bluesinateacup

OBESITY EARLY DEATH

The McDonald’s poster doesn’t mince its words. A young man in pinkish sunglasses is holding up his iPhone as I line up my shot. He looks as if he’ll engage if I kick start the conversation
Says it like it is
Did you do that?
There’s a hint of admiration in his voice, but while quietly flattered he thinks me capable, I’m forced to deny responsibility.
I wish I had
Someone’s been enhancing the billboards by the roundabout ever since I’ve lived here. I don’t even know whether these angry black capitals are the work of the same hand as some of my past favourites – REAL LIFE IS WAY TOO SCARY, added to ‘fortify your home with BT broadband’, or RED-TROUSERED GREENWASH, splashed across an advertisement for a former city mayor’s dubious environmental policies.

Have you lived round here long?
He puts the iPhone in his pocket as he asks the question, which bodes well for an intelligent exchange.
Almost nine years
I suppose that makes me an established member of this shifting community, although having once lived twenty-six years in the same house I still feel a bit of a newbie. The conversation meanders on to human connection. We mourn the easy interactions of pre-pandemic days, and agree the internet’s kept us all from madness this past year. It’s also largely responsible for the decline in physical communities, we opine, but I have to add I think the rot set in some time before the worldwide web was woven
I blame the internal combustion engine
He looks surprised, but he’s too young to remember the days when everyone walked. Back then, it could take an hour to make the half-mile journey from my friend’s house around the corner, depending on who I met along the way. In that lifetime I used to say there was a rut worn in the pavement where the children and I walked to school every morning, deep in conversation with whosoever happened to be on the same part of the route. Come three o’clock I’d return like the Pied Piper, often with eight or ten children. Friends’ children, neighbours’ children, and my own three of course, chasing and squabbling the long mile home to tea and biscuits. I kept an eye on them all whilst I chatted and pushed my friend’s toddler, sleeping oblivious in his stripey buggy. He was killed by a train at the age of twenty-one, walking home along the track in the small hours. The wanton waste of that life wrenches my heart every time I think of it. These days it’s all different. The kids are dropped at the school gate from their parents’ cars. You can’t fit ten kids and a buggy in one car, and you’d be in proper trouble if you tried.

And you can’t talk to people if you’re inside a tin box
I’d never looked at it that way
Turns out he’s called Ben. He’s probably younger than the children I used to shepherd are now, yet still we have more in common than our differences. We move on from fractured communities to what happens on the bottom half of the internet. I’ve never been able to get my head around people who hurl insults at perfect strangers in cyberspace, but there are those who’d call me snowflake if I said so too loudly. It’s odd how such champions of free speech want to silence all voices but their own. Maybe they really do have the one ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything and they just want the rest of us to shut up so they can get the message out, but it sounds much more like intolerant dogma to me. After all, when it comes to spotting the specks in other people’s eyes, even the most vengeful fire-and-brimstone preacher couldn’t hold a candle to a keyboard warrior on a mission. Ben and I part in amicable agreement that blind dogma is probably the most destructive force on earth.

I’m planning a brief turn around the park before going home for a solitary coffee, but the ghosts of lifetimes past have been aroused, and they’re not to be so easily laid. As I come through the park gate, I see half a dozen people sitting in the sunshine, carefully distanced, whilst six or seven dogs romp on the grass around them. Most of the dogs seem barely out of puppyhood. Poor Arthur’s sulking under a bench, a few yards from all the merriment. Arthur’s a blend of Jack Russell and corgi who moved in next door to me a year or so back. He and puppyhood parted company a while ago, and he’s too stout for romping these days, but you can see the longing in his eyes. If Arthur’s here, Annie must be somewhere, and sure enough she’s leaning on her walker in the middle of the path, watching a tussle that’s broken out between a black spaniel and an indeterminate poodle cross. She reminisces about the tea dances of her youth, and tells me once again that the local grand hotel is going to revive them any day now. The building was converted into flats some years ago, but here in the sunshine of an April morning the idea feels almost plausible.

