Comedy and Cadbury’s (9)

Last Saturday afternoon I bought an ice-cream. It was a 99 ice-cream with spirals of raspberry sauce all over the Cadbury’s flake and cornet and I sat on the grass, took off my shoes and enjoyed every mouthful of heaven. You can’t ever buy that raspberry sauce from shops but only from ice-cream vendors and vans. It’s more like a syrupy cordial than a sauce, and it doesn’t drip all over the place but stays stuck to the other deliciously complimentary components. It was a holiday, eating that ice-cream on the grass with no shoes on. A holiday.

Approximately 48 hours later, on a zoom call to a work contact, I noticed that I still had some of the sauce in my hair. I had slept on it twice and showered with it once, but a little bit of the sticky magic was still connected to my being. I’m not sure if the work contact noticed my sudden surprise when I discovered the raspberry sauce on my head, but she kept it to herself if she did. My resting Zoom face is so odd even at the best of times. I’m surprised to see my own self arrive in the Zoom gallery, as if I can’t believe I’m both on the screen and still looking at the screen. The work contact didn’t say a word and why would she? There’s no reason in reality that she would ordinarily imagine I had some dessert on my head. She was possibly more concerned about her own appearance anyway, which between me and you was highly inappropriate. I don’t mind saying this to you here in private, but her clothing was positively eccentric!

I’ve noticed some of you are still making an effort to dress every day and to those of you straightening your hair and applying make-up, I salute you. Others are less well groomed. Some of us have gone full-metal-retro-student, ca. 1990, with big socks, bigger cardigans and even bigger hair. Many of us said farewell to bras, zips and buttons in week one, but as it’s becoming more idiosyncratic it’s getting harder to know what’s hot and what’s not, in this pandemic.

For many women, the very idea that they have superfluous time to worry about clothing gets the Oscar for this year’s brightest comedy. Most of the women I know I are cramming their eight hour working day into ninety minutes in the bathroom when everyone else is asleep, while making a Camera Obscura for a school project the kids forgot to mention. These same women are carrying the bulk of the housework on top of any additional care responsibilities, while their partners claim the majority of the communal living space for their VERY IMPORTANT MEETING AT 3.00PM DURING WHICH TIME THERE MUST BE SILENCE IN THE HOUSEHOLD! OK, not all households but this is a fairly accurate picture of some of the heterosexual, middle class, “working from home” women’s lives, that I know and hear about, here in Ireland and in the UK.

Meanwhile, working class women continue to risk their health and lives to go to work in shops, care homes and factories. Their own kids are being looked after by grandparents, and aunts and uncles who probably should be cocooning but have no other option but to join in the risk. It was always expensive to be working class, but now it’s deadly.

Thankfully, this week the British Taoiseach, Mr Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, said that as long as these working class women stay alert they should be able to keep the country going and get Covid done. So that was probably a huge relief for them.

A pure, enchanted relief for them all.

To prove just how serious he was about this whole issue, Mr Johnson brushed his hair for the press conference. That’s how low the bar is in international politics today. We are now impressed when a 55 year old man, with the most responsible job in the United Kingdom, uses a comb before a making a public announcement. It’s almost as if hiring a TV personality for the top job in the country was a mistake; you know, with hindsight.

Anyway, I’ve been terribly serious about this whole global humanitarian emergency disaster recently, so I decided to just lighten up! To that end, I spent the entire evening last night re-watching episodes of Twenty Twelve and much like the ice-cream in the sun last Saturday, it was a holiday. If you haven’t seen Twenty Twelve, watch it tonight and if you’ve seen it before, watch it again. It’s basically this BBC mockumentary about the 2012 Olympics and the team responsible for organising it. The Head of Sustainability doesn’t really get on with the Head of Legacy, but my absolute favourite character of all is Head of Brand, Siobhan Sharpe. She is such a great character and she makes me laugh so hard. If I had to choose my three favourite episodes, then I would say the one where Head of Deliverance gets shot in the foot, “Jubilympics”, and the episode where they have to design an audio logo for the games. You may well have different favourite episodes and I don’t mind if that’s the case.

I’d forgotten how getting engrossed in comedy is such a great escape from the latest conspiracy on social media. I think the most recent theory is that Greta and Gates invented the virus in a Chinese lab in order to sell us expensive home office furniture from IKEA, and you know what, I can’t actually prove that this is not true. Maybe it is the truth, who knows? What I do know though, is that curling up catlike on the sofa, with some comedy and some Cadbury’s is not a bad distraction at all.

Not at all.

See, here we are nine weeks into this madness, and we need more breakout rooms and escapes than ever. You’ll notice I put the number nine at the end of the title for this week’s blog, right there, like so, in brackets (9). I thought that the number nine was way too much of a panic number, with its associations with the emergency number, “999” and I didn’t want to alarm you! So that’s why I put it gently (in brackets). I did it to protect you.

Another thing I might do to protect you is to stop doing this in a while.

Not writing this blog every week, I’ll continue with that for as long as I can, but counting the weeks as I do so, because I’m not sure that it’s helpful anymore. I have this horrible vision of me posting a blog called “week 232 of forgotten butterflies and euphoria” or something, and it’s too scary. So perhaps I’ll drift us into numberless updates before too long; not yet though, but in a while.

I have to go now. My first assignment for my Buddhism and Modern Psychology online course is due in. I want to submit it early to impress the professor and piss off the other participants, so I have to get cracking on that this afternoon. You have a good weekend now. I know it’s not always easy to differentiate between the week days and the weekends, but try and do something restful. Please look after yourself and stay sane and watch some comedy and eat some Cadbury’s. Do it in that particular order, and you’ll be just fine!

You’ll be just fine!