Monday's Long Song

I've posted quite a few of Richard Norris' Music For Healing series since lockdown began. Part 9 came out last week and it is my favourite so far, a stunning twenty minute long piece of ambient music, led by piano with gentle drones and noise as a backdrop. It works beautifully as background ambience and equally as deep listening, an idea Richard has been exploring in the last two years.

As the government appear increasingly incompetent and the news doesn't really offer any respite- we have the highest number of Covid 19 infections and the highest death toll in Europe. The government clearly acted too late and mistakes were made in February and March, some of them for political reasons, that have contributed to thousands of people dying. There doesn't seem to be a well planned way out of this at the moment and the right wing press are massing behind the government, attacking anyone who steps out of line as unpatriotic, lacking bravery or asking questions at a time when 'we' should be rallying around the government. The relaxing of lockdown has been clumsy and unclear and many people seem to be behaving as if it's all over- meanwhile the daily death toll is still well into three figures. The plan for re-opening schools was proposed against the advice of everyone involved, except the government. Given that the government have made such a mess of the whole thing so far, is it really surprising that so few people trust them to get re-opening schools right?

Then there's the whole Cummings situation, where the people who govern us- this particular person being unelected- clearly think that the laws they make in an emergency don't apply to themselves and that they therefore are better than you. That this is then followed by the Prime Minister's defence of this as 'legal, responsible and [done] with integrity' is beyond belief, beyond where any modern British government have gone in defending the indefensible. Johnson is a liar. We've known that for years but he is now it is obvious increasingly also a puppet. He is so weak, such a piss poor excuse for a leader, that he can't fire a senior aide. Look at the front bench, a parade of elitist chancers and charlatans, all stacked up behind the biggest chancer and charlatan of them all. What a sham our democracy is.  It doesn't matter that I am angry. I'd never vote Tory. I voted Remain. I'd never vote for Johnson. But it does matter that Tory MPs from the Shires are being bombarded with letters and emails from constituents, people who followed the lockdown instructions to the letter and didn't go to comfort family members when they were in hospital, didn't attend their parent's funeral, or their child's. I just hope all those people remember this and that it fuels them when they have the chance to do something about it. I hope that the government's inability to care about how this looks and the way they clearly despise us, coupled with the rage that people are feeling about this, sticks and wears away at them, burning them slowly, from the inside.

If all of that doesn't require the need of long- form, calming music to still the dread, the anger and anxiety, I don't know what does.