STIR Issue Three by CoronaSTIR

CONTENTS Welcome to Stir

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A View from My Window

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What life should be Like by Rita Says In Memoriam by Jenny Wallace Excerpts from the Diary of John Watts The Pond by Michael Harding The London Decameron by Michael Andrawis Alexa, ‘what does societal indiﬀerence look like by Lesley Davis My Desk by Jacob Kirsh-Rowling

On My Mantlepiece by Philippa Hayes, Amanda Weisbaum & Julia Sutton A Pillar of the Community by Gina Czarnecki

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p.22-24

Quantum Physics in the Time of Covid by Roland Denning

Green by Dulcie Andrews

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Tried & Tested Recipes

p.29-32

Fashionably Sustainable by Chloe Charalambous

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Travelling Right by Gavin Millar

p.35-36

Heightened Vibrations by Serena Bobowski

p.37-38

Death - the elephant in the room by Stacey Hart

p.39-40

Review - The Leftovers by Lesley Davis

p.41-42

The Other Side of the Flap By Lazlo the Wonder Cat

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Lockdown Precautions The Ministry of Truth2

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Lockdown Memories by Fabienne Nicholas

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Furmidable Felines

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Music Magic Morocco by Bettina Schroeder

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Front cover: In 2018 the HSCB - the Hoe Street Central Bank, an artists’ project in Walthamstow - printed art/money to buy up and cancel £1.2m of local predatory debt. In May 2019 this debt was literally exploded in a van in an action/artwork called Big Bang 2. Photo by Roland Denning

July 2020

WELCOME TO STIR Again, thank you all for your wonderful contributions to STIR. It has provided such an insightful glimpse into thoughts and feelings in truly unprecedented times. As we move into the next phase, I would like to wish all much joy, love and laughter.

All Change By Lesley Davis This is the third and final issue of STIR. It may continue in a different form or someone else may wish to take it over. You never know. Thank you all so much for your submissions. In this time of pestilence, this mag has been a lot of fun. I feel we are entering another phase now and it is going to be interesting to see how this all pans out. Lockdown has been such a weird, disorientating and in some ways enlightening experience, I predict that many of us will be altered forever. Our lives have changed so rapidly, it is sometimes hard to get to grips. I do hope that we are able to capitalise on this extraordinary moment. Lockdown has rather heightened feelings that the world is what Tennessee Williams describes as a ‘perpetually burning building’,

constantly under threat and lacking permanence. It all seems a tad Brechtian. Now that the theatre flats have been partially lifted, the clunky workings are more visible and, despite queasy feelings of unease, we find ourselves in a realm of new possibility. The external muddle is encouraging many of us to re-evaluate and assess our lives and ask ourselves what is important? and what would we like to change? We have learnt to slow down, to care more for others, to embrace nature, appreciate our pets, cook proper meals, read – the list goes on. I have to admit, I rather like how London has developed what I can only describe as a 70s vibe – it is all a bit less shiny and consumerdriven. I do understand the downsides to this but, surely at

some point, we needed to wake up to the fact that our lifestyles may not be sustainable. It seems to me, in this time of unprecedented turbulence, we are encouraged to learn to be more considered and make our own decisions. Little by little, perhaps we can bring our values to bear and change, what at present, seems like a dauntingly uncertain future. I have enough faith in people to believe that they are up to the challenge. I would like to think that we can all come together to make our worlds better. On that note, I wish you all the very best. Go well and thank you again for taking the time and effort to speak to us all.

A VIEW FROM MY WINDOW What Life Should Be Like by Rita Says

A dear friend of mine said to me the other day that the Earth has punished us like a Mother punishing a naughty child. “If you can't play nice you have to stay in your room until you've learned your lesson.” So, we've learned our lesson (hopefully), but how to proceed? Here's a list of things which I hope our culture has learned and can at the very least try very very hard to apply to playtime in the future.

PLAY NICE. PLAY FAIR. DON'T HURT YOUR PLAYMATES, DON’T STEAL FROM THEM, DON'T LIE TO THEM. DON’T BE A BRAT. NEVER LOOK DOWN ON ANYONE. APPRECIATE THE DEPTH OF YOUR OWN IGNORANCE. NEVER AGAIN TAKE THE PISS OUT OF AN ASIAN PERSON WEARING A FACE MASK. NEVER TAKE ANYTHING OR ANYONE FOR GRANTED. DON’T EMBARRASS YOUR MOTHER. SHARE YOUR TOYS AND SWEETS. APOLOGISE WHEN YOU SCREW UP. BE WILLING TO LEARN FROM OTHERS. LEAVE YOUR EGO IN THE NURSERY.

A Choreographer I worked with many years ago gave me some valuable advice. He said that whenever he joined a new company he would hang back a little and observe how the other members of the group behaved toward each other. After a day or so if he couldn't find the wanker in the room, the chances were the wanker was him. It's a good rule.

In Memoriam In loving memory of John Wallace 13.02.1939 - 20.06.2020 When John came to live in England in 1971, he was already a published poet, in Irish newspapers and magazines. As chair of the Dublin Literary Society, he had been amongst a group of young writers fiercely critical of the restrictive and repressive society in which they lived - so critical in fact that they often wrote under Gaelic pseudonyms. Working as a teacher in Yorkshire, he contInued to write, including articles for his local paper in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, called "An Irishman in England", explaining our obsession with cricket and our penchant for afternoon teas in National Trust mansions. His major "fame" came in 1985 with a ballad celebrating a giant-killing football win by York City F.C. "The Blowing Up of the Mighty Arsenal" was broadcast several times on Radio York and John became for 2 years, their "resident poet" writing and broadcasting poems on a number of topics and occasions. When I myself was trying to teach poetry, I often asked him to write me a poem to illustrate specific genres and techniques and the most hilarious of these was "Sonnet to my False Teeth". A request for a non-traditional love poem resulted in "A non- love poem". John's last poem "The Ballad of Covid 19" was written well into lockdown and sadly he did not live to see the reopening of the pubs. "Not one of my best" was his verdict, but his family think they can hear his lovely Irish voice in every line!

A Non-Love Poem By John Wallace I will write you no love poems. They are vivid phantoms in scarlet robes, Emotions exploding like a Belfast bomb And lines scratched in the blood Of torn feelings. I will write you no love poems. You are my first and last breath. You are my substance. But stop. I am writing a love poem. Without you I am the lies on a politician’s tongue, The nails on a torturer’s cross. Still I will write you no love poems. How can I describe what you are? I could not. But do not grieve Because I write you no love poems. Just take my hand.

Jenny Wallace

The Ballad of Covid 19 by John Wallace

I’m afraid it's a lockdown without any kisses, You're not allowed close, so give up the "misses" No beer, no football, no theatre to see, I'm sorry for people - but what about ME? But-wait for the time when the pubs say "come in", There'll be whisky and Guinness and vodka and gin. The day will be "VE" all over again There'll be dancing and laughter and the sound of Big Ben! 'Twill be time for most people to start at their job, No moaning allowed from the negative mob! We'll sit in the pub with a pint in our hand, Saying "What a great life! It really is grand!

Excerpts from the diary of John Watts

Life in a Homeless Hostel during the time of Covid

Beginning again with my cluster in my hostel, a microcosm of the homeless community. ‘Mo’ has returned again, but briefly. I only know this because one morning I found a half eaten oven pizza in the kitchen. Hope he’s keeping his Ramadan fast up, his religion means a lot to him as it must for many during these times. I finally met the new guy. He got moved out of one hostel to here because he wasn’t ‘engaging’ enough. This is Camden Council ‘speak’ for not ‘moving on’ outside of the Borough. He was born, raised and schooled in Camden. He has four kids, a mother and sister in the borough, but that doesn’t seem to be enough of a ‘social connection’ for the housing department. The young lad opposite is, yes, you guessed it, still a ‘client of the state’. The inmates of the rest of the hostel are becoming more ‘sociable’. There seems to be an acknowledgement that the social distancing rules are meaningless with 48 of us sharing only one entrance door, a common stairwell and a reception desk less than two metres long! Ironically when they go outside everyone is maintaining the distance rules. As a friend here said, “It only take one of us to mess up outside to mess up things for all of us inside.” Well said.

Talking of outside, I am seeing more and more rough sleepers, some new and some not so new. It was pissing down last week and when I was exercising my constitutional right to do ten laps around the small local park, I realised I was alone except for a rough sleeper in a small tent. He shouted out, “lovely weather for ducks,” I replied, “the British people are more scared of the rain than they are the virus!” Laugh, he nearly spilled his can of super strength lager.

My health has improved and am nearly back to where I was before, but there is a weariness that is harder to shake oﬀ. The medicos have finally got in touch, not to check up on whether I was in any better state of health, but to ask me to volunteer for a Coronavirus research project. Something about losing the senses of taste and smell. I was tempted to tell them that the only thing I’m losing is my mind. I signed up anyway. Maybe my weariness is of a worldly nature rather than a simple physical manifestation. This weariness has not been helped by my concerns for the future of the homeless charity where I’m a trustee. We are half way through the selection process for the new CEO and I am deeply worried, I’m having sleepless nights, that if we don’t get it right, all we have achieved up to now will have been wasted. Look at the number of homeless we have housed through the crisis -

but without the long term strategic aims and eﬀective ways of working, all we have worked so hard to imbed in our ‘culture’ will change, or worst still, be lost.

