This Is What Happens When The Disabled Go Out After Sunset

I went to Wembley at the weekend. It was mostly amazing. The weather was glorious, Saints won and for an encore there was some great musical entertainment at BOXPARK. The capital letters are their’s by the way. They are quite fitting as BOXPARK is a venue at which shouting is encouraged. 

But there is always something, isn’t there? Something which puts a dampener on the experience and leaves you feeling like if you were considered an afterthought it would be an elevation from where you are currently. Let me explain the background to the ensuing farce. Emma and I stayed in High Wycombe on Friday and Saturday night. Emma’s mum and dad live there so it was a chance for us to meet up with them and then make the short train journey to Wembley on Saturday morning. Emma hasn’t seen them much during the pandemic, maybe once. I hadn’t seen them for several months before the first lockdown. 

On Saturday morning there were other Saints fans at the platform at High Wycombe station. Clearly travelling to London from High Wycombe is not so unusual, particularly on Challenge Cup final day. Yet for us it ended up feeling like we had tried to get back home from the moon on the back of a scooter. 

Things seemed fine before the game. We bought return tickets and received all the right assistance to board the train. The fact that people with my level of mobility still need assistance to get on a train in 2021 is a bloody outrage but I was prepared to grin and bear it to get to Wembley to watch my team play. Saints win a lot. They have now won the Challenge Cup eight times in my lifetime and have also added another eight Super League titles in that time. But before Saturday they hadn’t won at Wembley since 2008. That is 13 years. Who knows where any of us will be in 13 years? I don’t take their success for granted so if they get to Wembley I want to do everything I can to be there.

Another obstacle to that aim was overcome when we were met at Wembley Stadium station by another ramp-wielding assistant. It’s important to make a distinction here. Wembley has two stations. Wembley Stadium and Wembley Park. The vagaries of the transport system mean that the overground train from High Wycombe only goes to Wembley Stadium station. Had we been able to travel on the underground to Wembley Park - as we did when Saints lost at Wembley in 2019 and we stayed in London - I would have been able to get on and off the train without assistance. Whoever upgraded the London Underground system - presumably before the Paralympics in 2012 - understands what is meant by wheelchair access. 

Instead after a successful disembarking we were stopped by a staff member at absolute pains to explain to us exactly what we needed to do to get back on the train to High Wycombe later. Go over the bridge, take the lift, security will help you. She even spoke to someone on her radio to make sure that the lift was working that day. I mean why would it be? There were only 45,000 people trying to get to Wembley after all. The lift was confirmed as operational and so that was that. All we had to do was make sure we didn’t miss the last train, which as it turned out was not until around 10.50pm.

We left BOXPARK about 9.30. We knew there were around three or four trains to High Wycombe after 10.00 but we also knew that we are never the best at navigation in unfamiliar surroundings, especially after drinking since midday. We needed to give ourselves plenty of time. Predictably there was a fair amount of self-inflicted stress as we wandered around not really knowing for sure that we were going the right way. But we found Wembley Stadium station in what we thought was plenty of time. It must have been about 9.45-9.50. We found the lift we had been told about at the start of the day pretty easily. But - and you’re probably ahead of me if you have read MOAFH before - it was not working. Not only was it not working, nor was the telecom system used to call for assistance on either the lift or the ticket machine. 

There were no staff around. We didn’t really know what to do. I’ve never slept on a railway station platform before but it was starting to look like a possibility. I did almost end up roughing it in Cardiff after the 2004 Challenge Cup final. I ended up paying more than £100 to stay in the only hotel that my cousin and I could find that had room for us. At their prices it’s easy to see why. But that was our fault because we drunkenly but quite deliberately missed our mini bus back to St Helens. This was different. We’d seemingly been left high and dry by shite advice and for having the temerity to stay on for a few drinks after the game.

Emma went down the stairs to the platform to see if she could find anyone who might resemble staff who might help us. For several minutes I could see her in conversation with the driver of a train which had just stopped. It didn’t seem to be going well considering how long it was taking. When she came back she told me that the train driver had phoned somebody to arrange for a taxi to take us back to High Wycombe. In essence what they were saying is that it is not possible for a wheelchair user to get on a train from our national stadium to High Wycombe or anywhere else after dark. Which makes perfect sense because as we all know disabled people couldn’t possibly need to go anywhere after sunset. Even if I had been able to get on to the platform the only person who would have been able to assist me on to the train would have been the train driver. In my experience their willingness to unlock a small ramp and plonk it on the platform up to the train is a bit hit and miss. If I had been on my own I would have been on the platform for the night, no doubt. 

I was irked by this as you might imagine, but slightly relieved that it now looked like we would at least get back ok. Yet it got worse before it got better. Emma received a message to say that a taxi had been booked and that we should be met on Preston Road, which is the road on which Wembley Stadium station stands. We were not sure which side of the station was Preston Road but we reckoned they’d find us. Emma then spoke to a driver. She explained where we were and where we were going and why. He agreed to everything and we had an update to inform us he was one minute away. Moments later we received another update telling us that our driver was EIGHT minutes away! How had this happened? Had we made some sort of leap back in time? We never got an explanation. I suspect the driver - having listened to Emma’s explanation - just cancelled us. Couldn’t be arsed. Disabled people are just too much trouble, aren’t they?

Ten minutes or so passed during which I was convinced we wouldn’t find any driver willing to help us and that the one who had been eight minutes away would soon update us with news that he had been urgently called away to Glasgow. It was longer than eight minutes but thankfully the next driver was a good deal more civilised and did his job. His fare was around £100 and I hope he got every penny of it from Chiltern Railways. Sadly, even if they had to pay it I get the feeling that they would rather do that occasionally than pay whatever it would cost to make train travel accessible. Or even to just staff the bloody station at night. 

Naturally I complained. Firstly on Twitter but Emma has also emailed them. Guess what? It’s our fault. Wembley Stadium station is not a staffed station except when there is an event on. And that is only due to the safety issues created by having so many people attending. So essentially accessibility is not an issue as far as they are concerned and this is fine because apparently this information is available on their website. This information is not available on Google Maps but even if it were, there is no justification for just not being arsed to provide access, and for not explaining this when we arrived. It is effectively banning disabled people from travelling. If a train company banned any other minority group would it be ok as long as that information was available on their website? 

We’ll be staying in London next time. Even if it is in 13 years time. On this evidence and given how far there is to go the chances of overground rail travel being fully accessible by 2034 are somewhere between slim and none.

Vaxxed Up

Some of you will have seen my Facebook update about receiving the first dose of the vaccine. If you have - or even if you haven’t - you may be interested in finding out a bit more about the process. It won’t change your mind if you’re an anti-vaxxer. The kind of person who worries about what might be in it while simultaneously gorging on pigs’ dangly bits from Greggs. But if one undecided or apprehensive person reads on and feels a little more comfortable as a result then it will have done some good. I can’t describe how important it is that as many of us as possible go and get vaccinated when the opportunity arises. Ten months of on-off lockdowns do not constitute an exit strategy.

Like many across the city region I had mine at the rugby league ground that dare not speak its absurd vape-shifting name. Saints RLFC in old money. I was met by a car park attendant who instructed me to park up and then go to the entrance five minutes before my appointment time. This isn’t enforced particularly but I don’t see anybody trying to get in early or making any attempt to form or join anything resembling a queue. That’s either because it’s January and consequently absolutely bone-chillingly cold or because everybody is genuinely terrified to get within two metres of another human being from a different address.  

