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2020 Memories are made of this

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 292 [31 December 2020]
or Goodbye 2020, if I never see you again will it be too soon?

Published: 31 December 2020 ~ 2020 Memories are made of this

The End is Nigh! Well, you would think so from the aggregated hype bubbling furiously over the past 12 months in the cauldrons of the western media. Never before in recent history has the press had the opportunity to indulge itself in a Groundhog Field Day like the one that has been handed to them by the pandemic (or is that scamdemic?). But enough of the soothsaying and a tad more soothing-saying, if you don’t mind. The end is nigh for 2020: Time to reflect on the past 12 months.

My period of voluntary self-isolation began back in March 2020, and like most people I have evaluated the quality of my life during this epoch as a series of stops, starts and checks. However, on looking back I realise that although the impediment of coronavirus fear and its attendant restrictions have cast a long shadow over our social life, it never succeeded in inflicting a total eclipse. As my wife is fond of saying, “Humans can adapt to anything in time”, and whilst in my books I have committed the cardinal sin by steering clear of bars and other places where people tend to congregate, in retrospect 2020 was far from totally written off. Indeed, in spite of muzzle-wearing and fetishistic hand-sanitising, we did still have a life ~ we met friends, took several trips to the coast, visited art galleries and places of historical interest, entertained at home and, most importantly, used the extra time that we had at our disposal in the most constructive ways.

We certainly managed to get more done around the house and in the garden ~ especially in the garden. This is Olga’s pet project: converting what was a slab of inherited concrete into a proper, functioning outdoor area, where she can enjoy the flowers and trees, and I can enjoy a pint.

Years ago, in the mists of a different time, I worked on a magazine called Successful Gardening, from which I learnt that my greatest contribution to any practical endeavour in this field would be to make myself scarce, which is exactly what I did. So, I have to confess that the lion’s share of the work was done by my wife. Yet, I feel no need for excuse making. Gardening is a sport, and like any other sport, some you participate in; in others you are a spectator.

Where coronavirus is concerned, it is for my family and friends back in the UK that I feel the most sorry. The UK media has not had the opportunity to be this gory and ghastly in its coverage since Jack the Ripper terrorised Whitechapel. Not even brutal acts of terrorism, which are officially swept under the carpet by deflection techniques that focus on holding hands and candle-lit vigils, come close to the penny dreadful coverage that coronavirus receives. It would not be half so bad if 1 + 1 = 2, but nothing about the measures being taken to combat coronavirus in the UK ~ the draconian measures ~ seems to add up, and, as with Brexit, the country appears to be split yet again, and uncannily yet again, as with Brexit, the fault lines are political and a peculiar inversion of the status quo.

In complete contradiction to the overt emphasis placed at any other time on civil liberties and the evils of the so-called surveillance society, 1984 and all that, it is the left that appears to be screaming for lockdown, mask-wearing and any other hard and fast rules. Indeed, they do not seem to be able to get enough of it, and, with the illiberality that is customary with liberals, are spitting tar and feathers at anyone who is impudent enough to advocate liberty above home slavery. The megaphone message is: Do as you are told! Stay in! Don’t go anywhere, or we are all going to die!!.

Admittedly, there are a lot better things to do with your time than dying but is being bolted and barred in your home for what little there is left of your life it? The older we become the more precious life becomes, but so does living your life. It is the Bitch of having been born at all.

The problem, or at least one of the salient problems of getting old ~ and for some inexplicable reason we all tend to do it, get old, I mean ~ is that you reach the stage where you think you can hear each grain of sand dropping into the hour glass, and whilst it is normal on the push-penny arcade machine of life to brace yourself for the moment when inevitably your turn will come, when you will be bumped off down the chute, the media over the past 12 months has not missed a trick in reminding us that the man with the cowl and scythe is busier than he has ever been pushing coins into the slot.

No one can deny that there has been a lot of death about, and sadly we were not spared. Our good friend, Stanislav (Stas) died in November 2020. Immediately, rumours abounded that he had died of coronavirus, the majority of people having become so obsessed with the virus that it has become almost impermissible to die from anything else. Stas did not die from coronavirus. But he did die, and with his passing we lost a very good and much-loved friend.

Without doubt, one of the most perplexing things about getting older is that not only do you have to come to terms with your own mortality, you also have to come to terms with the loss off those who are nearest and dearest. Each loss tears a hole in the fabric of life that can never be repaired.

