Old Rage, page 17
It did me a lot of good to look at the architectural marvel of Regent Street and my beloved Broadcasting House, still trying to function to keep the news being communicated truthfully, as opposed to some of the dangerous stuff on the web. Sometimes I just have to stop watching and listening to the events as they occur. I turn to BBC Radio 3, where the music I cherish continues to soothe me, and all the presenters are carrying on calmly chatting to us, now from their various homes, in their usual gentle tones.
I had arranged to meet a friend of mine in Soho Square to pick up some masks she had made for me – a worthy reason, I felt, for breaking my sheltered status. It was a glowing sunny day. I walked, a bit tentatively, to the square. There, people were basking in the sun, reading papers, chatting, or just sitting, like me, looking around. The two permanent table-tennis tables were occupied by Chinese men, local waiters, judging by their outfits, playing with skill and courtesy; none of the shouts and squeals that happen when I play table tennis, just soft laughter. A group of five scruffy, shiny-eyed disciples were sitting on the grass, ringing bells and tinkling little cymbals, whilst tentatively chanting ‘Hare Krishna’, a cry that in the sixties echoed round London, when Hare Krishnas used to dance ecstatically, garbed in orange cloth, harmonising their mantra, totally ignored by the shoppers and office workers as they weaved around among them. I then wandered around the virtually deserted streets, smiling and greeting the other few strollers. The roads were closed to traffic. The friendly atmosphere was like it was when I was a young girl lodging in the Theatre Girls Club hostel in Greek Street, apart from the absence of the women stationed along the pavement politely selling their wares (who, as they got to know me, gave me advice on make-up, as long as I didn’t stand around too long on their pitch). I am probably romanticising the scene and their lives, but they weren’t the cowering, drugged-up, trafficked youngsters you see in shady hallways, nail bars and massage parlours nowadays.
20 May 2020
Every Thursday at 8 p.m. many of the population go into the open air and clap for the NHS and care workers, who are courageously fighting this malignant virus. Those front-line workers are trying to do their usual job of healing and comforting, with a few ineffective weapons, and under threat of coming down with the disease themselves. In fact, many have died. The politicians make sure that they are filmed clapping along with what they interpret as public unity, but I detect in the applause a hint of anger that the NHS has been neglected by the government, along with all the care workers, dustmen, shopworkers and delivery people who are now keeping us going, and have been shockingly underappreciated. Captain Tom Moore, a one-hundred-year-old ex-soldier, is marching up and down his garden, and Margaret Payne, a woman of ninety, is going up and down her stairs to replicate a childhood memory of climbing my beloved Suilven, both of them raising huge sums of money for the NHS. They, like me, remember how awful it was before the availability of healthcare for all, and they are demonstrating that money can, and should, be found to fund that.
22 May 2020
My body is not happy. Idleness makes me aware of pain. Because I am not working – no new scripts to learn, no nightly performances plus two matinees, no singing lessons, or visits to the gym to keep fit – my engine is no longer throbbing and I am becalmed. I have persevered with practising mindfulness, living in the moment and accepting whatever is happening in an interested, unemotional way. Not easy for me, but using an app from the University of California, Los Angeles, which sounds suspiciously Hollywood, but seems medically sound and not New Agey, I have found it a help.
One of the main benefits of this enforced idleness is the discoveries I have made about my body. I was alarmed the other day when I climbed a flight of stairs and was breathless. Because I was not, as I normally would be, rushing off somewhere, I stopped and thought about it, and realised I had not been breathing. I had run up the whole staircase holding my breath. When I did it again, breathing normally, I was fine. From there, I went on to observe myself in other situations, and discovered I frequently held my breath, particularly when doing something tricky.
Another thing I have found time to work on is a long-term practice of tensing my body against life. The smallest undertaking will cause the muscles in my neck, across my back, in my arms and hands and my diaphragm, to clutch in apprehension. I have tried to relax by practising yoga, Pilates, tai chi – to no avail. In fact, the effort to get the practices right, in my perfectionist way, has made the condition worse. Now something very strange has happened.
My body is teaching me a lesson, sending me a message. It is using my illness to cure a lifetime’s destructive habit. With nothing better to do, I have had time here on my own to notice that every time I go into Clutch Mode a streak of pain goes through my body, and lo and behold my reaction, to stop it hurting, is to release the tension. This lifelong habit of living in constant preparation for fight or flight, in my body, and even my mind, is being driven away by pain. What an irony. I do not grasp this pen I am writing with like a last straw, as I was wont to do, because it hurts, whereas using just enough effort to hold and guide it does not. My poor body. All my life I have gripped it in an iron vice of unnecessary effort, and now, in the last lap, as a last resort, it is forcing me to relax. When I discovered I had rheumatoid arthritis, I thought my body had turned against me, allowing my immune system to attack me rather than defend me, but now I like to think it is trying to teach me a new approach to managing movement. If somewhat brutally.
