Psalm 23

April 13th 2020: A new recording

The fog of my own COVID illness finally started to clear in early April. I knew it was dissipating because I finally found myself wanting to write music again.

At the same time, people from my synagogue were dying. On one occasion I attended a joint Zoom shiva for two men who had died on the same day. My heart broke to see Ethel, the husband of one of them, sitting there, entirely on her own, in the flat where her husband had passed away, still suffering from the illness which had killed him. I felt utterly helpless. We all did. We couldn't be there in person. It was just horrifying.. 

Ethel and her husband Judah were both huge fans of our synagogue choir and I instinctively knew that I needed to write something which had a chance of bringing just a modicum of hope or comfort to the scores of people who were suffering. 

I wrote to our rabbi and asked him which of the psalms he felt had a message which might best speak to people who were frightened or grieving and he immediately suggested Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd. After reading the words I knew not just that I wanted to set it to music, but furthermore that I needed to step up to the plate and sing it myself. I am usually rather happy hiding in the background when it comes to performing. I like being part of a choir primarily because, whilst I love making music, I’ve always suffered crippling embarrassment and nerves when asked to perform anything solo. I have the typical voice of a director in my head at all times which says, "what DO you look and sound like?!"

The piece wrote itself in minutes. I have seldom had such an immediate musical response to words. Obviously, setting Hebrew text brings its own set of challenges. I had to run everything past Michael to make sure I was stressing all the correct syllables. Scantion is something I’m fanatical about. Nathan, who is even more fanatical about it than me, taught me well!

I asked Julian Simmons if he would produce the track for me. We decided that I could send him midi files of all the different instrumental parts and trust him to make sensible choices in terms of the pads and samples he used. We've been working together since 2002, so I knew that everything could be done remotely in this manner. We wouldn’t need to sit in a studio together, even though that's the way we'd always worked before.

I asked Fiona to add some violin, and she recorded herself playing in her front room in her house in a village just outside Glasgow. I loved that we were making music like this. It somehow felt like we were beating the virus. My body had beaten the virus and now creativity was beating it as well.

The track the three of us created felt epic and emotional and all that remained was for me to record the vocals. I do not have a good enough microphone at my house, so, after much discussion, we decided it would be okay for me to go to Julian’s house in Crouch End to record it. As long as we were never in the same room and could be linked-up via headphones, it felt like we weren’t being foolish, or breaking too many lockdown rules. 

So, in the middle of Passover, on Easter Monday, in fact, I drove through the entirely empty streets of North London from Finchley to Crouch End. The weather was incredible. Spring really did suddenly rush in this year. I pulled up outside Julian’s house, texted to say I was there, and the front door was opened for me. My instructions were to head up the stairs, and go into a room where a mic had been set up with a music stand and a pair of headphones which I put on. I took a kippa out of my pocket, placed it on my head, and then heard Julian’s deeply familiar and hugely friendly voice in my ear. It really was a wonderful moment. Julian's wife, Carla, is a vicar, so we were actually recording the piece in a rectory! I don't know why this felt quite so right. It was Passover, but it was also Easter and Psalm 23, of course, has as much resonance with Christians as it does with Jewish people, so, I reckon I was in exactly the right place. 

“Shall we do this?” Julian said. And for the next hour, I sang my heart out. I thought about Ethel and Judah most of all. I remember looking out through the window into Julian and Carla's garden, seeing the sun and the lime green buds bursting on the trees, and, for the first time in I don’t know how long, feeling a sense of optimism. I sang well. The notes sailed out with great ease. And, before I knew it, everything was in the can.

I stood on the street by my car, and Julian and Carla brought their son, Yuvi to the front door for me to meet for the first time. We chatted for five minutes, standing maybe ten meters apart, I blew kisses, got back in my car and drove home, feeling very happy, and incredibly hungry.

The photograph below shows the transliterated Hebrew words to the psalm, with all my marks indicating where the stresses needed to fall, alongside literal English translations of the words. I really did my homework! 

And if you'd like to hear the piece again (or for the first time), please click here

Central London Lockdown

Photograph(s) Two: Central London. May 2nd and 4th 2020.

In the very early stages of lockdown, Central London seemed like a no-go zone. I remember seeing a set of photographs taken by newsreader, Sophie Rayworth, which showed all the familiar tourist hotspots almost eerily empty.

