Broad Sheep June 2020

BROAD sheep

june 2020

A SPECIAL ONLINE EDITION

thought for the day ‘Mind Body Spirit’

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CAN’T remember if the editor of this fine organ has warned me off writing about anything that might come under the general Dewey classification 200 [religion] or ‘Mind Body Spirit’, as they call it in Waterstones. It’s the kind of thing hard-nosed, pinot noir glugging magazine supremas might do, but then, our editor has a soft nose and can take or leave the pinot noir. Whether or not I have been instructed not to, I’m going to write on the dangerously amorphous topic of the human soul this month because if ever there was a moment in modern human history when spiritual reflection is relevant, that moment is now – however long it lasts.

No commentator is in any doubt that what is going on is utterly unprecedented, not least in their complete inability to make any kind of meaningful predictions. Dominic Cummings’ super-forecasters, in whatever Whitehall dungeon he has harboured them, must be vacillating uncontrollably like so much seaweed in a turbulent sea.

What I will predict is that a lot more people than usual are contemplating the non-corporeal aspects of their existence as they have never done before.

Besides, I’ve often noticed, with some surprise and a little optimism, that the ‘Mind Body Spirit’ shelves in the bookshops are usually bustling with thoughtful, earnest-looking individuals of all genders looking for answers. Books on such topics feature consistently in the non-fiction bestseller charts; pieces on mindfulness, meditation, wellbeing and yoga fill fat columns of the woolly sections of the Sunday broadsheets.

While some, perhaps Nigel Farage or Katie Hopkins, Marc Francois or Tommy Robinson may not be expending much intellectual energy on their spiritual destiny, it’s abundantly clear from some of the audience participation radio shows that there are a lot of people out there who are thinking very hard about their non-corporeal existence – whether it’s on Anita Anand’s Any Answers, or Dotun Adebayo’s Up All Night phone-in. Adebayo, one of the nation’s most broadly erudite broadcasters who can talk about anything from Soccer to Soul to Socrates, has used his breadth of understanding to evoke some unexpectedly uplifting insights from his callers.

People are thinking about death, and a refreshingly large number seem ready to accept the inescapable truth that they will die – sooner or later – and that it’s only sensible to have your own exit strategy. However, for the majority, now the cultur-

Gaia

al norm, it is the pretence that it will never happen – indeed, should never happen in this era when, ironically, older people, through their confinement in care homes, are in effect more socially irrelevant to their families than ever before, that makes the contemplation of death for many such a potent source of fear. This pandemic, like hundreds that must have occurred throughout the history of mankind, should have the effect of a natural cull, seeking out, generally, the oldest and the weakest – in practical terms, the least contributive. It is a process which in all other species of animal would be seen to be beneficial to the species as a whole, but for homo sapiens in the 21st century the needs of the individual trump the greater claim of the common good. Prevailing culture posits that any human life is worth whatever it costs, even simply to defer death for a few more years.

Nevertheless, the evidence of the radio phone-ins indicates that there is a growing number of people prepared to question this ethic.

Last year, visiting a friend regularly over the three months before she died, I tried to calm her fears by suggesting to her that there was nothing to be afraid of, that with the right palliatives, death wasn’t going to hurt.

Personally, I’m well within the sector of society ripe for culling. My children don’t depend on me – far from it – my wife doesn’t depend on me. I ask myself if I’m ready to go.

I’d rather not be culled just yet, and the people

close to me will miss me, (I hope), but so they will if I die in ten years, even twenty years’ time. Avoiding their grief now is simply deferring it. On the other hand, I’m enjoying life now as much as I ever have, because, luckily and, for the moment, I’m not ill and have no particular health problems. But if I did become ill, I’m uncertain how much the NHS should spend on deferring my death for an unknown period of time.

I’m certain though, that it wouldn’t make sense to spend say, £50k on someone my age when it would be far more practical to spend it saving an otherwise still viable forty-five year old, or twenty five year old. If the NHS had limitless resources, which a lot of the public seem to believe they should have, perhaps I might justify them spending it on me.

But of course, the NHS doesn’t have limitless resources – nothing like, and never will have. And if they did, it still wouldn’t be enough. Consider the life and death of Howard Hughes the absurdly egotistical billionaire who spend millions of dollars trying to protect himself from infection and, presumably, death by isolating himself and instructing his staff to practise immensely elaborate processes to keep him away from any external infection. He died aged 71 of heart failure, and in terrible physical condition. No amount of money would have allowed him to avoid the inevitability of death. He died worth $6.5 billon at current values, providing ample proof that however much you spend on medical treatment, death will get you in the end, and sometimes sooner than you think.

Beyond the more obvious conundrums surrounding death, it seems likely that this pandemic and the strange social conditions it has caused will give rise to several critical new perspectives. At a simple, practical level, we could reconsider the amount of Howard Hughes

travelling we do. The residents of Richmond, and anywhere under Heathrow flight paths are likely to realise after a few weeks of peace, just what hell they were suffering before.

We might recognise the value of physical exercise, the interdependence of society, as well the inadequacy of our approach to death.

We might also reassess our relationship with Gaia.

Where I am now, in the midst of the South Shropshire hills, with no neighbours and miles of deserted open forest accessible from my front door, I couldn’t be luckier, and I know it. I’ve been walking every day that I’ve been here for many years and I’ve been learning, especially now in the deep peace that pervades this place in a warm spring, to nurture my relationship with what is beneath my feet.

It is an essential aspect of Homo Sapiens that every member of our species, along with the whole panoply of animal species, every entity that possesses life, every type of plant, amoeba and microbe, was originally spawned by Mother Earth.

She gave birth to the very first in the subsequent process of evolution that produced us. She is our common ancestor, our great, great nth grandmother and we should treat her with the enormous respect that she deserves.

We can learn to love all our trillion, trillions of cousins, from the rats in the barn, the owls who predate them, the oak in which the owls lives, the primroses on the banks, the bluebells, the catkins, the lichen on the trees, the myriad insects, the earthworms, the soil and its microbes that support directly and indirectly every other living thing.

Now could be the moment to recalibrate our priorities and to stop concurring with a society that is trashing so much of the living world around it, and diminishing the very existence of the world herself by consistently putting the needs of homo sapiens above those of every other living thing that Gaia has procreated.

Petrusonus

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mark’s mutterings Stuck in a Hole Mark Williams surveys the damage to and by our woefully maintained roads

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EEP, as we are at the time of writing, into the wretched quarantine our government has imposed on us in their faultless handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s perhaps not the time to be carping about the state of our local highways and byways. But yes I’m going to because whilst as a motorist and motorcyclist I’ve long railed at the plethora of potholes and seethed at the surface irregularities I’ve had to endure, taking up cycling to try and keep fit and active during this lockdown has ipso facto compounded just what a danger to life and limb they can so often be.

I and my wife have had serious and potentially dangerous suspension damage to our cars, as have numerous friends living in the area and any garages hereabouts will tell you that repairs to tyres, wheels, springs and dampers have multiplied exponentially in recent years. Yes, we have of course undergone a particularly wet winter during which floods and relentless surface water have conspired to degrade our roads, particularly the lesser rural lanes. Which of course is no excuse for the lack of repairs but when one approaches, say, the relevant highways authority, say Herefordshire County Counci, to complain and seek compensation for damage to one’s vehicle, they – conveniently for them – advised us that road maintenance had been outsourced to the construction mega-company, Balfour Beatty.

