Julian Roup – People are pissed off and some just plain pissed, parties are on the rise Ep30

In Episode 30 of his new book, author Julian Roup observes South Africa in a home brewing frenzy in Covid-19 lockdown. 

In case you missed Episode 29, click here.

Life in a Time of Plague

Sussex, 4th May 2020

By Julian Roup 

South Africans have had it tougher than us – no booze or cigarette sales – and this is driving all the nicotine and alcohol addicts crazy. You can’t find a cigarette butt on the streets of Cape Town and pineapples are not to be had for love or money, as everyone is brewing their own poteen or witblits (white lightning) at home.

There is all sorts of black-market stuff going on in Cape Town, I hear from my contacts, as drinkers and smokers are forced to be rather more creative than usual. I suspect that every garden in the city is now growing cannabis to meet the smoking demand, and that ginger beer has suddenly got enough of a kick to give everyone the ‘Malmesbury brei’, or the guttural rolled R typical of real Afrikaners.

Cape Town supermarket shelves, already denuded of loo roll, pasta and wheat flour, are suddenly short of yeast, sugar and fruit too. And no pineapples!

President Ramaphosa may have saved thousands of lives with his stringent lockdown, but Cape Town won’t be walking straight for a while, it seems.

A good friend, a doctor in Cape Town, known for brewing his own beer, says he made a batch of ginger beer using pineapples and cane sugar a week ago and one evening had two glasses before supper ‘to test it’. He was then called out from his home in Newlands to a patient in Seapoint, on the other side of the mountain. He said he only realised something was amiss when he could not find the road his patient lived in, and after a while, fuzzily realized he was in Llandudno, three miles further down the road – and fully three sheets to the wind.

He very sensibly called on his locum to take the Seapoint call and after a spine-chilling swim off the beach at Llandudno, drove home very slowly. Not an effect his normal homebrew or Pinotage had ever had on him, he said. I asked what had happened to the rest of the ginger beer, and he said he was saving it for a party when lockdown ended. It promises to be a party to remember.

Here too, we await our next delivery of food and drink with anticipation. Whole streets are now co-operating to keep each other topped up with essentials and gossip and scandal are rife when someone asks for a mango on the WhatsApp group. A mango? My sister-in-law Gail tells me there was outrage on her street in Bristol when the request for this exotic fruit was made. Some people, it seems, do not realise that there is a kind of war on, as the politicians keep telling us. I just wish some of them would remember that Churchill was out on his ear after saving Britain from the Nazi threat (with a little help from our American and Russian friends – and men and women from every corner of Empire). Churchill, our war leader, was out on his ear at the first post-war election. Boris? You listening?

Our dog, Gus, is properly pissed off, as we’ve run out of tinned dog food and he is now on a diet of dog biscuits de jour and meat rinds from our plates. Not good enough it would appear, judging by his hangdog look. We may have rescued him from a dogs’ home, but he did not sign on for such meagre rations, he seems to be saying. Our next Tesco slot will be heavy on dog food, if they will allow it. Thank God the cat, Saffy, is not currently moaning.

They don’t realise how lucky they are. I tell them stories of WW2 and the disappearance of pets into pots, but this falls on deaf ears; the last war is history as far as they are concerned, and their only concern is grub. Lots of it. Bit like us humans really.

And then disaster strikes. I have been jawing to Jan about Alec Hogg’s introduction to the podcast of my book on BizNews, which mentions that Charles Dickens started the system of serialisation. Jan is much amused and gives me that old fashioned look that says: ‘Don’t get above yourself, mate.” I don’t see that it’s that funny myself. Charles Dickens, after all, lived just up the road from us in Kent, and maybe, just maybe, I am channelling Dickens with my ‘Life in a Time of Plague’. But, jokes aside, you have to hand it to Alec, he takes hyperbole to a whole new level.

