The *Is It Safe Yet Diaries?* 19th June 2022

So busy. It’s like the old days. I am working. Due the current economic climate I hardly dare to turn anything down, just like the old days, but boy it makes me tired. Today was a welcome day off. Colm returned the book table yesterday. While it’s been at his workshop I have realised how much bigger the room seems without it. In the long term it’s a piece of furniture I could part with. In the short term it’s much too useful. Still, I felt inspired to cull some of the books normally housed in it. They have been taking up an impressive amount of space in their strong carrier bags in the corner of the living room.

I carried as many as I could to the Oxfam bookshop in Bloomsbury. Since coming home I have filled another bag, and put a selection aside for my great nieces. Some of the books are too old for them now, but they are growing up fast.

Others are old in a different way. Two big books on natural history belonged to my great grandfather and he has written his name on the flyleaf. How do others part with inscribed books like these? I foresee a day when the only books I own will belong to long dead relatives, most of whom I never met.

The news: Could it be bleaker? The war in Ukraine goes on with no end in sight. News of atrocities have become everyday. Here, the government says it cannot provide for everyone as the economy goes tits up. Which means what exactly? Will we become accustomed to mass homelessness and starvation, and primed to accept it as the only option? Dead people on the streets an everyday occurrence. Shrug and pass on until the day comes when we are those desperate, abandoned people. Laws are being passed which make the government unassailable. Those at the top cling on to power for power’s sake. They don’t even try to hide it, yet a compliant press published distracting non-stories on their front pages: family rifts between William and Harry as related by William’s ‘close friends’. He doesn’t need enemies then. Faux outrage that Keir Starmer has sympathy with striking rail workers. Who in their right mind wouldn’t have? Grant Schapps saying the last thing rail workers need to do is strike. Well Grant, what’s the first thing they should do then? Do tell. Strikes are not popular, they are disruptive, and that’s the point of them. And they are often the only effective way that continued grievance over pay and work conditions can be conveyed to an apathetic public, and a government which frankly does not care. Its indifference shown by its refusal to join last ditch talks. Cynical conniving bastards.

Boris Johnson has so far stayed out of prison, as indeed has Trump which seems daily more improbable, but surely it’s only a matter of time. Oh no, I’m forgetting the new laws. Johnson’s inviolate. Nadine Dorries (if you live in another country than the UK and have never heard of heard Ms Dorries, thank your lucky stars) will be the person who decides what should be censored from our news feeds. Read about it here. It seems someone has jumped the gun. A story about Boris Johnson trying to get Carrie Symonds a £100,000 per annum job when he was at the Foreign Office, a story which was reported in the newspapers, has disappeared both the Times and the Mail online. Well what a surprise.

Fortunately The Outlaws has returned for a second series, and as it’s starting in less than five minutes, I am stopping here.

Have fun.

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The Coronavirus Diaries, 25th March 2022

I am not going to talk about the war, or at least not much. Tonight’s news has awoken a flicker of hope that Ukraine may have withstood its powerful neighbour. Withstood may be too strong a word when you see the scenes of devastation in cities which were, just four short weeks ago, full of people going about their daily lives, returning to their homes each evening, cities which are now just so much rubble.

Rebuilding is going to be a mammoth task, not just the physical rebuilding of all those ruined buildings, but the rebuilding of hopes, of normality, of belief in the ordinary humdrumness of life. But compared to Afghanistan, compared to Syria, or Yemen, Ukraine may have a chance at normality sooner rather than later. Girls in Afghanistan refused the right to education were filmed weeping on a day they hoped to return to school. Their ambitions, their future, our future with them playing an active part in it has been placed on hold.

Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe has at last been freed, is back with her husband and daughter and is no longer wearing a tag. She spoke at a press conference a few days after she got back. Composed, gracious, assured, articulate, she was apparently insufficiently grateful for some, insufficiently grateful that it had taken six years to get her release, insufficiently grateful to a foreign secretary, now prime minister, who had not bothered to read about her case properly and asserted she was teaching journalism when she wasn’t.

Given a choice between that prime minister and Nazanin I know who’d I’d vote for.

Octavia is on the mend, slowly. Reinhild and Mark have tested positive. I had a PCR as part of the ONS survey. I tested negative. I hope it stays that way.

MasterB has decided he wants to be an outdoor cat. Each evening he meows piteously until I accompany him down to the front door. Then he takes flight. The nervous, unsure ginger who peers out into the street and decides discretion is the better part of valour has been replaced by a boy who, if there is no other cat about, and on occasion even if there is, is revelling in the smells and possibilities of the garden. Getting him in again is a problem. He’s outside now. I’m giving him until I have finished this post before I go in search of him. I really hope he’ll come in readily, and that i don have to catch him. It is wonderful to see him enjoying himself so much, and I don’t want to curtail or discourage that.

The Coronavirus Diaries, 11th March 2022, Nuclear Holocaust?

Celia and I are planning to get out of the city and walk tomorrow. We’ve agreed on our destination, our start time, and that we’re taking packed lunches. The news continues to be unremittingly grim, and I am hoping a walk and greenery will be restorative. Will Putin press the button and end all our existences? I find I am making plans, while at the same time wondering if I’ll be alive. The phrase ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die’ makes a lot of sense right now.

Not that refugees are getting much opportunity to do much of that, especially those refugees who are trying too reach friends and family in the UK. Our government continues to plumb new depths. One back bencher claimed Lincolnshire (one of the least populated counties in England) couldn’t take more refugees. Another MP offered the kind suggestion that would be refugees could register to pick our fruit and vegetables. They’re all heart aren’t they? Lose your home, the life you know, trek across Europe bringing what you can carry, fearful, exhausted, heartsore, and be sent from pillar to post by UK representatives who wonder why when you left to escape the bombing you didn’t have all the certificates they ask for with you. After all you might be a terrorist. Terrorised would be the correct word.

The Coronavirus Diaries, 2nd March 2022, in war do you wear a mask?

I seem to have spent most of the last hour crying. Now we are on the weather forecast I am sniffing and blowing my nose; there’s a heavy feeling in my heart. In my head I keep hearing the Beatles song Back in the USSR, and the lines the Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind. I’m not sure I should be anywhere near as brave as the Ukraine girls I have just watched on Channel 4 News. Actually, I am sure, I shouldn’t be.

I was cooking, so my tears dripped into the red bean stew with millet pilaf and greens, a meal I haven’t made in a while. I finished cooking and ate, still watching the news.

Clive James, now departed from this mortal coil, used to write a TV column for the Observer. In one he made a remark about Kate Adie, saying that if Kate Adie appeared on our screens reporting from somewhere we knew it was serious. Kate Adie doesn’t report from danger zones now, but Matt Frei and Lindsey Hilsum are carrying on her tradition, both reporting from inside Ukraine, while Paraic O’Brien reports from the border with Hungary, and the rest of the impressive news team fill in the gaps from elsewhere.

The Coronavirus Diaries, 27th February 2022, War

What do you do when you are on the brink of world war?

How do you react when your prime minister makes a speech with grand sounding phrases which don’t actually say anything?

How do you feel when you see people like yourself making Molotov cocktails to defend their city from an aggressor who wants to change the way they live, the way they think?