Take the friend who lives up a steep lane outside Presteigne which over the past couple of years has suffered really serious degradation due to a total lack of concern, also on the part of Balfour Beatty.

Said lane is regularly used by the huge tractors and trailers – which remember are exempt from road tax and are now so wide and so heavy that they steadily crumble the edges of the tarmac which in turn causes water to enter the sub-strata below it and creates cracks and then deep crevices right across the surface. And that’s in addition to the potholes which get wider and deeper with almost each new heavy rainfall and passing HGV or tractor.

It so happens that this friend is a semi-retired safety officer for the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, motorsport’s governing body, and an ex-Lotus chassis designer, so knows what he’s talking about when it comes to road surfaces, and he is also not a man to suffer fools or council apologists gladly. So after numerous emails, phone calls and letters – remember letters? – He actually managed to get someone from Balfour Beatty to come and spend a whole half hour (!) inspecting the lane they were responsible for, but during that time, apart from farm vehicles, nothing passed along it and so the B-B man reported back to the council that the lane was no longer used by private vehicles! And that despite the fact that my friend’s house is one of several dwellings along its deeply damaged section. And also that it’s designated as part of the National Cycleway!

Taking this up with the council, I was directed to its Highway Maintenance Plan, later discovered to be similar to those of other local councils, a dense, 70 page document full of reassuring intentions, e.g. to set out a ‘reasonable system of inspection and repair that will be deployed by the Council to ensure that it meets its duty to maintain all publically maintainable highways for which the Council is the highway authority’. However those undertakings, nay statutory obligations, plainly aren’t being borne out in practice and when approached by my friends, and more recently yrs. trly., the three councils that border our little town all refused to comment other than to re-direct me to the commercial companies they’ve apparently charged with responsibility for maintenance and repair, who in turn and at the time of writing have refused to comment.

So what to do? Well most councils have a reporting procedure for adverse road conditions, obviously including potholes, which are accessed via their websites and there’s also the national FixMyStreet service who offer a simple reporting procedure which is communicated with the relevant council. And in association with FixMyStreet

Potholed-snapped car spring

(www.fixmystreet.com), the RAC (www.rac.co.uk) also provides such a service and offers help claiming against councils for vehicle damage – current running at over £15million nationwide.

If, however, you still don’t get any joy, which in both my friends’ cases appears to be so, then the next step is to contact the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (www.lgo.com) who will handle your complaint… albeit very, very s-l-o-w-l-y.

Sometimes a contractor will spray white paint around a particularly bad pothole that’s been reported to them by one means or another, but often no further action is taken and the damages worsens, or the hole will be filled in but usually in a cheap, makeshift fashion that doesn’t stand the test of time, tractor tyres and a bad winter. But equally infuriating is the fact that the repairer will ignore many other, equally damaging or dangerous holes in the immediate vicinity simply because they don’t have a ring of white paint around them.

However after years of cutting financial support to councils, whilst the national government announced huge infrastructure investment in the last budget, this was for major motorway, by-pass and vanity white elephant projects such as HS2.

Moreover in the time of Corona and the major economic recession that will follow, I fear nothing will filter down to rural road repairs. And if I’m correct, then the best we can and should do is lobby our local politicians and MPs to get a grip on the situation before more people are killed, vehicles damaged and cyclists seriously injured.

Mark Williams NEW Corona Coping Blog link: https://markswill.wordpress.com

grass roots COVID-19 Virus experts dumbfounded by Whitehall mistakes!

B Y early June, Britain will have a contact-tracing system for coronavirus that is world-beating, according to Boris Johnson. We clearly need it, for, through a slow start, followed by indecision and incompetence, the UK has managed to sink close to the bottom of the league in the fight against COVID-19.

Professor Devi Sridhar speaking at Hay Festival, 2018

America has suffered about ninety thousand COVID-19 deaths. Or 283 people per million of population. But the USA’s population is about five times that of Britain. And so deaths in the UK - at about 525 per million people - are way above those of America per head.

By 20th May, the direct UK death toll stood at more than 36,000. And In terms of excess deaths during the COVID-19 outbreak, Britain had suffered 55,000 by May 8th. That figure is 67% above the number normally expected. The worst in Europe, says The Times.

How on earth did a country whose health service is envied around the world, including by many people in the USA, manage to plummet to such a dismal position in the world rankings?

What has gone wrong? I wanted to call in independent experts. But due to the lockdown, I was unable to convene my own meeting! So, instead, I interrogated the published statements of a handful of top academics.

I went first to Professor Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University, who I saw online at a Chatham House briefing on May 20th. I needed to hear Ms Sridhar for only a few minutes before concluding that she is the outstanding public health figure to emerge during this crisis.

This is how she sums up Britain’s performance since the pandemic became apparent at the end of January.

“In the UK,” says Devi Sridhar, “I think we’ve been quite complacent. And we’ve been quite slow to react. And so I wonder whether we could have taken measures much earlier to stop the spread, through actually containing… to test people, to be able to test contacts, and… to try to break chains of transmission, instead of just assuming everyone will get it.”

People who attended the Hay Festival in 2018 got a lucky preview of Devi Sridhar’s no-nonsense analysis of global health threats. They also witnessed an uncannily accurate prediction she gave then of a global pandemic emanating from China. She said that while GPs in Britain might be focused on over-use of antibiotics, “The largest threat to the UK population is someone in China who’s been infected from an animal. It’s transferred to the farmer, which is transferred to the community and gets on a plane to the UK. It’s about interconnections across the world.”

Another expert who is critical of the Johnson government’s response to COVID-19 is Anthony Costello, Professor of Global Health at University College London.

In March he predicted the current wave of COVID-19 infection could cause 40,000 deaths in Britain, a figure

which we are uncomfortably close to suffering by the end of May. The big problem, said Costello, was that under the “herd immunity” scenario, outlined by a prominent government science advisor, Britain might be subjected to five or six such waves of COVID-19, conceivably bringing over 200,000 deaths, on some calculations, by the time an effective vaccine becomes available.

I was utterly perplexed when that government advisor spoke of herd immunity. That is the kind of protection that is usually cited in relation to mass vaccination, as with MMR, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, once it has been given to around 90% of the population. But if there is no vaccine, as is the case with COVID-19 now, the only way herd immunity can be achieved is if a huge slice of the population - 60% or more - actually go down with the coronavirus infection. And, given the limited treatments we have now, we could expect a death toll potentially in the hundreds of thousands.

A top infectious disease expert at Harvard, Dr William Hanage, told The Guardian that, when he heard about the “herd immunity” plan in Britain, he assumed it was a joke satire, perhaps, in the vein of Beyond The Fringe or Monty Python. Even though Hanage was writing in mid-March, before the dramatic U-turn away from herd immunity, his thoughts are worth repeating. He compared the situation in Britain at that time with a house fire on which the owners were turning their backs. “Even though they knew it was coming, the UK government has inexplicably chosen to encourage the flames, in the misguided notion that somehow they will be able to control them.”

