From Channel 46 News today:
Tag Archives: death
RIP Jeanette Cousland… So it goes…
Jeanette (right) with Scotsman critic Kate Copstick after a Grouchy Club show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014
I got a shock phone call this morning to tell me of the death of the always lively and bubbly Jeanette Cousland – aka ‘Machete Hettie’ or sometimes ‘Machete Hetty’ – who appeared in this blog over the years.
She died 15 days after being told she had cancer.
On 21st September, on Facebook, her son Barry Martin posted:
Hi folks,
2 weeks ago my mother Jeanette was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and given weeks rather than months to live. She had been in good health until then apart from a bad back the last few weeks. She was just 54 the day before.
We are at home now and keeping her at peace. She has a great support team with me, my brother and Kirsty.
She is still with it and I can pass on any messages that would cheer her up. The family is still in shock and we are pretty devastated. Please do not call my mother just now: she is sleeping a lot of the time. Also not too many questions for me or Ricky as it can get a bit much. Please, she would not want people to be sad and always tries to make people laugh.
She is still with us now and we are trying to keep her at peace as much as possible.
Thankyou,
Barry, Ricky and Kirsty, my mum’s best friend
The next day, her son Ricky Fyffe posted:
It is with a heavy heart myself and my brother Barry Martin have to announce the passing of our one-of-a-kind mum, granny and sister, Jeanette Cousland.
After an all too short battle with lung cancer, she passed away peacefully this afternoon at home with her family by her side.
After a period of mourning, we will update everyone on the funeral arrangements in due course.
Our mum will forever be in our hearts.
Jeanette’s last post on Facebook was on 12th September.
She lived in Leith, Edinburgh…
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Filed under Death
It was twenty years ago today… a heroin addict’s mugging and a broken heart…
Earlier today, I heard some radio station playing the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper and its opening lines “It was twenty years ago today…”
I used to half-heartedly keep a diary on my computer. On a whim, I looked up what happened twenty years ago today… I have changed the names of other people and their locations…
Saturday 22nd June 2002 – Edinburgh
Shirley is trying to give up heroin. Her father is trying to give up chocolate.
In the evening, Shirley and I stayed up until 03.00am talking. She told me God gave her help immediately on three occasions she asked for help. She has a water container from which she swigs regularly during the day. I had presumed it contained water; in fact it contains Blue Star cider.
When she lived in Manchester, addicted to heroin, she was mugged by a tall black man and and a small white girl she knew. Without warning, the man kicked her in the chest. She went down on the ground and both started kicking her. She had been mugged five times before so she used her hands and arms to protect a pocket with only £2 in it. They stole that £2 but left her handbag and the other pockets in her jacket untouched – that was where she really kept her money.
(Image by Randy Laybourne via UnSplash)
Then I went back another year in my diary…
Friday 22nd June 2001 – Cambridge/Borehamwood/Clacton-on-Sea
I had lunch with a friend in Cambridge. It was her 16th wedding anniversary and I think she was feeling a little down.
She told me her son (aged 13) is still being bullied at school. The other week, someone pushed him into a bush. Her daughter (aged 11) says she has decided she is going to marry a rich man, take over her mother’s house, have children early, then her mother can look after them while she goes out and has fun.
“Good luck finding a rich man,” my friend told her daughter.
“You managed,” she told my friend.
“I didn’t know he was going to be rich,” my friend replied. “I thought we were soul mates.”
After lunch, I drove back home to Borehamwood.
As soon as I got through the front door, my mobile rang – It was the matron at my father’s nursing home. My mother and aunt (my father’s sister) had walked in to see him and found him lying back with his mouth open, apparently not breathing (and, as I later found out, his false teeth dropped down from his upper gum) with a spoon in his hand and a bowl of jelly in front of him. My aunt, a former nurse, found he had no pulse.
The nursing home matron was up in the room within about a minute and found he had a strong pulse but, by this time, both my mother and aunt were in tears.
I drove out to Essex from Borehamwood in the early Friday evening rush hour – it took about 2 hours 45 mins instead of the normal 90 minutes – to find my father looking dramatically thinner, I thought: bonier than he had been when I saw him yesterday afternoon. I got there around 1830 by which time my mother and aunt were dry-eyed but still twitchily upset. I drove them back to their homes around 1900 – my mother broke down in my arms – and then I went back to the nursing home where my father was asleep. When I had left, I had told my father:
“I’ll be about half an hour.”
“You’ll be back – and the boatman?” he asked me.
“The boatman?”
“The boatman.”
“Probably.”
When I got back and he was awake, I asked him if he felt hot.
“I really don’t know,” he replied.
My father’s wedding ring was found on the floor below his bed this morning. Because he had lost so much weight, it had slipped off his finger.
(Image by Kelly Sikkema via UnSplash)
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When I was a teenager, I dreamt I would die this year…
(Image by Enrique Meseguer, via Pixabay)
I tested positive for Covid-19 on the morning of Christmas Day.
It is 1st January now, a new year and I’m still testing positive…ho hum.
I had a dream last night. I was in the front room of my house with an unknown woman, watching a feature film from the 1950s.
Through the window, I saw this man who looked like a 1940s/1950s ‘spiv’ coming to the front door.
I said to the woman I was with in the front room: “There’s a spiv coming to the door”.
She looked out the window but could not see him, so I went out of the living room into the hall, then into the front porch and he just pushed through the letter box some ordinary leaflets about something I was not interested in.
I went back to watching the feature film with the woman.
For some reason the TV set was now on the floor and the woman had become six inches high and had pink hair, as young children’s dolls do. She told me she wanted me to hold her hair as she coiffured it. That was the word she used. Coiffure.
“I want to coiffure it,” she said.
She moved a small, padded stool over to near the wall, but this entailed turning the television round. We could still see the screen, but the TV set itself had been turned round.
The woman sat so close to the wall, though, that I couldn’t both hold her hair while she coiffured it AND continue to watch the television. Also, she was six inches tall, which complicated things. So I got another small, padded stool and moved it to the middle of the room and told her: “I won’t be able to do your hair so close to the other wall.”
So I turned the TV set round again.
I had to lift it up then put it down in its new position.
It was sitting in a low, one-inch-high wooden frame.
At least, that was what I intended to do but, when I was about to start, some more people arrived at the front door.
They were trying to tell me my back garden was in a mess and that I should buy a top layer of grass from them.
“Turf. That’s the word,” one of them said to me.
“Life is turf,” I told him. That is what I told him.
There were about three of them. I knew they were con artists and told them: “I like my back garden to be in a mess.”
The first man started lifting up the turf with his foot. One of the other men was holding some 6ft high poles. There were about six of them. The poles. Six round poles, each one the girth of a small man’s waist.
I thought I would try to confuse the men at the door.
“I don’t need any more poles,” I said. “I already have some. I was thinking of painting them. One can be red, white and blue for Britain. One can be red, white and blue for France. And I can probably get the German flag in there somewhere. I think if I paint one black, it would be very effective.”
I said this because I thought it would confuse the hell out of the man holding the six tall poles. And the others.
