The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

Gemma Pitcairn’s blog

Locked in, locked up, locked out… Welcome to 2020. As a vision it is perfect. As a year it is pure shit. Locked in because there is a reactive organic molecule roaming, just waiting to do its chemistry with the human genome, smacking its apparently multiple lips, each little stalk looking like a suckermouth, ready to extract the lifeblood - well the phlegm! - from any reservoir it can tap. We are locked up because we are fucked up, apparently powerless to influence this inanimate object’s hold on our lives. We are locked up because our government says we are, forced to wear masks when we go out, straying no more than one hundred metres from home. This applies to everyone, except people on bicycles, people running, people walking dogs, the vulnerable, the rich, those caring for others, anyone going shopping, certain members of parliament or political appointees, who may wander where and when they wish, whether within public gaze or out of it. If we include all women, all children, all poor people, all people of colour, the sick, the already dying, anyone in need of assistance, people who self-declare an inability to cope, the vulnerable does tend to include everyone, except for rabid libertarians and white supremacists, an unholy alliance of Tory Shires and uneducated loud white males with tattoos, who refuse to follow the rules anyway on principle, if that word might be used to describe a knee-jerk, and only if that signifies the knee of a jerk. And locked out, because we can’t go to work, students can’t go to class, fences have gone up and fines have been threatened. It’s quite a world we live in today. Hardly the separate, elevated, cloudless heaven on earth, purified of its foreign poison that Brexiteers think they voted for.

There was a time, not so long ago, when, apart from the daily disappointment of the weather, our media used to broadcast stock market figures that were sometimes up, sometimes down. Now the daily fear is an isolated number, counted as each corpse no longer coughs, no longer fights for the air that is mechanically pumped into its lungs. At least the numbers never go down. There are no crashes when deaths are counted.

Like many others of my generation, perhaps the last one to grow up without social media being a first port of call, I find I can only talk to myself by creating a blog, of all things, that no one will ever read. It is a way of passing time. Far easier, one might think, to allow time to have his own way by deliberately seeking out infection by virus and holding one’s breath. Hold it for long enough and you don’t recover, and the time issue is solved. If we do recover, and life goes on as normal, it is exclusively for the surviving antibodies, so we are told. Unless, of course, you-know-who mutates, ceases looking like Jack the Ripper and dons the disguise of a hungry shark. Thus, our sophisticated defences might no longer perceive threat and now the mutation, now shark-like, will start to bite all over again, and in lots of places where before it couldn’t even swim. Bright, aren’t we?

But what the virus, the strictures, the controls confirm is that despite our ability to offend half the planet with a few well-chosen witticisms on Twitter, another place where the uncommunicative talk to themselves, we are still slaves of the entirely local interactions of chemistry. We may debate terms, analyse motive, assess impact, at least when it applies to our own petty utterance, but when two molecules designed for each other meet, they just go for it, they react rather than interact, produce products rather than more raw material. And then, revealing that it is primarily just another tweet, the virus does reproduce itself, regenerates and re-broadcasts, commandeering material we would want to keep for ourselves. In our age of undiluted individualism, it is a virus that insists we share!

But even more paradoxically, like many others locked in against our will but perhaps for our own good, I now feel I have time on my hands, time that work, travel, illusions of social interaction and possibly Brexit used to steal from me. I was happy with being robbed; I realize! Like the super-rich, I probably have too much and don’t know how to spend it. Lord knows, whoever he might be, but definitely a ‘he’, I have enough to do – didn’t I just promise that I would put my entire course online before next term? - but for some reason when I start the task, it seems nowhere near as big as I thought. I get things done because I have no distraction, apart from that daily announcement of increasing numbers, that seems to demand my undivided attention. And then, at the end of a week working from home, I realise that somehow, I missed the weekend, slaved at my screen for ten hours a day and, looking back, that task I thought was ‘nowhere near as big as I thought’ is just as big, just as exhausting, just as unfinished. It’s easy to imagine the end state. The impossibility, it seems, is getting there.

I have even taken to watching the daily briefing. Like a Pavlov rat, I have accommodated the reward cycle into my behaviour. Each day now, I find that just before that fixed hour, I have conveniently reached a point where a break seems inevitable. The task I set myself punctuates itself perfectly, allowing time to pour a glass of something, switch on the gogglebox and absorb the daily numbers.

