Did Dominic Cummings kill my mother?
IT doesn’t matter whether, by the time you read this, government adviser Dominic Cummings still has a job or is in the stocks at Templecombe in Somerset waiting for the rest of us to throw tomatoes at him from a safe distance.
Given his cross-country virusspreading antics, that distance is crucial. In case you missed it, just before the Cummings scandal reminded us that rules don’t matter, the government issued a rather odd guide to what the two metre distance looks like.
They recommend we think of a fridge, bench or a few chairs as a guide but left us free to invent regional variations which make more sense to us outside the M25. For those of you reading this on the Somerset Levels, you must stay three eels away from everyone else, even if you actually see anyone else down there at all.
Cotswolds readers will know to put about the length of a laying down pony between themselves and the nearest human. In Wiltshire, of course, a safe distance is about the height of standing stone (except on its side) at Avebury. For Bristol folk, it’s the same distance as 15 hipster beards. Over in Bath and North East Somerset, just imagine Jacob ReesMogg MP in that photograph of him reclining in the House of Commons. Or maybe not.
Which brings us back to Dominic Cummings. All roads lead to him, not least because he seems to have driven on so many of them during these past few weeks.
The news about his lockdown transgressions broke while I was cycling out from Bristol to Saltford for some weekend exercise and a rest beside the River Avon. The roads, paths and river were busy but people were doing their best to stay the distance of, say, one lying special adviser from each other.
On the way back, we stopped at the Warmley Waiting Rooms café, which has recently reopened for take-away business. Cyclists and walkers alike queued sensibly to be served by scrupulously safe and friendly staff who gave us the first taste in months of what it’s like to be served a fancy coffee.
But Cummings and his lot cast a shadow over the weekend, and led to dark thoughts. Like this: it looks like one of his first 260-mile lockdown trips took him within a few miles of my mother’s home. I hadn’t seen her or any of my wider family recently because, like you, I was following the rules even when it hurt.
Up and down the motorway Cummings went, and around the same day as at least one of his trips my mother was diagnosed with Covid in the morning and died – alone – by the evening.
Did Dominic Cummings kill my mum? Who knows, but she didn’t grow that virus by herself and must have caught it from someone. Given that almost nobody was on the move in those early lockdown days, it’s not unreasonable to point the finger at the few who were. That’s how it works, although the mechanics of it seem to have been misunderstood by some of those who believe they are fit to rule over us.
By the end of the weekend, my family phone calls and social media groups were red hot with the fury that comes with being bottled up for two months, bereaved, then told the rules weren’t really rules anyway.
You will have heard it all before, and it’s likely many of you feel the same: we could have seen our kids, grandchildren, parents, siblings and the rest, if only we had known it was OK to be like Cummings.
For some of you, it may have been the last chance to see family members but you turned it down to save everyone else and it worked – just look at those tumbling death rates; you did that, putting the safety of others before your own instincts.
You’re still beating the virus now - the boaters on the Avon steering around each other; the patient cyclists on the path pulling over to make room; the family-minded folk who have been sacrificing the contacts that make life worth living.
Out of all this anger, then, comes the good news that the great British public knows the difference between right and wrong. It’s a reminder that, in a democracy, it’s not the people who have to explain and defend themselves to the government but the other way around.
Those in Downing Street are our our servants, not our masters; perhaps, just perhaps, the combination or our anger and achievements will wake them up to that fundamental truth.