Then the woman I had been in the front room with came out to see what was going on. She was her proper height again.
It was now dusk or just after dusk. It was quite dark, so the gardening people went away, duly confused.
But now there was a man at the bottom of the front garden who was allowing people to come in and offer their services to all the people who owned local houses.
I thought: This is very strange.
He was supposed to supervise them, but he was just letting anyone in who wanted to take a photograph.
Well, nothing wrong with that, I thought.
And then I woke up.
That was last night.
That is true.
Well, OK, that is not true.
That was a dream I had on the 30th August last year. But I thought I would share it now. I muttered it into my iPhone, half awake, just after it happened.
And the heading of this blog is not true. When I was a teenager I did not dream I would die this year.
I worked it out logically when I was awake.
Back then, in the mists of the time when I was younger, I looked at the average life expectancy for an ordinary person. And I worked out that this would be the year I would die. I figured, all things being equal, I would die sometime in the 2020s and, if I were dead-on average, then 2022 would be the year I died.
We shall see.
Well, obviously, maybe I won’t. See.
But – hey! – life is but a dream…
(Image by Reto Scheiwiller via Pixabay)
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Dave Brooks, RIP – astonishing original
Dave Brooks with his sons and daughter (Charlie on right)
I was asleep today – about 11 in the morning- when Martin Soan phoned to tell me Dave ‘Bagpipes’ Brooks – an early member of The Greatest Show on Legs – had died, aged 72. Dave’s son Charlie Brooks had announced on Facebook that his father died at the end of last week.
Charlie wrote: “He passed away end of last week. They broke the mould when they made him. Here’s to all of you who played music with him, loved him, got exasperated with him(!) and had fun with him over the years. With the coronavirus situation, we don’t know what will happen with the funeral at the moment.”
(Charlie lives in Oregon; Dave lived in the UK.)
“At some point, there will be a moment to remember Dave and it will involve music and a few drinks.
Dave playing at Charlie’s wedding (bride & groom on left)
“Charismatic and occasionally cantankerous, but always quick with a joke and someone who definitely lived by his own rules, for better or worse. He was also a brilliant musician, starting as a jazz sax player in the 1960s, then becoming a piper.
“Going to miss you, Dave… everyone is unique, but they truly broke the mould when they made you. They say you can’t choose your family, but if I could, I’d choose you again. So sad I didn’t get to say goodbye. Love you.”
Martin Soan remembers: “Dave joined The Greatest Show on Legs very early on…
“I don’t know what year or indeed how we came to meet him in the first place, but he was a valued member and was a very funny man indeed.
“Going on tour with ‘The Legs’ wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea: it was a hand-to-mouth existence and a lot of anarchy to put up with, but he fitted in without any trouble and sometimes led the way in outrageousness.
(L-R) Malcolm Hardee, Martin Soan, Jools Holland, ‘Digger Dave’, Dave Brooks (Photograph supplied by Martin Soan)
“I performed with him a few times in later years and we both slotted in where we left off. It was simply natural to perform and hang out with him.
“His temperament was sunny and always even but also he was very educational (important when spending long hours in a van), He introduced Malcolm Hardee and me to garlic, which Malcolm hated… He knew what was happening politically and, of course, musically expanded our minds… Above all, I will always remember his wicked sense of humour and infectious laugh.
“He excelled on stage and personally made sketches of ours complete and perfect and, after he went his own way, we had to drop the routines he had made his own. The Human Scottish Sword Dance and Dirty Ol Men were his sketches .”
In 1981, Dave performed The Human Scottish Sword Dance with The Legs on ITV’s ratings-topper Game For a Laugh…
I myself met him, I think, only twice, maybe three times: clearly my loss. As well as having an original sense of humour, he had wide talents.
He was wonderful on the Highland bagpipes (and saxophone) playing Irish Traditional and Scottish Traditional music and jazz with many other artists including Joan Armatrading, Graham Bond, Elkie Brooks, Phil Collins, George Harrison, Dick Hecksall-Smith, Manfred Mann, Count Dracula and The Barber of Seville. Probably also Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
He played weddings with Sikh dhal drummers
He had an 18-month run in London’s West End as a piper in the stage production of Brigadoon (where he had his bagpipes sent to sleep for 100 years) as well as appearing in the BBC TV production of People Like Us and in the movie Loch Ness.
He also performed and played bagpipes on the alternative comedy scene with Arnold Brown, The Greatest Show on Legs, John Hegley, Marcel Steiner (Smallest Theatre in the World) as well as Keith Allen (whose record company, Dave said, still owed him £60!).
In the US, he was a founder member of infamous band The Don Wannabes.
Back in the UK, he played various Scots and Irish piping at weddings, funerals and divorces and had his own Irish ceilidh band Sham-Rock, sometimes appearing playing the bagpipes with them as the Green Man, dressed in a suit of leaves. He claimed he was thinking of branching out. He is on whistle in this video…
For Asian weddings, he appeared playing bagpipes with Drummers Delight – two Sikh dhal drummers.
On 29th July 1996, the Corporation of London prosecuted him at Hampstead Magistrates’ Court under an 1890 by-law for “playing a musical instrument (his bagpipes) on Hampstead Heath on three separate counts. This was despite the fact that Dave had been playing his pipes on the Heath for an hour every morning for 15 years without any complaint from anyone.
As part of Dave’s defence, solicitor George Fairburn cited the legal precedent of Jimmy Reid, Highland Bagpiper, who, on October 2nd, 1746 – after the Battle of Culloden – was charged with playing an instrument of war and insurrection. Jimmy stated that his Highland pipes were a musical instrument not an instrument of war (which sounds reasonable). But the Lord Chief Justice of England overruled the original jury’s not-guilty verdict and dismissed their later plea for mercy by declaring that the bagpipes were indeed an instrument of insurrection. On the strength of this, Jimmy Reid was hanged, drawn and quartered.
After the Battle of Culloden, they were “an instrument of war””
Dave Brooks said that if his Highland bagpipes were an instrument of war – as stated by the court in 1746 – then now, in 1996, his Highland bagpipes remained an instrument of war and insurrection and could not possibly be a musical instrument as charged.
The 1996 judge – Stipendiary Magistrate Michael Johnstone – said that the case of James Reid and his Highland bagpipes was a gross miscarriage of justice – a point not picked up by the press at the time – and then bizarrely threatened to have Dave Brooks and his Highland Bagpipes charged with bearing arms on Hampstead Heath. He said that, if this interpretation was accurate, Mr Brooks could be charged with carrying a dangerous weapon on the Heath and the penalty could be a prison sentence rather than a fine. He asked the bailiff of the court if he was ready to take Mr Brooks, Highland bagpiper, to the cells below the court never more for his bagpipes to be heard,.
Dave was found guilty on three counts of playing a musical instrument and fined £15 on each count plus £50 costs.
In his summing-up, the magistrate said: “In time of war the bagpipes are an instrument of war and in peace they are a musical instrument”. He dismissed a petition of 2,500 signatures collected around Hampstead by people who liked the Highland pipes.
