Death. It is a scenario that will face us all sooner or later. Most people hope for the latter, I suppose. But since Coronavirus has been a regular feature of our lives, “death” has become a statistic that is now an essential feature of the BBC’s nightly news. Am I alone in being slightly offended? Could somebody not have died? Would it not be marginally more humane to report that ninety seven people have lost their lives today as a result of Covid? I sense that it dates back to the daily media briefings from Number 10, when the expert scientists would invariably talk about ‘deaths’ and how there might be over half a million ‘deaths”, if we didn’t lockdown and cease all life as we knew it. That was according to their ‘models’, which is another word that should be handed back to Airfix and Triang to describe the very beautiful toys, boats, planes and trains that we used to make, paint and play with. Yesterday’s Times reported that we could be heading for another national lockdown. If we wish to totally destroy the economy, encourage rampant unemployment, drastically hinder our children’s education and return us to something rather worse than the 1970’s then that is a brilliant idea. Not sure I wouldn’t rather be a ‘death’!
One of the many drawbacks of septuagenarianism (like spelling long words and staying on top of technology for instance) is keeping up with the ever changing language. Fortunately my teenage children help me to keep abreast of a lot of the new words, but I’ve recently come across one that’s new to me; influencer. Apparently it’s now been defined in law that if you have 30,000 followers on anti-social media you are officially a ‘celebrity’ and therefore an ‘influencer’. Seemingly that makes you quite valuable when it comes to advertising and marketing. As, to my certain knowledge, I only have three followers of JaJa99, my ability to influence a dyslexic squirrel is somewhat limited, let alone a heaving pile of the great unwashed. Imagine having the influential power of a David Beckham with 55 million twitter followers or The Donald with over 80 million. Have all those people nothing better to do with their lives?!
Meanwhile, I am facing a dilemma. My kind neighbour has generously agreed that I can help myself to a large quantity of nice old red bricks that are currently housing two raised veggie beds, that are now time-expired. (Our furloughed neighbours went mad in Lockdown and had visions of The Good Life before realising that even small kitchen gardens are quite hard work!). I have a choice. Throw the bricks over the wall and risk losing a percentage to breakages, or load up my wheelbarrow to transport them more lovingly. Unfortunately, the wheelbarrow will only go through our narrow garden gate on its side, which makes carrying bricks tricky. It also has a punctured tyre which means pumping it up for every journey. I can get the barrow to the bricks and back to our gate, where I have to deposit the bricks before carrying the empty barrow through the gate on its side and then reload the barrow to take them to the building site…….an area of bare ground where grass will not readily grow under fruit trees. (This is beginning to sound like Gerard Hoffnung’s ‘The Bricklayer Story’ at the Oxford Union. It’s on You Tube and hysterical). My plan is to create a brick patio with pots and a birdbath or perhaps a garden sculpture. There is no easy answer. Except perhaps buying a new, slimmer wheelbarrow.
Such are the compellingly daunting challenges facing an out of work septuagenarian. (Well ok I’m only 69, but let’s not be picky)
ADayInTheStrifeOf 