Julian Roup – Spaffing Britain up the wall Ep 10

In Episode 10 of his new book, author Julian Roup in Covid-19 lockdown, thanks God for the BBC.

In case you missed Episode 9, click here

Life in a Time of Plague

Sussex, 15th – 16th April 2020

By Julian Roup

Thank God for the BBC!

I finished my 1,000 words for the day and switch on the radio to hear the 1pm news. After the usual depressing litany of woe there is a repeat of the History of the World in 100 Objects by the former director of the British Museum, the brilliant Neil MacGregor. Today he is speaking about Stone Age hand axes. These tools accompanied man for at least a million years, unchanged in their design. Originating in Africa’s Olduvai Gorge, they came north and have been found all over Europe, the Middle East and even here in Britain, pulled out of a cliff on the Norfolk coast.

Often they are objects of great beauty as well as functionality, able to cut up a woolly mammoth or a deer. MacGregor says scientists have found that when these objects are being knapped from flint the same part of the brain used for language is activated and so they believe that this tool making coincided with the start of human speech.

Some of the axes, the very beautiful ones, seem uncomfortably large to be used easily, and MacGregor wonders if they were not something of a status symbol. Powerful men co-opting art to project power in the same way we see at Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions, when a Picasso is being sold for millions.

This thought takes me back to Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa where I studied anthropology for three years and flirted briefly with the idea of becoming an anthropologist. But reason prevailed, and I became a journalist instead. During those three years, I had some contact with hand axes and many years later at Bonhams fine art auction house in London’s Bond Street, where I ran the press office, I had the privilege of holding these Stone Age axes in my hand once more and marvelling at their beauty, bewitched by their vast age.

Holding such objects gave me a thrill, knowing as I did that I must be linked by family to these objects, the numbers of Australopithecines being relatively few in number. A sort of human Holy Grail, embodying food processing functionality, protection as a weapon, status symbol and art object all in one. The vast arc of time they represent also gave me an almost out of body experience while standing next to Joanna van der Lande, the Head of Antiquities at Bonhams, who showed me these miraculous stone survivals.

Sitting in the garden today, listening to Neil MacGregor speaking so eloquently about these hand axes, time collapses for a little while, and I forget lockdown and the coronavirus. These objects also help me gain some perspective on mankind’s current predicament and mine. What, after all, are a few weeks in lockdown against the span of the ages? The great accumulation of time those axes bring with them dwarfs my little life and another few weeks, or another decade, of life seem neither here nor there.

We’ve had another food delivery from our usual supplier and Jan has over-ordered on the pickles, not realising they are restaurant size! We now have enough dill pickle gherkins in two huge jars, each a foot and a half tall, to keep a Jewish Deli in business for at least a month. I wonder what a slice would be like with a G&T?

The postman delivered a letter from the NHS today, offering sympathy for my being stuck at home for 12 weeks and suggesting ways of keeping amused, reading, listening to music and cooking being some of the suggestions. They have also just texted me to say I should expect a telephone call checking up on me to see if I have all that I need. The trouble-making side of my nature wonders what would happen if I asked for a full body massage when they call? (They never do).

Listening to the news once more, the lacklustre Health Minister, Matt Hancock, who looks sicker by the day, was finally, reluctantly, promising the social care sector some help with personal protective clothing (PPE). Thousands of sick and elderly citizens are dying in their care homes, and the staff who are trying to help them are exhausted and at their wits’ end.

When this shit-show is over, and Britain is found to lead Europe, possibly the world, with its death toll, I do hope that Boris’s recent comment is recalled, that spending police budgets on child abuse claims is “spaffing money up the wall“. (Spaff is slang for ejaculate, and I have to presume here Johnson means the money spent on child abuse claims would be wasted). Let’s hope his self-image as Britain’s new Churchill is remembered for the sick joke it is, as he has certainly ‘spaffed’ Britain up against the wall with his half-arsed response to the Coronavirus. How many thousands of dead would be alive today if we had a competent Prime Minister; our would be ‘King of the World’ – as he told his sister Rachel was his ambition as a child – is another sad deluded little Trump-lite.

There is a further depressing descant to this song of destruction echoing across Britain – news of the scammers who are using the disaster to line their own pockets. People selling fake masks or just pretending to, others shipping cocaine in under medical supplies, and many others who don’t miss an opportunity to kick us when we are down. If we are at war, these people are traitors and saboteurs who should suffer the same fate as if this was a shooting war. Is that too much to hope for? I am so often angry just now.

Helping my mood and preventing me going on a killing spree of my own are the hundreds of yachting vlogs I have watched during this time and before it too. Thanks to these vlogs from so many, especially the two that got me into this watching spree in the first place, the remarkable couple on La Vagabonde (the team who sailed the climate protestor Greta Thunberg and her father across the Atlantic to Lisbon), and SV Delos, which has been going round the world for a decade with two brothers who had not sailed previously and suddenly decided to run off to sea. Remarkable people all, whose courage, fortitude, inventiveness and great good humour in the face of sometimes overwhelming weather is humbling. Free Range Sailing is another favourite, a young couple who are hugely knowledgeable about living off the sea and the land.

This morning I found a new one that did something truly remarkable: it dropped 50 years off my age and made me feel 20 again, however briefly. Four young American surfer-sailors, led by a grizzled Frenchman, took a Gunboat Catamaran named Vela from Hawaii to the Lion Islands 1,000 miles to the south, at a very respectable pace. It is so charged with male energy and goodwill and esprit de corps, that I longed to be 20 again and full of vim and vigour, thrilled by the world and all that it offered.

At one point on the journey, Vela is moving slowly in very light airs, and the lads leap in for a swim. There is a wonderful underwater image of one of the crew hanging onto the rudder boards, pulled along horizontally in the deep blue. It is the absolute image of an undersea angel flying through the sea.

Thanks to these videos, I am regularly at sea rather than in my rickety steamer chair in the garden. They have taken me vicariously – minus seasickness – across every ocean on earth, to the Arctic and Antarctic, the cruising grounds of the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and Thailand. I’ve circumnavigated the world with SV Delos and watched families form on RAN, Delos and La Vagabonde. Thanks guys, you’ve all been life-savers.

As I look down the lawn, there is a path sprinkled with daisies where my footsteps to the horse’s feed room through the winter has compacted the soil, encouraging this blossoming in the grass; a floral snowdrift that commemorates my morning and evening strides across the green. A spoor of flowers. ‘Los net ‘n spoor’ they say in Africa. Leave only footprints. With this writing, I am doing my best.

Click here for Episode 11

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