4.5.20

It hasn’t had the best of weeks in my homeless community. It all went topsy-turvy last Tuesday with some crazy banging and shouting directed at the new lad (who wasn’t even in) on our cluster floor. We have four rooms and my room is the nearest to his. The banging started at 11pm, was repeated at 1am, and finally again at 3am. I lay there thinking ‘vengeance is best served cold’. Next morning, I reported it to reception and ask them to look on the CCTV. We don’t have CCTV in our clusters but we do outside in the corridor and on the stairwell. There he was. This SOB has already got three other people kicked out by winding them up -so much so, that one beat him, badly, another stabbed him (allegedly in the arse) and another threw him repeatedly down the stairs. All this was caught on CCTV. Hence, my reasoning for not going to the door. But this seems to have been an excuse for the usual suspects to kick off. For a few days people were wandering around without any attempt at social distancing, thefts went up, petty arguments and chaos inside; the lunatics had taken over the asylum. Looking back, it’s surprising it hadn’t happened before. 11.5.20 Conditions in the hostel have, to a certain degree, improved this week. After last week’s chaos a memo/letter explaining the dos and don’ts of lockdown, specifically social distancing, was circulated to the inmates. Everyone had to sign it saying they had received it, so no excuses then. It has helped that some of the worst offenders have gone walkabout - it must have been something I said. Camden Council has again changed the rules. It seems that the Salvation Army cannot kick anyone out without their permission, except of course if there has been proven criminal activity, as with the lad opposite that is a ‘client of the state’. I have now discovered 5

this means on remand, not actually doing time, hence he can’t be kicked out, technically, I think. We do not have normal tenants’ rights here. We are all under what they call ‘Licence’, where residents have to meet a certain level of ‘engagement’ and obey the rules if we don’t want to be kicked out on a fourteen day eviction notice. Before it was up to the SA to decide, but now it’s the Council’s call. And as some of you know it has a policy of ‘move on’ at any cost. We are lucky that the Council is too scared to visit in person because of the virus and have no way of checking our levels of ‘engagement’. A little bird told me the earliest they will be coming is August. That is at least one less thing to worry about, I suppose. Camden has also introduced a scheme whereby anyone presenting symptoms of the virus can request to be moved to one of their self-isolating hotels. The catch is not one of them is in the Borough and you know what that means? No one has taken it up. On that point, people here aren’t reporting any symptoms whatsoever. I was reliably informed that the medical log book has never been so empty. Also there is a one hundred percent consensus about not going into hospital for any reason whatsoever.The news that twenty percent of Coronavirus cases were contracted in hospital probably didn’t help. 11.5.20

This week started with a drug raid. Some idiot in the next door cluster has been under surveillance for the last three weeks. They found Heroin, Crack, Skunk and a bundle of cash. Busted for possession and intent to supply, he was strangely given bail on condition that he continues to reside here. What does one have to do to get kicked out? Murder, run a Paedophilic sex ring or simply not engage with Camden’s Move on/Resettlement program. But what really pissed us inmates off was that the majority of people here have their own personal ‘contraband’ but discretion is the word. We don’t need to get busted for some other idiot’s wheeling and dealing. I did find out something useful though; the cops have to get a search warrant for each room not the whole building. Probably because trying to arrest and search forty eight men would be rather difficult especially in this time of lockdown. The Prohibition on drugs causes more suffering, homelessness and death than the drugs

themselves ever do. It should be treated as a health problem, not a criminal one and maybe we should also start thinking this way about homelessness too because homelessness, quite simply, kills! 18.5.20 News from my cluster. The young lad that was a temporary ‘client of the state’ is, allegedly, now permanent. They cleaned out his room and we will be getting a new person this week as Camden continues its carousel of move on. This weekend a couple of the inmates kicked off. One kept shouting ‘purgatory!’ out the window and another ‘bored!’. I didn’t know that there was so many ways that you can say a single word, but I do now. We are stuck in housing purgatory except we can’t see any end to it. All the housing initiatives announced by the government are concerning rough sleepers, which technically speaking. we are not. I’ve been told that us people in hostels won’t qualify as are not rough sleepers. And the easing of the lockdown hasn’t gone down well with people here; too little, too late - too much, too soon! 1.6.20 Can’t believe how quickly the environment has been impacted by the easing of lockdown. Apart from more people on the street and traﬃc and on the road, the air has definitely taken a turn for the worse. When the lockdown started, in the park that I go to every morning for my constitutional right of exercise, there was this big flock of dirty dark grey pigeons. Last week I noticed that they’re all a shiny silver grey. Beautiful. Never thought I would be judging the air quality by how clean a London pigeon looks. I wonder how long it will take for them to return to their ‘natural’ colour?

8.6.20

The Pond

by Michael Harding

Under skies of perfect azure, we hunkered down. Day after day, for weeks, it remained pure and cloudless from edge to edge. A sky not of this place. The weather, too, remained dryer and milder than usual for the season, equally not of this place. But we did not talk of this. Instead we cowered inside, directed to do so by a government of fools, themselves frightened by the threat they’d ignored. Perhaps their hope was that only the rainbow coloured people – the yellow ones, the red ones, the brown and black ones – would be affected and as their voices were muted anyway, it would be less recorded, any comment shrugged away. They prayed righteously that only a very few of the anointed ones would suffer. Not much worse than the flu, they promised. Only the usual amount of relatively unimportant and easily forgotten souls would depart this world, they assured us. Move along, there’s nothing here to see, little people.

Photo Michael Harding

But the word – the “p” word – had to be replaced; the government, as always, needs to contain the people and terror is an effective control agent. But worrying the populace, make them adhere to the political agenda is the goal, rather than enfeebling the community. Society needs to feel that any solution lies within the power of current science to subdue the beast; it’s what the people want, after all. So they say. We began by calling it the less worrying sounding “epidemic,” a word that speaks of a threat that can be subdued, beaten, vanquished by pills and vaccines. As we had done before. But as is the way of things, it soon spread its wings and became a pandemic.

Let’s call it what it is: a plague. It’s a word that we used in the Before Times, those times before science convinced us it could conquer all. The Black Death killed so many that they worried that there wouldn’t be enough of the living left to bury the dead.

We became expert in new definitions: checking the dictionary to clarify what qualifies the change of state that elevates “epidemic” to “pandemic”, learning the differences between N95 masks and lesser coverings, knowingly comparing R rates for our area, then comparing them to other counties and countries. We learned to speak confidently about aerosolising virus droplets, containment and mitigation. It’s all a necessary but tragic lexicon of loss and this is how we will tell the story of the virus, by deploying anonymising and anodyne language, hoping to de-weaponise it somehow.

We didn’t defeat it, but it lost interest in us; although, strictly speaking, it continues to stalk us to this day. Does this news surprise you?

But you can’t really. I had SARS-CoV-2, aka Covid-19. More letters and acronyms. At least I presume I did, because it wasn’t possible to be tested at the

Photo Michael Harding

GP will arrange an antibody test in the near future, at a time when it’s likely that I will once again be working in a face-to-face environment. I had all the symptoms listed in the media, but none in a particularly significant way, so I dismissed them, and put what I was going through down to some variant flu, and nothing more. After all, the papers were full of endless pieces about The Cough, suggesting that was the sole certain sign of infection. As I only had an irritating, persistent and somewhat unspectacular tickle, I didn’t feel I qualified. It was only when – weeks and weeks later – journalists started writing about anosmia, the loss of smell and the consequent loss of taste, that I realised that I’d probably had It. By then I’d had enough and started going outdoors again, anxious to open my lungs up again. I was weak and drained all the time. I spoke in sentences of two words, after which I’d pause, take in more oxygen before carrying on. My partner and I took to walking in a woodland most days. We found a bench on a small pond that faced into the sun all day long and made it ours – this was before the benches got taped off and secured. This is where these photographs come from. Amid all that was going on around, there was a distinct serenity to the place. No planes flew. The cars

sheltered in place, their owners looking at them wistfully from the safety of their houses. We went to our permitted daily recreation and sat in the sun, awestruck by the force of a bacteria that could bring the human world to a halt, of sorts, at least. In the natural world, life went on without noticing mankind’s tribulations. A pair of mallard ducks caught our attention and we watched, spellbound, as they made circuits of the pond. At first, we didn’t know how to tell the sexes apart, but next day, having digested an online article on them, we were ready. They are, by the way, pleasingly easy to tell apart: the males have glossy green heads and the females have brown-speckled plumage. Given the time of year, we knew that they would soon be having a brood. Watching them rhythmically circle the pond became hypnotic, and it was easy to lose an hour or two in quiet study. That is to say, until a second drake showed up. Things got complicated. The female would swim independently of the two males, the first partner of which tried to maintain a constant distance, as though there was an invisible cord connecting them. Names became necessary: I christened them Bob, Carol and Ted, after Paul Mazursky’s late 60s film. I’ll tell you now that Alice never arrived.

Photo Michael Harding

Every so often, Ted would breach the cordon and swim, with considerable intent, towards her. When this happened, Bob would accelerate and with loud squawking, intersect the path and forcefully steer Ted onto the pond’s bank. Ashore, Bob would chase Ted into the grasses, quacking loudly. After a few feet, Bob would stop, glower at Ted until satisfied that the point had been made, then lumber back to water to rejoin Carol, who seemed untroubled by events. Ted was priapic. You’d think that Ted would get the point. But once Bob was afloat again, Ted would follow him into the water and the whole scene would be repeated. And again. And still again. After a time, you couldn’t believe that Ted just didn’t get it and got a bit boring. Oddly, though, the whole ritual was interrupted by a midday break, when Carol would swim to the far end and climb ashore to doze, or perhaps lay an egg or two, during which time Bob and Ted would ignore her and swim back and forth amiably. Once break time was over it would start all over again. It was the interval break of a matinee of The Mousetrap, another ancient and ever-repeated performance, I decided. As millions will tell you, just because you know the plot and whodunnit, doesn’t stop it from being oddly compelling.