A young man with a beard and an indeterminate poodle cross greets Annie. She introduces both him and the pup without missing a beat, and I find myself chatting about lockdown dogs
What variety is he?
A labradoodle. I don’t know how we’d have coped without him
It turns out James and his partner are expecting their first baby any day, so Rupert probably hasn’t been their only coping strategy. James releases his exuberant charge to join the romping crowd on the grass, while Annie regales him with dreams of tea dances and home made scones. Arthur grumbles to his feet and lumbers to Annie’s side. He’s a dog who marches on his stomach, almost literally these days. Lunch time is imminent, and he’s learned from years of experience just how much dogged determination it’s going to take to persuade Annie to go home.

At Arthur’s silent pleading, I make my excuses. James has joined the group on the grass, easing down tentatively, six feet from his nearest neighbour. Rupert’s rough-and-tumbling with the black spaniel a few yards away and I have an odd sense all’s momentarily well with the world. Then comes the inevitable waft of wondering. How many of these dogs will be sitting at the sides of the same people when they’re old and stout, like Arthur? Will the community taking root here wither in a return to ‘normal’? Can we create a positive future from the wreckage of a pandemic, or is that too no more than the dream of a tea dance?

Back home, and Annie’s lunchtime carer’s waiting in the lobby. Arthur’s worked his magic. Annie’s just yards behind me on the path and only five minutes late. I greet the girl in the mask with smiling apologies for my part in delaying her client, and head upstairs for that solitary coffee at last.

Seven-thirty on Sunday morning. The sunlight’s soft, and the rasp of the crow on the church tower stirs smaller birds to song. In an hour or so, the chorus will be punctuated by passing cars and the pounding of runners’ feet. It seems a global pandemic has done more than any number of New Year’s resolutions for the urge to get fit, but for now the peace is palpable. I’ve almost forgotten the flash of fury on the wall behind the pub yesterday morning, and I’m some yards past when I turn back. I breathe relief when I see someone has painted it out.

Three days or so ago, the words ‘Feminism is Love’ appeared on the wall. Admittedly, it had already been embellished with ‘b*ll*cks’, in very small letters, by the time I first saw it. Yesterday morning the customary sense of safety I feel in my small corner of the world was ruptured by the words ‘FEMINISM IS MAN-HATING FILTH’. Someone, presumably not hugely fond of women, had gone to the trouble of wholly obliterating the original slogan with white paint, before painting over it in angry black letters.

I’m rattled by the thought that someone who hates me so much lives close enough by to have done this. I’m a woman, and by definition a feminist, since I don’t believe I’m inferior to any man. There are those who will say I shouldn’t take this personally, but how can I do otherwise? Here’s someone going out of his way to spew hatred against people like me, when the original slogan was all about love.

The trees and grasses are taking on autumn colours. The crow, tired of her rasping, has flown in search of breakfast. Two squirrels scatter ahead of me, and the sun through the leaves soothes me as I climb the hill behind the church. I’ve come here of a morning in the past and found the aftermath of parties on the mound, but aside from a red bandanna on the back of the bench, there’s no evidence of human presence today. I gaze out over the city, my adopted home, and wonder how a beautiful world like this came to be such an angry place.

A few weeks ago, I participated in a YouGov survey about people who try to reach safety by crossing the Channel in dinghies. I refuse to use the word ‘migrants’, because these are people like me, and there but for fortune. I was horrified to read a week or so later that 49% of respondents to this survey had been wholly negative about vulnerable people fleeing for their lives. I think I may have mentioned before that I understand the world less, the older I grow.

One of the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had took place a few years ago. I briefly belonged to a church that bordered on a cult, from which I’m almost proud to say I was expelled for refusing to toe the line. An older woman confided that she’d agonised for months over her children, who couldn’t swallow the dogma of the cult, and were thus summarily excluded from her version of heaven. She’d come to terms with it, she said, but it wasn’t easy. Not easy? Is it even possible to come to terms with the idea that your children are going to hell on a point of doctrine? The hell these people believe in isn’t a pretty place.

