The great swine flu disaster

I’m not sure if I mentioned it before on this blog, but I’ve recently mastered the art of time travel. I’ve invented my own Wellsian time machine with bits of piano wire, a Halfords car battery and an old Nokia phone and I’m actually writing this post in the summer of 2010. There’s not much to report from the future, to be honest. Things are pretty much ticking along as normal – except for Gordon Brown winning that unexpected landslide election victory, obviously, after he single-handedly saved the world from being destroyed by an asteroid. Oh, and the Tories were routed and have been replaced as the main opposition by the Top Gear party, led by Jeremy Clarkson. Anyway, I was at a bit of a loose end so I thought I would sort through some of my yellowing copies of old newspapers from the summer of 2009, when everyone was getting very worried about that dreadful swine flu pandemic. Here is a selection of the headlines from that period:

SCHOOLS MAY SHUT TO BEAT SWINE FLU: CALLS FOR PANDEMIC TSAR (THE MIRROR)

PIG IGNORANT: NEW SWINE FLU ADVICE LINES ARE MANNED BY MIGRANTS WHO BARELY SPEAK ENGLISH (DAILY STAR)

HE'S ONLY DOING THIS TO ESCAPE SWINE FLU IN MEXICO: WHAT LEAGUE 2 CLUBS THINK OF SVEN (THE SUN)

SWINE FLU IS ‘BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN A GENERATION FOR THE NHS’ (THE TIMES)

SWINE FLU THREATENS DEFLATION SLUMP: GDP COULD PLUNGE BY 7.5PC (DAILY TELEGRAPH)

IF YOU GET SWINE FLU ON HOLS: BRITS COULD BE STRANDED FOR WEEKS BY BUG (DAILY STAR)

£90BN SWINE FLU ADDS TO RECESSION: SICK WORKERS COULD TIP BRITAIN INTO DEFLATION (THE SUN)

AIRLINES TO TURN AWAY ‘SWINE FLU’ PASSENGERS: SNEEZING TOURISTS WILL NEED A DOCTOR'S NOTE TO FLY (THE TIMES)

CLUES FROM 1918 GRAVES WHICH MAY SAVE US ALL: RACE FOR SWINE FLU CURE AS PUPILS TRAPPED ABROAD (THE PEOPLE)

CHURCHGOERS ARE URGED NOT TO SHAKE HANDS IN SWINE FLU ALERT (THE MIRROR)

20,000 CASES OF SWINE FLU - AND ON TARGET FOR A MILLION (SUNDAY EXPRESS)

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY SWINE FLU (MAIL ON SUNDAY)

BECKHAM NIECE IN SWINE FLU SHOCK (THE MIRROR)

DON'T SEND CHILDREN TO SWINE FLU PARTIES, PARENTS WARNED (DAILY MAIL)

WIMBLEDON: FOUR BALL BOYS SENT HOME WITH SWINE FLU (DAILY TELEGRAPH)

CELEBS’ JUNGLE FEVER: SWINE FLU MAY WIPE OUT HIT REALITY SHOW (DAILY STAR)

SWINE FLU DOES WHAT THE NAZIS COULDN'T: CLOSE ETON (INDEPENDENT)

Some people here have been saying that, in retrospect, we all got a bit overexcited about something that, in the vast majority of cases, was best treated with some Lemsip and a bit of shuteye. But I say phooey. You can’t be too careful these days, and without the vigilance of the Fourth Estate who knows what havoc this potentially deadly virus could have wreaked.

Last week I also used my time machine to return briefly to 2009 so I could park it outside Broadcasting House and appear on Thinking Allowed on Radio 4, which (unless you’re reading this in 2010, like me) is still available for a few days on iPlayer at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00lpc8f/Thinking_Allowed_22_07_2009/

Mundane quote for the day: ‘There is something very English in the marriage of boredom and catastrophe, and the England that existed immediately after the Second World War appears to have carried that manner rather well, as if looking over its shoulder to notice that lightning had just struck a teacup. Reading the work of V.S. Pritchett or the absconded Auden, you pick up the notion that Europe had just come through a spell of bad weather, as though the only important question emerging from the war was about how it might have affected the course of English normality.’ - Andrew O’Hagan

Moon dust

The sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser wondered, ‘what if within the moon's fair shining sphere, what if in every other star unseen, of other worlds he happily should hear?’ His near-contemporary Robert Burton shared this interest in ‘infinite habitable worlds’, but thought we could only ‘calculate their motions’ or visit them ‘in a poetical fiction, or a dream’.

