Covid was a plague that attacked humanity's body and soul and none of us are the same.

Summer is well past the midway point and a small black dog of depression has come to sit at my side. He won't budge no matter how much I try shooing him away.

Stress probably let him in my front door because it has played havoc, with my emotions, leaving me sleepless- as well as prone to dark thoughts. Stress certainly weakened my immune system and left me open to illness.

I now have this half-arsed sickness on the skin below my nose, which has made my upper lip look like I went to a back street Botox doctor.

I had a pharmacist look at it because we ran out of doctors some time ago, thanks to our government's greed to sell off public healthcare to hedge funds. I was given some hydrocortisone cream and it has brought the swelling down. Yet, it seems to me a long process for such a simple infection.

The infection has tired me out and left me without much ambition outside of feeling better again. But probably worse is that I have done some damage to my rotator cuff and what was a tinge of pain in spring is full-on agony at the moment. So there will be a new essay tomorrow and this one from my manuscript standing with Harry.

Photo by 烧不酥在上海 老的 on Unsplash

Chapter Eighteen:

The monochrome Covid Present

Dear Dad:

During my journey across cancer, depression was my most faithful companion. I grieved intensely over the death of my old physical self. My surgery radically changed my ability to do what everyone does without thought - excrete their bodily wastes and get on with their day. I began to physically detest myself. My resolve to survive wobbled. I was in pain, desperately alone, and saw no future for myself. For a long time after my surgery, my existence was as tenuous as the last glowing embers of a cigarette end about to be snuffed out by a passing shoe on the pavement.

I lacked optimism or motivation. I couldn’t read, and my journal entries were a detailed list of my many daily bowel movements. I contemplated suicide on a daily occurrence but only resolved to do it if I reached utter despair. But with my suicide plans, I was always concerned about how and where I should do it because I wanted to disappear, not create a commotion. After much thought, I concluded that should I wish to die, the best method, although painful, was to contract COVID-19. My only fear was like Valkyrie Mitford, after she discharged a pistol to her head, in 1939, when Britain declared war against Hitler, I’d botch my suicide and struggle for years with long covid.

To distract myself from despair, I did Tai Chi. But the rhythm of the motions, reminded me too much of you when you did it to keep agile. So, I gave up on it as the routine depressed me. Instead, I did what I always do when my mind and emotions are overwrought. I walked it off.

My emotional upset was a PTSD variant. The trauma of cancer forced isolation, and the loneliness of living without you was overwhelming. It created a panic in me that was like being trapped in a car that plunged into a river and quickly filled with water. I was in emotional free fall along with most of the world due to COVID-19. The threads of society frayed dangerously to snapping through the spring, summer, and autumn of 2020 because Donald Trump and right-wing authoritarians around the globe continued to deny the seriousness of COVID-19.

Capitalism drove millions worldwide to work in non-essential front-line occupations that were not properly protected from covid, while only collecting substandard wages. Their lives were put on the line by the 1% as if it were the battle of Stalingrad rather than just a means to preserve or enlarge the wealth of billionaires and the entitled.

 There was no new political formulation to stop people’s plunge towards poverty. During the worst of Covid, a million food parcels were handed out to needy people in Britain. People were hungry and yet the nation’s billionaires made £41 billion in profits.

There were stop-gap methods: furloughs in the UK, a stimulus cheque in the USA and CERB in Canada. But these were intended as temporary measures that most realised would be paid for through austerity once the pandemic is over because Neoliberalism always guarantees there is never a free lunch for the 99%, only the 1%.

I foresaw my future, and it was bleak. Like Mum on her deathbed, I cried out, “I am afraid.” However, unlike Mum, I don’t fear the dark unknown of death. I feared ending up in a decaying rooming house. That is the way your dad met his end. I didn’t have the strength to either fight or flee. I was like Mum’s dad, who died at the age of fifty-one and perished in the carnage of Berlin’s last days as Soviet Troops stormed the city at the end of World War Two. He was too old to fight and too young to hide. So, he either fell in a futile battle on the streets of Neu Koln or was hung by a gang of rabid Nazis on a lamppost after being accused of desertion in the face of the enemy.

It’s not hard for me to imagine becoming unhoused, because even in my small town, our public parks are strewn with the detritus of the homeless as they set up tents as if they were ancient homesteaders laying claim to their farmland. During this past winter, homelessness was so extreme in Belleville that the dilapidated Hyundai that I once drove you to your medical appointments became a sanctuary from the bitterly cold nights for a homeless person.

For me, rent day approaches like the headlights from a truck with an unsteady load on its trailer. It leaves me stuck in the middle of the road, transfixed by it, or perhaps I am too tired to react this time and jump out of its way.

A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent because all I need is 6 to make August’s payment. But with 5 days to go, it is getting tight.
Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John

In the last 10 years of Harry Leslie Smith’s life, 5 books were published, hundreds of essays penned, podcasts produced, hundreds of speeches made across the globe, and tens of thousands of miles traversed on my dad’s quest to not make his past our future. I was my father’s comrade and partner during that odyssey, where sometimes my role was Sancho Panza, and other times Don Quixote.

Harry Leslie Smith was an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. He was born during an era when the working class lived in abject poverty whilst the entitled classes lived lives of excess and narcissism. My dad's life's journey was a voyage most of his working-class generation endured: poverty, war and then renewal with the creation of the Welfare State.

Remember to subscribe if you can because I'd like to finish the job I started with him and remain housed. Getting a rather bad bout of cancer at the start of the pandemic, along with a diagnosis of lung disease, altered both the trajectory of my life and the prospects available to me.