Hotel Quarantine

 

'Welcome to the Hotel Quarantine' - A Pilgrimage during a Pandemic

Life under “Lockdown” – A London to Tokyo, via Yokohama Diary #8

 

A global pandemic is not the most ideal time to emigrate. But life goes on. By increments we are all, hopefully, progressing inch by inch closer to a new normality. After the last year and a half, I couldn’t imagine life becoming any more dystopian. Surreal memories of finding myself to be the only pedestrian walking through a deserted Canary Wharf, the heart of London’s financial district eerily devoid of traffic, in the middle of the day in the middle of the working week was weird enough, invoking recollections of disaster movies, such as 28 Days Later and I am Legend.

 

Checking in for an international flight, just a few weeks ago, in a near empty Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport comes perhaps a close second. Everyone, at all points of the process, strangely anonymised, wearing face masks. Everyone ritually disinfecting hands as they pass by a succession of sentinel hand-sanitizer posts, as though genuflecting at the Stations of the Cross, embarking on some bizarre Sci-Fi-like modern pilgrimage – perhaps fleeing from (or towards?) Armageddon. Normal questions about hazardous articles in luggage now taking second place to questions about the state of your health and requests to see the sheafs of certification concerning Covid-19 tests and other medical declarations, as required by the Governments at your intended destination.

The weeks leading up to my departure were a recurring nightmare of fears: fears that I might have overlooked a crucial piece of necessary bureaucracy; fears that I might not get the certificate attesting to my double-jabbed vaccination status in time; fears that I might not make it to my “72 hours prior to travel” Covid-19 test because, of all the weekends on which I’d chosen to fly – inevitably – this one was one of those weirdly normalised London weekends when the entire Piccadilly Line was closed for never-ending engineering works; fears that I might get a positive test result, thus voiding all my plans and intentions entirely, not to mention the vast expenditure of it all. By comparison, the formalities of actually getting a visa and the attendant documentation required for the granting of resident status in Japan when the Embassy finally reopened back in May seemed a doddle. Hence, the moment I placed my boarding pass on the scanner and the security gates magically parted seemed unreal in the extreme.

Stopover in Anchorage, Alaska - 2004

Fortunately for me, my previous career, having spent the last 20+ years ferrying international touring exhibitions around the world for the British Museum, was ample preparation for all of this oddness. I’ve spent a large proportion of my time navigating my way through unusual situations in airports across four different continents. I’ve also spent many hours waiting in such places, having wrangled with many different visa systems and the associated processes which enable an air traveller to get from A to B with the correct permissions, stamps, finger prints, facial scans, metal detector checks, airway bills, customs paperwork, and the like. The key to the whole scenario is to keep a nimble eye on what is happening and being prepared to act quickly at the required moment should anything appear to be in danger of going awry; that, along with a hefty portion of patience, knowing that more often than not these long-haul journeys will inevitably be punctuated by interminable stretches of waiting, the long hours in which you are powerlessly held in thrall to the system which you are simply passing through.

 

Sitting in the Departures Hall, I couldn’t help reflecting on many of the strangest journeys I’ve made, such as: circumnavigating the globe from London to Tokyo to London, via Anchorage Alaska; or, crossing the equator for the first time after a 24-hour stopover in Hong Kong on the eve of the first umbrella protest. I’ve done some decidedly long journeys too. I once flew from London to Beijing, where I stayed less than 24 hours, before flying back to London, only to fly from London to Seoul just a day or two later. But I think my longest single journey was flying from Tokyo to Mexico City, via Krasnoyarsk, Frankfurt, and Chicago (a strange scenario which means I have entry stamps in my passport for both Chicago and Mexico City issued on the same day).

 

En Route : LHR >> HKG >> SYD >> MEL - 2014

Flying over the Ukraine in a cargo plane the day before flight MH17 was blown from the sky was a sobering experience (TV News reports the following day, speculating that it had “probably been a mistake shooting down an airliner” and that “they were more likely aiming to shoot down a cargo plane instead”, seemed to overlook the crucial fact that cargo planes have people on board too!). I was once on a flight which was struck by lightning as we were crossing the English Channel. I saw a white flash swiftly pass through the cabin like an ethereal ghost hurrying to the rear of the plane (I did briefly wonder at the time, if, like the Highlander, this might have made me immortal?).

 

On several cargo flights I was lucky enough to sit in the cockpit with the pilots during take-off and landings in different airports, such as: Mexico City, Chicago, Krasnoyarsk, and Taipei. One of the best was Hong Kong. Watching as we weaved between clumps of clouds which were flickering with summer lightning like incandescent candyfloss. With Victoria Harbour passing by so close below, it felt like if I reached out I’d be able to touch the tall buildings, all of them lit up brightly, sparkling in the dark warmth of the night.

Loading Cargo at Incheon, South Korea, 2011

I’ve also spent many an hour sitting in airports as they have slowly emptied of passengers with all the shops closing down for the night. It’s quite an eerie and sometimes unnerving experience. You hope that your contacts won’t forget you, or that when the time comes you won’t miss meeting your aircrew. There was one occasion in Luxembourg when we met a pilot and his co-pilot, who were both happy to find they’d have some company on their flight. It was only after we’d been chatting for about ten minutes that we discovered they and we were flying to different destinations entirely – thus we very narrowly avoided following the wrong aircrew onto the wrong flight! – If this had happened, once on-board, I’m sure the aircrew would have checked their paperwork more closely and realised we weren’t meant to fly with them before we got underway; but the delay this unintended misdirection would have caused would probably have meant we’d have missed our intended flight because the aircrews of cargo planes don’t tend to hang around for late running passengers – as I found out once, just in the nick of time, when clambering up the ladder to board a cargo plane which was just about to close its door and get underway!

 

In some ways though, it’s a real joy to pass through a near empty airport. The place feels less fraught. There’s less of that nervous jockeying to get a spot on the shuttle train between the terminals. Less stressing over squeezing into the lifts crammed with unwieldy baggage trolleys. There’s more time to step back and assess, to realise that you are heading in the right (or wrong!) direction. And the queues for the loos are mercifully shorter or non-existent. The shop staff in the Duty Free shops, if they are still open, look decidedly bored. My flight to Japan had been delayed by four hours which meant we were either the last or last-but-one passenger flight to depart Heathrow T5 that night. The passengers on my plane were all well-spaced out across the rows of seating, as 'socially distanced' as the cramped Economy Class cabin would permit. First and Business Class were both almost entirely empty. Everyone wore face masks throughout the duration of the flight, only taking them off briefly to eat.

