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I know this is really incredibly minor in *gestures broadly at everything* the grand scheme of things but I haven't seen Himself since the middle of March and I haven't seen my parents since Christmas. I made these decisions willingly knowing it was for the common good. 1/?
However, it became increasingly clear, as Newham became a hotspot for this virus, that if I visited my elderly parents, or my asthmatic brother, or Himself, that I risked being a vector of disease, not only to them but to anywhere I stopped on the way if I visited. 2/?
So I stayed home, and I washed my hands, and I video-called (and I bloody hate phone calls at the best of times, do you know how much I hate video calls?), and I didn't go to the funeral of a close friend's husband. Because we were told that staying home was the best thing 3/?
we could do to protect ourselves, and protect others. And we did these things, and we washed our hands, and we did our best to stay home, and protect the NHS, and save lives. And we queued outside the Co-Op, and we did socially-distant swaps of eggs for rhubarb, and made do 4/?
And Dominic Cummings, Grima Wormtongue in a stupid hat, and Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister in name only, have taken all those hard and bloody sacrifices that everyone made for the common good, and trampled them in the dirt as so much garbage. And I am heartbroken and furious.
And my sacrifices are minor. It was my parents' 50th wedding anniversary yesterday, there was supposed to be a party. There'll be other parties. We stayed at home and missed people so when we meet again, there won't be anyone missing.
But there must and shall be a reckoning for the unspent grief, the funerals over Skype, the missed time with new babies, the weddings postponed and the changes unmarked. These things which carry us down the years should be marked in person and not through a glass, darkly.
I keep coming back to this. People with responsibility for dealing with civil emergencies built a temporary morgue down the road. And Dominic Cummings went on a jaunt to look at the fucking bluebells. https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/health/wanstead-flats-morgue-1-6588516
