Cutaneous evidence of early coronavirus infection in the UK?

On 26th January this year I started to experience a cough, a slight temperature, peculiar headaches, wheezing and shortage of breath, and a sensation that my breath smelled of petrol. Because coronavirus wasn’t supposedly at large in this country at that time (although isolated cases had begun to be announced, three days earlier) I never even thought that it might be the cause of my symptoms. I had not been abroad since the previous September, and then only to European countries not initially associated with coronavirus. It wasn’t a cold, and my flu inoculations were up to date.

A week later, at 4 a.m. on 3rd February, unable to sleep and while still feeling unwell, I switched on the light and noticed a peculiar red patch on my right hand, below the base of the thumb. It was angry looking, with a sharply defined but irregular edge, about the size of a postage stamp; it wasn’t painful or itchy. During the day the colour faded to pink before disappearing entirely, but emerging in the middle of it was what looked like a friction blister, which felt slightly sore if I pressed on it. This photo was taken during the evening.

 

I’ve never experienced anything like it before, although I’ve had plenty of viral infections over the years, and suggestions that it could be a burn or a bite aren’t really credible. Curiously, it’s the one area of skin where occasionally, if I’ve eaten very sugary cakes or biscuits, I get transient hives or itchy spots. A few days later I accidentally knocked the blister, which burst, releasing watery fluid, and beneath it the flesh looked raw and weepy - as with conventional blisters. I put a plaster on it and it took several weeks to heal, leaving a slight indentation and dark red scarring, which is now – 3 months on - starting to fade. It remained a mystery; “one of those things”.

Only at the end of last week did I see press reports, commenting on studies in various parts of the world, suggesting that peculiar cutaneous reactions to Covid-19 are frequent, and have been tentatively grouped into five types. Only then did I realise a possible cause of my strange skin lesion back in early February. 

Many anecdotal accounts online report what sounds very much like coronavirus infection in the UK long before the first officially confirmed cases. If these cases – and my own - were not coronavirus, what were they? If they were – as may be established eventually by antibody testing - what would that imply for the “official” narrative and chronology?

Mr Hanbury the Gardener

I’ve been reading Paul Mason’s “Clear Bright Future”, sub-titled “A Radical Defence of the Human Being”, which rails against the use of technology, in particular artificial intelligence, to modify our species into something less than human. These are developments of the technologies already used to help maintain regimes whose leaders are so (justifiably) afraid of their citizens and their thoughts that they seek to monitor and control them, denying them the sorts of freedoms we take for granted here in the UK – even the restricted freedoms we have during the current lockdown. It’s a stark warning, but the book offers grounds for optimism. As I do here. If what follows is random, wacky and absurd, fine, that’s part of the argument.

  

There are some things that artificial intelligence can’t achieve, and knowing this with total certainty makes me extraordinarily happy. Transhumanists and posthumanists be damned; Kurzweilian singularity freaks, off with you to the exquisite corner of hell awaiting you. You won’t catch me with your human life extinction-promoting algorithms; I’ve no wish to be “smarter”, thank you very much, just more human.

No automated system would ever “think” to create what follows, simply because there’s no point. Many of the greatest human activities have no point to them; when we get pointy we get dangerous. Which – to put it bluntly - is kind of the point I want to make here. AI would never in an infinity of universes come up with this: 

Mr Hanbury the gardener

“It’s Mr Hanbury the gardener”

Said Baldy in the teeming bus

As we sped into the moody twilight

Tired and worked out of tune

Uncaring, Thursday, and Clean

But Mr Hanbury cared

Stepping back into the bus shelter where the dual carriageway begins

Dirty, with grizzled hair, he scowled

At two black blazer schoolboys waiting there also

“I think I’ve messed myself” he growled

Disappeared into the shelter’s humic depths

To busy himself with a pipe in a pocketful of rosecuttings

And faecal incontinence

The schoolboys giggled hatefully and free

Mr Hanbury scowled again encopretically

His shopping bag was zipped

Heavy with vicious turds and the remains of lunch

“Damn, it’s slipped again”

Knee deep in the shelter

“Damn there goes another bus”

“Damn Damn Damn”

“Damn it’s all over the dual carriageway”

Never in a squillion years, never again, will anything remotely like that be composed, by man, machine, Schrödinger’s Cat, or anything in between. Mine alone, forever unique, absolutely unpredictable and unrepeatable. Post-human programming I refute you thus, with a bagful of squashed turds. And just to rub it in, I’m not even sure that Mr Hanbury – a name with remotely ripperish and pharmaceutical connotations - was a gardener. Or even that he was Mr Hanbury.

We still have choice, we still have the upper hand. In the meantime, with this viral imprisonment going on week after week, perhaps I should point out in self defence that if you didn’t go mad occasionally you’d go mad. So, do go mad, just a little, but stay safe.

Socks and the city

Nothing is ever straightforward, is it. Especially when it comes to words. Take the world “adult” for instance; not only does it mean an individual who has passed age-wise beyond adolescence, but it has connotations. “Grown up” as opposed to childish; or erotic, as in the sense of “Adult Shop”.

