“Hope you’re keeping well and healthy and avoiding all the winter germs and bugs,” comes a message from an acquaintance.
Thank you for your kind concern, I replied. Actually, I usually get a chest infection over the winter months, and I know I should turn this into a spiritual contemplation of mortality.
We should all sometimes dwell upon the hour of our death and what better opportunity than in the midst of winter germs and bugs?
There’s a flu epidemic, with ghastly “Japanese” and “Aussie” strains against which we may not be protected by vaccination, so be brave and ponder on this: you know not the day nor the hour. Isn’t the rule of the Cistercian order for each monk to dig a little of his own grave every day?
Yet far from being courageous and spiritual about the possibility of catching some deadly form of flu, such risks have revealed me to be a total coward and a dreadful fusspot about cosseting myself.
I’ve equipped myself with those facial medical masks – which you can access online from MediSupplies (at £3.94 for a box) – and taken to wearing one in public places. I’m aware I look like a complete twit, but what’s that against the feeling of protection against germs and viruses? (Though I’m told that the surgical masks mostly serve to protect other people from my germs, rather than me from theirs.)
Apparently any surfaces – doorknobs, say, or bannisters – which other people touch can be cesspits of germs, so I wear gloves everywhere. Even exchanging the “handshake of peace” at Mass, I resorted to doing so with gloves on.
I used to have such a robust attitude to germs and bacteria: let your system fight them off. Now I’m swiftly going the way of the movie mogul Howard Hughes, who became a germophobic recluse. Marcel Proust, too, walled himself up in a succession of rooms to fend off real or imagined infection. (The French have a lovely verb “to cosset oneself”: se dorloter.)
It’s the old struggle between the spirit and the flesh. The spirit aspires to be virtuously stoical, but the flesh says: “Dorlotez-moi!”
…….
Karen Bradley, the new Northern Ireland secretary, enters into important negotiations this week with the political leaders in Belfast, in the hope of restoring the power-sharing executive there.
If women ran the world, would it be a better world? In Belfast, we have a perfect laboratory in which to test that theory. Karen Bradley is female, despatched to Belfast by a woman Prime Minister. The two main political leaders she will be encountering are also women, Arlene Foster of the DUP and Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin.
As it happens, the new leader of Sinn Féin in Dublin, Mary-Lou McDonald, is also female. Should Scotland play any advisory role in this set-up – many Ulster Protestants consider themselves Scots-Irish – Nicola Sturgeon can always be summoned from Edinburgh.
So, ladies, show us that sisterhood can indeed bring about political transformation where male rule has patently failed.
…….
Anyone with a nostalgic feeling for the old-style newspaper business will enjoy the new Steven Spielberg film The Post, starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. There is always a strong moral note in a Spielberg movie, the theme here being that a newspaper is doing the right thing by uncovering government deceit, even at risk to itself. In this case, it’s the truth about the Vietnam War, which America was losing and pretended to be winning.
Yet history isn’t that black and white. My late husband reported from Vietnam on three separate occasions, and by the end he found it much more complicated than he had at the beginning. The Americans waged war in the wrong way – brutal bombing forays – but their intentions in standing against communism were not always wrong.
Still, it’s the well-observed details in the film of how the presses operated – the hot metal that only the printers were allowed to touch, the roll-out of the editions – that’s so engaging.
The foreman who pressed that button to start the edition rolling was a very important guy. There’s a glimpse, too, of how many working-class men once toiled in tough jobs in the newspaper industry.
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