Celebrate the moments

Nearly nine weeks.

Nearly nine weeks of being at home with only these four walls, two bears and one cat for company.

Nearly nine weeks of attempting to create some kind of routine and stability for my LittleBear, and even hoping that occasionally there might be moments of education tucked in there somewhere.

Nearly nine weeks of glumly reading the news and discovering what new idiocy a cabinet minister has blurted out, what new lie has been honed, how many people have died.

Nearly nine weeks of trying, and often failing, to work productively from home. Trying to design scientific instruments when my notes, reference documents, old designs and colleagues are all elsewhere. Some of these can be accessed remotely, but two filing cabinets full of annotated diagrams of a twenty-two year career designing and testing instrumentation isn't really compatible with remote access.

It's easy to be dragged down. It's easy for the days to blur into one and time to drift by, each day's tears and tantrums feeling much like the previous day's. It's easy to find that every day has too many tears and too few triumphs.

So today, for one day only, I shall celebrate the triumphs.

I went to work for the morning and made a stupidly complex instrument work. Everything came together; years of experience, understanding and knowledge flowed through my fingers and into the beast in front of me, as tweak by tweak I tuned it up into doing exactly what we'd designed it to do. One of those days that comes around only once or twice a year. Most instruments are considerably more recalcitrant and throw up considerably more problems.

I came home and after lunch with my bears, then coaxed the smaller one into attempting not one, but two pieces of schoolwork. He expressed extreme reluctance to tackle either but then both he confessed to rather liking by the end, and being proud of the outcome. And to cap it all, LittleBear's brand new cricket bat arrived whilst in the middle of this burst of scholastic achievement*.

Armed with the new bat, we spent the rest of the afternoon at the local Recreation Ground, and LittleBear discovered the great joy of a decent bat, and the ability not simply to hit, but to thwack, hoick, loft, welly, and smack the ball to all corners of the field. His strokes straight down the wicket were frankly terrifying and had the bowler ducking for cover.

And now, having gloried in one of the few genuinely positive days I can think of in the last nine weeks, I have ordered a curry for dinner. And I am taking great joy, not in the eating of the curry as it's not here yet, but in the fact I can buy takeaway curry via PayPal and cycle to collect it in an appropriately socially-distant fashion.

There are still moments of good in life.


* The reason LittleBear needed a brand new cricket bat is a story of its own, but involves tears, rage, and a broken cricket bat.

How many hours in the day?

The world (and when I say world, I mean internet) appears to be full of people who are having to find ways to fill their days while in lockdown. Amusing little memes about how many times a day they're cleaning their kitchen, or whimsical ideas for craft projects. Expressions of boredom.

Frankly, and excuse my language, fuck that shit.

Here's how the hours in my day currently get used....

• A minimum of 1 hour per meal, three times a day, preparing, eating and clearing. And yet sometimes an hour isn't enough for three people to eat toast. How is this? That's at least three hours per day just providing meals. 
• Half an hour in the Joe Wicks torture chamber.
• 4.5 hours working from home*
• 4.5 hours homeschooling*
• 1 hour playing football. Or cricket. Or catching. Or some other sporting permutation in the garden with LittleBear.
• 1 hour playing Minecraft (also with LittleBear I hasten to add).
• At least half an hour cleaning up the kitchen in an attempt to avoid a localised outbreak of listeria. Somehow this is necessary on top of clearing up after a meal. Crumbs and sticky patches simply materialise out of the ether.
• At least half an hour on laundry or cleaning or tidying or finding missing objects.**
• Half an hour bike ride after dinner, because otherwise LittleBear isn't tired enough to fall asleep.
• Half an hour bath-time or bedtime reading or tucking LittleBear up with snuggles, or some combination of the above.
• Two hours per evening staring blankly at the goggle-box, or the goggle-phone, or the goggle-laptop. There is generally also wine involved. Sometimes treacle sponge and custard. 
• Half an hour of my own bedtime reading.