Another bothersome word is “moquette”. The French original implies a carpet, preferably a fitted one, but the English language has latched on more to the concept of the pile of a carpet or a fabric, and employed the word differently.

Which takes us towards a typically Robagraphic convergence, and to the excellent – although of recent years ever so slightly dumbed down – shop adjoining the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. This would scarcely qualify as an Adult Shop, being family friendly as it is, although catering also for those (mostly male) who have proudly and quite rightly never grown up. If you read on, however, you will discover that it does supply Adult Material - and not just the merchandise aimed at those who drool uncontrollably over photos of Routemasters, lust after T-shirts saying “Mind the Gap”, or whose testosterone levels are elevated unhealthily by roundels reading “Arnos Grove”. (I know mine are).

Those who travel on the London Underground will know that (a) each line has its own diagrammatic colour (Northern – black ; Piccadilly – dark blue, etc) and (b) that the seat covers have a pattern, distinctive to each tube line, which graphically enlivens their thick-piled, springy, fabric – their moquette. I find it slightly disturbing, even in these eerie times of minimal travel, to think of all those people down there every day sitting on their respectively coloured piles, the designs of which can occasionally be quite angular. No wonder so many of them look unhappy. 

At this point the two themes – Adult and Moquette - combine. I’m not sure to what extent socks contribute to the fetishwear market, but the items shown above are definitely Adult Socks. It says so on the label. I hope you’ve been able to contain yourself. They were bought for me as a Christmas present, but thanks to lockdown and consequent lack of opportunity, remain unsullied and virginal (yes, we really are straying into Adult territory). They are District Line socks, and so they come along in pairs at infrequent intervals. The District Line is diagrammatically colour coded green (the precise shade varies between Turnham, Stepney and Parsons) and the moquette of the socks is evidently, er, not green. Line colour and moquette (though not the socks themselves) are delightfully at odds. That’s exactly how I like it. The left sock I shall name Ealing Bdy and the right one will be called Upminster – unless I mislay it in which case I shall go completely Barking.

Over Lord Hill’s Bridge

Over Easter I listened to one of my favourite albums, “The Good, the Bad, and the Queen”, the 2007 offering by Damon Albarn and friends. It’s a very London record, a work of sonic genius; on the track called “Northern Whale” you can actually hear the mud of the Thames estuary. “Nature Springs” begins with the words “Over Lord Hill’s Bridge we must go”. That’s a very promising first line for a song.

Perhaps you haven’t been over Lord Hill’s Bridge, or don’t know where it is, but if you’ve ever caught a train from Paddington you’ve been under it, while accelerating westwards past Royal Oak. A thought which fills me with anger and frustrated desire, because shortly I was hoping to go that way, so as to visit my elderly friend in Berkshire. I hope he’ll be all right. However, if you go over Lord Hill’s Bridge, it looks like this: 

 If you about turn on the photograph and go the other way, northwards, taking very good care as you cross the Harrow Road beneath the Westway viaduct, and head up through pleasant enough grassy parkland between the blocks that form the Warwick Estate, you reach the Grand Union Canal, in normal times jostling with joggers and lined with colourful houseboats, and a footbridge leading to Formosa Street. Park that image for a moment.

Also, over the Easter weekend, I watched the 1951 Ealing comedy “The Lavender Hill Mob”, a gentle farce about a bullion robbery starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway, and featuring atmospheric scenes of early postwar London, including heavily blitzed areas around St Paul’s. Approximately forty-five minutes into the film, for a couple of seconds you see this:

 

The same Grand Union Canal, more or less at the same spot as you would have reached after your imaginary walk from Lord Hill’s Bridge, with the backs of Clarendon Street on the left. Except that it doesn’t look like this any more because in the early 1960s, Clarendon Street and the whole of Westbourne Green, an entire community of tight little streets, squares and crescents, condemned as slums, was annihilated in the process of creating the city of the future, which is now the city of today, the bit you have just walked through  – thinned out, airy but meaning-lite, visually timid, bland, flaccid and lacking in urbanity.

Because I’m made that way, immediately I saw that filmic image from almost seven decades ago I was seized by an almost physiological sense of longing for somewhere that in any realistic sense no longer exists, by a desperate yearning for a time long past, and for a place with which I have absolutely no personal connection. The film was released a week before my first birthday. It’s nothing to do with me and yet it hurts.

If I were to walk over Lord Hill’s Bridge today, and continue up to the canal and look down on that water, the longing would not be satisfied nor the pain annulled. The object of my desire – a time, a place, a mood, a potential – no longer exists in the real world. So it doesn’t matter whether I go to that spot or not, the longing is the same. Practically, of course, this damned infection means that, even if I wanted to, I can’t.

