The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
What will lockdown reveal?
You might remember, in that wonderful sunny-hued film classic, The Wizard of Oz, the musical number where the three original friends of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tinman and the Cowardly Lion, sang wistfully of what they might be able to do and achieve if they only had (respectively) “a brain”, “a heart” or “some noive”, as the sublime Bert Lahr put it when speaking of the nerve needed to be King of the Forest.
Well, none of them, were they joining us here in 2020, would be allowed anywhere near the Yellow Brick Road for fear of being spotted by a police drone and fined more than the worth of a pair of ruby slippers.
But it isn’t a huge leap, of faith or anything else, to start to wonder, along the lines of that rather touching song, about what most of us would say is holding us back in this world, changing elementally though the world as we know it undoubtedly is.
I would surmise that it is not, for the most part, lack of brains, street smarts, ability, financial back-up, determination, application, opportunity or even sheer dumb luck, though most of us would admit to feeling that somewhere along the way, a general dearth of one or all of these things hasn’t exactly provided a leg-up when it was most needed. Nope. I reckon it’s all about time.
“I don’t have time for this.” “I’ll do it later.” “I’ve got other things to do.” “Can’t it wait?”.
The phrase “cash-rich and timepoor” may not apply to all of us, especially the first part, but we can all persuade ourselves to put something on the back burner when the fact is, we don’t really want to do it at all.
This was encapsulated for me by a Facebook post I was shown the other day, along the lines of: “After years of wanting to thoroughly clean my house but lacking time, now I discover that wasn’t the reason.”
I forgive the split infinitive for the pithily expressed sentiment. Bang to rights and nabbed bonny, in my case.
Lockdown has thrown up various conundrums and I freely admit I know perfectly well that I will not come out the other end of it with a sparkling house, a carefully-edited wardrobe and the makings of a significant novel or a mountain of home-made pasta.
Although I’ve started on the garden already, the ironing pile has never been lower and my technological abilities have expanded beyond all recognition. Who knew about Zoom before this? Not me, guv.
I have also become reacquainted with various truly terrible TV shows of my distant youth (Hart to Hart anyone? I love it!) and have discovered new and unfathomably deep sources of ingenious and highly creative songs and videos on Youtube, mostly involving the kind of language not suitable for reproduction in a family newspaper but hilarious – and amazingly appropriate – all the same.
As someone else put it, previous generations were asked to go out and fight wars. We’ve being asked to stay at home and sit on the couch – although let’s not pretend that any of this is as facile as that makes it sound. Especially when millions of hitherto under-appreciated, under-paid and over-worked employees are batting their pans in every hour of every day, literally to save lives and shore up the social structure. And even those of us
“Previous generations were asked to go to war. We’ve been asked to sit on the couch...
who might very recently have been described as “economically inactive” and therefore a useless drain on the state, are rushing around trying to help our friends, neighbours and often, complete strangers, in any way we can.
With certain notable exceptions, the public generally has been covering itself with glory, as have various companies and organisations who have come up with solutions, ideas and new scientific developments off their own bat and in a matter of days.
But there is, in some ways, a delicious irony to be found in previous attitudes ascribed to some of the people now purporting to govern us.
Let us for a moment, turn back briefly to the enlightened days of 2012 when a slim volume, labouring under the loaded title of Britannia Unchained, was published. Its perpetrators were five Conservative MPs of the 2010 intake who used its pages to posit a new way forward for a revitalised nation, simply groaning with vim, vigour and prosperity.
Those involved included Priti Patel (strange how little we have heard from her in recent times), Liz Truss (ditto), Kwasi Kwarteng (there’s a pattern emerging here) and Dominic Raab (we have but we wish we hadn’t). Phrases were used such as: “Too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work.” “The UK rewards laziness.” “Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world.” Oh, really?
In my cursory – some would no doubt say lazy, researches and given the constraints on my time, I didn’t find the name of the fifth author. And like most of the British population described by them and their colleagues, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered.