Month: April 2020

THERE’S been a lot of sentimental claptrap in recent weeks about the health service angels, the dedicated dustmen and the selfless supermarket shelf-stackers who are keeping us all going in these difficult times.

But what of the private bankers, the hedge fund managers and the real estate rentiers who are the real creators of our modern London. How quickly we forget!

There’s anecdotal evidence that some are struggling to get by with no cook, no butler and no au pair. And how is a master of the universe supposed to break the no-drive advice if the chauffeur’s in self-isolation?

I was panicked into finding out for myself by a shock report from the Financial Times, one of my old employers, that owners and operators of superyachts may be facing major asset losses when the pandemic is over.

It’s not all bad news. At the moment, the sector is buoyant as billionaires take to the high seas to escape the virus. But the long-term outlook is grim.

To investigate, I headed to our nearest yacht basin at St Katherine’s. Today, the vessels there were certainly thin on the water. Maybe some owners have headed out to sea or to their second, third or tenth home. There was no sign of life in the berths that remained occupied.

The former working dock, opened in 1828, now hosts converted London barges and sailing yachts but also the petite end of the glamour motor vessel market.

The dock entrance from the nearby Thames is too small to take the gilded monstrosities favoured by oligarchs and tycoons. These are obliged to moor, sometimes for weeks on end, across the river at Butler’s Wharf Pier. There are none there now.

Twenty first century London is widely regarded as the creation of these now absent plutocrats. They claim to keep the city going by paying the largest proportion of its taxes – or at least some of them do. That may be, in part, because a lot of working Londoners are too poor to pay any tax at all.

Let’s leave aside that business about the 2008 financial crash. These people make a vital contribution and the super-rich don’t come cheap.
As for the hard-pressed, hospital staff, I recall a Tory MP once arguing against a pay rise for nurses on the grounds it “would attract the wrong sort”.

I don’t want to go all Class War here, but might I tentatively suggest we consider a little economic rebalancing once the post-virus Reckoning comes.

The government is already stepping in to help business entrepreneurs who actually make things or do something useful.

But what of those who rely on short-selling, currency speculation and charging exhorbitant rents to keep the wolf from the door. What will their fate be once the crisis is over?

During the divisive Brexit debate – remember that? – many people bought into the line that London was a city of the idle rich preying on an ever-poorer Britain. London’s response to the coronavirus, in which the lowest paid are suddenly the heroes, has given the lie to that.

But, as you step on to your doorsteps this week to applaud the NHS, don’t forget the super-rich. They are people too. Although, fortunately, they are by definition only the one per cent.

I’M not sure I’ve ever climbed to the top of the Monument and there was no chance of rectifying that today as, like all London’s public attractions, it has been shut down for the duration.

The 202-feet column, topped with a flaming copper urn, was set up in 1677 to mark the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666 that broke out near the site at Pudding Lane.

The Great Fire was something of a good news, bad news event. It destroyed 90 per cent of the city but it also cleared the web of medieval slums that had been a breeding ground for the Great Plague of the previous year.

There were only six verified deaths in the Fire, less than the number who have since plunged to their deaths from the monument that commemorates it.

During the Plague, the diarist Samuel Pepys wrote of how he overcome a panic attack when he left self-isolation to take a walk in fetid Drury Lane. “It put me into an ill-conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell and to chaw, which took away the apprehension.”

Carry on smoking, then.

The Monument to the Great Fire hardly rates as one of London’s top tourist attractions. It’s tucked away in a square at the north side of London Bridge. It was completed just 28 years after the English had chopped off the head of their king, Charles I, and 17 years after the monarchy’s restoration.

In the still febrile politics of the post-Civil War years, both the Plague and the Fire provided ample opportunities for conspiracy theories. In those days, the targets of the fake news that spread among the good burghers of Protestant London tended to be foreigners and Catholics.

In the years after the Monument was erected, England was embroiled in the so-called Popish Plot, an entirely fictional conspiracy theory about Catholics plotting to assassinate King Charles II.

In 1681, the keepers of the Monument added to its Latin inscriptions recording the events of the Great Fire: “But Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched”. They were deleted in 1830.

In those days, fake news was chiselled in stone rather than Tweeted out.

The Monument was designed in consultation with Sir Christopher Wren, who rebuilt St Paul’s cathedral but failed to push through his plans for a new city of broad, straight avenues and open spaces.