Suddenly the smoke alarm goes off, my toast and the toaster (which is on its last legs) are on fire in the kitchen. I’ve forgotten about it after jamming a wooden spoon handle in its side to hold the ‘on’ mechanism down, and coming upstairs to discuss my new role as the next Dickens with Jan. She says from now on my new nickname is not ‘Dickens’ but ‘Big Dick!’ And “Lucky the smoke alarm worked, or we would have had to jump out of the windows.” Pride does indeed come before a fall. Luckily, the house is saved when I rush the toaster out to the garden, much to Gus’s interest. Lockdown has its moments.

The UK Government has not yet published its plans for lifting lockdown, but cracks are appearing in lockdown anyway. One hears anecdotally of lockdown parties and today there are two confirmed, one in that great party town Liverpool, home of the Beatles. Police yesterday arrested 13 people and fined 11 others after raiding two Sunday lockdown parties in Liverpool. In a separate incident on Saturday, people travelled 20 miles from Greater Manchester for a party in Wavertree.

Twins were also stopped in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, on Saturday night after driving 17 miles to buy a kebab. As you do when the mood moves you, and only a kebab will do. Police impounded their car for “serious vehicle defects”. The driver had no insurance and the pair had travelled from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, officers said. They don’t mention whether the twins got to eat the kebabs. It would be good to know if the trip was worth it.

Looking at Ireland’s five-stage lockdown exit plan, I realise just how complex this process in the UK is going to be, with no guarantees that it won’t trigger a second wave of infection. This is a seat-of-the-pants operation, if ever there was one. And it will be the same the world over. The Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, has said that Ireland will begin the first of five phases in late May. Starting with small social gatherings and easing restrictions on funerals and outdoor activities, then progressing to allow more social and travel freedoms, come August the Irish will be able to go to pubs and small festivals again. So August will be one hell of a good time to be in Ireland. If you are not afraid.

One of the best overviews of this catastrophe and how to get out of it that I have seen, is summed up in The Guardian by Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh.

Knowing how to control the spread of coronavirus is not rocket science, he says. “But actually doing it has proved elusive and difficult for many governments across the world. When China first alerted the World Health Organization about a novel coronavirus on 31 December, the countdown began for countries to each prepare. Some, such as South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, were scarred by their recent experiences with two other deadly coronaviruses, Mers and Sars, and so reacted quickly to the coming threat. Others, such as the UK and US, consumed with domestic political issues, watched and waited, anticipating that this new virus would be more similar to a bad flu strain.”

He says that after four months into the pandemic, there are lessons we can learn about how best to control the virus and minimise deaths.

The first is to aggressively identify where the virus is and break chains of transmission. This requires a “test, trace, isolate” policy that involves mass community testing, tracing those who had been in contact the previous week with any individual testing positive, and putting all of those individuals into a mandatory quarantine.

The second is to protect health and social care workers who are most at risk from contracting the virus, and who are exposed to high viral loads during the course of doing their jobs.

The third is to keep constant surveillance of the virus using tracking systems to detect whether certain parts of the country are becoming hotspots that are setting off more clusters of infections.

The fourth is to control borders.

The fifth is that clear and honest communication with the public is required to keep trust and compliance with the necessary policy guidance in a sea of noise.

The sixth is recognising that any ‘exit’ strategy is not like a switch that means life will go back to pre-Covid days. A ‘new normal’ will need to be adjusted to, which is likely to involve distancing whenever possible; possible temperature checks when entering public buildings and offices; and the use of face masks in public.

The seventh lesson is that a lockdown, if introduced early and quickly, can slow the spread of the virus.

The final lesson is that all of the above are short-term strategies, while countries await key scientific findings to create informed policy decisions and find the ultimate ‘exit strategy’.

But Dr Sridhar concludes: “The steps above can ensure that countries keep daily new cases low and avoid a repeat of the 1918 flu epidemic, which was determined, in the end, by the survival of the fittest.”

That won’t help me one little bit, that is for sure. The last time I might have counted among ‘the fittest’ would have been during my National Service in the Army in 1969. It’s been all downhill since then.

Click here for Episode 31

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