At seven minutes before my appointment time I stop listening to Darren Gough warbling on about Frank Lampard’s sacking at Chelsea as if he’s a football expert and not a retired cricketer and pretend ballroom dancer and make my move. I added two minutes on for getting my chair out of the car. That process doesn’t happen as quickly at 45 years of age as it did at 25 touring around the UK masquerading as an athlete. Especially when you have the energy levels that 18% kidney function bestows upon you. Lockdowns reduce opportunities to practice even further. Mercifully, I was not offered any help by any of the octogenarians present. You’d think that kind of offer wouldn’t happen with social distancing in place but somebody did it when I went for my blood tests at the Royal a couple of weeks ago. If we’re looking for reasons why Covid has got out of control then watching these people go about their daily lives might be instructive. If they are willing to offer unnecessary physical contact to a stranger pushing a wheelchair over Prescot Street then what other kinds of contact that is currently frowned upon are they engaged in? Makes you think.

As I approached the large tent-like walkway that has been erected just outside the main entrance I am asked whether I’d booked through my GP or the NHS. This is the first and only real bump in the road throughout the whole experience. The answer is both in a way. I got a text from The Spinney which is my local GP surgery but it was just a link to an NHS booking site. The reason they ask is because there are separate queues to join for either GP or NHS bookings. They then contradict that by telling me it doesn’t really matter anyway. I’m not so sure. I didn’t check but I wouldn’t be surprised if in this tier-loving version of Tory Britain the other queue led straight to a private jet which takes you to a hot, sunny island which has handled Covid a whole lot better than the UK has. There are plenty to choose from. Probably cost you though...

They asked me to sanitise my hands then showed me through to a large room with rows of tables and chairs. My first impression was that it reminded me of the Blue Peter bring and buy sales we used to have in the school hall at Hamblett. Bring and buy sales were what they did in the 1980s instead of educating the disabled which was considered largely a waste of time. I’ve obviously been to college and university in more enlightened times since then but my knowledge of Shakespeare and the literary classics has never recovered. 

The room was on the ground floor, so not the conference rooms they use for the forums I have been to when pretending to be a writer (like now?) and a broadcaster with my mates from the 13 Pro-Am podcast. I was then asked to wait and I made the mistake of taking my coat off. I thought someone was going to come to me but the drill is that you go to them when someone is free to vaccinate you. Coat back on, which takes an embarrassingly longer amount of time than it would under less pressure. There are other people waiting. It’s not a queue exactly. They only let in as many people as they can fit into a line of chairs spaced suspiciously less than two metres apart. So it’s more of a row but with an order, like waiting for a pizza from Geno’s on a Saturday.

At the vaccination table there were two people to assist. An Asian man and a white woman. They asked for personal info - name, date of birth, address and postcode, whether I have any allergies or blood disorders, favourite Shakespeare play (no, not really). I was then asked to take my jumper off (I’ve already removed my coat again at this point) and the man starts wiping my upper arm in preparation. I’m expecting it to feel like a blood test but it’s less than that. It’s less of a scratch than that and it takes less time because they’re not trying to find one of my camouflaged, dried up veins. If the vampires ever capture me in some kind of gothic apocalyptic scenario they’ll throw me aside because I am a bloodless individual.

And just like that it’s done. I asked about side effects and the man was very non-committal.  He handed me an information sheet and a card with a number on it. He told me I’ll get another appointment in 12 weeks. I’ve had the Pfizer vaccine and he told me not to worry about side effects. He said the info sheet would tell me what to do if I have any. It kind of does. It tells me the numbers on who gets side effects and what they’re likely to be but it doesn’t tell me whether I’ll get Covid-like symptoms. He doesn’t either.  I’m assuming that wouldn’t be a normal reaction. 

Being one of those melodramatic fools, neurotic to the bone that Green Day used to sing about I have spent large parts of tonight (24 hours on from the jab) wondering if I have a bit of a sore throat coming on. I don’t think I do. I’m not a medical expert but I don’t think that things like that come and go according to how much time you spend thinking about them. The information does mention chills and headaches but I’ve had no hint of anything like that. I thought I might considering the number of nursing students I have spoken to this week at work who have reported feeling unwell after their vaccine. Then I remember my own uni days during which I would have explained that I had malaria, small pox and the plague itself before I’d turn up for a shorthand session. That’s come back to bite me. The only thing I have to report so far is a bit of a sore arm. Like a bruise, nothing drastic. Better than Covid.

The last thing I’m asked to do is go over to another row of chairs and wait 15 minutes before leaving. Again there is a questionable interpretation of two metres between them so if you are having your vaccine at Saints keep your mask on and don’t start any conversations about last night’s telly. Nobody enforces the waiting time. Nobody releases you. You just time yourself and go. In theory you could just get straight off but I didn’t. It was Monday night. There wasn’t much to do and I’d recorded House Of Games so there was no fire.

All in all it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. The people there are doing great work and it is not often you can say that St Helens is involved in something which will genuinely change our lives for the better. I feel privileged and fortunate to have been involved, particularly since the government did not consider me clinically vulnerable until last week. My surgeon disagrees based on our last conversation in November, but I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to get the vaccine once it arrived. 

We all need to go and get jabbed the first chance we get. It really is the only way out of Joe Wicks exercise videos and back to the pub.

Have You Got A Spare?

You know my political opinion on our current predicament but here’s a quick recap so we can move on. 

Transmission is probably more to do with schools than pubs so we close pubs and keep schools open. People die of causes other than Covid as a direct consequence of lockdown policies, but so many people die of Covid that you’re not allowed to mention deaths by any other cause. They just don’t happen if they’re not tallied daily on the TV news or in the newspapers. 

There’s an effective vaccine but not enough of it to protect the number of people required to bring back some semblance of normality. So we get tier 4 restrictions, which like their predecessor in tier 3 are lockdown rebranded in an effort to combat lockdown fatigue. People are wavering. After nine months of restrictions they’ve had enough. So along with the rebrand there’s the timely release of news that there are not one but two new strains of the virus. At least one of these new strains spreads faster than the original, which was already spreading so fast that it kept us from our work places, hobbies and anything that even looks like a social life.

I think we’re up to speed on that now, so let’s come at this from a different angle. After all, this is a column about disability as opposed to politics. Let me try and shed some light on what it’s like to be a disabled person in the Covid-19 pandemic. Or to be this disabled person, in any case.

The first assumption people make about me is that I am or have been shielding. I am sure many disabled people are shielding.  I know one or two who are but I’m not one of them. It’s an easy if slightly lazy assumption to make, like imagining that I live on benefits instead of working or that I’m on first name terms with that woman who used to be in Silent Witness.

When restrictions were first imposed in March I was one of the first in our office to go and work from home. That was because the government released a list of conditions which they thought might make you more vulnerable to the very worst effects of Covid. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) was one of those conditions. CKD makes it sound a bit like an after shave. Like something you’d pay for or buy for someone else as a gift. I hate ungratefulness but I’d be largely disappointed if somebody bought me CKD for Christmas. I’ve already got it, anyway. If there’s anything more awkward than receiving a shit Christmas present it’s receiving a shit Christmas present that you’ve already got. 

