Julian Roup – Angels of the evening Ep23
In Episode 23 of his new book, author Julian Roup notes that angels of the evening are abroad in this time of Covid-19.
In case you missed Episode 22, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 29th April 2020
By Julian Roup
I wake up to a sunny day, but the forecast is for three wet weather fronts pushing through in the next 12 hours, one after another. I put the binoculars on Callum in his paddock at the bottom of the hill and see he is wearing his raincoat.
With toast and coffee made, I go back to bed for the 8am news. Already it is clouding over.
I had a strange night filled with troubling dreams, none of which I remember, other than waking with some sense of anxiety. I am worried about Jan as she has hurt a rib when she tripped and fell against a chest of drawers. It has meant that for the past two days she has been in pain. Our walks have stopped as a result. Today I will get Gus out for a decent walk.
The United States has now had more deaths than during the 20 years of the Vietnam War. At the end of April some 50,000 people have died with a million having been infected. It beggars belief.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the American physician and immunologist who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and is currently the lead medical spokesman in the US on the virus, warns that there could be a second spike in the autumn and we will be living with Covid-19 for a long time. I groan inwardly.
Mass graves are being dug in the Amazon, and Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro is losing members of his cabinet after saying the virus was really just "sniffles". A South American Trump.
Nurses in India and Brazil have been attacked because they are seen as spreaders of the virus. There is no end to the hysteria and fear of mankind for his fellow travellers.
Taiwan and South Africa are mentioned on the news as countries which have done well in their handling of the coronavirus, by taking tough early action with a lockdown and also thanks to their knowledge of handling infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and others.
The UK Government has announced that it will today finally provide the true death toll, adding home and nursing home deaths to the 21,000 announced dead at hospitals. Some belated semblance of honesty appears to be breaking out.
Better late than never, I suppose.
Cancer referrals are 70% down as people are terrified of going to hospital. Thousands will die because of the delay. The NHS has taken over part of the private health sector to provide Covid free hospitals for cancer operations, the Guardian reports today. "Almost 18,000 more people with cancer in England could die after the coronavirus pandemic led hospitals to suspend treatment and deterred patients from seeking NHS care, research has found. Cancer experts claim that an extra 6,270 people in England who have been newly diagnosed with the disease could die from it over the next 12 months as a direct result of the disruption caused by coronavirus. The additional toll, taking into account all of those living with cancer, could be 17,915. That is an increase of 20% on the 89,576 deaths among cancer patients recorded annually in England, according to the latest available statistics."
The Government's aim of testing 100,000 people per day will be reached by tomorrow, says a Government spokesman. The Army is setting up drive-through testing sites all over the country. The first targeted are the one million health workers, and then the over-65s with symptoms.
The UK health and social care secretary, Matt Hancock, is determined that the transmission rate of the virus be suppressed well below one (one infected person only infecting one other) before the lockdown is eased. He is also racing to get a track-and-trace system up and running to help control the virus when restrictions are eased.
The 75th anniversary of WW2 VE Day (victory in Europe) will be a very muted affair, and will rely on Vera Lynn songs, centering around the song "We'll meet again", mentioned by the Queen in her speech to rally the nation a few weeks ago.
British Airways plans to make up to 12,000 staff redundant. The BA boss says more than one in four jobs could go as coronavirus causes global collapse in air travel.
After yesterday's rain, I need exercise and I walk Gus down to the valley floor to see the flowering garlic patch under the trees by the river, and the bluebells beyond the lake. Gus runs free, off the lead, happy as a sand boy. He sends such a powerful message for me – 'stay in the moment'.
Walking down the hill, I had hurried a bit, thinking of all the other things I wanted to do today, taking me away from the present and the presence of the wood. And then Gus brought me back to the present. It is an overwhelmingly beautiful present, decorated here in the woods with lime-luminous leaves on the spring-dressed trees, the colour of the season as they say in Paris among the haute couture salons.
But the bluebells are the real heroes of the hour, massed in banks of mauve and violet and shyly offering their visitors a scent so subtle even Chanel would be hard pressed to match it. This setting and the bluebells make the best case I know for the existence of faeries in the English woods. After all, I've seen their bell-shaped blossoms worn as faerie hats in my childhood picture books. How blessed to be in England now that April is here, as the poet Robert Browning put it in 'Home-Thoughts from Abroad'. The pandemic seems a million miles away.
A couple out walking their dogs stop for a chat. They have a small black Shiatsu on a lead and the friendliest white-blonde golden retriever, called Lucky, who bustles up to Gus and me, her whole body wagging, and grinning delightedly. Oh to be so happy on meeting new people!