But enough of this morbidity. Like everything in life, what some people lose on the swings others gain on the merry-go-rounds, and whilst we can conclude that whereas it has been a troubled year for most of us, especially those on the frontline ~ doctors, nurses, paramedics and the rest ~ if you have the good fortune to be a mask producer, the director of a pharmaceutical industry, a media magnate, I do not suppose that Mr Coronavirus seems such a bad fellow after all, and this is without mentioning the increased yields experienced in the funeral industry.

Enough said: In a consummately original and unplagiaristic moment, my valediction for the year 2020 is that it was ‘the best of years, ‘t’was the worst of years’.

Think of 2020 as a painful tooth that needs to be extracted by the dentist: you might miss it, but you will certainly be glad it has gone …

Happy New Year
to One & All

Flowers in Olga Hart's Garden Kaliningrad

2020 Memories are made of this Mick Hart Woodoo Hairdressers Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad 2020 Mick Hart & Olga Hart Vintage Car

2020 Memories are made of this Mick Hart & Olga Hart

Olga Hart celebrates Kant's birthday Konigsberg

Mick Hart with relics Kaliningrad market

2020 memories are made of this

England Lockdown Déjà Vu Scare

Déjà Vu & The Man in the Iron[y]ed Mask

Published: 2 November 2020

Surely, the irony cannot have escaped anybody’s attention, that is to say the date on which Boris Johnson proposes to submit England to a new round of severe lockdown restrictions. When? November the 5^th. Talk about pissing on your fireworks! Let’s hope that Guy Fawkes doesn’t own a time machine!

For me, personally, the sudden but by no means unexpected surge in coronavirus cases has solved one puzzle. It has ended my indecisiveness as to whether or not I should change the title of one of my post series from ‘self-isolation’ to ‘social distancing’.

Would I be resident in the UK, the choice would no longer be mine to make. The new title would be lockdown. But here, in Kaliningrad, Russia, no such lockdown exists and, as at the time of writing, there is no intimation of one being implemented sometime soon.

Nevertheless, this seemingly clear-cut situation compared to that in the UK has done nothing to ease the difference in opinion that persists between myself and my friend and sparring partner, Ginger Cat Murr, about how we approach life now that coronavirus is once again in the ascendancy.

The difference is a nuanced one. Both of us are batting from the same wicket when it comes to lockdown. We share the belief that any benefits derived from such draconian measures, and there aren’t any, at least proven ones, are offset by the detrimental psychological impact that lockdown is having in its breakdown and fragmentation of normal human relationships ~ proof of which there is plenty.

We both believe, therefore, that the role of those in authority should be to guide and not dictate, and that the decision to what extent he or she decides to isolate themselves should be a matter of individual choice.

Admittedly, at the outset of coronavirus, earlier this year, I fully supported lockdown, as it was, without doubt, a sensible precaution to take as we travelled into the unknown. But that was then and now is now. In moving on we would do well to consider the almost 100-year-old maxim: adapt, adopt and improve.

Thus, as much as I balk against using such media catchphrases as New Normal, if it has taught us anything it is that Covid-19 is here to stay and that there is not only no quick fix but at the moment no fix, full stop.

Less than three months ago, the media was awash with vaccine-race stories, the implication being that at any moment the Lone Ranger would be riding on down to rescue us from Black Hat Corona. Now, we are told that although the vaccine, or myriad vaccines, are on course and will be rolled out soon, there is no silver bullet. It makes you think that someone should be given the bullet, and that it would not be a bad thing if whoever it is fired at it should ricochet a while throughout the world of science and the media.

That being as it should, back to our argument; I mean the debate between Ginger Cat Murr and myself on the pros and cons of lockdown.

Where our opinions diverge is that whilst we are both anti-enforced lockdowners, I have no problem at this point in time of entertaining a limited period of house arrest in order, if it works, to take pressure off the NHS and to give the science community and pharmaceutical companies time to test, develop, produce and distribute the once-vaunted vaccines/drugs, even if, as realists suggest, the end result will be less of a precision hit as we have been led to believe and more like the discharge from a sawn-off shotgun. Well, better hit and miss than no hit at all.

Ginger Cat Murr, on the other hand, sticks like glue to the mantra that the policy should be to protect the vulnerable as best we can and allow the rest, those who do not fit into this category, the freedom and intelligence of individual choice, taking up the logic cudgel that shutting some venues, like pubs and restaurants, whilst keeping other places open is a bit like being in first gear and reverse at the same time. In other words, Ginger Cat Murr is firmly behind the Great Barrington Declaration.