This adds up to a daily total of 19 hours, leaving an impressive 5 hours in which to insert all those improving things that I apparently should be doing. Except I haven't included the things I need to do that aren't daily, but still happen - Facetime calls with my family; Zoom meetings with the neighbourhood volunteer network that I'm part of; WhatsApp chats with fellow Mums about what the hell the schoolwork is about this week; making football training videos for my little football team; doing the grocery shopping (prefixed by planning the grocery shopping, which takes almost as long); responding to random administrative emails (frequently football related); attempting to remain in some form of contact with friends and relations; gardening (though we're cultivating more of a "wild" garden this year...); cuddling my precious LittleBear, playing with him, talking to him, reassuring him, cajoling him into brushing his teeth, laughing with him, listening to him.

Oh, and I still need to sleep.



Footnote: Obviously I exaggerate for comic effect. Yes, BigBear is doing some of the above, and no, I am not superwoman, squeezing eleventy-billion hours into one day, it just feels like it.


* Admittedly, just for giggles, I am attempting to do both these things simultaneously, which actually means being a bit shit at both of them. I guess it means I get 4.5 hours a day back for doing other stuff though, doesn't it? That's definitely the way this works.


** No, half an hour a day is not sufficient to keep a three bedroom house, occupied by three humans and one cat 24-hours a day, 7-days a week clean. The house is not clean. But it's not actually a health-hazard yet. Got to set the bar low enough to meet it.

A controversial opinion

Apparently it's VE Day on Friday. The 75th anniversary of VE Day no less. And this is worthy of moving our May Day bank holiday from its traditional slot on a Monday. Why?

I can recall little in the way of celebration 25 years ago, when we passed the 50th anniversary of VE Day. So why is the 75th anniversary suddenly so special?

I can hazard a guess, and it's not one that I think everyone will like.

We are being governed by a right-wing, jingoistic, nationalistic cabal of man-babies who hanker after nanny and Empire. Men who truly, and terrifyingly, believe in British exceptionalism. Men who wish us to all follow them in believing that we are better than those nasty foreigners. Men who fervently want to lead us out of Europe and into the hallowed uplands of Making Britain Great Again. What better way to remind us how great we are, and how exceptional we are, than to ram our Victory in Europe down the population's throat?

This isn't about remembering the war dead -  we have a calm and contemplative Sunday in November for doing that.

This isn't about cherishing peace, or supporting our veterans, or celebrating the ties that bind us to Europe.

This is about the kind of knuckle-dragging "two World Wars and one World Cup" chanting that makes the rest of Europe loathe us so much. This is fuelling nationalism, triumphalism and a tragically misguided believe that we're better than them.

This is about us and them. It's about how we beat them.

This is about manipulating history, distorting the past, and using it to persuade the people that we're somehow special. It is the grotesque lie of British exceptionalism writ large. We are not exceptional. We are no braver or brighter, no more honourable or honest, no more stoic or stalwart, no more courageous, calm or clever than any of our continental neighbours. We are all just people. We have a rich, varied and fascinating history with an expansive literary and artistic heritage. As do other countries. We need to get over ourselves.

If VE Day should mean anything, it should serve to remind us of the ties that bind, of how hard so many nations fought together to bring a lasting peace to Europe. As the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Europe from Nazism dawns, Britain instead sets herself apart, convinced that she is better than the rest of Europe. She is not. She never was, and she never will be. She is just another country.

At a time when that belief in our own innate superiority has seen us refuse to bulk buy PPE with the rest of the EU; fail to initiate a lockdown in a timely manner; fail to test adequately; fail to track infections; fail to protect our front-line workers; and subsequently witness the worst death rates from the pandemic in Europe, now is hardly the time to be beating a drum for ourselves.

It is nothing short of grotesque to persuade the population to "celebrate" Victory in Europe when we are choosing to sever our ties with Europe. What is the message there? Is it that Britain stands alone, always ready to fight the filthy Hun? Is it to not-so-subtly continue to build the comparison of Johnson to Churchill? It is a disgusting display of arrogance and self-delusion at a time when more people have died from COVID-19 than died in the Blitz. Johnson is no Churchill. He has provided only vacuum and vacuity where leadership was needed.

I have never "celebrated" VE Day in the past, and I have no particular desire to do so now. I continue to mourn the fact that we are choosing to leave the Europe that we helped to form from the ashes of the second World War. I will always honour the war dead on Remembrance Day; I will always make sure that my son knows the evils of war and the need to fight for peace; but I will not participate in manufactured national back-slapping, bolstered to foster support for the petty, bigoted Little-Englanders currently leading this country.