On two occasions, quite close together, I found myself walking into Central London, once with my friend Michael and once with Nathan, on both occasions to experience something I felt I would never have a chance to witness again. And some of the things we saw on those two walks have embedded themselves in my mind, probably forever. They were both deeply moving and hugely magical.

The most astonishing aspect was the complete silence. The nearer to the centre of London we walked, the more empty it became. Take away the tourists, the workers, the theatre goers, the revellers and the people who have second homes in the country, and you’re not left with a great many people. Food shops up in Finchley were open and positively thriving, but everything in the West End was closed, and a great many shops and cafes were entirely boarded over. Some of the larger shops like Liberty and Selfridges had security guards standing outside, and very often these were the only people we saw.

Standing on the South Bank and being able to hear nothing but the wind rustling the masts of boats on the Thames was hugely eerie. Hearing St Paul’s Cathedral’s bells chiming the hour whilst crossing an entirely deserted Hungerford Bridge some 2 kilometres away was nothing short of miraculous. Walking around Covent Garden and hearing our footsteps echoing in the roof of the covered market was beyond spooky. Whilst with Michael, I walked for about four blocks, all the time hearing the sound of an alarm in the misty night air. It was the sort of sound which would have been blotted out by traffic noise within a second of hearing it in a normal London.

Piccadilly Circus was particularly weird. The huge LED billboards had been replaced by a giant, blue screen which merely read “NHS”. There were no cars. Almost no people. The occasional bus or cyclist drifted past, silhouetted perfectly against the dark light. You could hear the spokes of the bicycle wheels clicking as they passed.


On one of my visits, I chatted to a homeless man whilst standing on the steps underneath Eros. These steps are usually packed with tourists screaming at each other in a hundred different languages over the yells of traffic, but we were almost whispering to each other. “Where did you study?” asked the incredibly well-spoken, middle-aged homeless man, half way through our chat, “York” I said… “ah, I’m an Oxford man, myself…”

Nathan became rather tearful whilst walking down an empty Shaftesbury Avenue underneath the glowing marquees of the closed theatres. This is his world - his community - and seeing the ghosts of shows was too much for him. For me, standing in the middle of that particularly road took me back to an Autumnal Sunday morning in 2006 when we were shooting the apocalyptic movie, 28 Weeks Later. I worked both as a casting director and as the acting coach on the film, and we did a lot of filming on empty streets. I wrote about it in my blog on March 30th this year. We shot a sequence in the very spot where I was standing on Shaftesbury Avenue - and, to be fair, everything was as crazily empty back then… except for the massive film crew. And, even at 6am on that Sunday morning, we had to do pedestrian and traffic lock-offs for three minutes at a time. We’d finish the shot and then a stream of bemused people and angry-looking drivers would file past. This wasn’t the case back in early May this year…

The other notable aspect of my trips into Central London was the darkness. This was partially created by many of the main landmarks, including the London Eye, the National Theatre and the fountains in Trafalgar Square being lit up in the dark blues and purples of the NHS colours, but it was further enhanced by large areas of the city not being lit up at all. Large swathes of buildings on the Thames were in complete darkness and most of the bridges were unlit. And possibly, as a result of less pollution (both light and from traffic fumes), the skies were much darker. I have never seen stars in the skies above central London before. I’m used to a sort of milky, orange, halogen glow, with clouds reflecting light back into the city. Not so on May 4th.

A return to blogging - with a different mind-set

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down this year, written all, or most of a blog-post and then decided not to publish. Most of the time I’ve been too frightened of the consequences of having an opinion in a divided world where, unless you are happy to put your name to the exact wording of a script which has been written by a bunch of shrieking virtue-signallers, you’re considered to be a right-wing fascist, and dispatched accordingly. I am trying as hard as I can to avoid anything which is triggering: anything which brings back the hell of what happened to Nathan exactly a year ago.

We entered lockdown talking about a brave new world. Caroline Flack’s suicide had made us think more than ever about the concept of kindness, and when people started dying in their thousands, we finally started to act on these thoughts. The helplessness and terror that every single one of us felt meant that, for a brief, almost magical period, we forgot about our differences and started to pull together. We checked in on friends and family. We put notes through the doors of complete strangers. We celebrated love. We accepted hardship and learned to put up with lack of food and interminable queuing.

