The Deadly Game Of Easy Travel

It’s become the ultimate conversational cliché, whenever we manage to have conversations, to utter some variant of ‘everything has changed’ or ‘things will never be the same’ or ‘did we ever think’? etc. We comment on unwanted change the way we used to talk about the weather, but I wonder if any of us really know what we mean by ‘things will never be the same’?

At the mercy, even more than usual, of blind Fortune

Nearly a year on, it’s possible to turn a more critical eye on Government responses to the Covid pandemic. For the first few months, after all, everyone except already rabid partisans probably felt most Governments deserved a free pass. Nobody had ever dealt with anything like this before; there were always going to be errors.

Nearly a year on however, it already seems likely that, if the world ever finds itself in a place to hold inquests, then those inquests are going to be long, painful and pretty damning. It will also be very interesting, indeed crucial for any notion of social stability, to see if we ever get clear answers to particular questions.

The once widely accepted origin story – namely that someone ate half-cooked bat in a market in Wuhan and so kicked off the pandemic – has recently been challenged. WHO have apparently finally been allowed access to investigate in Wuhan by the Chinese Government. One wonders what they’ll manage to find after a whole year. Why did it take so long to let them in?

Back in our neck of the woods meanwhile, it’s now entirely legitimate to call out certain aspects of the restrictions imposed by Government as inconsistent, not to say nuts.

The emphasis on keeping schools open at virtually all costs has failed, forcing Governments into embarrassing climbdowns. The key problem has been one of consistency. Why impose draconian restrictions on certain sectors of society while trying to keep others more or less completely open?

If you’re going to preserve the social solidarity Governments are so fond of talking about these days (and yes, there is a certain shameful joy to be had from listening to the multinational offspring of Margaret Thatcher pleading for ‘social cohesion’), then restrictions need to be seen to be both consistent and fair.

This hasn’t been the case with schools. Ok, the inability to physically attend school is arguably bad for children (and you’ll never get to hear about them, but there are differing views here), but is it much worse than being banged up by yourself in a house and seeing no one for weeks at a time?

Vastly more damaging to solidarity however, has been the schizoid approach to travel between borders, and this is something most Governments are going to be faced with questions about for a long, long time.

In many countries now, people are forbidden to travel more than 5km from their homes. In some cases, they’re barely allowed out at all, yet travel between borders has been continuing almost as before. Only now, with numbers spiking all over the place, is there talk of restricting it.

A Government spokesman attempts to explain the change in Covid policy

Largely for ideological reasons, countries in Europe have insisted on keeping their borders open, with consequently devastating impacts on their populations. Only last week, Ireland’s Deputy Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, was quoted as claiming that 33,000 people a week were coming into the country ‘for essential reasons,’ surely one of the most idiotic remarks by any politician in the history of anywhere. It’s a crying shame that, Ireland’s ageing media being what it is, Leo doesn’t get pulled up a great deal more for this kind of thing.

Only now are European Governments being forced to confront the inevitable, and they don’t like it. It goes massively against the official grain. It’s not the type of thing middle class liberal, right on columnists are likely to praise you for doing.

Yet the three countries which have largely gained control over the pandemic – China, New Zealand and Australia – did so by drastically restricting access to their borders almost from the outset. Arrivals to each of these countries underwent forced quarantine. They didn’t take anyone’s word for anything, unlike Governments in Europe and the US, who for a long time simply accepted the word of people who promised not to go out for two weeks.

The result: infection and death rates in Europe and the US have spiralled, and they show no sign of stopping.

The last time a pandemic spread this quickly was in 1918, when four years of war in Europe had led to unprecedented movements of people and breakdown in infrastructure.

The exponential spread of Covid 19, even allowing for vastly improved health systems in parts of the world at least, has to be related to the fact that people are now routinely roaming across the globe in numbers unprecedented since the dawn of homo sapiens.

To put it perhaps too simply: at any given time, there are all kinds of nasty things in the natural environment. The more you allow potentially infected hosts to move around, the more you boost a pathogen’s chances of killing large amounts of people.

We absolutely don’t want to talk about this. Governments today go queasy even thinking about it. But one sign of the times is the fact that ultra-pliant Government media, such as RTE in Ireland, is being mobilized to soften people up for what will be one of the starkest U turns in history.