23 May 2020
Another bloody letter from the NHS. In fact an email and a letter to make sure I don’t forget that I am Extremely Vulnerable. Although there is actually no clinical evidence yet to prove that people taking my medication are more at risk; it is just a supposition. When I suggested to my medical team that perhaps a drug that makes the immune system behave, like tocilizumab, might be useful in treating coronavirus, in which inflammation is a huge problem, I was surprised and a little gratified to be told that they were in fact doing clinical trials to see if it does. Epidemiology appears to be another talent I have acquired.
All in all, although resenting the ‘vulnerable’ label, I do now accept that I am old. I cannot avoid it, since we oldies are constantly in the news as being in need of protection. It still surprises me a bit when very old ladies tell me they were at school with me. I opened a wing of an old people’s home where ancient folk were mumbling to themselves, shuffling around on Zimmers, and the matron told me they were excited about my visit because ‘You’re their generation, aren’t you?’
One of the things that depresses me most about getting old is all the things I will not have time to learn. And this bloody virus is wasting what time I have left.
I curse it for forcing the cancellation of the canal series I was doing with Gyles, which was proving the most fulfilling job of my career. In the two episodes that we managed to complete I not only learned to handle a canal boat, but had a rowing lesson from the Olympic medal-winning crew, and did interviews with many intriguing people who live on or alongside these historic waterways. I was doing a job that satisfied my avid thirst for knowledge, and being paid for the privilege. Tempus is fugitting.
24 May 2020
Had a lovely email from Norbie, my Hungarian friend, telling me to take care of myself. I am thinking a lot, in my lonely, disconnected state, about how lucky I am, in normal life, to be the recipient of sometimes quite profound affection from strangers, who have been touched by something I have written or acted in. I am at the age when women are normally invisible, treated unkindly.
Coming back from a gig in Inverness in those days when we could travel around, there was a mistake in my booking and a uniformed official at the airport berated me loudly, in front of the crowd in the waiting area, rudely accusing me of daring to sit on some seats reserved for business class, which I had actually been booked in, but for which I had been given the wrong ticket. It was humiliating and upsetting, but then a woman from the ticket desk swooped on us, told the man off and apologised profusely, saying that she recognised me, and was really sorry that I had been treated so badly.
‘I know who you are.’
Had she not ‘known who I was’, I fear I would have just been a stupid old woman, fair game for humiliation. It was a salutary lesson, reminding me how fortunate I am to be treated so well. Because I pop up in people’s drawing rooms on their television screens they think they know me, and kindly share with me stories of their lives, pouring out their hearts, knowing I will not share them with their friends or family. That is why I got hundreds of letters from readers when The Two of Us was published, and still get many, some sixteen years later, discussing addiction and bereavement, saying things to a sympathetic stranger that they cannot to people close to them. The marine in the hotel, and Tom in the pub in Cornwall too, felt able to share with me the secret sorrow they had to withhold from colleagues and loved ones.
I remember feeling sad that Tom had lost out on a prosperous life that he was entitled to. Thinking of it now, with the pace of my life reduced to a standstill, and a new consciousness of the enjoyment to be found in small natural things, it was arrogant of me to think he would be missing out by rejecting what I deemed exciting new experiences.
Sitting here alone staring at four walls, I would give my eyeteeth to be in that pub with a plate of chips, a glass of cider and amusing company. That is Tom’s everyday life. Why on earth would he want to endure an airport, and flying, to be at a party with a lot of rich people he has nothing in common with, except a father who deserted him?
I will go to that pub again after this is all over. I bet he will still be there, smiling at his mates.
What’re you going to have, Tom? Oh, if only.
25 May 2020
Stay at home; protect the NHS; jobs, jobs, jobs; stay alert; control the virus; save the NHS; keep two metres apart; wear a mask; don’t cough; flatten the curve; whatever it takes; and now ‘Get it done’ – referring to ridding ourselves of the virus as well as Europe, which is still worryingly going on behind our backs, whilst we focus on this new government endeavour.
Slogans are still the order of the day. An approach that fills me with trepidation. Hitler recommended in Mein Kampf that short slogans should be used to appeal to ‘the primitive sentiments of the broad masses . . . These slogans should be repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that is being put forward.’ One of his favourites was ‘Germany first’, which I hope Trump is too stupid to have known about when he made his inaugural speech as president, otherwise he is even more dangerous than I thought. We have even endeavoured to obey our prime minister’s Delphic maxims to ‘whack a mole’ and ‘squash the sombrero’, though his classics tutors at Balliol may flinch.
The instructions have become ever more complicated and contradictory. The comedy actor Matt Lucas’s impersonation of Johnson dithering summed it up perfectly:
‘So, we are saying, don’t go to work, go to work, don’t take public transport, go to work, don’t go to work, stay indoors, if you can work from home, go to work, don’t go to work, go outside, don’t go outside, and then we will or won’t . . . er . . . something or other.’