And yet, within weeks, we were divided again. A new script emerged that we were forced to use. You couldn’t talk about going for a walk unless you added the words “socially-distanced”, key workers had to be described as “brave” and so it went on. If you broke the new laws, or used the wrong script, then the cracks started to open again. People became incensed: “what? You don’t wear a mask?” “How dare those dreadful Londoners living in flats without gardens go to their local park?” “How dare these people go to a beach on a sunny day?” “What?! You’re not applauding the NHS at 8pm on a Thursday? You are so uncaring…”

And, of course, the moment Dominic Cummings messed up, the seething anger and bitterness which had built up in us all whilst being cooped up in tiny houses, flooded over the country like an oil slick. You’d think he’d ridden through County Durham with a machine gun and a machete, our anger was so intense. “He must be sacked!” “No, sacking is too good for him” "Covid is his fault" “Burn the witch…” And, as lockdown finally eases, we are back in our echo chambers, literally tearing each other apart, demanding that certain public figures are cancelled for expressing independent ideas or flying too close to the inappropriate wind. We demand that art is censored. Our silence is violence. Our words are violence. We support Black Lives Matter and then the official UK Twitter account for the group starts to tweet antisemitic conspiracy theories but if you criticise them, you're racist and sent into a corner to "do the work." In short, we can’t win. No one wants to debate because no one can be bothered to listen to two sides of an argument. We only read the comments or newspapers which re-enforce our own views whilst living in a culture of absolute fear. Nuanced conversations have been forced behind closed doors, into conspiratorial whispers, whilst those who scream the loudest use sweeping, deeply unacceptable terms like “fascist" “Nazi” and “genocide” to re-enforce their hatred of the people who refuse to bang their drum. Is whipping people into submission a way of making the world a better place? Do we genuinely believe that we can change someone’s mind by attacking them?

Until very recently I thought I could fight it. Moreover, I felt it was my DUTY to fight it, having seen, first hand, the hell that happens when you don’t. I now realise I can’t. A good friend of mine finally got through to me in one of those text messages which you just want to frame for future reference; “let the terrible twos rage. I’m not engaging. People just want to bicker. I prefer to transcend, knowing my own truth.”

And suddenly it was like a weight was being lifted from me. I no longer needed to be the man who rants about politics, about Brexit, about social justice warriorism and virtue signalling. By ranting about the dangers of all of this, I am no better than those who have stolen my right to call myself left wing from me. I need to focus on my own truth… or perhaps try to find my own truth. There’s a long old road ahead of me, I will fall off the wagon countless times, I’m sure, but I need to do this for my own mental health.

Twitter is no longer on my phone. I no longer watch the news. I am actively attempting to surround myself with beauty, music, kindness and joy, so that, instead of throwing negativity and bitterness into the ether, I’m creating art which moves people and gives them the space to be transported from the anger of the world.

And that, my friends, is the last I will write on the issue…

But the blog is back, so what am I going to write about?

I’ll confess. Lockdown for me was a rather special time. I was lucky. Sure, I lost a tonne of work but I had Nathan. Though three people died at my shul, I didn’t lose anyone hugely close to me. And, more than anything else, because I had the sodding illness, early on, I was able to be a little more adventurous. Once the terrible fog of COVID had cleared and my creativity returned, I was able to go out and experience the joyful silence of London. I could go for long walks in the seemingly never-ending sunshine. We could explore the joys of the green belt, which turned out to be just half an hour’s walk from our house. We were able to watch the days getting longer and longer and feel that extraordinary sense of optimism growing on a daily basis. For the first time in years, I watched the seasons turning.

…And I photographed everything fanatically because I knew I was living in a remarkable time which I would probably never see again. And so, for the next however long, this blog will be a testimony to that remarkable time. I will publish one photograph a day from the lockdown period and write a little bit about how I was feeling when I took it.

I very much hope you will join me on a journey into a unique time, and enjoy experiencing it through my eyes.