The briefing is certainly daily, but rarely brief, with suited gentlemen stolidly waving graphic presentations about indices, numbers that have names and concepts that no one had even defined until a few weeks ago. It is all eagerly awaited, even lapped up by a non-comprehending public. Before now, I don’t think I’ve ever listened in such concentrated detail to the empty inanity of repeated jargon, the utterly facile dressed up as academic respectability. “It’s out there. Don’t go out!” is the sum total of the message. And yet it needs armfuls of Powerpoint slides to communicate its utterly obvious simplicity. It also needs at least three lecterns arranged Presidential-style with you-know-who in the middle, blabbing. And then they answer or ignore largely planted questions, no follow up allowed, the mere response providing opportunity to restate the same soundbite message. The only way of catching a follow-up question is to learn to lip-read! Apparently, we are being led by science. Now there’s a first.

But the extra time at home has allowed my usually focused mind to wander. Is nostalgia, I wonder, always the product of inertia? Or is it the other way around? And why do such reconstructions of the past always arrive rose-tinted? It has been years since I thought much about my mother. I am fifty. Well fifty-ish. She died when she was in her mid-sixties, denied the chance of a gentle degeneration into the living oblivion of weakness and incapacity we generally call old age. I do concede that, just a few generations ago, a human aged sixty plus had genuinely achieved old age, but times change, don’t they? They do, and now sixty plus would still be ‘living’, as we loosely call it, even after the onset of senility. Perhaps she was never very strong, at least physically. I remember her primarily ailing, colds and flu caught from the kids at school, aches and pains, migraines, a broken arm after a tumble downstairs, shingles and then cancer, a three-year battle against herself which she lost. Is that my own prognosis? Illness dominating by the time I reach sixty? I have never considered having that much publicised genetic analysis to see if I have an enhanced risk of developing breast cancer. But what if I did have it and it came out positive? Would I be any wiser? So, the risk is greater. But I still don’t actually have cancer. Is the treatment certainty of having both breasts removed worse than a known risk of developing the disease ‘at some point in the future?’ I think we need a good dose of Bayes’ Theorem, which I probably don’t understand. Or because of this damned virus, does illness already control my life, despite the fact that I am not ill?

And yet, when I knew her, the woman I was brought up to call Penny, not mother, I was always impressed by her strengths, her resilience, her ability to make the best of a bad deal, a hand which she was regularly, arguably permanently dealt. How she coped with dad over the years I will never know. How a man could be so focused, so meticulously correct in his professional life and conduct could transform into such an unguided missile in his private life still escapes me. When I say unguided, I must qualify, because anything in a skirt was worthy of his aim, his range being both considerable and accurate. And, presumably, the missile never had a problem with launching.

It was an open relationship all along, Penny used to tell me. ‘We were children of the sixties´ she used to say. That meant, as far as I now can judge, that dad did his own thing and mum looked after the house and kids. It was about as open as a closed shop. Ours is not to reason why, she used to say, apparently ignoring the fact that she did precisely that with every other aspect of her waking life. She seemed to have a devotional blind spot when it came to the institution of marriage. It was a blind spot that dad´s behaviour rendered highly visible. Lust for life is a phrase that comes to mind… In his case it was dad’s lust for life that created a custodial sentence for my mother.

And now a message from him reminds me of his mortality, because he admits to feeling unwell, certainly another first, and is taking time away from his work, yet another. Don’t worry, he says, because his maid, Fatima, is looking after him. She lives in. I bet she’s not a maid as in virgin! She’s twenty-four or five. He’s seventy-two. There’ll be a baby on the way soon, I’ll bet. Another to contest his will. I wonder how many there are. I wonder if he knows himself.

There was certainly that Italian woman in Australia. He never brought her home. We never met her. What a coincidence it was that there was never a conference here in Britain! What a coincidence that the ‘conferences they simply had to attend’ always took place where the two of them had to stay in a hotel! When dad used to say he was in the field, the image of a rampant stallion sniffing mares’ bums always came to mind.

And mom just put up with it! Never complained. They never had rows. Never shouted, never even raised a voice towards the other. She suffered him like he was just another affliction, just another ailment for which there ought to be, or indeed might not be treatment. Except, in his case, there were no pills, no ointments, only the suffering.

