Barkeep's Blog - Vollsanger: 19th May 2020 - Shutdown Blues & Mr Bojangles

Thought for the day :"Each day I tell myself – “John, you are drinking too much” Luckily my name is not John"

LINK JOHNS HOPKINS
Office of National Statistics (latest)

Valid Point ...

reblogged from Quora.Com - as these things disappear....

“Is the U.K. protesting against the coronavirus?”

My dear Anonymous, I’m afraid that my fellow Britishers haven’t been entirely forthcoming with you, so I’m here to set the record straight.

You’ve received some jolly good answers; referencing British civic-mindedness, people being mostly sensible and preferring to follow expert advice, the general futility of shouting slogans at a submicroscopic infectious agent and so forth.

I just don’t feel that any of them have touched upon the specifically British reasons why we are among the least-likely nations on the planet to make a big fuss about the measures taken to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

You see, whilst the whole thing is of course an absolutely ghastly business - economic collapse, lots of people dying horribly, not being able to visit Aunty Joan to make sure she’s okay (and finally get the charming set of nested tables she promised us) - and we wouldn’t have wished it to happen for the world, it’s not without its compensations.

Traffic

British people love to complain about traffic. Not just people in London, which is at least understandable (although trying to drive there isn’t), but everywhere. Even in little hamlets with only one road, there’ll be somebody drowning their sorrows and telling anybody who’ll listen that it took them a whole 5 extra minutes to get to the Co-op this morning.

One of our favourite grumbles, traffic congestion ranks alongside the weather, Brexit, and “England never winning international sporting events” as a perennial whinge*.

(*In England, anyway. In the rest of the UK it’s a source of considerable joy. Or at least, “relief”, because none of the rest of us win at anything either.)

It’s not that our traffic is worse than many other places in the world, it’s just that it’s practically set in stone that if you have a conversation with anyone who has been more than 100 yards from their house in the past week, they will complain about it, even if the only congestion they experienced was “needing to slow down briefly for a cyclist”.

We moan about traffic constantly. People from Tokyo don’t make as much fuss, and they can spend more time crossing the city to get to work than most British people spend at work.

Even people from Los Angeles don’t complain about traffic as much as we do… and their entire city frequently gridlocks so hard that when you get stuck, it’s often quicker to forget about your journey and just wait in your car until the next time you need to be wherever you stopped.

But since the travel restrictions?

This is a photo of the M5 motorway, just north of the Stroud junction, at around 5pm; a section of road which routinely turns into a car park at this time of day.

So… if we love to complain about traffic so much, why is this a good thing, I hear you ask?

Travel restrictions mean that everyone’s too embarrassed to talk about traffic anymore, and this is a huge relief. You see, the one thing we all hate more than traffic - but are too polite to mention - is hearing other people complain about traffic. We only talk about it all the time in revenge for having other people talk to us about it, and so the cycle continues.*

Perhaps, finally, the madness can end.

(*Well, that and the fact that if we run out of things to say about traffic, the weather, and the England team’s dismal prospects at, well, anything at all; someone might ask us about something personal. And then where would we be, eh?)

Of course, the lack of traffic does rather rob one of a perfectly good topic of conversation, but we’re having so few conversations these days that “the weather” generally suffices.

Which, of course, brings us neatly on to our next silver lining…

Social Distancing

The rest of the world is quite understandably upset at not being able to hug, kiss on the cheek, shake hands and otherwise physically greet anyone who doesn’t actually live with them. However, the British have a well-deserved reputation for reserve in such matters, and frankly the whole social distancing thing comes as rather a relief. No matter what they might say, most Britons’ internal reaction to the announcement of enforced keeping-apart went something like:

“Wait, what? The Government says we have to stay six feet apart from strangers? And family members we don’t live with?

You mean, someone has actually made it a law?!

RESULT!”

To the average British person over the age of 35 or so, six feet seems about right as a standard amount of personal space. If and when the day finally comes when the Government tells us “Jolly good show chaps, no need to stay so far apart any more!”, I imagine that about three-quarters of the country will pretend not to have heard.

Policing

You probably think I’m about to say something about the great British tradition of policing-by-consent, and how proud we are of that.

Not at all.

We are proud of it, of course: it’s just that with crime rates and traffic accidents being way down at the moment, the British police are finally able to spare the manpower to properly fulfill what many older Brits consider to be their most important role…

…that is, driving slowly up and down the streets, glaring menacingly at young people who look like they might be about to enjoy themselves.

And a damn fine job they’re doing of it too.