England Lockdown Déjà Vu Scare

In the UK, the debate appears to be going the way Brexit went. The country is becoming polarised into two distinct camps: those that want and welcome lockdown and those that don’t. And here there is a funny (as in bizarre) thing happening. Take a look at these headlines from the UK’s online media:

The Independent [2 November 2020] ~ ‘We need better leadership to beat the virus – not more of Boris Johnson’s false promises’

The Guardian [2 November 2020] ~ ‘The Guardian view on a second lockdown: what took him so long?’

The Independent [1 November 2020] ~ ‘This lockdown is better late than never, but it would have been even better in September’

Making allowances for the usual, and inevitable, ‘party political broadcast on behalf of …’ does it appear to you that it is primarily the liberal left who are rooting for lockdown? If so, how strange? I would have thought that the very word ‘lockdown’ would be sufficient to ignite cries of totalitarian agenda from the usual suspects, and that any government, but particularly a Tory government, advocating such policies would be condemned out of hand for launching an assault against our sacred ‘uman rights! But then, as we all know, liberalism and rationale …?

England Lockdown Déjà Vu Scare

The insult-to-injury kernel of this nut, the lockdown debate, not partisan politics, and what I would hazard a guess will prove to be the enduring symbol of early 21^st century angst, by which history will judge our governments, scientists and media, has to be the face mask.

Who would have thought, before coronavirus came along, that this little piece of material slapped across your face would be such a bone of contention? It alone defines the division between those who do as they are told and those who do otherwise? But it represents more than that, a great deal more.

The mask symbolises the confused messages that have launched a thousand conspiracy theories; obfuscated the issue like no other; completely and totally undermined our trust, not only in politicians but also, and more importantly, in the credibility of our scientists, whose case for and against mask wearing veers from claims that masks can trap the virus to masks are perfectly useless, with the disturbing caveat that in the worst case scenario the improper use of masks can aid and abet viral transmission.

What is the proper way of using and wearing a mask? Don’t ask, because once you have the answer you will realise that unless you are a walking ‘laboratory condition’ living in a hermitically sealed sterile environment, your chances of success are about as odds-on as winning the lottery.

Do I personally wear a mask? Don’t we all? [Leonard Cohen: “And if you want another kind of love, I’ll wear a mask for you.”] Well, that all depends, of course, on what I am doing and where I am. But in the ongoing struggle against coronavirus, I do just as much as the rules necessitate, albeit without conviction (in both senses!)

To end on a more personal note, I must confess that I do derive a certain degree of amusement from observing the relationships between individuals and their masks.

Whilst there are some people whose masks seem to have become a sort of never-to-be-removed fungus that they have assiduously adhered to their mug, others do seem to have adopted a loose, indeed very loose, definition of what mask-wearing entails and, by default, what they expect to achieve by it. The best example of this are those that plaster their masks about their mouth but have their noses hanging out, as if the proboscis during this particular pandemic has ceased to play any meaningful part in the respiratory process.

I remember seeing something on Facebook that compared wearing a mask in this way to the unlikely practice of men wearing their pants with their willy over the waistband. (I’m sorry? Have you something you wish to confess to, comrade?)

It would appear that coronavirus mask-wearing has led some of us to completely reinvent our faculty for breathing; why else would anyone wear their mask on their chin or tuck it into their throat as if it is a cravat? And what of those naughty people who in spite of ‘rules are rules’ deliberately flout them and do not wear a mask. Are they rebels? Selfish anti-social miscreants? People who have a justifiable grievance against mask-wearing, ie they believe that they facilitate viral transmission rather than prevent, or cannot wear a mask for medical reasons? Or, in the last analysis, could they be mask wearers of an unconventional kind, ie wearing a mask but not on their face!

Ask yourself this question: Every time you see someone without a mask, is he or she really maskless or have they got one secreted about their person, wearing it in the most unlikely of places? So far, I have not seen any authoritarian rules about how to wear your mask, only that you must wear one! So, where and how you wear it is open to interpretation. And there are cases, of course, where people should be exempt. Take The Invisible Man, for example, there would be as much logic in him wearing a face mask as, er, repetitive bouts of lockdown?

UK Police Lockdown Enforcement

Coronavirus & Rights: an Unholy Alliance

Published: 1 April 2020

I wondered how long it would take for the whinging and whining to start about the police being beastly in enforcing the new lockdown. Not long, is the answer. Two articles appeared in the UK media this week. Yes, you have guessed right: one in the The Guardian the other in The Independent.

