Our current plight has resulted in all sorts of dilemmas where we feel morally compromised. I have already mentioned our discomfort at the idea of other people having to run around doing our shopping and delivering our prescriptions, when we are physically perfectly capable of doing our own. There have always been three retail monoliths that we have preferred not to use because of their near monopolies, their destruction of smaller independent bodies and their non-payment of UK taxes: Amazon, Google and Starbucks. The first two we’ve now been manoeuvred into using frequently and, I have to admit, enthusiastically. In the past and distant days when we were out and about we could generally avoid Starbucks. I like their coffee but don’t like the over-familiar way they ask for our first names to scrawl on our cups when we haven’t been properly introduced. Some sixteen year with a pair of curtain rings stuffed through her eyebrow screeching my Christian name for all to hear, I find too ignominious. As well as that presumption their wasteful packaging upsets me. But when waiting for a flight at an airport, incidentally another compromised activity, or at a motorway service station, there’s often little choice. The latter we’ve challenged by bringing our own coffee in a flask and sitting fragrantly and flagrantly drinking it in the Starbuck’s facility. I really enjoy a KrispyKreme doughnut with it, another compromise, this time with my diabetes. We always prefer to use a local coffee shop and so in Seattle back in 2009, we felt justified in going into the original Starbuck’s, so that was alright! Anyway it was quite nice.
But Google and Amazon are different matters and at the moment we are unrestrainedly using both. Amazon can offer everything we need, it’s usually delivered free within days, it’s cheaper and in every way more convenient, and I have to grind my teeth and repent every time I press the checkout button. Daily news reports another high street shop tumbling into liquidation as a result. When we next venture masked and shy into the towns, there will be nothing but abandoned premises, boarded up windows and felt-tipped apologies pasted in doorways. It may be months before customers would feel safe to enter shops and then, boom! Everyone will want the freedom, sociability, extravagance and celebration of blasting their way into the stores. Which won’t be there. And it will be my fault.
Today we took a tiny risk. We bought a half whisky barrel to plant flowers in from someone in the village and we had coffee with friends in their front garden, sheltering from the wind behind their cars - the new normal. It rained and the sun shone, so there must have been rainbows somewhere.
The Muse keeps whispering silly ideas into my waking mind in the mornings. Ideas that would make for a good public reading in a pub which, like the shops may not be there. Here is this morning’s atrocity, unrelated to any lockdown philosophy or ponderings, unless it follows on by a process of free association from my innate guilt feelings. I recently read in a history book a rather too detailed account of execution by hanging, drawing and quartering, though some versions have the drawing before the hanging. I recall Mel Gibson made a bit of a meal of his own entrails when filming ‘Braveheart’. I instantly felt challenged to see how many rhymes for ‘quartered’ I could think of. Of course Anthony Babington our own local boy (pictured), as mentioned in an earlier blog, was quite a crowd draw himself in 1586 after his plot to rescue Mary Queen of Scots and assassinate Elizabeth I was discovered. Here is his story, written perhaps to expiate my own sense of guilt for using Amazon.
THE TRUE HISTORY OF ANTHONY BABINGTON OF DETHICK (1561-1586)
Young Anthony Babington of Dethick
He thought he had it sorted
To rescue Mary Queen of Scots
And have Elizabeth slaughtered.
Mary in Chartley Castle,
With strong stone built and mortared,
A note in a barrel of real ale,
He schemed to have imported.
But his faith in his companions
Was sadly rather distorted,
Because Walsingham had his spies there
Who to their Lord reported.
So Anthony was arrested then
And to the Tower escorted,
Which sealed poor Queen Mary’s fate
Whose favour he had courted.
All his plots and stratagems
By Walsingham’s spies were thwarted,
So he felt extremely cut up,
In fact hung, drawn and quartered.