Now so many of us have real grievances, let’s hear less from all those spouting daft made-up ones
ONLY when the tide goes out,’ according to the great investor Warren Buffett, ‘do you discover who has been swimming naked.’ The tide of the major economies like our own is certainly going out at the moment. Never in our lifetimes have we seen a period of such enforced economic inactivity.
But just as there will be many negative things because of this pandemic, so will there be positive things to take away from it, too.
None of us knows the future. But this crisis should push us to think what we want to be as a country when it is over. And I hope it will finally call time on so many of the daft, right- on obsessions that have recently wasted so much of our attention.
Many of us will have legitimate grievances as a consequence of this disaster ( as a nation, we will certainly be significantly poorer). So, will we hear a bit less from those people with imaginary ones?
A bit less from those attention-seekers who pretend that anything that’s true or honest makes them feel ‘unsafe’.
And a bit less from those who present our country as though it’s the worst place in the world when it’s noticeable that even now people are crossing the Channel, one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world, in an illegal attempt to get here.
I hope we will be a bit less obsessed with the whole ‘look-at-me’ celebrity culture. While multi-millionaire Victoria Beckham was attempting to get the taxpayer to subsidise her fashion business and the whiny pop singer Sam Smith was getting photographed looking miserable in a mansion, Captain Tom was on his feet to raise more than £30 million for the National Health Service as he approached his 100th birthday.
That’s the spirit this country had in the past, and can have once again.
To get it back, we should remember some of those people we have taken for granted in recent years.
Take the people who, like Tom Moore, have chosen to serve in our Armed Forces. At times it has seemed that the only thing we want to do is to prosecute them.
Perhaps now we’ve seen soldiers of the Royal Anglian Regiment and the Royal Gurkha Rifles help build a 4,000patient hospital in just nine days, we might remember that there is something to be said for our soldiers, sailors and airmen and women.
Even our police chiefs might take some lessons from this new reality. Perhaps they will recognise that in serious times we need a serious force. Over recent weeks we have seen some officers over-react to the Government’s social distancing guidelines with disgraceful stupidity. It is merely the latest example.
This heavy-handedness is not, for the most part, the fault of ordinary coppers. Rather, we should blame the politically correct higher-ups who have spent years trying to turn the force into the thoughtpolice and prioritise ‘ hate- crime’ over actual, real crime.
It is easy to see where other people need to mend their ways, of course. Far harder is to ask what things in our own lives we should consider amid the fall- out from this devastating epidemic. The truth is that we’ve all contributed to our problems in one form or another.
LOOK at the scale of manufacturing we’ve allowed to escape from these shores in favour of products made more cheaply, often in China. Whatever your political viewpoint, we’ve all been guilty of this.
Together, we acquired a taste for disposable goods – clothing in particular – even as people in the UK lost their jobs to this grand global undercutting.
Perhaps when this country picks itself up we might realise that we need products which are of good, lasting quality and which can be manufactured closer to home.
Our fragile supply chains have been hopelessly exposed. Surely, when the next crisis comes, we will want to buy medicines and material produced here in Britain or by our closest friends. Who wants to rely on the generosity or compliance of the Chinese Communist party, a deceitful bunch of arsonists who just burned down the world’s economy?
Of course there will be political extremists who will try to use this situation to drive us in their own political directions.
Anti-capitalist activists and others, including groups like Extinction Rebellion, the environmental obsessives, look upon the corona pandemic as a great opportunity.
From the start of the outbreak they have been hoping to persuade the world that this is how the planet ‘heals’ from the blight of
We’ve had a glimpse of what the fanatics’ grudge-laden green utopia might look like
us human beings. Yet what we have been going through in recent weeks is as nothing compared to the lives we would have to live if the green and anti-capitalist extremists had their way. Trying to be as kind as possible to our planet is one thing. It must be balanced, however, with being kind to the odd human being.
Just as our strange new world has given us a glimpse of what their grudge-laden dystopia might look like, so it has also given some of us a reminder of what the better things in life are like.
