Melanie McDonagh

You’d think that any measure that would help to get people out spending would be all to the good, wouldn’t you? Well, not so. The government’s latest genius idea for rebooting the retail sector is to abandon Sunday trading laws for a year, at least in the case of the larger supermarkets. Those laws at present mean that Brits cannot actually spend the entire day of rest shopping; just six hours of it. Rishi Sunak and Dominic Cummings are both said to be all for the idea, which, I suppose, makes it a shoo-in. Personally I think it’s an abominable idea. For starters, the likelihood that at the end of the year, Britain will revert to the status quo ante is precisely nil. It’s far more likely that the laxity will extend to the entire retail sector.

Sally Challen killed her husband, Richard, with a hammer in 2010. She was convicted of murder and given a life sentence but on appeal the conviction was replaced with one for manslaughter. A psychiatric report had concluded Challen was suffering from an 'adjustment disorder'. The judge, Mr Justice Edis, said the killing came after 'years of controlling, isolating and humiliating conduct' with the added provocation of her husband's 'serial multiple infidelity'. So far, so normal.

As we can see from the reaction to the PM’s speech, there are several ways of looking at the lockdown. Some people can’t wait to get back to business. Lots are frankly nervous at this sort of talk. And there are those, like my friend the clap consultant, who see it as an opportunity. Let me explain. My friend is a consultant in sexually transmitted diseases whose special subject is HIV and associated conditions. Viruses being his home turf, he takes a dim view of Covid-19. It’s an awful thing, he observes. ‘It’s racist, sexist, ageist. You wouldn’t have it to dinner.

It seems that a quarter of A level-students preparing to go to university haven’t been set any work by teachers. So… what does that tell you about the rest of them, the ones who aren’t the focus of teacher attention? Perhaps all over the country, there is a frenzy of education going on. It just hasn’t happened very much in my vicinity. Except, from what I can gather, from people with children in private schools. I do know of teachers who’ve heroically gone out of their way to teach, set work and mark it (it takes more time marking online) but it’s by no means the norm. How about the summer holidays lasting a month rather than six weeks, to take some account of the time lost?

It is 178 years since the last recorded charge of blasphemy in Scotland, against the Edinburgh bookseller Thomas Paterson for ‘exhibiting placards of a profane nature’ in his shop window in 1842. One of those placards announced that ‘Paterson & Co (of the Blasphemy Depot, London)… Beg to acquaint infidels in general and Christians in particular that… [we] will sell all kinds of printed works which are calculated to enlighten, without corrupting — to bring into contempt the demoralising trash our priests palm upon the credulous as divine revelation — and to expose the absurdity of, as well as the horrible effects springing from, the debasing god-idea.

You know what day it is? That’s right, St George’s Day, England’s own. Except he’s also patron of Georgia, Portugal, Venice, Malta, Ethiopia, Serbia (one of them) and Lithuania. Plus the Boy Scouts. And I am told, of syphilis sufferers. A happy feast day to you all. George is that excellent thing, a saint who’s both national and international. He was venerated in England since before the Norman conquest; his feast day on this day was celebrated since 1244. He was popular during the Crusades, being a soldier saint; from 1399 he was venerated as England’s patron saint. And in the century before the Reformation, the day was the occasion for civic pageantry; a sort of trooping the colour.

The Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, is worried that children will go feral if they don’t get back to school sooner rather than later. Actually, that’s not quite how he put it. He’s let it be known that he’s worried about the lack of pupil-teacher interaction while schools are closed and that it’ll affect progress if they don’t reopen until after the Whitsun half term. Dead right, Mr W. My own children are 13 and 16 and frankly, I can’t see much difference between holiday and term time since the lockdown. One child was on Google classroom, which I thought – silly me – would be a kind of virtual version of an actual teaching session. In fact, it was nothing of the sort; the teachers set work and leave the children to it.

Last week I was put on furlough from my job, which was – in a way – quite exciting, invoking images of sturdy sailors on shore leave (my grandfather, who was a sailor, had his own approach to this; jump ship from a vessel in port if he fancied a change). Anyway, the largest bit of my present work is to review art exhibitions and since there aren’t any exhibitions to review, and there’s a limit to the number of times you can exhort people to have a look at the Hermitage online, I could kind of see the point. But now I’m thinking that I was actually dreadfully short sighted, not to say, selfish.

In Ireland at some point in the 1970s there was such a queue of people waiting to take their driving tests that the government of the day said, what the hell, there’s only one way to get rid of the backlog, and gave everyone with a provisional licence a full driving licence. The result was, as you might have expected: insurance companies registered that a shower of duds would be let loose on the roads that year and, for years to come, factored that into their equations when it came to assessing premiums.