To end our sample of expert opinion, I turn to David McCoy, Professor of Global Public Health at Queen Mary College. He reckons that after swine flu in 2009 and Ebola outbreaks in Africa over the last ten years, Britain should have been well prepared. But, he says, our health system was weakened by austerity, marketisation, and constant restructuring. He writes, “COVID-19 is not a black swan event. It was waiting to happen. The failure to prepare the NHS for COVID-19 signals how it has not been led, financed, or organised as a public service…to fulfil its national health protection function adequately.”

Julian O’Halloran

films Carry on Streaming

Mark Williams considers some alternatives now that cinemas are locked-down

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ERHAPS it’s perverse offering film reviews during a national – or thanks to Dominic Cummings and his accomplice, bumbling Boris – notional lockdown, but many of us movie junkies have, with varying degrees of ironic reluctance, taken to the streaming services that were hastening the death of the public viewing experience. And indeed some of the fare being offered by Netflix, Amazon, Curzon Home etc., are well worth the price of admission (sic) and the sometimes annoying hoops one must jump through to see them online. That said, the bigger t.v. screen you have, and a good plug-in soundbar, will get you a little closer to big screen experience even if it’s still nowhere near the Real Thing. So here are three of the current crop.

THE COUNTY (Curzon Home Cinema) As his 2017 Cannes prize-winning RAMS, amply demonstrated, writer/director Grímur Hákonarson is clearly fascinated by the harsh realities of farming in his native Iceland, but whereas that tale of feuding brothers reunited by their sheep was suffused with a certain grim humour, THE COUNTY certainly isn’t. Like last year’s flat-out wonderful WOMAN AT WAR from another rising Icelandic auteur Benedikt Erlingsson – who also gave us 2013’s bleakly rural OF HORSES AND MEN, can you see as pattern developing here? – this concerns a determined and resourceful middle-aged lady taking a lone stance against an ultimately malevolent authority. In this case she is Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egisldóíttir) who assumes the running of the family dairy farm after her husband commits suicide and decides she must defy the local agricultural co-op which controls almost everything in the titular county from milk prices to supermarket shopping, putting her and her ilk in subservient hock to them. It’s a film of relatively few words and considerable symbolism, but none the worse for that and whilst Egisldóíttir is not as accomplished an actress as WOMAN AT WAR and OF HORSES AND MEN’s Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, what she lacks in charisma she makes up for in canny stoicism, and if you love cows, you can’t fail to be moved, as her Inga is.

NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (Amazon Prime, Sky Store, Apple TV) Films about abortion have never been an easy watch, e.g.

VERA DRAKE, but writer/director Eliza Hittman’s 2019 Sundance-winner nails it both dramatically and morally thanks to extraordinary performances from first-timers Sydney Flanigan and Talia Ryder. Emotionally marooned in impoverished rural Pennsylvania, Flanigan plays newly-pregnant and somewhat conflicted Autumn whose cousin, Skylar (Ryder), offers to help her procure an out-of-state termination. Stealing cash from under the nose of their pervy supermarket boss, they make their way to a New York clinic where it becomes horribly clear that the abortion will be more complicated than initially assumed. Hittman cleverly draws understated performances from the two young women which avoid explicit discussion

I See You of the issues at stake whilst nonetheless conveying their feelings with great sensitivity, and indeed poignancy. Both are enhanced by the songs sung incidentally by the women – Flanigan is an established singer-writer – and the gritty realism of Helene Louvart’s (HAPPY AS LAZZARO) 16mm camerawork.

I SEE YOU (Now TV, Amazon Prime, BT TV) Belying its shoe-string budget, this agreeably noir-ish thriller by up-coming British director Adam Randall stars two much underrated thesps, Jon Tenney (THE SEAGULL) and Helen Hunt (AS GOOD AS IT GETS), the former a grizzled detective, Greg, pursuing what may be a copycat murder in small Midwestern township, the latter his guilt-wracked wife, Jackie, whose recent affair fosters a poisonous family home-life. As Greg delves deeper into a series of older, unresolved homicides, Jackie wrestles with her conscience and the apparent haunting of their swish lakeside home, not eased by a son (Judah Lewis) who firmly sides with his cuckolded father. The atmosphere and indeed the camerawork by Philipp Blaubach and soundtrack are creepily Lynchian, and there are some mighty, and mighty effective plot twists and flashbacks along the way but what elevates I SEE YOU above its genre norms is the complex web of intrigue and recrimination that informs the basic narrative and, of course, its riveting central performances.

When, how and indeed if we’ll ever be able to enjoy the real-deal cinema experience again is, sadly, a moot point, but my sister, who runs a nationwide chain of (almost!) indie sites tells me that her cinemas are well advanced with plans for socially-distanced seating arrangements, although this will mean showing fewer and less art-housey films. She also rather gratifying revealed that big distributors such as Universal who’d announced that they’d henceforth cancel cinemas’ exclusive rights to screen their films for weeks or months before putting them online, have done a humiliating U-turn because streaming-only launches during quarantine, e.g. TROLLS, have been a disaster. So hurrah to that.

Mark’s Corona Coping blog is available at https://markswill.wordpress.com

reader’s writings “So what did you do in the Great Pandemic Lockdown?”

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HE enormity of the Coronavirus pandemic only really hit home for most people on the evening of Sunday 5th April, when The Queen was drafted in to make a television broadcast to the nation. Until then, most of us had been rather coasting along, begrudging the hastily-cobbled together new ‘rules’ about pubs and restaurants being shut, schoolchildren being sent home and something weird (clearly invented up by government shrinks) called Social Distancing.

What on earth was all the fuss about? The nation’s response was to denude every supermarket shelf in Britain of every roll of toilet paper and every packet of dried pasta. But The Queen – or her courtiers – shrewdly judged that this was as serious a national emergency as the Blitz: old people would be at the greatest risk, our National Health Service would be stretched to near-breaking point and for many young people 2020 would be as traumatic as the WWII Evacuations. Here follow the views and recollections of more than a dozen of our contributors who survived the Great Coronavirus Lockdown.

Oliver Tribute Cookery books normally leave me cold and my heart sinks when I find one in the bottom of my stocking at Christmas. But the Lockdown gave me a new perspective on Jamie Oliver’s ‘5 Ingredients Quick & Easy Food’ (Penguin / Michael Joseph). Which is exactly what it says on the tin. This 320-page hardback contains 130 fast-prep recipes, all containing just five ingredients (garlic seems to feature extensively!)

There are salads, pastas, veggie dishes, meat and fish, plus 20 sweet treats.

Lost Opportunity Did anyone else become totally exasperated by those nightly Lockdown Press Conferences? What a lost opportunity!

