It’s week six of Britain’s lockdown and our fourth week of home-schooling. And the first one in my family to show signs of losing the plot is me. Continue reading →

I’ve stopped watching the government’s daily Covid-19 press briefings because they make me feel like I’m stuck in a Groundhog Day film script, and I know that script by heart for it never changes. One government minister’s presentation blends into another’s, they’re like robots, emitting pre-recorded sentences that no one bothers to update.

What was I thinking, holding out hope that the government would grow a backbone in the face of a pandemic that is claiming hundreds of lives a day across Britain? How naive was I to think that the prime minister’s illness and treatment in an NHS hospital might change him for the better? Continue reading →

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.     

– Lao Tzu

Seven years ago, almost to the day, I sat next to my 91-year old grandmother as she drew her last breath. Three days earlier, I had flown from London to Stockholm to visit her at her flat where she’d lived alone since her husband passed away in 1987.

My trip had been planned for a month, long before my grandmother’s health deteriorated, but a few days before my departure, I was admitted to hospital with a suspected mini stroke. Forty-eight hours before my scheduled flight, I was discharged with orders to rest, but I insisted on travelling as planned, despite feeling very weak.

“Postpone your trip for a couple of weeks,” friends and family advised, but something in me just knew I couldn’t delay; I had to go now. Before I left the hospital, I asked the consultant neurologist if it was safe for me to fly, and he looked at me as if I was mad but, after a moment’s hesitation, he said as long as I took my blood-thinning medications, I should be alright. Continue reading →

The British prime minister is currently in intensive care, being treated for complications arising from the Coronavirus and his underlings in the cabinet don’t waste a moment to pronounce publicly that Johnson’s case is proof that the Coronavirus is indiscriminate and that we’re all in this together.

That isn’t quite true, though, is it, for as journalists and writers like Afua Hirsch and Kenan Malik have shown in recent articles, not only are working-class people, the unemployed and the homeless more vulnerable to the effects of the virus but so too are people from the Black and Asian communities.

The first four doctors to die from Covid-19 in Britain were Muslim men from Asian and African backgrounds and, of the dozens of transport workers who’ve died after catching the virus on the job, a disproportionate number were black or Asian. Continue reading →

 

Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.

Madeline L’Engle

We’re two weeks into Britain’s lockdown and my children’s home schooling experiment. This week, the 9-year old’s maths work involved measuring just about every piece of furniture in her bedroom, a task that was probably intended as a fun activity, but which turned into an almost obsessive project of measuring, calculating and scaling. At least it offered a momentary respite from my other obsession: the news. Continue reading →