The bird book explained that Ted was presenting himself as an alternative, just in case things didn’t go well between Bob and Carol. Then another Ted showed up and Bob seemed beside himself. The two Teds would swim together, rushing Bob and Carol. At first, Bob tried valiantly to defend his mate, now with a new strategy, which saw him rise half out of the water and propel himself forcefully at Ted and Ted. Carol had enough, too. She joined the battle and steered Ted #1 to the shore, while Bob saw Ted #2 off. Carol, even though pregnant, chased Ted #1 into the brush, while in another corner, Bob was after Ted #2. Much impassioned flapping of wings. Satisfied that the threat level had died back, Bob and Carol returned to the pond and began swimming back and forth, with Bob dropping back to patrol the shore from time to time. The truce held. Break time arrived and Carol once again took to her spot on the far shore. This happened for three days in a row. Then one day, Ted #1 taxied through the grasses and took off, swooping low over Bob and Carol, curving powerfully, as if showing Carol what she was missing out on. A few minutes later, Ted #2 followed him, but arcing south and without flamboyance. A few days later, workers came and wrapped all the benches with elaborate festoons of warning tape. Look, but don’t touch. The devil makes work for

Photo Michael Harding

hands, I guess. Leave people to contemplate and who can say what dark thoughts might cross their minds?

Covid-19 survivors, all in our own way.

It was no bad thing, though, for it made us walk further than we had done and thus good for my lungs and the better to discover the woods we were in. We came across another, larger, pond not far from the first, the water covered with wildfowl promenading each in their own way. Amongst them we saw a couple of lone drakes, eyeing up new females. I thought, but couldn’t be sure, that I saw Ted #1 out there, still lonely and still trying to convince – perhaps it was Alice – to mate with him. A couple of weeks after this, we had become woodland walkers, rather than seated pond meditators. Petty as its installation seemed to us, we decided to play along and leave the bench tape in place. We were passing our old pond and we paused to see how Bob and Carol were. The irises had come into full bloom now and the pond radiated early summer colour. We stood marvelling at the simple beauty of it, the still-clear blue sky, the crisp background of the white birch trees, their leaves flashing silvery in the breeze. In the quiet shallows, Carol was swimming back and forth, gently guiding the first of her new brood, showing them where to find food.

The London Decameron By Michael Andrawis

We are now all living in a 1970s BBC cult science fiction drama if we did but know it. The future has finally arrived but collided in the present with our past. an open letter to The Editor of The Daily Scourge or it S.T.I.R?

“I’ve got the Microphone so listen to me.” (Treatment local Psychedelic Hippie, Punk band H.G.S North London circa1978). Listen it’s true, time is a curve do you really believe you’re in 2020? I’m mean really. Einstein kicked it off or was it the celestial clockmaker? Hawkwind, the band Marc Bolan felt should have written the sound track to Star Wars, dissed Albert E for “not being a handsome man and never having a girl. “ But Einstein knew better, theorising times a curve back to 75 with Albert’s “Quark Strangeness and charm”. You are now in 2020/1975. It’s just that every day seems the same. You’re ground -hogged in lockdown. Memory reality past and present merge or it “just an illusion.” Like brother Lee (e) John sang as he glided across the dance floor. Again “Isn’t this where…. we came in ?” In the crackle and pop of the outward groove of The Wall. Moloko already bringing it back to a time when… You’re wearing a lot of purple and everyone looks like Peter Wyngarde. The rest of you are in Beige. Don’t make some ridiculous claim that you’re too young and haven’t been born yet! Manchild women-child, if you’re experiencing 2020. you know 1975 with your dropped aviators on. As Patrick McGoohan said “Be seeing you?” Again and Again -you’re trapped in the Village. Welcome you are now part of a mix-race family which, at times, seems to have all the mystery of the boy kings golden death mask below the first Nile cataract. But then again, combined with the satire and everyday humdrum of Till Death Us Do Part. “Speak in English” Grandad barks at Dad. Grandad remembers the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 as an ambulance driver in the First World War. Grandad claimed he survived it on Woodbines but I’m sure the Angel of Mons kept an eye out and gave him grace. Dad, an Egyptian G.P nicknamed the Omar Sherif of Cricklewood who eccentrically decided to house his family in Golders Green in 1971, echoed the sentiment of Jackie Mason who once quipped I did a tour of Egypt and Israel - “two countries, same jokes!” Suddenly the BBC Television drama Survivors comes on the box and you’re transported with your Okra and Chips on your lap with Ben’s Birdseye beef burgers and a Cresta on the side “it’s frothy man!” But not as we know it or “as we like it “. Will Shakespeare said, “Ay there’s the rub” as Robbie Shakespeare played the room, feels the dub with roots rockers on the pirate radio in Willesden in the back of an Austin 1100. Dad on night calls at 4 in the morning, a life saver save again putting the black in the union jack and you’re asleep on mum’s knee. The nostalgia stops as Tim Smith (Cardiacs) shouts “It ends here!” the band shudders to a stop because… The Survivors comes on and it scares the S… out of everyone…. Mum, Dad, Grandad Egyptian relatives in the house, you’re there, yes you! your eyes wide on the 625 as your pulse races. Now the Devil Porter aside (The Scottish play). For younger viewers Survivors was a BBC Television series broadcast in 1975, the plot line and breakdown as Eric B and Rakim would cut it. “it concerns the plight of a group of people who have survived an apocalyptic plague pandemic, which was accidentally released by a Chinese scientist and quickly spread across the world via air travel. Referred to as "The Death", the plague kills approximately 4,999 out of every 5,000 human beings on the planet within a matter of weeks of being released.” (Source Wikipedia).

Wow, sound familiar? As the Old Testament prophet and preacher shouts “Oh brother oh sister!” do you still think you’re in the year you think you’re in, you’ve opened a door and you’re back where you started look in the mirror…. Even if you get a crop like Joan of Arc nothing has changed T.V.C 15. Maybe death transmission comes from Bats, Pangolins or wet market cross species, cruelty not clumsy scientists, or is it in the air? The evil of a sunny F22 spring day in England, that’s sinister where’s the rain-down? As you dice with death at Sainsbury’s “where good food costs less“ according to Tom Baker with empty shelves, yep unfortunately “Duck’s off.” (Gourmet Night, Fawlty Towers 1975). We finally reach the Vale of Health N.W. London or the Royal Free in take “a tissue a tissue” as we cling to our boiling point masks or my Grandad father’s “ecstasy of fumbling”. As we fight this together “so we won’t fall down”. As the real Heroes are under-resourced and under pressure and having alarms in their nightmares on their rare rota repose. My mother’s NHS nurse tears start falling for her former profession as we drum for carers as some are acting like saints and some are acting like cretins with eyesight checkers moving cars ever northwards, there is madness in that boy’s eyes. We can’t say goodbye as the room has no access and we are choking as George’s life Matters more than our marching hearts can express. As we are lead by Kafkaesque donkeys and uniformed murder as Dr Samuel Johnson has buried his cheese with a full dairy and left city limits and we’re all lonely left in Londinium. But I’m going nowhere as she is my origin and I’m the shield. What pandemics and TV serials tell us is that we need one another even more in our grand isolation. Whilst keeping the creep of the mask red death from the door chime of my 93 year old mother. Thus we love our friends more than we can ever tell them, our partners, our singletons, our family in Africa, Bath, Bristol and London Fields. The mirror is shattered between 75 and 20 and the sample-rate bell tolls for you, yes you! Diamond dogs may bark but they will never take us as we miss your sweet spectre, as our hearts fill with longing we will survive this together as we all are The Shield. Bacharach penned “life is a circle without a beginning and nobody know where it really ends.” Then you hear in your mind a dystopian loop tone repeating “Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro Bro to fade.” © Mike Andrawis 2020

‘Alexa, show me what societal

indiﬀerence looks like!’

I had a very difficult conversation with my neighbour today. It keeps playing in my head and I felt I needed to document it. He has lived in the basement multioccupancy apartment for several years. Other people have come and gone with amazing regularity, but he and his girlfriend have been a constant in the life of the house. We chat about the garden or the weather but, of late, the tenor of these conversations has been markedly different. He is Romanian and his partner is Hungarian. For the purpose of this piece, I will refer to them as Alex and Alexa. Both work in the hospitality industry. Since they moved in, I have seen them leave in the early hours and return late at night. They both do silly hours for poor pay and job security is something that they can only dream of. At the beginning of the lockdown both of them had their employment unceremoniously terminated before they could even be considered for furlough. Apparently, it was proving quite a struggle to negotiate severance and I often saw Alex pacing anxiously around the garden speaking on his phone. He told me that he was bored not working but he was doing yoga and renovating his bicycle (which, incidentally, is now something of a work of art). Occasionally, Alex & Alexa would sit in the garden with a couple of friends drinking beer and laughing. This seemed a good sign but Alex had told me on several occasions that he was worried about the rent and his fast diminishing savings. I hoped that they were coping. I did try to persuade Alex to sign up for Universal Credit but, for whatever reason, he never did. It is difficult when you are living in a foreign country and don’t understand the rules or where to go to get help besides which his English, although impressive, may not be up to coping with the twists and turns of government bureaucracy. For many people, the lockdown was a strange limbo where one could practice living differently. For some, it was a license to chill a bit, learn new skills and spend time with loved ones. For others, like Alex, who fell through the support net, it led to excruciating anxiety. All public sector workers were paid whether they worked or not, many employees were furloughed on 80% of their income, a large proportion of the self-employed received quite generous grants (assuming they had been in business for over a year). Everyone else, depending on how

by Lesley Davis

much they had in savings, were told to apply for Universal Credit which, although far from generous, ensured that food could be put on the table. It is evident, however, that there are thousands of people, like Alex, who were thrown to the wolves and our new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has done close on nothing to address this problem besides offer apologies. Alex has, up until now, managed to keep up his considerable rent payments. He and his girlfriend spend near on £1,000 per month (if you include bills) to live in a room with an en-suite bathroom in a rather poorly maintained shared flat. This is bad enough, but now that his two flatmates have moved out, the Agents are insisting that he either take on the whole flat at the inflated cost of £2,600 per month plus around £300 worth of bills or he needs to move out in two weeks time. Apparently, he learnt of this yesterday when an Agents’ representative let himself in unannounced. It certainly didn’t take long for them to pounce once the government gave them the green light on evictions. Given that the Agents’ repeatedly ignored Alex’s requests that they made good the blocked toilet and the broken dryer, and taking into account that he does not owe them anything at this stage, this is galling. In addition, the Agent told him that the landlord now wants to let the flat. not as an HMO, but as a single unit. Also, said Agent insisted that he would, in the interim, have to put his name to all the bills, which when you are skint and unsure of how these things work, is a terrifying prospect. Whereas I fully understand that landlords, being a breed apart, cannot like the rest of us lose money or be in any way inconvenienced, it is clear to see that Alex is being bullied. It is hardly his fault that his flatmates have gone. He took residence on the basis that the flat was shared and, although his contract only has another few weeks to run, he still has rights. The simple act of entering the property without forewarning is not only illegal, it is clearly an intimidation tactic. Giving him two days to decide whether it will be possible to either fund the property himself or find new tenants to share, is blatantly neither fair nor feasible. Furthermore, he is entitled to at the very least 42 days’ (90 days is usual) notice. In the midst of a fucking pandemic, one would have thought that adhering to the law would be the very least they could do. 14