 

I’d read about the exacting processes to be expected on arrival in Japan, and this information turned out to be accurate. It was a long gauntlet which needed to be run as each part of every traveller’s paperwork was checked thoroughly and then double-checked again at desk after desk. Unlike at Heathrow where the Covid-19 test was a nasal swab which made my eyes water involuntarily, here at Haneda we had to spit into a test tube – a process which feels a lot less invasive and a lot less uncomfortable, but each passenger was ushered into a small booth in which to spit more discreetly. The tedious paperwork processes actually alleviated some of the long wait for this test to be processed, but there were still long interminable stretches of waiting too. On the whole the few children who were travelling with their parents were remarkably well behaved; only a few whined quietly at their parent’s elbows due to a very forgivable combination of boredom and extreme tiredness.

 

Once our test results were returned (happily mine was still negative) we were led through to Immigration, which rather comfortingly was dealt with far more informally than usual. Stewards remained close at hand throughout to direct us travellers at all points with friendly deferential but decisively firm instructions, marching us back and forth along a beguiling maze of ribbon-barriered corridors. Once all my paperwork was at last in order and with my residence permit now reassuringly in hand, I passed through the last of all these checks where a Customs officer looked at my passport and then, returning it, looked up over his facemask and said warmly “Okaeri nasai” (Welcome home) instead of the usual “Yokoso Nihon” (Welcome to Japan).

 

But I wasn’t home just yet. My fellow passengers and I were then marshalled down to a bus, where we were in for another long wait. Eventually though, the bus moved off into the night. Winding through the near empty streets it took us to a hotel in Yokohama. Again, here in the lobby, another long process of form filling ensued and instructions were relayed and affirmed. Once again, the staff were faultlessly polite and friendly throughout. I was issued with a thermometer and a boxed meal. I was then led to my room on the 28^th floor, where at 3am – a full seven hours after landing, and almost 24 hours total in transit – I was able to collapse into bed with no further obligations until I awoke later that morning.

 

For the next 6 days I was required to live in this small hotel room like a monk in his cell. Isolated, no going out whatsoever. A meal box (Obento) delivered three times a day: for breakfast, lunch and dinner. With a bottle of water each time (no alcohol was allowed). My daily rituals required taking and reporting my body temperature to reception each morning, and answering the random spot checks on my location demanded by the Japan Government’s panopticon-like mobile phone App, which also wanted to know how I was feeling each day. My own phone was too old to support the App, so I had to rent a rather expensive one expressly for this purpose from the Government, to be returned on the first day of my eventual release from quarantine. I didn’t regret the expense too much though, because the staff very helpfully set the whole thing up for me (which, watching them, I feared would have been well beyond my Luddite-like capabilities had it been left solely up to me), and also because, unlike for anyone arriving in the UK, here in Japan the cost of bed and board in the quarantine hotel was borne entirely by the Japanese Government (Arigatou, Nihon).

 

Akarenga Soko & the Hikawa Maru, Yokohama

The hotel was much more comfortable than I had been expecting. Plus, opening the curtains when I woke up later that morning, I found I had a wonderful view of the seafront at Yokohama, overlooking the landmarks of Akarenga Sōko, the red brick warehouses built by Western traders in the nineteenth century, plus the old NYK Hikawa maru ocean liner. I’d walked along that promenade many times before with friends and family, but for now all I could do was watch it from my solitary confinement in my hermetically sealed room. I had six days to seek spiritual satori, and to sleep off my jetlag. Keeping myself busy with my PhD studies, messaging my family and friends, meditating upon the transience of the boats coming and going from my window’s high vantage.

 

NYK Hikawa Maru - Yokohama

I joked via social media with my former colleagues at the BM who asked how I was coping with life under quarantine, saying that all of my life for the last twenty years – spending most of my time living for long periods in hotels – was the perfect preparation for this. It was in fact my moment. As if, all my life, I’d been in training for exactly this – as though this was my own personal Olympics. A lot of people had asked me before I left the UK if I might get to see any of the Tokyo 2020 Games when I reached Japan, and I’d replied: ‘probably not.’ But from my hotel window I could see one of the venues, Yokohama Baseball Stadium, lit up at night with a sprinkling of spectators in the stands. At Haneda Airport too, I’d seen the Cuban and Moroccan Olympic teams arriving. The TV was wall-to-wall with seemingly non-stop coverage, exclusively focussed on the team of the host nation. There was absolutely no escaping the Olympic Games, just as I’d experienced previously in Britain in 2012, and in China in 2008.

 

Yokohama Baseball Stadium - 'Tokyo 2020' Olympic Games

The monotony of life in my hotel room wasn’t too bad though. After the prolonged periods of living alone through the last two ‘lockdowns’ in London, long periods of solitary study were now a routine normality for me. Reading books and articles, updating my bibliography, or watching history documentaries (such as my perennial favourite, John Romer’s Testament) helped to pass the time. The view from the window was an unexpected pleasure too. I’d assumed I’d end up with some non-descript view of an office block wall or something similarly dull, but watching the maritime activity in the harbour as well as the sunrise each morning was wonderfully relaxing. Outside it was clearly baking hot during the daytime. The air con system kept me from roasting when my room caught the full blaze of the midday sun. But, by day five I was getting a little desperate for some fresh air and the opportunity to stretch my legs properly. The thing that surprised me the most though was the bento box meals – no two of them were ever the same! – They were delivered three times a day. And there was never any choice. You ate whatever you were given, and, even though I was asked what allergies I had on arrival, I was simply told not to eat those things if they appeared in the boxed meals(!).

 

Breakfast 'Obento'

Covid-19 tests were taken early in the morning on days three and six; once again, mercifully, they were the spitting into a test tube kind, the same as at the airport. ‘Holiday camp’-like tannoy announcements reminded you each meal time to wear your facemask and to be careful not to lock yourself out of your room when you opened your door to take in your bento box which had been hung silently on your door knob. It was an odd way too live, strangely Sci-Fi in many respects – but I still can’t decide if it was more like something out of the imagination of J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, or Stanley Kubrick. It was a kind of ‘Silent Runnings’ meets ‘The Andromeda Strain’, I suppose – with visits on test days from a group of medical personnel swathed head to toe in anonymising PPE.

