Taking – and getting - the hump

On the subject of my Spotify playlist, again, I’ve been revisiting my enthusiasm that peaked earlier this year for the works of Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. Fortunately, Spotify uses predictive text. One Eno track I believe is particularly relevant during these diseased times, “Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)”. Though, as regards the coronavirus, we don’t have a mountain as such to take, but we do have a hump, and it’s certainly one ideally taken by strategy.

Actually a series of humps, but any strategy we may have once glimpsed has by now fallen by the wayside. I do realise, of course, that humps have become something of a personal fixation (it’s probably an age thing) in these postings.

While we don’t know the truth about the precise timing and causation of the start of the coronavirus pandemic, we do know that from early March reasonably accurate figures have been kept in the UK for proven incidence of the disease and, sadly, for fatalities linked directly to it. At the outset we were told that the figures would rise, plateau, and then decline, in a recognisable hump, with deaths likely to reach 20,000. The picture as it has developed across time indeed represents a fairly well drawn hump; the projected trajectory was accurate in outline. If asked to draw a hump, yes, I think it could plausibly be titled “Covid-19 2020, side view”. Happily, at the moment, we are descending the right hand side of the hump at some speed. Whether we will whizz straight to the bottom or have further humps or humplets to negotiate remains to be seen. Outrageously, the final death toll will be far higher than at first estimated.

As for strategy, early on it was proposed that there would be a sequence of five stages leading us out of the crisis and ultimately to the resumption of normal life. So that was another type of hump for us to be confronted with, but one that once “taken”, would see us through. While – perhaps unadvisedly – suggested dates were attached to these five phases, it was emphasised that progress could only realistically be governed by the infection figures. If they worsened again, restrictions could be re-imposed and progress to the next stage delayed. As a strategic approach this seemed to me perfectly logical. Lockdown would be relaxed in stages only when it was safe to do so. The ideal was that the hump in restrictive measures would mirror the hump of disease incidence; the latter hump would decline in response to the decline in the former. The two would proceed in parallel. I quite liked the hump model of the disease; it was tangible, achievable, finite, end-in-sightable, and all in all, adequately humpy.

Meanwhile, other humps were forming – enlarging, peaking and plateauing, declining. Humps of anxiety, fear, anger, sorrow, and so forth aroused directly in response to personal tragedy or family circumstances, and to news reports of what was happening to patients, to the economy, and to the way the crisis was being handled or mishandled. Whatever they thought privately, most people behaved well, showed their Thursday evening appreciation for the NHS and other care workers, and probably for a while overlooked some of the catastrophes that might one day be laid at the door of the government - like the delay in banning immigration, the situation in care homes, the acquisition of protective equipment, and the apparently headless chicken style of management – particularly after Boris was hospitalised. All those promises about “ramping up” “world beating” track and trace, antibody tests, vaccine research, equipment magicked together by the manufacturers of vacuum cleaners and aircraft engines, rapidly built hospitals with not enough staff and, surprisingly, not enough patients; one thing after another with seemingly no follow-up - left one feeling bemused. I still want to know if I had coronavirus in January. By and large though, in this phase of the outbreak the growth of the disease and public behaviour were in tandem. Perhaps, retrospectively, we will now have a hump of nostalgia, when we look back at these “good old days” of the crisis, when the situation was, despite all its ghastliness, seemingly more under control and everyone was polite.

But then came some destabilising factors – warm weekends, VE+75 Day, the irresponsible behaviour of certain prominent individuals – followed by some new humps encouraged by the media, humps of expectation, of indignation, of over-eager anticipation of relaxation measures, of doubt about the advice we had been given, of financial distress in the travel and hospitality sectors. Humps of impatience; the ‘end of the beginning’ mentality, gate fever. Finally, a considerable section of the population, though surely only a minority, decided that they had had enough of being told what to do and – to use a favourite expression of my late grandmother who originated in one of the most deprived parts of the East End – we learned that these individuals had “got the hump”, were having none of it. Without consideration for others or for the environment they had – entirely predictably - gone off to parks, seaside resorts, beauty spots and elsewhere, behaving irresponsibly, leaving behind physical evidence of their unlovely little lives.

So, starting off with a very real hump of reality, namely a potentially deadly disease, plus a sensible hump of proposals for getting through it, all the humps have now become misaligned, desynchronised from one another, spread about chaotically, laughing at each other, threatening to negate the sacrifices made along the way by so many. In an ideal world the two basic humps would have mapped neatly onto each other; the disease would be in its final days and we would be looking forward to normal life any day now. Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in twenty-first century Britain with the sort of people who live here.