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 ...
Coronavirus and life in the big city
For me, this outbreak is unfolding against a backdrop clouded by cancer. Last March, after surgery, I began a course of chemotherapy. It lasted six months and played havoc with my immune system. Six months after the chemo my white cell count is completely normal. Nor have I had a letter from the NHS telling me I’m vulnerable. Had this outbreak happened a year ago I would have been terrified; now I look at my test results and think "bring it on...”
Of course, it’s not all good. How can it be? There are members of my family with health issues, and whom I won’t be seeing at the start of May as intended. Please, God, may they all stay safe until it’s over and our long-postponed reunion can take place. And even from my own perspective things could be better. I have flights booked for a trip to Spain in a few weeks; with an enduring lockdown in place and Easyjet now having grounded their planes it looks like we won’t be going. That’s a shame. Trips last year were cancelled and this one would, in many ways, signal the resumption of a normal life.
A normal life? In the middle of this great pandemic? I suppose there are two sides to that story. One is that South Liverpool, where I live, has an abundance of open spaces in which we (me and the Mrs) can and do walk, much as we always have. And as there are only the two of us and we’re both retired we don’t have much to worry about – no lost wages, no carousing in pubs at the weekend and staying in while it’s cold is not really a problem – we weren’t out long today. Trips out to the shops (we can get to loads of them with ease) might reveal some shortages but nothing has really inconvenienced us and it will be a while yet before we need to top up our wine cellar. So you could say little has changed.
John in the photo that regularly accompanied his articles for Salut! Sunderland
Even so, we don’t see our daughter and the grandchildren, and will miss a five-year old’s birthday at the end of the week. We won’t be taking train trips up the coast to extend our walks, or popping up to the Lakes or Anglesey any time soon, and I really do miss the fitness centre and the conspiracy theorists in the sauna. (The moon landing did not take place and aliens have kidnapped humans – it said so on Youtube. They’d be having a field day right now). My post-chemo recovery and increasing independence is being curtailed by a virus over which I have no control and which, every day, tightens its grip on Liverpool.
Just over two weeks ago I went into the city centre and up to the hospital for a scan. Things were starting to hot up on the virus front but at the time there was only a handful of coronavirus cases in Liverpool. That was the day 3,000 Atletico Madrid fans flew in for a football match, despite Madrid being an epicentre of coronavirus and Spanish games being played behind closed doors, which might give you an idea of the level of complacency at the time. Towards the end of last week numbers rose sharply and we had our first fatality. There are those who blame the rise on the Spanish invasion - the timing’s right. Myself, I think it much less likely. Whatever the reason, numbers continue to rise and I’m very pleased the next hospital appointments I have are for the end of May and July. I don’t fancy another trip into town in the next few weeks.
Nor presumably do many others. TV shows the city centre is a ghost town and when we do go out on our walks we see fewer cars on the road and fewer people on the streets. We give them a wide berth, and they do the same to us. Social distancing is being observed, the message is getting across. But that began to happen, football notwithstanding, even before Boris announced the lockdown. My greatest risk in the the past two weeks was on a second trip to hospital. It involved a nearly empty train and an almost empty bus but in the hospital itself I came into contact with or sat in proximity to about 20 people. I doubt I’ve been close to half that number in all the rest of the fortnight.
Otterspool promenade, usually inhabited by cyclists, walkers, dog walkers and the occasional fisherman
This downturn will hit the city hard; tourism is no small part of Liverpool’s economy. Football we know about but there’s a whole lot more. Josie Lawrence was playing to packed houses at the Everyman. And what about all the fully booked hotels for a Grand National weekend that won’t now take place? The financial implications are enormous.
“In the meantime,” as my friend Pete Sixsmith recently said on these pages, “we try to stay as safe and sane as we can. It could be difficult.” I’ve been looking at the numbers for a while. Pete’s right. It could be difficult, and it down here it could be longer than we think.
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