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DIARY Distant socialising

Among other things, writer JAN WOOLF reflects on statistics as an anaesthetic, disinfectant as the only Covid joke in town and how 'normal' has become a contentious word

IDEALLY THIS POSTER WOULD SHOW YOU THE WAY — spotted on London Underground before lockdown. An image that says it all. Well, if not all, quite a lot in an ideal world.

Much of the news this week has been delivered through the anaesthetising mutations of statistics, as if in lockdown we can do the rapid calculations required to know if we, or those close to us, are at risk.

Have you ever met anyone who is statistically suffering? Or is comforted by a set of figures?

But what we’re learning, through this weird counterintuitive distancing, is that everyone feels close, that we mind about strangers. Maybe, like hibernating animals, it’s a rest, a refresh, a reset, as we hang out in conscious hibernation.

The most precise figure coming through the fug of imprecision was that there have been 261 Covid cases in Vietnam and no deaths. As its governance, like Cuba’s, is still notionally communist, we don’t hear much about their health systems and social structures. I wonder why?

Otherwise, my thoughts have veered from the quantum metaphysics of BBC2’s Devs, to the more profound: “How come there’s so much washing up when it’s just me?”

That last one stumped me, so I settled for the less cerebrally challenging quote from the New York Times (clear, enjoyable reporting): “People, during times of prolonged, radical change, end up changing,” wrote Luka Lucic, a Pratt Institute psychologist who studies the effects of war.

War language is still being deployed: “front line, invisible enemy.” Yet if war is politics by other means, Covid feels like politics in the making. When a soldier faces an enemy, the intention is to kill or be killed. When a medic faces a patient, it is to save that life, so the possibility of losing your own is a cruel inversion of warfare.

To withdraw from work to save your life will carry a stigma. Are they handing out white feathers? Of course you can’t refuse and, of course, this is heroic. Meanwhile, groundling workers like posties, bin men and transport workers, are infantry too — the working class bearing the brunt. ’Twas ever thus. Will conclusions be drawn?

Trapped in my open prison, I reread Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnitz, wondering what she’s making of this, how she’s coping and looking forward to whatever she’s cooking up in lockdown.

She writes: “Most Irish peasants before the famine never moved beyond 10 miles from home — day’s walk there and back again. This induces either stifling boredom and monotony or intimacy of outstanding depth.” Fascinating, but is this down to background? Parenting? Personality? Character?

We have a Prime Minister that’s a “character,” but it doesn’t mean he’s got any. His face has been off our screens for a while, so it’s been denormalised. Will his brush with death change him? Will he make jokes?

Just as I didn’t want him to die, I note there are no Covid jokes — except the President of the United States of America suggesting that people inject disinfectant: “Just an idea, folks!”

My cultural highlight was the Rolling Stones’ gig in the sitting-room rock concert. “You can’t always get what you want,” a classic from the beautiful gargoyles, Vera Lynns for our generation. It was very moving — but where were Charlie Watts’s drums?

We hear of “the new normal.” New York Times again: “In the first stages of an epidemic, people feel torn between wanting to resist their new reality, or adapt to it. They may torment themselves trying to preserve normalcy, or counting down the days to its return — as many are now.”

But what a contentious word “normal” has become. It literally means “a rule, a pattern, an authoritative standard.” It won’t be back to any authoritative norm but forward to new thinking, as people are finding strength as individuals so, therefore, the collective. This sort of psychosocial polemic is a good thing to say from pulpits, but I do believe it.

As so often it is the writer who has the clarity, with Margaret Atwood telling us on Radio 4 that “there will have to be a great deal of resetting, especially the circulation of wealth,” a counterblast to the establishment’s talk of further austerity, recession and depression.

Would you expect someone queuing at a foodbank to say: “I don’t mind, because at least I’m helping the economy?”

This notion that we’re all in it together is utter bollocks.

This article first appeared in International Times,   internationaltimes.it. Jan Woolf's latest short-story collection Stormlight is published by Riversmeet Press.

 

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