 

The result of my final test came via the hotel telephone just after lunch. I was still negative. I’d already readied my luggage in optimistic anticipation of this moment, and so I was out of the room an instant later, riding the lift down to the lobby. Handing back my thermometer, my luggage was stowed under the bus as I quickly climbed aboard. Ten minutes later the bus was rolling rapidly through the streets, heading back to the airport, crossing the suspension bridge over Yokohama harbour which I’d spent so much of the last few days wistfully viewing from the close confines of my tiny room in the quarantine hotel. My family met me at the airport – the first time I’d seen them in over a year and a half – a happy reunion full of hugs, grins and happy tears. We then drove home, as I was still not allowed to use the public transport system. Finally reaching home I still wasn’t free, I had 8 more days of quarantine ahead of me. Life in ‘lockdown’ once again, but this time on the other side of the globe in a city where the infection rate was rapidly rising. Mercifully for me, however, there was now more space for me to move around in, plus a balcony on which I could stand and at last breathe fresh air once again. And, of course, most important of all, I could now relax in the long-missed company of my nearest and dearest. Watching the sunset together behind the beautiful silhouette of sacred Mount Fuji.

 

Sunrise over Yokohama

Though I was now home at last, I was still under surveillance – required to report my state of health each morning and answer the random spot checks on my current location which either came in the form of push-notification ‘pings’ or actual phone calls. These phone calls were either AI operated video calls in which I had to stare into the camera with my background clearly visible while my phone’s silent mechanical eye recorded for 30 seconds. I’ve no idea if these visual recordings were checked by people or computers, but I waved politely cheerful from time-to-time just in case it was an actual living breathing human being who had to watch back half a minute’s worth of footage of me staring at them like a bug-eyed goldfish stuck in a glass bowl. The other kind of phone call came from an actual person, speaking either in Japanese or English, asking me where I was and if I was unwell. Nevertheless, these video calls were oddly ‘big brother’-like because I could see myself, but the screen I was talking to was completely black, so I could not see the caller. This always reminded me of the scene in both the old 1953 and more recent 2005 film versions of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in which the Martian’s cobra-headed mechanical eye snakes around the basement of the building in search of hiding humans. Mercifully, these calls were always fairly quick, but it was the uncertainty of when they might call which became somewhat wearing if not quite so unnerving as a probing alien mechanical eye. Each day I’d receive several locator pings and an AI recorded phone call, and usually a human operator phone call as well. This meant the phone needed to sit by my side at all times during the day, though calls and pings rarely ever came much before 8:30am, or later than 6pm. Such dystopian surveillance seemed politely civilised in this respect, but I was very glad to get shot of the infernal device as soon as I could when the 15 days of quarantine were done.

 

The thin line of Mount Fuji traced on the haze of the horizon

On my first day of freedom, proving the old adage that ‘only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’, I went for a stroll on the hottest day of the year so far in Tokyo. “The mercury topped somewhere around 36°C”, as the over-dubbed TV News channels here like to say. But it was a real relief to stretch my legs at last. I noticed that everyone here in Tokyo is wearing their facemasks. This isn’t so unusual. You often see people on the trains here wearing them throughout the year. It’s long been the custom in Japan for those with a bit of a sniffle to wear them, mostly out of politeness more than anything else. So this wasn’t unusual, but what was different now was the fact that people were wearing them at all times, even whilst walking down empty streets. An entire metropolis anonymised. And, though there were still plenty of people out and about, there did seem to be fewer people commuting – but it would take a keen eye to spot the difference, because the trains were just as crowded as the pre-pandemic rush hour on the Tube in London. Tokyo might currently be under ‘a state of emergency’, but on the face of things, apart from wearing facemasks at all times, life in the city seems to be going on much as it always has. A less perceptible pandemic than in the UK perhaps?

 

I thought it only proper that the first place I visit should be the local Shinto shrine. To say ‘hello’ to the local Gods. Here though there were subtle indicators that all was not well with the world. The chōzuya, the place where you should ritually cleanse your hands and mouth when entering the shrine, was dry and without its attendant utensils. Instead, stood sentinel beside it was one of the now ubiquitous hand-sanitizer stands found at every point of entry and exit in our daily lives. Plus ringing the bell to attract the Gods’ attention when praying at the shrine was now no longer allowed. One just had to hope that the ritual three hand claps would suffice to attract their favourable hearing. While I was there a few other visitors came and went, throwing their coins, clapping their hands and saying a silent prayer each. I’m sure all of us each made the same request alongside whatever else we were hoping for divine assistance with – that request being, of course, an end to this interminable pandemic soon.

 

The Buddhist Temple next door was almost entirely deserted. I saw just one other person coming and then going; a young girl who evidently had gone to pick her younger sister up from the nearby kindergarten, both of them, hand-in-hand, returning home. It was nice to sit for a moment under the dappled light shed by the dense canopy of green maple leaves overhead. But it was really far too hot to linger long. The loud rhythmic noise of the cicadas rasping, rising fast and falling slow all around me. I couldn’t help reflecting how the pandemic and the periods of ‘lockdown’ and quarantine I’ve had to live through over the last year and a half has slowed life down a lot. Though these times have been punctuated by periods of almost frenetic activity, attempting to catch up with the world as it continues to turn. Life’s tempo is undoubtedly all out of kilter, but I hope we learn from these experiences of upheaval and uncertainty, so that when life does return back to some sort of normality we can improve upon the way we lived before – so that we can all live in a new world made fresh once again. A world hopefully with more balance, with the good things in life shared more equitably, and a greater emphasis on care and calmness.

 

I hope, too, that sooner rather than later, I can stop writing these pieces, because I really don’t want to write any more entries here in this seemingly never-ending ‘lockdown diary’ of mine. But, such is life, sadly – shikata ga nai, ne.

Also on 'Waymarks'

On Top of the World

First Crossing the Equator

Transporting Treasures

Behind the Scenes - 25 Years at the British Museum

'Lockdown' Diary

Seeking Solace & Sunshine

 

Life under “Lockdown” – A London Diary #7

 

Like a lot of people in the UK over the last year or so, I’ve spent a lot of time on my own. And even when out-and-about, either going for a walk or on my weekly trip to the supermarket, I’ve been alone even when in company. Passing strangers on pavements and paths, queuing with other customers all standing two metres apart. Hidden behind facemasks, like highwaymen or bank robbers. Atomised by our anonymity.