Freeholders insisted on rebuilding according to the medieval street pattern of the City. That’s why it remains a patchwork of narrow lanes and why original names such as Pudding Lane and Fish Street Hill have survived.

Well, that’s enough history for one day. But before I sign off, just a word about joggers.

Has the government given them a special dispensation to ignore the two-metre social distancing rule as they wheeze and cough their way around the near deserted streets of London?

Unwilling to divert from the set trajectory of their daily power runs, they either come up behind you or advance towards you under the assumption that it’s up to us mere pedestrians to get out of the way.

Even the cyclists are behaving better these days. Joggers, however, have now replaced the absent seagulls as London’s new feral menace.

Footnote: yes, I know about Johnson. And I hope he, and everyone else, gets well soon.

WITH depressing predictability the old wartime comparisons have been wheeled out to show how the British are uniquely qualified to confront the coronavirus crisis.

“Queen invokes blitz spirit,” trumpeted the Sunday Telegraph, leading the charge ahead of an address to the nation by Elizabeth II.

Boris Johnson compared the challenge to a “war” before he went into Covid-19 purdah, since when we haven’t heard much from him.

Johnson is not alone in his judgment. The UN Secretary General António Guterres has also warned the world is facing its greatest challenge since World War II.

Pandemics can be just as destructive as wars. The Spanish flu of 1919 killed more people than the world war that preceded it.

The myth of wartime pulling together and bravely standing alone is uniquely strong in Britain and particularly irritating now, coming after four years of the same blether over Brexit.

The Brexiters peddled so much rhetoric about the war that you would almost think they’d been there. In fact, the Queen, 94 this month, is one of a dwindling band actually old enough to remember it.

One significant difference between then and now is that no one is dropping bombs on our heads. Back in 1940-41, my part of London, near the docks and a major rail terminal, was a major target of the blitz.

There is a blue plaque under the railway arch at Druid Street to commemorate the 77 who died while sheltering there during a 1940 air raid. The working class communities that lived near the docks and the railways and the factories were particularly vulnerable to the bombs.

When Elizabeth’s mother visited the working class East End with her husband, the king, there were boos as well as cheers.

There were plenty of examples of individual heroism from community wardens, firemen, the police. But there were also plenty of black-marketeers – yesterday’s version of supermarket hoarders – and burglaries went up courtesy of the blackout.

The myth-making started right after the war. Those of us born just after it spent long Sundays listening to relatives reminiscing about how people were much nicer during the war – pulling together, sharing what little they had, putting others first. Soldiers who actually fought tended to have much less rosy recollections.

The Brits did not have to face mainland Europe’s painful memories of occupation and collaboration.

The mythologising was encouraged by a range of British films that replayed the conflict over and over again with a familiar cast of plucky little Brits at home and abroad beating the Nazis pretty much single-handed.

As late as the 1970s, the TV series Dad’s Army showed us the quiet, comic gallantry of a group of south coast home guards. It’s still a favourite on the catch-up channels.

The rosy memories of the home front might also have been fostered by the fact that British life remained bleakly austere right up to the mid-1950s.

Maybe when this is all over, we’ll have to face a decade of cinematic replays of the present crisis with its heroes and its villains.

Perhaps, when extended families can get together again, children yet unborn will have to endure those endless Sundays of their parents and aunts reliving the dark days of the pandemic.

At least it will make a change from Brexit.

BORED already with Netflix box sets? Daunted by daily disaster updates? Exhausted from the online pilates and the online pub quizes? Why not learn a language?

That’s the gist of the unsolicited ads that have been tumbling into inboxes in the last couple of weeks as the language-learning entrepreneurs seek to make a buck out of the present lockdown by promoting their apps.

Have you ever tried one? They are sometimes fronted by a seemingly friendly cartoon rabbit, or is it a squirrel?, whose AI brain encourages you to keep going with phrases like “You’re doing really well!” or “Try again! Getting it wrong is part of learning.”

However, the avatar soon adopts a more hectoring tone, warning you that, if you don’t keep up the daily regime, you will lose your place in the virtual league table.

So you can end up burning the midnight oil to try to beat the daily deadline as you struggle to remember the Dutch or the Mandarin for cryptic phrases such as “The bear has eaten my mouse” or “The children are unable to eat salt”.