I’m delighted to find a bee on some late knapweed flowers. It’s hard to hold hate when there’s so much beauty in the world, yet for some people expressions of love or beauty seem only to enhance their bitterness. How do we speak about a God who loves the world, then delight in the idea that we have some kind of exclusive right to this love? How do people come to celebrate the thought that everyone else, even those they claim to care about, is on a highway to a place of extreme pain?

It occurs to me that we’re haunted by the idea of scarcity. In the words of a long-forgotten song, ‘there’s not enough love to go round’, or indeed enough of anything. The squirrels on the path are already hoarding nuts for a winter of scarce supply. It’s instinct that drives them to behave this way, and without it they’d likely starve. In the dark days when survival was perilous, we too were driven by instinct. We ate as much as we could when the food was there, because we couldn’t be sure where the next meal was coming from. We learned to hoard and fight and fear, and those instincts will rule us still, if we let them. Witness the billionaires, sitting like smoking dragons on resources they’ll never need. More than half us adults in the western world are overweight, to the detriment of our own health. For us, food is no longer scarce, but we continue to act as if it were. Then, when a global pandemic happens along, we fight to hoard toilet rolls as though our lives depend upon it.

Oddly, the experience of belonging to a cult didn’t poison me against the God it claimed to worship. I’ve always loved stories. My mother read to me as I sat in the pram in the kitchen of our first home. Milly Molly Mandy I remember to this day. Later, my father could often be persuaded to tell me stories at bedtime. His were moral tales or parables, so perhaps that’s why I’ve loved the stories Jesus told for as long as I can remember. I’m capturing the brief light on the teasels through the railway fence with the camera, when one of my favourites comes back to me.

Jesus told the kind of stories you can revisit time and again, and always find something new. This one’s about a man who owed a ridiculously large amount of money to a king. He couldn’t have paid it back in a million years, so he fully expected to be thrown into jail, in accordance with the custom of the time. Instead, the king chose to forgive him the entire debt – not simply to give him more time to pay, but to wipe the slate clean. As the man walked free, he bumped into a mate who owed him a couple of quid. You might think he’d have been so thankful he’d spread the love, and let his friend off too. Not a bit of it. He seized him by the throat and demanded instant payment.

Until now, I’d seen the man as one who simply couldn’t get his head around forgiveness. Today, however, it seems more about scarcity. This man truly believes there’s not enough love to go round. He needs to hoard against the day when the king changes his mind, and it all comes crashing down. His sense of scarcity makes him fear the man less fortunate. What if the king decides to give it all to him instead?

The members of any cult live in fear that their god might run out of love for them. The respondents to that YouGov survey are terrified the children who survive those perilous voyages will take their jobs or homes. The man with the paint bucket is afraid to give women respect, lest it diminish his own self esteem, and the man in Jesus’ story thinks the king’s generosity is so scarce he needs to hang onto every morsel for himself (spoiler alert – it doesn’t end well for him). And of course, we’re all of us frightened by our own mortality, the more so in this time of coronavirus, so maybe it’s small surprise we sometimes find ourselves at each other’s throats.

The sun climbs, and I find myself thinking of coffee. The pathway’s narrow, and in these strange days I’ve become vigilant, so the woman in running gear doesn’t see me standing back in the gateway until she’s passed. Nonetheless, she stops to thank me, and we marvel together at the morning light. Are you a photographer, she asks, and I think perhaps I am most of the time, but the world’s generous, so I can well afford a morning off. I come home to coffee and a fresh sense of peace.

It’s six-thirty in the morning of another indeterminate day. I stumble to the kitchen, down a glass of water and fill the kettle. Now to feed Frederica, the sourdough culture, who’s been relegated from the airing cupboard to the fridge, in an attempt to curb her bubbly personality. She’s the closest I’m likely to get to owning a pet at this stage in my life, and I find myself chatting to her as I spoon a little of the precious flour supply into her jar.