And consider: we’re talking about travel restrictions now simply because things are really bad, cataclysmically and horrifically bad, but what about later?

If the roll out of vaccines finally manages to end Covid 19 as a global health emergency, what then? Do we just go back to the way things were before? Do we go back to nice, cheap, shiny travel all over the planet? It’s so good to get money moving around the place, you know.

Maybe we’ll even launch a couple of new resource wars, create some new refugee crises, because they’re kind of good for the economy too you know, except, obviously, in the countries where the wars actually happen.

After all, there can’t be any more nasty new bugs out there, can there?

Living in interesting times

When We All Became Howard Hughes

When I was very young, I watched a TV miniseries about the life of Howard Hughes, the billionaire aviator, engineer, playboy and movie director who ended his life as a bug obsessed recluse.

The great man trying remember if he washed his hands before getting on his airplane

The show had a brief but powerful effect on my peers and I, a little like the way kids suddenly appear with tennis rackets whenever Wimbledon is on the TV. For weeks afterward, someone who showed more than the usual reticence about getting bits of themselves dirty was branded a ‘Howard Hughes.’ Children are such delicate, kind little creatures.

Decades on, the Hughes biography still perplexes. This was a guy who seemed to be living each particle of every little boy’s dream: untold wealth, cool machines, daredevil achievements and of course an endless conveyor belt of glamorous actress girlfriends, none of whom were willing to let his control freakery, reedy voice and growing germ manias get in the way of all that, to paraphrase Groucho, ‘charm and money and wealth and money and money and wealth.’

The pathetic ending felt uncomfortably like some sort of morality tale, something that still doesn’t sit easily inside the spirit of the age. Surely Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerbeg, Elon Musk et al won’t face similar comeuppances?

Decades on however, and much of the planet now groans under, if not an obsession, at least a greatly heightened interest in bugs and germs. We wear masks in public, we wash our hands obsessively, we avoid going out where possible. We have turned into Howard Hughes without the money.

That’s the power of unwelcome change. For many of us, it’s a wholesale return to an earlier type of life, or least existence: the whole world is now a sulky teenager, hiding in its bedroom, harbouring dark dreams about the future.

The depressing thing, I suppose, one of the depressing things, is that there is no clear sense of when, if ever, all of this is going to be over.

The so called ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic of 1918 took two years to blow itself out. We’re not even at the end of Year One yet.

More, if the most optimistic scenarios actually play out, and authorities start issuing all clears by, say, late autumn of this year (something that at the moment looks extremely unlikely), then how long will it be before you start dropping your guard?

How long before you go back to pubs or restaurants? How long before you stop using the pandemic as an excuse to avoid shaking hands with, or worse, embracing people you actually don’t like all that much? Parties? Seriously? That has to be out until … when?

The immediate aftermath – assuming that there is one – of the pandemic is likely to be more perilous than the disease itself, as large sections of the population take part in a drug and mental illness fuelled frenzy to give thanks for their delivery from apocalypse. I’m not joking: the death rates those first few months are going to be frightening.

Incidentally, on a brighter note, a new report from Oxfam says that the richest 1,000 people in the world recouped all their financial losses within the first nine months of the pandemic, and are now collectively half a trillion dollars richer than when all this began.

Not Howard Hughes

Isn’t it nice to know that, apocalypse or not, some things never change?

More Thoughts Of Death And Russians

It was virtually the last thing we did before lockdown: spend two intense weekends recording a play that had been worked on over months. Little did we know etc., but little did anyone know.

Recording The Dead Key was, as the cliché goes, hard work but great work. By the end of the second weekend, the material was safely in the can, or more correctly stored in a hard drive, and the process of cuts and editing could be carried out remotely. My Producer and I live roughly 60 miles away from each other, so we were just about able to comply with social distancing.

I still remember exactly where I was when the idea for The Dead Key burst forth from whatever secret committee of brain cells had been skulking away on the project.

The plot would concern a disgraced writer. Why had he been disgraced?

Someone from a younger generation – a daughter? I eventually decided on a niece – would seek to save him, or rather rehabilitate him posthumously, armed at first with nothing more than her own conviction. I do so love a message of hope.

The secret of his disgrace had to be something big, something so potentially awful that the writer himself had connived in, or at least accepted, his own disgrace: the fact that no one would ever read a word of his again.