Guardian headline is to do with police over-stretching their powers (is that why they call it ‘the long arm of the law’?) and The Independent’s “Coronavirus lockdown likened to ‘police state’ by former Supreme Court judge”. Hmmm, the Supreme Court, is not that the institution where they tried to derail BREXIT?

Let’s look at some quotes from the latter article:

With the police under attack by the ‘usual suspects’, the police response:

“We are not looking to criminalise people but we have to have some way of enforcing it,” said the NPCC’s lead for out of court disposals, Deputy Chief Constable Sara Glen.

Note: Police are not criminalising people. People are criminalising themselves by non-compliance with the lockdown.

Police having to defend their actions again:

In the same briefing, NPCC chair Martin Hewitt denied the police service was “an arm of the state”, saying forces were independent and adding: “There is no intention to be heavy-handed.”

Note: Brits have been told to stay put, so it is not being heavy handed, it is enforcing the lockdown. It is not unusual in the UK to accuse the police of all sorts of things when caught doing something that you know you should not be doing:

Numerous arrests have been announced by regional police forces since the law came into force, sparking accusations of overreach.

NB: No, numerous arrests are being made because people are not complying with the lockdown. You haven’t been arrested in your armchair in your sitting room, you have been arrested on the streets because you have broken the rules of lockdown.

And, yes, bring on the performing seals …

The Liberty campaign group said the powers had undergone insufficient parliamentary scrutiny and were “very broad, handing extraordinary new powers to the police”.

NB: Yes, well, these are extraordinary times, are they not? As John Steed of The Avengers once said as he fired a champagne cork at the villains, “Drastic measures for drastic situations …”

Policy and campaigns manager Gracie Bradley added: “Despite the broad scope of these powers, we’ve seen various incidents of police going even further – and beyond their lawful remit. This makes it impossible for people to know how to comply with these new rules, and challenge police when they overreach.

NB: We don’t want the police to be ‘challenged’ we need people to comply. Police have an extremely difficult job to do, and they need the full support of the government and the public. We only have to look at the state of British society today to know what happens when police confidence is undermined by over-zealous rights-related ‘scrutiny’: ie ‘discharging a weapon in the line of duty’ (crucify the cop); the end of ‘stop and search powers’ = 21^st century knife fest.

But the last two paragraphs bring fresh hope:

At a briefing with journalists on Friday, Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said: “The police will exercise their own discretion in the use of the powers we have given to them and will take whatever steps they consider appropriate to disperse groups of people who are flouting the rules.

“The regulations signed by the health secretary last week set out what the government’s clear instruction to the public is. Having asked the police to enforce that, we would expect them to exercise their own discretion in using the powers.”

I’ve said it once and I will say it again: Hoorah for Boris!!

I think the majority will agree ~ especially those who have lost loved ones through this pandemic ~ that if any time was a good time to put police powers and commonsense above rights ~ especially the right to be selfish and stupid ~ then this is that time.

UK police lockdown enforcement

Let’s face it folks, it really is quite straightforward:

The populace of the country has been told to stay indoors for a very good and sensible reason; the police are there to enforce the lockdown to ensure that it is complied with. If you choose to ignore the lockdown, then you can expect to be arrested. Not knowing exactly where you stand is a bit of a feeble excuse, when the presumption should be, if in doubt do not do it, and as it is a minority of people who are unsure about the advice and guidance, such as a child in a park who turns out to be a criminal anyway, adults who interpret lockdown to mean organise a mass Karaoke party or congregate in a suspiciously clandestine way on a hillock up in the Peak District, I think we can safely say, and with some authority, that such people are guilty as charged.

UK Police Lockdown Enforcement — (Photo credit: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/)

When you are caught doing what you know you should not be doing you are likely to be quite arsey, especially if you receive an on-the-spot fine or are otherwise prosecuted. First response: accuse Plod. I mean, who do they think they are? Well, they are the police force, you see (note the word ‘force’); contrary to umpteen years of disinformation they are not social workers or public relations officers, they are there to police and enforce.

Let us take it step by step; it is all very elementary:

A. You have been told to stay in your home

B. You stay in

C. By doing so you will be helping yourself, and others by not becoming infected, passing the infection on and endangering other people’s lives

Now, if you learn your ABC (which does not stand for being Arsey, Bolshie and a Complete T..t) you will mitigate the risk of being spoken harshly to by naughty Mr Policeman, you could avoid a fine and by not catching coronavirus you could save your life and somebody else’s.

“Evenin’ All”