A captive – not to say domestically-incarcerated prime-time TV audience of millions. Yet apart from the lady in the dark dresses who usually stood at the left-hand lectern and wise and knowledgeable Professor Chris (“next slide please”) Whitty, they all came across like frightened rabbits caught in a car’s headlights at night. Hancock (apparently his nickname amongst Department of Health civil servants is Matt Handjob), Raab, Gavin ‘fibber’ Williamson and poor old (or rather rich old, since his father-in-law is the richest man in India) Rishi Sunak. There were a few fleeting and stuttering appearances from Boris himself – when not on nappy-changing duties at Chequers – but nobody turned in an Oscar-worthy performance. Now if they’d only given the job to, say, Eddie Izzard or Alexei Sayle, think how much more upbeat we’d be feeling.

But as I am slightly deaf over-seventy in the lockdown I fear isolation. I wonder if I will ever be able to resume my already limited social life.

Dispirited viewer

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Channel 4 stole a march on everyone in Week 1 of the Lockdown by giving Jamie a half-hour slot to demonstrate his quick recipes every weekday afternoon. Then for some reason best know to themselves, pulled the series after a fortnight. Search for this invaluable culinary reference book in your local charity shop; it will set you back a stonking £26 if you order it from Waterstones!

Nick Jones *** I believe myself too literal to do casual conversation.

I hear “How are you?” and I think “How am I what?” and am lost for an answer. I have been reluctant to talk about myself as I fear I will not be believed.

My solution is to talk to myself; well, not actually talk but write. And I’ve put it online so others can see it; Well they could see it but I haven’t informed the Google search engine so they are unlikely to find it.

My target is an average of 300 words a day with a different topic each day in a manner interesting to other people. I was feeling down when I started so my rule was ‘Happy Memories’. But the happy memories reminded me of related less happy memories. So I now include unhappy or disturbing memories. I think I may want to extend it further to include essays or explainers.

My website now works in a limited sort of a way.

I am filling much of the rest of my time writing an improved website capable of hosting others who feel an urge to do a similar sort of thing.You can see what I’ve been doing on <http:\\brianbutcher.life> Brian Butcher

Wispas I get up when I want most days, except the odd day where the postman rocks up early and we get too many packages (this is rare). Sometimes I stare out the window, wiping the eye bogies out of my peepers and think ‘How did we get here?’

Obviously, that Chinese bloke ate a bat and it’s all been downhill since then.

I jog every two days - this makes me feel alive. I often see the same friendly faces on my walk and say ‘Hello!’ Well, you have to in the countryside, don’t you!? I spend my afternoons sifting through job opportunities I’ve usually already spotted, writing, or thinking about a new character for one of my comedy videos.

They say things might calm down in a couple of months but by that time, summer is dead. Be nice to go on holiday but this year isn’t really the year for that. No holidays, no gigs, and not much fun.

I wonder how much society will have changed when this is done? One thing I do know is that I’ve developed a hard addiction for Wispas and battling for shopping slots online. Are the pubs open yet?

Gareth Postans *** Just Sitting

And so it goes on distance between life and living.

To move to be still to be noisy Or silent, In the quiet which is Night and day.

To not disturb nature In its rebirth Or fight the nature Of our dying.

Just to be still and wait to sit, detached, alone, angry, cross, Sad and lost.

Pride taken in sadness all too late Praise and thanks from panic.

Questions not heard But answers are given Yet we still won’t listen Even in the stillness As rain continues to fall In the silence that is.

Covidity Weeks we have been caged, corralled in an aid for moral we drew together and clapped the game, then every Thursday it became the same, who died? I forget their name. Numbers drew and draw that is what we saw, a picture of developing disaster.

Corona; came and saw but nor conquered a simple spread of unity, for that brief moment when time became abundant and streets ran dry of most things.

Italians sing and sang for time, when pandemic pandemonium would purse its lips and quit; for this year. Mother Earth shed a tear as the disharmony between us and her drew nearer and a touch paper was lit on the keg of fear on which we all still sit.

Unity The slicing sharp edge of the curve within a united front, came and went very quickly and what was seen when panic hit the streets are forgotten names of hoarders who seemed to still clap every Thursday. We create historical reference to remember what and when and why, I hear a sigh from those who are forgotten. In periods of disharmonious dysfunction; the dead died and the dying nearly so, as profiteering began to flow, notices within pace of existence slowed to a near stop; except that is for those at the very top, I won’t name and shame but politicisation of scientific fact does not detract from individual incuriosity in to the introspection of survivors, once this door is unlocked. No scars or pocks for us to look back and take stock of a time when the enemy killed unseen.

Mark Christmas

Puddleduck

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reader’s writings “So what did you do in the Great Pandemic Lockdown?”

Funniest columnist alive today To lighten its readers’ spirits, The Guardian shrewdly brought out of retirement the amazing 91-year-old Nancy Banks-Smith, who had been its TV critic from 1970-2010. I just hope they have the good sense to publish all her Lockdown columns as a compilation paperback for next Christmas. Her 27 March piece was a master class of compressed satire, close to the spirit of the incomparable J B Morton (aka Beachcomber).

B & Q has never sold so much paint Your Gran had me decorating. Day and night. There were daily B & Q deliveries and I wore out 16 paint brushes. “If it moves, paint it!” was her motto.

“What about that telegraph pole on the pavement?” she asked one night in bed.

“What about it?”

“Creosote brown is so dull. In the morning I want you to paint it pale blue, with a pink squiggle running from top to bottom - like a May Pole.” It was clear that your Gran had lost her marbles, but I dutifully complied, drawing admiring glances from passing Lockdown exercisers.

“I think you should tackle the post box on the corner next. Give it a more interesting colour scheme.”

“The Royal Mail one? What colour do you want it?”

Ostensibly about experiencing WWII evacuation (she was moved to the Lake District from the East End pub where her father was landlord), she manages to pack in references to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Jonathan Aitken, Sir David Attenborough and Sainsbury, ending with this glorious swipe at her old Headmistress at Roedean: “Dame Emeline had one of those undivided bosoms popularised by Queen Mary.

More a shelf for resting stuff on.”

Nancy Fan *** Eyeing up the old Anderson Shelter at the bottom of my garden. I said to Dora “See that down there! That’s where I’m going in the pandemic.”

We don’t get on, it’s for the best.

I began to squirrel away essentials such as toilet rolls, liquid soap, painkillers and bleach. I left my phone in the house; “Won’t be needing this Dora!”

I booked a Tesco’s online delivery for the next year.

Like Rip Vanwinkle I slept through the nightmare, only the rats nesting in the bog rolls woke me.

Sometimes my Dora banged on the door. To tell me the sad death toll.

I slowly emmerged like a hibernating tortoise.

Into the sunshine noticing that my runner beans had grown at least four inches.

Jenni Gregory

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“All the colours of the rainbow! Just like those kids’ colouring charts Lidl are handing out. With SAVE OUR NHS on every curve.

Nick Jones *** Parents When I look back on the Great Lockdown, it seems as though the days were long, stretched out experiments to see how far my parents could stretch the boundaries of child abuse. This, of course, I enjoyed stating with all “seriousness” from the deep abyss of the hedge as of which I had a very close relationship with. The reason for that was when my parents detected any human vital signs, instead of just asking me to move to one side they would launch me inside of the closest hedge or ditch. In the numerous other attempts to social distance, we would take diversions if anyone was following us to let them pass the other way. In the explanation of this, I felt that this would be a great idea instead of turning me into a DIY Ikea shelf in a hedge. This worked fine of course, until they started following us and we were forced to stray to one side and start pointless conversations such as “Well yes, the floor here is made of floor…” All in all, I will look back on these days as my parent’s failed attempts to lower the council tax.

