Salut!

Covid-19 Diaries. Toronto (10) dog mess, dim wasps and social distancing

 

 

Nothing to do with my headline but Bill Taylor, in his latest (and 10th) report on how things are just now in Toronto, has the same thought that will have occurred to many of us about people previously taken for granted or dismissed, unvalued, as unskilled.

However important the health service personnel whether or not medically qualified, supermarket workers, care home staff, quota-driven delivery drivers, binmen and cleaners (and yes, lots more) seem at this. moment of crisis, it is pertinent to ask how long that acknowledgement of worth will last. Will employers - and the 'society' Boris suddenly notices, at odds with conventional Tory wisdom, does exist after all - act accordingly or just go back to being grateful that 'unskilled' or 'taken for granted' also means grossly underpaid?

The full Salut! series of Covid-19 diaries can be browsed here ...

 

Covid-19 Diaries. Liverpool: (1) when the Mersey beat falls silent

Lockdown in Liverpool: 2.30pm and the main road through the south of the city to Widnes and the new Mersey bridge is deserted

 

 

When Salut! took its first breath in 2006, many readers - and there were a great many, most of them from the large following I'd amassed with my blogging from Paris for The Daily Telegraph - were grateful to see relatively few mentions of football.

Soon enough, I launched Salut! Sunderland, which talked of little else and lasted, with some success in terms of readership, until the end of 2019 (the link takes you to the successor site). It has taken the coronavirus outbreak to bring the team together again. With this stirring contribution from John McCormick, four of the five people to have written so far for Salut!'s Covid-19 Diaries were connected to the football site. John was its associate editor. Here is his lockdown story ...  

 

Covid-19 Diaries. Toronto (9) if Oscar Wilde could stomach two years of Reading jail ...

 

 

And still he keeps them coming. Bill Taylor worked for the Toronto Star for decades. The Toronto Star's pages must be full of cracking stuff if they are not finding room for its former writer's splendid jottings on trying to stay healthy and occupied during the Covid-19 outbreak ... see the whole series, with input from Madrid, London and Shildon (County Durham)  at this link ...

 

Monday, Monday notes from the trenches:

         Has it only been two weeks?

         Damn.

         Sorry, déjà vu. Start again…

Covid-19 Diaries. Shildon: (1) life turned upside down in a small northern town

 

This has been a remarkable series, triggered by the lockdown jottings from Toronto of Bill Taylor. Bill and I worked on different local newspapers at their district offices in Bishop Auckland, County Durham. We'd both been lazy, low achievers at school and were probably fortunate to scrape into journalism. But I knew from early in Bill's career that he was an exceptional writer with sharp powers of observation.

 

Pete Sixsmith was much more driven and conscientious at school and, later, college. He became an outstanding teacher by all accounts (including my own, after he persuaded me to talk to his class about the media), rising to head of history in Ferryhill. He also applied much patience and, doubtless, ingenuity in dealing one-to-one with the more challenging pupils. Pete is also a writer of rare talent; the wit, wisdom and eloquence of his prose turned my site for supporters of Sunderland AFC, salutsunderland.com (it's become something else under recent new ownership), into a beacon of great football writing.

 

I was delighted when Pete agreed to contribute to the series from our home town of Shildon. Please read on. You won't regret it. In a just world, his words and those of Bill's on the current global crisis would be seen by many thousands, not a few hundred ... 

Covid-19 Diaries. Toronto: (8) when it's over, basement drill and going out with Donovan

You'll have gathered by now, if you have been following Salut!'s Covid-19 Diaries series - jottings from. Toronto, Madrid and London with at least one other location planned - that Bill Taylor's contributions from Canada have been hugely entertaining. His photographs, always his own, are quirky, arty or atmospheric. His work speaks for itself.

With so little else to do, I'll start a row. Almost all I touch when editing Bill's notes is punctuation and -ize verb endings. Bill started out as English. Perhaps he can now offer a convincing explanation for the apparently illogical device, when a sentence ends with a quoted word or phrase, of placing the full stop before the closing quotation marks. The same usage is found when the phrase or word precedes a comma in mid-sentence.

I am not pointing out an error since Bill is writing on the other side of the Atlantic, though this website is published in the UK so I do change his punctuation. The usage in question is merely a preference and one, unlike the -ize for -ise and removing the "u" from words ending our, that Canadians share with the other North Americans. Over to Salut!'s star contributor for a "robust defence". Those final two words did not need to be quoted at all but I did so to illustrate British English style ...