At the point when I started working from home there was no advice about shielding for anyone. When it became a thing a week or so later I did not receive a text or a letter advising me to shield. I have discussed this with both my nephrologist and my transplant surgeon and neither feels I am particularly vulnerable. If I’d had my transplant before all this kicked off then I would have been advised to shield. After the surgery I will be on medication which suppresses the immune system so that my body does not reject the new kidney. If the piss-pots running this country haven’t found a way out of this by then I will be required to shield. That is unless I receive the vaccine which according to the speculative gizmo that is the online vaccine calculator will be March or April. Let’s call it September, then. But until my surgery, since I don’t have an immune disorder or a respiratory condition I’m as free as the next man. Which is not very free at all as it turns out.  

Like many people, disabled or not, my freedom extends to the fact that I can go to the shop for essentials like food, and to the pharmacy to pick up the 363 medications required at my stage of CKD. One one such sunlit jaunt recently I was shouted after by someone walking behind me. She clearly didn’t know my name (much like the rest of the population who think I’m Phil, Paul, Lee or that woman who used to be in Silent Witness) so I didn’t know she was talking to me at first. It was only when I turned to cross the road that I realised she was trying to get my attention.

“Ey mate...have you got a spare one of them?’ 

That’s how they talk sometimes in Thatto Heath. Common nouns are viewed as a luxury. Either that or she just couldn’t bring herself to refer to my wheelchair. Maybe if she had to she would whisper that one word like Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough used to on that inane sketch they used to do where they dressed as gossiping women. The only way I knew that the woman was referring to my wheelchair is that when she asked again she looked down at it and nodded.

The answer was no.  I do not have a spare wheelchair. When I relayed this information she looked genuinely shocked, as if I’d told her that test and trace was now working. What sort of disabled person was I if I didn’t have a spare wheelchair? What if that the one I have breaks? It’s a fair question, isn’t it? And it reminds me of something my dad used to say if we asked him for something unrealistic as kids:

‘Oh aye...we’ll get two in case one breaks’

It was meant to be a sarcastic way of saying no but I didn’t think that approach would be appropriate in this situation. Not everybody gets sarcasm and I didn’t want to get her hopes up. She didn’t even do nouns. There was bugger all chance that she would get my inherited sarcasm. So I just said no. I don’t have a spare wheelchair and if the one I have breaks then an incredibly sweaty man comes around to fix it, realises he hasn’t got ‘the parts’ and then comes back and fixes it.

I did try to help the woman with some advice on how I got my wheelchair but it turns out she was after a quick fix. The time it would have taken to go through the correct channels at wheelchair services in the NHS were not going to cut it. That’s if they are still organising the provision of wheelchairs during Covid.  So all ends up I didn’t solve her problem.  The chair was not for her, but for some unspecified relative who somehow needed but didn’t have a wheelchair of their own. Now who was the disorganised disabled person? I might not have had a spare wheelchair but I had at least managed to organise one! 

Even if I’d had a spare wheelchair what are the chances of it being of the required size and dimensions to cater for her unspecified relative?   Non-wheelchair users don’t always think about these things. A wheelchair is a wheelchair to some. They’d think about that a bit more if they had to use someone else’s legs for a spell. Her plan made Operation Moonshot look like a sure thing.

She didn’t press the matter, and one of the advantages of using a wheelchair is that you can escape from people fairly quickly in a downhill direction on Elephant Lane unless they break into a run. The only people in Thatto Heath who regularly run are eight year-olds scampering after the ice cream van before it pulls away so I was able to get away..

I reached the sanctuary of the shop, where all I had to deal with were the ‘shouldn’t you be shielding?’ glances of the other customers while I was deciding which doughnuts to buy. Essentials. So there you have it, a snapshot of what it is like to be this disabled person during the pandemic. It turns out that it is still not a given that you can avoid unwanted, bizarre attention even when everybody else is supposed to be staying in.

Locking Down The Debate On Covid Regulations

You might expect another spectacular u-turn from Boris Johnson and his turgid band of haunted goons to be met with anger and derision, and you’d be right. The way he brushes his hair (or doesn’t) is enough to infuriate most of us.  Not that anything he does stops even his opponents from referring to him as ‘Boris’ as if he’s their mate and not some entitled, over-promoted journalist who can’t count high enough to tell you with any accuracy how many children he has. But it is his policy making and inability to handle the current crisis that have regularly sparked the most criticism and anger. And justifiably so. The man is a tedious, vacuous imposter playing out his Churchill fantasies.

This latest u-turn is perhaps the most spectacular, which is quite something when you consider that he was recently forced to change his mind about his policy of trying to starve children. A footballer made him do that, which is ironic given that the same people who call Johnson ‘Boris’ are also quite likely to view footballers as greedy playboys who are destroying civilisation one tweet at a time.  

Anger has cranked up as a consequence of Johnson somehow raising his already prodigious u-turn game.  He told everyone just a couple of days ago that the rules around social distancing would be relaxed for five days over Christmas, only to announce today that not only would they tighten again but that for many they would be more severe than they has been before. The planned five-day window of relaxed measures is now reduced to one for those of us lucky enough to live in tiers 1 and 2. For London and the South East, moved from tier 2 to tier 3 only three days ago, Johnson has invented tier 4. Tier 4 is a baron wasteland in which Christmas is pretty much cancelled except for the shit bits like the Mrs Brown’s Boys special. No mixing with other households and if you happen to have made plans to travel to or from that area to see family then you are now forbidden from doing that too.

Plenty to get angry about there then, as complex and often expensive plans are being cancelled as I write. Yet it is the timing of the change of policy which has outraged the lockdown ultras and not necessarily the measures themselves. They have been calling for the Christmas relaxations to be scrapped ever since they were first dreamed up. That doesn’t seem too out there as a concept. I’m still with them at this point. Perhaps increasing the number of households allowed to mix just because of the date on the calendar doesn’t feel like the most logical step. Covid doesn’t know it’s Christmas. That’s a fact. Bob Geldof wouldn’t even have to ask. 

But the most enthusiastic lockdown advocates don’t just want the Christmas plan scrapped. They want a full lockdown.  Apparently we haven’t had one yet which is why we need one now.  The relish with which some of them have been calling for this is something to behold. All they want for Christmas is for legislation to force them to stay at home. That’s a sentiment which wouldn’t work quite as well in a Mariah Carey song. But it’s what they want. Desperately. If they have to open another pair of socks on Christmas Day when what they really want is to be able to look forward to working in their pants and another series of Gethin Jones on Morning Live there is going to be trouble. 

I can understand why they feel we need a lockdown but I struggle with the strange notion that we haven’t had a lockdown already, which is the tale that the real champions of lockdown are peddling. The idea that we are in this situation because people were not placed under total house arrest since March is mildly offensive given what everyone has been through. I failed maths at school three times but by my reckoning we are about to enter the third lockdown in the last nine stinking, noxious months. I should have had a kidney transplant in the first half of the year and by the end of it my family and I were being prevented from visiting my dad in hospital except on days when he was considered critically ill. By the time he passed away we had already been brought in to see him three times - braced for the worst each time - having been told we had to stay away on the days that he was well enough to enjoy the company. 

So the issue here is not that we don’t have a problem with Covid or that we don’t have to significantly reduce the numbers of infections and hospitalisations. The issue is that Covid is far from the only problem and that tackling it with the blunt instrument of lockdown is merely a pausing mechanism - a sticking plaster which throws up all kinds of other issues that in many cases are as bad or worse. Absolutely no attention whatsoever is being paid to the very real human cost of lockdown. 