It gets addictive. A recent cartoon pictured a mourner standing by a coffin, saying: “He leaves behind a loving family and a 239-day Duolingo streak.”

On a normal Friday evening, we’d be off to the Hellenic Centre in Marylebone for our weekly dose of Greek. Housed in a classic London Portland stone and red-brick block off Marylebone Lane, it offers night classes to people of more than 40 nationalities.

Our little class has been soldiering on for almost three years, inspired by a charming but indulgent teacher. She never lectures us about getting the class work in on time. A phrase I learnt early on was “ο σκύλος μου έτρωγε την εργασία μου – the dog ate my homework.”

Since the onset of the pandemic – from the Greek for “We’re all doomed” – teaching has gone online and the virtual assistant at our Google hangout has adopted the aggressive tone of the language app rabbit, sending daily reminders for us to get the homework done.

That’s one reason I miss the weekly trips to Marylebone. It’s a charming neighbourhood with which I have another loose connection. My father was born above his father’s fish and chips shop in Marylebone Lane in 1911 before the family moved on to Pimlico and then New Cross Gate.

Marylebone and Pimlico have been massively gentrified since then. But both retain some aspects of their Edwardian charm. Marylebone Lane still has a rather upmarket fish shop. New Cross, as a friend who lives there tells me sardonically, is “still up-and-coming”.

The first two neighbourhoods have been affected by being so close to the always chintzier Mayfair and Westminister. But they were always cosmopolitan, even in the old days. So was New Cross come to think of it.

This is, after all, London. More than a third of Londoners are now foreign born and the city includes every nationality and language, Greek included.

Now we’re all locked down together and making the best of it. As the Greek philosophers say: “τι να κάνουμε; τίποτα – what can we do about it? Nothing.”

Where have all the seagulls gone?

The lockdown has only been going for just over a week but every last one of them has decamped from the river wall at Tower Bridge. Maybe they’ve followed the refuse barges down the river to the recycling plants at the Isle of Dogs or Greenwich.

They normally outnumber even the tourists at London’s third most photographed sight. Their trick is to have one seagull perch on the wall and pose for a tourist’s selfie while the others swoop down to nick the snapper’s sandwich or chips.

Seagulls, as the name implies, used to live at sea or by the coast. Now they’ve become the city’s principal feral menace, particularly since ex-mayor Ken Livingstone declared war on its pigeons in 2003.

At dawn, they are sometimes loud enough to wake you up as they scrap outside the window like a mob of Millwall fans. That’s our local, rough-and-tumble football team. Its fans are best known for fighting among themselves if they can’t get near the opposition, and for their slogan: “No one likes us, we don’t care!”

I once told the football-mad former Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom that it would be a great slogan for his country. He agreed. But that’s another story.

Meanwhile, back in feral London, the foxes also seem to have made themselves scarce. That said, I usually bump into them late at night on the way back from a drink with my wrinklie posse but currently the pubs are shut.

The fox will stand in the middle of the road or on the pavement and fix you with a “who do you think you’re looking at?” stare before then adopting a bored expression and wandering off.

The rats are presumably still around although you rarely see them. According to the urban myth, you are never more than six feet from a rat. Rodent expert Professor Rob Smith from Huddersfield University said it might derive from an old public heath announcement from the Ministry of Agriculture. A government department, promoting myths! Shocking!

Curiously, six feet is the recommended gap for social-distancing when you’re out for a walk these days. So, if you don’t know what six feet looks like, presumably you just imagine you’re looking for the nearest rat.

Give it time and other species might move in to replace London’s absent seagulls.

Over in Llandudno in north Wales, a herd of goats has moved in and is roaming the now deserted streets.

Abroad, gangs of wild turkeys have been spotted on the streets of Oakland, California and a puma broke the curfew in Santiago, Chile, to take to the streets.

Sadly, the story about drunken elephants staggering around in China, where the pandemic started, turns out to be a fake.

In London, Livingstone’s despised pigeons appear to be thriving. No one’s feeding them breadcrumbs these days, so they’ve taken to swarming along the river to forage away from the usual beaten track.

There’s a increasingly bold blackbird nesting on the rooftop opposite us but he hasn’t quite summoned up the courage yet to venture on to the kitchen balcony for scraps.