You get it on the breeze. I don’t just mean the Corona virus aerosols but shreds of conversation as you pass people or overhear phone conversations: “What will happen when...?”; “I think they should...”; and so on. Or there are the specialised words we never heard in everyday conversations a year ago: furlough, asymptomatic, antigen. Strange, disembodied words overheard, wafting on the breeze like leaves or litter. Covid is a conversational pandemic. It has infected all our talk and has bedded down into all our intercourse as natural as the weather. We’ve become a nation of epidemiologists and social psychologists, disease pundits and viral gossipers. We assess the future chances of different vaccines with the same passion and expertise as we used to discuss the chances of Derby County in the League.
Back in the summer we were rejoicing in having the leisure to notice the small things in life: the butterfly on the buddleia, the fungi at the base of a tree, a particular modulation in a blackbird’s song. Since being locked down more indoors we’ve reverted to airing our views on the great issues in the news. Now, having recognised that nothing we say will affect anything, Deirdre and I have begun noticing the finer things again, like solicitors. I don’t mean real ones or the Showbiz type who star in court dramas, but the rather shabby ones who always sit wordlessly beside an alleged villain in crime drama interviews. They’re particularly common on ‘Vera’, mostly just off screen but occasionally their right ear might creep into the frame. Of course they have to be there in real life and are probably as annoying to film- directors as they are to real life police interviewers. I can imagine they are an afterthought when the director realises that the hopeless addict who has been hauled in has a right to legal representation. So do they resort to a sort of hiring fair of extras waiting outside, or are there theatrical agents who specialise in faceless, anonymous, nondescript actors who can’t act, but who can look expressionless and occasionally quizzical? They’re often middle-aged so they’ve left it a bit late if they see this as their doorway to fame, a CV or an Equity card. Anyway, whoever they are, they’ve obviously been rushed into wardrobe, quickly given an ill-fitting suit, over to props for a writing pad and a pencil and then a rudimentary lesson in Method Acting so they can pretend to be taking notes.
The other under-rated aspiring thespian, we’ve come to regard critically and whose performance we analyse, is the corpse. No crime drama is complete now without a post-mortem, and I expect more would-be male murder victims audition to be poked and eviscerated by Emilia Fox than by Vera. So let’s widen our repertoire of conversation beyond Covid and Brexit, just as today we welcomed a change in news headlines with Priti Patel bullying civil servants. Let’s give a shout for the aspirant whom no one notices, the person on the edge of the frame, the one who is instructed to remain expressionless, immobile and invisible – the anti-celebrity.
One positive feature of the last 8 months has been our being encouraged to recognise the role of the shop assistant, the bin man, the carer and the delivery driver. Once upon a time society was guilty of not noticing the elderly, the isolated and the residents of care-homes. The whole thrust of so much Covid policy now has been to recognise the potential we oldies have to wreck the NHS and economy, that we are a powerful lobby, so we’re not sitting just outside the camera frame but are in sharp focus, every pixel of our wrinkled old bodies being lovingly protected.
Pam Ayres has written in a recent poem:
You see, we are the ‘oldies’ now
We need to stay inside
If they haven’t seen us for a while
They’ll think we’ve upped and died.
Many individuals, elderly, financially disadvantaged, vulnerable have slipped out of the limelight and it’s a mark of our community here that so much effort is being made locally to bring them into focus. So when I say “consider the poor solicitor” it’s not an appeal to fund impoverished lawyers, but to recognise the ‘extra’ just out of the margin.