Well, if you are reading this, then congratulations: you have survived Covid 19, a particularly unpleasant virus that has dominated the year 2020 and made it a thoroughly miserable one. The virus may still be with us, but I hope that – by this time next year – we will at last be free to resume our normal lives again, with hugs and kisses and no face masks: poor as a nation, but alive.
The Covid 19 epidemic continues a pace and the number of people tested as positive in the UK is increasing at about 23% per day. More regions of England have been placed in the highest state of readiness, Tier 4, joining Scotland and Wales in what amounts to a full lockdown, with a return to school for some children postponed. We in Barsetshire have moved up a tier to Tier 3. Frustratingly for the alarmists in our society, the number of daily deaths is not increasing at the same rate as the infections; indeed, the number of daily deaths from Covid currently stands at a comparatively modest 414 and is falling at a rate of 4%. The key concern, however, is – and always has been – the pinch-point of hospital capacity. Several hospitals are approaching full capacity, with admissions rising at 16% daily and ambulances queuing to discharge their patients. As surmised in my last blog, those vast temporary hospitals, the “Nightingale” hospitals, mostly stand idle because of a lack of staff to man them; indeed, the one in London has been dismantled. What was once a logistic triumph and a great hope has turned into a waste of money. A very worthy attempt to recruit retired NHS nurses and doctors to help with the crisis has been frustrated by red tape, each GP offering to return to service apparently having to submit 21 separate documents, such as certification that they had completed Prevent Radicalisation training. Of the 40,000 retired doctors and nurses who applied to return to service in March, 30,000 were considered eligible and only 5,000 had been employed by July; many had simply given up when faced with the bureaucracy. What an opportunity lost: personally, I would rather receive my vaccination from a retired healthcare professional than some heavy-handed layman who has only just received training. It is so heartening, at this time of national emergency, to find that the Department of Health has lost none of its standards and rigidity: if we were abandoning the TITANIC then the DoH officials would be there, checking our tickets and insurance documents before letting us into the lifeboats. On a high, and very encouraging, note the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has finally been approved for use in the UK and the programme of those vaccinations is due to start on 4 January. The Oxford vaccine is cheap, works differently from the other vaccines and is much easier to administer as it does not require near cryogenic temperatures to store it. GP surgeries can readily use the vaccine and a broader and ramped-up immunisation package is anticipated. Given our age (we are Level 5 priority), Jane and I do not expect to receive our first jabs until February, with the follow up jab three months later. On completion, I would still like a sticker saying “I’ve had the Covid 19 jab”, along with a barley sugar for being a good boy and not crying.
Christmas with the Shacklepins started with the traditional Christmas walk into the countryside: a daring move given Jane’s poorly leg (now diagnosed as “Jumper’s Knee”), but an adventure that she thought she would try. You might be excused for conjuring up in your mind’s eye a scene of a crisp, sunlit day, with our two adventurers frisking joyfully through virgin snow from Wrinkly Bottom to the distant church tower of Little Smidgin, smoke rising vertically from a nearby cosy cottage and the homely smell of cooking turkey pervading the atmosphere. Alas, it was not to be. The day was, indeed, sunny and crisply cold after a hard frost overnight, but there was no snow. There hardly ever is in England: I think all those Christmas cards that we send must be based on the hard Dickensian winters that the country experienced in the early 1800s, when the River Thames froze so solidly that the people could roast a whole ox on the ice. Such practice would be vetoed today, because Health and Safety regulations would ban people from the ice, vegans and vegetarians would be offended by us carnivores eating an animal, and the Green Party would claim that eating beef was adding to global warming. But I digress. What the Shacklepins trudged through, instead of snow, was mud: ankle deep mud, enlivened by the occasional puddle that was knee deep. After a mile of trying to make progress through this agrarian adventure playground that resembled the Battle of the Somme during a ceasefire, the novelty was beginning to wear off. The memsahib, as was her custom, was covered in splashes of mud from boot to eyebrow and was grumbling mightily. When she became temporarily entangled in a bramble hedge while trying to avoid a large puddle, the decision was made to loop around and return to base. We lumbered across a field that was devoid of all livestock and followed an all-too-well trodden path that would eventually take us back to the road. The usual argument as to the correct route punctuated the journey, with myself (holding the Ordnance Survey map and following a hand-held GPS) on one side versus Herself (spectacles flecked with dirt and relying on memory) on the other; I, of course, was Wrong and she was Right. We did reach the correct stile using my route, for which I claimed a victory; unfortunately it was inaccessible, being surrounded by a lake about a foot deep, and so she claimed a late triumph based on hindsight. Re-routeing and trespassing took us through yet another bramble and hawthorn hedge, across an electrified fence and over a five-bar gate, Jane scaling this final obstacle with an effort similar to Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tensing ascending Everest. We eventually made the road and trooped back home fagged out and filthy after only about three miles. Why do we do these things?