Debate on this issue is shut down before it begins. Failure to support a policy of endless harmful lockdowns is of course viewed by the far left as some kind of poisonous Ian Duncan Smithery. For an encore I’ll no doubt be out in the streets (when it’s safe) protesting against the award of my own disability benefits. Yet for all we’ve been through because of lockdown I might still support it if I thought it was going to bring about an end to the pandemic. Every time I hear someone say that we should stay in so that we’ll be back to normal sooner I want to vomit and commit random acts of violence upon their person. We have been sold this lie by Johnson and his imbecile colleagues too many times. It’s got nothing to do with getting us back to normal sooner. Its only achievable aim is to temporarily reduce hospital admissions so that we don’t run out of ICU capacity should it be needed. That might be a very real danger but If the u-turners running the country hadn’t spent the last 10 years deliberately under-funding the NHS then the threat of that might be greatly reduced. 

The government can’t take responsibility for that so they need to find a way to get the few remaining dissenters to believe in lockdown and to keep those who back it on board for longer.  Enter the ‘new strain’ of Covid which is apparently even more infectious than the one which is so infectious it has demanded people hide from it for most of 2020. It has an infectiousness spectrum similar to that of the speedometer settings on the spaceship in Spaceballs. Ludicrous infectious and ‘are you nuts?’ infectious. If it is more infectious than the original strain then you must be able to pass it on just by looking at someone from outside your own household. No wonder people are worried. 

The new strain doubtless exists, but it has done since September and there is no evidence either that its effects are any worse than the original or that it won’t respond to the vaccine. Wheeling it out now because you’ve got to find a way to pull off an about face on Christmas regulations without sparking a riot (also bad for Covid) is just the kind of docile shithousery you’d expect from the most incompetent leadership since David Cameron decided to ask xenophobes about our membership of a major trading block.

The joyous reception which greeted news of the Covid vaccine feels like a very long time ago now. Yet it remains our only hope of a return to normality. In the meantime measures will be tightened and then loosened more often than Johnson’s trousers. People will die, many of them from Covid despite the measures and the best efforts of medical staff. But many will die also because they missed their cancer screening, because their transplant was delayed or because nine months of restrictions with no end in sight pushed their fragile mental health over the edge. 

Just don’t expect to see a running daily tally of those casualties on Sky News. 

Back To Bedlam

We are not quite back where we started, but almost. Despite having had seven months to develop an effective test and trace system the government wants us to believe that it has no choice but to put us back into a pretty severe form of lockdown. Merseyside, and more specifically the Liverpool city region which includes St Helens, appears to be just about the only place in England which has today been subjected to the very strictest restrictions under the government’s facile three-tiered ‘traffic light’ system. As the only region in tier 3 our pubs, gyms, casinos, sport & leisure facilities and betting shops will be forced to close from this Wednesday (October 14) for a period of at least four weeks.

The government has spent the last few weeks blaming the public for the rise in Covid-19 infections which it says justify stricter measures. This ignores that it fully reopened schools in early September before a few weeks later declaring that students could and should prepare to return to or start university. With the £9,000 per head that this raises in tuition fees now safe it then decided that any students who had moved away from their home towns to study (as most do) would not be able to return home this side of Christmas. Despite many feeling confined to their university digs the government pressed on with its agenda that the public, and in particular students, were causing a spike.

And yet it is not the education sector which is subject to any tightening of restrictions. The blame has shifted again. Universities will stay open which is fabulous news since it means I still have to work. Schools will stay open. To combat the spikes noticeable since the start of the new academic year the government has decided to implement restrictions on the hospitality sector. Pubs, in essence. Backed by its army of useful idiots on social media tweeting their videos of crowds gathering on city centre streets, the government has seemingly convinced local leaders in Merseyside that some actual scientific evidence that the spike is down to pub-goers will not be necessary. 

Never mind that many of the videos doing the rounds were the result of the government’s own idiotic decision to introduce a 10.00pm curfew at pubs across the country a couple of weeks ago. This ensured that all pub-goers would be chucked out on to the streets at the same time, potentially causing crowds outside and taking us back to the not so glorious days of unseemly scraps over taxis and places in the kebab queue. The argument that shutting pubs an hour earlier means people get less drunk and are therefore more likely to comply with social distancing measures has been offered. This seems fanciful. In the first place most people inclined to go to pubs with a 10.00pm curfew just go out an hour earlier to compensate. In the second place it’s an argument that accepts that scenes like those seen on social media videos are the norm, and that pubs are either not trying or not succeeding in enforcing social distancing measures.

My own experience of this theory is that it is absolute and utter arse-wash. I have just been to Durham for a few days for my birthday. It was outstanding, than you for asking. Durham is the scene of Dominic Cummings’ now notorious eye-test drive and so perhaps a little synonymous with Covid-related problems. Yet the people running pubs there are doing an outstanding job of making sure that all of the government guidelines are adhered to. You don’t get through the front door without a mask or proof of an exemption, and you have to keep the mask on until you are at your table, making sure to put it back on if you leave your table which you only do in order to use the facilities. It is table service only so no queues at the bar, and you check in to the pub using QR codes either on the pubs’ own app or on the NHS test and trace version. This allows you to be notified should you come into contact with somebody who is infected. 

And despite the berserk 10.00 curfew there were no crowds outside either. Numbers inside the pubs are limited to however many can be accommodated at socially distanced tables. Several people were turned away on Saturday. Those people do not - staggering as it may seem to the lockdown ultras who have been wishing this Fresh Hell on us for weeks - hang about outside for a bit of a drunken sing-song or to protest at the injustice of reduced pub capacities. They accept it and move on with their lives leaving the rest of us to continue with a quiet, perfectly safe and social evening.

Part of the reason that government has been able to foist this shit show back upon us is not only compliance from political leaders like Joe Anderson and Steve Rotheram but also from the public. Social media has been awash with posts from those who are just desperate to go back to the good old days of March when going out meant half an hour in the park or a trip to Tesco. There is no appetite it seems within our community for learning to live with the virus. We must always live in fear of it and any alternative ideas are dismissed as dangerous Covid denial. I’m not a Covid denier. I can read a newspaper and digest a TV news bulletin. I understand how many people have died from it and that potentially nobody is really 100% safe while it is in the community. But if our only defence against Covid-19 is a form of lockdown then I would question whether we are truly alive anyway. Those arguing that lockdown reduces infection numbers are right. It does. No shit Sherlock, as they say. But it is no way to live and is just a pause in any case. Where is the exit strategy? This government told us in March that we would ‘turn the tide’ against this virus in 12 weeks. Now look at us, forbidden once again from having a life outside of work for who knows how long and gratefully applauding the decision as we shut ourselves away again. Fucking pathetic.

A lot has been said (then largely ignored) about the non-Covid death toll during these measures. When it does finally end how many people will have died because they didn’t have access to the treatments they need for other serious conditions? I am already a victim of lockdown. When Britain shut up shop in March I was just waiting for theatre space for a kidney transplant. All transplants were suspended in April until July, during which time my kidneys - being about as compliant as a ‘reveller’ on a politically motivated social media video - decided to kick up a gear to a point where my level of function was considered too high for a transplant. 

On the face of it an increase in kidney function might be considered a good thing and while I don’t place myself among the absolute most unfortunate of those with treatments delayed by lockdown I can assure you that live kidney donations are not something which can be put off indefinitely. The sooner, the better to give everyone involved the best opportunity to recover as quickly as possible. I am expecting a call from the surgeon tomorrow (October 13) with an update on my situation but let’s not be too open-mouthed with shock when he decides that my currently non-essential surgery can wait. All of which leaves me in an intolerable limbo, something which I have been living with since the summer of 2017 and which I tend to vent to the renal psychologist once a month rather than on these pages.  