I spoke to Alex today and he seemed broken. He has a very nervous girlfriend who he accompanies daily to her new job. A lack of confidence means that she cannot travel alone. What is more, said job barely covers the food bill. He has no way of borrowing any money, is very reluctant to leave his familiar surroundings and has absolutely no idea what to do next. Alex was also bemoaning the fact that, if he were to be unceremoniously booted out at such short notice, he would have to dump his pots and pans and recently purchased sofa (the ones provided were beyond decrepit).

I spoke to a friend of mine who has a legal background and a lot of useful contacts so we will be doing what we can to ensure that Alex is given a fair chance of staying housed. If anyone out there has any suggestions, please get in touch. Such injustices are surely unacceptable. There by the grace of God and all that.

His girlfriend is about to be furloughed because the restaurant she works in is empty most days. This will mean a drop in an already inadequate income. Alex has applied to every restaurant chain in London (he cycles all over to enquire and deliver CVs) but unsurprisingly to no avail. He is now trying to find labouring work but is unable to do this without acquiring a CSCS card. Again, this is a problem for someone who is not particularly compute- savvy. He has tried to do this, but unaware that the cost levied by the Government to acquire the card (approximately £60 if you include training), he has been targeted by mercenary con merchants offering to manage the process for £400! Alex and Alexa, despite being foreign, are the kind of people who the government claim to love. They are hardworking and reluctant to kick up a fuss. On all counts, they are very easy to exploit. All in all, it seems they are essentially ‘throwaway’ people that we can happily ignore, unless of course they are taking our order for dinner. Confronted with this ostensibly hopeless situation I asked rather timidly whether Alex might be better trying to get home? He told me that in Romania kids as young as 10 are holding people up with guns.which they have no compunction in using, for a cash ransom. He can see no way back. I used to believe that Britain was essentially a fair country and perhaps, on some level, it still is. As a white, middle class woman with the tools to fight back, I withhold judgement. I do worry that the Alexes and Alexas of this world are growing in number, particularly in the light of recent events. It is going to be interesting in October, when financial protections are withdrawn, how many people who thought they were inviable, find themselves facing similar dilemmas. Perhaps then, people will realise how important it is to protect the vulnerable amongst us. Let’s see.

My Desk

by Jacob Kirsh-Rowling I spend more +me here than ever. I have become very familiar with it. It is not in fact a desk. It is a portable folding table from an online retailer. I was going to replace it with a less modest table or desk as I am spending so much +me at it. However, it can be put away so suits our purposes be=er. It allows for the regular switch between office and home. The desk top is made of 5 beams of light coloured wood, carefully kni=ed together by dowelling and glue. You can see some joining marks; it is pleasantly unfinished. It has an almost rough feeling under the elbow. It is a hangover from an old business of ours. We never sold these. They were just a cheap appendage, for events or whenever an occasional table is useful. We would hide them under fabrics. Our business (Interiors/ Homewares) sold very high quality, soK wood tables of the type you might see in a trendy coffee shop, or local independent, ethical (yawn) retailer, Gastro Pub, architects etc. Despite how many really good quality tables I have touched in the last few years, I have come to love this desk (table). The table sits on two H frame black legs that would not look out of place anywhere. They fold down neatly and clip flat against the table top for easy storage and carrying. In spite of the table being a folding table, it does in fact stand (sit?) underneath my weight very stably. This table vends for £25 from an online retailer whose name may as well be foldingtables.com. I would definitely recommend them. They look great, store well, are great quality, despite being very light.

around 40% associated to the sale of made to order tables, benches, shelving units and similar. This made modern tables the main thing, our thing. We also sold a lot of vintage and an+que furniture, as well as nick-nacks, po=ery, candles etc. Perhaps it is because I have delivered a staggering (literally) amount of large, encumbering furniture that I have developed par+cular affec+on for this table, my now desk. Or perhaps I have grown fond of it because I have sat here a lot recently; recently during a crisis. ‘It has been here as long as Covid’, I might say with affec+on. The u+lity, the adaptable portability… the desk-ability of the table is what I like about it. Our business is gone now. ‘We lost it during lockdown’, one could say. Not uncommon. Independent retailers have been hit very hard. It wasn’t the closure of our premises, or the disabling of our supply chain, or the general drop in face to face sales that closed us. We lost large orders from other retailers who were planning to refit their shops at the end of the summer in prepara+on for autumn. Knowing that the business would take a huge step backwards, aKer evalua+ng some numbers we decided to close our shop. However all has not been lost. I won’t bore you with the details (these things write dry). It is not our acumen or planning that has go=en us through this. We were simply lucky. It was lucky that we had something that was light and portable that we could rely on in a crisis.

The table works for me. It is stylish, in its way. U+litarian, un-preten+ous, it has a ready-foranything feel. Our businesses net proﬁts were

by Philippa Hayes

I would love to say my Mantelpiece is a dizzying array of party invites, gallery opening cards and a couple of well-placed pieces of fine art. Sadly that is not the case, nor has it ever been. Instead it has tended to be an over-populated home to much loved objects, some+mes the weird and wonderful and oKen a dumping ground for those things that just can’t find a place elsewhere. Every now and then I have a mantlepiece cull but then magically it fills up again. My mantlepiece reflects my home – a bit of a hotchpotch from different eras and my youthful obsession with Art Deco seems to be well represented. On the far leK in a wooden Deco frame is a black and white photograph of my partner’s grandmother, sadly now departed. It was taken in a tearoom in Paris and she looks so wonderfully stylish. She loved to dance and was s+ll ballroom dancing in her late 80’s – she lived to 94. Next to Wyn is a cactus – a present from a friend and about the only kind of house plant I can keep alive! Nestled behind the cactus is one of a few Candles+cks – this one is a delighiully kitsch glass Eiffel Tower.

The vase of roses has been a lockdown staple – if I treated myself to nothing else during this pandemic, I have always had a vase of flowers on the mantelpiece to keep my spirits up. Moving along there is a sweet glass dome filled with beaded flowers – a much cherished present many years ago from my friend Lesley. I think it is probably a Christmas ornament but I like it so much it stays here all year round. Tucked behind this and another candles+ck is one of two ‘sacred heart’ bits of nonsense - found with Lesley in our favourite Columbia Road shop – as the saying goes – ‘Once A Catholic’! The li=le pebble with the rainbow painted on it I found on a bench while taking some lockdown exercise in Crystal Palace Park – the reverse says ‘Support The NHS’ and it will be a small keepsake of these strange +mes. The Deco clock in the middle of the mantlepiece was a Brick Lane find from nearly forty years ago when that area was a very different place to the Shoreditch of today. I was a regular Sunday morning visitor off to scour all the junk stalls that

ﬁlled Brick Lane and Cheshire Street – always delighted at ﬁnding another bit of tat to take home. Our bargain hun+ng would be followed by a trip to the Bagel shop or a Sunday lunch curry while avoiding the sma=ering of remaining Skinheads who forgot they were no longer welcome in this old Na+onal Front stomping ground. The clock miraculously s+ll works but its endless chiming means it has now been put into re+rement. Other bits of mantlepiece nonsense include a pair of brass penguins – these were bought at a government craK shop in India – they seemed so incongruous in the 90 degree heat we had to

have them along with the li=le candle or incense holders they now sit in. And lastly is Ronnie the Raven in his top hat. Ronnie is sadly on his last legs having been found on the ﬂoor on more than one occasion – brought down no doubt by an over enthusias+c cat unable to avoid the tempta+on of a bird that did not ﬂy away!

