In Episode 33 of his new book, author Julian Roup thinks of Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as MaCavity the cat in Covid-19 lockdown.
In case you missed Episode 32, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 7th May 2020
By Julian Roup
My day starts each morning with the 6am BBC news on Radio 4, and as I lie in bed, I make notes of the headlines for expanding on later. This morning, it has emerged that the 400,000 surgical gowns from Turkey, that much vaunted delivery of protective clothing, do not meet British standards, are not up to the job, and will be sent back to Turkey ASAP. The PPE crisis, it seems, is still happening.
There has been a surge in bicycle sales, as many people fear to get onto buses, trains and tubes. So, perhaps, having killed so many of us, the virus will ultimately leave survivors a fitter bunch, and that can’t be a bad thing.
The economic outlook is grim; the Bank of England forecasts a 14% drop in GDP, the biggest for 300 years, but they say the economy will bounce back sooner than expected. Here’s hoping.
Then a report that says many furloughed folk will find after lockdown that they don’t have jobs to go back to. We are all flying blind, that is the truth of it. And I know just how dangerous that is. My mind goes back to 1971 in Cape Town when three Airforce 125 Mercurius jets flying in close formation, practising for part of the planned Republic Day celebration flypast, struck Table Mountain in thick fog, killing all three pilots and the other eight people on board.
Anyone who knows Cape Town is aware that its skies are dominated by that great, grey-blue looming colossus. Yet those pilots ploughed right into it and out of this world with a bang that echoed across the shocked city.
Yesterday afternoon, Jan and I decided to visit Robert and Jacqui Taylor’s fabled bluebell field a mile from us. The night before, I had phoned to ask if this would be possible, and Robert had kindly said he would leave the gate to the field unlocked for us, so that we would not need to come to the house first. I parked my car by the gate and we strolled through the small wood with its views beyond of the bluebell field and the heights of Ashdown Forest looming beyond in all its majestic palette of greens. As we emerged from the wood, the scent of the bluebells hit us in a wave, and we stopped, bewitched, filling our lungs with the intoxicating smell, and eating the blue and green views like so much eye candy. We agreed that we were blessed to live in this place.
We circled the field, photographing every possible angle, and then pulled up the two chairs at its edge to simply sit in the shade and observe the light-changing colours of the flowers, noting the odd patch of rare white bluebells among the sea of violet and purple blooms. We watched three horses, in their own green Eden beyond, meander in the warmth of the late afternoon sunshine.
Finally, we dragged ourselves away from this bliss, and walked back through the wood to the car. Just as we got there, Richard Wilkinson, our long-time horse guru and friend pulled up in his car. He was heading to his and Katherine Seymour’s stable, where they run a professional horse-backing yard whose speciality is fixing problem horses. We stood well back from the car to talk.
Richard is a legend. He is the single most accomplished horseman I have ever known, utterly fearless and unfailingly kind to the animals that pass through his hands. He has saved the lives of countless horses that would otherwise have been put down. Often the problem is a skeletal issue that has led to such pain that the horse has become too dangerous to ride; or bad and inept human handling has created an angry, problem horse. Richard, now in his late 60s, with innumerable broken bones, a missing spleen, wrecked hips and crocked knees, keeps going, and gets onto horses I would never think of mounting. Many of them are, like Oscar Wilde, mad, bad and dangerous to know, but he fixes them all, almost without exception.
I can remember some years ago, a huge black horse, almost 18 hands tall, whose favourite vice was rearing up with his rider and then throwing himself over backwards, determined at all costs to get rid of the man on his back and ideally pin him to the ground and kill him. He met his match in Richard.
Richard would exit left, throwing himself out sideways as the horse reached the pinnacle of its rear, and just before he fell over backwards. Once the horse had regained his feet, Richard would remount, and the deadly game would recommence. I am still not sure, even after knowing Richard for 35 years, if he is brave or mad. Probably a bit of both. He is a gentle, humorous man and yesterday teased me, saying he’d heard I was playing about with peas. A bit confused, I asked what he meant, and he said he believed I was making podcasts. We laughed, and he drove on down to his waiting horses. He’s never going to make it as a stand-up comedian.
The audio recording of the book now takes up the start of each day. The sheer toe-curling horror of hearing the sound of your own voice takes some getting used to. A shot of Jameson’s helped me through the first one. But a double whisky at 10am is not a good idea, and things were a bit fuzzy till lunchtime.
In subsequent recordings, I can hear a tongue-licking sound at the end of each paragraph. Jan hears it too and asks about it. I tell her the sound engineer in Jo’burg says it’s not my tongue, but the opening and closing of my sphincter muscle. Jan has the best laugh I’ve heard from her in years when I tell her I’ve now disguised the sound with a second pair of underpants when recording. Tears flow as she laughs so hard it seems she might choke. It makes me happy to see her laugh like that.
The kind feedback I am getting is heartwarming. I hear from among others, old school classmates, and from former freedom fighter Marion Sparg, who was in our journalism class at Rhodes University, whose name will be inscribed in the history of South Africa, and who Jan featured in her book Class of ’79 about three anti-apartheid activists who studied with us there. And I hear too from Graham Watts, who in a unique way is father to these words, for though he is younger than me, it was he who taught me news writing at Rhodes, encouraged my life in journalism, and after he met up again with Jan when they both worked at the FT, provided a platform for my work when he edited its weekend magazine. In his way he spawned a writing virus! Thank you Graham.
I fear the end of lockdown a little. The deep peace of this house arrest, and the hours of uninterrupted time it provides have become addictive. The ongoing conversations with family and friends round the world will be missed when work kicks in again, if it does.
One of the costs of emigration has been the loss of this daily contact with my sister and brother with whom I am very close. The sibling bond has, if anything, got stronger over the years as I have always found them in my corner when the solids hit the fan. I value their wisdom and honesty and integrity and the fact that they put up with my bullshit, my teasing and joking. The loss of their company, their physical presence in my life, has been the single greatest cost of emigration. We joke that we are as close as we are because we each have a continent to ourselves: Africa, America and Europe. Thank God for them and my friends, who have made this strange time so productive and rich in so many ways.
Jan sends me a Twitter comment that delights me, as it will doubtless entertain many others who think Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is almost as bad as Covid-19. It is from Phil Sparkes, and riffs off ‘MaCavity: the Mystery Cat’ by T.S. Eliot:
“De Pfeffel is a Mystery Man: he’s known for his guffaw,
For he’s the shady dilettante sidestepping the law.
He’s playing wiff-waff in Beijing and being Churchill’s heir,
But when the brown stuff hits the fan – de Pfeffel isn’t there!”
Click here for Episode 34.