There seems little doubt that there is a direct link between Boris Johnson’s long-held and rather infamous dislike for Liverpool and the targeting of Merseyside today. Or at least between Boris Johnson and the fact that most areas in the south with their Tory MPs are currently under the lightest restrictions in tier 1. It hardly seems worth having the debate about Johnson and Liverpool ever since his vile comments about the people and their perceived victimhood. That’s a trope which is shamefully trotted out to to score cheap points only by the desperate in online disagreements about something as trivial as football. You would think a man who considers himself worthy of the highest office in the land would be above it. Apparently not. He’s the source of it and this is just another example of that prejudice. What is more surprising and therefore disappointing is that people like Anderson and Rotheram have not done enough to challenge it. By contrast leaders in the Manchester region led by Andy Burnham have threatened legal action if these draconian measures are introduced without proper scientific evidence. The result of that is that those areas remain in tier 2 and pubs stay open. Life is far from normal there, but they have some semblance of normality and more importantly of hope. 

Hope. Remember that? It’s been a while. It will apparently be a good while longer.

Blind Faith

A couple of summers ago I had to visit the optician. It was a particularly hot summer, large parts of which I had spent in a baking, stuffy office staring at a screen. This, it turned out, was drying out my eyes to such an extent that they had turned red. I looked like a cartoon baddie.

So I had an eye test. An eye test which did not involve climbing into my car and driving 30 miles to a beauty spot. This method - the one we are expected to believe was used by Dominic Cummings to determine whether or not it was safe to drive back to London from Durham - is unsurprisingly not one currently recommended by any of the major optical retail chains. To paraphrase Blackadder there is only one thing wrong with this explanation. It is bollocks.

The initial denials of any lockdown breach from Cummings, from bumbling Donald Trump tribute act Boris Johnson and a whole host of desperate, should-have-known-better careerist ministers were not enough to bury the story. Even Tory brochure of hate the Daily Mail turned on the government and its lying, entitled, narcissist chief advisor. The nation’s press could and should have employed some more sensible social distancing measures in the current climate, but they were fully justified in continuing to follow this story up. It was and still is essential to the continued efforts to control the pandemic that the little snot-weasel be made accountable.

All of which led to the announcement yesterday that Cummings would be making a statement and taking questions himself. Some had a problem with an unelected fraudster getting this type of national TV platform which was understandable. The man already has far too much power and to make him the centre of national attention was arguably pandering to his massive ego. But it also offered the viewing public an opportunity to see him try to explain for himself why it was fine for him to drive his family 250 miles to Durham while his wife was experiencing symptoms of the virus. Why was it ok for him and not for you? Why had you not seen your grandchildren, why had you lost loved ones without being there for them or missed funerals if this sort of thing was within the rules of the March 23 lockdown?

So he got his platform. Half an hour late he finally arrived, seated at a small table in the Downing Street garden. He looked like he was selling raffle tickets or some sort of cheap shit at the St Helens Show. Someone in government (possibly Cummings himself as it appears he is the one in possession of the administration’s one brain cell) had obviously judged the mood and decided he wasn’t worth one of the brightly coloured plinths reserved for ministers at the daily briefings. Bad Eyes? Get In Your Car, Drive 30 Miles would not have worked as an effective slogan.

What followed was an explanation that was inconsistent and implausible. We are back to Blackadder again when he had to explain to his puritanical auntie why she had just heard someone shout ‘great booze-up, Edmund’ from the drunken party he was secretly hosting in the next room. He thinks about it for an age before coming up with the tale of Great Boo who had just awoken after suffering from sleeping sickness. As Auntie Whiteadder had heard ‘Great Boo’s Up’.

Cummings told us that having himself fallen ill with the symptoms of coronavirus and isolating for the requisite 14 days he had been suffering from poor vision. The problem remained when he started to recover from the other symptoms so to find out whether he would be fit enough to drive, he drove. Of course, why wouldn’t he? Who hasn’t done that?

Well, everyone as it turns out. Cummings’ increasingly desperate supporters must have been dismayed at this explanation. They had spent the previous 48 hours explaining why driving 250 miles to a different part of the country, in a confined metal box with an infected wife and a four-year-old was not a breach of the lockdown rules. They thought they had nailed that, now here they were learning that the next task on their to do list would be to explain why it was not in any way dangerous to drive around for 45 minutes without the ability to see properly. You have to feel for these useful idiots. For me that’s like pushing my chair up the steepest ramp in Britain to get to the pub only to find a flight of stairs at the top of the ramp which lead to the pub. The hard work has only just started and maybe it is a hopeless cause. Couldn’t he have given them something to work with? Anything?

Not that it has deterred them. Cummings still has his loyal following. They tell us that in taking the child to a place where he could receive the care that he may or may not have needed Cummings was only doing what any caring parent would do for their child. These people queued up to tell us that they would have done the same in his position. We’ll ignore the fact that Cummings has to drive the length of the country to find someone who likes him enough to help him with child care. That tells its own story. The point is that had any of those people done what Cummings chose to do they would have been arrested and fined. What his explanation depends on is the public’s belief in his exceptionalism. That we will tug our forelocks and accept that he is better than we are and so not subject to the same rules. The sadness of it is that to a large extent it works. Or at least it has so far. Unless something changes dramatically Cummings is going to be allowed to ride this out on the back of cap-doffers who ‘aren’t interested’ in politics, absolutely do not vote Tory but have no doubts that Dianne Abbott would have redirected all of their taxes to the local mosque.

There are others who go a stage further. There have been some fairly vile takes which state that anyone objecting to Cummings’ actions has no idea what he has to go through because, being furloughed, all they have to do is sit in their gardens and enjoy a beer. It hardly needs saying how insulting this is to the millions who have had no choice but to be furloughed. The thousands who have made horrifying sacrifices to comply with the measures as their family members perished. To my personal dismay a couple of rugby league club owners and self proclaimed man of the people Tony Bellew are among those sitting in judgement of the furloughed. The same rugby league owners who are currently using the furlough scheme to pay their players at Rochdale and at Wakefield Trinity. As for Bellew, the next time he visits Goodison Park I would hope he is met with the same reception that greeted Rod Stewart when he went to Celtic Park just after the election. After hearing that the wannabe-Scot crooner had sided with the Tories during the campaign the Celtic fans unfurled a banner which read ‘fuck off, Rod’.

There are just the beginnings of a Tory revolt. Douglas Ross was a minister in the Scotland office until today when he became the first to make a stand. He decided he could not tell the public that they had been wrong to follow the rules and one government advisor had been right to break them. Yet this is merely a ripple. It will take similar action from several more weightier names in the government for our non-stick Prime Minister to abandon his plan to baton down the hatches until it all blows over. The prospects of that appear bleak at the moment. Only this morning Michael Gove, that symbol of self entitlement and psychopathic British exceptionalism, was on TV trying to keep a straight face while telling people that he has ‘on occasion’ driven to check his eyesight but that he is ‘not an authority on driving’. Indeed not, but the question of whether it is advisable or even legal to drive with impaired vision feels like something the DVLA left out of the handbook because it was just too bloody obvious.

So what have we learned other than that the far right cult which comprises our government don’t much care whether the public believe their lies or not? Fundamentally that it is less about left or right wing politics and more about the more basic question of right and wrong and about not having a psychotic belief that you are untouchable. But most of all, we have learned what not to do if your working environment gets too hot and your eyes turn red.