Robin Fletcher (Age 12)

Anxieties I realise I am scared, and I am dealing with fear; the fear of loss. It hasn’t taken a crisis, a virus, a pandemic, to show me my priorities, but it has given me the time to take my foot off the peddle, to rest, to come back to me, and to be with those I love and to face my fears. I have known bereavement and grief before and as I have watched the daily death toll rise, I have worried about each cough my family have had, each time one of them has said they felt unwell...I just want us to survive.

So how to deal with these anxieties, how to ‘be’ in these challenging days? To really lockdown or to take the lid off my emotions? I use the written word to help me deal with my feelings, no keeping them at a distance, and the spoken word to express them, no feeling isolated... I realise I do not want to go back to ‘normal’. I want to be better, do better.

I too want to create a ‘new normal’... I want us to thrive.

Kay Fletcher ***

Long hours on the Front Line The Pandemic was an especially tough time for me and my children as we were poised to move home when the Lockdown put paid to all property moves.

On top of that, a close relative was booked for an operation which had to be postponed. In Hereford the usual clinics had been temporarily suspended and only work deemed “essential and urgent” was carried out at specific designated sites. Four, eight or 12-hour shifts were available, but there was no pressure on anybody to do more. Most of our work was Pandemic-related. Briefings were given every morning on updates and new policies, ‘cascaded’ to each shift through a duty manager, verbally and with written texts.

There was copious paperwork for me to take home for bedside reading – though most nights (after supper and a glass of wine) I invariably fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I and all my colleagues felt terribly touched by the Nation’s recognition and show of appreciation every Thursday.

Nurse

The new normal Quickly. One day normal, the next thrown into a terrifying new world where we are suspicious of our fellow man. Social distancing is not a normal human trait, but what is normal? Two metres?

Work stops. Lockdown begins. Immediately the weather breaks and becomes warm and sunny, like a holiday - oh the cruelty of it all. Ill-prepared teachers scrabble to offload homework onto startled ill-prepared children. Below the surface tempers fray. Our leaders miss the signs, the peaks, the deaths here and abroad. Over 30,000 deaths.

Playing with people’s lives.

There is much stillness. The ignorant flaunt the advice. Then the pubs close. This is a pandemic.

We binge on boxsets and too many custard creams, increase waist sizes, We learn how to be families again, play Xbox late into the balmy evenings, redecorate the house, mow the lawn twice a day, take some dodgy online courses and spend an inordinate amount of time waiting for ASDA to release new delivery slots.

We wait for “the spike”. We fear the virus but this is offset by the fear of having to phase out lockdown and all of the inherent risks of returning to “normal”. Whatever that means.

David Fletcher

7

reader’s writings “So what did you do in the Great Pandemic Lockdown?”

Lockdown days on our allotment My wife and I are lucky enough to have an allotment in Hereford. It is on unbuilt-on land near the railway station and may well have done service during WWII when the nation was encouraged to ‘Dig for Victory’ and many women were urged to join the Land Army. Until this year our plot has always been under-utilised.

The Lockdown, some fine late-Spring weather and the need to escape the four walls of our city home changed all that. It has never looked so tidy and we can pump out our chests with pride at the rows of brassica, the promise of some fine broad beans and rhubarb a-plenty (one of our friends say they’ve never had so many rhubarb crumbles!). We’ve strictly adhered to the social distancing rules (it’s still possible to be sociable with fellow plot holders at 2m distance) and what many, pre-Lockdown, had considered an outdated urban activity seems to have become very popular once more.

B Mee

8

Queuing • Dog walk or bike ride? Tough one • Of course, I need Shreddies - a taxi driver type route to the shop with the dogs, and a ride later is my daily exercise!

• I’d normally run a mile from communal claps, but only chance to engage with those interesting new neighbours • Crap queuing; snail’s pace through Aldi whilst Mrs Brown weighs up her need for a large or a small tin of prunes & Mrs Green decides she’s in too much of a hurry for all this resigned patience karma stuff.

Deep breaths.

• Good queuing: sunny Market Square exchanges waiting one’s turn at artisan family bakers Prices’ Saturday morning openings.

• Report Farmer Haddock* for closing key public footpath through his farmland: in juicy terms he informs walkers all his livestock will die if they persist. Relents after ‘guidance’ from Council and Police - hope his livestock live the full, happy lives they were always destined to.

• Ah, it’s the cyclists losing us this war: Hereford Times correspondent boasts of accosting local cyclists he deems to have strayed too far from home; better lie low.

• Freezer defrosted, cellar tidied, garden weeded: any mental health consequences of completing a To Do list?

• Can now ride and dog-walk as far as I like, every day; even more fun working out routes that reach but don’t breach that Welsh border!

• Radio 3 Bach Before 7: the Magnificat; life’s okay really. * Name change, obviously.

Charles Edwards

Dreaming In my dream – I am lying on a beach, the sun on my back, absorbed in a book. In the background I hear the gentle swish of the waves and French children’s voices laughing and chatting.

In my dream – I am strolling through the vineyards on a warm sunny evening.

In my dream – I am sitting outside a café drinking a glass of chilled rosé, eating fresh olives, enjoying the music with good friends.

In my dream – I am wandering through a Vide Grenier full of an eclectic mix of wonderful items. Then sit with a fresh coffee and relax watching the world go by.

In my dream - there are succulent melons, peaches, apricots, sweet tomatoes and asparagus for sale on the side of the road.

Instead – my life entails walking, reading, cleaning; (what again? It’s already clean!)

Oh Yippee!! There’s a Sainsbury delivery slot available.

Anon *** Writing poetry Almost 6am, it is fresh along Mousecroft Lane, I have my blue scarf up around my neck. At Mousecroft pool it’s quiet but for the coots and moorhens that skim the disused quarry. I check my phone - 6.18, push my hands deeper into my pockets. This March morning isn’t wasted on me, that first quarter of the day I share with no one.

Through April my route is established through Nobold along narrow country lanes where goldfinches dart across my path, to a field where a herd of Friesians greet me, their careful scrutiny a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. I negotiate the entry into Mousecroft, careful not to touch the grey metal, I hook the swing gate with my foot. The water at the fishery pool levels have dropped, and a thin layer of mist swirling recalls the scene from Apocalypse Now as Martin Sheen’s camouflaged head emerges from the dark water.

It’s now late May and the lilies and water iris have begun to show their golden flowers. The rabbits seem less concerned with my presence now, Jays flash their orange high in the trees. I return, unlock, begin to write, almost 8.

Barry Tench

Can’t stop the wheels turning at 90 – an inspirational cyclist Lock down, didn’t stop us celebrating Dad’s (‘Mike the bike’) 90th in May…proof that cycling keeps you fit and young! Stationed in Zimbabwe with the RAF, work steered Mike into gliding, then a passion for two wheels starting with his beloved Excelsior Autobike (1949).