 

Being alone has never been much of a problem for me. I’m quite a solitary individual anyway. Before I got married I lived alone for many years, and whilst I travelled frequently in the company of colleagues for extended periods on work trips overseas, it’s never troubled me to travel alone for my holidays. In fact, some of my trips alone have been the most memorable and the most enjoyable. But like a lot of people, the isolation of the last year has (at times) been trying. On the plus side, it’s given me plenty of time to focus on my PhD studies, and I’ve managed to do a lot of writing and a phenomenal amount of reading. But it has also meant I’ve not been able to access the libraries and archives which I need for my research, as I had been planning to do. Other, even bigger and more important aspects of life have similarly been put on hold as I have been cut-off from my closest family members and friends, who have all been turned into faces seen only on computer screens.

 

Life has morphed unrecognisably. Everything which used to be exterior has become interior. It’s an odd thing to reflect upon; how a life put into limbo has played havoc with the natural rhythms of what used to be normal. It is almost as if, for the last year, I have been living a double life. On the one hand, the time has simply flown by because each day has basically been filled with the same now near ritualistic practices. This day last year seems like it was only yesterday, because it was exactly the same as yesterday. But, very oddly, this day last year also feels as though it were a lifetime ago, because it was another lifetime, lived by another me – a pre-lockdown “me” – someone whom I no longer seem to recall very clearly. What details I can recall about that person seem bafflingly unfamiliar now.

 

There are different ways of being alone. Being alone isn’t necessarily the same as being lonely. Many people find solace in solitude. Many more people feel lonely in the crowded confines of a commuter train, or whilst sitting at their desk in a busy office. Often what determines how we feel is the sense of control we have over what is happening to us. This is why lockdown has been hard for so many people. It is the fact that we have no control over what is happening, nor how long we will be subject to such social restrictions. It has put me in mind of a slim (but not slight) volume which I first read quite some time ago now – Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence (1957). As a writer famous for his travel writing, this short book very eloquently describes a different sort of ‘journeying.’ An inward and self-reflective journey in which Leigh Fermor describes the times when he stayed in some of Europe’s oldest and most venerable monasteries. He describes staying at the Abbey of St. Wandrille at Solesmes, famous for its revival of Gregorian chant. But here he finds that something deeper seems to be driving his search for solitude, eventually leading him to the monastery of La Grande Trappe, where the Trappist monks famously take a vow of silence. And his fascination for the lives of the earliest Christian anchorites finally leads him to seek out the remarkable rock-cut monasteries of Cappadocia, hewn from the unusual rock formations of the region’s lunarlike landscape. 

 

It is the modern world which Leigh Fermor is seeking to escape by going to such places, but once he is safely ensconced in these secluded retreats, he realises that this is in fact a more complex undertaking than simply hiding himself away in the meek austerity of a monk’s cell: “Mental discipline, prayer and remoteness from the world and its disturbing visions reduce temptation to a minimum, but they can never entirely abolish it. In medieval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be expugnable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, special targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism.”

 

I find echoes of ‘lockdown’ in such reflections. But during lockdown temptation comes in the form of the rabbit-holes of bickering which swiftly seem to be dug on social media, into which people readily seem to fall each time the Government has made its many U-turns in attempting to navigate us through this pandemic. Having listened to what often feels like the ever-decreasing circles of a deracinating form of logic during the daily briefings from Number 10 Downing Street at certain points during this strange collective social 'rite of passage' for our nation and the wider world at large, I have often despaired. In truth, I have had to tune out for most of it, especially during this second period of national lockdown. My head can no longer seem to fully comprehend what any of this means any more. All I know for sure is that I will continue to follow the rules, wear my facemask, and make the best of things, even though I have been segregated like a lone monkish inhabitant on a suburban Skellig Michael.

Like many people, I have found myself focussing on the solace offered by the natural world. In the brief thawing of the restrictions between ‘Lockdown 1’ and ‘Lockdown 2’, I managed to escape to Cornwall for a week. I wandered the cliffs, filling my lungs with the much-needed scent of gorse, sun-kissed granite, and the salty tang of the sea air. After months of being confined to quarters, seeing little beyond the four-square walls of my own world, to sit there, looking out across the limitless horizon of the sea was a liberation of both heart and soul. I sat watching a pair of grey seals, a male and a female, delighting in dancing together in the foaming breakwaters, and for a moment it seemed as though the world was being washed clean. But it was a bittersweet liberation, because winter was not so very far away and the impending inevitable second chapter of the pandemic meant the sky and sea were still limitless boundaries which I was not yet allowed to cross. It was a brief moment of respite from the on-going reality of a disjointed double-life caught in limbo. During the short days of winter which followed, when the lockdown was reimposed and I was once more cut-off and isolated on my own, I have often found the lines of a particular poem by John Keats arising quietly in my rather despondent mind. It is a verse which has buoyed me with its eye to the promise of future joys, waiting to be cherished in the personal reunions which are yet to come:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—

         Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

         Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

…

 

During that brief break in the lockdown, I also managed to ‘up sticks’ and move home. A process which had first been delayed interminably by the economic uncertainties of Brexit, only then to be subsequently stalled by the sudden onset of the pandemic. This had long been planned as the first step in a much longer journey of relocation from London to Tokyo. Moving briefly back to my ‘hometown’ was the first stage; moving back to the place where I had grown up on the outer edge of London, from the place where I’d lived for many years in the inner city. It felt like I was touching base once more with another life long since lived and left behind; touching base before launching off on a great leap around the globe. Walking around my old hometown, I found the place curiously changed but also still the same. Discernible perhaps only in hints and echoes, shadows and memories. A lot of people have commented on the resurgence of birdsong into the fore of our consciousness as traffic on the roads has been reduced during the lockdowns. In my most recent home, living on the banks of the tidal Thames for many years, I’d grown accustomed to the calls of seagulls, pigeons and corvids, as these seemed to predominate there. But here in the leafy suburbs I rediscovered the avian soundscape of my younger days. Here there is a backdrop which is filled with woodland voices: robins, wrens, blackbirds, thrushes, many different types of tits and a fusillade of finches, plus wood pigeons, collared doves, jays, and at night there are owls too. This is the soundscape I grew up surrounded by, and I realised it was still an elemental part of me.  

