Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 42 [30 April 2020]

Published: 30 April 2020

Are you familiar with that old British expression, “The pot calling the kettle black”? Case in point: Since entering the new Coronavirus Age, the British media claim that vodka consumption has substantially increased here in Russia. What the UK’s self-appointed temperance league failed to mention (and having worked in the media, I have to say that most of them are alcohol sodden (mind you, they may all be too PC for that now!)) and what has subsequently emerged in a BBC article* (no less!) is that Brit’s consumption of supermarket-bought alcohol has shot up during lockdown by a whopping great 31%.

Previous articles:
Article 1: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 1 [20 March 2020]
Article 2: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 6 [25 March 2020]
Article 3: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 7 [26 March 2020]
Article 4: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 9 [28 March 2020]
Article 5: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 10 [29 March 2020]
Article 6: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 16 [4 April 2020]
Article 7: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 19 [7 April 2020]
Article 8: Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 35 [23 April 2020]

As to whether there is any truth in the purported rise in vodka sales here, it is quite possible that the UK media has only part of the picture (not that that has ever seemed to bother them). An anecdote related to me last week told of mystified traffic police, who, having stopped a number of cars to ask the occupants where they were going (as part of the social distancing rules) and in the process discovering a strong smell of vodka, breathalysed the drivers only to find that they were sober. Apparently, the vodka was being used not for human consumption but as disinfectant!

Ha, a likely story, I thought. But then it seemed to make sense. With so much adverse publicity accruing over the dubious effectiveness of this and that disinfectant, and Trump wanting to inject us all with it, what could be more logical than to fall back on something you can trust! I was straight out and buying my extra two bottles!

Whilst there is no direct evidence to suggest that consumption of the national beverage has been coronavirusised, I have detected among our immediate neighbours what I consider to be a far more invidious addiction seemingly catalysed by the rules of social distancing, and that is an obsessive predilection for D.I.Y..

They are all at it! Apart from me. I am too busy indoors disinfecting. But there they are in their gardens digging, sawing, hammering, shattering the tranquillity of early-spring with the high-pitched rasping noise of angle-grinders and the dentistry whine of high-powered drills. Cement mixers rumble, new garden fences clank and rattle as they are bolted into place, old tiles and other neglected items are noisily removed and stacked; indeed, such is the energy expended, both in physical labour and ardour, that it is enough to make you reach for the bottle and disinfect again.

Even we had six new trees delivered and planted, but I think we got away with it, leaving payment at the backdoor and shouting merrily to the tree planters from the safety of our terrace-balcony.

Englishman Self-isolating in Kaliningrad

The man next door, whose garden has resembled Steptoe’s yard for the past 12 months, possibly more, appears to have developed one of the rarer symptoms of coronavirus, which the Daily Express expressly discovers on an almost daily basis. Why else would he cut down a tree that should never have been cut down, put up a plank to replace the tree because his cat used to climb up it and, what I really found hard to accept, removed the bog that had been lying around incongruously in his back garden?

This toilet was the sort of romanticised novelty that I had not beheld since the days of my early youth. I had been brought up in rural surroundings, in those halcyon days when villages were still villages, before that is the second-home buyers and city commuters moved in; when villages were populated by British-legacy stock, folk born in Victorian times whose families, generation after generation of them, were born in the village, lived their lives in the village, died in the village and were buried in the village graveyard. Every one of these people was a country character, and every other house in which they lived was characterised by a tin-roofed shed at the far end of the garden. Admittedly, the ubiquitous outside lav would normally be enclosed, inside four walls and with a roof of sorts, but this only strengthened my case for the retention of a toilet most unusual in mode and manner.

Englishman Self-isolating in Kaliningrad

In deference to those save-the-planet groups who, like the dinosaurs before them, used to rule the world, before that is the world decided it could stand up for itself and swept them off the streets, I like to think of this toilet as the environmentalist’s bog of choice. Lying abstrusely on its side and out in the open, it was such an inspiring sight that had I not been disinfecting I could almost have taken up easel and canvas and captured it for posteriority.

On the other side of us, the place I call ‘the commune’, rum goings on are keeping us guessing. For 14 months or so the back garden owned but unfrequented by our rock-music-loving neighbour, fondly referred to by us as Greengrass, was little more than a neglected patch of scrubland. Then, in an alarming development, a gaggle of Greengrass’s confederates, hitherto unknown to us, began gradually, very gradually, to hack down the undergrowth, clear the extraneous material and dispose of all the junk. In the process of doing so, the wilderness was turned into a place where weary cowboys can bivouac.

A camp fire was lit and, with the help of Mother Invention, makeshift seats were quickly assembled ~  a couple of planks on four piles of rock ~ and with the timely assistance of some disinfectant our auxiliary neighbours ~ seven or more  ~ set about celebrating the art and science of coronavirus distancing.

Since then these rawhides have helped the neighbour at the end of their Ponderosa to put up a new fence (the irony of this did not escape me) and in a sinister development, which has given credence to all kinds of ‘there goes the neighbourhood’ theories, are constructing something around their camp fire which could be anybody’s guess, from a Russian version of Stonehenge to an outside toilet from Wigan. My money is on a coronavirus air-raid shelter, the idea being that should the Big C continue to threaten the populace with more of the same social distancing, then the entire city could protect itself by getting together in there.

Reference
*https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52329679

“If coronavirus has taught me one thing about the human condition it is that the less sense it makes the more sense it makes.”

~ A man with an outside toilet