Dave with his Scottish military weapon
The Corporation of London as a token gesture gave consent for Mr Brooks to play his bagpipes for one hour, three mornings a week on the bandstand at Parliament Hill Fields. He was also given permission by the management of Alexandra Palace to play his bagpipes in Alexandra Park anytime, which he then did regularly in return for playing his bagpipes at various charity functions for them.
Stipendiary Magistrate Michael Johnstone, in delivering his judgment, conceded that many might not consider the bagpipes to be a musical instrument, although he said he was not saying it was one.
When Dave’s case first came to prominence and he became a cause célèbre in piping circles, the College of Piping in Glasgow offered some words of comfort: “Well, if they hing you, dinnae you worry. We’ll compose a fine lament to your memory!’’
Tracks on subsequent albums released by Dave included the evocative Birds Eat Turds, a flute and pipe combination of Irish and Mauritanian songs like A Chailleach do mharrias me/Arts Plume and the classic Did They Come From Outer Space? No. They Came From Hendon Central.
RIP an original.
Here is Dave Bagpipes Brooks playing Auld Lang Syne…
…and playing solo bagpipes with an Indian theme…
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I watched my father die for over ninety minutes with a look of horror in his eyes
This is rather long but, if you can’t be selfish in your own blog, where can you be?
We are in coronavirus lockdown at the moment and yesterday was VE Day, so death is in the air.
A photograph taken on my parents’ Wedding Day in 1946
Yesterday I posted a photo on Facebook – of my parents on their wedding day in 1946.
A couple of people said I was the living image of my father. I always think I look nothing like my father but loads of people say I do.
They were very good parents. They did everything they could to be kind to me and to bring me up well with Calvinist morality. We were Church of Scotland in Aberdeen but, when we moved to Ilford in London, the nearest Church of Scotland was about 3 miles away, so we went to the local Presbyterian – very low – church. All my character flaws and faults are mine, not theirs!
My Scottish father was bizarrely born in Liverpool. His father was a Scots merchant navy captain and was based in Liverpool. He died when my father was 3 years old, at which point the family moved back to Wigtownshire in SW Scotland,
When my father was 15, he ran away to join the Royal Navy. I am a bit vague about his exact age but, whatever it was, it was one year before the age he could legally enlist so they rejected him. A year later, he re-applied and was accepted, just in time for the Spanish Civil War in which – allegedly – the UK was not involved. Although my father remembered his ship dropping men in civilian clothes off the Spanish coast who were then taken in small dinghies to land.
In the Second World War, he was based in Malta on the cruiser Aurora, whom the Italian press nicknamed ‘The Silver Phantom’ because it would attack then disappear.
Me (aged 1) with father near home in Campbeltown, Scotland
My father was a very calm and quiet man but, after he died, my mother told me he had once, in Clacton, where they retired, had a panic attack in the small toilet in their bungalow. They had a small self-contained toilet room next to a bigger bathroom.
He had been a radio operator during the War and, on one occasion, the Aurora was under attack. He was down in his radio room in the bowels of the ship, totally isolated, with no way out if the ship started sinking and all he could hear was the sound of explosions magnified in the metal ship and all hell breaking out unseen around him. He re-lived that terror, isolated in his tiny toilet room in Clacton.
After the War, he serviced marine radar on fishing vessels around the Scottish coast. In the mid-1950s, he had been isolated in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Aberdeen then got employed by a company called Kelvin Hughes.
We moved down to Ilford when he got employed at their main factory in Hainult.
Me, at home in May 2020, looking, I think, unlike my father…
In the early 1960s, because of the places he had to visit, he had to be ‘positively vetted’ – after the defection of Kim Philby. I remember him telling my mother they had interviewed his masters at secondary (and possible primary) school.
He died of cancer, alone, in the gloomy-lit back bedroom of a nursing home in Clacton-on-Sea. I was there and watched him die in 2001. I spoke to him, but I don’t think he knew I was there.
I posted the blog below in June 2014.
In recent weeks, I have been posting extracts from my 2001 diary about the period when my father was dying from cancer.
I previously posted a shorter version of what follows in November 2011, when Apple boss Steve Jobs died. I think this one has a better ending.
Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature) painted in 1893 by Edvard Munch
Saturday 23rd June
My father’s mind was on another planet. He did not recognise the nurse when she came in. He could not recognise words said to him. It was not that his ears could not hear them; it was that his brain did not recognise their meaning.
Sunday 24th June
When we visited my father this afternoon, he was unable to communicate, staring blankly into the middle distance.
Monday 25th June
My father told the nurses he felt pain this morning. So he will now be given an extra daytime tablet with a morphine-element in addition to the one he is given in the evening. His eyes stared, as if at something faraway and long ago. As I left and put the trolley tray by his bed, he looked at me and said: “There’s something not at all right with me.”
Tuesday 26th June
I had a 2-hour medical check-up in a BUPA building near King’s Cross.
London was sweltering in extraordinarily hot weather, but inside the building it was cool and relaxing. Later, I sent an e-mail to my friend Lynn, saying:
They say I’m getting into the start of being dangerously overweight and VERY slightly too cholesterolly. I do wonder if it was really necessary for the short Chinese gent to put his finger up my bottom to test for Prostate Cancer. Surely there must be another way to do this or was he just ‘avin’ a larf?
I phoned my mother around 6.00pm and she told me that, when she had visited my father in the afternoon, there had been no response to anything she or my aunt (his sister) said. His eyes were open but staring ahead. “I think he was drugged up to the eyeballs,” she told me. “I don’t think he’s in any pain.” (Later, the matron told me the medication he was on was not that strong and that they had not given him a daytime tablet to avoid making him zombie-like.)
At around 8.30pm, I was mowing the grass on my front garden. The matron phoned me on my mobile phone to tell me my father had deteriorated very badly and I arranged to leave at 10.00pm, to get to the nursing home around 11.30pm, telling my mother I was getting to her home in Clacton at 1.00am and not to wait up for me. I was going to see how he was at 11.30pm and decide what to do.
The matron rang back at 9.30pm to tell me the doctor had just been and said my father only had four to five hours left before he died, so I went immediately, told my mother I had been phoned by the matron and asked if she wanted to go to the home to see my father.
She said (quite rightly) No, with a sad, tired, tone to her voice, and I phoned her just after 11.05pm when I had gone in and seen my father briefly. I suggested my mother take her two nightly sleeping tablets and go to bed and I would stay with my father all night and phone her at 7.00pm when she got up. She knew it was terminal because she had told me where the undertaker was. There was some surprise in her voice when I phoned her:
“Is he still here?” she asked.
When I arrived, the nursing home’s night sister warned me he had deteriorated a lot since my mother had seen him this afternoon and warned me “his eyes are open”.
The first thing that shocked me when the door was opened, though, was the sound. I had never realised the phrase “death rattle” was anything more than a colourful phrase. It is an exact description. I had also thought it was a brief final sound rather than an ongoing sound.
It was a rhythmic, rasping sound.
