Thankful for sunshine amid the gloom

IT is quite a thing when you can reach your 60s and then one day have to admit to your kids: “Nope… I’ve never seen anything like this before, or anything remotely like it. I have no idea what is going to happen.”

Apart from a handful of epidemiologists, no one – no matter how worldly-wise – could say anything else in these extraordinary times. Anyone who claims to know how things will pan-out is either a fool or a liar. Even the specialists admit they’re only guessing.

There were a lot of experts during Brexit. Huge numbers of people knew best either way, even if 99.9 percent didn’t have a clue about international trade relations. Now there are very few homegrown experts – we’re all just watching our TVs and muttering: “Bimey!”

I was thinking this as I drove through the popular medieval village of Dunster where my daughter lives, taking some essential things to drop off at her doorstep. She has underlying health issues and has had the NHS letter advising her to stay strictly isolated.

Dear old Dunster. I’ve known it all my life. In fact, the first meeting I ever covered as a journalist was at the village parish council, held monthly in the old community hall by the famous Yarn Market, in the shadow of the mighty castle.

What I liked about it then – and what I still love about the village today – is that Dunster has the feel of ages. Even as a young reporter I felt this sense of history. Jotting my shorthand notes more than 40 years ago in the council chamber, I used to think: “This has all happened before. Everything they are discussing has happened in some way or another, time and time again. Everything is new, and yet nothing ever really changes.”

I still think that. Even though this pandemic is new and horrifying to all of us alive today, the councillors or local worthies of yesteryear will have discussed or worried over such a thing in places like Dunster many times before. A century ago there was Spanish Flu which hit an estimated 500 million people and killed more than the battles of the First World War. Before that there was the flu pandemic of 1889-1890, which killed a million people around the globe. You could go on and on – the Great Plague of London (1665-1666), the Black Death (1346-1353)…

Not exactly cheerful stuff. And yet there in the little council chamber in ancient Dunster they’d have had to come to terms with it as best they could. No matter how scary.

And let’s put the current situation into some perspective – those other pandemics would have been a great deal more frightening. Lack of ventilators wasn’t the problem – lack of any kind of healthcare was. Lack of medical knowledge regarding virus molecules or the reasons why some diseases are contagious. At least we know the reasons why people around us are getting ill. In those days neighbours just dropped dead.

Getting away from doom and gloom, I have fond memories of Dunster Parish Council. There was always something to amuse even a bored 17-year-old cub reporter. The chairman was a nice little man called Len Upham and he was completely bald – unlike the huge hirsute poodle he’d bring along to meetings, which would sit bolt upright in a chair next to him.

Among the councillors were two old men who were cousins, and they always argued about… well, about everything. Ding-dong, the rows would erupt across the big table and I used to get the giggles just watching Mr Upham and his poodle turning their heads in unison – this way and that – like two umpires at a tennis match.

The argument which earned me a month’s wages in freelance fees from a national newspaper was all about death. One of the cousins told the meeting his terrier had run up to him holding part of a human skull in its mouth. Alarmed, the old councillor discovered a small landslide had occurred in a disused part of the graveyard - so he went home, got a shovel and returned to make sure all the bones that had been exposed were put back beneath the sod.

But at the meeting his cousin was not at all happy: “How do ’ee know you got the right bones back down the right holes?” he asked, affronted that the dead had been treated with such a lack of dignity.

That was enough for me to arrange a photo of the temporary grave-digger and his terrier standing among the tombstones. I knew the local rag I worked for wouldn’t be interested, but the old councillor enjoyed a brief moment of fame after a national newspaper used the story. And I enjoyed a cheque for 50 quid – a fortune for me back in 1974.

Wouldn’t mind it now, actually. Seeing I am one of the hundreds of thousands who have managed to slip between all the government’s new packages to help workers and the self-employed.

But not the newly self-employed. Not that I am complaining. Researching past pandemics in this week’s sunshine, I have felt lucky to be alive. And I dearly hope that continues for us all…

How do ’ee know you got the right bones back down

the right holes?