Stir crazy

I am increasingly of the opinion that many people are becoming more than a little stir-crazy, and that this is manifesting in anger and intolerance. Or maybe it's just I'm spending more time on the internet, and people on the internet are angry and intolerant. It's a close call. I'm definitely becoming more angry and intolerant, but this may be from excess exposure to other people's rage; or the state of the world; or the gradual degradation of my mental health after 13 weeks trapped at home while watching one of the most catastrophic governments in living memory mishandle everything. Again, a close call.

A case in point for you.

There are a group of people in our village who are choosing to hold "street discos" once every month or so, placing a professional PA system on their front drive and cranking the volume up to "entertain" the neighbourhood. In itself, marginally anti-social, as they inflict loud music on a wide area, without apparent consideration for whether everyone wants to hear their choice of music. Nor indeed any awareness that once said music has travelled half a mile, to call it music is an affront to Euterpe, as the sounds bounce, diffuse and dissipate their way through and round buildings, trees and roads. But, it's only been about once a month, and it does appear to have been a communal decision for their street and a lot of people seem to have been made happy by it. So, while I was only one person who was unhappy, I didn't feel inclined to complain to anyone beyond my nearest and dearest. 

Saturday night was another such night of "entertainment". It started at about 7pm, with the published intent to end at 11pm. A bit late for my liking, on a hot night when I want the windows open, particularly in LittleBear's room. He was left with the choice of a stifling bedroom or being kept awake with loud music. "A bit late for my liking," veered into, "You have got to be kidding me," as the music continued blaring out beyond 11:30pm. I went and checked the village Facebook page, and sure enough it was supposed to finish at 11pm, but all I could see were pages and pages of comments about how much fun everyone was having, so I simply seethed quietly to myself and tried to sleep.

The following day I discovered that I was not alone in having felt vexed by the antisocial volume and end time, and a couple of my friends recommended I have another look at the village Facebook page to see the conversation one of them had got involved in, in which she politely and calmly suggested that maybe finishing earlier would be considerate. 

Oh dear.

It was one of the worst mistakes I have made during lockdown, because I was exposed to the full depths of idiocy which humanity can plumb. Most people limited themselves to knuckle-headed inanities, such as "We all like different things, so you should just put up with what I like," or "The nay-sayers always get their way, it's not fair", not to mention the classic, "You should just chill out." One particular resident really aggravated me though, when he launched a remarkably aggressive post to defend the organisers of these events, using an impressive array of logical fallacies. The more I think about the things he said, the more angry I become, not only at his attitude, but at the level of support that attitude received.

The essential points he made were:

• while holding this event, donations were collected for the local food bank, and £250 was collected for the local mental health support charity
• not only did lots of people enjoy the event but the man in question has evidence that many people supported his views, as demonstrated by the number of "likes" his post acquired.
• those who were complaining about the volume and duration were challenged to answer what they were doing for charity
• anyone who complained was simply a moaner trying to spoil other people's fun by preventing any music being played ever.
• the next event would be held, come what may, and since we'd all had plenty of warning that was good enough.

The first point is literally Machiavellian in its assertion that the end justifies the means. The fact that some good comes of these events is deemed adequate to excuse any distress, inconvenience or illness that they induce. I doubt very much that £250 to a mental health charity comes anywhere close to counteracting the impact on the mental health of the excess noise and sleep deprivation. I'll take myself as a single example. I have attempted to write about my relationship with sound before, but the essence of it is that I find too much external noise emotionally and mentally painful. I cannot function properly. I can't think. I become stressed and anxious and angry. In the case of the street disco, even once the music had finished, I was in such a heightened state of anger and anxiety, I still couldn't sleep properly. I am one person out of many, many hundreds who were forced to listen to four and a half hours of music that was not of their choosing. How much was my mental health worth compared to £250 and some food? How many other people suffered sleep-deprivation, anxiety, or other mental health issues as a result of not only the anti-social hours, but the aggressive attacks on social media? Do the ends really justify the means?

Next we can move on to the more classical logical fallacies exhibited, and here I can prove to my sceptical friend that there is a use for my Latin GCSE...

We can start with the idea that because lots of people approved of the event, and approved of the subsequent post, they were in the right. This is Argumentum ad Populum  - or an appeal to popular assent. This isn't actually a valid argument at all. The fact that many people like something does not demonstrate that that thing is in itself right and proper. And even if we were to consider the holding of street discos to be a matter for democratic assent, 60 "likes" on a Facebook page can hardly be considered a free and fair election. Nor does the fact that many people like something justify causing distress to a minority. When your fun comes at the expense of other people's wellbeing, your "right" to that fun needs to be questioned. Popular assent is not sufficient in itself to justify all actions.

Then we can move on to the Argumentum Ad Misericordiam - an appeal to pity. These street discos are being held for charity, and therefore to complain is virtually the same as stabbing orphaned children yourself. What kind of a monster are you? I'm not sure I need to point out that this is a ridiculous argument.

There's my own personal favourite of Ignorantio Elenchi - an irrelevant conclusion, in this case via the use of a straw man. No attempt is made to address the reasonable requests to finish earlier, or to play the music at a lower volume - instead a totally different proposition is countered. Our aggressive Facebook warrior contends that a complaint about the event is a de facto attempt to stop the entire event ever occurring, which would be quite obviously unfair, unreasonable and an affront to the personal liberties of those who do enjoy it. The request to modify the event to be less anti-social is thus brushed aside by imputing something that was never said. The actual argument is bypassed by railing against something else entirely.

