The Hidden Abode

 

It has been held that the Universe constitutes a thermodynamically closed system, and if this were true it would mean that a time must finally come when the Universe "unwinds" itself, no energy being available for use. This state is referred to as the "Heat Death of the Universe."

What constitutes life today? What is a home? What is work, what is a school? Where are they? Where are we? What are we?

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We are adaptable. Flexible. Resilient. Productive. Innovative. Positive. Above all, we are individuals, on a journey, as pliable as the tools we use, copied and pasted, regularly updated, equipped with the latest climate-proof clothing and anti-viral software.

'What’s the problem?' 

'I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.'

Outside, in the yard, the rubbish piles up.

Solutions for your busy life, confirmed

A 5-year-old clicks through exercises on a laptop. Last week she had a high temperature and understandably would not submit to a lateral flow test, so this week she is not allowed to go to school or see other children. Having reported the symptoms and accepted the consequences (for fear of worse consequences if he didn’t), her father asked, via the online portal through which the teachers communicate with parents, for some materials to be provided relating to the topics listed for this week. He was sent a generic ‘isolation timetable’ dating from the previous term (when the child was also off for a week) consisting of some CBeebies links and suggestions such as making a rocket out of recycling, and tersely told to look up resources online. The implication was that to expect anything more was unreasonable. Yes, this is a common and predictable occurrence, yes we have a range of resources at our disposal, and yes the child’s absence is due not to illness but to government policy. But, well, we are very busy. In the absence of a negative test result, the responsibility for your child’s education has been passed over to you. Thank you for your co-operation.

Luckily the father does not have to ‘work’ during school hours (actually how much this is luck and how much a matter of being excluded from paid employment opportunities due to childcare responsibilities is something of a grey area), so is ‘free’ to set up and supervise the child’s learning, cajole her into maths and phonics, tend to her needs, clean up after her and make desultory attempts at housework. In the bedroom the child’s mother works full-time for a large public sector organisation. Her desk is a window sill. A rubbish-and-dogshit-strewn patch of turf behind the block counts as a communal ‘garden’. The wifi sags under the strain of homeworking and homeschooling. On weekend mornings he works as a cleaner. He used to write. 

In the evenings they watch the news.

NHS data shows callouts for problems such as heart attacks and strokes are taking nearly three times as long as they should in England.

Targets are being missed in the rest of UK too, with some seriously-ill waiting up to nine hours for an ambulance.

Investigations are ongoing into deaths linked to delays in a number of areas. These include:

A person died following a cardiac arrest after waiting more than five hours in the 
back of an ambulance outside Worcestershire Royal Hospital

A death in the East of England after it took crews an hour to get to a call classed as immediately life-threatening. The individual was found dead

With ambulance services under their highest states of alert patients are being told to make their own way to hospital where possible.

It is usual in our sick society for politicians and business executives to be detached from the lives of the people over whom they wield power; this is part of their parasitic self-serving hypocrisy, on which they should be challenged and held to account. But a second-order detachment seems to have occurred by which the people reporting and commenting on politics, and supposedly holding those in power to account, now seem to to be required to inhabit the same remote world as those politicians and business executives, and a different world to the rest of us. It is in all their interests - politicians, chief executives, advisors, management consultants, editors, columnists, opinionators - to keep the news rolling, to keep the show on the road. Journalists pass on snippets of parliamentary gossip like off-duty courtiers and report on welfare cuts and deportations as if they were episodes from a TV drama, a bottomless box set of triumph and tragedy, characters and cliffhangers, set-pieces which resemble real life but are not part of it. And we watch, stunned, as the same breathless, depthless tone is applied to Covid, even as it becomes apparent by the most cursory joining of dots that the government, through its negligence and callousness, has allowed thousands of people to die and then blamed the public for it. All this is just grist to the content-mill. To pause the drama in order to step outside it and look at how the narrative is being shaped and in whose interests, to actually look at politics politically, would be a career-ending offence. It is their duty to impel knee-jerk excitement at each new WhatsApped twist and turn, no matter how horrific or banal. Their job is not to inform or educate but merely to keep people watching and clicking.

He tries to picture Hugh Pym languishing on an NHS waiting list, Owen Jones opening a DWP brown envelope, Ayesha Hazarika on a rail replacement bus service. It is impossible.

