Saturday September 12th 2020

07:15 Up fairly early again – Saturday is one of the 3 days each week where Lois and I take a shower. Also, our next week’s groceries are being delivered by the local convenience store, and we’ve got to be on hand to take them in and swab them down with disinfectant etc., before storing them away. Damn!

After an afternoon nap we drive over to our friends, Mari-Ann and Alf’s house to give them some cooking apples from our much-envied “fallers” collection, plus a margarine tub of raspberries. And we get one of their marrows in return – it’s the cashless “barter” society in miniature, but we’re really helping them out because they’re being overrun with marrows – it’s almost like a horror film, The Revolt of the Triffids or something similar, says Alf. 

But we’re also doing ourselves a favour - Lois and I love marrows, especially with minced beef: yum yum!

typical “faller” apples, seen lying on the ground, showing the essential difference

between what we call “fallers”, and those apples still remaining on the trees,

for which we have no specific name at present. I suppose they are  the“stayers”

or “hangers-on”, (?) but we’re not completely sure. Anybody know?

They could also be a metaphor for Brexit - with the apples on the tree

labelled as the "Remainers" - again, we're not sure.

But we don’t stay - we find that Mari-Ann and Alf are in the middle of some crazy “zoom” online seminar: what madness for a Saturday! When we arrive at their house, about 4 pm, it's one of the recesses, where numerous “break-out” sessions for the super-keen are in progress in different virtual "rooms", but Alf can't work the technology:  they can hear the other students but can't air their own views for some reason. This could be one vision of what hell is like – we're not sure, but isn't this idea in a book by Sartre ?

Alf says their internet connection at home is not the best. Lois and I have found this a problem when we try to run our Danish group meetings on zoom or Skype: some members’ internet connections seem to make an unpleasant noise periodically – something like a vacuum-cleaner or a dentist’s drill, but we don’t know what to do about this. Some people say that Danish as a language sounds  a bit like a dentist’s drill, but we have got used to that, so we don’t mind too much now.

We read today that quality of connection is also a problem with schoolchildren's remote learning, because not all students have the same quality in their homes. But some imaginative solutions have been trialled in some areas, according to the influential American news website, Onion News, in a story that first broke today.

CHICAGO—Assuring parents they were more than prepared for their first fully virtual semester, Chicago Public Schools encouraged students without internet access Friday to attend remotely by peering through the home windows of wealthier classmates.

“If you have any problem at all connecting to online classes, simply walk to a more upscale neighbourhood, peer through the blinds, and watch your Zoom class via their feed instead,” said CPS superintendent Janice Jackson, adding that they were working around the clock to get all children, regardless of income, access to wealthy family’s mansions where they could longingly press their faces against the glass while they stared at laptops 20-feet away.

What a crazy world we live in! But essentially that’s pretty much the story of 2020, isn’t it.

Steve, my American brother-in-law has sent me a business graph of the relative importance of various products and processes in the early months of the pandemic.

I don’t know what the comparable figures are for the UK, but I suspect they may be broadly similar, although tea is another big factor here. 

Lois told me some months ago that, with increased working-from-home, sales of bras were sharply down here, especially the underwired sort. Apparently the first thing women used to do when they got home from work was to take their bras off – 8 hours or more of wearing the things, just to look their best in the workplace and to maximize their chances of promotion etc – 8 hours was more than enough, she says, and who can blame these women?

19:30 We settle down on the sofa to watch a bit of TV, the first part of Simon Schama’s new series on the Romantics of the late 18^th and early 19^th century.

An entertaining canter through the likes of Blake, Mary Wolstencraft and Shelley.

The early romantics were all enthusiastic about the French Revolution, but Blake himself was a very much a Londoner, and rarely left the city – he was essentially waiting for the Revolution to come across the Channel, and dethrone the forces of Reason and enthrone Emotion in its place, without his having to travel. Travel can be wearisome, as Lois and I know!

The “dark satanic mills” of his poem “Jerusalem”, which a lot of people still think were something to do with the Industrial Revolution, were actually Britain’s universities: the centres of Reason, so the big enemy.

Wordsworth, another Romantic, famously spent time in Paris in the early years of the Revolution, so he would have seen it at its best, before things started going downhill and turning into “The Terror”. Mary Wolstencraft unfortunately arrived in Paris at the world-record unsuitable moment, just as “The Terror” was beginning. She actually saw the king from her window as he was being driven to his execution. Oh dear, poor Mary! And poor Louis!!!!!

On the other hand, Louis was at least partly to blame for his own downfall, as Alan Sherman put it in his song "You Came The Wrong Way, Old King Louis" (sung to the tune of "You Came A Long Way from St Louis"):

You came the wrong way, Old King Louis
You disappointed all of France
But then what else could we expect
From a king in silk stockings
And pink satin pants?

And who knew that the phrases “Enemy of the People” and “Fake News” (“fausses nouvelles”) originated in the Paris of the 1790’s as The Terror began to pick up speed? [I expect a lot of people knew that – Ed]

The Revolution never really made it to Britain, although the Tory Government of the time was very worried, and introduced a lot of repressive measures to try and keep it out, which Shelley in particular was incensed about.

After the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in Manchester, Shelley identified "the forces of Anarchy” with the Government side, rather than with the protesters, in his poem “The Masque of Anarchy”, an idea which was quite radical for the time, but which has resonated since with many peaceful protest movements facing violent repression from the authorities.

And Shelley was perhaps the first person to promote the idea of non-violent resistance – which has been taken up so often since, of course, by Gandhi and many many others.

An interesting programme.

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzzz!!!!