Naturally, no internet argument would be complete without everyone's favourite, Argumentum Ad Hominem - attacking the person. Unless you give to charity, you can't complain. If you do complain, you're just a moaner trying to ruin the "fun", not to mention virtually stealing from charity yourself. You're joyless. You're oppressing the rights of other members of the community by your selfish desire to sleep, or have some peace in your own home. The issue here is you and your unwillingness to allow anyone else to have any fun. You're a snowflake, and represent everything that's wrong with modern society.

I don't think I'll be visiting the village Facebook page again for a while.

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.

Week Five lesson learnt

I have only learnt one thing this week and, as previously, it is a lesson that in my heart of hearts I already knew.

I do not like ironing.

Even five weeks stuck inside the house is not enough to make me crumble and do any ironing. The iron has been out once in that time, and it was to fuse some Hama beads together. The pile of clothes waiting to be ironed still squats, sullen, on a shelf in the bedroom. It grows a little every week, but only a little, as few of my clothes need ironing, especially the ones I wear around the house. Nobody irons their pyjamas anyway do they*?

I have even started disassembling the dining chairs one by one to re-glue the joints and clamp them back together. I would rather learn furniture repairing than iron my own clothes.

I do not think this lesson casts me in the best of lights, but it is what it is.


* This is a joke. I am actually rigorous about getting dressed every morning as though I were going to work. If I didn't I might never actually do any work.
 

Week Four lessons learnt

So apparently I didn't learn anything during week three of lockdown. But on the other hand, we're all alive and fed, so lessons or not, I consider it a success.

Week four on the other hand, despite it only being Thursday is perhaps the pinnacle of my adult life.

A friend posted an amusing meme about the idea of learning things during this peculiar time. I was amused by it, but thought little more of it. Here it is...

Four, yes four, separate friends then commented on this, genuinely wondering if Teapot Lady was me. A fifth friend, entirely independently, messaged me with a copy of this meme to ask if it was me. Closer inspection did reveal a passing resemblance. But, more importantly, it looked quite fun. And I'm nothing if not willing to entertain my friends by making a complete arse out of myself.

(No, I didn't use a bone china teacup. I didn't have faith in not accidentally knocking it over in my exuberance. I may be prepared to make an arse out of myself, but I'm not prepared to break a teacup for you lot.)

Week Two lessons learnt

I'm a bit late in getting round to summarising last week, because it turns out that this working from home, running a household, keeping a child entertained lark takes up about as much energy as I have available every day, and by the time I've crawled through the day to LittleBear's bedtime, I tend to sink, slack-jawed and blank-eyed, onto the sofa, fit for little more than posting pictures of my cat to Facebook.

Fortunately, lesson one this week has been to discover how enduringly popular pictures of cats are on the internet. IdiotCat is developing his own fan club now that I have adopted a habit of posting pictures of Therapeutic Cat Of The Day to my own Facebook feed. I feel as though he and I are adding our tiny droplet to the sum of human happiness. I may not be able to do much, but at least my cat can cheer people up.

Lesson two has been that I have never been particularly disciplined about completing a weekly grocery shop in the past. I have always bought approximately the right stuff, and winged it, safe in the knowledge that I can always pop to the shop in my lunch hour to collect this'n'that, or cycle down to the shop in the evening for extra something or other. Now that I am attempting to minimise trips to the shops, I am having to expend considerably more brainpower on actual planning than I am accustomed to. This will probably be good for me.

Lesson three is the discovery that received wisdom about exercise is correct - it may hurt for the first few days, but if you keep going it gets easier. Who'd have thought the entire world was right on that one? Now that we're on to the start of our third week of Joe Wicks, I'm no longer suffering crippling quadricep pain and am able to walk up and down stairs without wincing. This will probably be good for me.

Lesson four is a lesson of two parts. Firstly, it turns out that ten minutes kneading bread dough is a pretty hefty workout for the arms, especially when one hasn't yet overcome the initial pain of Joe Wicks. Secondly, there is a huge satisfaction in making bread by hand, made even greater by a small boy who declares that he prefers it to supermarket bread. This may be a double-edged sword as, though making and enjoying home made bread is probably good for me, having extra jobs may not be. Next step - teach LittleBear to make bread on his own.

Lesson five is that LittleBear finds large tasks very daunting, but with the right gentle encouragement and support he can achieve sizeable pieces of work and enjoy them. The need to complete my own work has meant that I wasn't realistically able to accept "I can't" as an answer to the suggestion he start a writing task set by his school. Instead I put aside some time each day to chat about it, and help write a plan until he felt able to put pen to paper. Had I not had to work, I might have taken the easier path of saying it didn't matter, and that staying happy and healthy mattered more than doing a particular piece of work. Instead he, and I, discovered together that he can do more than he believes, and he finished the week proud of what he achieved. This will probably be good for both of us.

Lesson six is that technology is what will keep me sane. On Tuesday I had my first "Zoom" Pilates lesson. I've been going to the same Pilates class since 1998, when internet connections were still dial-up and the Nokia 6110 was the height of mobile telephone sophistication. The ability to have the same lesson, with the instructor and friends who have been with me through marriage, divorce, re-marriage, motherhood, depression and more, but in the comfort of my own home, was a chink of normality in an otherwise upside-down world. This will probably be good for me.

It would be an exaggeration to say that lockdown is fun, but in the circumstances, it's currently going better than I imagined it would. And while my exhaustion levels are ensuring that there is as much chance of me doing something "improving" like learning a language or mastering macramé as there is of me becoming an astronaut, I am learning something. I am learning things about myself, and my LittleBear, that should stand me in good stead as we travel through lockdown, and emerge one day on the other side. I am finding that I can live in the moment, particularly when there is little choice. I am not exactly feeling Pollyanna-ish about all of this, but I am feeling better able to cope than I was a week ago. And I've learnt the importance of cute cat pictures.