My first memory is looking up at the moon with the little girl who used to live next door to us in Overton Crescent, Sale. That must have been in 1972 (I am now the same age as Neil Armstrong was in 1969) and so I suppose it’s possible that I was looking for the last man to walk on the moon (Gene Cernan), who left in December that year. But maybe that is a case of the wish being father to the thought.

I’ve been enjoying Andrew Smith’s book Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, having watching his charming BBC4 documentary, Being Neil Armstrong, a couple of weeks ago. Lots of pages marked with post-its but here is my favourite:

There was also the joy of finding that the eye was so much more powerful without an atmosphere to cloud it … this was one of the reasons why lunar astronauts found the return journey so moving, with the Earth in their sights. Only twenty-four people have ever left Earth orbit and seen her from the perspective of Deep Space – all American and all between the Christmases of 1968 and 1972. The difference between near and far is enormous: the orbital astronaut experiences the planet as huge and majestic, while from afar it is tiny, beautiful, and shockingly alone.

It’s a cliché to say that the astronauts went to the moon and discovered the earth. But for the purposes of this blog on the everyday I loved the account of the post-lunar life of Alan Bean, the one who became a moon artist. He says he just sat in a shopping mall for hours when he returned to earth, eating ice-cream and watching the shoppers walk by, ‘enraptured’ by the simple fact of being human and alive.

PS I liked this email to the Guardian cricket blog after the first test (you need to be familiar with the rantings of a Norwegian commentator after a famous victory over the England football team in 1981): ‘Paul Hogan, Paul Keating, Skippy, Ned Kelly, Harold Bishop! Can you hear me Harold Bishop? Your boys took one hell of a draw!’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘There is nothing they won’t do to raise the standard of boredom.’ – Guy Debord

In search of middle England

Halfway through my interview with Robert Elms on BBC Radio London last week, something strange happened – a little piece of broadcasting history. I actually started to ENJOY it, mainly because he seemed really interested in my book. You can listen to it here (about 15 minutes in):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p003lm11/Robert_Elms_07_07_2009/

But then what do I know? The last radio interview I even vaguely enjoyed I don’t think they even used. It was a pre-record in which I went off on one (as I believe they say at the high table at Queen’s) about ‘Middle England’ being a political and media invention – momentarily forgetting that I was being interviewed for a three-part series called In Search of Middle England. So I can’t really blame them for leaving me on the cutting-room floor. I wasn’t really entering into the spirit of things.

And in case anyone doesn’t believe me that service stations once used to be the go-to places for the jeunesse doree (see ‘22 Years in a Travelodge’, Chapter 5 in On Roads), I found this in Brian Viner’s new book about 1970s telly, a memory of the car journeys his wife used to make as a teenager: ‘A visit to the restaurant at the New Trust House Forte service station on the M1 was considered a rather special family outing. Once or twice, when they went for a Sunday-afternoon drive to Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, both girls had to take a change of clothing in case they stopped to eat at Woodall services on the way home.’

BRAVER MEN THAN ME

While I’ve been consorting with the meejer, real men have been busy with maps and rucksacks. Three generations of the Moran family – my dad, brother and 11-year-old nephew - are walking the Tour du Mont Blanc this August, in aid of Peak District Mountain Rescue. You can find out more at this site (http://www.justgiving.com/walkingthetmb/) and even donate if you like …

Mundane quote for the day: ‘I seem to have spent half the time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging over the insolence of bus-conductors.’ – George Orwell

Under one small star

Why are politicians so slow to say sorry? They say they can apologise and they have apologised but they don’t actually say sorry in the present tense, or they express a ‘level of regret that can be equated with an apology’, or they apologise for things that aren’t their fault, like the slave trade or section 28. What are they afraid of? Apologies can be beautiful, as the Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska shows in her poem ‘Under one small star’:

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.

Please don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.

May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.

My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.

My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

I apologise for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.

I apologise to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.

Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.

Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.

And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,

your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,

forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.

My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.

My apologies to great questions for small answers.

Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.

Dignity, please be magnanimous.

Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.

Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.

My apologies to everyone that I can’t be everywhere at once.

My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.

I know that I won’t be justified as long as I live,

since I myself stand in my own way.

Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,

then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

On behalf of the world, Ms Szymborksa, I am very happy to accept your beautiful apology.

Another review of my book from the FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/365664c0-61df-11de-9e03-00144feabdc0.html

There were also a couple in the Literary Review and the Herald, but they're not on the internet.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying … to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own … It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me.’ – James Joyce