Photograph One. Chalk messages. April 2nd, 2020

Whilst still recovering from COVID, Nathan and I started to take advantage of our permitted daily walk. To begin with, it was simply a way of regaining strength - we would walk up the tiniest incline and find ourselves breathless - but the feeling of fresh air was very healing after two weeks trapped inside. The outside world, however, was very frightening. Lockdown happened a week into our illness, so emerging into the new world was like walking into a dystopian novel. Everything was deathly silent. Cars no longer roared down the once busy Ballard’s Lane. A masked young lad on one occasion rode past me on a bicycle yelling vaguely homophobic comments before screaming “covid” and coughing in my direction. The shops were empty. Passing someone in the street involved stepping out into the middle of the road whilst holding our breath to give them as wide a berth as possible. We crossed over the road for old people. We could hear bird song. The rustling of trees. The barking of foxes. My neighbour attempting to play "Tequila" on a guitar. Over and over again. And we discovered the joys of the Dollis Valley Green Walk, which follows a brook that runs all the way from Hampstead Heath, through Finchley, into the greenbelt.

But despite the beauty of Dollis Brook, those early days were highly depressing. It was still winter. Gales in February had brought down all manner of trees. Paths were muddy and everything seemed spiky and wintry.

Our strength grew and the walks became longer, and, to our great joy, we discovered that people were chalking messages of hope onto the pavements by the side of the stream. The messages touched both of us. The sentiments were simple but optimistic:

“Focus on the right things. 

Stay strong.
Make a difference.
Stay connected.
Be kind.
Look after each other.
Stay hopeful.”

I look back to those times and realise we were both broken men. The symptoms seemed endless. The illness affected our minds. We couldn’t focus on anything. We felt depressed. We were scared. We’d lost our sense of smell and taste. But to those two, frightened, hobbling, breathless men, those messages meant the world. And I send my heartfelt thanks to whoever wrote them.

The SJWs are back

I read a rather troubling piece on the BBC website today which suggested that TV presenter Ben Fogle had got into a bit of trouble for suggesting that we could all open our windows at 9am on the Queen’s 94th birthday this coming Tuesday to sing happy birthday to her.

Cue the entrance of the Social Justice Warriors, whose pissy scripts have changed very little since the Coronavirus crisis began:

"Next Tuesday will have been many people's birthdays. Some of them may be dead due to Coronavirus” 

"The Queen is a very wealthy woman who could be donating £millions to NHS and opening up one of her palaces for use as a hospital.”

"Let's save the clapping/singing for the frontline heroes shall we?”

And then the obligatory pompous dig: “Really misread the room with this one Ben."

Patently Ben Fogle is not a bad man for suggesting that the country unite to sing to the Queen. She is beloved to many and frankly, I rather like all initiatives which enable people to come together in these lonely and difficult times. Plainly Ben Fogle wasn’t suggesting that anyone should be forced to do something they didn’t want to do. He was just mooting an idea, which, it turns out, had come from his 8-year old daughter. 

The idea that ANY of the Queen’s Palaces would be appropriate for use as a hospital is laughable. This is not the First World War. You can just see the decision makers can’t you; “right, we’ve been offered EXCEL in the heart of London where the virus is rife with its huge, concrete-floored rooms where thousands can be treated… but, wait, the Queen has offered the dusty ballroom and drawing rooms at Sandringham in Norfolk. She says she’s got a special deal with the Big Yellow Storage Company and can get the Whistler paintings whisked away in an appropriately socially-distanced way.  We reckon we have space for at least 17 beds...” 

Accusing someone of not being behind NHS Workers has the same ring to it as the empty cries of racism which blighted the internet last year. Only the most horrible people would try to argue that the NHS isn’t vital and wonderful, but it seems it’s incredibly easy for a twisted mind to warp someone else’s words to make it look like they’re arguing just that! It’s a form of thought-control. It’s gas-lighting. It’s mean-spirited, pathetic virtue-signalling. 

There is space in the world for those who want to sing Happy Birthday to the Queen as WELL as those of us who want to applaud the NHS. Doing one absolutely does not preclude doing the other. Neither is regulatory. 

We’re all doing our bit - or trying to at least. We all get it wrong from time to time, or snap under the pressure. There isn’t a hierarchy of pain during this crisis. There’s only love. And I’m still not sure this message is quite getting through. If you can't be kind, use your spare time learning a foreign language or a musical instrument. It's better for your soul. 

