words + pictures

by Tim Baggaley

Virus Diary

Lost in translation

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Ecco, volevi a corona...

Ecco, volevi a corona…

My dear friend, Erwin Schrödinger, has just found me laughing at this joke. His Italian, however, is not as good as mine so I have translated it for him but, in so doing, I appear to have killed his cat

Or not.

‘So,’ I say, ‘you are telling me that the humour in this joke is lost by my very act of translation?’

‘Exactly,’ says Erwin. ‘An English translation does not have the same duality. The uncertainty is a function of its native language.

Corona translation‘The word corona has two possible meanings in Italian in this context, and the ambiguous syntax allows both to exist.

‘All the interpretations are possible,’ says Erwin, ‘in its native tongue.’

‘Ah,’ I say, ‘so when I consider its meaning in Italian, any and all interpretations are possible and probable – one might say it has superinterpretation – but by translating it, I then impose a particular interpretation.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ says Erwin. ‘I’m away this weekend, could you feed my cat?’

‘Certainly,’ I say, ‘are you going somewhere nice?’

‘In all probability,’ he replies.

The post Lost in translation appeared first on Strapping Times.

Tory Party Do Not Resuscitate notice

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The government announced its ‘lockdown-lite’ on the evening of Monday, March 23, after a weekend in which half the UK observed the isolation advice by dogging on Snowden

The definite-maybes from the Prime Minister and his lackeys about staying indoors but going out for exercise in the fresh air being a good thing too, were confusing. It prompted the National Trust to throw open its grounds free of charge, only to have to close them completely three days later after attracting crowds that made Glastonbury look formal.

People extrapolated the ill-framed advice on fresh air to mean pack the caravan and go to Wales for the weekend.

The government has taken too long to explain what it is we are facing. It is all very well the government shying away from totalitarian actions and prevailing upon the public to be sensible but that depends on the public understanding the gravity of the situation.

The long March to reality

The public doesn’t know anything about viruses, the way they behave or the risk they pose and they are not interested in learning epidemiology. What we need is an unequivocal message with strong leadership.

The warnings have been too half-hearted. The government seems to have worried more about how it looks itself, rather than how it looks after us.  We need a simple, brutal message and a determined response.

Everyone around you is a suicide bomber. Anyone you see could explode at any moment. Where would you be safest?

  • Outdoors within talking distance of the bomber
  • Indoors in the same room as the bomber
  • Indoors in a separate room to the bomber

Instead, our government has left it to reality to bring the message home. And so here we are at the end of March with news of increasing infections and deaths illustrating the message the authorities should have delivered a month earlier.

Change is going to come

The glass-half-full evangelists are cheer-leading the positive changes that will come after all of this; of how we will build a new strength of community in our neighbourhoods and a new appreciation of our public service employees, and that the public and welfare services will enjoy newfound value and benefit in government funding.

We have been so comfortable in the small government, each-one-for-themselves capitalist free-market materialism world, that it will need to be thoroughly broken before we build anything to replace it. If this virus and the lock-down persist for months, then there will have to be fundamental changes. When people cannot pay bills and buy food, then something will give.

Undoubtedly, Boris Johnson’s political career is at an end

But if the virus and the lock-down come to an end with April, then we will slip back to everything we had before. Undoubtedly, Boris Johnson’s political career is at an end. Take a look at Churchill, the Tory leader he most admires and aspires to. A determined and purposeful statesman who led the country from the front in its (previous) darkest hour. He navigated us to victory but once the war was over, the electorate dumped the Tories with a landslide Labour victory in the 1945 general election.

Tory Party – DO NOT RESUSCITATE

Show your support for the NHS, don’t vote Tory

For Johnson, there will be no victory, only survival and the profound economic impact of the coronavirus and its lock-down will be seen as a consequence of his failure to lead.

As I negotiate the form-filling to apply for Council Tax reduction and wait for advice on how the government will help me as my self-employed income dries up, I do not see the leadership that this situation demands. Instead, Johnson looks like a deflating sex-doll lashed to the ship’s wheel of a floundering galleon. But not even that useful.

The local council and the HMRC are going to take their time to work through the due process to decide whether or not I get a place in a lifeboat, while I look at my bank account and wonder if I should just cancel all my direct debits and jump ship.

The Sun 'newspaper' – Treacherous rat

The Sun ‘newspaper’ – Treacherous rat

Kick the bucket list

If I’m diagnosed with COVID-19, I have a list of the people I’m going to lick before the Derbyshire Police Stormtroopers gun me down.

If I survive, then I am sure I will see changes in the aftermath. Not least of all, I’m going to buy a copy of The Sun newspaper … to use as the touch paper for the molotov cocktails I’m going to throw through the windows of Wetherspoons’ pubs.

The post Tory Party Do Not Resuscitate notice appeared first on Strapping Times.

