Covid-19

Surviving Covid-19 at 91

January 9, 2021 By graham stewart

That’s not a palindrome

I didn’t get to see my father this week. And I have tried calling him but his phone is switched off. So, I thought I would write this post about him instead.

My father is 91 years old. He is in a care home not far from where I live. He caught — and survived — Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic. That’s getting on for a year ago now, which is both strange and frightening to consider. The home called to say he had the virus but they weren’t going to tell him in case it worried him. He had a week of mild symptoms and then was fine again. When I visited him later he said he had not felt unwell at all and had no sense of being in danger. One of the lucky ones, obviously.

He enjoys the care home life. the best part is that he has everything done for him. My mother used to do everything for him, too. She died five years ago and for a year he found living a struggle. I suspected he would soon give up eating — apart from chocolate and biscuits — because he would tell me he was bored of even thinking of what to ask me to bring him from the shops. Arthritis in his hands had stopped him driving. He talked of wanting to go into a home. This, for him, was code for “I want to be looked after again.”

Our relationship has never been close and yet, as an only son, I felt it my duty to invite him to come live with us. My wife, not exactly a fan of the man, agreed that it was something we should do.

He stayed with us for two years and I don’t think any of us were happy. The happiest day of those two years for all of us was the day he left for the home.

I visit frequently for thirty minutes at a time. It is all that is allowed at the moment and it is long enough. We sit separated by a screen in a cabin in the grounds of the home. It is like visiting a prisoner but I’m not sure my father feels that the prisoner is him. My father remains, for the most part, cogent. He repeats the same questions from week to week. The best part of the slight memory loss is that he forgets how we argue about politics.

His days are spent reading the Daily Telegraph. Literally all day. He reads it more or less from cover to cover. A break for meals. The weirdest effect this generates is that he will raise an issue that is a result of Tory mismanagement, Tory policy, or the results of the years of pain and misery instigated by Thatcher and yet, when I point out the reasons for what he bemoans, he refuses to accept the root causes. His view seems to be that the world is a mess and the Tories are best placed to make it better.

You can imagine this makes conversation difficult. And this is not new. My father and I have been at loggerheads politically since I was a teenager. I think my father turned right-wing at an early age and has not deviated. He has not become more extreme but he has certainly not mellowed. He has a dry sense of humour and a notion of absurdity but his humour can turn to condescension when it comes to politics or economics. My father knows nothing of economics but thinks he is smart with money because he used to be a pensions manager for a large company. He is a perfect example of someone who accepts the right-wing myth that a national budget is the same as a household budget, with all the implications of balanced books and not spending what you don’t have. His acceptance of this ideological nonsense is the thing that most separates us.

We talk football and rugby and when we discuss Hearts or the Scotland team we are on safe ground. My father took me to my first game at Tynecastle a long, long time ago and I have followed Hearts ever since. For anyone who knows Hearts, this is a poisoned chalice that my father has given me. I forgive him for that.

There has been a new outbreak of Covid-19 at the home. The new strain, probably. They are starting to vaccinate the residents. My father has not been re-infected and it looks like the outbreak has been managed well. I received a message yesterday that the home was letting the residents mingle again and have meals together in the dining room. My father enjoys the chance to walk along the corridor to the dining room. I think it makes him feel like he’s in a hotel.

Tomorrow I will call the home and ask someone to remind him to turn his mobile back on. He worries about saving battery. I am the only person who calls him. Last time I saw him I said I had tried to call and asked him to remember to turn the phone back on. He said he would. He hasn’t.

Perhaps he’s happy not to talk to me.

2020 — Gratitude and Anger

January 1, 2021 By graham stewart

It’s too early to make a call about whether we’ll look back on 2020 as the year from hell or as the year in which things started to become even worse and what we thought was hell was merely hell’s reception area.

And was what befell us this year completely unforeseen? Well, yes, in some ways. But a pandemic was becoming increasingly likely as ecological damage continued, and its effects could be — and were — fairly accurately modelled both at the economic and health levels by large numbers of both national and international health organisations. In other words, the scale of the detrimental effects of this particular pandemic are a result of political decisions. And if we look especially at the UK and the USA — where the death toll and the economic impact for anyone already living on benefits or one pay check away from eviction and food banks — we can see that it is more than political. The profits-led, private-industry-focused, and corruption-riddled responses to the pandemic have been driven by ideology.

When the Tories and other parties of the neoliberal death cult talk of the economy they don’t mean the health of the nation as a whole. Their idea of economy is the profit-gobbling transnational corporations that destroy the planet, shatter communities when they shift production in search of smaller overheads, seek to continually depress wages, and campaign feverishly against the rights — and safety — of workers.

Living in the UK now means living in a country that is likely to see one of the world’s highest death rates from Covid-19 — and that was before the onset of new, apparently more aggressive strains of the virus began popping up like unwelcome molehills in the immaculate lawn of our self-regard. And, of course, to add that little extra irony, a major health crisis hit these shores after the Tories had spent the previous decade seeking the best ways to undermine, underfund, and ultimately sell off the NHS. Hospitals were hugely understaffed before the pandemic hit. NHS staff were already working over one million hours of unpaid overtime every week before the pandemic arrived in the UK. One million hours. Every week. Nurses and midwives account for over 400,000 of those hours. You know, those nurses that have lost their bursaries and been refused a pay rise by the Tories?

Add to all this a Tory government led by ministers both corrupt and incompetent — and with a majority in parliament that makes them almost untouchable — and it is hard to see what anyone could be grateful for. It hasn’t helped, of course, that the so-called leader of the opposition is not much of a leader and seems to believe that the best way to oppose austerity, corruption, and incompetence is to abstain in crucial votes or, when he is particularly exercised by the blatant lies engaged in by the Tory front bench, to tut.

So much for anger. Or, at least, the fertile ground on which my anger is laying its ever stronger foundations.

But gratitude I do have. It may be a short list but it’s full of important things. Here it is:

My health and that of my family. My wife, my three adult children, and I have all escaped illness so far this year.

I have a built-in support network in my — for now — Zoom-based twelve-step meetings. The humour in the rooms and the ability to right-size problems and put things in perspective has been, if not exactly a life saver, a balm for my sanity.

The love of my wife. She shows me how to love and be loved. After twenty-nine years of marriage, our marriage grows stronger every year. We have faced this year together.

I love reading and I love books and this year I have found in the books I’ve read worlds of hope and joy and knowledge. Not escapism, perhaps, so much as a source of strength for all the best that we can be. Turning from a news report containing the flippant evil of a Boris Johnston or a Donald Trump (or any of their toadying, self-serving acolytes) to the essays in My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy or a novel like Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House, for instance, is to inhale hope like fresh air in a world that seemed enmeshed in the smoke of a billion fires.

The danger is that I let my gratitude crowd out my anger. That way lies silence and silence is fatal to us all at this time. I hope, therefore, I will have the strength throughout this year to add my voice to those who are agitating for change, for an end to free-market capitalism — of any sort of capitalism, to be honest — and for saving the planet for our children.

Happy New Year.