24.04.2020

What do you think is wrong with Donald Trump, something medical, like syphilis or that brain worm disease that cats get, or cocaine psychosis? Maybe both.

Last night things got a little tough. My partner is getting a little claustrophobic, not really able to get outside much, and we don’t really get much sun in our flat. And the fact that this isn’t going to be a short term thing dawned on both of us. I’m worried about what world we’ll emerge into. Someone from the Bank of England yesterday said we’re likely going into the worst recession that has ever happened. So my optimism, about coming to the end of what Naomi Klein calls the crisis of imagination, the no-alternatives of Thatcherite capitalist realism, and my personal hopes of dealing with ADHD, is slipping away a bit. That and seeing the deaths just relentlessly go up, day after day. 

I had the best night sleep in ages though, and things don’t seem so awful today. We went on quite a long walk, my phone is saying 6.9km, which is about 4.5 miles, the most exercise I’ve had in ages, and longest I’ve been outside for a while. We walked all the way to the ruins of Winchester Palace by Borough, almost to Shakespeare’s Globe. Just looked at stuff, ambled, got a beer from an offy.

Woke up to see Donal Trump suggested injecting disinfectant and shining really bright lights on people in an attempt to cure covid. And the coronavirus testing centre at Chessington World of Adventures, run by the accounting firm Deloitte (crikey, that’s an odd combination of words), lost the results of the very few people they’ve actually managed to test. I mean, obviously an accounting firm are not going to be competent at running a medical facility, but this really looks like a scam. What the fuck is wrong with these people.

Which reminds me, George Osborne, who the other day I referred to as economically illiterate, which I thought was maybe a bit arrogant, because I know fuck all too, suggested we’re going to need more austerity when we get back to work. If he really thinks that, I take it back, I probably do actually know a lot more about economics than he does, and he was the chancellor! At a time when debt will undoubtedly balloon, and demand in the economy will plummet because of high unemployment and depressed consumer and business spending, the last thing you want to do is depress growth further by cutting spending.

We are not in a debt crisis, we are in a confidence and demand crisis, but cutting spending now, could easily cause one. Our economy could shrink faster than our debt payments grow, in which case we’d end up in a death spiral, like Bailoutistan, AKA Greece, was and the IMF will have to bail us out, if they are able to, and bye bye democracy.

If you look at it another way, it is very clear. According to the OBR we’re probably looking at a 9% hit to GDP this year, which is about £200bn, which could be mitigated with an increase in debt of £260bn. Right now interest rates are 0.1%, which means we can finance that debt for around £2bn a year. If, however we don’t increase debt, and weather even a very optimistic hit to GDP of 3%, the economy will shrink by £35bn, every year it persists, which it fucking will if we take money out of the economy by cutting spending.  If, now, after all these years, all George Osborne can think about is cutting the bloody deficit, maybe he is just a bit fucking stupid. On top of ALLLLLL of that, if unemployment is increasing as significantly as it appears to, our punitive benefits system makes all these problems exponentially worse. So yes, increasing things like welfare spending will increase the debt, but not as much as not doing it. These people are ideological extremists, they are not the pragmatic politicians they pretend to be. I need to take a few days off the news.

Why does such a moron have so much power? Fuck!

I’m getting worked up now. I need to calm down by thinking about that nice walk yesterday.

London is really nice without all the tourists about, it’s an actual liveable city, you can breathe and take you time to look at things. I noticed a lot that’s been in front of me my whole life but I never saw. It was odd though, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen the Thames without a single boat puttering along it.

I stopped to notice the hierarchy of power through London's  history, each system claiming the space above the last. You can see it here in one photo. A thousand years ago, when William the Conqueror built the White Tower, the Camp Bastion of its day. It must have dominated the landscape. The military power that underpinned the feudal system would have been physically and politically dominant in the area. Then to the left, just over 800 years later, Tower Bridge was built, and it towered over the Tower. It’s huge. And all though it has feudal symbols all over it, the big heavy iron girdles that support it, speak of the heavy industry that dominated society at the time, when Britain was ‘the workshop of the world.’ About 130 years after that, the Shard, a facsimile of the tower that holds the Eye of Sauron, ie, a comic book rendition of evil, was built behind in Southwark. It’s obvious what it tells us, that finance totally dominates the city, it towers over everything. We are all subservient to it. It’s a trite statement to make now, but it’s a temple to capital, a literal pyramid of our times.

A few steps further and I spotted an example of how the legends influence our physical world. The story goes that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall and England will with it. It was commonly believed, and I think true, that the ravens in the Tower had their wings clipped to prevent them flying away. Now it seems, the yeomen are getting worried the Crown is on shaky ground, because they appear to have built an aviary for the ravens. It’s a full time job, perhaps the Tower of London is the only military facility in the world with its own ravenmaster. They made me think of Odin’s ravens, Hugin and Munin, thought and memory, I wonder if keeping them caged is sensible.

On the bridge I noticed these strange symbols. Apparently they are the emblem of the Bridge House Estates, set up by The City of London in 1282 to maintain the original bridge. Now it seems like a powerful body, over the years they collected tolls and invested the money to build up a property portfolio. They used the money to build Blackfriars and Tower Bridges and bought London Bridge.

