Pandemic

Tuesday

Henry Dodds

Is Britain prepared for a different corona disaster?

Amidst the drama of Dominic Cummings’s appearance in front of MPs last week, perhaps the most important thing the PM’s former adviser said was almost entirely ignored. As well as slating his former boss, Cummings criticised the UK’s disaster planning. The pandemic has shifted attention to how Britain would deal in the future with another respiratory virus, but arguably a bigger threat to this country – and, indeed, the world – has been forgotten. When it comes to dealing with solar flares, Cummings’s said, ‘the current Government plan is completely hopeless. If that happens then we’re all going to be in a worse situation than Covid’.  Cummings is right to be worried: the worst effects of a

Friday

Andy Shaw

A handy guide to hugging

Boris Johnson has announced that the government will permit hugging from Monday 17 May. In subsequent weeks, it is expected that permission will be granted for people to hold hands, kiss and, perhaps, engage in even more intimate acts of mutual appreciation. However, the authorities remain cautious about mutant variants and their ability to spread through rampant hugging.  Former SAGE expert and BBC commentator, Neil Ferguson, has played a key role in government policy throughout the pandemic. Initially responsible for producing forecasts that led to social distancing policies, Ferguson is also rumoured to have performed a series of covert, close contact experiments with his married girlfriend. The results of these

Monday

Alec Marsh

It’s time to revive the handshake

Those with a watchful eye might spot something this week (or next)  not seen in a while. And I’m not talking about a freshly poured pint, or the sight of your forehead after three months without a barber’s care. Rather, as England and the whole of the UK, begins to ‘open up’ after the third national lockdown, and as we emerge socially emboldened into the spring sunshine inoculated to the tune of some 32 million first doses of Covid vaccine, there’s a chance we might see the handshake make a tentative return. I can’t be the only one who has begun to wince slightly every time I see someone on TV shaking hands in

Monday

Robert Jackman

Covid virtue-signalling has infected our TV dramas

Not for the first time in its history, Eastenders managed to make a bit of a stir last week. In a break from the more harrowing stuff, viewers were treated to the sight of the ever-sprightly Patrick Trueman waltzing into the Minute Mart to jubilantly announce he’d received his second Covid vaccine. ‘Good for you! I’m due my first one later today,’ replied the shop-keeper, before dismissing the objections of a vaccine hesitant customer (called Karen, of all things). As you can imagine, the scene went down like a cup of cold sick with conspiratorially-minded types online. But you don’t have to believe odd things about Bill Gates to ask

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

The French lesson that shames Britain

Emmanuel Macron has become the pantomime villain for much of the British press after his hissy fit last week in which he questioned the efficacy of the AstraZeneca jab. It was the latest in a series of snipes at the British that has made the French president the scourge of Fleet Street. ‘Bargain-basement Bonaparte,’ was how the Daily Mail described Macron, while the Sun plumped for ‘pint-sized egomaniac’. He’s none too popular among his own people, either, the figurehead of the French failure to be the only member of the UN Security Council incapable of producing their own vaccine. No wonder a recent opinion poll suggested Marine Le Pen is a stronger

Thursday

Taki

The myth of American freedom

Gstaad Imagine a beautiful, sexy woman, an Ava Gardner or a Lily James, with a wart on the end of her nose. It stands out, whereas on an ugly mien it would go almost unnoticed. Noise in stunning and peaceful surroundings disturbs more than it would in grating, jarring cities. Last week, on a gorgeous sunny afternoon, after yet another record snowfall, I was cross-country skiing and stopped for a picnic lunch with Lara and Patricia, two married friends of mine who had left me miles behind. They were using the new skating method of cross-country skiing (I remain traditional, gliding on the double track). A cloudless and very blue

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of my new British passport

‘Anything you want?’ says Catriona on her way out of the house to go to the shop. I’m standing at the hob stirring a first batch of Low Life’s 2021 Pandemic Second Wave green tomato chutney. (My outdoor homegrown tomatoes stopped turning red just before Christmas.) The wooden spoon stops revolving while I google my brain for things I want. No results. Materially, I have everything I need. Too much of everything. What I once looked on as too few clothes now strikes me as insane excess. I’ve got a Honda Jazz that starts first time parked down in the village, lent to me by a friend for as long

Saturday

Philip Thomas

Why Imperial College’s REACT study is so problematic

There was very gloomy news this week. ‘Coronavirus infections are not falling in England, latest REACT findings show,’ said a press release from Imperial College. It was widely covered in the press in this vein: Covid levels ‘may even have risen’ since the latest lockdown, BBC news reported. This reignited fears that further tighter lockdown measures might be needed to contain it. It was all a result of Imperial College’s latest REACT study of Covid-19 infections, a massive study of 143,000 people and one of the biggest Covid surveys around. So its findings – and talk of rising cases – were taken very seriously. And understandably so.  The study’s author,

Wednesday

Benedict Spence

Why ban goal celebrations?