The RAF brought a love of flying. Wings were clipped after an unscheduled landing on the black mountains. Two wheels moved from motorcycles to cycling. We often joked how he has nine lives, a few near misses on a cycle too!

With Lands’ end to John O’Groats bagged aged 73, at 86 a 50-mile EROCIA challenge from Bakewell, the oldest cyclist in the event. From the age of 80, birthday rides started when we cycled 80K in a day. Thereafter each year a kilometre is added. Dad bought an electric bike in May 2018, clocked up 3500 miles, with traditional pedal power behind him, a restored Dawes cycle, a Boardman, a tandem (resting up after years of cycling with Mum).

Now at the age of 90 we didn’t make 90K in a day due to obvious reasons…looks like it’s a 91K ride instead in 2021!

Annette Hutchinson *** Local reflections The story of the Wellington bomber which crashed on Moccas Park in April 1945, killing its crew of six, all in their 20s; or the 14-year-old farmer’s son who’d fetch Italian PoW’s from Pengethley before cycling to school in Ross. Right now, I’m sifting through a host of county reminiscences we’ve received for In Our Age, though as most of our 2000 copies are distributed through the county’s libraries (closed due to the Lockdown), there’s no knowing when it will appear.

Bill Laws

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reader’s writings “So what did you do in the Great Pandemic Lockdown?”

Forging a more resilient community For many of us, Lockdown has provided a completely new way of living and working that is leading us to reflect; and my sense is that this period will lead to longer-term change.

The first thing many of us have realised is how important outside space is to relax, work and exercise in (we are all placing a much higher value on our gardens and on green spaces). I believe we have also noted the importance of ‘community’ at all levels, where many businesses and volunteers have pulled together to reach out to those in need. In addition, many have noted the value of social interaction within communities.

One of the last re-ordering schemes we completed before Lockdown was at the church of St Michael & All Angels at Kingstone. Here the church family wanted to be able to play a more integral role within the community. Through our re-ordering project we were able to ‘forge’ an accessible community hub within the fabric of this 12th century building, bringing people together – such as with the ‘Take a Pew’ café which is held each Thursday.

The simple addition of a ramp, a fully-equipped kitchen and new toilets has created something so much bigger than the sum of these parts: a stronger – and I believe – a more resilient community.

Alex Coppock, Communion Design

St Michael & All Angels, Kingstone

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Buntings are no substitute During this Lockdown we have probably been reflecting on relationships, which nourish and are central to our ‘politics’. But buntings and rainbows are no substitute for tackling the issues highlighted by this crisis: crises of financial insecurity, domestic violence, pollution and access to nature. Solutions already exist; we don’t need more research, just political will. For many, this Lockdown experience of ‘democracy’ has felt like the air of an abusive relationship, the government’s blurring of truth heightening an Orwellian atmosphere of instability and unreality. On Herefordshire Council, where we still operate at ground level, I’ve missed ‘physical’ meetings, with much of our ‘zooming up’ via YouTube: a positive development which I hope will encourage more people to engage in local decision making.

Cllr Diana Toynbee (Greyfriars Ward) is one of seven Green councillors on Herefordshire Council. She stood as the Green Party’s candidate in the 2019 General Election, contesting Hereford & South Herefordshire and taking 4.8% of the vote share. *** Death by Spam I plotted the assassination of an enemy of the state.

He would give his security personnel the slip. He would be lured to a remote farmhouse via a trail of buns and the promise of a shag. He would knock the secret knock on the paint-peeled door, wiping the last of the bun-crumbs from his rubbery lips. I would open the door disguised as Scarlett Johannsen in Under the Skin, a reference he would not recognise because underneath the expensive classical education he has the cultural wit of a parsnip. He would enter the house, smirking lasciviously in anticipation. I would offer him a glass of cheap supermarket prosecco and a plate of Spam vol-au-vents. “Eat these while I undress,” I would command him. And he would obey, dribbling.

But he does not know that Spam was invented by Russian communists plotting to overthrow their rich overlords and he will choke to death, his face turning puce, his knees buckling as he croaks “Hoc non est difficile brexit volui”*. I will leave his body to be consumed by rats, finish the prosecco and walk into a new dawn. *This is not the hard Brexit I meant.

Annie Vickerstaff

Prepare for New Normal In Lockdown conversations, the phrase ’when things get back to normal’ frequently crops up. But I’m not sure we’ll ever see ‘old’ normal again. Prepare yourselves for New Normal, folks. Among other things, on the plus side, schoolchildren will expect more of their education to be on-line; more people will remain ‘wedded’ to healthy home cooking; the good old ‘corner shop’ is back in business; and the increased streaming of films to our TV screens may see the demise of ugly multiplexes. On the debit side, I fear some rural pubs may take a hit; ladies’ hairdressing salons will probably lose many of their regular customers; and Hereford’s long-awaited multi-modal transport hub will once more become a pipe dream.

Soothsayer *** “Got any girls?”

Enforced ‘stay-ins’ like the Lockdown invariably result in offices, workshops and garden sheds being tidied. My office sort-out uncovered a cache of the environmental monthly Vole, which ran from 1977-80 and was financed by the Python the late Terry Jones. This story about evacuees was related to me by the magazine’s cartoonist the late Bryan Reading, who in 1943 was evacuated from north London to Wales. His journey started at Paddington Station, where the mandatory luggage label with his name and number was tied to his jacket buttonhole. When the exhausted (and confused) children eventually arrived in Swansea they were made to board an army lorry and sat silently on benches in the back. The lorry’s canvas flaps were closed and they headed off for the mining valleys. At each stop, the flaps would be opened and a curious Welsh couple would look in, before selecting an evacuee to live with them. The numbers dwindled until there was only Bryan and two other boys left. At the next halt, a man with a coal-black face - a miner who had probably just finished a shift down the local pit - peered into the back of the lorry, looked dismissively at the three cowering youths and called to the driver: “Haven’t you got any girls?” The wily Welsh had clearly realised that during wartime girls meant free domestic staff, while boys would just consume their precious food supplies.

Nick Jones

Dickens to the fore Smart-arsed bibliophiles on several of the nationals weren’t slow to brag about what great literary works they’d immersed themselves in during the Lockdown. Needless to say, War and Peace topped the list. The Guardian’s TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith was far more honest, recommending revisiting P G Wodehouse. I decided to remain patriotic and renewed my acquaintance with the incomparable Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.

What a cracking good read it is, so much so that I soon had to ration myself to one chapter a day. As well as being the most coruscating attack on the English legal system ever published, the novel teems with memorable characters. From Joe the crossing sweeper to the fragrant Lady Honoria Deadlock, Inspector Buckett (a precursor to Peter Sellers’ Clouseau, though Dickens was settling an old score with a Scotland Yard detective), the manipulative Josiah Tulkinghorn KC and Krook, the wretched rag and bottle man who dies of spontaneous combustion. Eat your heart out Leo Tolstoy!

Bookworm

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hugh’s bit

Sunny Dale T

HE scene: A mid-Wales property wishfully named Sunny Dale.