Back in 1976, my then husband and I hitch hiked from Wiltshire to Ireland. An old school friend of his had bought a smallholding near Sligo. The farm had no phone line, and mobiles were a distant dream, so we filled a couple of backpacks, hit the road and hoped there’d be someone home when we arrived. I’ve never forgotten the journey. The summer had been intense. There was barely a blade of grass that hadn’t been burned brown. We were picked up near Ross-on-Wye by the driver of an empty coach on his way to Holyhead. My husband loved to talk, so I settled back to enjoy the scenery. Nothing I’d read about the drought had prepared me for the skeletons. Gaunt and grey, the charred remains of hundreds of acres of Forestry Commission trees lined the roads through Snowdonia like hungry ghosts, occasional wisps of smoke still rising from the barely-extinguished forest fires.

There are so many tales I could tell of that summer living the hippie dream. There was the village shop that sold crisps with pre-decimal prices on the packets, more than five years after decimalisation, there was the stream where we washed because the farm had no mains water, and there were the endless tales Martin brought back from the local market. He grew vegetables not commonly cultivated in rural Ireland in the seventies, including Brussels sprouts. These had caught the eye of an elderly farmer
So, what are they exactly?
They’re like tiny cabbages
And why would I want tiny cabbages when I can grow great big ones of my own?
Forty-four years on, and it’s the tiny things that matter most. Our larger aspirations have been laid waste by a virus so small it can’t be seen with a conventional microscope. Our lives have shrunk to the size of our living rooms, and to admit I talk to a sourdough culture called Frederica sounds nowhere near as crazy as it would’ve done way back last year.

When my brothers were born, the NHS was not ten years old. I’d be lying if I said I could remember which afternoon it was every week that Mum bundled them into the twin pram for the walk to the clinic, but I know it wasn’t Monday. Monday was divvy day at Williams Brothers, so we shopped on Monday. That was a much longer walk. The clinic building was makeshift, and I have a vague recollection of corrugated iron, but the staff were brisk and efficient. I remember my brothers, stripped to their terry nappies, wailing as they were placed in the scales that took pride of place. We’d come home with purple tins of National Dried Milk in the basket under the pram, and bottles of cod liver oil and rose hip syrup, whose tastes I love to this day.

Chocolate buttons were a rare luxury in the late 1950s, but in my mind they are forever associated with the sting of a needle in the upper arm. The small room behind the scales was where all the immunisations took place. The room had two doors. A queue of anxious mums and fearful children would form at the left-hand door, and a steady procession of tearful children would emerge on the right. I think the chocolate button one of the nurses popped into your mouth as the other popped the needle into your arm was supposed to distract you from the pain.

I consider myself beyond fortunate to have been born in post-war Britain. Uncomfortable though my memories of the clinic may be, I’m truly thankful I never had to face the slow suffocation of diphtheria, the agony of tetanus, or life in an iron lung. My mind often chafes at the way my world has shrunk of late, and it’s easy to forget I’ve had a lifetime of comfort and safety, and experiences beyond the wildest dreams of half the world. Whatever the future holds, I’ve already seen and done far more than most people, past, present or future, ever will.

With Frederica back in the fridge, it’s time for the morning walk. Alert as meerkats on sentry duty, my companion and I venture into the sunlight. I take photographs of the ever-changing minutiae of the world around me. Today the seed pods of the buttercups are swelling, the fern fronds continue to unfurl in an infinite range of patterns, and there are tiny, white flowers on the holly tree. In sixty-six years on this beautiful earth, I’ve never noticed those before. The meadow grasses dance higher than yesterday, the bluebells are fading to reveal their green hearts, and a lace of cow parsley spreads alongside the path.

It’s almost eight weeks since lockdown drove us all inside, although in truth, it’s been rather longer for those of us who realised early on our lives were at risk if we didn’t act. COVID-19 has broadsided everyone. Nobody knows who’s got it, who’s had it, or what effect it might have on anyone who catches it. In comfortable Britain, we’ve enjoyed two generations of antibiotics and immunisations, and we’re not used to illnesses we can’t control. This time no-one’s immune, there’s no cure, no defence except isolation, and nobody seems to be in control.