Christmas luncheon, with the Waitrose “De-boned Easy-to-Carve Duck with Rum, Pear, Chestnut and Prune Stuffing” was…different, mainly because of the addition of a Port and Redcurrant Sauce, formulated from our son’s recipe but allowed to over-mature while Jane had a sherry. In fact this year’s luncheon experience was so different that the Editor-in-Chief has imposed a D-Notice on the whole episode and I am banned from describing it to you: a shame, as there is probably a whole chapter of a blog in there; alas, it is now sealed in the National Archives for the next twenty five years. Let us just say that, next year, we will be returning to our traditional rib of beef (provided the Climate Change lobby has not banned cows from the face of the earth). After luncheon we enjoyed the opening of our presents and were very flattered by the thought that people had put into them: as ever, they were very well received.
On Boxing Day the weather returned to its more traditional English setting: it drizzled with rain all day. We found that very reassuring, for it was what we were used to. Stimulated by our walking adventures on Christmas Day, we parked ourselves in the drawing room, switched on the lights, put up our feet, lit the fire, and read our new books as the daylight advanced from dark grey to feeble light grey, then descended to night again. You can only pack so much excitement into one seasonal festival.
The hiatus between Christmas Day and New Year is always a peculiar time as one recovers from the anticlimax of one annual celebration and then tries to work up enthusiasm for the next, the week being overlaid with indigestion, guilt about the expanding waistline, a hangover and a diet of leftovers. This year the week has not been much different from previous years for the Shacklepins, despite the fact that we did not over-indulge with alcohol. Fortunately, Jane has been gainfully employed in making marmalade in the manner of Paddington Bear: an annual ritual. The kitchen is full of steam, the gash bin is full of orange peel, the extractor fans are throbbing like the engine room of a destroyer at full power, and my contribution has been limited to tying a reef knot in the Soaking Bag. I like marmalade time, for when Jane is chopping or squeezing oranges she is not casting an eye on me to ensure that I am not loafing. Also, I enjoy the marmalade.
We do not not normally celebrate New Year, which is just as well as all socialising and pleasure is banned (unless you want to stand in the cold in the back garden). We just cannot wait to get this awful year over with, and plunge into the hell that is January: possibly the worst month of the year because of its foul weather and its curb on outdoor activity. At least January 2021 may feature a glimmer of hope in the form of a Covid 19 vaccination for us both, who knows?
Whatever happened to First Footing? Is it, or was it, just a Northumbrian or Scottish thing? On New Year’s Eve when not at sea, my father would be sent out into the cold just before midnight clutching a piece of coal, which he would then present to a neighbour after knocking on their door after midnight had passed. He would be given a tot of spirits in gratitude. I never did work out the significance of the coal or the fact that the bearer was supposed to be a tall dark stranger. Midnight would be announced by the sounding of ships’ sirens on the River Tyne and a field gun fired by the army at Tynemouth. In the Royal Navy, sixteen bells would be sounded on the ship’s bell, rung by the youngest rating onboard. I wonder if these traditions continue? I would imagine that the sirens would still be sounded in seaports, and the striking of the bell in warships would continue, but as to the coal and the First Footing, who knows? Perhaps it has gone the way of “penny for the guy” during the run up to Guy Fawkes Night. For the benefit of younger readers (if any) or those not British, Guy Fawkes Night celebrates the successful foiling of a plot by a traitor called Guy Fawkes to blow up King James I and his parliament in 1605. The unfortunate Fawkes was one of several traitors in the plot, but the one always remembered. He was hung, drawn and quartered for his crime and the occasion has been commemorated ever since by fireworks and public bonfires on 5 November. In my youth, the “guy” was a stuffed dummy that children created and used as a focus for a begging campaign to obtain money to buy fireworks; it would be burnt on the bonfire on The Night. “Penny for the guy, mister”, was a common request on the streets in the early Novembers of my childhood; the more realistic the guy, the better the contribution. One friend tried using his brother instead of a dummy as the guy, but the public caught on to that quite early on. I don’t know when the tradition died away; perhaps it went out when “trick or treat” came in. It was not until I was well into my thirties that I discovered that the Gunpowder Plot (as it became known) was, in fact, a Roman Catholic conspiracy against Protestant England and the “guy” is supposed to represent the Pope, not Guy Fawkes. I must have been asleep during my history lessons of that period. It is curious: none of us children (including Roman Catholics) thought we were burning an effigy of the Pope; Guy Fawkes Night was (and still is) just a jolly occasion when one can watch fireworks, wave sparklers and stand around a bonfire on a cold winter’s night in the rain. We British really know how to party.
Now this is interesting. The punishment of being hung, drawn and quartered was a particularly brutal one reserved for traitors. The miscreant was hanged slowly by the neck until almost dead from asphyxia (‘hung’). He was then cut down, his genitalia were cut off, his torso cut open and his intestines removed, sometimes to be burnt in front of him while still alive (‘drawn’). Finally, his heart would be torn out, his head cut off, and his body cut into four parts (‘quartered’). The head would be displayed on London Bridge as an example to all traitors; the four quarters of his body would also be displayed or sometimes distributed throughout England as a similar deterrent. No one could say that those early English monarchs were soft on crime. Interestingly, hanging, drawing and quartering was not removed from the English statute books until 1870, and beheading remained on the books until 1973, though both punishments had become obsolete long before those dates. The death penalty for treason in the UK was not officially abolished until 1998; the last execution for this crime took place after WW2 in 1946. The death penalty was retained in Britain for arson in Her Majesty’s Dockyards until 1971. When you think about it, the term ‘hung’ as used in ‘hung, drawn and quartered’ must be the only instance in English when it is acceptable to use the term to describe killing someone by hanging them by the neck, the correct word for this method of execution is, of course, ‘hanged’ not ‘hung’. I always remember my old English master pronouncing that only meat and portraits are ‘hung’; people are ‘hanged’. For the benefit of any non-native English speakers reading this, incidentally, I should point out that to say that a man is well hung has a different meaning entirely.
