Friday, 3 April 2020

This Crisis Is Bringing Out Long-Buried Skills


It’s amazing how this virus with its lock-down and social distancing edicts has made us draw on skills that have remained buried deep in our DNA for thousands of years. The streets are now filled with stealthy hunters gathering early in the mornings waiting for a herd of fast-disappearing Andrex or the ever-elusive face masks to come to the local watering hole.

Early hunter gatherers (graphic art courtesy of Mariella)
 
In Britain this crisis has also revealed that survival-of-the-fittest Darwinism and the population theories of Thomas Malthus (both Brits, by the way) are alive and well. One of the reasons that the UK lags far behind counties such as Germany in Coronavirus testing is that’s its initial response was the so-called ‘herd-immunity’ – something like ‘we’re all going to get sick anyway so let’s get sick and then the herd (us) will develop an immunity to this virus. If people die along the way, well that’s too bad but inevitable. So what’s the point of wasting money on testing.’ Underlying this belief was the unstated – publicly anyway – belief that this ‘culling of the herd’ was long overdue. It was a little disconcerting to hear people who get upset at the thought of culling badgers express such eagerness for culling a large part of the human population. Rather makes one feel like the sheep  just before Easter.


Time to think about moving on -- rapidly
After the death toll from the virus began to mount sharply and the potential cullees expressed some displeasure at being shipped off to the knacker’s yard the government did one of its patented U-turns. It announced it was working hard to ramp up testing and that its earlier policy was ‘misunderstood’. The government has quite a bit of ‘ramping’ to do. Germany – a country whose population is larger than the UK’s – manages at least 50,000 tests a day while the UK can’t even manage 10,000.

This enforced home stay has also reinforced my earlier belief that certain home appliances are not to be touched. I grant you that washing clothes has evolved a bit beyond women gathering at a local stream and beating one’s clothes over a handy rock. But it should not be beyond the wit of man to design a machine that does not require a degree in mechanical engineering to operate. In a burst of enthusiasm a few years ago when my wife was out I decided to help by doing the laundry. Simple, right? Put the clothes - regardless of color - in the machine, dump in a little washing powder, push a couple of buttons and away you go. Actually, not so simple. Confronted with a control panel that would not be out of place on a nuclear submarine one resorts to the tried-and-tested formula of ‘more is better than less and hotter is better than colder.’ Thinking to save drying time I moved what I thought was the spin dial to maximum, shut the door and proudly pushed the start button. Alas, the result when I opened the door about an hour later was not entirely satisfactory. First, what I thought was the spin dial was actually the heat dial. Therefore, some of the clothes that went into the washing machine emerged a few sizes smaller. My wife is small. But not that small. Second, the color. You know, it’s amazing what very hot water and too much washing powder will do to colors. Suffice it to say that my view that this by-now multi-colored blouse was quite stylish was not widely shared. Even in these dire times I am banned from the washing machine.

Oh well, we tried
Those of you have read my two previous posts will be delighted to hear that Emmanuel Kant has made it down from the upper reaches of the bookcase. Not to be read, mind you. Not yet, anyway. But in a fit of general cleaning it was declared that all those books were just gathering dust and it was time to take them down to way for a duster. It was similarly declared that as long as the authorities were talking about culling it just might be a good time to a little culling closer to home. I think one or two books might have been ‘deselected’ – temporarily at least – but the others were put back exactly as they were. Emmanuel was dusted and given pride of place where the sheer bulk of the volume gave it extra duty as a book-end. As for the deselected books. Now that the local charity shop has been closed for the duration I suspect those volumes will find their way back among their brethren.

1 comment:

Christine said...

I have a special relationship with Kant since one of my neighbours, a philosophy lecturer at a UK university, told me he was writing a manual on Kant. "Kant for Dummies?" I said. Yes indeed, he agreed. When I enquired about the progress of the mighty tome many weeks later, I was told that things weren't going well. Trying to be polite and desperate to think of something sympathetic to say, I blurted out "I suppose you just have to do a little bit every day!" When the manual was eventually completed, I received a lovely card thanking me for my inspired guidance, which I had some difficulty in recalling. And as an aside, I know the gentleman in question doesn't have a washing machine. There must be a link there, somewhere.