The poet, author and broadcaster Michael Rosen almost died of COVID-19. In episode eleven of With Reason, he talks to Samira Shackle about that experience, described in his new book ‘Many Different Kinds of Love’. They discuss the value of kindness, touch and practical atheism, and reflect on liminality in life and literature. Plus, Michael describes his anger at the “unethical and immoral” decisions made by the government, and urges against the dangerous devaluing of some lives over others, amidst our present pandemic.

Hosts: Samira Shackle and Alice Bloch

Producer: Alice Bloch

Music: Danosongs

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Transcript:

Samira Shackle:

Hello, you're listening to With Reason with me Samira Shackle

Alice Bloch:

.. and me Alice Bloch.

SS:

This is the podcast from New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association where we consider questions of reason and unreason belief and disbelief, criticism and debate, all through conversations with writers and thinkers whose ideas speak to our turbulent times.

AB:

And today, we're talking about times that have certainly been turbulent. But also times in which some things have remained weirdly rather stuck: our present pandemic, COVID-19. That's the context of the latest book from today's guest, the writer and poet Michael Rosen, Samira, I'll leave up to you to introduce Michael, and I'll have a listen and be back to catch up at the end of the show.

SS:

So I think lots of our listeners will have already heard of Michael Rosen, they might have enjoyed one of his books, when they were little. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is a hugely popular book, which may be people read to their own kids. So he's one of the best loved and most prolific figures in children's literature. He's renowned for his work as a poet as a writer and as a performer. And he was the children's laureate too from 2007 to 2009. But the thing about Michael's work and his role in public life is that he doesn't just speak to children. He's written numerous books for adults, too. He hosts Word of Mouth on BBC Radio 4, which is all about the weirdness and wonder of language. And I think it's safe to say he's something of a household name here in the UK.

So when, last year, near the beginning of the pandemic, he got seriously ill with COVID-19, and spent 50 days almost in intensive care, much of it in an induced coma, people around the country were eagerly waiting for news and were desperate to see him get well. So that time, that period of really serious illness and the slow and painstaking recovery is the context of his new book, Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS, is a book that's made up of poems and other fragments. And through those Michael is really grappling with that experience of being so close to the brink. And it also offers powerful insights about compassion and connection. So when we met, I asked Michael to tell me what happened to him in the early months of the pandemic.

MR:

I started getting ill, it felt a bit worse than flu, but I wasn't coughing. So it wasn't that alarming, because they told us that COVID is an illness that affects, you know, is an upper respiratory illness. I should have been, I think they kept describing something as a persistent cough that was one of the sort of alarm signals. And it was only really, when I started finding it difficult to get air. I think I said to Emma, I can't catch up (that’s my wife). And so we rang the paramedics, who I think I remember they got me to breathe – diagnosis by telephone, by breathing. So I think I sat there going [makes laboured breathing sounds] and he said, “Yeah, well, you know, you're not coughing, so it's fine. Just keep taking the paracetamol.” But Emma noticed that I seem to be dipping, and my face – the way she described it was it looked like death crossed my face. And so she was in contact with a neighbor and a friend who's a GP, a doctor Katie, who appears in the book, and Katie came over with an oximeter, which was a way of measuring how your body can take up oxygen. And I'm saying this now, in retrospect, Katie said I was lucky to be conscious. So she urged me to take me to the hospital. And I was, in their words very poorly. So everything was closing down. So I was whisked into intensive care, came out of that, because they thought I was doing all right. And then I dipped again. And that was quite worrying for them. I think. I don't really remember this. But at that point, they gave me an alternative. They said, “Do you want to go on a ventilator?” I didn't really know what a ventilator was, or what it entailed. They explained that, you know, that they put you to sleep. And I said, “well, will I wake up?” And they said, “you'll have a 5050 chance”. And I said “if I don't?” and they said “zero”. So I said, “Yeah.” And I signed a bit of paper. And then I went down there for 40 days. I know absolutely nothing about that at all. Or indeed for about the next 10 days. I think it doesn't really mean much to me at all. I've seen film of me, there's an ITV film that's gone out. Or I've seen a film of me talking to the consultant. I don't, well, I mean, I don't remember any of that. And then I was slowly coming around in one of the wards, and then I was taken to a rehab hospital to learn how to stand up and how to walk. I was taken home in an ambulance, and that was in late June. So I was in hospital for three months.

SS:

It's a long time and COVID-19 has had a lasting impact on your health, hasn't it?

MR:

Yes, well, I think I had micro bleeds in the brain because one of the things they've discovered about COVID is that it isn't just an upper respiratory virus. It is a virus that gets into the upper respiratory tubes, but also seems to affect the blood system, seems to affect the nervous system, some people the digestive system, so it's affecting those but also the body has a response. Somebody said that in the book I'd been a bit like a kind of little boy, you know discovering sort of things about myself, sort of about your body, and I am, it's fine that the reviewer said that, but actually what all this has reminded me of (and I am sticking to the subject, I promise you somewhere) is that when you get this ill what it reminded me of is, I know it sounds rather grand, but it reminds me the moment in King Lear when King Lear is sort of stripped of all his sort of grandness and his huge power. And he's out there on the heath with Edgar who's disguised as poor Tom. And they're naked to the elements. And they, it's sort of very visceral and very much to do with the body, very corporeal. In a way, it's a bit like that in hospital that you've just sort of, you've just got you and your body and your mind, and you're stuck there. So the mind thinks about the body most of the time, because it hasn’t got anything else.