Cummings And Goings

Like most people I have barely left the house for the last two months. I have been working from home since the government announced on March 17 that anyone with any of a whole raft of underlying conditions should do so.

Though I am at an advanced stage of chronic kidney disease and am awaiting transplant I am fortunate that having not had my surgery yet I am not immunosuppressed. So I have been able to take the odd push down to the shops for essentials. I have even driven to the supermarket once. This constitutes a day out in the new normal of 2020.

Others have it worse than I do. I know people who are shielding. People who are immunosuppressed who according to government advice from March 23 could no longer leave the house at all if they wanted to avoid contracting the potentially deadly coronavirus Covid-19. The rest of us were told only to go out for food or medicines, exercise for up to one hour, work (if you are a key worker like an NHS worker, delivery driver or supermarket staff) or to take supplies of food or medicines to friends and family who were shielding.

Those rules have been relaxed slightly. On May 10 our jibbering halfwit Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the previous limit of one hour of exercise no longer applied. Activities like picnics, sunbathing, golf and ‘unlimited rambling’ were back on the agenda. There’s a certain irony in gaining permission for unlimited rambling from Johnson, a world class unlimited rambler. Yet visiting family was still a no-no. You could meet family members for outdoor activities as long as you adhered to the social distancing guideline of staying two metres apart but you could not visit them at their home nor let them into yours. The only exception to this was that children could spend time at the homes of each of their parents if they were not living at the same address. If you were a grandparent hoping to see the little ones you were still shit out of luck. You had to suck it up and stay away from them for the greater good. Many grandparents were more likely to be in the more vulnerable groups it was said. It was accepted that the measures were for their own protection.

Imagine all our surprise then when it was revealed last night that Dominic Cummings, the government’s special advisor, flagrantly and dangerously broke these rules. Rules that he had helped devise, let’s not forget. And not just by popping down the road or across town but by driving over 250 miles from his London home to Durham. Fucking Durham. He apparently did so to help his sick wife look after their son. In imposing the restrictions the government went out of their way to express sympathy on the matter but nevertheless explicitly stated that individuals should not travel even in such circumstances. The message was drummed into us day after day at the government’s pantomime plinth daily briefings. There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt. No circumstances in which it was deemed ok to just pop here or just go there. Not even if you were Dominic Cummings.

Though social media has been full of people delighting in eagerly grassing each other up for breaches of these rules they were mostly followed. There were photographs doing the rounds of people gathering on beaches and of one hard of thinking community dancing the conga on VE Day. Still, the vast majority of the population reluctantly complied and stayed at home. If there were sick relatives to care for in other parts of the country the people made other arrangements. Thousands have had to leave family members to die alone as a consequence of this directive. The cruelty of this needs no further explanation. I haven’t got the words for people who have been through this horror only to learn now that the rules didn’t apply to Cummings.

He stayed in a building close to his parents’ farm. That itself is a breach of the government’s own rules but it also places his parents at significant risk given that they are in the most vulnerable age group. He did all of this while himself experiencing symptoms of coronavirus! Either Cummings is sufficiently sociopathic to deliberately place his own parents in mortal danger or the risks aren’t quite as high as we have been told to this point. Either way millions of us have been taken for fools by the elected officials responsible for protecting us. I always knew that electing a government somewhere to the right of Paolo Di Canio would be damaging but I must admit to being slightly taken aback by the extent to which they have fulfilled that potential.

Such is their arrogance they are not even sorry. As I write the entire Tory cabinet is rushing to send out social media statements in defence of Cummings. He is receiving a more strict level of shielding from any wrongdoing than anyone vulnerable shielding from the virus itself. It’s actually an embarrassment and quite shameful to see the leaders of a developed democracy behaving this way. It is even more mortifying to consider that it is happening in our democracy. This is the sort of skullduggery normally reserved for despots and dictators who rule by fear. Consider the following responses;

‘Two parents with coronavirus were anxiously taking care of their young child. Those seeking to politicise it should take a long, hard look in the mirror’ - Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.

‘It was entirely right for Dom Cummings to find child care for his toddler when both he and his wife were getting ill’ - Health Secretary and ought-to-know-better recently recovered coronavirus patient Matt Hancock.

‘Taking care of your wife and young child is justifiable and reasonable, trying to score political points over it isn’t’ - Chancellor Of The Exchequer Rishi Sunak.

‘Caring for your wife and child is not a crime’ - Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for Fuck All Michael Gove.

You’ll notice the common thread. Trying to spin these irresponsible breaches as some moral good. Looking after the family. Taking care of the kids. The problem with this approach is that it implies that the rest of us, including those who could not be with their dying relatives or who could not attend their funerals, just didn’t care enough about their loved ones to break the rules. If not, if the ministers are standing by the idea that Joe Public was right to stick to the rules however emotionally difficult that may have been, then what they are therefore trying to sell us is the idea that Cummings is entitled to be viewed as an exception. That his family matters more than yours or mine. Don’t you be driving up to a different part of the country to look after your family. You stay at home, save lives, stay alert, don’t be selfish. But Dom? He’s sweet. He gets a pass.

To be fair it wasn’t always part of the plan to let him off like this. No, phase one (this government loves a phase) was to cover it up for eight weeks. When an unusually inquisitive national newspaper got bored of complying with the bullshit and asked on April 5 whether it was true that Cummings was in or had recently been in Durham Downing Street said ‘that’ll be a no comment’. It wasn’t until Cummings’ wife Mary Wakefield failed to specify his location in her account of his illness for The Spectator that the jig was up.

Defending the indefensible is merely an encore to what has been a scandalous cover-up from which there should be a succession of rolling heads, not just that of Cummings. Someone in Number 10 sanctioned Cummings’ Covid road trip. I’d send them on another one. A European football tour with Harry Redknapp and Razor Ruddock and the boys at the earliest opportunity. If the electorate can’t hold them to account and make them change their shameful ways then perhaps a few nights listening to Paul Merson trying to save them from their vices might do the trick.

Cummings’ lockdown flout is not the first of its kind. Yet the response from the cabinet ministers is markedly different to the one we saw previously. Neil Ferguson was a government advisor on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) before he broke lockdown rules by receiving a visit from his married girlfriend. Before that Scotland’s chief medical officer Catherine Calderwood lost her position after visiting her second home.

On Ferguson future fall-guy Hancock declared himself ‘speechless’ and said that Ferguson had ‘made the right decision to resign’. Hancock also said he would ‘back the police’ if they saw fit to take action. In the end they decided not to, but it was not the backing of those in positions of political power that got Ferguson off the hook. Hancock just didn’t want to be seen to be trying to do the job of the police for them. Just as well since he can’t even do his own job, as over 35,000 deaths and counting will attest.

The most worrying aspect of all of this shameless rank-closing within the cabinet is what it says about Cummings’ influence within government. What is it about him that has Hancock, Raab, Sunak and Gove so desperate to avoid cutting him loose? My best guess is that he is the only one among them with an IQ over 12 and that without him they just won’t know what to do to get us through the rest of the current crisis. Or is it something more sinister? Has he got the negatives? Has he kidnapped Gove’s mum? Nah, that can’t be it. Like Gove would care. Whatever the reason for it the government’s collective refusal to force the resignation of an unelected advisor in clear breach of the law at a time of national crisis is deeply troubling. We are back to the question of government without accountability. Of dictators and despots.