All of us maintain the six-foot social distancing that has become the norm, so easy to do here in England where social distancing has been the way of life, in fact de rigueur, for centuries.
And now, Richard Wilkinson and Katherine Seymour, long time friends, pass by, out exercising horses. They find me sitting on a tree stump editing bluebell pictures and chatting to the dog walking couple. They stop to say hello and we all catch up on local news briefly. Katherine's mare, known as 'Evil Edna' – because she'd bite your face off given half a chance – has just had a stunning foal and is turning out to be a surprisingly good and gentle mother. What a surprise.
Katherine has been a very good friend for some years and recently she went to a great deal of trouble to help me find a horse again. She sent me a load of horses she thought might do, and introduced me to Abbie Hart, a respected local dealer who does most of her selling out in the hunting field. Abbie had some nice animals and Katherine even came to help us test them out. What she and Richard know about horses it's now too late for me to learn. They can look at a video of a horse and tell immediately if it is sound, or if there is some hidden issue there by the way it carries its head or assess its temperament, depending on how much it swishes its tail. Katherine is a fund of wisdom, an excellent dressage rider and all round good egg.
And Richard, well, Richard is something of a local legend. The bravest and best horseman I have ever met in a lifetime of horse riding. He has spent his life saving and fixing damaged horses. A place awaits him in horse heaven.
Both of them like to tease me, something that has taken some getting used to, as I am the one in my circle that usually does the teasing. When I was ill and thinking of giving up riding both suggested I buy a sofa. It was enough to irritate me, make me snap out of it and send me in search of Callum. They know me well.
I bid them farewell, and as Gus and I move on I hear the first woodpecker of the season hammering hollowly. Down by the river, there is a bird whose call sounds like a penny whistle from South Africa. And then three geese fly over at treetop height in tight triangular formation, honking their heads off hysterically, like three offended grannies who've just been flashed on a train. Further up the hill on the way home, a cock pheasant calls and suddenly a buzzard croaks above us, looking for a meal. Britain may be in lockdown but nature is getting on just fine, thank you, doing her thing.
All this bird activity takes me back to an evening walk with my daughter Imogen some 20 years ago when she was still a child of eight. We were on a mission to the woods behind our house in search of a long straight pole that would make a flagpost for the camp she and her friends were building in the wooded grounds of their prep school.
The school did many things well, but one of the best was to use the 300 acres it had at its disposal. The children spent every Wednesday afternoon in the woods, and at the end of the academic year younger children like Imogen built camps and competed for the best one. In their final year, pupils built camps in the woods, stayed overnight, had pitched battles between the teams, and in the morning made fires and cooked breakfast over them for the exhausted teachers. The school then chose a winner for the best thought out and constructed camp. The amount of enthusiasm this annual project generated is hard to imagine.
We were two steps from our front door when Imi said: "Gosh! Look at the bats." They were swooping on the clouds of midges dancing in the last of the evening sun at 8.30pm, on this perfect early May evening. A few steps further on and we heard the noise of approaching Canada Geese, honking loudly as they flew over our neighbour's house, heading down the valley to the pond where they spend the night on a grassy island.
Imi and I ambled down the lane and slipped into the woods. We were lucky, and in short order found the ideal pole, a slim fir about two inches in circumference and twenty foot long, neatly felled and 'abandoned' on the soft pine needles. Explaining that this was not really theft but would fall into the English category of 'scrumping,' we made our way back up the hill – me carrying the heavy end and Imi the light bit up front. As we emerged from the dark woods there was the most God-awful shout from one of the myriad pheasant who haunt this place, and then we marched off again into the twilight.
Imogen mentioned that she could spell photosynthesis and then demonstrated this facility. Rather overcome by her forwardness, she sought to disguise her embarrassment by jumping on my back, saying she had not had a piggyback in ages.
As we reached home with our flagpole, an angel started up his nightly aria just behind the cottage. A male nightingale, fresh from Africa, was at it again, sending out into the night his most beautiful love song. We stopped, enchanted, and listened. Truly we live among angels, some with voices, some without, but as Jane, a neighbour with Irish connections would say, "to be sure they are all angels of the evening."
And now here in 2020, the angels of the evening are at it again, making the countryside alive with glorious sound, but they have angelic competition among humans now – the nurses and doctors fighting for our lives in hospitals and care homes across the nation. The angels of the evening have taken on human form.
Click here for Episode 24.