Thought I might have run out of material by now, but this situation is, in truth, the gift that keeps on giving. I’ve seen all the movies from Papillon to The Shawshank Redemption and I know that the first thing an innocent man does as the cell door slams shut behind him is to carve into the wall vertical lines (usually with his tin spoon) to show the number of days he has to spend in incarceration. Now, I don’t have a tin spoon (I do, however, have a bent spoon courtesy of Uri Geller when he was a dinner guest though…. my wife wasn’t best pleased about that, nor the fact that he didn’t tell her he was vegan until he arrived…) and I think if I started carving into the wall of my office the plaster-board might give way, but you get the picture. The only problem is just how many lines do you carve? Or in my case draw on a piece of paper with a biro. I’ve taken a flyer, and you can call me wildly optimistic, and worked out there are 134 days to July 31st. Now I know that some of you will check that figure, because readers always love it if the writer gets it wrong. But, whether you do or you don’t let me have your guesstimate and remember even serial killers like Dexter would have got out eventually for good behavior.
Responses to these blogs continue to remain positive and readership continues to grow. I’ve got followers in South Africa, Australia, America and Israel to my knowledge so far and am thinking of organizing some kind of virtual Eurovision (I never could understand how Australia qualified for that or what would have happened if they’d won). That cancellation is another bitter pill to swallow (I hope all these bitter pills are doing me good as they are having to suffice in the absence of Paracetamol which you can’t buy for love or money). That’s left another huge hole in my social calendar, as I always had a Eurovision gathering at my house. Suppose I could watch re-runs but, at least this way UK can’t come last and our song this year was another no-hoper, I fear.
I’m beginning to feel like Samuel Pepys writing his diary against the background of The Plague. Although when I mentioned this to a friend on a phone (this pandemic has even got me making social calls, which is pretty much unheard of for me), it was suggested that what I was writing was more like ‘Peep Show' or Little Bo Peep than the Samuel variety. Folk can be unkind. I’m also not usually a social media person (I’m not really social at all). Another friend asked me if I was in self-isolation now and I replied by saying that I’d been in self-isolation for over 70 years. That’s why my wife and sons call me MOB . Stands for Miserable Old Bugger. But a gathering of more than one always causes me a problem (unless it’s for Eurovision or at Barnet FC, where there’s not usually many more than me and the Chairman and his family in the Stand ) so I’ve no real issue complying with Government advice in that respect.
One of my other friends said he’d started reading my blog, but hadn’t had time to read it all. What else did he have to do for goodness sake? The one thing we all now have is time and we shouldn’t allow it to hang heavy on our hands. We’ve really got the time to smell the roses now. The only thing is we can’t go out to find any roses to smell, but in the greater scheme of things that’s a mere detail.
I did break curfew this morning and thought I would go to Sainsbury's to see if I could earn any money as a surrogate shopper (see yesterday’s blog for that career opportunity). The only trouble was that at 7.45am I couldn’t even get into their car park to join the other septuagenarians. I could only leave the scene of carnage to my imagination. Wheelchairs, zimmer-frames, crutches, walking sticks, every one of them a lethal weapon. It must have been like the Somme after the first day of fighting, with the younger shoppers arriving at 9.00am to battle though the barbed wire and the mustard gas to remove the dead and the wounded. If you’ve ever been to your local Post Office on pension collection day then you know what I mean (though do people still collect their pensions in person?). Years ago I mooted the theory that Dr Harold Shipman was innocent when he killed all his old patients and now I am fairly sure he was. It was self-defence.
Anyway, abandoned Sainsbury's and went to our little local supermarket, which is a veritable Aladdins’s Cave of goodies albeit one needed the rubies to pay for it. The main reason for this shopping expedition was not for ourselves (I don’t want anybody to think we are guilty of panic buying…. Not panicking Mr Mainwaring for sure), but for our older son Nicky, whose efforts to get out of LA with his dog are still continuing. At the last count he had three (or was it four) flights booked on a random collection of airlines (he HAS managed to avoid China Airlines as I mentioned yesterday) and seems Iran Air wouldn’t take the dog unless Nicky flew via Tehran with a load of paper money to get the visa (they don’t seem to want to create a cashless society like everybody else). I don’t understand the difference between handing over a fiver or a much handled credit card, though what do I know, mind you, is that you learn a lot from watching series on Sky and ‘Burn Notice' taught me that if you sharpen the edges of a credit card it can be a lethal weapon. So, I guess you could threaten the shopkeeper with it to avoid paying. Though, outside of the Sainsbury's Car Park and The Battle of the Oldies, society has not yet disintegrated that far.
So, Nicky’s struggle to escape continues. As the days tick down to the last flight out of LA and into the UK I commented that it had marked similarities to Miss Saigon to which my younger son, Paul, commented “Only without the helicopter and the Viet-Cong “. I then thought there was a parallel to “Saving Private Ryan" and my Second World War expert younger son replied “But without the Sherman Tanks". So, if anybody is out there, Spielberg or otherwise, wanting to buy the movie rights to the dramatic story of a boy (well a 43 year old man really) and his dog trapped on the 30th floor of a LA apartment block, then I can give them the name of my agent. Or my daughter-in-law, Rachel, who as I said yesterday is more likely to strike the best deal possible.
Just a final thought. I listen to "The Archers" every day. For those of you who live abroad or have been stuck in a parallel universe for seventy years (unbelievably, non-listeners, one member of the cast who is now a hundred is still in it…. Unless she fell in the fields of Sainsbury’s car park) that’s a 13 minute radio soap set in a farming community in a rural village called Ambridge, which is in the Cotswolds . We’ve a second home in the Cotswolds and I reckon it’s within walking distance of us, although like Brigadoon the village itself only appears once in every hundred years. The point is that although the posh hotel in the village suffered a gas explosion in its kitchen nearly killing two people, its managed to re-open its gym and not only has nobody in the village caught the virus, but everybody seems very welcome to gather in droves to use the said gym. So, if you want to move there before London gets locked down I can give you driving instructions as to how to get there.
So much to say today, but I’m feeling optimistic so am going to save stuff for tomorrow. Stay healthy and speak then .