A quick view of my day with lockdown observations.
I spent the early hours of the morning struggling with a blog post which I want to write, but which I can’t get right. I had already abandoned one yesterday and though I did manage to post, it was not about the things that were on my mind.
After no more than five hours I rose when the alarm went, made sandwiches, had breakfast and went to the Treatment Centre at Queen’s Medical Centre. Yes, time for a blood test. Parking was tight, as I didn’t get down until 9 am so I parked in a bay reserved for disabled parking. I don’t actually have a blue badge but I do have a walking stick and my knee was playing up. I was wrong, but I’m gradually becoming more selfish in my behaviour as I realise that being considerate just means that you are use as a stepping stone by the greedy self-centred people who actually run the country.
They now want all NHS staff to wear masks when dealing with the public and all members of the public to wear masks in hospitals. I took one with me just in case. I wasn’t asked to put a mask on when I arrived and I noticed that the receptionists and other staff weren’t wearing them. I checked later and this will all happen on June 15th, so they aren’t actually compulsory yet.
The phlebotomist had several attempts on my arms – one in the right, two in the left. She didn’t use the method I suggested, and decided to call a colleague in. There was nothing wrong with her technique but she just couldn’t get it right. I’m not a qualified phlebotomist, but as you may have noted, after the number of blood tests I’ve had I have picked up quite a lot of knowledge whilst being stabbed in the arm.
I was sent out to wait and drink water (which is supposed to make it easier to draw a sample) and they called a second patient in. When I was called through again the second phlebotomist took the blood quickly and efficiently while we all had a laugh about her friend’s failure. I do enjoy my blood-letting sessions – they are the only social life I have these days.
After that it was off to work for five hours in an empty shop. There wasn’t much to do so I cleaned the sink, the computers, the toilet and the door handles. When I went back to the computer I noted that two more orders had come in and then, on finishing those, found that another had come in. Sometimes the days seem to last forever.
I sent a text to the owner telling him we were running low on stationery and then sent another to Julia telling her I was running late, in part due to my co-worker failing to refill the drawers after using all the envelopes from two of them. I added three of those faces with steam coming out of the nostrils to indicate annoyance and sent it. Big, stiff fingers and touch screens are a bad combination and I sent it to the boss. Then I rang him to explain I had meant it for Julia.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…
The Post Office was empty, so Social Distancing was a doddle.
Then it was home to try again with the difficult blog post (it still proved difficult) and news that people want to take down the statues of Sir Francis Drake in Devon. He might have done a bit of slave trading, but they all did in those days, so if this continues, we will have to take down all our statues, replace them with images of liberal nonentities and rewrite our history. It was an evil trade, and I make no excuses for it, who does it help to label all historical figures, with hindsight, as evil racists?
It’s all getting a bit like 1984, though of course, that’s a tricky subject too, as George Orwell’s great-grandfather was a slave owner and, if things carry on the way they are going, we’ll soon be burning his books rather than reading them.
That is more or less the subject of one of the blog posts I am finding difficult. I don’t like modern life.
And that was my day.
I am now going to submit my grocery order for tomorrow. An hours struggling with TESCO’s rubbish website on a creaky old computer. This is the stuff dreams are made of.
There is a lot in this one, Quercus. You manage to be amusing about your torture sessions and sensible about attempts to rewrite history.
Thank you Derrick. Always look on the bright side of life…
Well, you seem to be in a state. So is the world, so that’s to be expected. But you know you don’t HAVE to write every day, right? A couple times a week might be easier. Sometimes I go a few weeks, not because I don’t have things to say, but I don’t have time. I’m with Laurie on the statues here. Bring those babies down. Here in the US they were used to reinforce Jim Crow and white supremacy, sometimes pretty obviously when they were dedicated. The fact people ignored it made it possible for things to get to the point they are now.
Once you have established that the statues must come down will you then remove the slave owners from your currency. At what point does their historical contribution to the nation outweigh our modern qualms about events of 200 years ago?
That’s where it gets complicated. the statues being pulled down now are of people who rebelled against the country in a civil war. They were put up in the 1920’s for the most part, when the South was beginning to feel like it could assert its power again, with denying voting rights, fierce segregation and other types of oppression. They symbolized the “lost cause.” The founding fathers are more complicated, and I doubt will come off the money. It would be a mistake to mix up the statues of rebels with them. And you’re right about what historians call “presentism.” We shouldn’t judge people with an eye on our modern manners, but on who they were in the context of their times.