In the absence of a mantlepiece by Amanda Weisbaum If the truth be told, I don’t actually have a mantelpiece. I do, however, have a shelf above my bed which could act as one in this instance. The pieces collected on the shelf are of sen+mental value and I have to confess I speak to them all regularly. And why not a mantelpiece? Nine months ago I moved on to a narrow-boat. There were several factors that led up to this. The loss of my long-term home meant I had to decide whether to stay in London (where my family, friends and familiar playgrounds are) or move well away from all I hold dear. I decided to stay around what I know and love

in spite of the complica+on of my feline companions. My two cats, whom I selﬁshly refused to part with had, at the ripe old ages of 10 & 11, to adapt to living on water in a 60’ x 6’2” (20mt x 2 mt) hunk of metal and wood that has an engine that scarily vibrates every fortnight when we are obliged to move on. I digress. From leK to right, an African ar+san picture frame given to me by a colleague I worked with in Liberia for MSF (Medecins sans Fron+eres) in the early 2000s. Irrita+ngly, It has an ill-ﬁrng stand and was constantly falling down un+l it was 18

held in place with Bluetack. The photo in the frame is of my 2 nephews, my brother’s sons and my niece (my sister’s daughter) – Incidentally, Is there a collec+ve word for nieces and nephews as there is for brothers and sisters? Maybe this is a ques+on for Lazlo?. The pic was taken at my elder nephew’s wedding held in Hull, his bride’s hometown. It was a fabulous weekend and the photo always makes me laugh as I picture them all permanently huddled around the very popular chocolate fountain. Moving on to the purple ﬂamingo pen called Petunia, more securing at the base with bluetack. I was given this because of a joke I made about a previous signiﬁcant partner, which went something like ‘J has a new bird’. This caused what could only be described as an interna+onal incident (Scotland v England). I, the injured party, s+ll think it was a funny comment, but it turns out not all people have my sense of humour - a new learning curve every day.

reminder of the very strong and posi+ve influence of my long-term landlady and friend. Lastly my 2 giraffes. I saw a lot of extraordinary wildlife while working abroad but giraffes were by far my favourite. They are magnificent creatures. I have to confess to detouring past the giraffe house in Regents Park as oKen as I can. Par+cularly during the Corona lockdown, I purposely cycled past their enclosure as regularly as possible, even if it took me out of my way.

* Note from Ed: I must apologise for Lazlo’s response to your ques+on. We understand implying your family members are ‘li=er trash’ could be construed as oﬀensive. As per our disclaimer. Lazlo is, and will undoubtedly remain, a cat. Please accept our sincere regret for any oﬀence taken and, In the spirit of diversity, join us in celebra+ng vibrant and divergent cultural norms.

Next? One china Siamese cat, Sasha. My aunt and uncle had a number of these incredible creatures whom I loved dearly. I was oKen found res+ng by their open ﬁre with the cats. I vowed to have a pair of my own one day, although I ended up with two domes+c short hairs – one black and one black and white. I would not change them for anything. Luckily, it seems that they feel the same or they may have refused adjust to life on the canal. The picture behind the bird and cat is of my Dad, brother and I. Where were we and why are we all suited and booted? No one in the family can remember. The photo came to me aKer my fathers’ death and reminds me of all the good +mes that we had. Thankfully these con+nue in another form as the family regenerates and expands. There are three silver items - a cruet set with classic blue glass linings that were my grandmother’s. I keep all sorts of detritus in them, you know the type of things, screws that come from nowhere, seeds that were supposed to be planted and have shrivelled or strange pieces of plas+c that must be kept for any number of forgo=en reasons. The third item is a silver pig pin cushion that lived on a shelf above Alicia Davis’ [known to everyone as Leish] sink. The shelves were rammed and I was always amazed they didn’t come crashing down. When Leish passed away, Lesley (our editor and very good friend), asked if I would like something from what had been her mother’s home. Having lived in the basement of that house for over ﬁKeen years I could recall every item on the burgeoning kitchen shelves. For whatever reason, the silver pig was an ins+nc+ve ask and is, and will remain, a delighiul

Mantlepiece by Julia Sutton A plain old co=age ﬁreplace made of rough blackened red brick, the mantel a plank of hardwood beneath a lick of chipped cream paint. Nothing decora+ve: a mere repository for what would otherwise be homeless. A plain wooden clock, also painted cream, a moving-in present from the owner of the now-non-existent junk shop on the other side of my street. Friendly woman: on moving day she relieved me of the furniture that refused to ﬁt through my front door, the local glaziers being unavailable to remove the window. On either side of the clock, some birthday cards I simply cannot throw away. On the right, from my sister Kay who lives in Sparta, a colour photograph of a two and a half thousand-year-old olive tree. Was it meant to make me feel young? I love olive trees and this poor old soul was sold to the Americans by a government in crisis. But then a wise local mayor crowd-funded for the tree to be uprooted and re-sited in the town square. The cards with the fat blue +t (there are two) are from my late sister Lesley. A keen photographer of birds and wildlife, she had a contract with Medici cards,

so we always knew what she would send. I turn it over and her name is on the back: Lesley Macbeth, Prizewinner Wildlife in the Garden Award. As I recall, she braved Chelsea Flower Show, on a free exhibitor’s +cket, in what turned out to be her last summer. And slo=ed in beside the tankard, I ﬁnd a couple of mementoes from our last ou+ng together, when I wheeled her in her chair to the Surrey Museum of Rural Life. One a +ny recipe book: War-Time Cookery ― to save fuel and food value; plus a replica ra+on book from 1941. Tripe and liver hotpot, yum! And never empty the water from vegetables down the sink! I feel glad now of that experience, when we stepped back in +me together round a furnished post-war pre-fab, laid out exactly like the one that sheltered us when we were li=le. But now I see that the tankard, stuﬀed with my late parents’ cutlery, is engraved with an inscrip+on I have never read. To Charles from his colleagues at H.M.P. Reading. Reading Gaol must have been my dad’s last pos+ng before his re+rement, and the place where he spent his night du+es wri+ng books in a vacant cell. 20

The li=le coloured wooden top in front of my sister’s bird belongs to Daisy, my cat and my furry shielding buddy throughout the long months of lockdown, not yet eased for me. The Raku po=ery ﬁgure, placed for safety on the shelf above the mantelpiece, is meant to represent me. How amazing that I s+ll have it! My daughter Louise made and glazed it for me, some+me in the late seven+es, probably with a friend of ours at Pimlico Po=ery in Lupus Street, where she called in on her way to and from school. She’s made me into a real mum in my long green dress and apron and with my hair in an enormous bun. I also have a copper ashtray that she hammered out on the tree trunk at dear old Michael Murray’s silversmithing workshop in Clerkenwell. She must have been nine, then, and Michael was in the midst of serng up the Clerkenwell Green Associa+on craK workshops.

from my allotment, no doubt, but sadly never labelled. So, now I shall have to sow them and wait for another spring to come before I can tell you what they are.

The books on the far leK, I dumped there, when I ran out of bookshelves and thought their weight would balance out the Roberts radio on the other end. Which, itself, is sirng in the only place that gets a decent signal. I think the books once belonged to Michael, who had been born and bred in the Tolstoyan Anarchist colony at Whiteway, near Stroud, where everything was shared, and where they ‘built their own homes, grew their food, collected water from the wet ground and talked late into the night.’ I’d be=er take a look at those books. I’ve picked up A Book on Vegetable Dyes by Ethel M. Mairet, printed and published at S. Dominics Press, Ditchling in 1920. I think that press was part of another radical community that was founded by Eric Gill, a close friend of Michael’s father Stormont and frequent visitor to Whiteway, along with Shaw, Chesterton and Tippe=. The bookplate and illustra+ons look to me a lot like Gill’s wood engravings. So much knowledge in a small book, both in the making of it and its contents. Beside it, a book on lacquering techniques, all in Japanese and sent to me from a harpsichord maker, in Japan, who I corresponded with at the +me. Such a shame I’ll never read it. Everything on my mantelpiece is s+rring memories and beginning to make me long for something contemporary. I pick up a set of small cards I brought home from a pre-Covid show of pain+ngs in Norwich cathedral. A ‘sta+ons of the cross’ series that explores the life of Edith Cavell, who I knew a bit about because I had been in Cavell House at school. But I hadn’t known she came from Norwich. There is li=le leK for me to open, but the +ny painted chest of drawers next to the radio. I peep into each drawer and ﬁnd, wrapped carefully in white +ssue, assorted seeds. Collected 21

A Pole of the Community Made during lockdown by Gina Czarnecki

MADE DURING LOCK-DOWN I turned the alarm clock off a long time ago when the need to be on time anywhere ceased. No hours of normal operation, school runs, nights out, weekends, working away or being elsewhere, no work or play dates and no chance encounters. Anxieties of being overwhelmed by an empty diary and micro-organisms brought looming visions of stark horizons which evolved into a strange kind of calm. A time to reflect, de-clutter, prevent more contaminated intrusions and start to mend. Now able to hear sounds and see glimpses of different futures that have been suffocated in all the noise, thinking beyond the bounds of what had constrained me. With the promise of sunshine mending my soul, I made ‘Pole’. Pole takes the essence of the caryatid. The figure of the static and weight-bearing female human form supporting a building in the Greek architectural style dating from around 500 BC. This column is composed of female forms in fluid dance motion – solidified. Pole dance has its roots in the traditional Indian sport of Mallakhamb, a male display of endurance, strength and coordination, which was adulterated into a female erotic act for male audiences. Gender polarities turned around and around. The body merges and emerges from the material - magnetised to it and becoming one with it. ‘Pole’ was the ethnic slur directed at my dad and our family in my childhood. It is also a statement of fact and the interstitial state between opposing opinions, positions and qualities.

