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?
Apps
you know and love
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.
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?
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?
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.
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...)...
