Monday
During a TV interview over the weekend ahead of the further relaxation in coronavirus rules, Rishi Sunak urged us all to “get out there, get shopping”. As if it was somehow our civic duty. Only there were few things I wanted to do less. I’ve missed many things during lockdown – family, friends, football, opera and going in to work – but shopping isn’t one of them. There was a a time 25 or 30 years ago, when wandering in and out of shops on a Saturday morning was a genuine leisure activity, but now I buy almost everything online. Partly as it takes less time, but mainly because it eliminates the possibility of traipsing into town only to find that the size you want is out of stock. I even mildly resent having to go up to the local Budgens to buy the odd item of food we’ve run out of. In fact just about the only thing I have bought during lockdown, apart from the psyche-saving exercise bike, has been my wife’s Christmas present. Not that I’m usually that organised, but it was a beautiful pot in an online exhibition that wouldn’t have been available come early December when I normally start thinking about Christmas. It was also rather more expensive than my normal present budget, so I am having to pay it off in monthly instalments. Which meant I rather felt obliged to tell my wife what I had done in case I died between now and Christmas and she never got to find out there was a half-paid-for pot with her name on it in some gallery. Weirdly, the moment I told her, my wife guessed exactly what I had bought her as she had specifically told me not to spend so much money on that particular pot. Ungratefully, she went on to query who the present was for …
Tuesday
It’s just as well the government thinks everything it has done to combat the coronavirus is “world beating”. Given that the UK already has one of the worst coronavirus death rates in the world, I’d hate to think how many more people would have died if our response had only been “good enough”. Most would think that the only area where the government is truly “world beating” is in its incompetence. It’s going some to have made three major policy U-turns within a month. This week’s U-turn on free school meals was a collector’s item. Even if there is someone inside No 10 who believes it’s genuinely a good idea for 1.3 million children to go hungry over the summer – maybe Dominic Cummings has written a 40,000-word blog on the positive effects of a poor diet on future life chances – saving £100m seems a strange hill to die on when you’ve already committed hundreds of billions of pounds to bailing out the economy.
It took Marcus Rashford – or Daniel Rashford, as Matt Hancock called him – the 22-year-old Manchester United striker, who had grown up on free school meals, to shame the government into reversing its decision. And even then the government spent a good 36 hours pretending it had never heard of the footballer’s campaign. Still, Rashford’s involvement – following on from Raheem Sterling’s advocacy for Black Lives Matter: how can we have a foreign secretary who doesn’t understand the meaning of “taking the knee”? – has given the lie to the fact that all footballers are pampered and out of touch. Rashford and Sterling have shown more integrity in a matter of days than Boris has shown in a lifetime. I now look forward to Harry Kane getting involved in the Brexit talks and negotiating an extension to the transition period.
Wednesday
Sticking with football, I spent the evening watching the first two games back to back as the Premier League resumed. It was somehow appropriate that the first match between Aston Villa and Sheffield United was a classic 0-0 shocker. I had imagined I wouldn’t care that much about the restart as I hadn’t missed televised football as much as I had expected, but within minutes it was as if I was back with an old friend as I remembered the value of wasting hours of my life watching mediocre football played by two teams in which I had little interest.
Sky offered viewers the choice of either watching with a fake crowd soundtrack or in the near silence in which it was really being played. I spent the first half with the crowd noise, before watching the remainder of the game – and the one between Manchester City and Arsenal that followed – with just the sound of the players shouting at one another. That way I better got to experience the full alienation and futility of the event. Without the noise of the crowd, many of the players seemed a bit lost and unable to perform at their best. Even the commentators, who are seldom at a loss for cliche and hyperbole, seemed oddly subdued. At one point Martin Tyler asked Gary Neville where Jamie Carragher was and he just shrugged and said: “Who cares?” Though I will, of course, make it my duty – if I’m not going to go shopping then I have to do something for the national effort – to watch as many games as I can get away with over the next six weeks, starting with Spurs’ game against Manchester United tomorrow night. And I guarantee I will think even more of Rashford if he chooses to mark the occasion by not scoring a goal.
Thursday
You’d have thought that the Duchess of Cornwall isn’t short of people to go to for horticultural advice, but this week Camilla phoned in to Gardeners’ Question Time to ask for help with finding a variety of lavender that grows in Scotland. But needs must and why stop here? I’d love the rest of the royal family to get involved in radio and TV shows. Just imagine the fun of the Queen traipsing along to the Antiques Roadshow in disguise with a couple of Leonardos tucked under her arm.
“So where did you get them Mrs Windsor?”
“I’m not quite sure, Fiona. They’ve been hanging in the drawing room for as long as I remember.”
“Well that’s amazing. They must be worth well in excess of £100m. What would you do with that amount of money?”
“To be honest that still feels like loose change.”
Or Prince Philip letting rip on Any Answers?. “It’s about time we got rid of the Department for International Development. All those bloody foreigners from the Commonwealth scrounging off us and giving nothing in return.” Though perhaps the best would be a series of Channel 4’s A Place in the Sun in which Jasmine and Jonnie try to find Harry and Meghan’s ideal new home abroad. “This one feels a bit cramped. We were rather hoping for somewhere closer to Hollywood with eight en suite bathrooms and an infinity pool.” Anything to keep Fergie away from Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Friday
After a few weeks in which my anxiety appeared to settle down to near manageable levels, I’m now back to waking up every morning with a physical feeling of dread. A state of mind directly linked to an ever-growing sense of the government’s incompetence. Having once said they would always be “guided by the science” it now feels more and more as if ministers are winging it on a daily basis and are looking for any excuse to ease lockdown measures. We were once told that a good track and trace system was key to any relaxation of the guidelines. But we’ve gone ahead anyway despite the human track and trace picking up less than half of new cases, while the “worldbeating” app has been junked after a trial on the Isle of wight that every techie knew was doomed to failure before it had even started. We also know it’s only a matter of time before the 2-metre guideline is reduced to 1 metre and other steps are taken to open up the country – I still find it hard to believe that other countries are so desperate for our tourist pounds they will take any number of Brits without quarantine – regardless of the R rate and other scientific indicators. I understand the economic imperatives but as a man the wrong side of 60, I can’t help feeling the government has taken a deliberate decision that my life is now worth less than it was a month ago. So whatever Boris decides, I shall still largely maintain my routine of not really going anywhere and watching a lot of TV. Here I would like to put in a plea to the BBC. We know we’re going to be treated to a whole load of repeats as there aren’t any new programmes in production, so please can we bring back Howards’ Way, the 80s series about sailing on the south coast. Just for the comedic value of seeing if it really was as bad as I remember. But to end on a positive note: after it appeared that a cat had wiped out the rabbits living in my daughter’s garden in Minneapolis, she yesterday spotted a new baby bunny hiding in the corner. It probably wasn’t a survivor of the carnage, but it would be nice to believe that it was.
Digested week, digested: If it’s not one U-turn it’s another.