National Pastimes

When people from other countries think of quintessential British pastimes, they often imagine “cricket”, “soccer” and “drinking tea” (or just “drinking”), and superficially they’d be right.

However, the majority of Britons would rather complain about how badly other people are doing these things than actually do them ourselves (apart from the drinking). Not only that, but certain other nations undertake these occupations with equal passion, and - if truth be told - greater competence than we do. And yet, there are two activities of which it might truly be said that we Brits do better, and more frequently, than anybody else in the world:

Queuing.

Nobody - and I mean nobody - queues like the British. We’d prefer to spend half a day in a line stretching so far around the supermarket that the normal rules of space and time have to be suspended, rather than suggest to shop staff that maybe, just maybe, it might be a good idea to open more than one till at a time.

If there are just two people waiting at a bus stop, they’ll somehow form a neat line when the bus approaches, even if they subsequently ruin it by spending five minutes saying “after you”, “no, after you” once the doors have opened.

Coronavirus has given us the opportunity to hone our already-refined queuing skills and take them to the next level, whilst at the same time increasing our enjoyment enormously.

You see, we’ve always done queuing well, but reluctantly. One problem was that in order to maintain one’s place, it has been necessary to stand rather closer to other people than we’re comfortable with.

Another was that we don’t trust each other as a rule, either, so we’re constantly on high alert, watching like hawks to make sure that:

The person ahead of us in the queue is putting their shopping on the conveyor belt in an approved manner without any of it falling over the little divider things onto our shopping
Nobody behind us takes the last packet of the decent tea bags out of our trolley and swaps them for that awful shop-brand stuff
Nobody wanders up to their spouse ahead of us in the queue with an armload of additional shopping to be put on the belt just when we thought it was our turn.*

*(Not that we’d ever say anything, you understand, but one has to keep watch anyway in order to be properly annoyed when it happens.**)

**(It’s not easy, being British.)

Since the advent of the social distancing rules, we’ve had to queue six feet apart, and It. Is. Glorious.

There’s so much about it to love: nobody’s going to invade your personal space, the queues are monitored by shop staff to make sure everyone behaves so you can relax a little, nobody’s allowed to approach the till at the same time as you, nobody can get close enough to swipe your tea-bags, and best of all it’s really easy to avoid making conversation.

Honestly, the British are culturally equipped to handle this situation like no other nation on Earth. Which is, again, a neat segue to our second national pastime:

2. Engaging in a misplaced sense of superiority over America

It’s nonsense, of course, and utterly unjustified, but it’s there.

Call it a case of parental jealousy if you will, but the United States could cure every single known disease, balance the entire world’s budgets and usher in a thousand years of peace, harmony and prosperity while simultaneously solving the climate crisis for all time and we’d still know that we’re better than you because we say “lieutenant” properly.

This isn’t an easy thing to maintain, and naturally causes a certain amount of cognitive dissonance among a people who haven’t made a significant contribution to Western popular culture since Monty Python, but we manage anyway. It was especially difficult when Obama was the face of your country: a polished, friendly, urbane, charming and intelligent man who had tremendous warmth and poise, and more charisma in his little finger than any British political figure since Robert the Bruce. And to cap it all, we went and voted for Brexit, which was an act of self-harm roughly equivalent to, well, inhaling disinfectant.

Then you elected Darth Cheeto.

Then the pandemic happened.

Hats off to the U.S., there’s probably nothing else they could have done to restore our flagging national confidence. Sure, we may have done less testing, we may have more infections and death per capita, and we may have a Prime Minister who skipped most of the emergency meetings and then spent the rest of the crisis in hospital because he was too arrogant to put on a mask or avoid shaking hands. We may have a Prime Minister who lies almost as frequently as your President,. We may not even know how many children the man has (although, to be fair, we’re pretty sure he doesn’t either). But at least he has never gone on national television and suggested - to the pained expression of one of the country’s foremost medical scientists - investigating the internal application of disinfectant and/or sunlight as a cure.

Nor has he tweeted the idea that, say, Oxfordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire should free themselves from the tyranny of his own government’s social distancing guidelines.

So long as we’re able to sit at home and watch that kind of thing, nothing happening here seems so bad. In Trump’s national leadership (*cough*) of the crisis, we finally have one thing apart from “healthcare in general” that the U.S. is being demonstrably worse at than we are, and our sense of ineffable superiority is thus bolstered.

And THAT, my anonymous friend, is why the people of the U.K. are not protesting against the coronavirus.*

*(That, and not having access to placards which can only be read with a scanning electron microscope.)

Thanks to Jarrad Harries

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