If I listened long enough to you
I'd find a way to believe that it's all true
Knowing that you lied
Straight-faced, while I cried.
Still I look to find a reason
To beleive.
I didn’t write that. Well, obviously I did, but I wasn’t the first to do it. So far as I remember it was the B side of Maggie May when Rod Stewart first released it, when it was the first single I ever bought. Back when there wasn’t much music around to listen to, so if you were into any music at all then you listened to it again and again and again, no matter how many times your Mum banged on the floor or ceiling screaming at you a stream of non-sequiturs about other people living in the house too.
The song was called, oddly enough, Reason To Beleive. It ought to be the national anthem now.
It’s week I don’t really know what of Covid19 lockdown. I can’t see any end to it and I don’t think anyone can. The biggest problem for me is that I can’t trust pretty much anything outside my front door now. I can’t trust people I don’t know not to kill me. And I certainly can’t trust this government, specifically because they told me not to.
When I was a boy we watched a lot of TV at home, despite there being only two, then three channels and not enough programmes to go round, to the extent that HTV, my station back home as they called it on heart-wrenching posters above the buffers at Paddington Station (they should have strap lined the whole railway ‘We’ll take you home,’ except they never did) used to have to run pictures of daffodils to a Russ Conway soundtrack in the daytime on the rare occasions a pre-epidemic cold was bad enough to keep me at home. When they weren’t broadcasting daffodils and knees-up piano music they ran Combat.
It was written, filmed and screened in the early 1960s on for the prime target audience, the men who’d actually fought through northern Europe not even twenty years before, just turning forty and beginning to appreciate a comfy chair and their memories of a time when they didn’t need to worry about trouser buttons popping when they sat in one. My father hated it for the way the “trigger-happy Yanks’ never had their helmets fastened, though quite when called-up RAF groundcrew who pretended they were pilots got so finicky was always unclear. But then, so was my father’s whole war along with the rest of his life and that’s another story in itself.
The format was simple. GIs invade Normandy and fight their way through France to beat the Nazis. Despite hardships, goodness eventually and always prevails. So far, so simple. You’re sitting there watching it, ain’t you? There are plenty of guys you knew that ain’t.
How it was as a six year-old is something I’ve begun remembering a lot now when practically anyone you meet can kill you, not with a burst of Schmeisser fire in an idyllic French hamlet but by silently giving you a dose of a fatal virus without even meaning to. Every simple walk outside becomes an episode of Combat.
A gap in the hedgerow? Don’t rush through it. Stop. Listen. An empty narrow trail across that field? Binoculars. It looks empty, but look at that path coming into it in the next field. The one that’s got (cue title sequence and dramatic music) …. SOMEONE WALKING ON IT!
But that’s how a walk through the fields is now. You can’t sensibly get on a path through crops if there’s a chance you’ll meet someone halfway across. Around here if you startle wildlife you have a decent chance of a deer running smack into you, and we have some big deer in my part of Suffolk, most of which never seem to have heard of social distancing. Maybe it’ll all be over by Christmas.
And maybe it won’t, because the one thing that has become absolutely clear is that the government doesn’t have the first idea what to do. The second thing that’s become clear is that pretty much everything said by them turns out to be a lie less than a week later.
We’re expected to believe in the same breath that the Prime Minister was fully in command of everything in the UK and literally wrestling the Grim Reaper at one and the same time. That it’s ok when the Prime Minister boasts about shaking hands with people with corona virus but everyone else shouldn’t go within two metres of anyone they don’t live with. That it’s all something from Foreignland, but there’s no need to test anyone coming into the ?UK, let alone track and trace their contents, and at the same time just 300 people were quarantined. But most of all, the constant drumbeat for the masses:
We’re following the science
Which is palpably untrue when other countries’ science hasn’t just been different but resulted in rather less than 32,000 deaths, one of the worst fatality rates in Europe.
Now the PM has announced, simultaneously, that a) we’re past the peak of infections and b) oh by the way, here’s 6,000 death figures we just found down the back of the Office of National Statistics’ sofa, but that doesn’t count. Because science. And anyway, it’s difficult to compare, which seems to be the standard response any time the government is questioned now.
All of this from a government which told us that we’ve all had enough of experts, except when experts can be rolled out to agree – or at aleast stand there not disagreeing – with anything the PM says.
It’s insulting. It’s the new normal. And I don’t have anyone to believe any more.