But he was good to her. When she was within range, his guidance system seemed to log onto her. Penny certainly came alive whenever he was around. During those periods of absence ‘in the field’, she used to become gradually more morose, self-obsessed, utterly focused on her work, perhaps, but also self-professedly unproductive. Then he would come home and Penny would suddenly have energy to cook, clean, wash, go to the theatre, visit galleries and invite friends, things she only ever did grudgingly and without enthusiasm when dad was away. He seemed to be her energy.

We perhaps live now with chemistry, but with dad and attraction it was clearly physics, opposites attracting, the closest exerting the biggest pull. It was personification of the inverse square law. Once the interaction came close to contact, however, it was biology that took over. If the physics still applied, it was merely euphemistic, sub-atomic signifying ‘below the waist’. As for particle… And it applied to mum, just like it must have applied to that Italian woman in Australia, probably just as it now applies to an Indonesian maid fifty years his junior.

But who am I to talk? Married once, surname changed, divorced once, surname reverted. And was I patient? I certainly was not! Once a cheat, once only, and always a cheat. Goodbye, John, good riddance, and don’t come back. I had a young daughter. I kept the house. One up on you, you male chauvinist! Good riddance! But I still keep that house, keep it as in the sense that I clean it, provide for it, manage it. I still brought up that daughter without help, just like Penny did for me most of the time. Are we destined to repeat our parents’ lives, whether we like it or not? I am suddenly theoretically back to a discussion of free will versus predestination and personally back to that discussion about the breast cancer test. So, who is the mug? And precisely what, in forty years, has changed?

And now I am up to my neck again. I have Geoff, Geoff Sullivan. It’s been a year now since he started to live in, even if it is only a day or two a week. I have known him for four years, a Brexit fellow traveller who, it seems, came into my home with his own version of ‘remain’. How did we end up sleeping together? When Elsie first announced she was bringing a boyfriend home, I remember saying, “She’s that age, I suppose.” Well, what about me? Am I that age? Does forty-nine qualify for ‘that age’ as well? It seems that it’s not only viruses or indeed dads that simply react, given the opportunity. But where did those four years since we first met go? And why did it take us over three years before we got into the sack? And it was four years on the back of another three when there was that other bloke who wandered off when responsibility raised its ugly possibility. And then there were those other three short lived fellows when we were working together on the anti-war campaign. It’s all a long time ago. But it is still with me. Or is it? Can seeing someone for a week or two count as a relationship? And if not, what else might one call it? I wonder if dad had a set of classification criteria for his encounters. I wonder if Ms Chupesi was in the same group as the one-night stands? I doubt it. But why did he never let anything show? How was it that he could do what he did in private without it ever apparently showing on his public face? Was he the brazen, uncaring, selfish, rampant male that a family face hid? Or, behind that competent, confident exterior, was he just as complex and mixed up as the rest of us?

And what about Penny? What made her simply put up and shut up for so many years? Was I really that important to her? And if she could do it, why could I not do the same on behalf of Elsie? Why did I need to put myself first?

And am I the model of my own antithesis? Communication, analysis, situation, ownership, identity, motive, these are all things I deal with upfront in anything I consider academically. But, like the molecule I probably am, when it addresses the chemistry of sex, I just react, exchange bonds, absorb and give off energy. Geoff is like my sex toy. I hardly know him. South London, he says, when I ask him where he is from. Family? Not much. Either dead or estranged. Siblings? Only child. School? Yes. University? Never. He is here when I want him. He lives here part of the time, more often than not, it seems these days. He has his own flat, he tells me on the Cally Road, but I have never been there. For all I know, he could be treating me like John Harness did, or like dad treated Mum. And do I care? Of course, I do, but what you don’t see you don’t know. I have no evidence he sees someone else, but I have no evidence that he does not. Can one ever prove a negative? And can one rely on the positive?

Ask a PCR test, but only after consulting with Bayes.

And how will I react if dad is really, for the first time in his life or mine, ill? Professor Edward Pitcairn has been gratefully taken for granted by all of us, especially me. I have never even conceived the idea that he might not be around. And seeing him regularly has not even been part of the argument. In the last decade, I doubt I have spent more than a month in his company. Maybe longer on reflection, because I did take Elsie to the dig site on holiday when she got into university… We had a month in July and we travelled. And now, how would I react, how indeed would I cope if dad was really ill and needed care? I don’t pray, but if I did, I would now be praying that some little anonymous molecule, some probably garishly coloured reagent trying to react with cells from my dad’s body withholds its chemistry and stays unattracted, negative, wherever its territory.