We have re-learned what communities of real meaning are. After years of bemoaning the death of the high street and then using the nearest huge supermarket, many of us have remembered local shops, institutions run by dedicated, hard-working businessmen and women. These shops support communities which support them in turn. It is wonderful to see family grocers thriving.
Technology, of course, has allowed us to keep in touch with loved ones with unimaginable efficiency. Yet in a world where some people have thousands of virtual friends, we have remembered that human contact matters more than anything.
We have spent years fixed to our screens but recent weeks have reminded us to look up, out and beyond. And to take part in life.
We have seen a huge upsurge in volunteering, for example. Of people helping to look after their real, non-virtual local communities. As a nation we have been busy helping out family members, friends and neighbours.
And in a world with an ever-decreasing attention span we have had the opportunity to spend time thinking and reading about things with real meaning.
When all this is finally over, we might wonder how it ever came to be that we made too little time for family and friends.
I hope we will have remembered – and permanently – what it means to be a good family person, a good friend and a good neighbour.
There is plenty of bad to come from this disaster, but it has reminded us of human virtues at risk of being forgotten.
The opportunity for a better world lies in all of our hands.
THERE comes a point in every child’s life when they realise their parents aren’t invincible. That moment, for me, came later than for most: my father, the explorer Robin HanburyTenison, had seemed indestructible even into his 80s. But that changed six weeks ago when, desperately ill with coronavirus, he was rushed to hospital by medics in hazmat suits. We haven’t seen him since.
While we were shocked at the suddenness and the terrible danger he found himself in, I know that my father was not surprised, for a global pestilence is what he had predicted in his new and alarmingly prescient book.
He had believed such a catastrophe was imminent, although he had never imagined that he would be among its first victims.
Even as Taming The Four Horsemen: Radical Solutions To Defeat Pandemics, War, Famine And The Death Of The Planet was published in February, Covid-19 had begun to silently work its way through Europe.
His thesis is clear: we humans have consistently and wilfully neglected the world we rely upon to sustain us. Deforestation, intensive agriculture and rampant consumerism have destroyed the natural environment and left us vulnerable to contagions and risks we as yet barely understand.
History teaches us that, without fertile lands, there is hunger and war, epidemics and climate change. This pattern has destroyed civilisations for centuries, he says, and now we face the same fate.
As a veteran explorer and conservationist, who has seen the impact of viruses on remote tribes, his anger is deep-seated.
Now 83, my father has led more than 30 expeditions around the globe, was one of the founders of the tribal peoples’ charity, In his book he said the danger will be from a new virus, a strain of influenza. Sound familiar?
Survival International, and has written 27 books about his travels and the indigenous people he has lived with.
The Four Horsemen – with a foreword written by the Prime Minister’s father Stanley Johnson – was inspired by a trip to Central America to visit old Mayan temples and pyramids. This once huge civilisation of around two million people collapsed very quickly and has almost entirely disappeared, leaving just a few relics to fuel the imagination.
To my father, the parallels were clear. Pestilence, famine, war and death – the four horsemen of the apocalypse – had wiped out the Mayans. And epidemiologists all agree: we, too, were long overdue a pandemic.
The risk today is the speed of its spread as the rate of global travel transports it across continents in hours.
In the book, he writes: ‘ Pandemics are extremely difficult to predict and difficult to prepare for. They all start with a random event: a pathogen crossing to humans from another species. The real danger is a brand new virus, probably a strain of influenza.’ Sound familiar?
Today, he lies in hospital, recuperating after a month under sedation in intensive care, a victim of the modern plague he had warned society it was facing.
But there is hope – not just for his own health, but for the world as we know it. Unlike ancient civilisations, he reasons, we have the technology to overcome this and other threats. Scientists are investigating the influence of the ecosystem of bacteria and organisms which live in our digestive system (the gut biome), which may have a role in our ability to fight disease, our physical health and even our moods. Our bodies are ‘literally riddled with life’, he says.
