Well, hasn’t that been an eye-opening couple of weeks. I came back from the Mill Hill Souk to find the world changing right before my eyes. The only thing I can liken it to is how everything changed after 9/11. I was in the States with my Mother on that Tuesday; we went to bed on the 10th of September and I remember being called  by her, ‘Come and look at this’, and we sat on the bed watching the TV in total disbelief. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen both the best and worst of mankind – all human behaviour seems to have telescoped to a point. I’ve seen people trying to look after neighbours they hardly acknowledged before, I’ve seen people steal sanitiser gel from hospital wards, potentially condemning the sick to the possibility of sepsis. Before I start writing about other stuff, I hope you find the chart helpful. What you need to watch out for is a continual cough, a high temperature, and shortness of breath. All respiratory illness might have the usual cough/cold/flu symptoms but those three are red flags. Also, washing your hands and good hygiene is key. The virus might not kill young people in general but an opportunistic bacterial infection that piggybacks on a virus-weakened immune system can cause mayhem. If you are a vegetarian or vegan, unless your diet is exemplary, a course of extra multivitamins AND minerals, and maybe some iron supplementation might be something to consider – talk to your friendly local pharmacist.

It’s one thing to tell yourself that the stuff you accumulate is worthless; we all say it, but we don’t really believe it. It’s another thing to find life reduced to dried pasta, tinned tomatoes, and loo rolls. Even the things we think are sensible won’t help – we think we will have things to trade: gold, electronics, clothing. None of these are worth a thing when the only currency is Tamiflu, surgical spirit, and tinned peas. As a Christian, it brings into sharp focus Jesus asking, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul. What will a man exchange for his soul”, or in this case, what use is the Balenciaga bag or the Stella McCartney top if there is nowhere to wear it to, and no one to see it? It’s made many of us consider how and why we live, and even when (not if) we survive this virus, one day it will be game over. What next? And this isn’t THE pandemic, although the wretched media would have us believe otherwise with their scaremongering and incitement to panic. Turns out all the world needs is people to grow food and healthcare professionals and scientists to supply medication. And undertakers, sadly. Even if the power stations and water supply shut down, we would survive. But no food and no medicine? Not so much. At no time have I heard anyone say ‘If only I could see my lawyer or my facialist or my couturier’. Not that those things are worthless, we all play our part to make this planet work and play after all. But when push comes to shove, you end up with Italy….supermarkets and pharmacies. Even your GP can’t help unless she/he has a handy ventilator stored in a cupboard somewhere. It is entirely sobering.

And yet. This is exactly how the majority of the world lives – no power, no water, little food, no schools, no hospitals, no infrastructure. Can you imagine life in those refugee camps? The other thing that occured to me is that if you locked down the motorways, people in cities would starve within a fortnight. How did this happen – that we are so far from self-sufficiency? So much stuff is trucked in from elsewhere, it is absolutely crazy. We should start growing vegetables in those pretty gardens of ours if we have them. So, no working from home for pharmacists unfortunately but I have to say that although the job may sometimes be a pain in the neck, it’s at times like this that we realise how useful our profession is. When the surgeries are in lockdown and hospitals are guarded by the Army, I can guarantee that pharmacies will still be open and the staff will still be smiling – more or less 🙂 A big thank you to those ‘unskilled’ people who keep the country running, and to the awesome crowd filling our lives with memes and gifs. Some think the jokes are irreverent but I think, 1) over 40000 have died of the flu this year alone worldwide, and 60 million people die on average very single year, of not-coronavirus and 2) we are alive, and must live till we die. Redeem the time, hug a loved one, have a laugh. To this end, I have made a giant pot of ragu and will watch some brainless rubbish to calm my brain. I leave you with my favourite videos. I was going to share the ghastly coronavirus nail art but I’m holding back on grounds of taste. Stay safe, stay well, go see your Mother on Mother’s Day – she doesn’t want a present, she wants to see that her child is well and happy. Have a good one.

What have I been doing lately? Well, I’ve been having my portrait painted. Swank, eh? I know, I know, I ought to have been immortalised in paint ages ago, the whole nation cries 🙂 Still, here we are. I’d been asked a couple of times before (not counting the sleazy offers of ‘you could be a model, do you want some pictures taken?’) and never felt like it but it just gelled this time. Sitting for an artist is a very interesting experience. I would say I’m quite a still person, trained by hours of church services and zero-tolerance science teachers (or sadists as they’re called these days….) so I was surprised to see how much I talk with my whole body. Never mind talking with one’s hands, my entire body is hypermobile. Who knew? The most (or least?) infinitesimal movement changed the light and thus the painting so my poor exasperated portraitist had her work cut out. I took some photos of the initial slash -and- daub painting. When the final portrait is done, I’ll post it so you can see her work. She’s very talented.

Seeing as I dabble as well, we talked art throughout. We had pretty similar tastes but where I think Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon are superlative artists, she hates them but for precisely the same reason which is funny. I like the works because they are true to the artists – they are totally misanthropic and are crystal-clear in intent. It’s not pretty, but it’ss very good work. She hates them precisely because they’re so talented and hate people so much. We both love Jackson Pollock.

It made me really think about how and why I paint. My works are very mannered, and she was encouraging me to just take to the canvas and see what happens as I don’t paint like that. I’ve always thought it was because it’s not my style but really thinking about it, I think most artists paint and get their inner turmoil on canvas/metal/whatever. I paint to express inner calm: it’s the order I want to put down, not the chaos. Essentially, I see pattern everywhere: I constantly add, divide, factorise numbers, make words from letters, see patterns in everything. No matter how chaotic the system – clouds, gales, waves, fluttering leaves – I always feel I can just see the pattern if I only looked hard enough but I can never see it.