His face was side-lit in the darkened room by a yellow-cream glow from a bedside table lamp sitting not on a table but on the floor of the room with old-fashioned floral wallpaper. It was bit like a Hammer horror movie of the late 1950s in slightly faded Technicolor.
His bed was behind the door and when I saw him lying there on his back in bed I was shocked again because his face was like Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.
His false teeth were out, so his mouth was abnormally small considering it was open to its fullest extent, the skin between his upper lip and nose seemed wider than normal; and there was an indented line on his nose between his nostrils which, in profile, made him look like he had two noses.
He was lying on his back staring straight up at the ceiling with wide open, unblinking eyes as if he was shocked by something he saw on the ceiling. His head was tilted back slightly from his torso as if his head had been dropped into the soft pillow from a great height.
This tilted-back head, the shocked eyes, the open mouth all combined to make it look like he was frozen in a silent scream yet the sound coming out was a death rattle from his throat, as the air mattress beneath him made discreet little isolated cracking sounds presumably caused by the slight movements as his body made the rattling rasping breathing and his distended stomach rose and fell under the bedclothes.
The rattle was like a machine breathing through a very slightly echoey plastic tube partially blocked by air bubbles in water. I wondered if he was dead already, inside. It was as if his brain or heart must be telling his throat and chest to desperately gasp for air even though they knew it was pointless.
Towards the end, the rattle became less pronounced as the sound of the breaths within the rattle became slightly more human.
Towards the very end, the rattle slowly died out and human light breathing returned, getting gentler and gentler as his life ebbed away. When the breathing ended, I pressed the buzzer for the night sister.
When she arrived, there was some slight breathing again, but only for 40 or 60 seconds. For perhaps the last 15 seconds of his life, his mouth – until now rigidly open – partially closed then reopened three times, then his eyes slowly closed, his mouth partially closed and reopened twice more and he was dead, his eyes closed and mouth open. It was 00.35am and 22 seconds on Wednesday morning. I had arrived at about 11.03pm.
After he died, I went downstairs to the nursing home office with the night sister, whose father-in-law had died in the same room – Room 11 – of the same disease. I then went back up to the room where my father lay for 15 or 20 seconds during which time there were a couple of tiny surreal flashes through the window from the outside world.
When I went outside to my car, the black sky was flashing white with lightning. Every few seconds, the whole night-time sky was silently flashing white with increasing – but still silent – violence. On the drive back to my parents’ bungalow in Great Clacton, the flashes became whiter and more frequent and the thunder sound arrived. On the drive beside their front garden, small surreal white specks were being blown across the tarmac. When I got out of the car at my parents’ – now my mother’s – house, there was a neon-like flash of vertical lightning and a sound of rustling which continued for 60 or 90 seconds.
I took my bags inside the bungalow and then the rain started. Torrential rain thundering on the streets and windows and roof. Violent and angry rain.
It all struck me as unfathomably dramatic. My father’s death… then immediately the heavens in turmoil… then strong winds… then thunder crashes and angry, violent rain… As if the heavens, in turmoil, were protesting.
It reminded me of the death of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play.
I looked up the quote later:
There is one within,
Besides the things that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets;
And graves have yawn’d, and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
My father was a very ordinary man. Yet it was like the heavens were protesting.
Wednesday 27th June
In the morning, my father’s dead body lay on an occasionally cracking air bed in Room 11 of the nursing home.
People were talking about the dramatic overnight storm. The telephone lines had been cut at Weeley Crematorium but the fax line was working, so the funeral director could only talk to the crematorium by fax.
Thursday 28th June
The curate who will lead the service at my father’s funeral came round to chat to my mother.
“What was Harry like as a person?” he asked my mother.
“He was very placid,” she told him. “But if he was riled he would go through a brick wall. It would take an awful lot to get him riled, though.”
My mother partially broke down later in the day saying of the funeral: “It’s only his family that’s going to be there – only his family not my family.”
Almost immediately – within 15 seconds – the phone rang. It was her cousin Sybil ringing from Edinburgh to say she and husband Osmond (who is dying of cancer) would be coming down to the funeral.
Friday 29th June – Clacton
My mother partially broke down again in the evening.
“I’ve been worrying about this all day,” she cried to me. “When I said yesterday I had no family……. I’ve got you……. That was a terrible thing to say!”
Of course, when she had said there would be no members of her family at my father’s funeral, I had taken it the way she had meant it.
Her parents were dead. She was an only child. Almost.
She had had a brother. He died when (I think) he was aged 16 and she was 11.
Her parents had adored her brother. He was the perfect son.
My parents married in 1946. My mother died in 2007, aged 86
My mother was born with no left hand – only a rounded stump. When she was a small girl, her mother told her: “Keep your left hand in your pocket. Don’t let anyone see.” She always hid her left hand from strangers.
Once, in the 1930s, she saw a man in a Glasgow street – she still remembers him clearly – leaning on the wall by an office doorway and she saw he “had exactly the same as me”. But he didn’t care if people saw it; he just behaved as if it was natural. “I wanted to talk to him but I didn’t,” she told me. “I wish I had.”
Before my mother married my father in 1946, my aunt (my father’s sister) told her: “I wish Henry could marry a whole woman.”
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John’s UK Coronavirus Diary – No 9 – Personal stories in a strange new world
… CONTINUED FROM DIARY No 8 …
SUNDAY 19th APRIL
Romanian entertainer Dragos Mostenescu posted another video of family life in lockdown in London:
The latest figures for coronavirus-related deaths in UK hospitals are 592 deaths in the last 24 hours (down from 888 yesterday)… So now 16,060 in total.
My friend in Central London, who has a close friend with coronavirus in a hospital’s Intensive Care Unit updated me on his current situation:
“I spoke to the hospital earlier. Things are not going well since yesterday. They have been reducing sedation over recent days but he was not coming round, so they stopped all sedation last night… but he’s still not waking up. ‘Neurologically unresponsive,’ they said just now. CT scan of brain later. Today will be a tough day. I am full of fear.”
MONDAY 20th APRIL
(Photo by Luke Jones via UnSplash)
A friend who lives near Milan tells me that the Italian government is going to start easing some restrictions and trying to re-start things on May the 4th. I suggested on Facebook that the Italians must be big Star Wars fans… I was told by someone that this did not work when translated into Italian.
In the last 24 hours, there were 449 hospital deaths linked to coronavirus (down from 592 yesterday)… So now 16,509 in total.
Lynn Ruth Miller, an American living in London – who recently contributed a piece to this blog Diary – writes:
I am an 86-year-old woman. I am a performer whose life revolves around travelling throughout the world to do my act. I am in comparatively good health. I live alone. I have no children, no partner, no family. Because I am in a third floor flat, I have no dog or cat. I am in relatively good health with no debilitating pre-existing conditions.
Governments the world over have told their populations that all people over 70 must go into social isolation. That means I must stay home without visitors and talk to no one face to face. If I need exercise I should walk around the garden. But I do not have a garden.