When it became clear COVID-19 was rampant, there was talk of herd immunity. The government denied they’d said that faster than Tim Martin could dismiss his staff. Apparently, allowing half a million and more people to die isn’t a popular strategy. Who knew? Nevertheless, the idea wasn’t far from the mark. For most of human history, our sole defence has been our own immune systems. During the last couple of hundred years, antibiotics, antiretrovirals, antiseptics and immunisation have joined our armoury. Antiseptics, bleach and soap are highly effective against COVID-19, but despite what Donald Trump tells you, they only work outside the human body. Once the virus gets inside, nothing works at all. Scientists are searching round the clock for a cure, or better still, a vaccine, but they haven’t found it yet.

Research on COVID-19 is in its infancy. Nobody understands the long-term effects of the virus, or why it does so much more damage to some people than to others. It seems to me that until these things are understood, any return to ‘normal’ is likely to be at the cost of many lives. All the conspiracy theories, anti-lockdown rallies, burning of 5G masts, denial, point-scoring, statistical manipulation and fake news in the world can’t change the facts. We’re in the grip of a pandemic. Nobody knows where it came from, nobody is immune, and until we have a vaccine or a reliable treatment, soap and social distance will be our only real defences.

One of the more unexpected consequences of lockdown has been the rediscovery of my fondness for raw carrots. It’s not that I ever actually forgot that I liked raw carrots. I suppose what I mean is, I’ve reacquainted myself with the simple pleasure of eating them.

When I was a child, supper was an important part of the daily routine. It wasn’t a meal as such, more a bedtime snack. Supper took many forms. It might be leftover gravy from the Sunday roast, heated and eaten as soup. Sometimes it was toast and dripping, or bread and milk. It might be a home-grown apple. I can even remember a brief phase when it consisted primarily of ice cubes.

One of my supper favourites was a raw carrot. Unlike formal meals, supper was only lightly supervised, so I had freedom to experiment in ways that would have been considered ‘playing with my food’ at any other time of day. A carrot, I soon discovered, is a vegetable of two parts. There’s a deeper orange outer layer, which becomes darker and harder on the teeth as the carrot grows bigger. There’s also an inner core. This is lighter, juicier and often sweeter than the outer layer, although it can become woody if the carrot grows very large. It’s fairly easy to remove the outer layer carefully with one’s teeth and eat it, I found, without damaging the inner core. By this means, I was able to save my favourite part of the carrot until last. With practice, the same technique can be applied to a bourbon biscuit, although the cream’s inclined to disintegrate rather more easily than the centre of a carrot.

I have no idea where I first came upon the idea that a person who saves their favourite part of a meal until last is a natural optimist. The theory, if I recall correctly, is that a pessimist will eat the best first, for fear someone will steal it, whereas an optimist has a more positive view of human nature. To be honest, to steal food from someone else’s plate would have been so far beyond the pale when I was a child I’m not sure the possibility of it happening entered my head. I saved the best for the sheer delight of enjoying of it. On the other hand, I suppose delight is a crucial part of optimism, and I’ve spent much of my life being taken to task for seeing the world through rose-tinted spectacles, so perhaps the theory holds good. These days, sadly, my spectacles are untinted, and absolutely necessary if I’m to see anything at all.

My self-sufficiency must’ve made me an undemanding child, but I sometimes I wonder whether my parents noticed my childhood was lived pretty much wholly in my imagination. The stories in my head seemed to me vastly superior to a world of which I could make little sense. What was the point of sitting at a desk all day? How was it my best friend could turn on me without warning? Why was a stuffed sock on a garden cane the closest I could get to a pony?