Panic attacks, it doesn’t wait for an invite

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Friday, March 20: My first day in solitary starts with the 7:00am news on Radio 4. It is not good news.

I’ve tried turning the radio off and avoiding the news but no news is worse than bad news. One day last week I turned the radio off for most of the day but in the approach to 6:00pm, I turned Radio 4 on and Sailing By was playing. I stared at the time.

No news is worse than bad news

5:58pm

Sailing By is playing on Radio 4 at the wrong time.

I flopped in my chair and stared at the radio thinking; ‘Please be the Shipping Forecast next.’

It wasn’t. It was the Six o’clock News.

What I had missed was that the PM Show had decided to play out with an uplifting tune each day to raise our spirits and on this occasion, had chosen Sailing By.

Protect and Survive

Protect and Survive

Protect and Survive

I remember the days when taking your living room door off its hinges and propping it against the space under your stairs made a nuclear shelter. And Sailing By playing at the wrong time on Radio 4 was the coded signal to the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarine commanders that the game was up and they should launch the Trident missiles.

But as the news bulletin lumbers on with no mention of nuclear apocalypse, I realise I have missed the explanation for the inappropriate timing of the nautical national swan song.

On reflection, they’ll probably just send a WhatsApp message. And the nuclear subs have been replaced with drones or Amazon driverless delivery bots, or something. Technology has marched on, our aircraft carriers are so advanced now, they don’t even have aircraft on them.

Your right to panic

I have the radio on and I’m listening to the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, railing against people panic-buying and accusing them of being selfish, like it is a choice they make. Hancock clearly does not understand how panic works.

The panic response is programmed into us by the process of evolution. Back in our prehistoric times, there was a caveman who had the panic gene and there was one who did not. As they traipsed across the Paleolithic savannah, they realised they were being stalked by a sabre-toothed tiger. The caveman with the gene panicked and ran off, leaving his non-panic colleague to engage in calm, rational discussion with the tiger. Guess which one the human race is descended from.

Do you remember that episode of Bay Watch where Pamela Anderson looked through her binoculars at a drowning man and said; ‘I don’t know why he is making such a fuss, waving his arms about and screaming like that’?

We have evolved the panic response as a survival tactic when we have run out of options and we need someone to come to our aid. Boris Johnson is no substitute for Pammy in her prime but I’ll forgive him that if he throws me a life-preserver.

Hancock is saying we can still go to the pub but don’t stand at the bar and don’t get too close to anyone. What kind of advice is that? That’s like PornHub saying you can still watch its videos but don’t masturbate.

Conflict of idiots

Saturday, March 21: Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he’d rather we didn’t go to the pub but he isn’t going to impose a shutdown. JD Wetherspoons’ dark overlord, Tim Martin, insists he will keep his pubs open because closing them; ‘won’t stop coronavirus.’

We are being served a contrary mixture of lame suggestions from government and strident assertions from a pub landlord. How are we supposed to remain calm when the advice for our survival comes in conflicting instructions from what looks like Stadler and Waldorf on meth?

Boris Johnson: 'Don't go to the pub.' Tim Martin: 'No, do go to the pub.' – Stadler and Waldorf on meth

Boris Johnson: ‘Don’t go to the pub.’ Tim Martin: ‘Do go to the pub’

People are not panicking because they are selfish, they are panicking because they lack strong leadership. Ministers should not be on the news telling us we are making the wrong decisions, they should be making the right ones and imposing them. I fear there is a Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse and his name is Dither.

There is a Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse and his name is Dither

The government needs to get fundamentalist. I want to see Tim Martin in an orange jumpsuit in front of the Union Jack reading a statement he clearly has not written himself, telling us the UK is going into lockdown.

Instead, I’m seeing Boris Johnson struggling to rearrange the deckchairs on the sticky carpet of the poop-deck of the SS Wetherspoons.

The post Panic attacks, it doesn’t wait for an invite appeared first on Strapping Times.

Swimming in Egypt

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I was in denial. Two weeks ago, I thought it is just bad flu. More people die of influenza every year and we don’t panic over that, this coronavirus will pass. But at the beginning of last week, my thinking started to change

I’m self-employed and work largely from home on my laptop. I go out dancing most evenings. I love social dancing and five nights a week is typical for me; Argentine tango, swing-jazz and salsa, among others. In the course of the week March 9-13, everything I usually attend is cancelled, save for one salsa class and a scaled-down milonga (Argentine tango social).

Choose your weapon: coronavirus or knife?

Monday, March 9: Monday mornings I’m in a physio class at the gym but in my first, tactical move, I cry off. Tuesday night, my usual dance event is cancelled and I toy with going to my local for a pint but I’ve got beer in the fridge, so I stay home. Next morning, I read that someone was stabbed outside the pub last night. I joke that social-distancing to dodge the coronavirus saved me from a knife fight. London, eh?