I have always believed that the British sense of humour is one of our strongest weapons against extremism. The strutting absurdity of Hitler, Mussolini and the rest of his murderous gang, with its ludicrous goose-stepping soldiers, would surely have been laughed out of court in Britain. Indeed, they were, in the playgrounds in England during the war, which resonated with songs about the relative merits of the Nazi leadership’s balls.
But we mustn’t forget that these ludicrous cartoon figures ended up killing many millions.
Social media is, I’m glad to say, full of ridicule of our present leaders. Cabinet ministers are wont to say, of things they want us to believe, it is ‘the will of the people’ or ‘the country has spoken’. All I can say is they can’t be looking at social media, or chatting in the queue at Tesco.
25 May 2020
A distressed phone call from Joanna. My youngest daughter has a rental home in St Ives. After it was permitted to make a short journey, she drove the three children down from Devon to check on the house. She met no one, and went nowhere apart from her house. The work on the house went on till late in the evening, and the kids were tired, so she decided to stay the night, but at 9 p.m. a neighbour came to the door and threatened to report her to the police if she did, because overnight stays were not allowed. For God knows what reason. His belligerent visit felt a bit like the Stasi in East Berlin. She was no threat whatsoever to anyone. But her neighbour was drunk with the power of self-righteousness. My daughter was disobeying the rules. Never mind how pointless they were. And she must be punished.
I have always had a reluctance to obey rules. Maybe growing up in the shadow of the rise of the Nazis had some effect. My mother was reluctant to let me join the Brownies with their lovely brown uniform, and utterly refused to allow me to become a Girl Guide, because she had heard of, and been frightened by, the Hitler Youth movement in Germany.
It seems to me that, if you are going to obey rules, you have to double-check that they are necessary, and made by people with good motives, who know what they are doing. We do not seem to be controlling the virus as well as some other countries – 65,000 people have died so far. Despite numerous prior warnings of a potential pandemic by scientists and the likes of Bill Gates, we were not prepared at all. Johnson likes to think of himself as a Churchillian figure, but he has none of the honesty with which Churchill warned us of the inevitable tragedies of war, and it is hard to trust him after the lies of the Brexit campaign.
The new rules have come at us thick and fast, and to begin with we nearly all did as we were told. We locked ourselves away, trusting that the government was dealing with it. But the daily briefings, with multiple charts and facts and figures, have not inspired us. Schemes like the Test and Trace app, tried out on the Isle of Wight and hailed as ‘the cherry on the cake’ of getting the virus under control, have not filled us with confidence in our leaders. South Korea and Germany have effective systems up and running, but we were supposed to be getting our own ‘world-beating’ version. I personally never really understood it. It seemed to be a few operators waiting for people to phone them to tell them they had the virus, whereupon these observers would inform those people’s friends, telling them to quarantine for two weeks. I could not grasp what function the app had in the process. Anyway, it has disappeared without trace. Or track. Together with the millions it cost to invent and trial it.
Nevertheless, people are still loyally trying to abide by the rules, whilst not being sure they are sensible. The economy is inevitably going to be wrecked by the shutdown. The NHS is forced to delay all other life-saving treatment whilst it deals with the virus casualties. My profession faces ruination under the disastrous rules whereby no theatre, cinema or museum can operate. It seems young people just get a mild version of the infection. So is there not an argument for locking away and protecting just us vulnerable ones, and letting the rest of the population carry on as normal, apart from a few bouts of fluey illness, so that the economy continues to operate, avoiding the potential disaster of a massive recession?
Although I admire the way my fellow countrymen are obeying the rules, it makes me nervous. I have already confessed that I have disobeyed them. That is partly because of my reluctance to kowtow. I need to respect a person before I do as they say.
26 May 2020
There are rule-breakers even in their own ranks. Svengali Cummings has himself transgressed. As a rule-breaker myself, I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt when he sat in the rose garden of 10 Downing Street – a setting usually reserved for major governmental announcements, not scruffy backroom advisers – and rambled on about why it was all right for him to go gallivanting up to his family estate in Durham, and then have a nice little drive, and a sit by the river with his wife and child, while the rest of us sweltered behind closed doors. The mockery of his excuses – driving over fifty miles to see if his eyes were good enough to drive, not having enough childcare – has been wonderfully funny, covering the profound anger at his hypocrisy for which ‘the will of the people’ was definitely that he should have been sacked. But, of course, he wasn’t. How on earth would Michael Gove, and the man Gove stabbed in the back during the leadership battle, our prime minister, know what to do without him?
27 May 2020
Went to Hammersmith Hospital, where I was five minutes late getting back to my parking meter. The attendant was already tapping into his machine and, remembering previous similar occasions when I have been told that, once started, the process of issuing a ticket has to continue, I was reduced, at the thought of yet another fine, to whimpering, ‘Oh, please.’ To my utter amazement the man tapped a few more keys and said, ‘All right, love, but don’t do it again.’ He abandoned the protocol, maybe risking getting into trouble with his boss, who presumably would be able to see evidence of his having given away the revenue. In the afterglow of his kindness, I decided we can and definitely should break rules.
