Keeping up with what claims to be the real world is bruising right now.
Keeping hands mostly over eyes seems as wise as mask wearing. Though honesty demands disclosure that this comes from someone who last week claimed ‘mammies’ versus ‘mummies’ is as revealing as how people say ‘H’. Inside 24 hours Michelle O’Neill saw that off, rattling out ‘mummy’ to the executive scrutiny committee as naturally as Arlene Foster.
If you insist, look sideways at the weirdness of politics. Like that Order of the British Empire for Mid and East Antrim Borough Council chief executive Anne Donaghy. Who, as the Irish News reporting her OBE noted on Saturday, defended her actions again this week over that 2017 Michael Gove-attending fund-raising dinner for DUP MP Ian Paisley. (Well worth listening to the tapes of council meetings by Brendan Hughes of this parish; see his Twitterfeed.)
If you didn’t know that British honours operate in a parallel world you might think what tone-deaf timing. Take note of the knighthood for recent top civil servant David Sterling. During that mouse-producing mountain of an RHI inquiry, Sir David acknowledged mistakes made.
Meanwhile Northern Ireland shoots up to number two in Europe’s league of infection rates. Maybe Stormont ministers internally battling for economy versus health deserve sympathy for trying to sound decisive while at a loss, like much of the globe. But there is what looks like an institutional lack of cop-on. MLAs, pre-pandemic, voted themselves a hefty raise while setting up ‘processes’ to soothe the voters by handing it back. Another B Hughes report finds fewer than half of them have.
And no minister has had the gumption to apologise to citizens who imagined they could freely access abortion, thanks to Sarah Ewart, Stella Creasy (and Westminster distaste for the DUP). Instead a brazen Department of Health spinner tells the News Letter that self-administered medication has health dangers. So first stall the provision envisaged by Westminster and sanctioned by the courts, promise more public consultation when the pandemic allows, then blame your citizens for risks they are forced to take. Using Covid as cover to shuffle off abortion provision might be defined as non-existent-virtue-signalling.
Let us lift up our hearts, though, fight another day, find distraction. The New York Public Library has a digital album of the Covid-struck city’s ‘Missing Sounds’ including the ‘Not-Quite-Quiet Library.’
Nifty London Times writer Ann Treneman (an American) hailed the library’s production with her own lost loves including ‘the giggles that cascade out of women’s changing rooms. Let’s hear it for a bit of noise.’ One Belfast street-sage struggled to think of sounds lost to the virus ‘since long gone are “6th Telllllly” and “5 lighters for a pound.”
We better collect the unconsidered good stuff. ‘Time blots our gladness out.’ Some everyday experiences that we never realised as important won’t come back the same way. Like cheerful noisy nights in the pub, which some never had and many never wanted, but some of us did and they’re gone. Lost livelihoods and homes, lonely deaths and funerals unattended are going to scar for years or forever. Connection, that’s the thing.
Angry but practical as the politicians block and stall, Alliance for Choice keeps on offering information. Many of us are grumpy without suffering real loss; better go find the isolated who don’t love solitude. The luckier among us can still feed (some) people in the kitchen and do food drops to food banks. It’s happening everywhere and still worth spreading; shared recipes, books exchanged, recommending films and tv series. Phone calls, texts, emails. Plant cuttings propagated (there’s a skill) and dispersed to neighbours on their doorsteps.
Pass on a poem, get some reggae back, listen to Skin and Skunk Anansie, Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin. Read Nina Stibbe’s ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ and at least the first bit of Edna O’Brien’s memoir, Country Girl.
The ‘little things beloved and held are best’.