Turn down the suspicion

I watched the deputy chief medical officer making an announcement on the television a few days ago. She seems to think that we might be in this lock-down scenario for another six months, which is information I’m sure the majority of us took with an inward gasp of air. It really got me thinking: Obviously people are dying at the moment - in almost staggering numbers - and for the time being, health professionals probably need to be taking the lead in guiding us through the early stages of this pandemic. But, at a certain point, if the economy collapses because no one is allowed to go back to work, we could face a far deeper crisis. We are justifiably protecting the vulnerable in society at the moment, but, as lockdown measures continue, a whole new set of people will find themselves in deep water, and the government can’t keep bailing us out - particularly if there’s no hope of our economy being kick-started. 

Of course, there’s a lot of talk of kindness at the moment and, almost every time I look at social media, I find myself moved by the genuinely altruistic gestures of others. But I’m also seeing a lot of self-serving posturing and general virtue-signalling, which I think we could all do without - particularly from celebrities who seem to take great delight in posting their marvellous messages of hope from beautiful houses which look out onto enormous gardens. And, furthermore, in the process of demonstrating that “we’re all in this together”, others are taking to the Internet and being quite horrible to those they feel are not towing the virtuous party line. 

After what we went through last summer, it was no surprise to me that a knitter decided to use the “clap for our carers” initiative as an opportunity to “call out” Nathan, whose weekly online knit-a-long happens to start at 8pm on a Thursday, the very time that those of us who felt moved to do so were opening our windows and applauding our over-stretched health service. This knitter’s tone felt horribly smug and self-righteous, as she admonished Nathan for “making money” whilst the rest of us thanked our brave NHS workers. And to that knitter I say the following:

1. Nathan’s online knit-a-longs are for people around the world and not just Brits
2. Nathan is running them (without any form of monetising) so that people, at the same time each week, can check in with members of their community in a period where many are suffering great loneliness
3. Gestures of kindness and solidarity like the “clap for our carers” initiative are only magical if people take part in them because they want to, and not because they’re told it’s a duty. 

We really need to stop focussing on what other people are doing and start focussing on what we ourselves are doing during this crisis. Quietly turn the negativity into positivity.

Let me make this statement: We are all different. We are all dealing with this awful situation in the best way we can. Some of us are coping better than others. Some of us are better placed to cope than others. Most government advice, in my experience, seems to assume that the majority of us are part of a nuclear family. But many people I know, of all ages, are living on their own and this lockdown is causing anxiety and waves of terrible loneliness.

The other thing I have observed in the few days I’ve been out of the house for walks since my Covid-19 quarantine effectively came to an end is how people, certainly in London, are really icy with those they pass in the street when they’re out on their constitutionals. I understand that we’re all terrified - but we’re not going to pass coronavirus onto anyone by smiling whilst we’re doing that hysterical do-se-do around them, whilst, simultaneously (if you’re me) holding our breath. It really isn’t very kind to look at everyone you pass like they’re plague victims. 

Nathan and I went down to Hampstead Garden Suburb for our walk yesterday. It’s now 18 days since we got the virus, so, by every calculation we’re now fully recovered. I celebrated by getting a vegetarian pastie at Daniel’s, a kosher bakery in Temple Fortune. There were only three people in the shop and two women were queueing behind us. As we turned to leave, one of these women scuttled to the other end of the shop. The woman behind her, somewhat confused, asked if she was still in the queue to which the scuttling woman replied “yes, I just wanted to get away from THOSE people.” She pointed at us like we’d just shat on the floor. As we left, Nathan addressed her, “it’s very difficult not to be offended by that remark…” I’m sure, had she found out that we’d actually had the virus, she would have considered her dreadfully unkind statement to have been justified. As it happened, it just upset me. Coronavirus, it turns out, isn’t a great deal of fun. I have had a pretty awful pair of weeks and I was actually really excited that I had sufficient energy to go for a walk and enough appetite to want to eat a pastie. I get that we’re all terrified, I really do, and perhaps it’s easier for me to say this, as someone who’s recovered relatively unscathed, but we really need to turn down the suspicion by a notch and start to treat those we’re forced to interact with with a little more respect. 