On wet days, I’d beg my mother to let me go through the family photographs, kept in the end drawer of the sideboard. This seemed a world full of magic. I’d leaf through worn envelopes, where women in full length skirts stood arm-in-arm with men in dark suits and stiff collars. I handled the photographs as if they might crumble to dust at any moment. If Mum wasn’t too busy, she’d stop by from time to time to tell me a little about one or other of these strangers. The naked baby on the bearskin rug was her own mother, my grandmother. The girl on the gate was Granny, my father’s mother, taken long before my father was even thought of. The curly-headed boy in the Scout uniform was Dad. There was a photo of a stern woman in black, with a new-born baby on her knee. Granny and Mum stood either side of her. Here, four generations had been photographed together for the only time in history, just weeks before my great-grandmother died. The baby, of course, was me.

Magical though my excursions to the past were, there seemed always something lacking. I loved my visits to a world long gone, but what I was really searching for was an answer. I wanted to know why I felt at home with dragons and princesses, ponies and pirate ships, flowing gowns and flying machines, yet so out of step with the world of scraped knees, inkwells and playground bullies. Could these grainy photos hold the key to the mystery? Was I a changeling, perhaps? Or a fairy princess? Maybe I’d been smuggled, at great peril, out of a distant land, and would discover my magical powers when I came of age.

Of course, I never found what I was looking for. The stories have become faded as the photos. I don’t remember the names of the imaginary princesses, what happened to the pirate ships, or the colours of the ponies that galloped the prairies of the back garden. What I do remember is the garden itself. If I close my eyes I can still see the concrete patio where the pirate ship stood, the coal bunker that housed a horse made from a stuffed sock, the apple trees that screened the vegetable patch where I ate the world’s most delicious raspberries, and the track where the grass was worn away by the tyres of my brothers’ bicycles. It’s not the fantasies I dream of a night, when my mind is free to roam, but the place I loved. It’s the smell of orange blossom, the tart bite of a windfall apple, head-bowed peonies, crimson by the path, and the pop of purple-hearted fuschia buds. These are the memories that remain. And now I understand that to love little things was the magic all along. An imagination powerful enough to create a wild horse from a woollen sock, a travelling companion from a stone, or a pirate ship from two logs and a broomstick can find beauty one way or another, no matter how dark the days. Turns out those rose-tinted spectacles are a magical power after all.

I was born less than ten years after VE Day. A sobering thought, especially as I’ve always considered World War II a distant historical event. But looking back, I realise The War has impacted my life in ways I’ve only begun to understand during these strange times.

My mother was less than a month short of her tenth birthday when war was declared. Within weeks, she was sent away from her London home to live with a family of strangers in a small town in Northamptonshire. No checks back then, to make sure the people who took in the thousands of evacuees were safe. My father was just fourteen. He was briefly evacuated from London to a village in Essex. I have the impression his experience was happier than Mum’s, but he was never one for talking about his feelings.

Like his father before him, Dad started work with the Electricity Board at the age of fifteen. He enrolled in evening classes, to study electrical engineering, and thus, when the time came for him to be called up, he was in a unique position. His employers agreed to consider his job a reserve occupation, so long as he passed all his exams. One failed exam, and he’d be called up without a second chance. As a result, my father spent his war in North London. He worked full time, studied in the evenings, and took turns at fire watch as the bombs rained down by night. Despite the stress and lack of sleep, he passed every last exam, otherwise I suppose I might never have come into being.

I sometimes wonder whether our collective imagination has erased much of the trauma of war. The London of my childhood was peppered with derelict buildings, demolished not by property developers, but by the bombs that had fallen night after night, as terrified people hid under stairs or kitchen tables, or ran for the nearest air raid shelter. People like my father, scarcely more than a boy himself, risked their lives to keep watch for the fires that broke out after the bombs had fallen, and to fight them, often using only rudimentary equipment.