I needed a grey eminence from our shared past, some great well spring of doubt and secrecy which can still cast shadows over our sleep. I needed something which, partly because it remains largely opaque after all this time, still has the capacity to breed myth. I chose the Soviet Union.

Among other things, the vanished ‘evil empire’ gave me my magic Maguffin, the technological device upon which most of the plot of The Dead Key turns. The idea may strike some as too fantastic for fiction, but there was a time when the catastrophe the Dead Key was designed to prevent seemed all too possible.

I’ve been pleased recently to find I’m not the only writer who has scavenged the corpse of the USSR for sci fi improbabilities. I’ve just finished watching a web TV series called ‘Pioneer One,’ in which a boy literally falls to Earth as the survivor of a secret Soviet mission to Mars. It’s on YouTube if you want to check it out. It’s rather good and I’ll be writing about it again.

I’ve heard interviews with the late John le Carré, among others, in which the view is put forward that Russia never really changes. This theory holds that the different phases of modern Russian history – from Tsarism to Communism to Putin and the oligarchs – are really just a continuum, the beast sheds its fur but doesn’t change its spots.

A famous Russian

Perhaps, but I’ve been struck again and again in recent years by the absolute reluctance of powerful institutions here in the West to let go of the Cold War paradigm, like a child holding on to a cherished yet filthy blanket.

It has seemed to me that conflict is sought rather than avoided. Imaginative solutions to diplomatic problems are eschewed in favour of the same old same old, in part because so many bureaucracies and tin soldiers are dedicated to continuing to do things a particular way. We may not need the evil Russkies, but they do.

This is the view I have the character ‘Prentice’ articulate in the Dead Key. I am haunted by the feeling that huge historical opportunities have been deliberately squandered since the early 1990’s, simply because human beings want to hold on to extremely highly paid jobs.

All of this, of course, is ludicrously ambitious for a two part radio drama. The Dead Key is perhaps too ambitious for its own good, but we should always aim high – right?

The burden of trying to live with these ambitions fell on my Producer, Alan Meaney, and my cast: Martin Kelleher, Sarah Gordon, Anne Hoey, Pavel Starkowski, Irena Cvetkovic, Harry Smith and Oliver Hegarty, and I will always be grateful to these wonderful people for what we managed to achieve.

Alan and I before lockdown. God I miss that shirt.

WHAT IS THAT EVIL WORD?

A status red terror alert has been declared amid reports that a new politically incorrect word has been detected.

Shock! Horror! Outrage!

There is no specific information yet on the nature of the word or how it was detected. It is believed that political health monitoring teams are refraining from comment because of security reasons, and also because they don’t want to give offence to anyone by using the word, whatever it might be.

However, a source within the National Political Health Emergency Team (NPHET) was quoted this hour as warning the public to be extra cautious.

‘At this point, we don’t know enough about the word or how it operates, which groups, for example, night be particularly vulnerable to any offence given by the word. It really would be best at this point to refrain from using any words at all.’

It is understood that the pages of all national newspapers will be blank tomorrow – apart from photographs from which any wording has been carefully removed – as a consequence of the warning.

In Ireland, RTE’s news, current affairs and drama broadcasts will be replaced by 24 hour rolling footage of Ryan Tubridy swearing at a can of Fanta while attempting to cuddle a terrified seven year old.

People are being urged to exercise ceaseless vigilance. Says the NPHET source ‘you need to ask yourself: do I really need to use any words at all? If you’re shopping, for example, would it not be better to simply point at the things you want instead of uttering any potentially harmful words? Is it really necessary to utter any words to members of your family? Most words spoken inside families end up in terrible rows anyway, so this latest advice may very well have positive benefits for public health.’

A spokesperson for the National Assorted Minorities Association (NAMA) condemned the word, adding ‘this is the most vicious attack on our community since at least the Second World War, if not before.’

He / she / they called for mandatory tongue or hand amputation for anyone caught using the word, and repeated earlier demands for an increase in Government funding of €50 Billion per year in order to help NAMA in its efforts to stamp out bigotry and prejudice. ‘It’s the very least we can do,’ the spokesperson said.

We will update you on the situation as soon as we know when it it safe to use words again, and we apologize unreservedly to anyone we have inadvertently offended with our shameless use of words in this article.