Wedding anniversary

Last night, at about midnight, I had a sudden flash of “what the fuck?” I realised that we are actually living through what, for so many years, has been the sort of thing which only happens in movies. Thirteen years ago, I worked as the acting coach on a film called 28 Weeks Later. The film was set in a post-apocalyptic London, 28 weeks after a weird virus had turned most of the population into rage-fuelled, blood-thirsty zombies. Actually, we weren’t allowed to call them zombies because they weren’t actually dead - they were known instead as the “infected.” We did a lot of filming in iconic London locations in the early hours of the morning. At the time it felt like quite a treat to be on Shaftesbury Avenue with all the theatre marquees turned off and no cars or pedestrians in sight. It gave us the opportunity to go down into abandoned tube stations, and strange tunnels and snickleways. One Sunday morning we did some filming in Finsbury Park. This particular sequence focussed on an upturned car on Stroud Green Road, positioned outside a bashed-up pizza restaurant. I think there were some corpses. To be honest, there were always corpses - it was a horror movies after all! I remember watching a night bus passing the scene, and a group of somewhat terrified clubbers, bleached-out from a night of partying, staring down at the scene, trying to compute what they were witnessing. 

And last night, I suddenly realised that I was living through the very thing which had seemed so far-fetched back in 2007!

I watched aerial footage of some of London’s key tourist destinations, all eerily empty. There was a shot of the pedestrian bridge over the Thames which runs from St Paul’s to the Tate Modern. We filmed sequences for 28 Weeks Later there as well - one early morning in October. The sunrise we witnessed on that day remains the most spectacular sunrise I’ve ever witnessed. The sky was initially filled with streaks of mauve and lavender and then, as the sun appeared, everything turned orange and yellow. Every window lit up - almost as though the whole city were on fire. 

I have another rather special memory attached to that bridge. Back in 1999, when it opened, Sam Becker and I were working at the New Ambassadors Theatre. The bridge had some sort of design flaw which none of its architects had predicted. If people walked on it, on masse, their footsteps would somehow align, and the whole bridge started to bounce - really quite dramatically. Sam and I, keen for new experiences, decided to walk from the theatre down to the bridge to experience the phenomenon for ourselves. I guess it was almost midnight when we finally got there, but the place was heaving with people having a fabulous time walking across the bridge. And it was the most bizarre, stomach-churning experience. Like a fairground ride. It was almost as though the floor were somehow rippling underneath our feet. It was how I imagine an earthquake must feel. 

Of course, the following day, the bridge was closed for an extended period whilst they figured out how to remedy the situation, so I am always very grateful that Sam and I had thought to be so spontaneous. 

I think I feel a little better every day. I’m not coughing anything like as much as I was, but my sense of smell still hasn’t returned. I thought I could smell the soap I was using in the bath this morning, but that might have been a memory of the good old days! I am having surreal dreams, which my father tells me is a symptom of a virus. I dreamed a few days ago that I’d learned how to play the flute. For me, this is about as random as anything I could ever have imagined. Hell would freeze over before I EVER took an interest in the devil’s pipe. Flutes are the coriander of the musical world.

It was our sixth wedding anniversary yesterday, and, in line with our once-yearly tradition, we strolled up to Alexandra Palace. Readers will remember that we got married - in song, and on the telly - in a disused Victorian theatre deep within the “Ally Pally” complex. 

Our yearly visit to the Palace gives us an opportunity to see whether spring has come early or late in any given year. In 2014 it came particularly early. We’d had weeks of wonderful, unbroken sunshine in the run-up to the wedding and this is very much captured in the filming we did for the show’s opening sequence. Meriel appears in shot at one point like Julie Andrews twirling in a sunny alpine meadow!

Nathan’s sister stayed with us the night before the big day, and we got a taxi up to the venue first thing. There are a number of photographs of me holding a bouquet of dusky pink roses which had been sent to us by the singer Katie Melua - a particularly wonderful surprise and it was the first thing we were handed as we arrived. I remember my brother arriving very early, and then Hilary, and the five of us walking, with our photographer Gaby, to a blossom tree where we spent a wonderful few minutes enjoying the sensation of the pink and white petals falling down on us like confetti. The view from Ally Pally over London is spectacular and I remember it looking very misty in the early morning sunshine. I also remember noticing that the rainbow flag was flying from a flagpole outside the complex and feeling incredibly moved, welcomed and accepted. It was amazing to think how far the gay rights movement had come in my lifetime. That frightened little child who didn’t dare to tell his Mum that he’d been spat at in the street because people had decided he was gay was now the poster boy for true equality. And that felt magical. 