This social isolation is robbing me of my future. Let’s face it. 86 is the beginning of old, old age. Every day my horizons are less distant. The end of my life is nearer. Each moment that I am able to live a purposeful and rewarding life is especially precious to me because those moments diminish every day. They diminish for us all, of course. But the reality is I have less time left to enjoy them than someone who is younger.
Since March 15 when we were advised to stay inside, I have not been face-to-face with a living, breathing human being. I have not held anyone’s hand; I have not hugged a friend or petted a puppy.
I do not want to get sick. I do not want to make anyone else ill. But I do want to smile at someone who smiles back. I want to tell a joke and hear the laughter. I want to feel a human presence. Live-streaming on a computer screen doesn’t do it for me.
TUESDAY 21st APRIL
Wot’s this ear? It’s some wag’s image of van Gogh
Uncertainty continues about whether people in the UK should wear or not wear masks when out. Jokes have appeared online. One source-unknown wag visually pointed out that Vincent van Gogh would have had problems attaching even a simple face mask.
The real world gets even more surreal than that. The price of oil has turned negative for the first time in history. This means that oil producers are paying buyers to take the stuff off their hands because demand has dropped so sharply and suddenly – because lockdowns across the world have kept people in their homes – that the producers’ storage capacity could run out in May.
The number of coronavirus-related deaths in UK hospitals in the last 24 hours rose by 823 (it was 449 yesterday)… So now 17,337 deaths in total…
WEDNESDAY 22nd APRIL
One friend of mine is taking no chances…
The debate on whether to wear face masks or not continues in the press and one friend of mine is taking no chances by wearing full serious face mask and goggles when she goes out. This is 100% true.
Her equipment may seem over-precautious and certainly likely to keep strangers in the street at a socially-acceptable distance. But the virus can enter the body, it is said, through your mouth, nostrils or eyes, so only wearing a flimsy mask covering mouth and nose would leave your eyes open to attack.
Thus her choice of full headgear makes total logical sense.
THURSDAY 23rd APRIL
Correct social distancing is marked on the floor
Most of the large chain food stores now have positions marked-out on the pavement outside and the floor inside to help keep social distancing (2 metres) from each other.
My friend who lives in Central London updated me on her friend who is in Intensive Care in hospital…
It has been a bumpy old week. From being told by a doctor on Sunday that we should prepare for the worst because my friend was not coming round from two weeks of deep sedation and that a CT scan of his head would assess possible brain damage, to being told that the CT was thankfully clear.
But then he needed several blood transfusions as his haemoglobin kept rapidly dropping. The doctors were looking for an internal bleed somewhere, but could not find one. So that was all very worrying.
Then yesterday the ICU consultant said my friend was doing as well as can be expected and seems to be following the same course as others who are further along (a week or two) in the COVID-19 disease process. He clarified that As well as can be expected means still critically ill. He also explained (perhaps unnecessarily) that they are literally stopping these patients from dying every hour of every day… A ‘good’ day for a patient means “still alive” and they don’t want to give false hope, even when small forward steps are logged…
However, today when I spoke to an ICU nurse, some small forward steps had been logged. Although still on a ventilator, he is now initiating his own breaths and seems to be holding his own. But, a week after removing all sedation, we are still waiting for him to come round. Last Sunday he was “neurologically unresponsive” which sounded pretty endgame-ish. However today I’m told that his pupils are reactive and that he has a good cough (which, in ventilated patients, is apparently a good thing). Small steps.
The total deaths related to coronavirus in UK hospitals now stands at 18,738 – a rise of 616 deaths in the last 24 hours.
FRIDAY 24th APRIL
Last night, BBC TV’s Big Night In show, lasting all evening, combining the charity know-how of Comic Relief and Children in Need and featuring a mega-star-studded array of names including Prince William, the presumed future British King, raised £27 million for charity.
Bizarrely, Captain Tom raised more than £28 million by walking round his daughter’s back yard. We live in strange times.
Also last night, “somewhere in Southern England”, my friend Lynn shot a video which shows that cabin fever has hit the local Brits in total lockdown…
In a press briefing yesterday, President Trump suggested that sunlight or ultraviolet light could be put inside the body – or disinfectant injected into the body – to treat coronavirus. After a backlash, particularly from bleach manufacturers who issued statements telling people not to drink their product, the man with his finger on the nuclear button claimed he was being sarcastic and/or joking, despite the video clearly showing he was being serious.
My friend in Central London spoke to the ICU consultant again today.
The consultant is cautiously positive about my friend’s progress on the ventilator. He is initiating breaths for himself, and the ventilator helps to fully inflate his lungs. His ventilation requirement is now less than 50%, which is still life support but a lot less than it was even a week ago. This whole process is called ‘weaning’ from the ventilator and is done by minuscule reductions.
He also briefly opened his eyes this morning before drifting off again. The consultant expects it will still take some time for him to come round properly because his lack of kidney function means the sedation is still hanging around, even a week after they stopped it. Some COVID-19 patients are taking weeks to wake up, he said.
I asked about the previously mentioned tracheotomy, but they’ve decided not to rush the decision. He said the option with the best outcome would be extubation (removing the breathing tube completely and stopping ventilation) when they are more confident that he can breathe on his own. However, a tracheotomy for continued longer-term ventilation might still be necessary although not ideal, as patients who go this route have a worse prognosis. The consultant said they will see how the weekend goes and review on Monday.
As always, it was stressed that my friend is still critically ill, needing life support, and that there is no guarantee of a good outcome. But the consultant added that his team does think my friend has a chance of recovery, otherwise they wouldn’t still be fighting for him…
So I see this as a glimmer.
Another friend I know – an anaesthetist at a local hospital – agreed that this all sounded encouraging. However he cautioned that, even if he does make it out of hospital, my friend’s lungs and/or kidneys might be permanently damaged. A high proportion of long-term ICU patients have psychological and psychiatric problems such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression (not to mention the much-documented ‘ICU delirium’). There is also a high risk of cognitive impairment. And the road to recovering some level of normal life will be measured in years, not months, with an army of physio and rehab support. He will need 24/7 care for months and obviously somebody living-in when he returns home. So there is a glimmer. But. at the same time… fuck!
UK hospital deaths related to coronavirus went up by 684 in the last 24 hours, making total deaths 19,506. Deaths in the US, where President Trump, despite figures to the contrary, says they are over the peak, have gone over 50,000. Globally, deaths are around 195,000.
Meanwhile, Captain Tom got to No 1 in the hit parade with his rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone.
SATURDAY 25th APRIL
The Guardian reports today on Mark Grenon: “The leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling potentially lethal industrial bleach as a ‘miracle cure’ for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump at the White House this week… Grenon styles himself as ‘archbishop’ of Genesis II – a Florida-based outfit that claims to be a church but which in fact is the largest producer and distributor of chlorine dioxide bleach as a ‘miracle cure’ in the US. He brands the chemical as MMS, miracle mineral solution’, and claims fraudulently that it can cure 99% of all illnesses including cancer, malaria, HIV/AIDs as well as autism.”
