When my mother first brought her first family down to this part of England in the 1960s, as they crossed the county line she'd cry out, 'Look! The blue hills! We are here!' Yesterday morning, running with the dog, I saw the misty shapes of the moorland hills through the trees on the track. Distance and angle, air quality, whatever it is, altering the light. Tawny green became smoky blue and the blue hills made me feel I was home.
On my run, too, I saw the farmer whose car I had smashed into about three months after I passed my driving test in the late 1980s. I totaled both vehicles and ended up in hospital with concussion. The second of my seven concussions - I make a habit of head injuries. He didn't recognise me. Maybe just as well. He was out on his quad to check the ewes and their lambs. For him, this current crisis perhaps has less meaning. Foot and mouth, which decimated livestock some years back, might have been more salient.
When I told my father about the run - and the run across country the night before - he said he'd driven down the same track in our American import in the late 1970s. We called it 'The Unsuitable', for the sign at the end reading 'Unsuitable for Motor Vehicles'. It didn't stop a Ford 4x4, nor indeed the farmer's quad.
As for my night-flight, 'Did you have to dodge the tanks?' he asked. 'No,' I replied, laughing. 'I don't suppose you remember Algeria?' he said. Turns out when we were leaving Algeria, via Morocco, in a Ford Cortina towing a caravan in 1976, I believe, we did indeed dodge tanks on the way to the border. Adventures, we've had a few.
I don't know about you, but the idea of adventure has lost much of its appeal in recent weeks. Normality would be rather pleasing, I feel.
In Algeria, for some reason, we all had to be vaccinated against something. There must have been an epidemic. We went to the clinic, my mother, my father and four or five year old I, to get the jabs. My mother looked at the rusty needle used for one and all and weighed up the risks of the two courses of action - vaccination plus unknown infection or no immunity from whatever it was. She opted for the needle.
Maybe in 18 months we'll have a vaccination for the coronavirus. One prays it's sooner than that. A year? Please, God. I say that as an atheist now seemingly willing to take Pascal's wager. When it comes, I wonder, will all the anti-vaccination people say, 'You know what? No thanks.' It is one of the more damaging manifestations of irrationality, of anti-science and anti-expert nonsense, the fear of vaccination. Those unswayable by reasoned argument willing to put the lives of their loved ones and other vulnerable members of the community at stake for a 'belief' that has no evidential base. An example of the limits of logic, which cannot pass through an armour of conviction.
The great claim that we are separated from other animals by the ability to reason meets its match in Holocaust deniers, climate change sceptics and anti-vacc-ers.
Normality. That can be seen as a time when maybe it doesn't matter so much if some people refuse to credit the day's best science. These are not normal times. It really matters now. Of course, science is always disprovable - more knowledge can change the playing field and alter best-practice. But, faced with an existential threat, are any of us willing to hang our futures on propaganda rather than research?
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