The 4 AM Curse

The time I find hardest of all is four o’clock in the morning. It’s the time at which I frequently wake up and brood. At 4 am I’m awake enough to struggle getting back off to sleep, but insufficiently rested so that I know I will feel tired by the middle of the afternoon.

Lying awake at 4 am, my mind starts to torture me. It’s bad enough at the best of times, my mind runs riot with hypothetical disasters from which I feel I will have to extricate myself sooner or later. Or, my thoughts take me on a journey featuring all of the greatest embarrassments I have experienced. Only at four in the morning am I likely to remember, in excruciating detail, some shame from half-a-century ago.

At present, things are worse than normal. My mind tricks me with temporary amnesia when I first wake, and the problems we currently face only slowly dawn on me. Then they occupy virtually my every waking thought until I go to bed, however many hours later that may be.

I remember vividly that in 1993, when June – my first wife – died, suddenly and unexpectedly, I would have no trouble getting to sleep (stress can do that), but would wake at all hours and, at first, have a vague feeling that something was different and wrong. Then the enormity of it would hit me. It’s the same now, except with one very important difference.

When June died, my world caved in. Bereavement hits you hard and suddenly, in the same way as a terrorist atrocity or a natural disaster (whether we are directly involved or not). The shock is immediate. Quite the opposite is true in the case of coronavirus (unless you have it, or know someone who has it, of course), but there’s an impending feeling of doom, a sense that the hammer is about to fall. They say that terrorists only have to get lucky once, the security services and the police have to be lucky all of the time, and that is how I feel about coronavirus. Every time I go out – and as well as the supermarket, I’ve ended up in B&Q and Ikea in recent days, and with a sense of foreboding on each occasion – I feel that I’m shortening the odds on my catching this thing.

While the Government has stopped short of telling pubs to close (Edit: Since I wrote this, the Government has announced that pubs, cafes, and restaurants are to close), they have counselled people to avoid them. But Stanley Johnson, father of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said on live TV that he had every intention of ignoring his son’s advice, and would be going to the pub that evening. That sort of attitude – and that of college kids continuing to party during Spring Break in the States, or British holidaymakers in Spain ignoring the state of emergency that has been imposed there - shows that voluntary measures are hopeless in this sort of instance. There exists a belief among these sorts of people that either they are invulnerable, or that the rules simply don’t apply to them.

I get the very distinct impression that many British people would not take kindly to draconian restrictions of their rights to do precisely what they want, and that banning assemblies of large groups, of closing the pubs, or limiting the right to movement, would all be treated as affronts. The population seems to have split into the ultra-cautious on the one hand – latex gloves and face masks while stripping the shelves bare in Tesco or Asda – to the carefree, potentially reckless souls who make no concession to the circumstances. Me, I’m somewhere in the middle, lurching uncertainly between despair and hope – and you know what they say about that in a different context – ‘despair I can deal with, it’s the hope I can’t handle’.

I should probably avoid social media, which is doing nothing to calm my anxiety. Twitter is especially bad. I’ve seen some dire predictions (including some from people working in the NHS) to the effect that a perfect storm is brewing; these posters are especially scathing of people who continue to use public transport, go to the gym, and socialise in pubs and restaurants. And to all those who shrug their shoulders, say they are fine, and blithely carry on as though what is swirling around us is no more inconvenient than a mild cold, remember – you may feel fine now, but you may be carrying the coronavirus, and by the time you know, how many people may you have infected?

There are even those who deny that we are facing a pandemic. The Washington Post features a lengthy and depressing article about coronavirus deniers who see the current state of affairs as a left-wing and media driven conspiracy aimed at bringing down President Trump, and claim that because they know no one who has contracted the virus, it is a hoax. Unless these people believe that governments and media outside the US are conniving in this, the theory holds no water, but there again they probably do believe that. The fact is that many people prefer to believe conspiracy theories than the truth if that truth is inconvenient to them, and that doesn’t just apply now.

I know no more than I can read, hear, or see through various news channels. How much is accurate, how much is speculation, and how much is downright bollocks, I have no idea. What I do know is that I don’t know how much I don’t know, and I certainly don’t know if I’m going to wake up one morning with a sore throat, start coughing and fall ill. And if that happens, I don’t know how many people I have already infected. And the thing is, if that happens to you, you won’t know either.

There’s not much I can do about going to supermarkets, or pharmacies (I had to collect a prescription yesterday, and the pharmacy staff were all wearing masks, enforced a six-foot exclusion zone, and allowed only three customers in at a time; they are taking this seriously). Clearly, social distancing is important, even if you think you are healthy.

But when Boris Johnson suggests we avoid socialising by going to pubs, and his father vigorously poo-poos it, you have to wonder if we are going to hell in a handcart. Wetherspoons boss Tim Martin – who is not a renowned epidemiologist to the best of my knowledge – weighed in by saying that pubs should stay open, and that there has been 'very little transmission of the virus in pubs.’ Now, I’m not normally one to agree with Piers Morgan, but he is spot on here, about people going to pubs in general not just about Wetherspoons.

I love pubs, but at present I shall be avoiding them scrupulously.

End piece: I wake up: It must be about 5.30, I guess. Wrong, it’s 3.54 – here we go again.