The dream: “It’s not land ‘ughie, it’s just landscape”, said the farmer pointing at my expensive expanse of Welsh rain forest. “But I s’pose that’s what you city types are after”, he ruminated as he handed over the keys, relit his roll-up and climbed back into his battered Land Rover. He had just pocketed a cool quarter of a million for a shack with asbestos-cement walls, a derelict barn and 7 acres of impenetrable brambles, silver birch and bracken. He puttered off trailing blue smoke and a faint smell of sheep dip.

It was the perfect delusion of self-sufficiency - chop your own wood, drink from the mountain stream, nettle soup, magic mushrooms, myxied rabbit, and trust to the ancient cesspit for the resulting gastric opera.

The pre-fab sits on the sunny side of the river and was constructed in the 30’s as an oubliette for a rich man’s daughter who had fallen pregnant without a license. Once she had given birth she broke out of the forgotten solitude and incessant rain that the local Buddhist monks so enjoy and escaped to a sun-soaked estancia in Spain, accompanied by a crooked bookie from Llandrindod Wells. It has been home to wild types ever since, rats, bats, hippies, drug dealers, grass-snakes, owls and suicides and looks like a gangsters’ hide-out from a black and white movie, but to compensate there is a perfect view of the Beacons, weather permitting, and a sequence of idyllic foaming shampoo ad waterfalls right there in the garden. Now it was our turn, me and my newly bedded partner to transform this damp environment into a light and airy, highly crafted, simple yet sophisticated, happy and profitable, long to rain over us, Grand Designs home.

Rural Reality dawns and defaults to rain “Oh My God! They don’t deliver!” She shrieked at me on the second morning after BT (“A nightmare!” “Say no more!”) finally plugged us into digital reality. “You what love?” I yelled back. “They do not fecking deliver!”

- “who?” I said. “Waitrose” she wailed......

Our cunning plan to avoid the car ownership we pretended to object to on moral grounds and in truth couldn’t afford had fallen apart because the supermarket doesn’t deliver, so now it’s a two mile walk to the Village Shop, which sells the bare minimum of sliced white, frozen pizza, baked beans, windfall apples and giant potatoes which the post mistress weighs out in imperial measures on the same scales as the parcels.

“They don’t fecking deliver!” she moaned.

Damn .... however every cloud has a silver lining .... an opportunity to console my partner often leads to sex so I consoled her.

12

The nightmare My partner and I share the sensual benefits of a vibrant natural environment, which includes rain coming through the ceiling, scraping frosted

condensation from the windows, choking in the smoke from the open fire, and battling the constant mud. In compensation we glimpse otters, glare at mink, spy on herons, and now and again catch the electric blue trace of a kingfisher by the river. We witness weasels playing with their hapless prey, listen to invisible birds and are bitten by midges as we wait for badgers at dusk. We throw stones at rats in the compost, watch skittering mice disappear everywhere, and set traps for moles.

We gesticulate at squirrels on the bird table, and at cats shitting in the veg patch, and yell at the neighbour’s dogs. We puzzle over the inflated colours of bird identification guides, unable to relate the exciting pictures to the drab brown and grey birds whose warbling sons we hear but can only catch glimpses of in the undergrowth. We smell the rain, tend to smouldering bonfires, sink into snowdrifts, soak up the spring sunshine, sleep on the summer lawn. All through we hear the music of the waterfalls. And sometimes we see the fox swaggering across the grass around dawn, pawing playfully at a molehill en route to a feast in our compost heap.

So One night, I stumbled back from the pub and took off my rather fine pair of veldtschoen shoes in the back porch before creeping up to bed - silently as I thought - hoping to snuggle up against the sleeping back of my beloved - and more - a wild misconception as it turned out.

I won’t go into the ensuing argy-bargy. Suffice it to say that next morning I felt jostled and jarred. Fresh air was needed. A walk. An assertion of the idyllic over the domestic. Get me out of here until the outline of an apology forms in one or other of us’s mind.

I found my hat and looked for my shoes, but they weren’t in the corridor. The left one I found 20 feet away down the back path, but I searched in vain for the other. As the weeks went by I kept a picture of it in my head, but I had all but given up when I happened to visit the next door farm and spotted it hanging on a gate post. I knocked and thanked the farmer’s wife. “We did think it a bit odd that a walker would leave just the one shoe behind” she said, “Oh! a fox, yes!” she seemed unsurprised.

And it went on like that. Shoe-stealing foxes, moles in the veg patch, badgers under the drive, potato blight, boundary disputes, Grade 1 listed bats in the Grade 2 listed roof, while skilled bureaucrats from the Planning, Building control, Archaeology, Tree, Fish, Bat, Eco and Heritage Dictatorship that is the Brecon National Park Autocracy imposed mutually contradictory embargoes on our plans. Our valley apparently encroaches on an SSSI, in an AONB, - a Site of Sacred Scientific Interest in an Area of Outstanding Natural Bureaucracy. In other words, it’s a SOB – a son of a bitch.

Eventually we sold up to the next in the queue of urban dreamers and went back to the simple life - in town.

Hugh Colvin © 2019

thought for today

Pop(ulation) will eat itself!

I

T seems to me, as I grind on to my inevitable death, that life gets more and more shit as it goes on.

Let’s get away and move to the country. Ah, that’s better. The freedom. No more searching desperately for a parking space. No more rat race. Listen, I can hear a woodpecker. I can smell the dew. Wow! Look at those stars in the sky. But what’s that coming up the valley? It’s a 4G mast with a white dish stuck on it, pointing at me.

Get me connected. I’ve got to be connected. Communication. Yes, communication is the answer. Tell you what, let’s put a street light outside your house so you can see where you’re going when you get up in the middle of the night for a walk. And what’s that popping up on the hillside over there? Oh, it’s only another chicken shed.

Well we need chickens don’t we? We can’t get enough of them. Let’s inject them with drugs to keep them alive so we can have thousands of them in this one shed. We can’t have too many chickens. It’s impossible. The Age of Aquarius. More like the age of mindless decision making.

Oh, it’s not a star in the sky. It’s a satellite! And there’s another one behind it and another and another and another…

Think I’ll read a book instead.

When was the last time you sat down and actually listened (shock, horror) to a whole record that some artist or band had lovingly crafted? What happened to vinyl records? Oh, we came up with a better idea – cassettes.

OK, they jammed occasionally, and the sound went muffled and they sometimes broke but they were better than all those little scratches, weren’t they? ‘Oh, we can do better than that – CDs. They don’t scratch and they don’t break. You can vomit on them and clean them with a scouring pad and they’ll still play.’ Like hell.

There we were at school – “Look, you can scratch it with a pencil sharpener and it’ll still play”. Do you remember them telling you that? Bollocks. ‘OK then, we’ll send it down your ear’ole via a computer and then you won’t have to waste your time reading about who created the bloody stuff and what instruments they played and where they played them and all that nonsense. Who wants to know things like that? Plus, you won’t need to waste your time listening to the whole fucking album. We’ve got another vacuous track lined up for you right here: Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber… Oh yes, you’ll like this one – another artist singing about ‘me’ singing about ‘me’ as you stare blankly into the screen vaguely hoping for some redeeming feature to appear.

Did you say ‘instruments’? That’s a laugh. Can’t sing? No problem; we’ll put your voice through a programmer so you can sound like everybody else.