The origins of the symbol itself though have been obscured by the fog of time, but to me, like the Shard, it looks like someone has just imagined something that looks evil. You won’t be that surprised by the fact that when I was younger I was quite into Games Workshop, not playing the game, but the stories, imaginening all the different worlds etc. One of the forces is called Chaos, which is an idea from the fantasy writer Michael Moorcock. Chaos is entropy, one of the fundamental forces of the universe, which opposes Law which is structure, order alignment. The two forces battle each other to create harmony and balance in the universe. They are sort of synonymous with good and evil, but not quite, which is why you see all those lawful evil, chaotic good etc charts on social media, that never really make sense to me.

Anyway, one of the gods of Chaos in the Games Workshop world is Khorne, the blood god, lord of skulls, who takes power from every killing that takes place in the universe. This is his symbol. Kind of similar right? I don’t see any reason not to take Games Workshop mythology as seriously as something like Christianity, so I don’t know, it just seemed weird to me that Tower Bridge has something reminiscent of the equivalent of inverted crucifixes all over it. They even had flags with the symbol on either side of the bridge. It is quite odd to fly emblems of, if not secret, unknown, but clearly quite powerful group, with no acknowledgement of who they are. Then again, it’s possible I’m just looking for reasons to spook myself.

We walked along the river past the HMS Belfast, seen here with the hideous financial district, most of which has sprung up in the last ten years, behind. Past Southwark Cathedral, which has an interesting founding legend, which I will briefly attempt to summarise.

Before London Bridge was built, in around the year 900, a ferry used to take people back and forth across the river. The ferryman, John Overs did alright, well enough, in fact, to buy up a considerable estate south of the river. He was s cheapskate though, like a proper skinflint.

At the time it was a custom to fast the day of a funeral out of respect. So in order to save the money he would have spent on a day’s provisions for his staff, he faked his death. Things went awry however, when the servants and workers were so overjoyed at the death of their boss, instead of fasting, they went on a drunk and a feast.

John was so angry that he jumped out of the casket to reprimand them. One of the servants thought he was possessed by the devil, or some other evil spirit so smashed his head in with one of the oars from the ferry.  

His daughter was pious, and overcome by her misfortune, dedicated her large inheritance to founding a convent, which today is Southwark Cathedral.

We passed Francis Drake's ship, the Golden Hinde, and stopped to have a look at Borough Market, which is once again tolerable, now there are no tourists, but they still charge £5 for a can of beer. 

Further up, at Winchester Palace, not much of which remains standing, and now appears to be a branch of Pret a Manger. Is an even weirder story of medieval London. Round the corner is Crossbones graveyard, which was the final resting place of prostitutes who couldn’t be buried in churchyards. They were known as the Winchester Geese, because Henry de Blois, the Bishop of Winchester was granted permission to licence prostitutes and run brothels by Henry the second in 1161 in an act called the liberty of the Clink. The Clink was a prison (which is where the slang word clink, still used today comes from), in the manor of the Bishop, which was in Southwark, he ran the prison, the church and the brothels. It was handy to turn a blind eye to the licentiousness south of the river, just outside the City of London, because the nobles needed somewhere to let off steam. The bishop could lock up whoever he wanted, and run whatever kind of scams he liked. That air of lawlessness still persists in the area today, I'm from north of the river, so call me prejudiced, but everywhere down there seems a bit dodgy to me. 

During the excavation of the Jubilee line, wondering around the area late one night, the druid poet and playwright John Constable heard a voice in his head. It belonged to one of the Winchester Geese, whose remains had been disturbed by the work. The voice whispered her story as a poem in his mind, and to this day, John honours the dead at the graveyard, where the geese were buried, in unconsecrated ground known as Crossbones, on the 23^rd of each month (on hold due to coronavirus). If you ever walk through the area and notice an iron railing covered with strange ribbons and flowers, that’s it.

These days, it not only honours Londoners past, it is also a symbol of the spirit of London holding out against the property developers ripping the soul out of the city. There's a fierce fight over its future.

I was reminded by the Pret in the palace of Matt Berry’s Toast of London memoir Toast on Toast (get the audio book, it’s incredible). Every anecdote he tells of one of his old haunts, theatres or pubs,  he adds, “now a branch of Pret A Manger.” 

On the way beck we saw these two beautiful fish in a little overrun channel between Shadwell Basin and St Kathrin’s Docks and into the river. We were talking about the over grown plants, sometimes when nitrogen or ammonia from fertiliser spills in waterways, algae grow very fast choking out everything else. I think a similar thing happened in London, it was over fed with cheap money, and all these chains like Pret flourished like a yeast infection and choked everything else out. I hope after this crisis, London finds itself again under all the rubble.  

We stopped by in the little park and I showed my partner the magic square. She mockingly said it was actually probably a volleyball court. When I originally wrote about it, I was half using it as a rhetorical device, but now I actually really value it. I’ve been going back, sitting in the square, looking at the trees, knowing I’m surrounded by branches so I feel like I’m in a forest. It’s really nice and peaceful. Every time I add a stick or two to the perimeter, and put any back that have been knocked out of place. It’s magic to me anyway.

We came back and I made some excellent experimental flat breads. I mixed mince with some tikka paste, few bits of onion and some tomato puree and spread across the bread. We stared out the window for a bit, and noticed another ambulance pick someone up on our road.

Now I need to fill in my work forms for my hospital job with Serco. It’s actually a bit better paid than I though, but I’m still a little nervous.

Hope you're all alright.