Yes, it’s all very complicated. Washington did rebel against the lawful authority of King George III. He’s lucky he won because history, as they say, is written by the victors.
Well, so there aren’t any Washington statues in the UK, one assumes, since that would be hard to swallow. If you’re going to think in terms of rebellions, hmmmm, say the losing side of the English Civil war (much farther back than ours) probably doesn’t have a lot of statues around in England.
Not actually sure who lost. The King was beheaded, Cromwell took over, the royal family came back in 1660. We have a few King Charles statues and a few Cromwell statues about, but not many. It was 380 years ago and they weren’t big on public statues. I think most of our statues are probably from the 19th Century. The one of Washington was presented to us in the 1920s. We don’t bear grudges.
https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/george-washington
I’ve been to Sulgrave manor in Northamptonshire – https://sulgravemanor.org.uk/
Second thought to make it a bit clearer. Imagine if Germany had statues of Nazi Generals sprinkled around the country where there were pockets of national socialism that hadn’t been quite stamped out. Or there was a statue of Oswald Moseley somewhere in Britain that got put up long enough after the war for people to let it happen and now it’s standing there, a rebuke to every grandchild whose father fought in the war…
I can understand the concept of the statues being abhorrent, particularly in the context you explained. I just wonder where it all ends.
Hard to know. Just one more bit of uncertainty to add to the big messy mix.
It just feels like people are removing bits of my life.
Yes. I can understand that. It is unsettling and there is a question of where it ends–
I’m with you on not needing to publish every day.
Well, I’m also concerned about statues which support a world we’d rather not have. Not sure Sir Isaac Newton should be lulled down, though. Until this post, I’d not know he had any involvement in the slave trade, no matter how tenuous the link.
Yeah, I’d give Newton a pass, as well. None of us is perfect. I guess that’s something to remember, too, going forward and looking back.
Yes, let’s look forward to our own behaviour 😊
He had the same link to slavery as Thomas Guy, the founder of Guy’s hospital, investment in the South Sea Company. They want to take down Guy’s statue and rename the hospital.
I see! As the mother of a mixed race child, that still doesn’t preclude me from white privilege, but clearly Thomas Guy had some good things going for him as well!!
Being white might make things less difficult but “privilege” is pushing it. That implies that life is queuing up to give us stuff, and it isn’t.
Yes indeed.
🙂
I have painful memories of botched blood draws. I hope this doesn’t happen to you again.
It happens frequently. I have tricky veins. 🙂
I have one arm that is far easier, but sometimes people still have trouble.
A few years ago I had to move back to the right arm when the left stopped producing. Then we had to start in a more painful spot. Now we are searching for another good site for testing.
Fortunately I don’t feel much pain/ 🙂
I will direct my comments toward my own country as the planks we have in our collective eyes could build a village. Here, Confederate statues are coming down and good riddance to them. Slavery and its aftermath have taken a horrible toll on this country. In many ways we are still fightiing the Civil War and the suffering continues.
We’re not the only ones. Check out Greg Johnson’s blog site.
https://www.resourcesforlife.com/docs/item30527
I read an article on this a few years ago, but hadn’t realised it mirrored the current situation so closely. Life is very complicated.
Good luck with sorting it out.
Thanks! We sure need it. Also want to include Maine historian Heather Cox Richardson’s perspective. She expresses it so much better than I do. “To historians, this is a no-brainer. Confederate leaders tried to destroy the United States and succeeded in killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, so the idea that we have any federal recognition of them is wild. And they were fighting to enshrine human enslavement in the laws of a new nation, and from there to spread it across the world, so for a country founded on the idea of human equality to honor these men seems particularly self-defeating.”
It’s much easier not being American. 🙂
Sigh.
Cheer up Laurie. You know it will get better.
Thanks, Quercus!
Ironically, we were finally given the two blue badges for our disabled sons that we had fought for and appealed over for five years …. just as it became illegal to leave the house. We had a sense of humour about it 🙂
Are there currently no statues of nonentities in our towns and cities?
Plenty of them, but that doesn’t give people the right to rip them down. There are two in Grantham, one to Sir Isaac Newton and one to Frederick Tollemache. Tollemache is probably safe as he discriminated against the Maori and they aren’t fashionable victims. The other – Isaac Newton – will definitely have to go as he was a shareholder in the South Sea Company and therefore a slave trader. I think he might have done something else too but let’s rip it down just to be on the safe side. We need a plinth for the new Thatcher statue anyway…