Football is an emotional sport, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune of being in Glasgow on derby day will attest. When your team wins, or even just scores a goal, that emotion can be hard to contain. Players, on occasion, have been known to celebrate such occurrences; sometimes they even make physical contact with each other. And why not?  The FA has announced that it will take a dim view such behaviour from now on, after criticism from politicians that some players have reprehensibly been breaching social distancing guidelines that the wider public have to follow. Never mind that these players, who spend the majority of their time

Friday

Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon’s pandemic politics

Nicola Sturgeon had some choice words to say about Brexit last month. Speaking at one of Scotland’s daily coronavirus briefings, the First Minister said she was ‘deeply frustrated and depressed’ about the prospect of no deal in the new year, and suggested that to talk about Brexit in the middle of a pandemic was not only dangerous, but deeply irresponsible. The country doesn’t need ‘another big thing to be dealing with’ when the focus should be on coronavirus, the First Minister lamented. So you can imagine Mr Steerpike’s surprise when Sturgeon appeared to embark on her own political pet project yesterday. In an interview with the BBC, the First Minister

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Could this pandemic be the death of veganism?

‘Do you want some of the private stuff from out the back?’ said the butcher to the builder boyfriend, leaning forward over the counter and winking theatrically. The builder b winced a little for this was starting to feel like the terrifying scene in League Of Gentlemen when Mr Briss starts selling a mysterious and highly addictive ‘special’ meat to the residents of Royston Vasey. Thankfully, this butcher was only selling private lamb. He revealed his secret stash to the BB because he took a liking to him. The butcher grinned, revealing big teeth between rosy cheeks, before disappearing out the back and returning with an entire side, which he

Aidan Hartley

Our exile in NW1

Laikipia The sweetest sound to me now is the dawn chorus of birdsong at home on the farm. I lay awake in bed and listened, as a light rain fell on the coconut thatch above me. When I walked out into the garden the three dogs burst out of the house to go off exploring. While I made coffee in the kitchen, our cats Omar and Bernini rubbed against my legs until I fed them and then in walked Long John Silver the orphaned calf, looking for a bowl of milk. I headed out to the crush where the herds were coming in to be dipped. Cattle were mooing, the

Saturday

Jeremy Clarke

Had the entire village population been wiped out since last week?

With my signed and dated laissez-passer in my pocket, I trotted down to the village to see if I could buy anything to eat, drink or smoke. A sensation of being out and about in the world was also high on the agenda. Cycling and jogging earns you a fine, of which a quarter of a million have been doled out in a fortnight. But we are permitted to walk the dog for one kilometre, or 546 yards there and 546 yards back. We cheat a bit, Catriona and I, by taking the dog separately, meaning she gets two walks a day. She’s elderly and frail, the poor bewildered thing,

Saturday

Caspar Henderson

Nature fights back with tooth and claw as we persist in destroying it

Where to turn in anxious and febrile times? One answer is to nature, or the ‘non-human living world’, which, despite the ravages inflicted on it by humans, continues to offer solace and hope to many. Such, at least, is a possibility linking these fine but quite different books. Lucy Jones’s starting point in Losing Eden is her own struggle with depression and addiction a few years back. She writes that three of the things that helped her recover — psychiatry, psychotherapy and the support of others — were straight-forward, but the fourth was more mysterious: a greater connection with the natural world. Surprised and interested, she embarked on investigating the

Saturday

Aidan Hartley

Africa’s invisible epidemics

Africa   ‘Ah, Africa,’ the French scientist sighed contentedly. This was 1995 and all around us was an Ebola epidemic ravaging Kikwit, a village in what they now call the Democratic Republic of Congo. ‘No lawyers to sue us!’ I had just asked him why doctors in the local hospital ward had shown me Ebola victims, lying in beds next to patients suffering milder diseases. In the Kikwit outbreak, the hemorrhagic fever killed eight out of ten people infected — 245 in all. People became sick after kissing and hugging the bodies of their loved ones at their funerals. Local doctors told me that dysentery routinely claimed more Kikwit children’s

Saturday

Tom Chivers

How close is humanity to destroying itself?

Humanity has come startlingly close to destroying itself in the 75 or so years in which it has had the technological power to do so. Some of the stories are less well known than others. One, buried in Appendix D of Toby Ord’s splendid The Precipice, I had not heard, despite having written a book on a similar topic myself. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a USAF captain in Okinawa received orders to launch nuclear missiles; he refused to do so, reasoning that the move to DEFCON 1, a war state, would have arrived first. Not only that: he sent two men down the corridor to the next launch control