In Episode 22 of his new book, author Julian Roup notes the Royal living arrangements during Covid-19 lockdown.
In case you missed Episode 21, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 28th April 2020
By Julian Roup
It is a cool wet day for first time in six weeks. I am glad that I cut the lawn yesterday, but annoyed that I did not put the garden furniture away last night as its soft cushions are all soaked. But reading the papers this morning, I feel ashamed about my worry over garden furniture getting wet.
Global virus cases passed the three million mark today, with more than 200,000 deaths, according to John Hopkins University in the US, which is tracking the spread of the pandemic.
Here in Britain, there will be a one-minute silence today at 11am for key workers who have died. I stand silent in the shower as the pips for 11am go off, thinking of the dead as the water beats hard on my head.
The Government announced last night that compensation payments of £60,000 will be made to families of key workers who’ve died from Covid-19. But, not unexpectedly, bereaved families say the money cannot make up for their loss. There will doubtless be a reckoning after this is all over. I do hope so.
The newspapers and TV show that London is a ghost city and the only people out at night are knife-wielding drug dealers and rough sleepers, many from abroad, who work in cafes and restaurants that closed six weeks ago. So many of the normal charity food and soup kitchens are not currently open, and people are starving on the streets of London.
There are restaurants that have turned themselves into impromptu charity soup kitchens, but they are few and far between.
Despite Boris saying yesterday that there would be no end to lockdown yet, for fear of losing all we’ve gained, thanks to the public’s sacrifice of staying home, there are commercial voices today calling for their businesses to reopen – gyms, food markets, garden centres. The garden centre spokesman makes the best case, saying they have the space for social distancing, and gardening is the perfect activity for people stuck at home; he also mentions the mental health benefits of gardening. All good stuff. But for now, the Government is hanging tough.
The football world is looking into ways of starting to play again behind closed doors, and F1 motor racing is planning to race at all their venues with no public in the stands. So strange, so very surreal.
Thank God for gossip. It is the yeast that lifts our spirits. Lockdown has meant that one of Britain’s national treasures, writer and playwright Alan Bennett, now gets a hot lunch. Bennett is known for – among other plays turned into film – The Madness of King George (1991) and The History Boys (2004).
In an interview this morning, he says that his civil partner, Rupert Thomas, editor of the design and decoration magazine, The World of Interiors, usually works away from home and likes a hot lunch. So now with both of them stuck at home, there is a hot lunch served for both of them. It is a charming insight into the living arrangements of this delightful man who has so enriched British life. I am glad you are getting a hot lunch, Mr Bennett!
I love his wit and wisdom. Some of his quotes about books and history stay with me as both have so enriched my life. Half my life has been reading, the other half writing. Or, as Bennett says: “You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.”
“The best moments in reading,” he writes in The History Boys, “are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
And, as he also says: “How do I define history? It’s just one fucking thing after another.”
The pandemic and The Express newspaper have lifted the lid on the royal living arrangements of Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Philip, who have been in lockdown in Windsor Castle for six weeks. Normally, the couple live apart, the irascible Duke at Wood Farm on the royal estate at Sandringham in Norfolk, and the Queen in London, at Buckingham Palace.
The Express reports: “The Duke of Edinburgh attended royal events at his wife’s side for decades, finally retiring from duty in 2017 at the impressive age of 96. Since then, Philip has enjoyed a break away from the Windsor bubble and is reported to split his time between Buckingham Palace and Wood Farm, Norfolk. While the Queen remains busy with royal duty in Windsor, Prince Philip enjoys a slower pace of life, painting and reading.” Hopefully no longer terrorising other road users with his appalling driving. But I imagine that being stuck at Windsor may not be improving the royal temper.
Other couples are not as fortunate to have farms and palaces to give them space. The Guardian reports: Calamitous: domestic violence is set to soar by 20% during global lockdown.
At least 15 million more cases of domestic violence are predicted this year as a result of pandemic restrictions, according to new data that paints a bleak picture of life for women over the next decade.