Matters grisly have a certain fascination for boys (as you will have gathered from the previous paragraph) and I have read several books on the topic of forensic pathology as they are the perfect antidote to being overly cheerful. One particular true story took my fancy as being more bizarre than most. This from Dr Iain West’s Casebook by Chester Stern. In 1986 a chap was digging over his garden in his newly-bought house in Abingdon when he unearthed a human head wrapped in a plastic bag; not a skull, a complete head, with hair and flesh, and apparently not long dead. Naturally, this triggered much tumult and shouting and he called the police, who launched a full-scale murder enquiry. When the pathologist cleaned up the head and examined it, it proved to be something of an enigma. First of all, the lower jaw bone did not seem to match the skull. Secondly, the wear on the teeth indicated that, in life, the owner had been eating bread made from stoneground flour that contained grit – a commodity that had ceased to have traces of grit in it by the end of the 19th century. The pathologist concluded that the head was clearly that of an old woman with grey hair, and it appeared from the teeth and radiological tests that she had died, not recently, but in the Victorian era.
While this analysis progressed, the boys in blue had not been idle. They traced the previous owners of the house, who had moved to the West Country, and sought an explanation. The previous owners admitted that they had found the head in a shoebox in the house shortly before they moved out and after their troubled son had left home. Not being sure of what to do with the head, they decided simply to bury it in the back garden, as you do. The investigation moved on to trace the son who, it transpired, had moved to London but was no longer a man: he had had a sex operation to become a woman (are you still with me?). The story that then unfolded was that the son had been interested in the occult and wanted to perform certain mystic rites, using a human head, to turn him into a woman. Accordingly, he had raided a Victorian tomb in London, found the the corpse of a woman, well-preserved, and ripped the head off to use in his ceremony. Disappointingly, the occult ceremony had not worked, so he had dumped the head in a shoebox in his parents’ home and the NHS had completed his transition from man to woman for him/her instead. The apparent mismatch of the lower jawbone with the rest of the skull remains unexplained to this day, as the miscreant was adamant that she/he had removed just one head. As they say in Yorkshire, there’s nowt as queer as folk.
Well, I have read through the details of the Brexit free trade agreement with the EU (that is to say, I skimmed through an article on the subject in the Daily Telegraph) and, as far as I can see, it can be claimed to be a success far beyond what I thought could be achieved. That, of course, would not be difficult seeing as how I reckoned no deal would be agreed at such a late stage. The only bit that the UK did not achieve was reclaiming full control of its territorial waters for fishing rights, that area being the subject of a transition period of 5½ years. It is rather odd that a sovereign country is only entitled to 25% of the fish in its own waters (as at present), but this quota will increase over the transition period. It is time to start building those trawlers. The remainder of the agreement looks good to me: the UK gets to trade with whichever country it wishes; there will be free trade with the EU; the country no longer will come under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice; we will be independent once more from midnight on 31 December 2020. Parliament passed the bill on 30 December 2020.
“Don’t forget your pill”.
Jane gestured at the small anonymous white pill next to my breakfast plate and I dutifully popped it into my mouth and swallowed it. It occurred to me afterwards that if my wife ever wanted to rid herself of this troublesome pest, all she would have to do is leave a cyanide pill in the same place, then tell me to take it; I would swallow it without a murmur. We do trust our spouses or partners so much in these things. The pill was a Vitamin D tablet: a supplement introduced by Jane every winter to make up for the lack of sunshine and to keep my bones in tip top condition. Entirely fortuitously, it turns out that the vitamin also enhances one’s resistance to Covid 19. Other than that, I take no regular medication: a situation that I hope to maintain for as long as I can, though the occasional Valium would be welcome, especially when I listen to the news in the morning.
Talk of pills reminds me of a true story of a female university lecturer in London who was still working despite being in her late 70s. She was very keen on opera and had attended a performance at Covent Garden with, what I suppose might be called, a date: a gentleman companion of a similar age as her. After the show, they shared a taxi back to her flat in Chelsea where she thanked him for his company and gave him a peck on the cheek.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in for a coffee?”, he asked.
“No, not tonight. I’m rather tired and I have to give lectures tomorrow”
“But I’ve just taken my viagra pill!”, he lamented.
So I suppose there are pills, and then there are other pills. Mine is just to keep the rickets away.
A very happy New Year to all my readers. Heaven knows, surely 2021 cannot be worse than this one?
30 December 2020
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 
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