Of course, a lot of people at the time were telling us that gay marriage was going to lead to the end of society as we know it. Back then, the Christians were convinced there would be a giant flood. God was really going to let us have it to show quite how much he hated the concept of same-sex marriage. In the end God sent weeks of sunshine - and ironically chose to break the glorious sunny spell, some three weeks after we’d got married… on Easter Sunday! I’m sure there were one or two very disappointed and confused Christians that year. I often wonder how these religious sects must feel; you know, the ones who sit on the edge of a cliff waiting for the rapture to come. At what stage must they think, “oh dear, we’ve given all of our worldly possessions to the people who told us the end of the world is nigh, and now we’ve got to re-enter society with our tails between our legs.”? I think, if I weren’t brain-washed, I might feel a bit of anger. 

The blossom wasn’t quite as advanced on the trees this year as it was back in 2014. It has been very sunny of late in London, but yesterday morning, maybe just as a little subtle warning from nature not to spend the weekend passing the virus around willy-nilly, it actually hailed. Proper hail. 

Ally Pally was, of course, next to empty. The weather didn’t help, but they’ve also closed the car parks to stop people from congregating there. They’ve also blocked most of it off, so you can’t go up to the building itself. We walked up to the boating lake. They have these wonderful pedalos shaped like flamingos and swans, but all are moored to the island in the middle of the lake. One wonders how long it will take for nature to start taking over. How long will it be until the boats are covered in mill-dew and algae? How long until weeds start to push up through the tarmac? One day, we may well know whether those set dressers on 28 Weeks Later got it right. 

If reading this blog has given you a sense that you might like to see our wedding again - or for the first time - we have a link which you can follow for a private viewing. Let me know if you enjoy... Happy times. 

www.nathantaylor.co.uk/ourgaywedding.m4v

The infected

It feels like forever since I last wrote a blog. I’ve had very little to write about. Since the business with Nathan last summer, I’ve not much liked the world. It’s felt vengeful. Brutal. Angry. Divided. I’ve felt irrelevant. Ignored. Old. 

And, of course, in the last few weeks, the world has descended into… well, what is this? How can any of us effectively describe the situation we’re presently in? Is this the “black out” that the shamans warned us about? Is this the beginning of the end? Or is this the moment when we take a collective step backwards in an attempt to learn what we’ve been doing wrong, so we can finally begin the process of healing? 

It’s certainly a surreal time. A frightening time. More than anything else, I suspect, it’s a time when we realise how fragile ALL human beings are.

My union, the Musicians’ Union, awarded me a grant of £200 to help me to pay this month’s rent. For the first time in my life, I received financial assistance without having to fill in a painstakingly long form. I wasn’t asked which word best describes my gender or ethnicity. I wasn’t asked to apologise for being who I am. The union simply asked if I needed help. The answer was yes and a day later the money was transferred into my account. 

My own story is, of course, echoed by creative freelancers around the world. Three weeks ago, I lost nearly all of my work. Every day, over the course of about a week, the emails came in to tell me that my diary had been denuded. I fell into an absolute panic, waking up in the night in pools of sweat wondering what was going to happen to me. 

But then I realised it was happening to other people. More and more of us. Other musician friends were losing their work. The theatres were closing - and the bars and cafes. Then the schools, the shops… And there we all were; an army of workers, scratching our heads, shell-shocked, challenged in ways we could never have predicted. 

And then Nathan and I got sick. We spent nine days in complete isolation, living with this infamous virus which had travelled all the way from a market in a region of China I’d never heard of. We initially told very few people and simply hunkered down. The stigma felt great - and we didn’t want people to panic. The problem with Coronavirus is that it consumes all of your thoughts. The news seemed to suggest that it was the second stage of the illness - the coughing - which was carrying people to their graves. And so you sit, waiting for the cough to come, going to bed at night with a heavy chest wondering if you’ll even wake up in the morning. And the other thing about the virus is that it makes your head feel very strange. A sort of fug descends which, on one hand, fills your brain with bizarre existential thoughts, and, on the other, makes it almost impossible to focus on anything. And worse than that is the fact that the symptoms come and go. One day you’re full of beans. The next you’re exhausted again. And after a while, this can start to make a person oscillate between depression and anger.  