Food and clothing were in short supply throughout the war, and were strictly rationed. Vegetable growing was a necessity, not a hobby. In the main, clothes were hand-made, and mending was a crucial skill. Socks and stockings were darned, tears stitched meticulously, and elbows patched. Hems were let down as children grew, then turned up again for the next child. I remember my mother describing how people would save their sugar and butter rations for weeks ahead, so as to be able to bake a real cake for Christmas or a family birthday. Expensive presents were out of the question of course, as was any kind of waste. My grandfather still kept his wartime bees and bantams in his North London garden when I was a child. I remember the tiny eggs, and the near-black honey on Granny’s home-baked bread for tea.

I’ve learned too much about the consequences of war ever to glorify it, but equally I’ll never belittle the sacrifices of those who’ve lived it. Those who survive carry trauma all their lives, those who die take a part of every one of us with them, and the heroes of war are not always the ones who carry guns. In the war of my parents’ experience, life was held by the thread of darning needles, the taste of cakes baked from shared rations, the smell of fresh-dug earth and the sting of the bees on my grandfather’s arthritic hands. These were the stuff of every day, the hope that heroes would come home, and the promise that the future would be better. In lockdown, small things take on significance again – the daily walk, the sourdough culture in the airing cupboard, an old knitting pattern, a new book – and perhaps it’s no accident that the lens most often on my camera now is best suited to shots of bees, buttercups and bluebells.

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day, we find ourselves locked down in the face of an invisible enemy, as dangerous as the Luftwaffe and far less predictable. The Luftwaffe took out less than 45.000 civilians in six years. In just four months, more than 30,000 plucky Brits have lost their lives to COVID-19. Nevertheless, several newspapers have heralded the predicted easing of ‘draconian’ lockdown measures next week as cause for celebration. ‘Happy Monday’, The Sun headline blared yesterday. There are also rumours that the Prime Minister faces opposition within his own party for being over-cautious about easing restrictions.

We live in an age of grand plans and sky’s-the-limit. We’re accustomed to instant answers, to what-we-want-when-we-want, so it’s hard to believe something we can’t hear, see, smell, taste or touch can change all that. Anyone who hasn’t yet seen the effects of COVID-19, or lost someone they loved, can perhaps be forgiven for questioning the need for caution, especially as the government continues to drag its feet over support for those whose homes and livelihoods are threatened. But, there’s too much at stake to risk a headlong rush back to ‘normal’. The Luftwaffe had been roundly defeated by the time VE Day arrived. COVID-19 is still wreaking havoc. There’s no cure, no effective protection apart from isolation, no vaccine and people are losing their lives every day. 626 of us have died in the past 24 hours according to the latest figures, including a six-week-old baby. Tonight, 626 heartbroken families are learning the gut-wrenching realities of grief. Thousands of people are facing life without a mother, father, sister, son, daughter, brother, aunty, granny, uncle, grandad or best friend. Of course, the tabloids and their wealthy owners are free to celebrate if that’s what they want, but you’ll have to forgive me if I sit this one out

Rwanda. Radio Four has conducted me through a range of emotional challenges this morning. Woman’s Hour opened with domestic abuse and moved on to stillbirth, taking me on a whistle stop tour of 1973 to 2009, with an enforced stopover at 1992, in a matter of fifteen minutes. Now I’m listening to a programme about Rwandan artists and I’ve settled in 1994. I’m watching a bouncy castle expand slowly across a church lawn, whilst choosing a name for a knitted bear.

I sometimes feel I’ve lived more lives than I ever expected. Today’s memory trip had its roots in the longest and toughest of them. The bouncy castle itself came from a fundraising fete, organised by my children and their friends, after they’d watched news of the genocide in Rwanda. It’s no good doing it in August. Everyone’s on holiday, we were told. We raised £495, which was probably more than any previous fundraiser on the same premises. Now I’m listening to Rwandan artists talking about how you make sense of a bloodbath and move on, and wondering whether this once-united kingdom I live in might need to take a leaf from their book before much longer.

