The End of Days

Over the last year or so, I have got used to various aspects of lockdown and working at home. After more than a year of working at home, no longer commuting the sixty miles each way to London, I have resolved that I will never go back to commuting five days a week. One rather uneasy thought has been occurring to me repeatedly recently, and that is if it is so easy to do my job at home rather than in the office, does anyone really need me to do it at all? Am I drawing a handsome salary on false pretences?

Before I got used to it all, the 2020 lockdown culture got me down a bit, and sometimes it felt like The End of Days.

The practicalities didn’t bother me. I was happy wearing a face covering, observing distance at the supermarket and cutting my own hair. I would go out in the garden with the kitchen scissors and hack lumps off my hair, which made me look ever so smart. I said to my older son Bill on one of our Facetime calls that the secret to cutting your own hair is not to look in a mirror while you are doing it. Bill observed that it might be prudent not to look in a mirror afterwards either.

I also noticed in the first lockdown in 2020 that at work I was busier than before, despite having freed up two commuting hours per day. This was because, as mentioned in a previous blog, now that they were stuck at home some colleagues seemed to have f*** all to do except convene online meetings. In relation to this, I got thoroughly sick of the sight on my own face on the screen, down in a corner below the Zoom speaker or gallery. Sometimes it looked a bit like my dad did in his declining years, which was bearable, but at other times it resembled E.T. wearing one of those joke things kids used to have, specs and false nose attached.

But what worried me most was the thought that some of the more pleasant aspects of life before the pandemic would never come back. And I thought I might as well kick the bucket list, as an alternative to kicking the bucket itself.

I had always thought that some day I would have a holiday in Malta  where I lived as an infant, and that I would revisit old haunts in Singapore where I worked for a while in the 1980’s. In my view, however, for a 65 year-old, even a vaccinated one, travel of that kind is out for the foreseeable future. I have had bacterial pneumonia, and I certainly don’t want to catch something that could give me viral pneumonia. Anything I do is planned to minimise the risk of contracting the virus.

I think that is what gets me most. We have had some brilliant holidays. In 2017 we had a few days in the Yorkshire Dales followed by another few days in Edinburgh, seeing a lot of both the Yorkshire and Scottish branches of the family.  In 2018, we had a week travelling around Arizona and Nevada, followed by a week in New Orleans. We had a wonderful time. After our return, we watched ‘NCIS New Orleans’ on the telly at every opportunity, observing, ‘We’ve been there,’ whenever there was a shot of the French Quarter or when someone got on a tram. In 2019, we had four short holidays, climbing the highest peaks in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Our last trip abroad was a few lovely days in Paris in the Autumn of 2019. We learned from previous experience and booked a lot of things in advance, including the Van Gogh immersive experience at the Atelier des Lumières, jumping the queue at Versailles and The Four Seasons performed in Saint Germain church. But most of the fun in Paris is to be had strolling down those broad streets planted with trees, and having lunch in newly discovered cafés half-hidden in picturesque lanes. I do miss that.

My great pal Kevin Connelly is if anything more cautious than me. He recently observed, in relation to the relaxation of rules, ‘Just because you could go to pub doesn’t mean you should go to the pub.’ This logic is too much for me. My entire adult life has been built on the principle that if you could go to the pub, you should go to the pub.

At the moment, we are poised on a rather scary ridge. Social life has reawakened, but infection rates seem to be rising again. We have a week’s holiday planned in November, in Derbyshire. I can’t wait. And it seems rather selfish to hope that infection and death rates stabilise, not for the sake of the people who might catch the virus and die of it, but for the sake of our holiday going ahead.

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So, whether or not I will ever revisit Malta, Singapore or Paris again, what are my greatest regrets? Apart from wishing that I hadn’t behaved like an idiot so many times in my past life, that is. Strangely enough, one that looms large is not watching the final episode of Z-Cars when it was shown on television in September 1978, just before I left Scotland to do my MSc in London. I have since seen it on YouTube, but that’s not the same.

For readers who are not British or not as old as me, Z-Cars was an iconic British cop show, set in Newtown, a fictitious area near Liverpool, which ran from 1962 to 1978. During its time, a stellar list of actors performed in it: James Ellis, Judi Dench, Brian Blessed, Colin Welland, Leonard Rossiter, Joss Ackland, John Thaw… The brilliant northern Irish actor James Ellis played Constable, then Sergeant, then Inspector Bert Lynch, I think being the only cast member who was there from the first to the final episode.

Z-Cars was a major force in the evenings of my childhood. Anyway, the last series included a running story about plans to add a layer of protection to the previously always open front door of Newtown Police Station in the form of a steel grille which would lower electrically on pressing of a switch. Various gremlins get in the way of this grille working in the episodes leading up to the final one. The final episode included a bit of comedy, with some of the old troopers, notably Colin Welland and Brian Blessed, playing cameo roles. In the very last scene of the very last episode, just before the credits roll, the electrickery works, and the grille lowers over Bert Lynch and his colleagues, forming a barrier between Inspector Lynch and the community he has policed for the past twenty years, to the sound of the immortal theme of Johnny Todd, played by a Liverpool flute band. I am welling up just thinking about it.