me a sense of solidarity, a sense of hope; this madness will stop.

If it doesn’t, those of us who wish to remain in the EU will continue to campaign to return. Please don’t talk to me about the will of the people, or democratic process. When the referendum was held in the early 1970s and people voted to stay in the EU, or Common Market as it was then known, the leave campaign sprang into action immediately. To paraphrase a meateater’s saying, what’s sauce for the lentils is sauce for the butter beans.

Democracy is about argument, not things set in stone.

My outrage meter was just returning to somewhere above normal after POTUS’ announcement that he would reverse his inhumane decision to separate children from their parents and then blame the Democrats, when I realised it doesn’t apply to those families already separated. The trauma those children have undergone for this Trumplestiltskin to make a point, beggars belief. I cannot begin to imagine how this is going to affect them in their adult lives. The insecurity, the realisation at a much too young age that their parents cannot always defend them will leave an indelible mark. And all because this man likes to think he’s strong, and that this is the sort of thing strong men do. The truth is he’s weak, and the weak never know how hard they are hitting you.

Strange Times

I saw Michael Gove yesterday. He saw me too, but I doubt if he’s blogging about it. He wouldn’t know me from a hole in the road. It was at Westminster tube station, late in the afternoon and it looked like he was heading into the Palace of Westminster. Maybe he’s got some prep to do before next week’s party conference and decided to do it when fewer people were about. I don’t know what his popularity ratings are, but I’d be surprised if people are rushing to sit with him in the canteen.

He didn’t look great; rather pudgy, as though he’s been comfort eating. Ah well. It’s not every day you do your bit to lead your country to a disastrous referendum vote and then find yourself voted out of power. I am indebted to Ken Clarke, words I never thought to type or say, for his pithy summing up of the situation in which we find ourselves. It is bizarre that I and people like me who voted remain are now hoping and praying that we can make leaving the EU work, while those who voted leave snipe from the sidelines and demand that the things they thought they voted be enacted in every tiny detail. Ken is a heavyweight survivor of the Thatcher era. Not my favourite politician, though perhaps I should be careful what I say as his London pad isn’t so very far from my own abode. However, according to Sky News, this is what he said.