In Episode 31 of his new book, author Julian Roup speaks of time travel back to the 18th Century during Covid-19 pandemic.
In case you missed Episode 30, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 5th May 2020
By Julian Roup
This pandemic has heralded a strange new fear – that of our fellow man, woman and child. It is not entirely a new fear to be fair, we’ve been chary of each other for a long time. And not unreasonably. We’ve killed each other in war and at home, on holiday and at work, by day and by night, just about every and any chance we get in strange, bizarre and mundane ways. Just read the newspapers if you don’t believe me. The greatest danger to humanity is humanity itself.
Any woman walking home alone at night is all too aware that any man poses grave dangers. Teenagers in inner cities fear other teenagers, gangs of us fear other gangs, and the elderly keep a wary eye out for everybody, young and old, who may simply push us over, deliberately or by mistake. Husbands kill wives at an astonishing rate, and now and again a wife will kill a husband. Sadly, it happens all too frequently. It is the people we know and who know us best who kill us, the statistics prove it.
But we do not normally have to fear the whole of mankind do we? But now we do, we have to. And it is a very strange feeling. Most of us are instinctively friendly, chatty and some of us like me, are quite touchy feely. I will reach out and touch a shoulder or an arm instinctively when chatting. Or take a hand. It is part of my Jewish and my Afrikaans heritage; menslikheid means humanity, an open-arms approach to life, to friends. And a lot of hugging. It is something I have had to try to wean myself away from, not always successfully, over the 40 years in England, which is more of a social distancing kind of place than a Latin hug, kiss and hug again kind of place.
But now this instinct to meet your fellow man more than halfway could kill you; literally, it could be the kiss of death, a hug that precipitates horror. What a very sad place to have arrived at.
And it is so bloody hard. I find myself grabbing Jan by the back of her jacket, jersey or coat as she instinctively leans in, shortening the distance between herself and a friend or acquaintance as we walk up our lane, and we stop for a chat, or a car pulls up and a friend wants a quick word. Jan moves forward instinctively. And I pull her back as gently and unobtrusively as I can. “Pull me back when I do that, please,” she has asked me, when she became aware of what she was doing.
It is difficult for her as she is a massive communicator, a talker to rival me and has a huge circle of friends. But, while I do like a chat to friends, Jan will speak to anyone, even total strangers. On trains, on busses, in shops, in restaurants, in public loos, on planes, in the street, Jan will reach out and make new friends. She makes friends everywhere, even as I and the kids pull back. “Oh God, here we go again”’ we think, she’s chatting again.
I remember the young, good-looking fire-bomber bush pilot from Canada who had a window seat next to Jan on a flight from Heathrow to LA. He was heading home after a season of fire fighting in the south of France. They talked a blue streak that would have doused a thousand fires, the whole way. Jan had met her match! But now, now it is different. To talk like that could be death.
In some strange way, we are time travelling. We’ve achieved a return to the 18th century, it is no longer 2020, it is once more 1720, but with electricity and the internet, TV and radio, smartphones and laptops thrown in. But we have gone back in time, make no mistake about it. We do things like they did in 1720; we don’t use planes or cars or buses if we possibly can. We stay home, we stay local, we stay put, we see almost nobody and we write endlessly to friends by email, just like Jane Austen and her contemporaries did when the Post Office provided a service that allowed for a same-day delivery of post across the land, such was the amount of letter writing going on.
We don’t go out to shop: the grocer delivers. We may not send a servant or a child with a list to the shop, but instead we shop online and the delivery comes to us.
We make intimate contact with every nook and cranny in our homes and gardens, and lavish love and attention on our pets because we can’t touch our grandkids or kids. We read voraciously, traveling vicariously, because that is what we have to do now, just as they did in 1720 when there were highwaymen lying in wait, cutthroats and pickpockets, disbanded soldiers roaming the land to rob and steal. Best to stay home with the door and windows barred at night. We are bloody back there again. It might not last forever, please God that it does not, but for now we are living a kind of modern equivalent of 17th century life. And I quite like it. Aspects of it anyway. I’m not in any great rush to jump 300 years forward, back to 2020.
In some strange way that I don’t understand, I have become a bit English in my 40 years living here. I no longer say: “Kom maak ‘n draai.” Do pop in, come visit anytime. In fact I’m a bit offended if people just pitch up at the front door, or I would be if they did, as it’s England they don’t, but you see what I mean. But now nobody knocks on your door. Even the postman or delivery drivers just dump your stuff and go. There are no distractions from the front door. And for a writer that is bliss incorporated. It makes me so happy. The drawbridge is truly, finally, completely, up and the moat is full!