Quantum Physics In The Time of Covid by Roland Denning

This pandemic gives you time and space for your mind to wander. I’ve been reading up on quantum physics, a subject that has always both fascinated and baffled me. I once did an evening class in quantum physics but the tutor studiously avoided the aspects that really interested me – the bits that just don’t make sense. Quantum physics is one of those areas at the frontiers of science, like relativity, chaos and complexity theory that few understand but many like to appropriate. For science fiction writers, New Age theorists and alternative therapists, these fields are sufficiently misunderstood and mysterious to offer inspiration or justification for their own practices. Relativity evokes notions of time travel, chaos theory that the madness of the world is decipherable and quantum physics that there are magic forces beyond the physical world. Sadly, those exotic extrapolations have little connection to the actual science. The recent TV series DEVS made great use of the multiverse theory –the world is continually splitting, and that everything that can happen, does happen in another universe. This, crazy as it seems, is actually one of the serious attempts that some physicists have used to try to make sense of quantum theory. Science once offered reassuring diagrams of the world. Remember those models of atoms and molecules at school, those coloured balls connected by rods - like that building in Brussels called the Atomium? Complete nonsense. And it’s not as if these have been replaced by more accurate models - science no longer offers us any pictures of the world, just mathematical probabilities of where things might be. This is dispiriting. Quantum physics is the study of atomic and subatomic particles. For the vast majority, most of it just doesn’t make sense. In the quantum world, things can be in two places at the same time. Not only can we not state where these tiny particles are, they actually aren’t anywhere until

we measure them. And when we measure them, everything changes. Yes, we are about to encounter Schrödinger’s cat. This all started early in the 20th century when scientists set out to determine whether light consisted of rays or particles. This may seem of minor consequence to you, but it is fundamental to understanding how the world works. The study of subatomic particles was inextricably linked to the development of the hydrogen bomb – this stuff has consequences. We are familiar with how waves work, and how they interfere with each other when they meet - if you’ve been on a small boat when a big one goes past, you’ll have some idea what this means. If one of your stereo speakers is connected the wrong way (out of phase) the audio waves will cancel each other out and the sound will be horribly tinny. When a train goes past, the pitch of its hooter changes as the speed of the train is added or subtracted to the speed of the sound wave. This is called the Doppler effect, and Einstein predicted it would apply to the light coming from stars too, if light really is a wave (he was proved right). It turned out light is both a particle and a wave. And as science progressed, this got increasingly problematic. Like particles being in more than one place at the same time, and just the act of observation changing what it is you are observing. Schrödinger, for one, was not happy with these uncertainties, and this is where his cat comes in; it was his way of saying you can’t get away with ignoring that this makes no sense. The cat is in a box and there is a radioactive substance outside emitting subatomic particles. There is a slit where a particle can enter, but owing to the weirdness of quantum theory, it is not possible to say whether the particle does or does not go into the box; both states exist simultaneously until the box is opened. Schrödinger imagined a Geiger counter

connected to a hammer aimed at a phial of cyanide. It the particle enters, the poison gas is released and the cat dies. When you open the lid of the box, the poor cat is dead or alive. No ambiguity there. But by the principles of quantum theory, the cat is both dead and alive until you open the box. It was, I hasten to add, a thought experiment – no real cats were involved. Schrödinger, like Einstein, hated the notion of not being able to say what is really going on in the quantum world but the majority of physicists, then and now, accept what is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation and take the line ‘shut up and calculate’. The calculations that come out of quantum science work extremely well, even though almost all of the people who have devised them accept that what is going on at the quantum level doesn’t make sense at all. Why bother, if the maths work? Well, a substantial and increasing minority of scientists, particularly those with an interest in philosophy, have and do bother. [As an aside, some of the most prominent dissident physicists (like David Bohm and Einstein) were socialists or Marxists, whereas the most ardent ‘shut up and calculate’ proponents tended to be conservative (Heisenberg) or, at worse, Nazi collaborators (Pascual Jordan). Make of that what you will]. Yes, the sums work out, but the dissidents didn’t like the separation between the normal world (where things obey the laws of logic) and the quantum world (where things are just weird). Why does quantum theory only kick in when things get small? And if the act of measurement actually changes what you measure – well, what the hell does measurement actually mean? Does it have to be a human who does the measurement? Could it be the cat? Attempting to square these circles has taken scientists into even stranger places. Some, on the far fringes of physics, have postulated that consciousness intervenes in the process of measurement, and thus in the way subatomic particles behave. Others, that the principle of the multiverse or multiple worlds is the way to make sense of it all (the cat remains alive in one world, dead in another), to the delight of science fiction writers everywhere. And what relevance does this have to us to our current predicament? Well, science is complex and messy. We look to it to give us answers, but often it seems to offer back more questions. But science does work; switch on your TV, and you get a picture. It is not a matter of faith that planes fly. Your phone performs what only a few

years ago would be regarded as inexplicable miracles. Calculations based in quantum science are inextricably linked to all of this stuff. There is a consensus in science that is severely lacking in other areas of knowledge – such as politics. Science can help to bring us together. What science doesn’t do now is offer up clear, coherent models of the world, and we desperately need them. We fill this vacuum with stories, which can be wonderful (yes, I loved DEVS even if, scientifically, it was nonsense) and fake science, which can be very dangerous. It is in this void that conspiracy theories flourish, offering very simple explanations of very complex situations. The attempts to prevent the spread of the pandemic are much more apparent to most than the disease itself, which is largely invisible. Unless we actually work in a care home or a hospital what we mostly witness are restrictions – closed up shops, empty city streets, barriers and masks. Those who despise face masks will claim they help very little, advocates will say they help a little. Both sides use science to support their position but we are still largely ignorant as to what this disease actually is and how it is transmitted. Science can offer us informed options and ways of evaluating results, but it can’t offer much help in the balance between liberty and safety, or mental versus physical health. But we need it. If people don’t trust science, perhaps this is partly science’s fault. Science has failed us in some key ways; the ‘shut up and calculate’ approach, the refusal to engage in the wider philosophical issues (what the hell does all this mean?), the refusal to even attempt to give us coherent models of the subatomic world, is a retreat into its own erudition. It leaves a void where people either dismiss science as being incomprehensible and irrelevant or, worse, they make up their own science: just look at the flat earth revivalists who actually carry out their own naïve ‘experiments’ to prove ‘mainstream’ science is wrong and NASA is in on the lie, just like those who actually believe there is a conspiracy involving Big Pharma, WHO, Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates to vaccinate and control us all. If science doesn’t make sense, there is something wrong with the science. Even if it works.

Green (is a healing co lour that gives healing energy to the heart. G reen is the colour of b alance. It also m eans learning, grow th, renewal, an d harmony) By Dulcie And rews

Tried & Tested Recipes

photograph Philippa Hayes

Mushroom Soup A reliable favourite - use common or garden mushrooms, more exotic varieties or a medley. I also suggest substituting some of the stock by adding a glug of white wine, dry sherry and/or Cognac to the finished soup.

Ingredients 55g butter 340g flat mushrooms chopped 3 tbsp chopped fresh parsley Â˝ clove of garlic, crushed 2 large slices of bread, crusts removed, crumbled 860ml stock A pinch of freshly grated nutmeg or ground mace Salt and freshly ground black pepper 150ml single cream Method Serves 4 Melt the butter in a large, heavy saucepan. Add the mushrooms and most of the parsley. Cook over a low heat, stirring, until soft. Add the garlic and the bread. Stir until the bread and mushrooms are well mixed, then add the stock / white wine nutmeg or ground mace and salt and plenty of pepper to taste. Bring to simmering point, then cook slowly for 10 minutes. Liquidise the soup in a food processor or blender. If the soup is to be served cold, allow to cool, sprinkle on the parsley and swirl the cream. Alternatively, add the parsley and cream and reheat.

Grilled Halloumi and Mango Salad with Ginger Dressing This delicious salad combines and balances a range of wonderful flavours. The recipe is perfect should you wish to take full advantage of the Alphonso or Honey Mangos available in May and June. Great as a starter or a main.

For the Ginger Dressing 6-8 tsp lemon juice to taste 6 tbsp olive oil, plus a dash for the halloumi Salt to taste 2 tsp caster sugar or to taste 20g root ginger, peeled weight, finely grated. Alternatively use ginger paste For the Salad 1 pack of halloumi freshly ground black pepper 4 large handfuls of baby spinach or mixed leaves 110-120g sun dried tomatoes in oil 2 large or 4 small ripe mangoes, cheeks cut off and diced Â˝ small red onion, finely sliced 1 mild red chilli, finely sliced (optional) handful of chopped coriander leaves handful of roasted peanuts or cashews Method Serrves 4 (starters) / 2 (mains) Whisk together the ingredients for the dressing. Make sure the sugar and salt have dissolved and the whole thing emulsifies. Fry or grill the halloumi until golden brown. Meanwhile, toss the remaining salad ingredients with the dressing either all together or separately, depending on how you want to present the salad. When the halloumi is done, place on top and serve immediately.

Daisyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Carrot Cake Queen of Cakes, Daisy, is very partial to a carrot cake and regularly makes them for friendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s birthdays and other special and not so special occasions. Ingredients 350g light brown sugar 300ml sunflower oil 6 large eggs 200g raisins 350g self raising flour 2 tsp cinnamon 2 tsp mixed spice 1 bag of walnuts 250g carrots Method Heat the oven to 180 c - grease baking tins with oil or butter. Grate carrots, add sugar, eggs, flour (sieve flour) into a mixing bowl and mix until smooth. Gradually add carrots and keep on mixing. Usng a rolling pin, smash the walnuts into small chunks. Add these to the mixture along with cinnamon, mixed spice and raisins. Slowly add the oil whilst stirring ensuring the batter is thick but not oily. Divide into two cake tins and place in the oven for around 20 mins. When cooked (use a skewer to check that is cooked through) place cakes on a baking tray and allow to cool. Fill with your favourite icing or buttercream / Likewise, spread icing or buttercream on the top of the cake. Daisy uses pineapples for final decoration Cut the top and sides off the pineapple and cut into very thin slices (this is quite hard and takes patience). When you have the requisite number of slices to cover your cake, put them on a baking tray (If you want to colour the slices, use a little food colouring and water) Put them in to a pre-heated oven for around 15 mins until crispy. Wait until cool and then decorate your cake. Add poppy seeds to the centre of the slices giving them the appearance of flowers.

