Monday
On Saturday, my wife and I went to join a short vigil for George Floyd on Tooting Bec common. It was a very orderly, socially distanced affair – so much so that standing near the back I couldn’t hear any of the speeches as there was no PA system. All I could do was take my lead from what others were doing. So I clapped when other people clapped and got down on one knee when everyone else did. This was something of a problem as I have a metal knee and I was in a lot of discomfort throughout – kneeling down is still painful even years after the operation – and my wife had to help me to get upright again. Other Black Lives Matter events weren’t quite so peaceful. Violence broke out in London, while in Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston was pulled off its plinth and rolled into the river. The statement on the protests in the Commons was a classic piece of parliamentary hypocrisy. Because while MPs on all sides were keen to condemn the civil disorder, everyone seemed secretly relieved that the statue had been removed. Certainly no one called for it to be reinstated. Bristol council has now decided that the statue’s final resting place should be in the local museum which feels like the right decision.
However I was quite taken with a more creative solution suggested to me by Aidan Quinn who runs the Beaux Arts gallery in Bath. He wanted to melt down the statue of Colston and invite a local artist to recast it as the American social reformer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass who visited Bristol in 1844. There is no reason why all statues have to exist in situ in perpetuity and for some to be time limited seems to be an important acknowledgment that history is as much a study of the present as it is of the past.
Tuesday
It’s sod’s law. There were we wondering if we were ever going to get a holiday this year – we’ve long since given up any hope of going to America to see our daughter – when my wife, along with two other couples, took a punt that Airbnb holidays might be a goer later this summer and put down a deposit on a week’s stay in a Norfolk house for the first week in September. Now it turns out that parliament has plans to curtail its own holidays and come back a week earlier than planned which would be the same week we were in Norfolk.
The official reason for the government’s change of heart is that it has a lot of business it needs to get through. After the events of the past week, please excuse my hollow laughter, as parliament has gone out of its way to waste its own time, not to mention money, and that of the entire country. First we had Jacob Rees-Mogg’s absurd change to procedures which resulted in MPs queueing for 90 minutes to vote on preventing some other MPs who were either carers, shielding, socially isolating or who had to travel long distances from taking part in debates or voting. Since then the government has had to make so many concessions that parliament is basically back to operating how it was before Rees-Mogg took matters into his own hands. We’ve also had to endure the spectacle of the government doing a U-turn on all children going back to school. So, if on the vague off-chance that Airbnb holidays with other couples are allowed and we aren’t in a second major lockdown, then I’m planning on taking my holiday regardless. I can’t plan my entire life around the government’s incompetence.
Wednesday
Speaking on the phone to my daughter, it seems that Minneapolis is gradually returning to some kind of normality. The protests have thinned out and the national guard is less visible. Also, having shut down a lot later than us – I remember conversations we had in early March in which she said that the coronavirus just wasn’t on the US radar – Minneapolis has now eased almost all of its lockdown regulations. It’s not immediately clear if this has been done on a scientific basis or because the city authorities are keen to ease some of the tensions that sparked the protests, but restaurants and gyms are now open and everyone is now free to meet pretty much anyone they want, subject to physical-distancing guidelines. It’s made me realise just how easily institutionalised I am. When I came out of hospital after a longish stay some years back, I found being at home totally disorientating and quite scary. But that was nothing to how I feel about the possibility of the government lifting lockdown measures here. At least with the hospital, I trusted that the doctors were making the right clinical decision to discharge me. But with this government, I have no faith that Boris Johnson will make the right decisions for the right reasons at the right time. I chose to put myself in isolation a week before it became official government policy and I will maintain a similarly cautious approach for a few weeks after lockdown is eased. Even though my 96-year-old mother has seen off Covid-19, I’m not willing to take any chances myself. I have always been a creature of habits, and right now my habit is staying indoors.
Thursday
Ordinarily, the end of the latest round of Brexit negotiations would have been a big deal with Michael Gove, the de facto Brexit secretary, making a ministerial statement to a packed chamber. Now the only way we can get any parliamentary scrutiny is for Labour to table an urgent question, and even then Gove couldn’t be bothered to turn up in person. Instead he let a junior minister, Penny Mordaunt, take the flak. Also missing in action this week was the accident-prone Robert Jenrick. Having caused controversy by travelling from London to visit his parents in Shropshire during lockdown, the housing minister has got himself into trouble by overruling Tower Hamlets council to allow the Tory donor Richard Desmond planning permission for the Westferry development the day before he would have been liable for a £40m tax surcharge. To add to the intrigue, Jenrick was not only on the same table as Desmond at a Tory fundraiser in January, at which the development was raised, he also later admitted that his granting of permission was unlawful. A few weeks later, Desmond paid £12,000 to the Tory party. Understandably, the opposition parties suspect that the ministerial code may have been somewhat stretched, and today managed to secure an urgent question so that Jenrick could explain how his actions had been totally above board. Only Jenrick pleaded the fifth amendment and sent along the junior minister Chris Pincher to face the music instead. As Pincher had clearly only been briefed on how not to give direct answers, MPs left the chamber none the wiser than they had been at the beginning. At any other time, this would have been a major scandal. But in the new coronavirus normal, it was just a minor inconvenience to be shrugged off. The crisis is good news for some.
Friday
It’s less than a week until the Premier League restarts and I still find myself totally underwhelmed by the prospect. This isn’t at all how I imagined I would feel back in March – I thought that I’d be ecstatic – and I’m not entirely sure why. Part of it must be partisan: at the start of the lockdown, Spurs were playing like a bunch of strangers and had nothing to look forward to apart from the outside possibility of qualifying for the Europa League – a competition many clubs try to avoid – so the final nine matches always felt as if they were going to be an ordeal to be endured. Then there’s the thought of the rest of the season being played out behind closed doors. I like my football live, preferably with me in the crowd, and the idea of empty stadiums in which three DJs – one for a remix of home team chants, one for the away fans and a neutral one for background noise of fans talking to each other about how everything is basically a bit pointless – competing over the PA system to provide atmosphere, feels soulless. I go to football as much to escape from myself for 90 minutes – to lose myself in something over which I have no control – as for the game itself. Not that I intend to boycott the games – I’ll be sat in front of the TV for all Spurs’ remaining fixtures along with a whole lot of matches in which the main attraction is wanting the team I hate more to lose – but I do wonder how much lockdown has affected me. This time next year, will the coronavirus just feel like a distant, bad memory with life having gone back to normal, or will it have changed my relationship with the world in a more permanent way? Not least with my sense of risk. I know I will go back to live sport, just as I will go back to opera, theatre and concerts, because life without them is a life half-lived. But I think it will be some years before I can do so without having a niggling worry there is someone in the crowd or audience who could unwittingly kill me.
Digested week, digested: A 20.4% drop in GDP.