And the sodding thing throws insane symptoms your way. All of those adverts which say that the only two things to watch out for are a fever and a dry cough are just nonsense. I, for example, have had no sense of smell or taste for four days. Nathan’s eyes ached and he had weird deafness. I had oddly painful feet, terrible upper back pains… But the number one symptom is fatigue. A deep, dark, fuck-this type of fatigue. 

The other thing you find yourself regularly doing is shouting at the telly to tell them that their numbers are wrong. They have to be. If no one but the very ill and the very famous are getting tested for COVID-19, how on earth does anyone know how many of us have it? Our Prime Minister has it. Our future king has it. This thing is everywhere. I have it. Nathan has it. Becky has it. Jo has it. Thierry has it. My brother probably has it. Are any of us included in the official figures? Of course not! And then the next question is whether there are legions of people who are getting it, but experiencing no symptoms. And we won’t know any answers at all until we start aggressively testing. 

What does seem to be the case is that the virus has sunk its teeth into my synagogue. The festival of Purim, I suspect, came at the wrong time. 

I’m horrified to say that people are dying. 

I was devastated by the news of the passing of one particular old gentleman of whom I was particularly fond. I actually dedicated an arrangement to him and his wife in the concert we did last month. He got ill on Friday and died on Monday. His wife, now ill, has been forced to self-isolate. There’s no one there to hug her or do any of the things which bring hope and respite to the grieving. 

And then, of course, other members of the community are feeling frightened and desperately lonely. 

The irony, of course, is that we endured gale after gale in the first half of the year, but since we’ve all been in lockdown, the sun has shone every single day! Spring has come. Blossom is heavy on all the trees. I woke up two days ago thinking how much I wanted to see my parents. On a day like that, at any other time, I’d have jumped into my car and gone to see them. But we can’t. Mothering Sunday came and went with very few people getting to see their parents. 

There is, however, something strangely comforting about all of us being in the same boat. It reminds us of our commonality in an era where we were being forced to see only difference. And I believe this is the key to the healing of society. 

At 8pm yesterday night, something very beautiful happened. The entire nation stopped to applaud our beloved National Health Service. I wasn’t entirely convinced that Londoners would want to get involved in an initiative like this. Though it’s painfully true that, here in the capital, we’re ahead of the curve in terms of numbers of infections, Londoners can be a little prickly and arch. We aren’t renowned for our sense of community spirit. 

Anyway, at a few minutes to 8, I opened my window and looked out into the street. I could see a group of three people standing on the pavement opposite who seemed to be looking at their watches. Of course, the eerie thing was the lack of traffic on the roads. If people had started clapping on Ballards Lane at 8pm on an evening before self-isolation started, we almost certainly wouldn’t have heard anything but the roar of engines. 

But suddenly I could see windows opening in flats above the shops opposite - and, at the stroke of 8, the applause started. It echoed down the empty streets. Soon it became cheering and then whistling. It lasted about a minute. It would almost die-out for a few moments and then take off again. 

The idea that people were doing this the length and breadth of the country was deeply moving. My mother said that her entire street in Thaxted had taken part. Hilary and Meriel applauded in Lewes. We were united in our pride in and love for the NHS. Many of us will desperately need its services over the next few months. Some of the people who stood and applauded last night will find themselves on NHS ventilators, feeling absolute gratitude that our health system is still available - free - for everyone. 

We none of us know where any of this is heading. The only thing we know for certain is that things will get harder before they improve. I can’t help but think that this is an opportunity for us all, however. This event could go down in history as the movement when we rediscovered the true meaning of kindness. The moment when we collectively reappraised the meaning of happiness. The time when we stopped shouting and started listening. When we discovered that there’s a difference between what we want and what we need. When we stopped demanding our rights and instead focussed on our responsibilities. Who knows, this may even be the moment when we finally redistribute wealth. Owning a house might become a basic human right and not another way of making obscene amounts of money. 

Please stay well. And if you’re lonely - reach out. Tell someone. They may not be able to come running to you in the flesh, but the one thing about this crisis is that we’ve all got a lot of time on our hands to listen.