The number of coronavirus-related deaths in UK hospitals in the last 24 hours was 813, making a total of 20,319; we are only the fifth country to go over 20,000.
Meanwhile, in Britain, rounding off the week, Romanian entertainer Dragos Mostenescu’s latest video shows he has found it is easy to get distracted when homeschooling his children in locked-down London…
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John’s UK Coronavirus Diary – No 3 – What it feels like to have the virus…
We are advised to wash our hands for at least 20 seconds (Photo by Nathan Dumlao via UnSplash)
SUNDAY 29th MARCH
I woke at around 0530 this morning. I live with my grandfather. He had been out late last night and upstairs, from my bed, I could hear him opening the front door downstairs, then coming up the creaking wooden stairs. Then I woke up. There was a strong wind outside making creepy noises. My grandfather died in the 1970s.
Most supermarkets now have an hour at the beginning or end of the day set aside for older people and/or people in vulnerable categories and/or NHS staff. I was in the local Iceland store this afternoon and got talking to a man at a safe distance across a frozen food cabinet. He told me he lives in Pimlico and, last week, someone was mugged in Pimlico and their NHS pass was stolen. Apparently true. Just the NHS pass.
MONDAY 30th MARCH
Yesterday afternoon, I had a FaceTime chat with a friend’s 8-year-old daughter. It lasted 1 hour 19 minutes and she is the most sensible person I have talked to since the coronavirus crisis started. Facebook and Twitter are awash with self-pity and paranoia.
The number of known UK deaths from COVID-19 was announced today as 1,408.
Things perked up later when the extraordinarily talented Romanian entertainer Dragos Mostenescu posted the first in a series of videos about his family and being self-isolated by the coronavirus crisis.
TUESDAY 31st MARCH
In the current coronavirus crisis, we are told only to contact our GP (local doctor) in a real emergency.
Most things in life depend on your viewpoint. Take this online posting from an Online COVID-19 Mutual Aid Group in an expensive area of London:
Hello, my wife and I have been asked by our GP to self-isolate as we are showing symptoms of a viral infection. Our problem is we do not know any neighbours being newish to the zone who can shop for us and we require dog food. Our dog has IBS – Irritable Bowel Syndrome – so she can only eat pasta and veg (broccoli, cauliflower & sprouts). If anybody can help with this plea we would welcome your contact. Many thanks.
The reaction of the person who told me was: “Honestly! People! So well connected they’ve actually seen their GP! Human beings can’t get pasta to eat let alone dogs! Middle Class entitled First World problems! Give the dog some bloody dog food, not vegan muck and it’ll soon feel better…”
A website satire not too far from reality
That reaction seems pretty reasonable to me. But, seen from the point of view of the isolated couple in a new neighbourhood, caring about their dog, their plea is not unreasonable either.
The NewsThump satire site reported a fictional outbreak of people sticking things up their bottoms from boredom.
This might not be a total fantasy. Many years ago, a friend with a friend who worked in the A&E Department of a hospital told me Saturday nights had a high incidence of this type of thing including people misunderstanding the physical nature of fish…
Fish can only go one way…
You can stick a (small) fish head-first up your bottom but – remember they have scales – you cannot pull it out… Result… a visit to the local hospital’s A&E Department… And people think coronavirus is bad…
WEDNESDAY 1st APRIL
Back to reality today. A Junior Doctor in the NHS Tweeted: “Last night I certified far more deaths than I can ever remember doing in a single shift. The little things hit you: a book with a bookmark in, a watch still ticking, an unread text message from family. Pandemic medicine is hard.”
The number of daily coronavirus deaths in the UK in the last 24 hours has increased by 563.to 2,352.
A friend who lives in central London, who was ill for a week or more and is just-about getting over it emailed me:
I have definitely had it, John. Without a doubt. All the symptoms – fever for the first week, complete loss of taste/smell, dry cough, aching all over. The GP more or less confirmed it on the phone. The fever comes back sporadically. But the worst thing is not having a working nose.
I’m sure I got it on March 8th when I went to an event with my two girlfriends who also got ill at the same time as me. One is now in hospital.
There is no guarantee that one can’t get it again but the hope is that, like with other viral illnesses, I will have immunity. If there were an antibody test, I would take it.
No masking the truth… (Photograph by Ashkan Forouzani via UnSplash)
The medical people are definitely mentioning the effect on taste and smell, certainly in the things I read and my and my friend’s GPs both said that’s the clincher. It is quite different from losing your sense of smell with a cold. It is just total. If you gave me two slices of bread, one spread with Marmite and the other with Nutella, I could not taste the difference.
Smell is a useful sense – I am only now realising how much I rely on it. I can’t smell whether food has gone off, whether something is burning in the oven, whether a tee-shirt needs washing. With food I never used to throw things out on the Best By or Use By date – if it smelled OK, I would eat it. Now, not so confident.
I am fine now except nose and the odd night fever. I think once over it, one is over it. It takes a couple of weeks. If you get lung complications like my friend (and another friend who is so weak he can’t get from bed to loo and hasn’t eaten for ten days) it’s fucking horrible, but I didn’t thankfully.
My cousin only has loss of smell but the two people who work for him also got it (at the same trade fair) – both young. One got a light dose like me; the other (53 years old and a fit runner) floored by it.
One can see that if one is old or infirm, this would see you off. Some friends who are Junior Doctors are very frightened of it as they’ve seen so many people with it.
Martin Soan practises his planned ascent of Mount Everest
THURSDAY 2nd APRIL
I am desolate.
Comic Martin Soan had planned an ascent of Mount Everest tomorrow. Now he has called it off. Only a week after he called off a concert at the Albert Hall.
Possibly just as well, because a recent article in The Smithsonian Magazine reported that there are over 2,000 bodies on Mount Everest – so many that they are now used as landmarks for climbers.
These are the facts you pick up when you are isolated in your home and only allowed out very occasionally.
“I am quite happy it’s low, but have no idea why”
FRIDAY 3rd APRIL
There are 3,605 confirmed coronavirus deaths in the UK now: 684 in the last 24 hours.
The normal resting heart rate for adults over the age of 10 years, including older adults, is between 60 and 100 beats per minute (bpm). Highly trained athletes may have a resting heart rate below 60 bpm, sometimes reaching 40 bpm.
My resting heart rate (according to my Apple Watch) is in the low 50s – around 53/53/54. I am no athlete.
I am quite happy it is low but have no idea why.
SATURDAY 4th APRIL
On Wednesday, my friend in Central London had mentioned another friend who was so weak “he can’t get from bed to loo and hasn’t eaten for ten days”. He was admitted to hospital last night, diagnosed with COVID-19 related double viral pneumonia.
Another friend who lives in rural tranquillity in Sussex tells me she has heard tales (by telephone) in the village about joggers hassling walkers, spitting and coughing near people etc etc.
I had to tell her that Borehamwood, where I live – administratively in Hertfordshire but really on the edge of London – has always seemed to me to be surprisingly not anti-social.
