Five Years

I'm not exactly sure what the point of this post is and have written, re- written and deleted parts of it several times and almost scrapped the entire thing but in the end I thought I should mark it. Five years ago this week Covid's arrival in the UK brought about the first lockdown and life changed dramatically for everyone. 

The Friday of this week in March, five years ago today, schools were closed and everyone was sent home. At that point I was an Assistant Head at the school I work at. I made the announcement in the assembly to our Year 11s that this was their last assembly and that they wouldn't be sitting their exams that summer (you might reasonably ask why the Headteacher didn't do that and therein lies a whole other story which is not for here or now). School was difficult all week with increasing numbers of staff and students off ill, the rest of the staff very stretched as absences left gaps and tensions were running high. Coughing became a classroom issue. Year 11 and 13 were particularly emotional as their school experience was came to an abrupt and unexpected stop. 

I started to write a post about our experience of lockdown, a reminiscence- lockdown nostalgia is a genuine thing (not for everyone I know)- but I didn't like the post and binned it. The impact of Covid has been huge and apart from a few pieces here and there in the media this week, for many people Covid is done, gone, over, to be forgotten, consigned to a weird period four to five years ago that they want to forget about and move on from. There was a lot of talk at the time about the new normal, about things being different when 'all this is over'. I don't see much of that.  

Our son Isaac died of Covid in November 2021, just as the world was opening up again. He was 23. He is one of 232, 112 people in the UK who died from Covid. His name is on the Covid memorial wall in London. It still staggers me sometimes that he is not just our personal loss and grief but that he's one small part of a national and global catastrophe. The memorial wall was on the news recently and there he is, one name among many. The news in January and February looked bad, cities in China in complete lockdown, Italian hospitals overrun and in chaos. We watched all of that and then all the fallout in this country with the nonsense and chaos of the Johnson government- and then Isaac died of that disease eighteen months after we went into lockdown. 

There are probably millions of people connected to the 232, 112 who died, millions of personal tragedies. There are also an estimated 1.9 million people with some form of long Covid, just under 3% of the UK's population. Many schools are still reeling form the fallout of lockdowns and the lost months, not just of learning but of socialisation and social skills and behaviour. It'll take another ten years for those young people to move through the education system. They've lost out in many ways and for those in already deprived communities the impact on their education and well- being will likely follow them long into adulthood. 

I'm not sure what we've learned from Covid. The Tories moved on as quickly as they could and the Labour government seem to want to treat the disabled as benefit scroungers and force them back to work. I don't see a new world being built from our experience of Covid and lockdown. Lockdowns built some bridges between people, community spirit in many places was stronger than before- street WhatsApp groups buzzed constantly- but they created differences and disagreement as well as people became judgemental of others who weren't following the rules correctly or of those deemed to be following them too closely. Into the void of human contact, division and conspiracy theories grew. Vaccination scepticism spread and undoubtedly caused deaths. When Isaac was on the Covid ward that he died on, the nurses told us almost everyone else on the ward was unvaccinated and that many would die due to their decision- and they, the nursing teams, had to deal with that daily. 

In some ways it feels five years ago, all of that. In some ways it feels very recent, very present. It's not something all of us can move on from. 

Lockdown saw the arrival of a few albums that arrived in the post, packages wiped down and isoalted for 24 hours before being opened, that sound tracked the evenings of those days in March in April when we all adjusted to living in lockdown. One of them was Four Tet's Sixteen Oceans, a record that if I reach for now instantly drops me back into the spring of 2020 and that sense of the unknown that the early weeks of the first lockdown brought. Four Tet's music on this album is so warm and enveloping, an aural balm, real mood enhancing music. This one closes the album in fine style. 

Mama Teaches Sanskrit

I Am Beside You

We had a couple of days in London last week. One of the things we did was visit Isaac's name at the National Covid Memorial Wall on the walkway besides the Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament. It's 500 metres long, a public mural with over 200, 000 red hearts painted on the wall and thousands of them then personalised to remember a person who died with Covid as the direct cause of death on the death certificate. A friend wrote Isaac's name onto the wall in early December 2021, in the week after he died. We've visited it three or four times now. One of the things I wanted to do when we went last week was re- ink his name. A lot of them are fading now.  

It's a strange thing and always very moving. When we go to his grave at the cemetery it feels like we are going to see him, that that is where he (or part of him) resides. Our weekly routine includes a trip to the cemetery. Going to the Covid wall feels different. It's in a part of central London that is always busy with tourists. As we walked away from the wall, a small group of people were talking, in a very matter of fact kind of way.

'What's this?'

'It's a memorial for all the British people who died from Covid'.

'Ok.'

That is what it is but so much more. It's a place which is deeply personal but also very public, opposite one of the most famous buildings in the world and while our grief has been very personal to us, at the Covid wall he's part of something else, part of a national, global, catastrophe. Each and every heart of the wall is a person and behind every heart, name and message is a larger group of people, friends and family, permanently affected by this. That he is a part of this always affects me in a way that is different from going to see him at the cemetery.

