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.