 

The part of suburbia where I spent the first two decades of my life is in fact an old rural Saxon village. A village which over time was surrounded and eventually swallowed into the cancerous concrete urban sprawl of greater London. These northwest hinterlands of the capital were dubbed as ‘Metro-Land’ in 1915 by the publicity department of the Metropolitan Railway. ‘Metro-Land’ was later turned into an eponymous ‘round-trip’ of rhyme in a famous film of that title by John Betjeman in 1973. Curiously a train trip along the Met’ Line reminded him of the sea in Cornwall:

Like the sound of little breakers

Spreading out along the surf-line

When the estuary's filling

With the sea.

 

Then Harrow-on-the-Hill’s a rocky island

And Harrow churchyard full of sailors’ graves

And the constant click and kissing of the trolley buses hissing

Is the level to the Wealdstone turned to waves

And the rumble of the railway

Is the thunder of the rollers

As they gather up for plunging

Into caves.

 

But my native part of London never lost that sense of itself as a rural village. Pinner is filled with old buildings, many dating back to Georgian or Tudor times. And it still has a working farm, meaning that there are still fields which can be wandered through as well as ancient weald land, with woods and copses surviving in pockets neatly bordered by cul-de-sacs, closes, avenues, and old country lanes which have long since been macadamised into London’s quintessential leafy garden suburbs.

 

When I was at junior school my class went on a long ramble on a sunshine-filled summer’s day through ‘the village’, with our teacher telling us the history of the old buildings, showing us how we could identify their respective ages by comparing certain characteristic architectural features. It was one of the first things to ignite in me a passion for history and a fascination for archaeology. During the summer holiday, wading along the local brook which flowed through a wooded oasis behind our house in my welly boots, I stumbled upon a small ceramic jar which bore the berried monogram of ‘J. Sainsbury.’ It dated back to somewhere between the 1920s-1940s. 

When I was a few years older, I trained as a bell ringer at the parish church at the top of the high street, and I relished the fact that this gave me access to one of the most fascinating and hidden parts of the church building. I loved looking closely at the stone sets of the stained-glass windows into which church-goers, decades and centuries alike before my time, had carved their initials and floral doodles into the soft stone. It felt like history was something which could be found all around wherever one went, if you only knew how to look for it. But some elements of history as it had been lived locally could only be etched into memory, unless it was fleetingly caught in the old flickering images saved on celluloid; like the memory my grandmother re-told, of her standing on the steps of the village bakery where she worked, waving goodbye to my grandfather as he walked off down the high street on his way to fight in Italy during World War 2; or the old cine film of my great grandfather, who was the blacksmith in Wealdstone, showing him shoeing a horse.

 

Illustration by J.W. Ferry in 'The Villager' (1943)

My grandfather may have set out from here and travelled overseas to fight in the War, but the War itself came to Pinner and has left its traces here too. Only the other week, while on my regular amble through Pinner Park Farm, I stopped and scanned the corner of one of the fields which I’d seen on a WW2 bombsite map, which had shown that two "H.E." bombs dropped from a German bomber had exploded there in 1943. And sure enough, I could just make out the slight indentations of the impact craters still faintly discernible in the grass. My aunt had been friends with the daughter of the family who lived and worked at the farm, and they had ridden on the farm’s cart horses in this very field in the late 1940s/early 1950s.

The farmland at Pinner Park was one of the places where I used to seek solace and solitude when I was growing up. In the summertime, I’d frequently install myself at the top of the hill in one of the fields which still command a wonderful semi-rural view even today. Fringed by tall oak trees, many with trunks thick enough to be several centuries old. I’d sit there in the warm sunshine, reading a book, or meditating. Casting an inward eye to the future, thinking of ways and means to escape one day, setting out in search of far-away places. A hole in the fence in one of my school’s playing fields meant I could sneak off and elude the tumultuous rabble of the school yard, disappearing up here at lunchtimes, seeking a moment of stillness during the school day. There is something about the solace of nature, even (or perhaps more especially) in the midst of an otherwise built-up environment which is a true tonic. A balm to soothe the senses, reset the mind, and help us to breathe freely once again.

 

Now that I am back here, but stuck yet again in another lockdown, waiting for my exit visa back into the ‘real’ world which we have all been banished from for a second time since the pandemic began, I have reverted into my sixteen-year-old self. Making my weekly trudge through those old familiar fields of the farm, as well as ambling around the streets and back lanes of my old hometown; revisiting and pondering once more upon the respective ages of old buildings and thinking about the layers of time which this place has accumulated through the centuries, ending in the here-and-now with me and my personal memories of growing up here as did the generations of a part of my family before me. Now augmented by another fresh and unexpected set of memories which are currently being formed and laid down in my psyche having found myself becalmed here once again, waiting for lockdown to lift so that I can get myself a genuine exit visa to leave these Betjeman-like native shores once more, but this time cutting those natal ties and sailing away for good, emigrating to a new life, to permanently sink my anchor in a bay located somewhere along the sheltering coast of Japan.

 

We’ve all been stuck in limbo during the lockdowns. Counting the days and months. Waiting for the future to arrive. Waiting for the past to return. All the while, both consciously and unconsciously, recalibrating our experience of each. And yet, once this strange time of stasis is gone, many of us may well come to feel like nothing has happened because it was all so unreal, the days all blurring into a single undifferentiated mass, but I think we will all come to realise eventually that in actual fact a lot that is unseen has shifted during these long days in a time of dark shadows. It might not be so readily visible on the surface, but surely something will have changed within all of us once this pandemic eventually ends and we regain our freedoms. Our right to roam further afield will certainly feel very different. In the same way that I felt different sitting in the autumnal sunshine on those Cornish cliffs watching a pair of seals in close company bathing in the bubbling foam of the breakers upon the beach. It felt as if I was watching “The moving waters at their priestlike task / Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”

 

I hope the things I’ve learnt and the insights I’ve gained from being enforced to remain alone at home will help me to appreciate, and so never lose, the relevance of my reflections upon the importance of place to who we are and how it shapes our individual worlds. Because home is not just where we are, it’s also who we are, because we take that essential element of ourselves with us wherever we go – whether we wander near or far, but most especially when reunited we make our homecoming returns.