Wednesday, there are just four students in the salsa class, including me, but the gym where it is housed and the streets of Shoreditch that surround it, are as busy as usual. Thursday, I join friends in a pub in Covent Garden before going to my favourite milonga, Tango Terra. I’m annoyed because my regular dance buddies have all cried-off and when I get to the milonga, it is a lot smaller than usual. I skulk off and rejoin my non-dancing friends in the pub.

First symptoms and a diagnosis

Friday morning I wake with a headache and bad guts and phone the 111 HNS helpline and describe my symptoms. They ask me of my social activities and contacts and then diagnose a hangover. Transpires it was the stroppy Malbec I’d necked the night before.

Saturday, I have dinner with my friend, Geny, in a restaurant in Lee Green. It is very busy, we wait for a table. There is no indication that anyone is concerned about the pandemic, this feels like a normal Saturday night.

Sunday, March 15: I’m in Covent Garden to see my friend, Nathan, and his band playing their usual pub gig at the Two Brewers. I live in South East London where it is traditional that trains don’t run on weekends, so I get the bus that drops me at the Aldwych and I walk through the market. It is deserted, like a scene from a dystopian future movie.

I take a couple of photos of Seven Dials and Monmouth Street with no cars and no people in them. It occurs to me that if you are a budget film-maker, you could shoot your zombie apocalypse street scenes on the fly.

There’s a war on, you know

The pub is usually very busy, but there’s barely a dozen in this night. At chucking-out time, my friends and I hug and kiss each other in defiance of the virus-dodging guidelines and say we’ll keep in touch.

It is weird.

Ordinarily, we know when we’ll meet again. ‘Are you going on Tuesday?’ ‘No, but I’ll see you on Thursday as usual.’ Kamila and I hug and then we look at each other and shrug our shoulders, ‘well, I’ll see you then,’ I say and it feels like an unfinished line from a movie, ‘…when this bloody war is over.’

A total stranger greets me on the streets of London. This is the end of days

I’m walking down St Martin’s Lane towards Charing Cross station and there is just one other figure, walking towards me on the same side of the road. As we pass, he nods to me and says; ‘evening’. A total stranger greets me on the streets of London. This is the end of days.

My physio class is still happening on Monday morning but I message and say I’m not going. I have WhatsApp conversations with Italian friends, one back in the UK, the others in Milan and under lockdown. They tell me of the dark scenes unfolding in their country and warn me to take great care, the UK is going to end up in the same place.

The looting has started

Tuesday, St Patrick’s Day, March 17: I go out in the afternoon to the convenience store across the road from my flat and there is a huge queue for the tills and not much of the basics left on the shelves. I go in the Sainsbury’s Local and overhear the staff on the manned-tills discussing people leaving without paying. Looting, but not of the American variety where you back your truck through the shop doors, this is the English sort where you pretend to pay at the self-service tills and then stroll out nonchalantly.

Looting, but not of the American variety where you back your truck through the shop doors, this is the English sort where you pretend to pay at the self-service tills and then stroll out nonchalantly

The video cameras that Sainsbury’s installed to catch people weighing avocados as carrots on the self-service tills aren’t much use when the culprits are wearing face masks. I shed no tears. Despite the low wages subsidised by government tax credits, Sainsbury’s still finds it preferable to dodge the expense of wages and income tax by eliminating staff altogether. I only use the supermarkets under duress and I’ll queue for a manned till rather than use an automated one on point of principle.

I bag a few things, then set off for the street market in Lewisham. I walk, rather than take the bus, for the exercise and because I am now thinking about reducing my contact with other people. I take stock in the evening. I’ll need to do a little more shopping tomorrow, then I will be able to hunker down in my flat for a couple of weeks.

Reporting from the front

Wednesday, March 18: I’m out to the convenience store at 7:30am and again, there are thin pickings and big queues. I head down to Lewisham and take a look in the Sainsbury’s store in the shopping centre. It is chaos. There is a colossal queue for the self-service tills and there is as much product scattered on the floor as on the shelves. Outside, people are queuing in the street to get into Superdrug. I feel like a foreign correspondent in a war zone.

Wednesday evening and I’ve got pans of food cooking on the stove which I will portion out into Tupperware and freeze. A pot of my own passata is on the go and I realise I have no fresh basil. I cross the road to the convenience store and find that fresh basil is one of the few things still in supply in the produce section. I would join the queue but my single packet of basil seems ridiculous amongst the cargo-like hauls of my fellow shoppers. So I supplement it with a bottle of Merlot. I dodge the Malbec. I’m getting the hang of this risk management.

Back in my flat, I do one last stock check. If I eat frugally, I reckon I have enough food for two weeks. I also have three and a half bottles of whiskey and a trumpet. 

I’m lockdown-ready.

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