Borehamwood – “It is really culturally an Essex town”
It is awash with secondary schools and Yoofs and it is really culturally an Essex town, but there is almost no graffiti. I think the aspiring anarchists must go somewhere else to be anti-social… Not something they can do at the moment, so I dunno where they are. There is no particular sign of Yoofs on the streets.
All I can imagine is that they are staying at home snorting cocaine or shooting-up heroin – both allegedly normally available in town – but this lockdown must surely have screwed the coke, crack and smack distribution system and it sure as hell must have put burglars out of work – everyone is always at home now…
These are grim times for the crime biz…
But the good news is my friend who had lost her sense of taste and smell reports back: “I had smoked salmon for lunch today. And it tasted fishy!!!!!!
… CONTINUED HERE …
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John’s UK Coronavirus Diary – No 2 – Paranoia and “eat colourful vegetables”
(CONTINUED FROM YESTERDAY)
Teddy bears now think humans are a dangerous virus… (Photograph by Daniele Levis Pelusi via UnSplash)
MONDAY 23rd MARCH
I woke up with the same very slightly hard-edged cough I had last night but it was, again, difficult to know if this was real or a slight variation on my normal lifelong dry cough…
I emailed a comedian to see if they were OK and got this reply:
“Yes I am OK, John. But it’s a war crime against humanity. It’s phycological warfare.
to distance humans from each other
the fear is a virus
isolate them
take away the self-employed sector of society and devalue them in one fell swoop
force everyone on to Universal Credit
the scrap heap of society
using war language like front line
next up forced vaccines and 5g
It does feel like we’re fucked.
This is crime against humanity.
Someone else (not a comedian) told me that her spiritual advisor had told her the whole coronavirus thing had been a purge by the spirits. They had decided to wipe out Mankind but had changed their collective mind. Now it is pretty-much over because the spaceships which were seen over Goa at the weekend and over Peru the previous week have gone away.
In the evening I went out for a one-hour walk – the government says we are allowed out once a day for exercise. When I got back home, I was a bit light-headed and had – I think – the tiniest hint of little headaches, but I could have just been imagining it.
TUESDAY 24th MARCH
We are supposed to keep 6 feet or 2 metres apart, unless we are living together. Thank heavens UK social distancing rules do not apply if you share a household…
A comedy performer has posted on his Facebook page:
I called it yesterday: Pandemic Panic gonna be over by April 6th. Only 28 people died in the UK yesterday.
Around teatime, again, I went out for a one-hour walk. And, when I got back home, I was very slightly light-headed and ever-so-slightly woozy but, again, I could have just been imagining it.
WEDNESDAY 25th MARCH
I feel back to normal today.
The comedy performer who posted on his Facebook page yesterday that the coronavirus outbreak and ‘panic’ would all be over by April 6th today posted:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” (HL Mencken)
Conspiracy theories are sometimes – for some people – easier to understand than reality. And so they are strangely comforting. Because we have all seen the twists in Hollywood movies where the government turns out to be the ultimate ‘baddie’. The devil and plot explanation you know is better than the devil and plot development you don’t know and can’t predict.
Prince Charles has announced he has tested positive for COVID-19 and will self-isolate for 7 days.
My chum Janey Godley, the much-lauded Queen of Scottish Comedy and nemesis of faux President Donald Trump, posted this on her Instagram, headed: Day four of self-isolation.
The bad news (for them) may be that her husband, daughter and dog all have to self-isolate with her
When I do my daily walk to get exercise in Borehamwood, everyone is very polite and keeps their distance. If you see someone coming towards you on the pavement, one of you moves to one edge of the pavement – or sometimes into the road (which is mostly devoid of traffic) and the other person moves to the other side of the pavement. Sometimes, the two people acknowledge each other with a smile or a nod of the head to say Thankyou. It feels like I have been transported back to an Agatha Christie novel set in a 1930s English village… and the killer is still on the loose.
Other views are available. Someone I know of Indian origin posted:
Walking down the street and having old white people cross the road when they see me… Now I know how my dad felt when he came to the UK in the 1960s. No Blacks, no dogs, no virus.
Two metres is the distance we are supposed to stay away from strangers during this coronavirus outbreak… I only understand feet and inches, so I have no idea what 2 metres is.
But I heard a useful explanation on BBC News today. If you imagine the body of an average-sized dead man lying between you and the other person… that is about it.
That I can imagine.
THURSDAY 26th MARCH
Who knew communes still existed? (Photo by Elias Arias via UnSplash)
Someone I know lives in a commune in North London. Who knew such things still existed? He tells me:
There was a minor drama in my house yesterday… The conspiracy theorists who live here actually went to the local hospital to prove that there was no such thing as coronavirus. They went to the chest unit!
When they got back, they talked loudly about it in the garden – about how the doctors weren’t wearing masks. They talked very loudly so everyone could hear because they thought then everyone would realise it wasn’t happening and it is just a conspiracy.
You can imagine the response. Everyone else started freaking out… I’m surprised they weren’t lynched.
I am going to have to try to talk to them again. But it’s really stressing me out because I’ve tried before and now they hate me because I don’t agree with them because that’s how groups work.
A little later, I got an update:
I feel better. I started shouting at the conspiracy theorists about fuck knows what and now I feel better. I had kinda let them chat before because I don’t want to be right about everything, but I had to say something now they’re running around hospitals and are trying to organise a flash mob of young people to meet outside Parliament to defy the ban (and no doubt give each other corona that will kill their grandparents).
I spilt oats on the floor during the row in the kitchen, but not milk – and there’s no use crying over spilt oats.
FRIDAY 27th MARCH
Yesterday, 181 people with coronavirus died in the UK.
Boris Johnson made his health announcement via Twitter
Today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced they had tested positive for coronavirus and each would self-isolate for seven days.
And I found a message in the spam folder of my email account. It started:
Dear John,
Here is Great News. The UK Government website has downgraded the seriousness of Corona Virus. The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.
However, We Still Have a PRISON PLANET No Matter what The Honest Scientists Say.
Why? Most European and World economies are now at a standstill. Virtually all European car manufacturing has come to a halt. I have talked about the coming collapse of the world economy since 2008 and I have done my best to tell people to protect themselves by getting healthy.
The Pharma/Medical Cartel have been concerned for a while that the public were realising that vaccinations may not be as safe and effective as claimed. This followed CDC researcher Dr Bill Thompson’s revelations who published 10,000 documents exposing a cover-up of side effects and failure of vaccines and autism. The Pharma/Medical Cartel quickly realised that Covid-19 that originated in China was an opportunity to terrorise the population by exaggerating its effects. Vaccines could be shown to be our saviour.
I strongly recommend getting healthy rather than any drug route. Eat more colourful vegetables.
Really healthy people don’t die of Flu or Corona Virus. Read and follow the plan in my eBooks, even if you can’t afford everything.
Like Hippocrates, my books help you to practice health care and follow his famous teaching, “Let Food be thy Medicine, and Medicine be thy Food”.
My bestselling book is now available on a download for all of my readers. Quite simply, this book could change your life!
