It’s a full month since I had Covid, and while I can manage most day-to-day activities, I still move very slowly. I don’t suppose there’s a variant called ‘Long Covid’; this will just be how our individual immune systems handle the infection. My reduced energy, mobility, stability etc are not much different from the ageing process – but make it worse. I only mention this because the queen commented, this week, on her own Covid after-effects: ‘Good for you’, I thought, 95 and still wants to be match-fit.
From the 2020 editions of this column, it’s clear that the level of fear – the proximity of death – has reduced; Covid 19 was lethal – we were scared. Omicron is a more normalised part of life which we try to live with. I’ve lost a level of function which I’ll try to regain; we’re asked not to bother the NHS until we have to; as far as I’m aware no helpful medication is yet available; I hope I don’t have long ‘long Covid’ – but mine is certainly lingering.
The pandemic has shown how little control any of us has over external events – but at the same time we have learned that it’s our state of mind that really matters. “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it’s all within yourself, in your way of thinking…….death smiles at all of us, all we can do is smile back”. It’s two thousand years since Marcus Aurelius wrote those words; I notice on good days, I sometimes smile back.
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Local elections of 5th May and, once again, the SNP is assured of a comfortable victory; I enjoyed Kevin McKenna’s recent article, saying that politics in Scotland has entered a deep sleep, and that the unresolved constitutional question, suits a small coterie of professional politicos. Sturgeon runs a tightly-controlled (centralised) fiefdom, whose main strategy seems to be ‘five more years’. Its political agenda can’t be identified as left-wing, social democrat or right-wing: ‘keep everyone guessing’. In a fundamental way, I feel Scotland’s ‘soul’ is different from England’s – I want independence, but not this twilight existence. We need to be shaken from our slumbers; the present leadership of the SNP have run their race.
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Britain’s self-titled money saving expert, Martin Lewis has warned that civil unrest, over rising energy bills ‘isn’t far away’, as he repeats his call for more government intervention to protect people. He says he is more scared for people’s finances that at any time since he founded his popular website in 2005. I don’t have any clear sense of what’s going to happen over this.
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From the uproar, I chose Andrew Rawnsley’s piece about the ‘stench of entitlement’ now oozing from the home of the Chancellor and other political leaders. We have people in high office who prioritise self-interest – loyal only to what they own; we must find a way of changing this before cynicism dominates public life. Would it surprise anyone if it was Boris Johnson who ‘shopped’ Rishi Sunak?
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France, Hungary, Poland, we are uneasily aware of the rise of the far-right across Europe – sometimes so difficult to understand; I appreciated Will Hutton’s Observer piece which discusses this in the context of the boastful nationalism of our own Brexit Conservatives – lots of scary parallels. If Macron loses the Presidency, Hutton thinks he jettisoned too much of the left.
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Far from the complexity of national and global politics, I’m much more comfortable with this article discussing the hope which inspires local activism: over a long working life, I don’t think any subject interested me more than local democracy. It’s a personal sadness to me that Scottish Govt has done more to resist than to assist community empowerment
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The Brazilian theologian/philosopher, Rubem Alvez (1933-2014) writing about hope: “ We must live by the love of what we will never see”.
“What is hope? It is the viewpoint that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of fact that oppresses and represses us, is not the last word. It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe – that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual – and that, in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection… So, let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.”
