In Episode 11 of his new book, author Julian Roup has his eye on China, California and Holland in Covid-19 lockdown and sees no change in British walking etiquette.
In case you missed Episode 10, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 17th April 2020
By Julian Roup
I wake up to find 25 deer in the field opposite the cottage, heads down, grazing contentedly. The lockdown has been extended for another three week, and the peace this Friday is tangible. A thought comes to me that I have had increasingly these past few weeks – I’m going to miss this time when its over. Why? The reasons are numerous. I enjoy the quiet, the sense that the whole world is stopped momentarily from its mad rat-race to destruction. I like the fact that though my work has almost dried up, demands for payment from various bodies have also stopped, as few people are at work. This gear shift is good, and as the old saying goes, a change is as good as a holiday.
There are so many fewer demands on my time, just cooking and walking the dog, not onerous tasks. There has been a devastating cost for many in lost loved ones and economic hardship, but personally, I would be happy to see this time extended if we could just put a stop to the dying and the financial concerns for everyone.
This morning’s news is led by a much needed happy story. A 99-year-old WW2 army veteran, Captain Tom Moore, set out to raise £1,000 by walking a 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday, using his walking frame for support. To his astonishment, the country has donated £15m (and at the time of recording this a month later it is £30m) and now the great British public is demanding he get a knighthood. Ah Blighty.
The FT today reports that the UK is setting itself apart from the rest of the world by maintaining loose border controls, even as dozens of countries continue to clamp down on international travellers, in an attempt to stem the coronavirus outbreak. As the number of infections worldwide rose above two million this week, Britain remained in a small club of nations that have failed to match the tighter borders and stringent quarantine rules on arriving travellers that are now common in other countries. “The UK is an outlier,” said Professor Gabriel Scally, president of epidemiology and public health at the Royal Society of Medicine. “It is very hard to understand why it persists in having this open borders policy. It is most peculiar.” More than 130 countries have introduced some form of travel restrictions since the coronavirus outbreak began, say Oxford University researchers tracking the measures. These include screening, quarantine and bans on travel from high-risk areas. But not Britain. WTF?
News that both China and the USA are lifting their lockdowns in a phased way is making the news. China has adjusted its death toll figure in Wuhan up to 3,000 and says its economy fell by 6.5%. Nobody believes anything that comes out of Beijing, so who knows. The same goes for the idiot in the White House who surely someone will put in permanent lockdown soon to save what remains of our sanity.
After our one and a half hour long walk in the woods yesterday, Jan and I have good appetites and for supper I make grilled chicken and a salad. On our walk, we passed two other couples with their dogs, two horse riders from the yard next door and a rather dodgy looking tattooed man in a singlet coming across the wall of the lake.
At present British walking etiquette is more pronounced than ever, people try their best to avoid coming close and one or two stick to the truly unique British custom of simply not seeing you. They walk past ignoring any greeting, eyes to the fore. Even after 40 years here I find it strange and irritating. Is it shyness, social awkwardness, annoyance that anyone else shares their space, a desperate need for privacy on a small crowded island? Or a mixture of all these things? I have never really understood it or come to grips with it. And, if anything, when I’m out horse riding, it’s worse. One might be forgiven for thinking one was invisible.
After supper, Harriet Doherty pops in after horse riding locally, collecting more clothes for our daughter Imogen who is in lockdown with her and her mother Julia over near Rye in Kent. Hattie hovers at the garden gate, while we stay by the cottage’s storm porch. I have not seen her for a decade at least, not since she was around 18 and we catch up briefly. This is a girl we have watched grow up, as her mother is Imogen’s godmother. Hattie looks so much like a younger version of her mother, who, like her, is an accomplished artist. I have no doubt that Hattie’s work will make her name in time. My years at Bonhams and consultancy for other art auction houses and galleries has honed my eye a bit and Harriet definitely has talent. She looks like a 1940s Land Army girl in her breeches and windcheater splashed with mud. She has a very old-fashioned English beauty, blond and rose, and she radiates good will, intelligence and competence. We are sorry to see her go.
When she leaves, with the clothes and the food and wine Jan has added to her load, we watch a film on Sky, Carlito’s Way (made in 1993) with Hollywood stars Al Pacino and Sean Penn. Pacino is a gangster who tries to go straight after leaving prison but is sucked back into crime by everyone he knows including Penn, his lawyer. The evening flies by. For Hollywood, it seems crime does pay.
During the day I received a telephone call from a friend, Martin van der Zeeuw in Holland, and I speak to my brother in California.
Martin tells me that the Dutch are pretty much going about their business as usual, despite lockdown and social distancing. He lives next door to the spectacular tulip fields of Kuikenhof outside Amsterdam, which my mother said were surely a foretaste of Heaven after visiting them. Martin says that the millions of tourists who visit each year have not arrived and the blooms have been cut three weeks early. He is a classic car journalist and editor and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of cars. Last year, he survived a triple-heart-bypass and is once again cycling, driving and working. When I had my stents inserted he was very kind and supportive. So we have a kind of survivors’ club, the third member being Tich my brother-in-law in Bristol who suffers from arrhythmia. At present, all three of us crocks are well. But God help us if we catch this virus.
In Santa Barbara, my brother Herman and wife Teri are missing their grandson William, aged three, whose language skills have blossomed in lockdown. Sadly, William believes that he is being punished by his parents, by not being allowed to see his friends. It must be so difficult to explain to a child his age what is going on without frightening them.
My niece Nikki and her husband Jon are in lockdown in Cape Town with two bright, energetic, demanding daughters Sofia 12, and Abi, 7.
To help them cope, Jon has come up with a brilliant wheeze to use up some of the girls’ endless energy. Their ankles are tied to an elasticised rope harness in the swimming pool where they can use every muscle swimming strongly, but not actually going anywhere. They will probably emerge with shoulders like rugby forwards and be able to swim the English Channel with ease. They also have a tent in the garden to give them a sense of camping and to give them some distance from the adults.
Lockdown with kids is not for sissies.
Click here for Episode 12.