One of the great regrets in my life is that I put attendance at a Parent-Teacher evening ahead of going to a concert to see Ian Dury and the Blockheads. It turned out to be one of his last tours before he died of cancer in 2000 after a tumultuous life that combinED vaudeville, music hall and punk with an ear for lyrics that is wholly English. For any teenager living in the south of England in the 1970s and 1980s songs like Plaistow Patricia, Billericay Dickie and England’s Glory, captured every home-town character and Saturday night out.
But yesterday I was reminded of him and the quirky Reasons to be Be Cheerful, Pt 3, tune filled with small and large parts of life that needed to be enjoyed just for existing. Combining nanny goats, health service glasses and porridge oats, with states of “being in my nuddy”, “being rather silly”, and the much more serious “Bantu Steven Biko” and “curing smallpox” is a work on the nature of being human. But the reason it came to mind was its reminder of the fragility of all those things.
“Yes, yes
Dear, dear
Perhaps next year
Or maybe even never”
With that in mind getting my first haircut since the California pandemic lockdown began in March 2021 was a might good reason to be cheerful. Sitting in a barber shop where the stereo played Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate before bursting into Thunderstruck by AC/DC was a reminder of the atmosphere that The Blacktree Barberia summoned up with effortless swagger and goodwill. Giacomo did a stellar job with my head of hair that had been sheared twice in the year with dog clippers but had become a haystack of near Boris Johnson chaos.
All this on a day that the notion of a European Super League had risen and then sunk without trace to the joy and delight of long-term football supporters everywhere. The best meme noted that it was starting to “look like the lads night out before everyone asks the missus if it’s OK”. We found 12 of Europe’s best known, most historical and honour laden clubs stripped of their dignity and class in just a few short hours of selfish money-grubbing hubris.
The logical questions about Leicester having as many Premier League championships as Liverpool, the two Nottingham Forest European Cups not counting for anything and every single reason Tottenham Hotspur didn’t deserve a place were rife. But it took a Russian oligarch and the Qatar Royal Family, withdrawing Chelsea and Manchester City respectively, to truly sink an idea that didn’t deserve to be floated in the first place. American owners, the Italians, Real Madrid and the aforementioned Spurs (or possibly just Daniel Levy) were left clinging to the wreckage for a while before, at the last count, three Italian clubs were left to play against Real Madrid for precisely nothing.
My third reason to be cheerful had come just over ten days ago with the reopening of the Whistlestop Bar which is sometimes known as ‘the bar that can’. It’s a dark cavern of a room which until recently only accepted cash and where choosing wine was more of a lottery than the bush tucker trials on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. It’s a strange thing to miss a bar quite so much but the possible loss of one of South Park’s institutions and the best local place to hear reliably brilliant British music was a constant fear.
All of this came as I reached the end of my fourteen day, personally enforced exclusion period after having the one-shot Johnson and Johnson vaccine. The pace and efficacy of medical science in moving to combat the coronavirus has been mightily impressive and the vanishingly small risks involved in having the vaccines seems a price worth paying. I know that the J&J route to usage has been bumpy and I’ll certainly be cautious about blood clots but it seems a far better chance to take than the alternative.
I’d had serious vaccine envy as many people I know had found that their age, job or country of residence had enabled them to leap ahead of me in moving with more freedom and security. I certainly hadn’t expected to be in line for a shot myself until end of May or even into June so there’s plenty to be happy about in an April jab. There is so much to come as the world re-emerges from its enforced hibernation even if the need for continued caution and care is self-evident and the likelihood of a ‘new normal’ is still many months away.
While I’m not sure that a guilty verdict in a murder trial can be a reason for cheerfulness it’s impossible to live in the US without being touched by the killing of George Floyd and the way it distilled a history of oppression, violence and persecution. The verdict finding Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts against him came just as I was about to walk to get my hair cut which reflected how the weighty and the trivial often coincide in human life. For anyone who believes in the rule of law it seemed the validation of a process that has often been found wanting in the past.
The great sadness is that nothing can bring George Floyd back and there are many other recent and pending cases where the same issues will be raised. But it felt like a glimmer of hope and an assertion of justice being applicable to everyone in a country where that has seemed more a hollow assertion than a fact. Not a reason to be cheerful but just, perhaps, a small nod in the direction of a better future.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay