The Smile Signals Emptiness
On June 20 (Castles In The Air) I wrote here
…news came yesterday of evidence of Covid in Milan in December 2019, while news of it was still only creeping out of Wuhan. In the UK it didn’t get a mention in New Scientist until early January, and that was in relation to Wuhan. So, while there is no evidence of the presence of the disease in the UK before February, it wouldn’t surprise me were it to have been here by New Year. Certainly there are anecdotal accounts of people with similar symptoms in the UK in December/January
We know that a significant proportion of those infected by the virus are contagious while also asymptomatic or presymptomatic. These people would not have been spotted at airports or other points of entry even had there been checks, and would have mingled in the community (as public health experts such as Dr Jason Leitch here in Scotland argued in March, as I recall). Therefore community spread could well have been well-established in the UK well before we saw what was happening in Wuhan and then in Italy. By the time UK authorities realised what was happening in March, it was, possibly, already far too late.
It now seems that the first UK death ascribed to Covid-19 was in January, the poor man was taken ill in December 2019. The newspapers first reporting this (the Sun and the Hate) make comments about the unfortunate man having never visited China, thereby entirely ignoring the genetic evidence that the virus was introduced into the UK multiple times and predominantly from Europe.
I’d hypothesise from this that the prevalence of the virus in the UK as a whole was a great deal higher in the first quarter of the year than has so far been recognised, and certainly higher than was recognised at the time.
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I watched the new Disney Mulan last night, for free. It’s a big-budget movie that relies on cliche for its entire running time. The cast deliver their lines with little heart or conviction; it is just spectacle wrapped up in Disney’s traditional cloying sentimentality, an enforced aesthetic that bears no relation to the joys and sorrows of life. The characters are cyphers, and Mulan herself an archetype to be moved around the board. It is an empty film
The old tale of Mulan from China, essentially a short poem, admits of this, of course, and is thus wide open to elaboration and imaginative interpretation. The failure of Disney is a failure to imagine possibilities outside the worldview of The Mouse. And the fact that Donnie Yen is in it is no reason to borrow plot points from Star Wars : Rogue One.
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Need I mention our governments acknowledgement that it intends to break the law? No. It is worth asking why more senior lawyers in government aren’t resigning. In some cases, no doubt, the reason will be purely pragmatic based on a need to retain their job for the usual economic reasons; in as many cases, though, it is inexplicable. I hope we will see more resignations in coming days. In the meantime the US Congress has said tonight that if the government does what it intends to do, then we can whistle for a UK-US Trade Agreement.
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Music: I said the other night that I’d planned to post some King Crimson. I first heard them one lunchtime in the early seventies on Radio One. Johnny Walker had the lunchtime show and he had a feature called the Family Album Spot in which three memners of a family would select an album track each for him to play. One day, one of those tracks was In The Court of the Crimson King and all of us who went home for lunch were late back to school, awestruck, because we’d stayed in to listen to it. I’ve never stopped listening to them throughout their several incarnations, and saw them on their last couple of UK/world tours, including the one on which the second video was recorded.
The Unthanks are unlikely candidates to cover a King Crimson track, but they make it their own.
Starless.
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