And because few of us are working, the phones barely ring, not much email either except junk and there is quiet, hours and oceans of peace and quiet at last. It’s going to be a shock going back to 2020 when all of this lifts. I am not going to like it and I think that many other anti-social types would agree with me.
Not Jan though; Jan is a social being and loves company. My late father was the same, he would station himself outside our holiday house at the seaside resort of Bloubergstrand in the Cape, in the sure certainty that someone, a friend, acquaintance, a neighbour would walk by and there’d be a chance of a chat. He was in seventh heaven one day when a German tourist coach disembarked its load at our front door – the house overlooked the sea which splashed up against the front retaining wall – and they all marched into the house and sat down to order tea and scones, thinking the place was a restaurant. Had my dad had his way, he would have kept them there for lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. As it was they just stayed for tea, embarrassed by their mistake but held there by my father’s robust hospitality and desire to chat, to speak, to tell stories, to hold forth. This lockdown would have killed him.
It’s hardly surprising that two of his children, my sister Jay and me, are still metaphorically speaking, hiding upstairs to avoid visitors. Our brother, Herman, on the other hand, is (metaphorically) in the road looking for tourist coaches. Isn’t human nature and genetics strange?
The cottage still reeks of burnt toast and toaster, my daily reminder now that Charles Dickens and I only truly share one thing, a part of England that is home. But then he did not have the fun of podcasts, poor man. Eat your heart out Charles!
Georgie, who has been looking after Callum for me, texted yesterday to say she had broken her foot. A horse stood on it, not Callum thank God. So now another friend, Alison who has helped us with our horses over the years, is going to take Callum on his daily walk down to pasture and back while Georgie in her plaster boot will do the mucking out. We are lucky to have friends like this to help on the horse front.
A report just in changes my mood immediately. The American publication Medpage reports that COVID-19 is killing African Americans at shocking rates. There are, it appears wildly disproportionate mortality rates, and it highlights the need to address longstanding inequities. Infection rates are three times higher and death rates six times higher than among the white population.
In Louisiana, African Americans accounted for 70% of COVID-19 deaths, while comprising 33% of the population. In Michigan, they accounted for 14% of the population and 40% of deaths, and in Chicago, 56% of deaths and 30% of the population. In New York, black people are twice as likely to die from the coronavirus.
Comorbidities like hypertension and diabetes, which are tied to COVID-19 complications, disproportionately affect the black community. But the alarming rates at which COVID-19 is killing black Americans extends beyond this, and can be attributed to decades of spatial segregation, inequitable access to testing and treatment, and withholding racial/ethnicity data from reports on virus outcomes.
“There is nothing different biologically about race. It is the condition of our lives,” said Professor Camara Phyllis Jones, MD, former president of the American Public Health Association. “We have to acknowledge that now and always.”
Many of these communities are located in poor areas with high housing density, limited access to education, and high unemployment rates. Low socioeconomic status is forcing some individuals residing in these communities out of their homes and into the workforce.
The Guardian’s Rashad Robinson writes: “The failed and corrupt response to Covid-19 is killing black businesses, black jobs, black votes and black people. Deborah Gatewood was a black nurse who worked for 31 years in a Detroit hospital. Last weekend, she died from Covid-19 after being denied treatment by hospital doctors – four times.
This fatal neglect may seem like a shocking individual story, but it is no surprise to those of us who have been tracking the many systemic inequalities in healthcare for years. As just one example, doctors routinely treat black people’s pain and suffering far less seriously than that of other patients. It is the result of preposterous, anti-science assumptions they hold about black people, which their medical schools and hospitals still have not forced them to unlearn, as research studies have revealed.”
He adds: “Even with factories shut down all across the country, one thing America never stops manufacturing is widespread racial injustice. Every day, we see how the unchecked racism that has pervaded our health system for years has become even deadlier now.”
The story is much the same in the UK, where Black, Asian and minority ethnic people are dying in numbers out of all proportion to their presence in the population.
The rich get richer and the poor get dead. Same old, same old. When will this ever change? If Prince Charles or Boris Johnson were black men, would they have survived? You tell me.
Click here for Episode 32.