Sunday, Bloody Sunday notes from the trenches:

 

           “So,” Lesley greets me as I marshal my pre-breakfast pills, “what’s the first thing you’re gonna do when this over?”

         For once, I’m at a loss for words. And it’s not just caffeine-and-Weetabix deprivation.

Covid-19 Diaries. Toronto: (7) how to get through life mostly indoors

Out west, in Toronto, Canada, Bill Taylor leaves no stone unturned as he examines daily life in a health crisis and comes up with a list of things to remember to do and maybe a few to avoid. Bill's dispatches, and some others from London and Madrid, are assembled in this group of Salut! articles ...

Covid-19 Diaries. Toronto: (6) the old folks' grumpy hour and picnics to come

And more from Bill Taylor in Salut!'s little lockdown series, in his case from Toronto, Canada, with a little ps from west London on contrasting sides of human nature. See all the articles here ...

Son of notes from the trenches:

TGIF…

Oh, yeah? Why? What am I gonna do tomorrow that I couldn’t do yesterday?

After half a century as a newspaperman, I know how the game is played. But I’m so tired of click-bait speculative doom and gloom, such as this Globe and Mail headline: “COVID-19 could spark a mental health tsunami.”

Covid-19 Diaries. London: (2) reasons to be cheerful

This mini-series of coronavirus ramblings from around the world will continue as long as they keep coming my way and people keep coming in sufficient numbers to read them. Covered so far: Toronto, Madrid and London. All my friends dispersed around the world are warmly invited to join in. If you don't already have my e-mail address, leave a comment below ...

The human cost of the pandemic continues to appal and distress.

Over at the Daily Mail, the wizened old columnists, Brexiters to a man and woman (though some have to go home to confront sullen Remoaner kinfolk), are becoming fractious.

Dominic Lawson rubbishes the sort of thinking that inspired part of the headline for this series: "Please can our politicians stop calling this a war? It's nothing like it." But Stephen Glover worries, in a way he didn't when energetically promoting the dangerous gamble of Brexit, about the future of our youth: "The old may be most at risk from coronavirus, but I fear the young are set to pay a heavy price for the financial cost of fighting it."

Luckily, there is humour, too, and assorted reasons to be cheerful.

Covid-19 Diaries. Toronto: (6) a Star turn, Broderick Crawford and reasons to go 'Wow!'

Bill Taylor's latest coronavirus chronicle from Canada brings us one of the best gags I have come across in this otherwise mostly grim crisis. I foresee you'll agree. Check out the series as a whole at this link ...

Guaranteed freshest notes from the trenches:

An admonition from the Toronto Star: “You may notice in the next couple of weeks that our horoscopes might include some suggestions that are contrary to the advice to socially distance or self-quarantine…

“That is because these horoscopes were written a few weeks ago, before these warnings were issued.”

So the astrologer didn’t see this coming? Just asking.

Covid-19 Diaries. London: (1) a mea culpa and the need to leave

One of those great covers Private Eye routinely produces. Buy the magazine as I do; it may be the best read in British publishing

My heartfelt thanks to Bill Taylor and Richard Pretorius for their superb contributions from Toronto and Madrid to this series on life under Covid-19. Here's my own first offering as a reluctant Londoner ...

Just over three weeks ago, I thought we might be sleepwalking into an unnecessary economic crisis.

I posted this sarcastic message at Facebook: "‪This is the moment to put aside partisan thoughts. In these dark times, let’s salute the Government’s valiant efforts to call an emergency Cobra meeting and then hold it only three days later. Let’s also salute the courage of 66m UK inhabitants who are going about their daily lives as if nothing much had happened. And may we also wish speedy recoveries to the 40 who’ve got Coronavirus?‬"

It can now be seen as utterly crass. Mitigating features? Plenty of highly intelligent people, including doctors known to me, at that stage shared my cynical outlook, arguing that ordinary decent winter flu was by far a greater threat, and one that never went away. The Government's own dallying over the timing of that "emergency" suggests similar thoughts had crossed ministerial minds.

We now know the crisis was not imagined and that, while many still seem to see no need to change their everyday lives, coronavirus is every bit as real a menace as suggested by one friend, Michael Smith, in his reply to my Facebook post back on March 2: "I tend to agree but I am assured by my neighbours, both senior NHS personnel, that it really is much more serious than it seems."