Feest Isolation Days – 8 April 2020
My editor has written a post that will give you all another version of Feest isolation days. He’s both my editor and resident teccy. And also my lovely husband and the man I am very pleased to be locked down with! It’s Day twenty five and we are still at Chez Feest and haven’t been out into the world for all this time. If any of you want to share something from wherever you are in the world Email it to me or simply add a comment. People are scattered all over the globe reading this and keeping connected is what it’s all about. For today, the view from Terry’s perspective. See you tomorrow.
Guest Post on Day Twenty-five……
It is with trepidation that I step into Kathy’s blogging role. Her prose sparkles and inspires like champagne, mine is more solid and opaque, like lukewarm tea – but hopefully still a stimulant. I thought it should also look different, perhaps a change of font, but Times New Roman is used everywhere, Arial is too cold and scientific, Book Antiqua too florid, so I simply settled for italics, often used to indicate a quote or insertion from elsewhere!
These are strange times. The world is shutdown, we hide in our houses from an invisible enemy, much of the life we are used to has stopped – and yet when I look out, everything looks normal. A colourful spring is unfolding in the garden, the dunnocks are building a nest in the ivy by the kitchen door as always, the morning birdsong is deafening, the sun has brought out the peacock tail and fritillary butterflies, the nights are getting longer, the days are getting warmer. But life is not normal. My book club recently read a most amazing book, “Chernobyl Prayer”*. After Chernobyl, the peasant farmers could not believe they could not drink the milk from their cows or eat the vegetables from their fields, or even go outside, because it all looked just the same as it had before, and many ignored the warnings with awful consequences. When I look out to the garden I understand how they felt. Sadly a few people here are acting that way, but thankfully it appears that in the UK the large majority of people are heeding the warnings and staying at home.
As our society faces the threat of the Covid virus there is palpable distress and anxiety around. It made me wonder how people felt when facing earlier pandemics, when there was little scientific knowledge and much superstition. As I read more, I got a new perspective. We could have been facing the black death of 1348 – historians now estimate that half the population of Europe died. We have instant information, we are bombarded with facts and figures, the government updates us, organises for us, supports us, we can communicate in so many ways with friends in so many places. In 1348 in our town or village we would have had no communication whilst we watched our village and family die around us in a few short months. I can’t imagine how frightening that must have been.
In the great plague of 1665 in England 25%, of the population of London died. The Spanish flu of 1918 (which actually originated in New York, not Spain) probably killed 50 million people, and was deadly across the age spectrum and to the otherwise fit, and especially so in the 20-40 age group and in young children: it may have killed 2% of the world’s population. We are facing a horrible situation at present, but coronavirus probably kills less than 1% of all those infected, and mostly people with other major conditions, or the very elderly. This is still too many deaths, to be avoided if at all possible, and the elderly issue is not a great comfort to me, but this is not on the scale of some earlier pandemics. In addition we have medical support, especially breathing support, on a scale never seen before. I am thankful to be facing this in the 21st century.
In thinking about this pandemic and our response to it, and how I feel about it, I realised something about our society. Someone once asked the anthropologist Margaret Mead what she considered to be the first evidence of civilization. She answered: a human thigh bone with a healed fracture found in an archaeological site 15,000 years old. Mead points out that for a person to survive a broken femur the individual had to have been cared for long enough for that bone to heal. Others must have provided shelter, protection, food and drink over an extended period of time for this kind of healing to be possible. Margaret Mead suggested that the first indication of human civilization is care over time for someone who is broken and in need,
Our whole society is under lockdown, this is causing vast numbers of people distress, loss of freedom, loss of income, loss of jobs, loss of their life as they know it. It will stimulate a worldwide recession which will take a long time to recover. We are all in this together, we are all taking action together, we are all undergoing hardship together, but then I remember most of us are at low risk: effectively we are all doing this largely to protect the vulnerable and the elderly. I find this comforting. Perhaps our society is not as broken as we often fear.
It must be time for a little humour….
And not all carers are at high risk………
Enjoy your day,
Terry
* – “Chernobyl Prayer”, by Russian Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, one of the most amazing books I have read in recent years. The author has a gift of getting people to talk, and of listening. She spent years around Chernobyl researching this, and has collated people’s words and memories into a thrilling read. Reading it I was enthralled, educated and informed, chilled, inspired, often sad but finally somewhat uplifted.
See you tomorrow,
Love,
Kathy x