By John Crace
I’ve catalogued my books, next it’s the ceramics. Thank goodness for the arrival of this year’s Wisden
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, each NHS trust would send out individual emails of the number of people who had died. Now the daily totals are approaching the 1,000 mark, we are down to one global email per day. It feels as if so many people are losing their individual identity and just becoming a statistic. So to redress the balance a little, I would like to tell you about Pete, who died of Covid19 last weekend, the first person I have known to have died of the disease. Just so that he and thousands of others like him don’t get forgotten. Pete wasn’t a close friend: more of a friend of a friend and someone my wife would join on long weekend walks. But he was a lovely man. He was at Exeter University several years before me – he took his studies so seriously, it took him four years to complete a three-year degree – but photos from that time show him as a dead ringer for Steely Dan’s Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. He was also known for driving his motorbike far too fast and for crashing cars. On leaving Exeter, he went on to establish his own communications business in Brighton and was heavily involved in several charities working in India and Africa. He is survived by his wife, Heidi, and his two children. My heart goes out to them. It’s still not clear of what the rules are for funerals in the time of the coronavirus but it will undoubtedly be a scaled back affair. Sometime, when this horror is all over, we will have a party to remember him properly. And for all the many others whose deaths were merely reported as a grim number at the daily Downing Street press conference.
Source: Another tricky week for my mental health but a saucepan hat helped | John Crace
Category: Coronavirus outbreak, Politics, UK news, Boris Johnson, Mental health