Another life, and I cower as Charlie towers, anger throbbing through that vein on his forehead. He’s stalking like a drill sergeant in front of an insubordinate parade, turning on his heel every time he reaches the limit of the room.
And stop playing the fucking victim. It’s always the same with you
It takes one to know one isn’t the wisest reply, but it escapes before I can stop it, and oddly it silences him. Charlie may be all kinds of control freak, but he knows when he’s beat and he doesn’t want a fight over his favourite security blanket. In a few weeks he’ll tell me he really is a victim, whereas I only think I am, but for today he pulls the plug.

Everyone loves a victim. And ain’t it so much nicer to be one than to take responsibility? Helplessness entitles me to sympathy, and to demand from others privileges I’d never dream of giving them. Politicians thrive this way too. Was ever a President so persecuted as Donald? How on earth is poor Nigel to survive on the pittance from the European Parliament? And look at those nasty MPs, thwarting Boris and Dominic as they battle to Get Brexit Done. It’s enough to bring tears to any eye. And it works. These men have money, prestige and privilege in spades, yet they cast themselves as victims-against-the-odds and their followers lap it up. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is neither a victim, nor ‘anti-establishment’. Eton educated, Balliol College, he’s the establishment on steroids. Born with silver cutlery in his orifice, he’s played wives and sired children with abandon that would’ve got him booed off the Jeremy Kyle Show. As a young journalist in Brussels, he fed Telegraph readers a diet of ‘alternative facts’ between 1989 and 1994 that set the foundations for Brexit. Nonetheless, he’s feted as a hapless victim, a hero pitted for ‘the people’ against overwhelming odds.

Another day, another demo. I swore I’d never do it again, after a million and more of us trudged through London in freezing February weather, only to be ignored by Tony Blair. Nonetheless, here I am, one of seven thousand or so tree-hugging soap dodgers of all ages, gathered in support of the Student Strike for Climate. It’s an idea whose time has come around forty years later than I’d hoped. Here we are on the brink of irreversible climate collapse, and it’s taken the initiative of an autistic teenager from Sweden to get the young people whose lives are going to be irreversibly damaged out on the streets.

With 97% of climate scientists agreeing that we need to change our lives radically, you’d think Greta Thunberg would be everyone’s hero, so at first I was baffled by the antagonism she seems to inspire. I get why Jeremy Clarkson calls her a ‘spoilt brat‘. After all, a man who’ll punch someone for getting his lunch order wrong isn’t likely to take kindly to being asked to clean up his act. Likewise, Donald Trump has mocked her and retweeted accusations that she is an actress. No surprise there. However, I’m more disturbed by reactions such as those of some older male intellectuals in France who think she’s not ‘sexy’ enough. She’s barely sixteen, for God’s sake.

The truth is, we only love a victim when they play the game our way, and Greta doesn’t do that. Donald, Boris and Nigel tell their followers they can have cake and eat it. Greta tells the United Nations
You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late
None of us wants is to be told the polar ice is melting, sea levels are rising, rainforests are burning, mountains are crumbling, the oceans are full of plastic, and it’s all because of us. That’s not playing nicely.

Thus recent weeks have seen a tide of criticism on social media that’s risen far faster than the sea. These young people and their climate marches. They’re monsters. Hypocrites of the first order. They wear shoes and clothes for heaven’s sake. They watch TV and use mobile phones, Xboxes and iPads. They travel in cars and go on family holidays abroad. Some of them even wear make-up. How dare they tell the rest of us what to do?

The truth is they’re simply not playing the game we’re used to. They won’t march to the populist drum that says we can have jam tomorrow, because they know there won’t be any jam. Yes, they can’t imagine a world without cars and mobile phones yet, and it’s going to take a while for them to grasp the extent of the battle they’ve taken on. But they’re young and strong, and their cause is just. My generation has plundered our Earth like no other. I’ve lived sixty-five years in luxury my ancestors never dreamed would exist, yet there are those of my peers willing to attack their own children and grandchildren for wanting no more than a planet fit to live on. It’s time for us to stop playing victim, accept responsibility, rise up and rebel in solidarity with our children’s children, who will be the real victims of the coming catastrophe.