We may all yet pay a price for the government’s abhorrent double standard. How can any government minister stand behind his or her brightly coloured, confusingly sloganed plinth each day from now and tell us to adhere to rules that its own insiders can break without consequence? There will be those who will no longer listen which can only increase the chances of more gatherings, more crowded streets, more congas, less compliance with social distancing and - if what we have been told is true - more of a likelihood of a second huge wave of infections and deaths.

If that happens and Cummings is still in his job then good luck telling people that they can’t visit family or attend funerals. Some of you will have already hit the road.

Testing Times

This story starts with Emma unexpectedly coming home early from work yesterday. She’s a key worker at the crown court. Though there are no jury trials going on amid social distancing in the current crisis they remain open for sentencing. Somebody has to staff them.

Until yesterday that is when it was discovered that two members of staff had tested positive for coronavirus. The building was evacuated and will be closed now until Monday at least. Although the two staff members in question have been off with symptoms in recent days their diagnosis obviously increases the chances that Emma could have contracted the virus. Last night she said she thought she might be getting a bit of a sore throat as well as some aches. By this morning the sore throat had not developed but the aches persisted. Matt Hancock had announced yesterday that key workers outside the NHS were eligible for a test along with their co-habitants. So it was time for us to get a test.

Emma went online to find that we had three options in terms of testing centres we could visit. Two were in Manchester at either the airport or the Etihad Stadium while the other was in Knutsford. Not ideal if you live in St Helens especially at a time when the government don’t want people venturing far from their own localities. But this was essential. We decided that Knutsford was just about the best of those options and were given a time slot of between 1.00 and 1.30pm today.

It wasn’t that easy to find. The website claims it is on Toft Road but when we got to Toft Road we had more to do. There is some very small white signage, hastily printed no doubt, leading you to the Covid-19 test centre. It would be very easy to miss and considering the litany of problems we had with the testing process thereafter it is a small miracle that we managed to find it without missing our time slot.

When you get there two things immediately greet you. Queues and soldiers. It was extremely hot inside the car this afternoon so we had the window open on the passenger side as we approached the queue. We were barked at to close the window by one of the soldiers. He was wearing a flimsy looking mask and full military uniform. There were dozens like him, all shuffling about from car to car giving instructions to an increasingly bewildered public.

At this point the barking stops. Once inside the grounds of the centre you cannot have your window open more than just a crack. Even then that is only for brief, simple instructions. More commonly they stand next to your car window holding up a card that reads ‘please call.......’ and then a mobile number is written underneath. So you call and have a conversation on the telephone with a soldier who is six feet from your car window. I didn’t read the full instructions on the website. Emma did that. So I don’t know what happens if you don’t have your mobile phone to hand.

The first part of the conversation is about scanning. When your appointment is confirmed they send you a text message with a link on it. You are instructed to open the link which takes you to a scannable (is that a word?, Pages for the iPad seems to think so) code. You are asked to hold up the code to your car window to be scanned which is supposed to allow you to register so you can be given your testing kit. Only it doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. This is me and Emma, remember? After a few minutes twiddling with knobs and muffled whispers between soldiers our man is back on the phone. He says there is a problem with the scanner. This has been fine all day, he tells us, until now. Again, has he not heard about us?

All is not lost. There’s a phone number on a receipt card that is part of the testing kit. We can ring that number to complete our registration at home once we have taken the test. He says something about attaching a bar code to this card and I have no clue what he means because what he doesn’t explain is that within the testing kit are four stickers each with bar codes on. He says it will all become clear when we get the testing kits. He asks me to wind down the back window so his colleague can drop two testing kits on to the back seat. We are then asked to move out of the queue and park up by a hedge on the edge of what is actually just a big car park next to Knutsford Leisure Centre. He attempts to reassure me that this will not be difficult but says that if I have any questions I should put my hazard lights on. He doesn’t state the obvious by telling me not to get out of the car which is a shame because I was looking forward to the look on his face when I told him that to do so would be more trouble than it’s worth since my chair is in the boot of the car at this point.

You need a nursing degree to decipher the testing process. If we ever get back to the office I might ask some of our nursing academic staff to give me a few pointers because initially I was clueless. You get four pages of instructions where one would have done. Part of those instructions is a diagram, ambiguously labelled. It is meant to identify all the items in the testing kit so that you know exactly what to do with which item. You wouldn’t want to be downing the contents of the vial, for example, or sticking the swab in the wrong orifice. The vial looks just that - vile. Like something they used to put in the cocktails in Maloney’s when the bar men thought they were Tom Cruise. Maloney’s is still the only Irish bar I’ve ever been in where buying a pint is frowned upon.

The swab is for your nose and your throat. You only get one so it is dual purpose. The instructions are to take a swab of the throat first. There might be a medical or hygiene reason for this but if there is it is not elaborated on despite the forest-decimating amount of paper they are using. When I swab the back of my throat I gag and splutter like someone who has downed the vial or a cocktail at Maloney’s. There’s also a self consciousness that comes with having to twirl the swab around inside your nostril for 15 seconds. It’s like picking your nose but without getting your hands dirty or removing any significant bogey-age. That’s definitely not a word whatever iPad Pages says.

The swabbing is the easy bit. It’s the labelling that causes the problems. The four stickers containing bar codes are there for a reason. There is meant to be one on the vial which by now should have the used swab inside it. That’s another difficulty. The swab is too long to fit into the vial so you have to snap some of it away. It bends easily but it does not break for what feels like several months. By this time we have been here over an hour. I have had to put those hazard lights on for assistance long ago. Anyone who thinks this is like going to a McDonald’s drive-thru think again. You don’t even get a happy meal at the end of it. Eventually the swab snaps, I can now close the vial and attach one of the bar code stickers to it. Another goes on your receipt card which we have to take home. Remember, we have to ring the number on the receipt card to complete our registration. The other two labels are for the clear plastic back now containing the vial with the swab inside and a bigger grey plastic bag into which the whole lot should be placed.

Except we’ve lost the remaining bar code stickers.

I had them just a second ago. I insist several times that I have put them in the bag but Emma has emptied the contents of said bag twice and there are no bar code stickers. To borrow Hancock’s phrase the pressure is ‘ramping up’ now. The soldier is back by our window, this time on Emma’s side and he’s trying to explain to us as patiently as possible how everything should be packaged before we can leave. As the search for the missing stickers continues and gets ever more fruitless, and as we start to bake inside an air-tight hunk of metal with the sun blazing down on us - conditions that would kill a good sized dog - Emma breaks into uncontrollable laughter at the farcical nature of this scene. I’m not laughing. I’m panicking. I’m worrying that Covid-19 will be a note in human history by the time we get out of Knutsford. Or that we may never get out. Perhaps to protect the public in a time of crisis the army will be authorised to just shoot the idiot that has managed to lose the fucking sticky labels! My fear turns to anger. Anger at Emma because she just won’t stop bloody laughing. Yet the angrier I get the more she laughs. What hope is there for us?

Eventually some sort of arrangement is made. I’m barely listening to what has been suggested or agreed but Emma is writing something on the various bags and bits of paper that seem to have multiplied faster than Covid-19 itself. Finally we are set free, still debating where the bloody hell those stickers got to as I negotiate the one way system which leads back to the outside world.