SATURDAY 28th MARCH
Nick Adderley of the very under-pressure Northants Police
We are allowed to go out only once a day to exercise and you are allowed to travel in to work if your job is deemed essential, but anarchy appears to have broken out in Northamptonshire.
The BBC reports Nick Adderley of Northamptonshire Police saying that the force’s control room has had “dozens and dozens” of calls about people ignoring the order to ‘self-isolate’.
“We are getting calls,” Nick Adderley says, “from people who say ‘I think my neighbour is going out on a second run – I want you to come and arrest them’. We would not want to discourage people from making us aware, but we have to set expectations. We won’t have police officers crashing through garden fences to check the ID of everyone who is there to see whether they live at the house or whether they should be self-isolating… If people think we will be descending on these houses with blue lights, then we won’t.”
Superintendent Ash Tuckley, who leads the control room, says other queries have included someone asking if it was illegal NOT to cough into a tissue and a man who asked: “My wife doesn’t think her job is essential but I do and she’s working from home. Is there anything I can do?”
260 people with coronavirus died yesterday in the UK. The victims were aged 33 to 100 with at least 13 of them being healthy adults with no other underlying health problems.
Echoing what was said around a couple of weeks ago, at the beginning of the outbreak, the medical director of NHS England, today said if the number of deaths can be kept below 20,000 the government will have done well.
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Filed under Anarchy, coronavirus
Rest in Peace: British showbiz legend Nicholas Parsons and other gentle men
Nicholas Parsons – much loved by generations of Brits
I was at a crematorium in Hampshire today. For a celebration of the life of my cousin’s husband, Michael. He was that seemingly rare thing: a kind, decent and gentle man. My cousin chose well marrying him.
When I left, within less than a minute of me switching on my phone again, there was a BBC newsflash that Nicholas Parsons had died, aged. 96.
And it started to rain.
Truly.
I grew up watching Nicholas Parsons on TV. He played the upper-class and slightly up-himself ‘posh’ foil/neighbour to Arthur Haynes’ working class character/tramp in a ratings-topping ITV comedy show The Arthur Haynes Show, written by Johnny Speight (before he created Till Death Us Do Part).
So, as a child, I suppose I thought of Nicholas Parsons as the character he played – a bit of a posh bloke thinking a bit too much of himself. Sort of a cliché actor type, if you see what I mean.
Later, when I was living in a bedsit in Hampstead, I guess in the early 1970s, there was a story in the local Hampstead & Highgate Express about some girl who had been sexually attacked on Hampstead Heath and afterwards she went to the nearest house she found which, as it happened, was Nicholas Parsons’ home.
My memory is that she was effusive about how wonderful and helpful, how kind and considerate, caring and efficient he was, helping her with the police and so on.
I always thought much more of him after that – he was not just some posh sitcom actor/foil on a television show but a good person – a human being.
A few years later, I was working in the on-screen promotion department at Anglia TV in Norwich, where he fronted their big ITV ratings-getter Sale of the Century. (It was getting over 21 million viewers weekly.)
One way to rate TV ‘stars’ I always found was that, if they ate in the canteen with the plebs and the canteen ladies liked them, then they were OK as human beings. The canteen ladies at Anglia TV always liked Nicholas Parsons. (A parallel was Victoria Wood and Julie Walters, early in their careers, in the Granada TV canteen in Manchester.)
His TV gameshow was getting over 21 million viewers weekly
One day, Nicholas Parsons came into the promotion office at Anglia TV and, for the life of me, I can’t remember why – I think maybe he was asking advice or plugging some travel project he had – but he – the big Anglia and ITV Network star – was, as ever, amiable, modest and charming – not in a schmaltzy showbiz promotional way but in a genuinely normal person-to-person way.
His image was, I suppose, of a constantly-smiling, slightly cheesy, always ‘on’ old style showbiz star.
But, on the two occasions I briefly met him in the flesh, he was anything but that. He was, if I have to choose a naff but exactly true term, a ‘real’ person. It was impossible not to like him.
An unlikely meeting of minds in 2007…
The second time I briefly met him was when he was a guest on Janey Godley’s Chat Show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007. I met him on the steep stone steps behind what had been the old Gilded Balloon, was at that time The Green Room venue and has since gone through various names.
He was, again, a charming, keen-to-please and keen-to-be-helpful, slightly frail gentle man. (He was 83 at the time and I thought to myself: He is going to pop his clogs soon… That was 13 years ago and he was still going strong last year!)
As a result of being a guest on that show, he – the seemingly definitive comfortable ‘Home Counties’ man – and Janey – the definitive tough wee East End Glaswegian – seemed to bond because, as I understand it, his parents had sent him to do manual work in the Glasgow shipyards in his youth to ‘toughen him up’. As a result, despite his image as ‘Home Counties Man’, I think he felt an affinity with working class Glaswegians.
Janey turned up multiple times later both on his own Edinburgh Fringe chat shows and on his long-running BBC Radio 4 show Just a Minute. The BBC tried the format on TV in 1999, but it didn’t catch on there. It has been running on radio since 1967.
On her Facebook page this afternoon, Janey posted this tribute to him:
Just a Minute – Paul Merton, Janey Godley and Nicholas
#NicholasParsons was one of the very few old school iconic comedians/presenters who was very much invested in new and young comics at Edinburgh – he came to see our shows and spent time getting to know us – he was one of “us” he loved stand up.
The sheer delight knowing that Nicholas was in your audience was something that “lifted” our spirits at the Fringe – despite his age and workload he came to see HEAPS of comedy shows and sat and chatted with us afterwards – nobody else that famous did that for us.
He took time with new and emerging comics and always was generous with his time. We were used to famous faces at the Fringe but Nicholas was that guy who sat in a tiny hot room and laughed and cheered you on. And for that I will always love him
That is Janey’s opinion.
TV chat show host Graham Norton Tweeted this afternoon: “Nicholas Parsons was truly the kindest and most generous person I’ve ever worked with. His continued delight at being a part of show business should be an inspiration to us all!”
I can’t say, personally, that I have ever warmed to men as a species. I’m more of a cat person. Cats have a nobility and (if you feed them) an amiability that is usually sorely lacking in men.
So it is a very great loss when genuinely decent gentle men die.
Nicholas Parsons had three wildly successful, long-running, overlapping showbiz peaks – The Arthur Haynes Show, Sale of the Century and Just a Minute – and, quite rightly, memories of him are splattered all over TV and radio news, in print and on the internet.
My cousin’s husband Michael – whose memorial celebration was packed to standing room only in a small Hampshire town today – tried to follow the philosophy of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius:
“It is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.”
Michael lived his life to the full and added to it the other key ingredient: kindness. I think he and Nicholas Parsons shared that.
At the end of the celebration of Michael’s life today, the poem One At Rest by that prolific writer Anon was read out. It ends:
“And in my fleeting lifespan,
as time went rushing by
I found some time to hesitate,
to laugh, to love, to cry.
Matters it now if time began
if time will ever cease?
I was here, I used it all
and I am now at peace.”
RIP Michael and Nicholas.
Or, as the Tralfamadorians would say:
So it goes.
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SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 