Could the flu be payback for our recent hoggish past?

Marvellous sight: Argentine piano virtuoso Martha Argerich played Prokofiev
12 April 2012

Face it: you aren't going to die of swine flu. Getting all wound up about the looming pandemic is just a way of ignoring the plague of debt sweeping the world.

The facts are stark: epidemiologists don't really know how many people have been infected in Mexico, so the ratio of deaths to diseased is also unknown.

At the same time, the outbreak in the US seems to have markedly different characteristics, with no deaths, and children rather than young adults principally affected.

Yes, the outbreak has spread; and, yes, it may well turn into a flu pandemic - but previous flu pandemics have had a slight impact on human populations, differing only marginally from the annual winter flu that kills the elderly and the weak. The only real exception was the Spanish influenza pandemic after the First World War.

It's nothing to make light of, and some people will be extremely ill - while a few will die - but the current hysteria says more about our deep-seated neuroses and bizarre desire for collective punishment than about the real threat posed.

The spin doctors may try to make capital out of swine flu, with the Opposition arguing that insufficient prophylactic antibiotics have been stockpiled. This has nothing to do with healing our bodies, only their malpractice on the body politic.

The more interesting question is why we listen so intently for the clip-clop of this particular horseman of the apocalypse - yearn for it, even? The answer surely is that there's something peculiarly satisfying about abrogating our own responsibility by giving in to such hysteria.

We undoubtedly have atavistic communal memories of the Black Death and other truly virulent plagues, and along with them we recall the attendant mindset, which included a firm belief in a morally judgmental and punitive God.

How convenient that the swine flu should come along just when we've finished our piggy binge, maxing out our credit cards on truffles and champagne. We've had our fun, our psyche tells us - now we have to pay!

There's also a deep-seated mistrust of the scientific and medical professions - one that has given rise in recent years to all sorts of extraordinary popular delusions about vaccinations and iatrogenic (doctor-created) diseases.

We don't like to admit to ourselves the prosaic but vital truth that antibiotics save millions of lives every year; the last time there was a truly destructive pandemic, they weren't yet discovered.

No, it's poverty plus swine flu that has the capacity to be the real killer, and while billions may have been wiped off the British balance sheet in recent months, we aren't so poor a household yet that we can't afford to fill a prescription.

All of this squealing about swine flu is just a massive displacement activity, allowing us to ignore the extent to which we are the victims of our own hoggish inclinations, rather than passive sufferers assaulted by microscopic hordes.

Martha brings the house down

To the Royal Festival Hall to see the great Argentine virtuoso Martha Argerich tackle Prokofiev's third piano concerto. She was a marvellous sight: a great, grey-haired, fiercely beautiful troll of a woman, pounding away as if there was no tomorrow.

She was given ample and nuanced support by the equally superb Royal Philharmonic under Charles Dutoit — not that you'd have guessed it from the audience's response. It seems a Britain's Got Talent mentality has infested the precincts of classical music, so despite being asked twice to refrain from flash photography, the digital idiots couldn't stop themselves.

Then, when Argerich left the stage, the star-struck went with her, leaving Dutoit and his players to complete the programme with a winnowed-out house.

These crass folk should stay away from concerts altogether and hang around stage doors with autograph books where they belong.

An elevating Tube encounter

There's an enduring pleasure to be gained from recorded announcements on the Tube — worth the swipe of admission, I'd say.

While Mind the Gap! at Bank may have all the patriotic fervour of Larry Olivier doing Henry the Fifth on the eve of Agincourt, at Chalk Farm on Monday I was struck by a more nuanced performance.

The lift recordings seem to have been made by the late Edith Sitwell, who, in fluting tones, tells us: "The next lift shall be on the right."

She then utterly contradicts herself — in true Modernist fashion — by intoning: "The next lift will be on the left." I spent the next 45 minutes pondering the significance of this tiny semantic incongruity.

I wrote in this space last week about the dramatic improvements a conscientious parkie had made to my local green space, Larkhall Park in south Lambeth.

What he can't be expected to do is stop murders. I returned from the Festival Hall on Tuesday evening to the sound of police helicopters circling overhead, and awoke yesterday to learn that there had been two stabbings in Larkhall Park — one of them fatal.

Last year an 18-year-old boy was stabbed to death in front of my house — the fifth teenage knife victim in London this year.

Apparently our Mayor would like to be prime minister, while Alan Sugar, a grumpy TV entrepreneur, could succeed him — but I couldn't give a toss about either of them while I can't get past crime-scene tape to walk the dog or take my kids to school.

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