First it was the hand sanitizer, then the loo rolls, then the pasta, then the bread, then the cans of soup, I think the picture is now clear what most reassures a nation in crisis, and what its going to be doing for the next few months. Sanitize - Eat Slop - Shit - Wipe Bum - Sanitize
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The gobby guy in the pub who after a few beers would regal you with 'you know what I think is wrong with this country......' and serve up in slurred broken sentences a potpourri of half masticated ideas and paranoid conspiracy, has now found the perfect vehicle for 'the truth that no one wants to hear' - social media. In the pub you'd just move away to the snug, on social media its harder to avoid them. For even the nutters have become media savvy, packaging their 'truth' in seemingly orthodox presentations. They've found once you have photo shop its not that hard to project an image of expertise. If you could actually hear them struggling through self intoxication to remain coherent you wouldn't give them the time of day.
Thank goodness for the real life experts who appear to know what they're talking about. The well informed blow away myths and misunderstandings with clearly expressed facts, also explaining the underlying basis for their judgements. This is not just refreshing, its reassuring. The briefings from that curiously Dickensian triumvirate of Whitty, Boris & Vallance are now becoming something of a daily joy. There is always Boris being Boris, trying not to make a joke about the graph looking like a sombrero, but it just slipped out anyway blowing his bid for statesmanlike leadership with one quip. For we all know never to trust a word that comes from his lips, even when he's trying his best to stick to the frank truth of the matter.
Whiity is not a natty dresser. The hair looks like an unruly wisp of fluff, the tie always slightly askew thin and malformed, the white shirt has seen one too many spin washes to sparkle anymore and the suit attended funerals on its own in the 1980's. All of which makes Sir Patrick Vallance seem like the suave level headed posh prefect who people instantly fell in love with and swooned over, simply because his handsome dress sense is matched by his intellect, and he doesn't make your toes curl. However, facts don't need to be well dressed, but just well presented. These are boffins after all.
Andy Burnham, health minister during the swine flu outbreak, said recently that he soon realised that in a crisis a politician up front regurgitating facts and figures to the general public would not be believed and their motives maligned, that it was best to hand the mike over to experts who everyone would be prepared to really listen to and act upon what they say. I think Boris should just get his unsightly bulk out of the way pronto, so the Whitty & Vallance double act can truly flourish.
Whilst Whitty & Vallance have been the quintessential calm measured and unruffled English experts, there is a whole other world of armchair experts in the wings shouting abuse at them. Everyone who as a child had once held a stethoscope shouting - wrong, pathetic, misjudged, they need to be more decisive, they're completely missing the point etc etc. The general public find themselves also standing confused in the middle of an unedifying holy war between the experts themselves for who will be proved right in the end, for they shall inherit praise and be worshipped in all future crises. For when the epidemiological war is over who will be left as the one truly catholic and supreme epidemiological leader ?
Experts have egos just like the rest of us, ones that needs pampering, and epidemiologists are no exception to this. It must be rare for an epidemiologist to find themselves having a media moment, where everyone's knocking on their door. Now, at last, they can finally be heard. There has certainly been a lot of them 'getting things off their chests'. What in essence is the epidemiological war ? - its not a dispute over what should be done, but when it should be done. Its a disagreement over timing.
But then, as we now know, the country is in a bit of a fear-filled panic at the moment, and that impulse needs calming and that energy diverted into more altruistic directions. We all have our anxious concerns, mine is for the future of our business Cottonwood Home. But its never good to act from a position of panic, when we're running around like a headless chicken we rarely do the best, correct or most sensible thing. In a time of uncertainty we crave security, even when their is none to be had. Whilst the whole world gradually closes itself down, we don't know for how long we will have to endure this - will it be weeks, months or more? What will be left of our previous way of life once its all over? This too cannot be known - right now.
Remember, the present abides in the place of the present... it has a past and it has a future. Although it has a past and a future, the past and the future are cut off from it.
Eihei Dogen - from the Genjo Koan
I'm on my way to bed. Just a brief stop over in the bathroom to do my teeth. Spread the toothpaste on the brush. Begin that distinctive circular shuttering movement. As I vigorously brush the foam across my teeth there's a slight background flavour to the toothpaste What is that? Its a bit medical, is it TCP? Its reminds me of germolene. Perhaps the tops off the germolene in my wash bag, I'll check afterwards. I carry on brushing right to completion. Then my gaze settles on the toothpaste tube resting on the windowsill before me it looked very like and indeed was.... a tube of germolene. It was slightly greasy but still, not a bad clean.
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