He goes outside to the yard and flings another full rubbish bag on top of the overflowing wheelie bins. Does Laura Kuenssberg have to put up with his? He wonders as he goes back in. 

On the fluted and flowered white plastic lid of the diaper bin she has written in Blushing Pink Nitetime lipstick a phrase to ward off fumey ammoniac despair. "The nitrogen cycle is the vital round of organic and inorganic exchange on earth. The sweet breath of the Universe." On the wall by the washing machine are Yin and Yang signs, mandalas, and the words, "Many young wives feel trapped. It is a contemporary sociological phenomenon which may be explained in part by a gap between changing living patterns and the accommodation of social services to these patterns." Over the stove she had written "Help, Help, Help, Help, Help."

The child is not eating properly. She refuses all but two types of dinner offered to her. She will not eat any vegetables. Whole meals are thrown away. The problem has been going on for over a year. People say it’s just a phase.

He phones the GP surgery. Do they have a dietitian linked to the surgery who can dispense advice? (Not to actually see the child. No-one expects that any more, except in A&E or cancer wards.) The administrator goes to check.

As he waits on the phone he looks out of the window at the heaps of rubbish overflowing from the communal bins, like a stinking cliché of social decay. How long has it been now - three weeks, four?

The question remains, then, what it might mean to “refuse” the work of social reproduction as it is presently organized and divided. As feminists have learned, refusing domestic work is a far more difficult project with potentially more far-reaching effects. In my opinion, the refusal of work in this terrain involves at minimum, the critique of the family as the institutional lynchpin of the social relations of domestic reproductive labor and the family ethic as its ideological support. At maximum it means confronting the entire organization of work and life.

There is no dietitian. It will need to be a referral from a GP, who will need to speak to you. You will need to phone at 8.15am to make a same-day appointment.

The surgery has been run this way since before the pandemic. It does not operate a proper appointments system. Anyone who wants to see a GP must ring at 8.15am - on the dot, not a minute earlier (answerphone) or later (engaged) - and try to get through to an administrator, who will ask a series of questions and decide whether a slot can be allocated on that day. Now of course, in the pandemic era, the prize at the end of the 8.15 phone-in lottery is invariably not an in-person appointment, but another phone call.

This means patients become rivals in a competition for spaces, who have to be ready to play the game, guessing the right time to ring and upselling their distress to get a slot. This system is regarded as completely normal, and anyone who takes issue with the surgery for imposing it is deemed unreasonable. The ‘appointments’ are not even really appointments; a five-minute phone call will be scheduled between, say, 11am and midday, and the person has to wait near the phone and be prepared to drop whatever they are doing when it rings.

It is difficult to think of a system more likely to discriminate against people with mental health problems, and to exacerbate those problems. If someone is suffering from depression and already feels worthless, let alone ready to push past other people to get help, this system will not enable that person to seek support, it will do the opposite. If you are already suffering from anxiety, waiting for the clock to tick round to 8.15 and scrambling to get through, then winning a few moments of clinical attention but still not knowing when the phone will ring or if you will miss the call and lose your slot (as has happened to people, for instance with physical disabilities) is guaranteed to cause huge distress.

The deterrent aspect also encourages people to put off addressing health problems - with themselves, or with their children - until they become more acute, and require more intervention, take up more resources, create more stress and long-term complications, and lead to less time for routine appointments. And so it goes on.

None of this is of any interest to the administrators. It’s just how it is, sir. As for the clinicians, who knows? They are so remote and their time is so mysterious and precious that every second has to count towards the immediate issue.

Hello, you are through to the NHS. We cannot help you. Please do not attempt to visit your GP surgery. Stay at home, or go to work. Good morning, this is the NHS. Please do not use our service if you can avoid it. Press 1 to continue, or hang up. Good morning, you are through to the world-renowned, world-beating NHS. All our staff are very busy saving lives right now. If we leave our duties to answer your call, someone in real need could die as a result. Do you want that on your conscience? If the answer is ‘Yes’, please hold. If the answer is ‘No’, please don’t bother us. There are apps, there are websites, there are over-the-counter pills. Why not use them? Good morning, this is the NHS. Have you considered going private? Good morning, you are through to the NHS, the UK’s leading heritage healthcare brand. If you need us, this means you have failed to keep yourself well; just like if you are claiming welfare benefits it is because you have failed to keep yourself financially healthy. Please hold. We are very busy. You, evidently, are not. Thank you for your understanding.