Harrow-on-the-Hill, by John Betjeman.

Pinner Fair in 1918 (Pathé News)

 

PINNORA’S LAND
 
 
Think of the Ancients in their easeful sleep
As you walk the way through Pinner Park Farm,
Along green hedgerows where the sparrows cheep
And black marauding crows squawk their alarm
At the fork-tailed kite wheeling high above.
Climbing the cinder track up Wakehams Hill,
To see the view which all the locals love;
Then onwards to Tooke’s Green, wand’ring at will,
First down then up the dip along Church Lane,
To the place where Saxon Pinnora’s band
Settled long ago. Where each yeoman thane
Built here a homestead on Pinnora’s land
In the shelt’ring lee of Pinner’s proud church,
Where old Skenelsby and the Loudons lie;
Its flint-walled tower looks down from its perch
Atop the High Street, vaunting the blue sky
With its tall cross, sheathed in godly green bronze;
Shading the green weedy brook which winds by
The foot of ancient Pinner’s sacred mons;
Flowing on, along leafy Cannon Lane,
Through Cheney Fields towards Haydon Hall Park,
Where blackbirds chorus at the evening’s wane;
Over Eastcote Village the sky burns stark
With the sunset’s red-golden flames alight,
As another warm summer’s day becalms
Itself asunder, passing into night.
Yet the birds keep singing; their vocal charms
Lulling the Ancients in their easeful sleep,
Lying content in comfort, as long time
Slowly accrues the centuries they keep;
Their lives and memories enshrined in rhyme
Scripted while walking these old lanes and ways,
Through the farm fields and over the green hills,
Along the winding brook’s soft purling maze,
Listening to the bird’s sweet chirps and trills,
Just as joyful birds have always sung here.
Our forebears from Saxon Pinnora’s day
Live on in local sounds which echo clear
In old paths and place names, which oft’ we say;
Our history hands down through the ages,
But the birds, trees and streams recall them too,
Like strolling players telling the stages
Of a play ever enacted anew –
And so, I dwell with full warm-hearted care
Upon my early kin’s generations
Who lived here long before me, unaware
Of their future’s far accumulations;
And I think of them in their easeful sleep
As I walk the way through Pinner Park Farm
Along green hedgerows where the sparrows cheep,
And black marauding crows squawk their alarm
At the fork-tailed kite wheeling high above;
Climbing the cinder track up Wakehams Hill
To see the view which all our kinsfolk love;
Then on towards Tooke’s Green, wand’ring at will
First down and then up the dip along Church Lane,
To the place where Saxon Pinnora’s band
Settled long ago; where a kindred thane
First made our home, here on Pinnora’s land.
 
 
By Tim Chamberlain – 14 April 2021. Hatch End.

 

Also on 'Waymarks'

A Distant View of Harrow

The Old Village Bakery, Pinner, c.1930s

Silent Film footage of Pinner in 1926 (BFI)

Lost in Translation

 

Life under “Lockdown” – A London Diary #6

 

Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Especially this year. It’s been the strangest of years for all of us. Normal life has been derailed or re-routed so comprehensively that none of us seem to have any idea where we are heading anymore. Earlier in the year I decided to write a post here on Waymarks with some personal reflections during the first ‘lockdown’ – inspired mainly by having taken part in this year’s Mass Observation project. It seemed like an unprecedented moment – at least, unprecedented in my lifetime at any rate. I did so because I thought such thoughts would be interesting to look back upon one day, hopefully many years hence, when all of this – our on-going predicament – will be a dim and distant memory. A kind of diary, personal thoughts written at the time, of an unforeseen national and global disaster.

 

In Britain the uncertainty has perhaps only been compounded by the additional (and unendingly circular) uncertainties of the on-going Brexit negotiations. Like many people, the predominant emotions I have felt this year have been: disbelief, confusion, powerlessness, despair, frustration, incredulousness, hilarity, cynicism (on a repeating loop cycle). In short, it has been a rollercoaster ride which has felt mostly sickening and not at all exhilarating. It’s also been a rollercoaster ride which never seems to end. Just as we get to a slower, less bumpy section of the track it suddenly starts to climb steeply or plunge once again at a perilously precipitous rate. I want to get off. We all want to get off. We’ve had enough. But no. We are powerless. And now Christmas has been cancelled. We’re stuck in a perpetual state of ‘lockdown’, though the ever-changing and hence unfathomable rules which apply seem geographically nonsensical. Europe and many parts of the world have closed their borders with us. We’re going to run out of food, hence panic buying apparently is (and isn’t) back, and the value of the pound is going to leap off a cliff on January 1^st, and yet there’s nothing that can be done about it. As I said, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

 

Humour is a very British way of dealing with trauma, crisis, despair, etc. But it is a cultural trait which doesn’t always translate very well, even to ourselves at times. We currently have a Prime Minister who has built himself a professional-persona which is based entirely upon a very particular kind of English humour: the loveable eccentric, the daft buffoon, the over-grown school boy, a Billy Bunter-esque type of charm. But when things get tough his demeanour and his antics simply baffle everyone. Some problems and difficulties can’t be laughed off. Perhaps rather paradoxically, we’ve been told he idolises Winston Churchill, and so he sees himself as some sort of Churchillian statesman-like successor. I’ve certainly seen many people saying in all seriousness that, in this country’s present hour of need, as with Churchill before him, “Cometh the hour, cometh the man!” I’ve laughed at this – not because I think it’s funny – but because hilarity is often the best and most natural response to incredulity. I don’t envy the Prime Minister his current lot. He undoubtedly has a difficult job on his hands. But part of those difficulties, arguably, were of his own making (Brexit), while the other half (the pandemic) very definitely wasn’t, at least at its start. The Government may well have handled all of it in a manner which is either: valiant/incompetent, or well-meaning/self-serving, doing the best they can/making it up as they go along, informed by experts/guided by cronyism, etc., etc. The list of perspectives goes on and you can choose your side for any number of personal reasons or motives, deriving your ‘facts’ from whichever source you feel most comfortable accepting as true. But none of it seems to change the status quo. And at present I can’t see how anything can possibly change for the better.