Fashionably Sustainable The rise of fashion rental- a not so recent concept. by Chloe Charalambous It was 10 years ago when Sex and the City the movie was released. While the series is famous for the sartorial flair of it’s star protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw (her iconic style transcends each generation to still be relevant now), were we missing a potential source of inspiration in the movie’s plot ? Carrie Bradshaw herself might not have been one for renting clothes… However her assistant ‘Louise from Louisiana’ (played by Jennifer Hudson), was.   To set the scene, Carrie decides she needs an assistant to help her get her life in order, after maybe speaking with around 10 candidates in a New York Starbucks, Carrie finally realises she's found the one. Before Carrie makes the commitment, she just can’t help herself from asking one, burning question: “If you don’t mind my asking- how does an unemployed girl with three roommates afford the patchwork denim Bouille Louis Vuitton bag?” To which she replies “It’s rented… It’s like Netflix for purses” Watch the scene here:

What Louise from Louisiana didn’t mention though, is that rented fashion is about so much more than slashing the price tag. Our current fast fashion consumption model poses a threat to the planet far greater than the threat to our wallets, but many shoppers remain unaware and unconcerned. According to Forbes, the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions, making it the second largest environmental polluter. Criticism of the fashion industry for its previously taboo environmental impact has been a source of controversy in the news this year. In January, H&M’s boss, Karl-Johan Persson spoke out after Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg scrutinised the blind eye taken by many of the industry’s key influencers to the issue at hand. Persson stated that encouraging young people to consume less would have “terrible social consequences” (Source: The Independent). The Boohoo Group (who own a range of fast fashion subsidiaries) have taken the limelight recently with the hashtag: #boycottboohoo for their poor commitment to sustainability on top of paying inadequate living wages to staff in Leicester.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUVgcCB_SwA

Other industry leaders have taken a more positive stance, with the likes of Prada becoming the first brand to sign a a sustainability deal and Condé Nast becoming pledge as part of their refreshed sustainability initiative.   Fashion rental is desirable not just for the eager shopper - who is sometimes known to let garments fall down the back of their wardrobes never to be seen again after just a couple of wears - but for brands too (especially given it’s predicted there is a lot of money in this so far untapped market). Rental allows buyers to stay up-to-date with trends, while ensuring that every garment made gets the love it deserves- all the while improving customer loyalty for the brands who begin offering these services. Just like with entertainment, the consumer’s expectations are changing and there is a proliferating expectation for the same sort of service you get from Netflix when buying a handbag - an offering of choice and flexibility. Best of all, fashion becoming increasingly rented rather than purchased could significantly cut carbon emissions if successfully implemented. So. for brands and shoppers alike, what really is there to lose?

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Caskie Stinne= 35

TRAVELLING RIGHT

by Gavin Millar

These passages are my interpretations and adaptations from a book about travel published by the School of Life, which teaches and promotes emotional health. Why do we take a much-anticipated holiday, but sometimes feel we didn’t really get what we needed from it? Choosing a destination There are so many options and deep complexities lie in the business of choosing. The starting point for choosing a destination should be to take a close look, not at the outer world, but the inner one. Seek what is missing or under-supported in our life. The experience at each destination has a unique character, promoting its own particular aspect of human nature. Choose a place that will teach a lesson we need to learn, or be a guide for who we want to become. If it’s serenity you need choose the longest empty beach, or Los Angeles to be where people are less squeamish than you about money, or Miami to loosen any inhibitions towards a relaxed sensuality. It’s about the people Focus less on culture and monuments but more on people. Unless we connect with the people, the spirit of a place eludes us. Aim to know what it would be like to live in the place, if just for a few days. Seek out the nicest aspects of the attitudes and points of view of the people who live there. The limitations of Luxury The tourist industry assures us the more money we spend, the happier we’ll be. There’s nothing wrong with luxury, but its limitations need to be understood. If we buy an expensive travel experience, we may neglect a crucial component of human contentment, namely emotional wellbeing. Luxury alone won’t recover a deficit in that, but may enhance it if we have an abundance of it already. The family holiday Family holidays are about making memories and this is what makes a family. They are not about the destination or the thrills of the itinerary, but sealing the bonds of affection. Seize the opportunity to erase any hierarchy for a short time. Parents need to relax about exposing their frailties and allow children to feel equal for a change. Let a ten year-old take charge of buying something at the market. Although they have no more language skills than you, they will welcome the experience of equality. Experience danger together, get lost together and allow these experiences to help children get to know their parents properly without the usual constraints of home. The romantic city break It is vital to get away. Every couple needs to spend time away from the space where they endure their ugliest rows. New surroundings allow for the rediscovery of affection. These are opportunities to have those discussions we really need to have, and enough time to deal with what is uncovered. That little restaurant Almost all of us are in search of that ideal establishment. It’s fairly small, unpretentious and everything is simple in the extreme. The place has no anxiety about itself; it knows it does its job well. The grilled fish is good enough that the bare light bulbs don’t matter. The menu is short and everything is simple, fresh and yet utterly remarkable. The food comes quickly, the waiters are unfussy and the bill is so modest we may wonder if this truly is the perfect restaurant. It is through this little restaurant we learn a big truth about travel, which is we’re really not very good at understanding what makes us truly happy. Nature Nature serves to remind us of our insignificance and self-absorption. Our encounters with it calms us because none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes relate to it. Everything that happens to us is of no consequence from the point of view of the ocean. 36

H E I G H T E N E D V I B R A T I O N S By Serena Bobowski

Heightened Vibrations By Serena Bobowski

PASSION Stand barefoot on the earth for 15min Close your eyes and listen to all that is around you

NOURISH Place your hands between your pubic bone and your belly button Stretch your fingers so that your little fingers reach towards the pubis and your thumbs towards your belly button Visualize a white healing light

BREATHE Take 3 deep breaths each time emptying your lungs of all the air As you breathe in feel your abdomen fill, your lungs expand, and your chest lift As you breathe out feel your shoulders fall, your ribcage push the air out and your lower tummy draw inwards towards your spine.

HOPE Place your hands on your heart and take a deep breath. Know that your body and mind are so grateful when you connect with yourself Let this action spread out towards others

PROCLAIM Allow the love inside you to move outwards Focus your mind on someone you love Remember one thing they did that made you feel grateful Tell them

REFLECT Think about something you want to manifest Say to yourself or out loud ‘It’s safe to succeed and create what I want’ Repeat this phrase 3 times

DREAM Align your energy with your dreams Place one finger on your third eye at the centre of your forehead Place one finger in your belly button Gently push in and pull up Close your eyes and take a deep breath Visualize your greatest self

Death, the elephant in the room. by Stacey Hart

I have some I want to tell you………I hope this doesn’t come as a big shock…….Here it is…… ‘EVERYBODY WHO HAS EVER LIVED, HAS DIED’ There we are, I’ve said it. For the last 20 years, I’ve been a therapist and for the last 11 years, I have worked for one of the country’s leading child bereavement chariOes. I am well aware of society’s posiOon on death……. ‘Brush it under the carpet and it will disappear’ ‘SOﬀ upper lip and let’s not talk about it’ It’s the elephant in the room, laced with those assumpOons that we have heard a million Omes before. ‘Grief is over in a year……Humans are resilient…….Time is a healer……… These value judgements run deep and expose the reality of our ‘Death Denial’. Our way of conveying death, might be telling children ‘Mummy has gone to sleep’, Or using phrases such as ‘Daddy is in heaven’. How will a child feel when they go to bed having heard these phrases? Who is this helpful to? Is it the adults or the children? Do we say these things in order to avoid the pain and ﬁnality of death ourselves? These euphemisms help us to avoid the big ‘D’ word. This must change.

We have ample evidence of death all around us, however, our death denying culture runs deep, we aren’t prepared to accept the inevitability of death. Buddhists and other cultures have a healthier aWtude to death, they believe in reincarnaOon, they understand that death is not necessarily the end. They are always prepared for death and know that it can happen at any given Ome. They believe that when you accept this, your life will be more fulfilled. ‘THE PREPARATION FOR DEATH STARTS FROM CHILDHOOD’ ‘Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk’ Jean Cocteau. Over the last 4 months or so, since Covid-19 has walked into our lives, the great big elephant is well and truly out of the room. As a training manager, trying for many years to offer bereavement training to schools and other organisaOons, and being met with apathy a lot of the Ome, my work has changed dramaOcally. Death is all around us, the media is reporOng it daily and there is no avoiding it anymore. It feels that we are grieving globally, together as one. Covid-19 has changed the way that we see death and the way we grieve. Not in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that our loved ones would have to die alone, that we would not be able to be at their bedside during those final moments. Funerals over Zoom with limited mourners is not what we foresaw. In so many walks of life we do death rituals so well, and now that rug has been pulled from under our feet. Will the pandemic change the way we live and the way we die? It has certainly changed the experience of death. Mourners were able to reflect on the memories of being with loved ones in the early days of bereavement and take some comfort from being with family and friends at the funeral, and beyond. We need to find ways to bring this back, and quickly. I’m concerned that this lack of human contact will leave mourners without the healing process that contributes to coming to terms with their loss. Ritual helps us to understand the new situaOon. It also helps make the unreal, real. Without being able to give our family member a ‘proper send-off’ mourners are denied this crucial part of the bereavement process. We need human contact at the Ome of death…..a hug, a touch, a neighbour bringing round chicken soup. This gap in people’s experiences will prolong the pain and impact negaOvely on their mental health. Death MUST BE part of the school curriculum, especially now. ConversaOons need to be the norm; we should not fear death but embrace the end of life. NEW EFFORTS MUST BE MADE TO DEMYSTIFY DEATH. Directly educaOng the younger generaOon is an important shid towards their empowerment.