The call menus, the leaflets, the banners outside the A&Es, all proclaim: Hello, this is the NHS. Do you actually have a problem, or are you the problem?  

Dido Harding said England's Test and Trace service was "an essential component in the fight against Covid” and promised it would be carrying on for some time to come.

The controversial service was given another £15bn in government cash in last week's budget, taking its total funding to £37bn over two years.

Experts said the sum was "vast" and gave Test and Trace a budget equivalent to the entire system of public safety, including prisons, police and criminal courts.

Test and Trace currently employs around 2,500 consultants, who are paid an estimated average daily rate of around £1,100, going up as high as £6,624 - rates Baroness Harding defended as "very competitive".

Although Test and Trace has a £37bn budget, it is not known how much money it has actually spent, nor what its future plans are.

There is an alternative way of booking appointments, the administrator reminds him (the role of the surgery administrator has changed from booking appointments to telling people how to book appointments; again, this is perfectly normal and reasonable, and to suggest otherwise may be regarded as abuse of our hard-working staff who are here to help you) - you can go through the surgery’s online portal. Later he visits the surgery’s website to reacquaint himself with this portal. First you need to find the tab which takes you to a generic corporate booking site. Then to make an appointment you need to log in, and to log in you need to enter a username and a password. To create a username you need a ‘Patient ID’, which you need to get by contacting the surgery. Kafka would be proud. A Kafkaeqsue portal, leading not to a distant dimension but to somewhere utterly banal that used to take just a few seconds to reach, but now takes hours or weeks.

Can I not book an appointment over the phone then? He asks. The institutional voice tightens. Yes, we do have some appointments. The earliest we have is Thursday, 3 and a half weeks away, between 7am and 8am.

A phone consultation, in three and a half weeks’ time, at 7 in the morning. Offered matter-of-factly, without any glimmer of its absurdity. He can hear her waiting for him to turn it down.

OK, I’ll take it.

OK, I’ll take it.

OK, I’ll take it.

Copy, Paste, Repeat

OK, I’ll

In fact, of course, our lives are most powerfully controlled by forces that are completely out of sight. It is in many ways a truism that those things which you ‘can do nothing about’ are the ones which tend  to affect your life most profoundly. Our world is structured,then, by powers at varying degrees of distance from us. Those closest to us – proximal powers – are the most salient, the ones which preoccupy us most, the ones focused on by psychology, the most amenable to personal intervention, and the weakest. The furthest from us – distal powers – are the least salient, the ones we tend to spend least time thinking about, the ones focused on by sociology and politics, almost entirely impervious to personal influence, and the strongest.

This term at school they are looking at space. Improvising an activity on the theme, father and daughter take a box of chalk outside into the yard and together they draw the solar system to scale on the pavement behind the building. The adult assesses the current state of the mountain of uncollected rubbish as the child colours in the gas giants. It is a cold, crisp, blue day. Seagulls circle overhead, waiting to rip open the exposed bin bags. Inside, the mother has caught the child’s cold. She notifies her work that she will take the day off sick. Exhausted, she spends the day in the same room where she works and sleeps. She receives no reply from her employer.

You don’t have any devices

At night he feels the walls of the flat closing in. He remembers when he was a child and he used to lie in bed in the dark and imagine the bedroom was a capsule travelling through space. At the time the fantasy brought an oddly comforting, cosy feeling of both safety and adventure. Now his default setting is a combination of cosmic terror and claustrophobia, as if the flat, with all three of them in it, exists in a vacuum, devoid of humanity, mediated by automated messages and virtual portals to nowhere, simulating social interaction, disguising the fact that they have been abandoned, supply lines cut off, left circling a black hole.

I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.

He goes outside and walks across the yard, stepping over the sleeping planets. He clambers up onto the mountain of rubbish, over split bin bags of rancid rotting food. He lies there and waits.

Did you forget something?

(Sorry the formatting is f***ed. Come back LiveJournal, all is forgiven...)...