 

I’m now finding it hard to laugh even incredulously. Instead, I have found myself beginning to review how I have framed my own outlook, not just over the course of this year, but over the course of my entire lifetime. I have grown up with (what I’ve always assumed to be) a healthy sense of scepticism, a distrust of Government (both Right and Left), and a wariness of bias in the Press and mainstream Media. But this year I have felt like whatever anchors I have hitherto relied upon have been ripped from the seabed and I am now wholly adrift. I’ve become so cynical that my cynicism has revolved full circle and I’m now cynical of my own cynicism, or to put it slightly less tautologously – I no longer like my own thoughts, or feel at ease with my own way of thinking. And this is because I am now so confused that I no longer know what to think, who to trust, what to believe, who to listen to, or what to feel … I just want it all to stop. It’s not that I’ve had enough, it’s more that I no longer know how to respond. I feel like an inflatable punch-bag whose slow puncture has reached equilibrium. The air pressure inside and outside has equalised, and I am now just a flaccid bag half-filled with a lingering stale second-hand sort of air. I am a broken sparring-device which is being kicked and punched back and forth, bouncing off all sides of the boxing ring. I am spent.

 

So, what is to be done? – “Keep calm and carry on!” – those motivational posters from WW2, which have had a resurgence in popularity in recent years (I’ve lost count of how many times I have seen them pinned up on the walls of shops, workplaces, homes, Facebook pages, etc.), their ubiquity has now seemingly long since lost its knowingly ‘self-aware’ sense of irony. I never liked its reappropriation in the first place. Archly nostalgic. I only ever found it half-funny at best, but I understood the intentions behind it because I’m British and I ‘get’ the intrinsic cultural nuances it seeks to convey on multiple levels. But reflecting on this phenomenon in other contexts has set me thinking along broader avenues of themes concerning cultural appropriation, re-appropriation, reinterpretation, assumptions, sensitivities, reclamation, etc., and above all humour and how it translates, and, perhaps more importantly, how it does not translate.

 

Last month I was asked to contribute my perspective upon race to an initiative titled the Engaging Race Project, which is being led by Dr Amy Matthewson, SOAS, University of London (see here). Various individuals of widely different backgrounds have and are continuing to contribute their own personal thoughts and experiences of how ‘race’ has affected them and shaped their lives. It makes for a fascinating poly-vocal examination of issues which are pertinent to all, but uniquely diverse according to each individual’s personal take or experience of it. Reflecting upon such things shows us that individual responses complicate our ideas of right and wrong. It is not always easy to determine binary conclusions. Morally and ethically, we need to engage more with multiple perspectives in order to find our common ground. And this fact could not be more starkly apparent in these deeply polarised and polarising times. Particularly in our responses to issues which are bigger than us as individuals, such as the current pandemic, Brexit, climate change, the struggle for equality, the widening social divide created by wealth vs. poverty, etc.

 

These may seem or feel like unprecedented times, but I think that’s not true. We oscillate on a social spectrum wherever our society sits on a globalised scale. There’s a lot of talk about how political populism is skewing or skewering our democracies, polarising us into seemingly irreconcilable, opposing camps. Albert Camus, George Orwell, and even Michel Foucault are all quoted, and/or mis-quoted, amidst increasingly partisan screams of this or that being ‘fake news’, ‘conspiracy theories’, ‘truth or reality denying’ tropes all devised to suit personal means and ends. We are living in the age of “me and mine”, “I’m alright jack, you get off of my back”, it’s every man, woman and child for themselves, and to hell with the rest of you! – What has happened to that noble idea of “strength through diversity”, “many hands make light work”, many minds working together, seeing through several eyes to broaden our outlook and better inform our views?

 

Such notions, sadly, seem too noble for these times. It feels almost as though we deliberately want to misunderstand each other in order to bolster ourselves and our own sense that we are right and all others are wrong. We’ve atomised ourselves. But I don’t think this is anything new – vide the writings of Orwell and Camus. ‘Twas ever thus, it seems. But I think it’s an awareness of how we might be being manipulated which is the hardest thing to grasp these days, and this is where I come back to humour – which I fear is often culturally the most impossible thing to translate of all.

 

Humour is a great leveller, and a great unifier. It can unite us through a shared sense of humility, especially if we are able to laugh at ourselves and show others that we don’t take ourselves (or them as well for that matter) too seriously. But humour is also a great weapon – there are so many stories of how jokes which were told about Stalin or the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union could get you sent to the gulag or worse, get you killed. For all their seemingly iron-fisted grip on power all dictators who fear people telling jokes about them ultimately seem so fragile once they are removed from their god-like positions of power, because, unlike anything else, humour can undermine and erode the twin systems of extreme fear and blind belief which are but the smoke and mirrors that prop them up – the essays of Vaclav Havel illustrate this all too clearly and are perhaps just as crucially worth re-reading alongside Camus and Orwell today.

 

Yet humour can also be misunderstood, misinterpreted, and cause harm where none was actually meant. Anyone who has had any experience of cross-cultural relations should know and heed this fact well. Even though experience only ever reaffirms and reinforces it for those of us who do cross cultural divides in either our work or our home lives, it is something which we often forget or overlook inadvertently because we are all so deeply culturally engrained in our own worlds and our own worldviews. We cannot help it. To give a seemingly flippant but perhaps more widely accessible example of this I’d point to Bill Murray’s character in the movie Lost in Translation. This is a Hollywood film, directed by Sophia Coppola, which is much beloved and often thought of with real affection and whimsical humour among Anglo-American movie-goers. I know many people who cite it as one of their favourite films. I also know other people who find it an uncomfortable movie to watch. How you view it, as with anything in life – especially jokes – all boils down to your own personal perspective. I find Lost in Translation a fascinating movie, especially from the point of view of my own changing perspective upon it through time.