Well we want to be an Electronic Civilisation, don’t we? Civilised. Yes, that’s the way to go. And don’t worry, the health service will keep us going till we can’t move and all we can say is ‘gahhhhhhhhh’. ‘Yes, you can eat

‘Spitting Image’

as much as you want. We’ve got drugs that’ll help you keep all that fast food down so you can get some more down asap. We’ll keep you alive.’ “And don’t forget to leave your rubbish on the verges so we can pick it up for you later, coz we haven’t got anything better to do, have we?”

Even art is crap; literally. I’ve got a good gag. I’ll cast huge inflated balloon dogs in bronze and sell them to investment bankers for a million quid. He he he…they don’t know when art is shit or shit is art. And they don’t really care either.

And what happened to Yes, Minister and The South Bank Show and Spitting Image? ‘No, people don’t want to watch that rubbish any more. They’ve got too many other things to watch like, how to paint a wall properly, or how to plant a bean in soil or how to make an asparagus foam for that splendid meal they’re going to cook tonight.

Yeah, vinyl records… kick them into the long grass.

Long grass, you’ve got to be kidding. It’s all got to be cut down. Mow it all down. That’s the way. We don’t want long grass. It looks so bloody untidy. Four tiny hedgehog babies, lying in a bundle, dead. ‘Oh shit – I meant to kill the slugs, not the hedgehogs. Oh well, onwards and upwards. I know, I’ll take my mind off that little tragedy by spraying the weeds down the drive. Bloody dandelions!’

We’re like a virus, spreading over everything. ‘Piss off Native Indian. We need to get at that gold.” Another forest felled. How many species have we lost this time?

Oh, it doesn’t really matter does it?

No, I don’t want to know what they do to cats and dogs in China. Do you think lobsters feel any pain when they are boiled alive? I’m giving up meat. I’m going to live on lettuce grown in undergrown bunkers under tube lights.

That’s not doing any harm is it?

Jeez, look at the time. ‘Hello Sid, sorry, can’t stop; got to get to the post office before it closes.’

Simon Jameson

13

unite the beat Community Radio

A

RTY has just requested ‘Material Girl’ by Madonna. Last week it was ‘BaaBaa Black Sheep’. Arty is 2. This week the show kicks off with a request for ‘Dignity’ by Deacon Blue. The caller is Pete and the request is for his partner Vanessa who he has not been able to see since Lockdown started. He fills the airwaves with beautiful sentiments, sharing with us their dream to move to South Africa together one day. Next up is ‘Black Taggart,’ a regular caller whose requests come with rich historical stories and then there is Granny. So far Granny has asked for ‘Never Smile at a Crocodile,’ ‘Teddy Bears Picnic,’ but also thrown in ‘Popcorn’ by Hot Butter and ‘Road to Nowhere’ by Talking Heads. Granny may well be our most unpredictable caller!

Our work is and has always been about connecting people. We use music and nature to do so and are often to be found roaming the wilds of Herefordshire & Gloucestershire with gangs of vulnerable groups as we ‘forage for sounds’ and create unexpected woodland bands. This project however needed to take us away from the face to face contact that we love and cherish, depositing us firmly into the online arena.

We racked our brains for what we could offer now, innovating alongside so many others to fulfil our desire to help.

Once born the idea seemed obvious. We had DJ’d together at 1BTN when living in Brighton where we also carried out some really juicy and meaningful work with isolated older people, using music to promote reminiscence and tackle isolation. Wasn’t a call-in radio show just what we all needed? A place to come together once a week and hear each other’s voices, share stories, memories, surprise each other with requests and shout-outs. The best part is that all you have to do is tell everyone you love and it somehow acts as an online family/community gathering.

Now in our fourth week it has become crystal clear, that like with much of our work, celebrating diversity and encouraging intergenerational contact has been

key. That may mean that you have to listen to a few songs you wouldn’t normally track down on your Spotify account, but the trade-off is that you will likely feel all warm and cosy as you take in the abundant giggles of our tiniest callers and the wonderful memories shared by all. Not only that but we also have a number of care homes tuning in so your calls can help bring the outside world to them, sharing the joy of intergenerational communication.

So, if a couple of hours of wildly abundant music takes your fancy and/or you are keen to trial a new and creative means of connecting with those you cannot physically touch, Unite the Beat Radio might just be for you. We are live every Thursday from 6-8pm. It is an online station, so you simply go to our website www. unitethebeat.co.uk/our-music and call 07376917707 if you want to make a request. You can also leave us a message on our Facebook page: https://www. facebook.com/unitethebeat/ We look forward to connecting with you and welcoming you into the Unite the Beat community.

A huge thank you to the Fastershire Grant for funding the necessary licenses that have enabled us to set up.

Emily Robertson

Stuart Morris HND

Garden Maintenance Services ♠ All aspects of garden maintenance ♠ Hedge and shrub cutting ♠ Tree surgery ♠ Full public liability

♠ Mowing ♠ Borders ♠ Turfing Mobile: 07828 995237

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Email: smorrisaos@gmail.com

♠

ACE

OF SPADES

arts alive

Arts Alive bring live shows to your home

W

ith theatres and event spaces across our region still closed, it is welcome news to hear that rural touring scheme, Arts Alive, have curated a programme of bi-monthly online performances to be delivered straight to our homes. Following the cancellation of their live shows and Flicks in the Sticks events, they wanted to keep bringing arts events to local communities in rural areas.

ArtsAlive@Home will feature a mixture of prerecorded shows and live streamed events. They are asking audiences to tune in on a specific date and time so that viewers can collectively enjoy a post show chat with one of the performers via group video conferencing.

Cerin Mills who has been putting together the line up believes the audience will really enjoy sharing the experience of an online show. She adds, “They can watch the fabulous events from the comfort of their sofa, organise their own interval drinks, share their response with the other audience members, and speak to the performers after the show. Whilst there is no replacing the atmosphere of a live show, we believe this will be a really unique and enriching community experience, for people of all ages.”

The Fairy’s Kiss, The Scottish Ballet

The line up includes ‘The Fairy’s Kiss’ from the Scottish ballet, with a post show chat with principal dancer, Beth Kingsley-Garner. The award winning Puppet State Theatre will be sharing a recording of their show ‘The Man who Planted Trees’ which was recorded at The Edinburgh Fringe 2019.

Songwriter and performer Louise Jordan will share extracts from ‘Florence’, a one-woman show about Florence Nightingale, with a live Q&A with Louise after the show.

Dave Gaydon, Head of Programming for The Cheltenham Jazz Festival has curated a one-hour online special featuring four of the performers who were due to feature at the festival, which was cancelled following the Covid-19 outbreak.

Artists will each perform a live 15-minute set from their home. He comments, “We are thrilled to be involved in the ArtsAlive@Home programme. It is a desperate time for the events and festival world, not only for the cancelled events but also for the diminished availability of live cultural experiences for the public. It is a pleasure to provide a mini online festival for the Arts Alive community - they can expect some quality jazz delivered straight to their living room!”

For more details visit www.artsalive.co.uk or www.facebook.com/ArtsAliveAndFlicks.

Claire Pocock

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