Thinking of domestic violence, I raise my eyes to ‘King’s Standing’, a group of pines crowning the hill that dominates our southern skyline, named for Henry VIII’s hunting visits to what was once one of his royal deer parks. At sunset, the trees are a black clump on the horizon. In my mind’s eye, I see a young Henry VIII standing there, bow in hand, waiting for deer to be driven past him for a killing shot. Beside him is the beautiful young Anne Boleyn, whom he is courting. Her family home, the lovely, moated Hever Castle, is just five miles to the north. The poor girl has no idea of the horror awaiting her. She is about to marry the poster boy for domestic violence. This valley of ours has played a number of supporting roles in English history. Our present troubles fade into insignificance when compared to Tudor England with its religious changing of the guard and all the bloodshed to which that led.
Chefs and restaurant owners across Europe fear bankruptcy as the continent’s gastronomic culture remains in limbo. Waves of restaurants are expected to close as they grapple with the problem of feeding people sitting in close proximity. Our culture of going down to the pub for a drink or dining out is history for the moment. How many will reopen is anybody’s guess.
The whole world it seems is chasing face masks, reports Guardian writer, Samanth Subramanian.
She says that epidemiologists have spoken highly of N95 respirators, masks that filter out 95% of small particulate matter, and now entrepreneurs the world over are chasing them down. One man began phoning N95 suppliers in Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Ireland. Each one turned him down. “The answers ranged from ‘No’ to ‘We only sell to accredited buyers’ to ‘Come back next year.’ After three days, he found a South African company named North Safety Products, which had 500,000 masks in stock, and he bought them all, at less than a pound per mask, certain that he would be able to sell the surplus.
During their conversations, North Safety Products executives warned the buyer to be careful. There were ‘interested parties’ lurking outside its factory gates, ready to bribe truck drivers for their cargoes. So the buyer hired a security detail to ride alongside his truck of masks as it drove to the airport in Johannesburg. Six grim men, packing pistols and rifles, clad in camouflage and bulletproof vests. “They asked if I wanted machine guns as well. I thought not. We’re not invading Lesotho. Let’s keep it reasonable,” he said.
In mid-February, two weeks after he placed his order, his shipment touched down in Hong Kong. Within six hours, the buyers he had signed up had collected nearly all of the masks. “Even if I’d had 5m masks,” he said, “I’d have sold out.”
Some countries have hoarded masks, and used them as chips in geopolitical games. Thieves have made off with them. The fashion houses Prada, Gucci and Balenciaga have started to manufacture them.
Last year, a fashion industry insider said that Burberry had toyed with the notion of putting face masks on some of its models during a catwalk show – a wink, perhaps, at our apocalyptic future. By March, things had become real, and the fashion house has pledged to make masks and gowns for the UK’s NHS. From a healthcare perspective, the mask was a matter of life and death. But in the fashion world it had already taken on the function of a talisman – as an object to hang comfortingly between the body and a diseased society.
And all of this, when we are still not clear on the advice about whether masks are helpful in stopping the virus spreading. But everyone is looking for masks.
There are glimmers of hope. New Zealand is going back to work today, having stemmed the spread of the virus. Jacinda Ardern has played a blinder. A Nobel Prize may well be in the pipeline.
Australia says it had only 12 new cases of the virus over the past day. More than 2.4m people have downloaded a tracking app, as the country seeks to move into a new phase.
US President Donald Trump once again censured China’s handling of the virus, saying: “We are not happy with China.”
I’m sure that’s true. But if Covid-19 costs Trump his hoped-for re-election in November, we will have China and the virus to thank for that. It will have been far too high a price to pay in terms of lost lives and economic ruin, but a lesson to us all that politics is a serious business, to which clowns and incompetents should not be invited.
I pick up the binoculars to check on Callum, who seems content under his rain rug, head down, munching. It’s my turn to cook, and so I plan the day’s meals – chicken sandwiches with mayo for lunch (from last night’s roast chicken) and chops for supper with a salad. Nobody is going hungry in this house, which in time may be a problem. But so much less of a problem than those starving on London’s streets.
Others, elsewhere, are starving too. My thoughts fly south to my wise, kind and funny sister Jay, making peanut butter sandwiches three times a week to be distributed to desperately hungry children and adults in the townships of the Cape flats.
The dead are not the only victims of this virus, there are the hungry, the bereaved, the battered women – and our tattered, worthless politics.
Click here for Episode 23.