 

I first saw Lost in Translation soon after it came out around 2003-2004, almost immediately after my second prolonged visit to Japan over that New Year’s transition. I know a lot of people in Europe and America found it a very fresh and rather un-Hollywood-like depiction of Japan. It seemed more grounded in a real Japan which (up until then) we rarely ever got to see on our TV and movie screens. It was funny too, because it lampooned that acute discombobulation which anyone who has travelled to a place where the culture and language seem so utterly different and incomprehensible to our own. Picture Bill Murray, a man experiencing some sort of internalised existential crisis, sitting in his hotel room dressed in a funny, ill-fitting nightie (yukata) and slippers. He’s playing an actor who is there to film a TV commercial for a famous Japanese brand of whisky: “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.” The director gives a great long and emotionally emphatic speech as to how he wants Murray to say his lines. Murray looks to the translator and she simply states the director’s intentions in a scant four or five words. Bill Murray is baffled: “No, what did he really say? He clearly said more than that!” – We laugh at this because of the interplay of stereotypes which we think we can all recognise in this situation. The movie seems to oscillate delicately between two poles – one of humour and the other of pathos – which is perhaps poignantly summed up by the movie’s title, as both Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s character’s lives are lost in some sort of unspoken search for self-meaning.

 

When I first saw the movie, I liked it because it made me feel nostalgic for Tokyo and my two recent trips there. At the time I thought these might be once in a lifetime trips, but in fact they were the first of many, and now Tokyo is a place I can call home. A fact which I never would have dreamed of when I first saw Lost in Translation in the cinema in London. I didn’t speak Japanese back then either, so unknowingly I read the movie on one level only, relating it to my recent and very personal experiences. I was surprised to later find that some of my Japanese friends really disliked the movie. And so, several years later, after I’d become much better acquainted with the country, the culture, and the language, I watched it again. I was rather shocked at how I read the movie afresh from two angles. Because now I realised how my first reading of it had been firmly rooted in the humour of my own Anglo-American culture. That stereotypical scene with the movie director was so over-the-top that I thought it made its point through exaggeration (the director does just say the same thing in several different ways over and over) and that this would be just as translatable as anyone playing a hammed-up English eccentric might be in any other typically Hollywood movie. Stereotypes are just that after all, we’re meant to laugh at them, not necessarily take them to be generically definitive, as with all stereotypes they are an affected exaggeration of the truth. So my initial response to re-watching this scene was to think my Japanese friends were being a little over-sensitive, although I could see and understand and so feel sympathetic as to why it might cause them offense. English eccentric stereotypes in Hollywood movies have ruckled my pride on some occasions too.

 

But it was later scenes in the movie, when Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are in the hospital, which made me realise why some of my Japanese friends found this movie so uncomfortable. I had read somewhere at the time when the movie first came out that these scenes were largely improvised, which was highly unusual for a Hollywood movie at the time. People said this is what made it feel so different, made it feel more real and more realistic, and so perhaps more relatable. And again, these scenes play upon that idea of things being ‘lost in translation’, finding yourself in a situation where you can’t understand or make yourself understood, so you flail about amiably trying to stay afloat, seeing the funny side of it all, and falling back on your sense of humour to see you through. And most importantly, at this point the film gives us no subtitles to translate what the fellow patients (who apparently are ordinary Japanese and not actors) are trying to say to Murray and Johansson. We aren’t given subtitles because we are meant to be seeing it from Murray and Johansson’s characters’ point of view – but if you can understand Japanese these scenes are really painful to watch because the Japanese characters are clearly trying to be kind and are empathising with the two Westerners, struggling to make themselves understood and not fully understanding why Murray and Johansson are larking about and are laughing at them in response. Here is a clear example of how humour and only seeing one side of a conversation can hurt and divide us, even if that wasn’t the intention of the person acting the fool.

 

I’m not saying we should all strive to be more serious. I still think humour is a great leveller, and I think it is a great weapon against oppressive or overreaching power, but it’s much harder to remember that humour can so easily be misconstrued, misunderstood, and/or seem to malign our own harmless intentions. Our worlds as individuals interacting in the greater social collectives through which we move or are embedded, are ever in constant danger of derailing us or those around us from making the connections which keep us sane and smiling, which help smooth the way or aid us in sorting out the ills which have inadvertently arisen between us. I make such cross-cultural faux pas all the time, and when I do, I can’t help feeling them all the more acutely for knowing I should be more mindful and more careful for having made such mistakes before. The lessons of forgetting are that we constantly need to relearn and relearn and relearn again the things which we already know and should have remembered. That’s life. It’s not the end of the world. But it’s something for us to improve upon. Because, ultimately, I’d much rather laugh and laugh together rather than cry or get angry about something which is simply a misunderstanding or a different perspective compared to my own. Life’s too short otherwise.

 

At the moment I feel like the world and the UK in particular is very much ‘lost in translation.’ Not just to those beyond our borders, but to ourselves as well. Boris may be a hopeless and a hapless buffoon, or he may well be a sinister and coldly-calculating clown (he may even be your latter-day Saint Winston Churchill!), but his past form makes it very difficult to comprehend him, let a lone take him seriously or trust him. He may well be ill-advised, or the indecision he seems to excel at maybe his own character flaw, but if we in the UK can’t understand him – how can we expect the rest of the world to understand him? I’d like to think our Prime Ministers should represent the best of us, and that they should always be seeking the best for us, but I know the reality is never quite so simple or straightforward. At the moment, as a divided nation, we seem to be morally bankrupt. Hemmed in by the biases of the news and the opinions we are fed by the Press and Social Media channels we choose and advocate to inform us and to trammel the way we think. Unusually we used to be able to laugh at our leaders’ faults and inadequacies, but that’s not possible at the moment because we are constantly being corralled into our partisan groups, opposed to one another to the bitter end.

 

Given the enormity of the challenges which we currently face, and the Merry-Go-Round circus ride of f*ck ups and failures we’ve witnessed as the crises of the last few years and 2020 in particular have deepened our situation, I’m beginning to think neither side should be given total control over such matters. Perhaps we’d get a sense that the rudder was being held more firmly if there were more cross-Parliamentary consultation and pooling of expertise to make decisions which are better informed, more balanced and more representative in order to find some way of progressing together as one? – I realise this might seem absurdly idealistic, but wasn’t this more like what happened in Parliament during the last World War? – If that’s the nostalgic kind of Britain people want to go back to perhaps it’s time to stop kidding ourselves as to what we think it was like back then during Britain’s “great glory days” on both sides of the current political divide, if only because I think we have reached the point where it is very genuinely and very worryingly no longer a laughing matter.

Also on 'Waymarks'

Life Under "Lockdown" - A London Diary

The Proust Questionnaire ...

Castaways in the Time of Corona

Falling Like Dominoes ...

The Singularity of Arthur C. Clarke

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Engaging Race Project