the thing about the heartsick shut-in

This brilliant song by They Might Be Giants was my earworm this morning. It made me laugh, the way that clever, rhythmically precise lyrics can.

And then I really started to pay attention to them.

Renew my subscription
To "Desperate Bellowing Magazine"
It sure does have a familiar ring
You might say I fit the description
Renew my subscription
To "Miserable Freak Show Quarterly"
Every back-number I saw spoke to me
Acknowledging it's my addiction

Although it would be natural to be tired of feeling like a "heartsick-shut-in", nearly five months into the UK's delayed lock-down, in all honestly it hasln't involved massive changes to my everyday life.

• Still working? Yep*
• Too much? Possibly
• Going out regularly? Well, as much as ever (i.e. not so much)

* By the way, the fact that the government has stopped shielding vulnerable people with chronic health conditions and is effectively forcing them back into work makes me sick. I’d hoped that the pandemic would make employers appreciate the value of remote working. I guess I missed a meeting. 

As I mentioned before, I've been getting more regular exercise than I have in years. In fact, I'm still displaying more commitment to the Joe Wicks exercise videos than the man himself. It became part of our home-schooling schedule so we carried on doing weekday mornings even when Joe went part-time. Plus me and Little Ms D did extra sessions on weekends, and we're still going.

Recently there has been a bit of talk about swimming pools reopening. Much as I miss swimming, I can't imagine anything less likely at the moment.

Like a kind of filthy, random stock-pot! Yikes.

On the couple of occasions I've been to the hospital for my Tysabri infusion, when asked the standard question about if I have any alergies, I have said, "Only other people." I really don't have much faith in the British public's much vaunted stock of common sense.

I mean, it's never a good sign when American friends send WhatsApp messages, mocking events such as the terrible scenes at Bournemouth last month. That's right. American people, from AMERICA, think that we're idiots.

A catchphrase of mine and the divine Mrs D's was prompted by a story on our local news programme. This was immediately after the announcement that people could book foreign holidays, a ruling that, in itself, didn't last that long.

I'm sure that, as I write, the official line is that people are being encouraged to book holidays in order to support the tourism industry. However, they should expect not to be able to travel. I'm pretty sure that, had I ever been arsed to finish reading Catch 22, this might make some kind of sense.

Anyway, in the news report that evening, they interviewed a woman who was going towards check-in with her kids. They asked her why she was travelling. She said something along the lines of, "The schools aren't in, and we'd seen that bookings were possible, so we just thought, 'Why not?'"

To which we responded, "Because there's a frigging GLOBAL PANDEMIC!"

So "we just thought, 'Why not?'" has been a recurring joke, whenever another brainfart recommendation has been mooted. Maybe we have a slightly more sensitive attitude towards risk than most people.

I wanna be a much better person
Instead I worsen with every day
But there's a drug whose name I'm not sure of
Which I need more of to feel okay

Read the full lyrics to Renew My Subscription.