CoVID-19 – day 46

It was 5.30 am when I got up and its now 7.30. It felt late getting up because I was in bed not long after 8pm yesterday (though I did watch some YouTube till 9pm). I had a really complex dream in which my brother was marrying a Japanese girl in Japan. It was the day of the wedding and I hadn’t got a card or a present (for anyone who knows me that would be very believable). The most memorable part of the dream was the oddness of how the light switches worked.

Everything’s weird — not bad weird — just weird. There we were on our way to hell in a hand cart and the wheels jammed. In unfamiliar territory we are making it up as we go along (or rather don’t go anywhere). Its surreal and its exhausting. Its a time of confusion but also invention. There’s hope and fear, destruction and reconstruction. And while we are being directed by forces outside our control we are in a place where we can retake control if only we pick up the tools. Weirdness can help because when you are caught unawares you are forced into making decisions you would otherwise postpone and when all your surroundings are strange you are forced to self orientate.

Children can be good at that because their world view is fluid and their assumptions are less fixed. Children with different languages can happily play together when they don’t understand each other’s tongue. They simply switch to a universal language and invent rules where there are none. They come to decisions based purely on evaluation of their surroundings, without prejudice or preconception and without fear of being wrong. Maybe we would be better off if children did the mind mapping for us and us grownups simply took care of the logistics. They really couldn’t screw the world up more badly than the grown ups however poorly behaved.

I’m not getting freaked by this but the continual sunsine throughout the lockdown kind of feels contrived. I’m not complaining, just musing. I’m not keen on crowds so I like the tranquility that goes along with it. I love the massive beach when the tide’s out. Acres of open space with no one else there (or just the odd dog walker). I used to love that as a kid. Its like a blank page where you feel you can draw whatever you like and everyday you get a clean one. Of course that’s illusory if you can’t map the page out with a mental grid. We need constraints in order to enjoy freedom. We need boundaries in order to enjoy the space we are in. You don’t get to break the rules until you know how the rules work and why.

There is no situation where there are no rules. There are laws governing everything and there are consequences for breaking them but if you understand them you can mitigate and even capitalise on the consequences. A competent government will break the rules all the time but understand the consequences. An incompetent government believes it can break the rules with no conequences for itself. All governments cover up their mistakes.

So what’s with the title? What Became of Jack and Jill is a 70’s film about a guy and his girlfriend who plot to engineer his grandmother’s heart attack in order to get his inheritance so they try to convince her that youths are persecuting her. Underpinning this is the young man’s dislike of old people and his contempt for his gran though he looks after her. I remember watching it and it was pretty grim. And this is where the weirdness comes in. We know that early on in this crisis patients were shipped out of hospitals into care homes without being tested, some even suspected of having the virus but them not being considered too ill to move out.

Its likely the high deaths in care homes can be linked to this policy. This was obviously not some sinister plot driven by euthanasia but it does sound like a sector of the population became collateral damage in attempting to save the NHS from being overwhelmed. Its not outragious to suggest that hearing of the horrendous decisions having to be made in Italian hospitals of who would not be given access to a ventilator, our government did whatever they could to avoid that scenario regardless of how heartless it was.

I hope I can dance better after this crisis than before it but only in a nightmare world would that be on someone else’s grave.