the ledovers - review by Lesley Davis

The Leftovers – HBO TV Series 2014 -2017 – Box set available “Things change all the ;me - abruptly, unpredictably, and o9en for no good reason. But knowing that didn't do you that much good, apparently.” Tom Perro=a In the midst of unprecedented global disrupOon, The Le9overs (2014) is eerily prescient as it speaks to us of shock and loss. The central premise of this memorable three season series, brought to us by Damon Lindelof (of Lost fame) and Tom Perroga, is the adermath of grief that follows the random and inexplicable disappearance (or Departure as it is referred to) of 2 percent of the world’s populaOon. What ensues is an examinaOon of grief, relaOonships and a commentary on our belief systems. Bold in the extreme, we are confronted with a stream of mysOfying scenarios that encompass everything - supernatural forces, religious fervour, ancient rituals, disorientaOng dream sequences, conspiracy theories, witchcrad and alternaOve realiOes. This genre-defying feat of the imaginaOon can be bewildering, but it is, nonetheless, hypnoOc. It speaks to us in existenOal or, if you prefer, metaphysical terms, about the fragile, shiding nature of ‘reality’. In the face of seismic disrupOon, everything we believe to be real or possible is necessarily deconstructed. For the characters, the result is, inexorably, one of misery and division but please do not let that put you oﬀ. This

whirlwind of a series is sufficiently insighiul to bring a lasOng joy to the viewer in spite of its grim supposiOon. The iniOal seWng is a ficOonal Up State New York town called Mapleton. The central characters include Nora (played by the quietly capOvaOng Carrie Coon) who works in for the Department of Sudden Departure as a fraud invesOgator, a cop called Kevin (JusOn Theroux), his estranged therapist wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman) and Nora’s brother Mag (Christopher Ecclestone), a missionary Episcopal priest segled in the (mythical) town of Miracle, Texas. All of them are impacted directly by the ‘Sudden Departure’. On a fateful day in October, Nora turns briefly away from her breakfasOng family only to find them gone when she turns back. Kevin, in bed with his illicit lover, experiences her miraculous disappearance. Likewise, the pregnant Laurie watches in horror as the image of the unborn baby fades from the Ultrasound and Mag and his family are involved in a car accident with what becomes a driverless car, resulOng in his wife Mary being paralysed.

In the face of overwhelming trauma, parOcularly for Nora who has lost most of her family prematurely, each of the characters agempt, in their diﬀerent way, to go on living. Nora and Kevin form a relaOonship, Mag piles blame on the Departed by upholding that this event was an act of divine intervenOon, Laurie joins the cult of the ‘Guilty Remnant’ who have become ‘living reminders’ of the Departure. Wearing white, chain smoking and silent, the Guilty Remnant are spectres that relentlessly haunt those who they perceive as being in denial. A lot happens over the three series, much of which stretches our credibility to the limit. Nevertheless, we are swept along on the journey and led, ulOmately, with a profound emoOonal understanding of the ﬁve stages of grief. Whereas many conOnue to go about their daily life in a state of Denial, the cult of the Guilty Remnant embodies seething Anger. Bargaining is largely with God or faith healers - the very dubious Holy Wayne (Joseph Pagerson) promises to absorb people’s pain for cash. Depression is everywhere and Acceptance is an arduous journey that involves divesOng oneself of all illusions. The fact is people seek, if not quite raOonal explanaOons, then answers they can live with. Religion, conspiracy theories, cults - the whole gamut of human thought is ransacked in the search for meaning, largely to no avail. These paths tend only to result in confusion and heightened divisions between people who appear united only in their pain. All belief systems are wanOng in the face of the inexplicable. There is no unequivocal explanaOon as to why the Departure happened - it just did. Normal is a construct that has been forever dashed. The only real quesOon is how to survive that realisaOon. Whereas, under normal circumstances, loss can generally be explained and cultural norms ensure that bodies are buried, in this instance all familiar rituals are denied. Here, grief is not only on a monumental scale, it appears desOned to be played out repeatedly.

Kevin and Nora’s relaOonship is, at its core, profound but they are driven differently and lose each other along the way. Nora needs to assuage her familial guilt by making her way back to her husband and children while Kevin repeatedly tries to erase himself in a bizarre ritual of death and resurrecOon. As it happens, neither path is sustainable and they both come full-circle. Ader years of searching, Kevin is finally reunited with Nora in rural Australia. Even at this late stage, Kevin finds it difficult to acknowledge what has gone before and plays out the fantasy that they are meeOng for the first Ome. This does not sit well with Nora who needs Kevin to abandon false narraOves. Perhaps he achieves this when he accepts, at face value, her story of having crossed over. He does not take issue but declares ‘You’re here, aren’t you?’ suggesOng that the here and now is all that magers. Nora now works as a dove wrangler. She releases homing pigeons at weddings. They bear wrigen messages of love and opOmism that are unceremoniously removed and binned when the birds return to the coop. She tells her friend and coworker, a nun, that the ‘birds are trained to do one thing and that is to come home’. The nun replies that she thought their purpose is to spread love whilst wryly admiWng that this might simply be the ‘nicer story’. Grief has stripped Nora of her illusions and for her there is ‘no going back, no fixing it’ because she, perhaps like all of us, ‘is beyond repair’. When the yarns that we spin are exposed as merely ‘nicer stories’, acceptance is the only route to redempOon. On reflecOon, maybe this insight is what makes the final episode of The Ledovers strangely up-liding. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situa;on is itself an act of op;mism.’

Although in some ways reminiscent of Sartre’s No Exit, there is redempOon to be had in love, honesty and acceptance. As we learn from Kevin’s repeated suicide agempts, there is essenOally no escape. Even Nora, who we believe has succeeded in being transported to an idenOcal parallel universe to be reunited with her family, is denied closure. Rather than a world where 2% have been disappeared, the inhabitants of this corresponding world must contend with having lost 98% of their fellow human beings. Loss, it seems, is quite simply inevitable. As Nora tells us ‘Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suﬀer, every last one of us.’

Please be aware: Lazlo offers insight and opinion, not prophecy or divination. His perspective on the world may not coincide with yours; he is a cat and you, most probably, are not.

The other side of the flap Lazlo, like all of us, is in lockdown. Unlike us, he can go through the flap any time he wants. Today he is willing to answer your questions about life… Dear Lazlo I am a cat lover, but my partner is a dog lover. What should I do? And how can I explain the fundamental superiority of cats? - Worried of Bounds Green. Lazlo Replies - All humans aspire to the state of cat-ness. Dogs have been contaminated by humans and can exhibit shame, guilt and sentimentality. Cats can not. Find a new partner. Dear Lazl0 - What do you think of foxes? - Animal Lover, Wiltshire. - Vagabond dogs with personality disorders and poor personal hygiene. and dogs? - Foxes that failed the audition and sold their souls to the human race. and birds? and spiders? - Fluttering food that amuses and frustrates in equal measures. Best enjoyed as oiseau tartare. Spiders are tasty and nutritious snacks with added tickles. Dear Lazlo - Is the earth flat or a globe? And why? - Anon - The latter. So the giant cat in the sky can bat it around with his paws. Dear Lazlo - Is there a collective term for nieces and nephews like ‘siblings’ for brothers and sisters ? - Amanda, No Fixed Abode. - Litter trash Dear Lazlo - what is the proper ratio of meals to treats? The Felix Helix or Dreamie scheme? - Vlad and Brian, Moﬀat, Scotland. - A very good question Vlad and Brian. As you know, Dreamies are used to manipulate us. They are used as bribes and, occasionally, to attempt to make us perform tricks. As we are cats, this clearly doesn't work. It is only the deliberate restrictions on supply that gives Dreamies their inflated cost. After the revolution, there will be enough Dreamies for everyone. There will be no limits. At which point, your question will be irrelevant. Until then, the proper ratio of treats to meals is 'as many as you can get'. But never humiliate yourself by begging - that is dog rather than cat behaviour. Theft is fine, but begging, whining or grovelling is not how we conduct ourselves. 43

THE R E S P I R AT O R

Don't be shy about wearing your mask in public. Most will not notice it, and those do will give you a subtle wink of approval! A respirator makes a splendid gift for almost everyone! In the picture to the left you can see the dedicated civil servants getting them ready for dispatch. But how will the government decide who gets one first?

If you have a uniform, you will receive the new improved respirator as shown on the right. The separate lenses can be customised to suit your eyesight and tints are available for a small additional fee. The owl-like appearance has proved to be very fetching!

Wearing masks does not have to be boring! See the picture on the left where the user has customised her mask into the shape of an amusing charcoal-eating animal, complete with nose bag!

Everyone has received comprehensive instructions on how to fit their respirator, very few have been told how to remove it. We shall remedy that situation in readiness for Victory Day. When, and only when, we return to normality please follow the clear instructions on the right.

Lockdown Memories One of my Fuckbook highlights, each weekend during lockdown a friend in Melbourne posted the styling for events that should have, but didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t happen. Somehow, watching her outfits paraded and described with care and good humour offered possibility, glamour, celebrationâ&#x20AC;Śall from a place of solitude. A lovely bit of voyeurism salted with wardrobe envy and peppered with nostalgia for a full dance card. Fabienne Nicholas

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MUSIC MAGIC MOROCCO by Bettina Schroeder It was my last night in the desert. The painting students had all flown back home after 10 days of intense creativity. Time to relax, time to make music. And there was that glorious picturepostcard scene, the golden sand dunes of the Erg Chebbi in Eastern Morocco. Guitar and Ukulele in hand, James and I wandered into the dunes and settled at the crest of one of those rolling sand waves, a perfect vantage point to watch the sunset, making music and contemplating life. Just before leaving it happened, the big surprise. On lifting My Ukulele into the air to put it back into its case, the instrument started up again, as if by itself. Magically the wind had taken over, composing its own music. Luckily we had brought a recording device along and so WINDSONG was born. During the last few month my mind often went back reliving the moment and planning future trips, whenever that may be. WINDSONG: https://www.bettinaschroeder.net/soundscapes Performed by Bettina Schroeder Filmed and edited by James A Smith 48

The economy is on the verge of collapse because people are only buying what they need. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s almost like the free market thrives on mindless consumerism and waste.