We stop at a Co-op on the way home. Since there is a chance we’ll test positive there a few things we need to stock up on if we have to isolate. Emma is slightly symptomatic and more likely to be positive (we think) so I go in. As I climb off the driver’s seat into my chair I notice something under my foot. Something yellow that looks like an office sticky that you write notes on. I pick it up and turn it over. It is the remaining two white sticky labels that we had just wasted half a lifetime not to mention the military’s time and resources looking for. I had seen this at the time but hadn’t bothered to explore it any further. It was yellow and I was looking for two white sticky labels. I hadn’t noticed that the reverse was office sticky note yellow. I just get a look from Emma. She doesn’t need to say anything. She still thinks it’s funny which considering how angry I was earlier at her fit of the giggles is a result.

I go into the shop. A man in the queue turns to me and tells me he has forgotten his card and needs to go back to his car. I’m not sure why I need to know. Perhaps he’s just making conversation. After all he probably hasn’t seen anyone for six weeks. It is only when he gets back from his car and thanks me before stepping back into the queue in front of me that I realise that he was expecting me to save his place in the queue. He shapes to leave no fewer than four times to let me have my turn before on each occasion turning to grab some other essential item (a 24-pack of Carling) off the shelf.

Finally served I make my exit. On my way out I decide against using my ruck sack to carry my shopping back to the car. It’s right outside the door and I’ve only bought bread and milk, some biscuits and a six-pack of Coke. I’ll be ok, right? Wrong. The top hat is placed perfectly atop my afternoon when I drop the plastic bag sending the biscuits rolling along the shop floor as the loaf plugs at the base of my front wheel. Only the milk and the Coke stay put. Ignoring social distancing because a biff who has dropped a bag is much more important than public safety, a woman comes to my aid, scooping up the biscuits and handing them back to me with the loaf. I thank her and apologise. Wisely, she doesn’t hang around.

The results will be in in the next 48-72 hours. I fully expect mine to come back positively brain dead.

Boris Is Back - But So What?

Well I feel a lot better, don’t you? No. Not really. The government and an increasingly compliant media are framing the return to work today of Boris Johnson as some kind of measure of relief if not an out-and-out saviour. You can almost hear them collectively exhale at the prospect of their beloved leader returning to lead the ongoing effort to eliminate coronavirus. Personally, I feel more secure now that Johnson is back in situ in the same way I would if you told me that Kyle Walker was organising a party for one of my elderly relatives.

The narrative that he has ‘taken one for the team’ after recovering from coronavirus is as sickening as it is false. First because he had previously boasted about shaking the hands of coronavirus patients and was therefore at least partly culpable for his own predicament, but also because it implies that those who do not recover somehow lack the requisite level of good old English bulldog spirit. Far too often we apply this narrative to illness, as if the outcome somehow depends on the will of the victim to just bloody well get up and go on living and not on other factors like human biology and absolute dumb inexplicable luck.

Even if you are naive enough to view Johnson’s recovery as heroic there is still very little evidence that his return will have a positive impact on the situation. As well as the arrogant, oafish handshaking in which he engaged Johnson spent two weeks away on holiday at a time when much of Europe was starting to enter the most dangerous phase of the pandemic. The bit when shit got real. Johnson missed no fewer than five Cobra meetings before the UK was finally locked down on March 23. That delay has translated to more than 20,000 deaths related to coronavirus in hospitals alone. Thousands more are thought to have died in care homes. To put that into context the government’s scientific advisors told us that if we could keep our overall death toll under 20,000 it would be ‘a good result’. We have failed to do that. The final tally could be double that figure.

The government have consistently claimed that their decisions were guided by the science. They have stated publicly that it is not problematic nor even unusual for a sitting Prime Minister to miss out on Cobra meetings. As if they are entirely voluntary and ultimately inconsequential like my failure to turn up for more than one shorthand session in three years of a journalism degree. Yet they will also tell you that it is absolutely necessary for Johnson’s closest advisor and vile architect of Brexit Dominic Cummings to be present at meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). Let that sink in as absolute weapons on Twitter sometimes say. Prime Minister at Cobra meetings - optional. Spin doctor and political influencer at science think-tank gatherings - essential. Just who is running this country? Perhaps that question isn’t so easy to answer when you consider that there were people expecting the Queen to announce some game-changing policy when she made a televised speech recently.

Though it happened way too late the government did finally start to get things right in terms of tackling the pandemic. Social distancing is working in as far as infections and hospitalisations are now decreasing, even if the death tolls announced at the daily briefings are still horrific. Lockdown has worked to that extent but hapless supply teacher Dominic Raab was right when he told us yesterday that now isn’t the right time to be relaxing the lockdown measures. There is a debate to be had. The people who would have us locked down for two years are just as dangerous and batshit crazy as those who go round licking shelves in Tesco. But measures need to be relaxed gradually with proper thought and consideration at every stage.

The right, driven to distraction at the thought of an economic crash, have been pushing for some relaxation of measures for weeks. They argue that the damage it is causing economically will lead to more death and destruction of lives than the virus itself ever could. They suggest that we should just shield what they call ‘the vulnerable’ so that the rest of us can go back to life as we know it. What they fail to understand is that we have moved on from the belief that only the elderly or the sick are at risk from the very worst effects. We haven’t yet established what it is that makes coronavirus lethal to some people but a mild inconvenience to others. Until we do we need some form of lockdown or social distancing until a sophisticated and effective programme of contact tracing is established or a vaccine is available.

Yet you can see where this is going politically. Johnson’s return coincides with the important improvements we have seen in the statistics on infections. If lockdown measures are relaxed within the next few weeks it will be Johnson who is presented as the saviour. The poor old rudderless UK bumbling along, failing palpably to control infections, acquire PPE or ventilators until Johnson rides in on his white horse and lo.....light appears at the end of the tunnel. The man is conceited and deluded enough to believe that his return has made all the difference and so are his idiot public. Voting for his party’s debilitating cuts to public services over the last decade yet absolving themselves of any responsibility for that dismal choice by clapping every Thursday night until their hands sting like a Portuguese Man O’ War. Even then some of his disciples can’t manage to show their appreciation for the NHS without breaching the very social distancing rules that their exalted leader announced before his enforced quarantine.

Johnson and his government have done too little too late. They are not heroes saving the day. They are only now doing what is and has been required of them for months. Those who feel they are in an impossible predicament and therefore not accountable forget that when you put yourself forward for the highest office in the land you have to accept your accountability. It is not all weekends at Chequers, multiple mistresses and hiding in fridges. That Johnson and his followers don’t accept that is evidence of how unsuitable he is for the role.

To finish and with due apologies I’m going to borrow, slightly embellish and eventually strangle an analogy from a friend of mine on Twitter. He pointed out that Johnson’s return at this juncture is like Ray Wilkins’ return to the England side after the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Wilkins has been sent off in a group game with Morocco which ended goalless. In his absence England breezed past Paraguay in their next game, free from the constraints of Wilkins’ crab-like horizontal but impotent distribution. They then went toe-to-toe with Argentina in an epic quarter-final which is infamous for both the genius and the villainy of Diego Maradona. Johnson is Wilkins, a man who some feel we cannot do without but in whose absence we are perhaps more likely to progress. The problem is that the government doesn’t have a squad as strong as the one Bobby Robson had featuring Peter Beardsley, Trevor Steven or Glenn Hoddle. Though it does have plenty of Hoddle-esque enemies of the disabled. The virus is more powerful and more villainous than even the great Diego. But all we have to throw into the game when Johnson is not around is Raab and Health Secretary Matt Hancock. Essentially we have Steve Hodge and Terry Fenwick.

Perhaps that’s why Johnson’s return is being pitched as a blessed relief.