Covid seems so long ago now- the initial fear as scenes from Italian TV showed genuine horror in their hospitals, the lockdowns, the working from home, Zoom, an hour's exercise a day, how unlocking would work, tiers, the total mess created by Johnson's government, the winter lockdown of early 2021, masks, the vaccine, the oft mentioned 'new normal', and the highly optimistic feeling from some that we might construct a slightly different approach to doing things as a society afterwards. 

I watched the Nick Cave film This Much I Know To Be True this week, a 2022 documentary directed by Andrew Dominik, capturing the working relationship between Nick and Warren Ellis in 2021 as they play various songs from Ghosteen and Carnage, a pair of albums directly informed by the death of Arthur Cave. There is a section where Nick talks through his ceramics (eighteen Staffordshire ceramic figures telling a story of the life of the devil), a part with Marianne Faithful, and Nick at his laptop talking about The Red Hand Files, the questions he receives from fans and how he responds to them. The live sections, Nick and Warren, a string section and three backing singers, are incredible, cathartic performances- filmed I realised as watching it, during Covid and the summer of 2021 when the world began to creep back to some kind of normality. In an interview section Nick talks about one of the emails sent to him at The Red Hand Files and how he sees himself. Nick says where once he would have described/ defined himself as a musician and writer, now after Arthur's death, he was trying to see himself not as those labels but as a husband, father, friend and citizen, who also sings and writes. 

In this clip from the film Nick sings the song Ghosteen Speaks, a song which opens with the words, 'I am beside you/ Look for me', a lyric where Nick feels Arthur's presence.

'I think they've gathered here for me', Ghosteen/ Arthur says in the song, via Nick, 'I am beside you/ You are beside me/ I think they're singing to be free/ I think my friends have gathered here for me/ To be beside me/ Look for me...'

It's an extraordinarily powerful song for me, one that I hear and feel a bit differently now than I did two years ago. Time doesn't heal but you can get used to living with the permanent scar of grief. 

Ghosteen Speaks

This Is London

We spent last weekend in London, staying with friends on the outskirts and then travelling in on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday morning we headed for the National Covid Memorial on the Albert Embankment, next to Westminster Bridge. Last December, shortly after he died a friend of Eliza's who is at university in London went down to the memorial and added his name inside one of the hearts painted on the wall. The memorial grew organically, started by the bereaved without official permission, with names added as the death toll mounted. It stretches from Westminster Bridge to Lambeth Bridge, half a mile long, thousands of names of ordinary people who died from Covid added with dates and messages by family members and friends. 

I expected it to be very moving and it was- Isaac's name, part of this sea of hearts and names, each one an individual loss, and it had us in tears. In a part of London full of official and state memorials, statues of monarchs, generals and prime ministers, there's something very honest and democratic about hand painted hearts and marker pen remembrances. It was emotional. Thinking it still is. 

From there we crossed back to the north side of the Thames using Lambeth Bridge, walked up Whitehall and got the tube up to Primrose Hill we we sat in the sunshine, had some food and enjoyed the view. 

From Primrose Hill we walked to Camden via Regents Canal, had a couple of drinks in the sun and then headed to Soho where they happen to have four of the best record shops in the country within a few hundred yards of each other (Phonica, Sister Ray, Sounds Of The Universe and Reckless). I somehow managed to take us down Dean Street in Soho, home to the Sabres Of Paradise office in the 90s, where Andrew Weatherall and friends based their operations above a strip club and next door to a house once occupied by Karl Marx. The doorman at Sunset Strip said that the guerrilla Weatherall plaque gets more attention than the Karl Marx one these days. I think both Weatherall and Marx would have been amused by that. We had a couple more drinks in the evening sunshine outside the John Snow pub, Soho filling with Saturday night revellers, and then a tube and train back to our accommodation. 

On the Sunday we trained and tubed it back into central London and walked from Baker Street to Hyde Park, stopped in at The V&A for an hour or two, missed out on the Natural History Museum due to the length of the queues, and then headed west, ambling up Portobello Road towards the Westway and then Ladbroke Grove. I was looking, at least in part, for The Clash's London I suppose. 

There is nothing quite like walking round London, flitting from one part to another, finding something to see round every corner, road and place names that are familiar from TV and songs and part of the culture we all grow up with. In some ways, London is a different place to much of the rest of the country- in parts of central London it feels like being in a different country altogether. We had a good time, tiring too and with some emotional moments, but it was well worth escaping for weekend. This weekend, we have no plans at all- and that feels ok too. 

This song is by The Times, the indie/ punk vehicle for the talented Ed Ball, released on an album of the same name in 1983 on Artpop! Records, a driving, low fi slice of early 80s Londonisms. 

This Is London

For balance and also from 1983 this is Get Out Of London by Intaferon, a single produced by Martin Rushent. Get Out Of London is one of those minor hit/ lost gems, powered by frantic acoustic guitars and a torrent of words, which only slows slightly for the refrain, 'I gotta g-g-ggg-g-g- get out of London', followed by the sound of a train passing, before the tumult kicks back in. 

Get Out Of London