They can lock me down, but they can't make me read Proust
Well – it’s all going well so far, this “staying in for ever” thing. My anxiety flares up at different times and mostly takes the form of intense irritation at particular groups of people. But I don’t mind being angry, as that is the thing that stops me being depressed. So far I have managed to have a row with the foolish hippies in the local health food shop about the stupid sign in the window about the only doctors you need being Dr Happy and Dr Nutrition and some other new-age nonsense. I merely pointed out that we might need, you know … some actual doctors.
Special venom has been reserved for joggers ( I note they now all call themselves runners) who pound every public place full of mucus, assuming they have right of way, and never seeming to observe the two-metre rule. Stay in. Do star jumps.
Then there are the public figures whom it is now finally permissible to hate, from Kirstie Allsopp, currently writing a diary of self-absorption, to Prince Charles, who managed to get tested, even though the BBC reported that his symptoms had been ‘“mild” – and this at a time when most frontline workers have not had tests – to the usual roll-call of businessmen who turn out to be selfish monsters. Whoever coulda known?
But my biggest bugbear at the moment is the well-meaning advice trotted out all the time by people who clearly have no real understanding of how life is for most people. I comprehend that there are many decent folk trying to help people with their mental health. All of this advice can
be summed up in one word: structure. None of it does anything for me as it also weirdly assumes some superannuated Protestant work ethic that is clearly no longer applicable.
What is this getting up early and sitting at your desk fully dressed nonsense? Anyone who has had a truly shite job knows that pretending to look busy when there is nothing to do is harder work than any actual work.
Also, all those analysts who predict the future have already been telling us that tech will take at least 40% of our jobs away anyway. So we have to make lives where working less is part of them.
So here is the chance: do nothing. Do whatever gets you through the night as the death toll rises.
Women cannot be at home half-working and home schooling. This is ridiculous. I am sorry if my suggestion that most work and most school is utterly meaningless sends you into an existential crisis, but we are in one anyway.
Watch the news or don’t watch the news. Its hard to avoid the presence of basically giant morgues being built. Maybe this is why all these exhortations to go on some self-improvement kick sit so uneasily with me.
We are already being told what to do by the government, and we know we have to do it. Now this other layer of “experts” appear to tell us how to exercise, have educational fun and games with the children and bond with the family. Have any of these folk been cooped up with kids and their own family? It’s a bloody nightmare.
Yes, now apparently is the time to learn a new language. Sure, I did Mandarin last week. Or there is calligraphy, as Stephen Fry suggested. Or you can clean. Whoopee! Or rearrange your book cases. Who are these people? I have never arranged my bookcase in my life, or got up early to sit at a desk.
Why, as the world collapses, am I meant to do this now?
If I want to stay up all night watching strange German movies it’s up to me. If I want to be a slattern again, it’s my choice.
I never managed Proust in pre-virus days, so don’t saddle me with him now, for God’s sake. Let me be, and you rush around doing whatever it is that makes you feel better. The obsession with “productivity” is odd. Except if you are a frontline worker. Then I bow down to you, I really do.
Someone check in on Madonna, please – from her Instagram she appears to be locked in a bathroom. And a big-up to Britney, who is now some kind of Bolshevik. But please, no more chinup cheerleading.
The only useful advice I have had was from someone I did mushrooms with in Amsterdam. Don’t @ me, it’s legal there. He gave me a stick-man drawing that said: “This is Bill. Bill wants to take a trip but Bill doesn’t want to contract corona. Bill chooses to take a trip at home. With mushrooms. Be responsible, be like Bill.” Now that is actually helpful. And who can possibly say? Doable.
• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist
kill off the old Phil Ochs for good. In the 2010 Ochs documentary There But for Fortune, Sonny Ochs, his sister, describes his final days in early 1976 at her house in Far Rockaway, New York. Broke and exhausted, he would sometimes sit at Sonny’s piano and pick out the mournful, sublime melody of Jim Dean of Indiana, possibly the last music he would ever play. He died by suicide.
History will rightly remember Phil Ochs for his topical protest songs, among the sharpest ever written in American folk music, and in Greatest Hits we’re able to see where the strength of his conviction came from.
The boy in the movie house worshipping at the feet of James Dean, and America, a place he loved dearly and believed could be better, more humane and forgiving. In the days before his death, Ochs asked his brother Michael:
“Do you think the songs will be remembered?” He needn’t have worried. His beloved and scorned gold lamé suit, meanwhile, hangs in the archive of that other great American protest singer: Woody Guthrie.