Harnessing this power could be a more sustainable way to combat pandemics, rather than creating new chemicals and drugs – particularly when antibiotic resistance is such a growing problem. And, crucially, it
will be alongside nature that I hope my father makes his recuperation when he returns to our family farm, Cabilla, in rural Cornwall, which he bought in early 1960, aged 23. He turned his hand to everything from dairy, sheep and cattle to angora goat breeding, red deer blood stock and wild boar luxury meat farming. Every tree was planted by him and he knows every wildflower, bush and bird.
He has always been a man of nature, whether sleeping in the Kalahari Desert with bushmen or slinging his hammock in the Amazon rainforest and listening to jaguars prowling beneath him throughout the night.
Several years ago, I took the farm over after I left the Army. My wife Lizzie and I live in the old farmhouse and my parents live in a barn conversion across the yard.
My parents returned from a skiing trip in France in early March so we maintained a strict two-metre distance between us.
Within a couple of days my father developed a dry cough. Unusually, he felt weak just walking in the garden and, by the evening, he had a temperature and was struggling to breathe. So we called an ambulance and he was taken away by paramedics, unable to hug any of us goodbye. Within 24 hours of his arrival at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth he was sedated and on a ventilator with confirmed coronavirus. He was kept sedated for almost a month and we were told that, at his age and in his condition, he had a 20 per cent chance of survival.
We swung from hopeless optimism and faith in his virility and determination, to dejected misery. His lungs were failing; then his kidneys stopped working and he was put on dialysis. This lowered his chances even further. Without the constant kindness and calm care he – and we – received from the nurses on the intensive care unit, we would have given up hope.
When they began to wake him up, he suffered terribly from a severe bout of sedation delirium. Finding yourself surrounded by strangers in full facial PPE with multiple tubes running in and out of your body would be terrifying at the best of times. Submerged in a fog of tranquillisers, antibiotics and other drugs it is panic-inducing and disorientating.
Several times he needed to be re-sedated and at no point did he seem lucid or aware of where he was. The first time we were able to speak to him properly was a moment I will never forget. The nurses had wheeled his bed out into a ‘secret garden’ they have at Derriford for ICU patients. He had the sun on his face and greenery in the background.
He didn’t make a great deal of sense. However, before lapsing into confusion, he looked up at the sky and said how much he’d missed the blue, and complimented the staff on the few flowers that were growing. Even this minimal exposure to a natural environment seemed to trigger the turning point in his recovery. It would be a long road but my father was slowly coming back to us.
I have long believed in the healing power of the natural world and have spent many hours immersed in peaceful woodland while battling my own demons from three tours of Afghanistan. A Japanese study has showed that forest environments promote lower concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol, lower pulse rate and lower blood pressure.
With that in mind, we had already planned to open our farm as a nature retreat, where people can come to escape the stress and pressure of their busy lives. Our first guests were due this month; the opening now delayed because of the Covid crisis. But it’s fitting that it will be my father who will now be the first to recuperate there. And I know that, when we get the old explorer back, his condition will improve rapidly.
The first step will be to gently return him to the woods he knows so well to drink in the air and gaze upon his old friends, the oaks, that dapple the light that reaches the ground and which provide homes and food for the bursting ecosystem that they support.
Having already started rewilding the farm – returning species such as beavers, water voles, pine martens and, eventually, red squirrels – that have been lost over the past few centuries, there’s a wonderful sense of poetry in the idea that we’ll also be rewilding my father. Returning him to nature after his medical journey.
Pulling the fences out on the land will be like pulling all those drips out of his arm.
My father left intensive care a couple of weeks ago and is now in a rehabilitation ward while they strengthen him before, hopefully, returning him home. He is not out of the woods yet but all of the nurses and doctors have been amazed by his tenacity and refusal to succumb, against all the odds.
It has probably been his most extraordinary adventure to date. In all his years of being my hero, he hasn’t let me down yet.
In fact, he’s already said he has two plans for his release: to write a book about his experiences, and to perform a series of challenges to raise money so more ICUs can build gardens. Sunlight, fresh air and some greenery can perform wonders.
In these uncertain times, it’s a lesson we would all do well to remember.
He was sedated for a month. We were told he had just a 20 per cent chance of survival