Monday
For just over a week this summer, I almost managed to forget the ongoing horrors of the coronavirus and the government’s seemingly limitless capacity for incompetence as we stayed with friends in their rental cottage in Norfolk. Almost. I slept better, occasionally waking up not feeling too anxious, and my wife even reported hearing me laugh for the first time in months. Though I have no memory of that. We didn’t actually do that much other than sit on the beach when it was sunny and go for walks when it was wet or cloudy – and sometimes vice-versa – and a seal even poked its head up just yards from where we were swimming. Or in my case bobbing. In the evenings, we ate, played cards and talked the ideal mixture of sense and nonsense. Now that we’re back, though, I feel the dread returning. The nights are closing in, the weather has become more autumnal and I fear we are in for a long winter of further lockdowns and high unemployment. Most of all, though, I miss my children. Even if my daughter, Anna, does make it over here from Minneapolis for Christmas – and we aren’t banking on that being possible – it will have been a year since I last saw her. My son we have seen just three times this year, partly because of lockdown but also because he is busy and now has a life of his own. While I feel proud that they have grown up to be independent of us – it’s what I always wanted for them and I’m confident that if they were still living at home we’d be getting on each others’ nerves big time – I still experience it as a loss. Last week, we went down to Brighton for a couple of days to see Robbie and his girlfriend and I spent most of the drive home in tears. In some ways, seeing the children has become as painful as not seeing them. Getting older is proving tougher than I thought.
Tuesday
Boris Johnson clearly doesn’t have the same problems, as every time any of his children show signs of growing up he chooses to have another baby. Each to his own. I don’t feel particularly sorry for him having to cut short his summer holiday, though, as it appears to have been a chapter of accidents entirely of his own making. The normal deal is that the prime minister arranges for one staged photo opportunity of his summer holiday on the understanding that the press will not reveal his exact location and leave him or her alone for the rest of the week. But Boris chose not to tell anyone where he was going and sure enough the Daily Mail managed to track him down to Scotland. Quite why he would choose to go north of the border is also beyond me as most Scots can’t stand him. Imagine choosing to go on holiday to a country where you’re not actually welcome. Either Johnson just doesn’t care or he is so delusional he imagines that the more the Scots see of him the more they will come round to liking him. Some hope. I also couldn’t make any sense of his actual sleeping arrangements. Why rent a comfortable house for £1,500 a week and then trespass on someone else’s property to pitch a tent on the other side of a fence on midge-infested land that belongs to someone else? And who was actually sleeping in the tent? Was the whole family in it together or was it just an insurance policy for Boris to have somewhere to sleep in case he had a row with Carrie? Still, Johnson was apparently livid to have his holiday curtailed. Imagine how angry he is going to be when he finds out about the exam results debacle, the ongoing failures of test and trace and the lack of progress on Brexit negotiations.
Wednesday
When the coronavirus and countless government U-turns get knocked off the front pages of many newspapers for a row about the Last Night of the Proms, it’s safe to assume you have reached peak August “silly season”. When I heard that the BBC had decided to play Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory as instrumental numbers, I assumed it was because they were following government Covid-19 guidelines on people singing in public, but somehow it seems to have been confected into yet another battle in the culture wars. Approve of the singing ban and you are a woke lefty, dragging the more difficult aspects of British history into a once-yearly nostalgia fest; disapprove and you are a hardline Brexiteer who thoroughly supports Britain’s part in the slave trade. Normally I would naturally fall into the woke camp, but just now I find myself unable to care much one way or the other. Partly because it feels there are more important history hills to die on, partly because I’ve often sung songs at football matches I don’t believe in – “Glory, glory Tottenham Hotspur.” Really? – but mostly because a YouGov poll has confirmed what I had already suspected. Namely that almost no one knows the words of either of the two songs beyond their titles and the bit about “never, never, never will be slaves”. Or sell them, presumably. Of those polled, 75% either knew only a handful of the lyrics or none at all and yet 58% thought that the songs should be performed with all the words. Rather suggesting that the more people knew the words, the less they thought they should be sung. So as a compromise, I suggest the BBC run subtitles instead of the lyrics to allow people to mumble along self-consciously at home. Much like John Redwood trying to sing the Welsh national anthem when he was Welsh secretary. It would be a very British solution to a very British problem.
Thursday
One of the joys of a staycation that I could do without is that it gave me the opportunity to take a whole load of garden rubbish to the dump. What made the experience even more punishing – normally this is the sort of activity that gets relegated to a grumpy Sunday morning – was that all the local rat runs to avoid the stationary traffic up Trinity Road in Wandsworth have been cordoned off and the six-mile round trip took well over 90 minutes. About a year ago, the council apparently did an online consultation – I somehow must have missed the email alert that was presumably sent out to everyone in the borough – but those that did engage tell me that the response was near enough 100% against the proposals. And yet Wandsworth have now used lockdown to make dozens of residential streets not just inaccessible to through traffic but to residents as well. The idea behind the scheme was sound enough: to promote greener travel by getting more people to use bicycles and to walk where possible. What the council doesn’t appear to have banked on is the law of unintended consequences. To make the scheme even greener, the few arterial roads with two lanes in each direction have now been cordoned off into single lanes with the other serving as a cycle route. The result is gridlock. Bus journeys, that the council are trying to promote, that used to take 10 minutes now take a minimum of 30 minutes. Worst of all, ambulances on sirens and blue lights trying to get to the nearby St George’s hospital also get stuck in traffic as there is nowhere for cars and lorries to get out of their way. Wandsworth insists this is only a short six-month trial and that it will be reviewed at the end of the year. No one is holding their breath.
Friday
In a few hours’ time, my wife and I will be loading up the car for a second time, hoping we don’t get caught in monster bank holiday traffic jams and heading back up to Norfolk to stay with friends in a rental home – five miles away from the last one – for the last week of our rather disjointed holidays. It’s much later in the summer than we usually go, but finding anywhere to stay has proved tricky with so many more people holidaying in the UK and the timing worked well as it coincided with the last week of parliamentary recess. Or rather it did coincide with the last week of recess up until the time Johnson decided to end it a week earlier, just to make it look as though he was actually doing something. So my week isn’t going to be quite the complete break I thought it was going to be, as I will now be sketching next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as MPs will no doubt be trying to debate all the damage Boris has managed to do during the time that parliament hasn’t been sitting. But there will still be plenty of time to relax and enjoy time with good friends: I just hope it doesn’t tip down with rain for the next seven days. It’s bad enough getting left behind on walks because of my dodgy knees when the sun is shining; when I’m soaking wet as well it can be plain miserable. Still, there are always the first three episodes of the Amazon Prime documentary on Spurs’ last season that starts streaming on 31 August. Amazon must have been thrilled to have signed Spurs up for one of their worst seasons in years; Tottenham not so much. No matter how much the club has managed to persuade the film-makers to edit out the more X-rated moments, I can’t see it being a promotional video to tempt Lionel Messi to come to north London – even if we could afford to pay his wages. See you for the Saturday diary in a fortnight. Just in time for the start of the next football season.
Digested week digested: The revenge of the school librarian
