Walking The Dog

A frosty morning. An ancient oak. A hint of blue sky. A bit of frozen cobweb. And days lengthening - "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" Percy Bysshe Shelley I can't quite believe that I'm here, writing another 'Life in a time of covid-19' blog - the sixteenth. Maybe I'm stuck in a covid loop of covid blogging. Maybe it's time to stop. I like the number seventeen, so maybe there will be a seventeenth, and then something different. For now though - getting back to the sixteenth - what a year we have had. What a time we live in. What ... I stare out of the window ... what ... I massage my shut eyes, smearing my glasses with my fingers ...  what about what comes next? Dare we think of that? Specifically, the what of what comes next. Time will tell. What a cliche! Well, yes, but it's a cliche that is true. Time will, indeed, tell. But the problem is, we want it to tell us now. We want to know. We want to be able to see past the doom-laden news...

What comes next?       What comes next is a question we impatiently ask ourselves throughout our lives. It assists planning. It is the bedrock of ambition. It builds futures. But, right now, what comes next is tinged with more uncertainty and fear than we are used to. In our cosseted, modern lives, those of us who live in stable, Westernised societies, have become lazy in our thinking - we've too often narrowed the focus of what comes next to our own small patch of the planet - ourselves, our families, and our friends and colleagues. Now the focus of what comes next has exploded to encompass the entire planet and all its peoples and ecosystems and political situations. And contemplating this near-incomprehensible what comes next is exhausting. I've been struggling with it for at least two months. Let's face it, I'm not alone - you have too; along with the rest of the population. Of the entire world. I say two months ... but in reality, we have probably been contem...

There's a first time for everything. Some firsts are met with deserved celebration. Some with derision. Some with despair. Some with a 'Huh,' and a shrug and a 'well, there you go - it was bound to happen.' That my laptop didn't try to correct  covid-19  in the title above, or just now for that matter, is one of those shrugging, almost sighing but actually can't be bothered to expend the energy that a sigh would require firsts. It was inevitable. Say something or type something enough times and it becomes the norm. Which is an intriguing thought - maybe we could invent a word and see how long it takes to get picked up by others. But hang on a minute this happens already. Lexicographers such as those working for the OED make their living out of tracking the evolution of language - the appearance of new words and the loss of old ones. As the coronavirus pandemic marched across a stricken world, covid-related words splurged all over our inboxes; social media...

Constants - those rooting things that never change. Those things that we depend upon. That ground us firmly in who and where we are. The things that if removed would be replaced by chaos. When I was thinking about what to write,  I clumsily started to input c-o-n- into my phone and up popped the suggestion 'consonants.' Consonant - definition: any speech sound that is produced by stopping the air flowing freely through your mouth - 'f', 't', 'z', 'm' ... etc, and also any written letter that is not a vowel. By substituting the t in constant with the on in consonant my phone unwittingly suggested something that at first glance might appear to be constant but is not. Language evolves and changes - even its letters; its building bricks. Not all of the vowels and consonants we take for granted today are the same as the ones known, for example, by Shakespeare. If we go further back in the history of the English language, to Chaucer, they are...

Crime drama usually has that pivotal scene where a witness is asked to recount what they saw. For the reader or television viewer this is an expected and hotly anticipated part of the story - the part where the detective will hopefully discover some small nugget upon which the investigation will turn. The unfolding story hinges entirely upon an accurate recall of what was seen. Skilled storytellers, who understand human psychology, will show how tortuous this recall can be. Ask yourself what colour of shirt and tie, or dress, the newsreader on television last night was wearing - you watched him or her speaking, between newsreels, for the half an hour or so of the programme. How accurately do you recall - not what he or she said - but exactly how they looked? When the police ask, 'What was the suspect wearing?' they don't expect their witnesses to give accurate answers 100% of the time. Witness testimony is notoriously unreliable; in cases that were overturned after DNA e...

How to switch off. Switching off is hard at the best of times, but as this is the furthest from the best of times that any of us has ever experienced, right now switching off is well nigh impossible. Or is it just me? Despite Life in a time of covid-19 - parts 1 to 4 and my advice to find our happy place; practise the ten daily gratitudes; and to be kind to ourselves, I find that I am not very good at practising what I preach. My mind jumps from one thought to another and my actions start and stop in a desperate attempt to keep up with my thoughts. Maybe meditation ... or regular exercise ... or a good book ... or gardening ... or a walk with the dogs ... or baking ... or sorting through the freezers ... I'm doing it again: sprinting towards a finish line along a track filled with distracting potholes and all the time having to find different ways of not falling in. Or if these ways are unsuccessful, of actually falling in - I walk into a room and find I don't know why I...

First - no I didn't: have to don PPE at work yesterday (... see the Life in a time of covid-19 - part 2 blog if you're confused). This was a huge relief. But I have vastly more than huge respect for all those who did. As GPs ... I've never admitted to being one here before but hey ho times change ... we are usually on the frontline but right now the frontline has washed into the A&E departments and we are left with phone calls; lots of them. We're doing what is called telephone triage which basically involves speaking to many worried well; issuing too many prescriptions for antibiotics to sore throats and earaches; and trying to diagnose rashes from descriptions of how red or sticky they are. Video calls are coming but what looked like plain sailing last week has veered off into choppy waters with messages not sending properly or sending twice or the process freezing on screen almost like its afraid of something; maybe its moment of being the rabbit in the headl...

The words 'happy place' probably turn the title of this blog into an oxymoron, coming after the eight words and numbers that precede them. I don't think many of us are feeling particularly happy at the moment. Me - I'm anxious; nervous; and sitting on the edge of my chair (which is possibly more to do with the general decrepitude of the chair and its broken undercarriage than any agitation I'm feeling). Why ... am I anxious - not why do I persist with a broken chair? Well - partly the obvious, the p word ... pandemic; but also two other words beginning with p. Might I have to put on PPE (personal protective equipment) at work tomorrow? Personal and protective. Personal - to me; to keep me safe. Protective - is it? I'll park that particular worry for now and deal with it tomorrow. There's nothing I can do about it today. You see, this is why I need to focus on my happy place. Why I need to escape. If I step back for a moment from the anxious l...

It feels like we are stuck in the opening credits of a disaster movie. But this is a cinema we cannot leave. And there are too many directors trying to tell us - the extras - what to do. So we stop listening and follow each other. And as the cameras roll, the dystopian world of the film descends into chaos and panic. The problem is this film is real. So what are our options? Well, it appears that a lot of people have selected option 1. The panic option. The option driven by an escalating drip drip of confused and contradicting information. The rabbit hole we hurtle down in a frenzy of wide-eyed suffocating fear as we search and search and search for information on the internet; read terrifying tweets and skip the too doom-laden headlines that we see, but are too scared to open. Some have selected option 2. The it-won't-happen-to-me option. The we-suddenly-find-ourselves-on-a-paid-and-mortgage-free-holiday option. The scientists-are-jargon-spouting-nerds option. The irrespon...