Longing takes many forms and affects people differently: for times, places, people, ways of life. It’s always driven by absence and loss; it’s a corollary of love. Longing can be for the currently available, the temporarily unreachable, for that which is forever inaccessible, for that which has gone and is never coming back, for that which never was, for times we will never see, for the impossible. All aspects of a world we love and never want to leave. “Nostalgia” would be the cheap sneer, but it goes much deeper than that.

Perhaps it is the constraints imposed by pandemic lockdown that help focus the mind sharply and painfully on that which is missing from our lives. Or perhaps it is a more ambient kind of awareness of the very real, life-devastating losses that so many are suffering around the world as a result of this cruel and unnecessary outbreak. The relentless sadness, the heroism, the heartbreak. Or the increased threat level to personal survival, the memento mori that accompany every news bulletin. 

Or perhaps it is just a chance encounter with music and photography that trips the mind into a mourning mood. Over Lord Hill’s Bridge we must go, and again, I have no doubt, one day we shall.

Information hygiene at a time of crisis

Much is being made of parallels between our present privations and the dark days of WW2. Fortunately, so far, this hasn’t resulted in a supermarket rush on Spam – by which I mean that of the original meaty variety courtesy of the Hormel Foods Corporation of Austin, Minnesota. As for spam of the annoying, virtual variety – and its paper equivalent, junk mail – both are relatively and pleasantly absent from our lives. I suspect at least one airline is still trying to seduce me onto non-existent flights to abandoned airports far from anywhere, my favourite travel company remains optimistic that I could be in need of a 14-day sojourn on the “Corona Princess”, and a flyer for a local pizza delivery service might actually be welcomed, but overall the rubbish content of both letterbox and e-mail inbox is gratifyingly low. 

Thus, unusually in this unusual time, we perhaps become aware that information, like most other commodities that thread through our lives, has an ecology of its own. Obvious rubbish is only part of that ecology; arguably the easiest part to deal with. The front door variety soon finds its way to (a) the recycling bin or (b) a transient benefit-of-the-doubt pile and then to the recycling, while the online species is mostly identified for us automatically. 

Information ecology, now there’s a thought. As practical advice, it has similarities with hygiene, and here we return to the one and only subject of the moment. You’re probably taking in far more news stories than you do usually, ingesting much more than your normal quota of emotionally charged, threatening, disturbing information. Even if you haven’t suffered in a directly personal way, you’re having to cope with all that stressful awareness of other people’s tragedies, as well as all the real anxiety for the safety of your own family and friends. Psychological waste products could be  accumulating that can’t be good for you, throwing a strain on your own personal informational ecology – and your mental health.

As regards the information we are exposed to, the very nature of the coronavirus attack reveals huge areas of genuine ignorance, of the medically unknown, which media types and every homegrown instant expert are only too ready to fill with speculation. Plus a few reliably depressing facts, repeatedly endlessly.

Naturally, everyone wants the situation to end as soon as possible, for the infamous curve to flatten and fall away so that normal life can resume. Everyone wants the best, fastest, least damaging, safest way out of this mess, but nobody has the definitive answer. The news stories cater for a whole range of affective attitudes, from unrealistic optimism to terminal gloom, and of every level of credibility from plausible science to conspiracy theories and paranoia. They provide the reader with plenty of scope for exercising innate tendencies towards confirmation bias, for inflaming natural suspicions, for provoking anger and despair as well as admiration and compassion. You may be undergoing a prolonged spell of emotional hyper-arousal, an excessively lengthy and bumpy ride on the roller coaster.

Much of the news material on offer is deeply distressing, putting up stress levels and nurturing anxiety while lowering mood into sadness and depression, occasionally offering hope only to have it dashed by the next item. The media are quite happy to fill out their schedules with wall-to-wall coronavirus coverage, since little else is happening of interest or importance to most people. Even the happy stories are coronavirus-related. One fears that the situation is “getting to” people - and we’re only four weeks into the lockdown.

As a retired information scientist officially on the decrepit fringes of the vulnerable category I feel that there is little I can do to help in a practical sense, but I offer the following proposal. I suggest that a new personal skill should be recognised and acquired for the duration (and beyond). Information hygiene. What I’m proposing is essentially a mental health strategy, a self-protective manoeuvre, an avoidance technique. I’m referring to the deliberate and selective withdrawal from information sources you suspect you will find upsetting.

Switch off. Look away. Do something else.

While it is important to be aware of official and other practical advice for personal safety, and to understand how the pandemic and its resolution are developing, in the interests of mental well-being I propose that one’s exposure to coronavirus-related news should be restricted. Do it like this. Try to develop a nose for the “fake news”, for the predictable distorted emphases exercised by resources known to have strong political biases, for the gloating-by-proxy horror stories, the accounts designed to engage your emotions, your fears and your sorrow. Try not to read them or watch them, but sense when they are coming. Ignore them. Not out of callousness or indifference but out of self-protection.

Switch off, switch channels, switch to another website, do something else if you find yourself being drawn in. If you must, focus on the uplifting stories, like the splendid example of Captain Tom Moore, and limit your input of news to a few minutes a day. Try to stick to the facts. Stay safe and stay positive.