SS:

And that actually, that is quite visceral, that sort of, as you say, kind of being stripped down. And the book seems to be an attempt to make sense of this really profound experience of coming so close to death and being so so very unwell or very poorly in the words of your doctors. And you produced it incredibly quickly after this long stretch in hospital. You know, it's coming out a year after you got ill more or less, and I wondered about that speed is writing, how you make sense of things. Is that how you process?

MR:

It is exactly, that's a mirror, yes, making sense, because – I don't know what model you work to your brain, and then your hand and then writing – but in my mind, the brain is like a place full of chaotic thoughts, and feelings. It's like a morass of, of sensations. Now we have something that some people have called inner speech, that's to say, where your thoughts that are in your head start coalescing into language, but it's still in there, it doesn't come out, and it comes out when you speak. But when you write, there's something a bit more organized and ordered about it. So the model that I see it's a bit like sorting. I remember when I was a kid, my mum had a button box. And it had lots and lots of different kinds of buttons. And one of the things we used to do at tea times was tip all the buttons out, and then invent ways to group them into different things. Well, in a way, writing is a bit like that is that you create these sets, and series. And I think that's what it feels like it's creating order out of this morass, that in my brain, I tried to make it the truth. I tried to be authentic, I tried to be realistic in some of it. But then also, I sometimes try to be mythological, I sometimes try to express things in a mythological way. And that means a different kind of truth. It's what I think Freud called psychic reality, where you try to be true to the feeling, or to the image that you have in your head.

SS:

And you mentioned making order out of the morass, which made me think of the format of the book, which is quite fragmentary, in a way, so you've got your poems and you've got messages from your wife, and you've got notes from your intensive care attendants in different sections. I know that's a form that you've used in some of your other books as well. And I wondered what attracts you to it, to telling the story in that way?

MR:

Yes, I think it attracts me because it is one of the ways in which I've grown up that's reading poems and reading fragmentary prose, you know, stream of consciousness prose, like James Joyce does in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses, and then poetry of the modernists, people like William Carlos Williams. And so I found it a way to express complexity. So there's a sort of contradiction here is that quite often these fragments are quite simple, but they offer you different views. And one image I've had is of a kaleidoscope. So a kaleidoscope is made of these little fragments of glass that are in lots of different shapes, and you shake it and then you look through it. And then you have an image, you have something that you can see and it is a picture. But each one is a different colour and a different shape. It's quite simple, but the final result is quite complex.

SS:

Yeah, Kaleidoscope seems like a really good image because the parts where you had sort of emails from your wife explaining your condition sort of felt like the pieces were moving and giving a completely different perspective on what was going on. And one of the things that book does so powerfully is sort of explain this experience in quite an interior way in some places of being so close to death. That is an experience that I think is often spoken about in religious or spiritual terms, but your book, of course, is very deeply human. So there was a line that I really liked, you said, “I got very nearly to the end. But then people, many people pulled me back, they wouldn't let me go,” which I thought was very powerful. And I wondered how your humanism and atheism coloured your experience of the last year.

MR:

It's always there. In one sense, it never goes away. That's to say, whatever extreme situation I'm in, whether it's happiness, its rites of passage in the family, or in this particular case, a near death experience. I never refer to any outside supernatural being, I might refer to the kind of what I've described there as mythology, in other words, the history of folk tale and legend and literature. But I won't refer, if you like, in any way to any deity or supernatural feeling that somehow or other my life is controlled by fate, or, as Thomas Hardy called it “Providence”. There is just us. So that's at the core of everything every day. So if you like, it wasn't a new thing for me to approach this illness, this recovery, this near death, in any different way from when I get up in the morning, I make myself breakfast, and I don't do great. I don't say “thank you, God for what we're about to receive”. Notice, I know how to say it, because we had to say to make us truly thankful, I think it goes on. So I don't have to do that. So it's just the same really. So in a way, it's a very ordinary answer. I know quite a lot of answers around atheism and humanism are very complex. But I sometimes think, for me, it's more about just what you do and how you do it. It isn't a thing about working out exactly why it is that religious beliefs are wrong in any way. If something like that is just I get through the day is what actually used to be called practical atheism. I think it's a phrase that's gone out of date, where people used to talk about theoretical atheism and practical atheism. Well, insofar as I identify with either of those, I'm a practical atheist. In other words, I do this stuff, because it makes sense to me to do it. It's as I say, it's not really any idea of referring to anything. And I don't have to do any rituals or anything that as it were acknowledges publicly or individually, that there is this other thing outside of our material world that is affecting me in any way or that I have to make votive offerings to in any way. So it is just very basic.

SS:

Yeah, that makes total sense. And it's interesting. You mentioned about the, the mythology and the folklore, because I think often when near death experience, for instance, has spoken about it, it is with this kind of religious resonance, and you talk about the liminal space, which I thought was a really nice way of phrasing it.

MR:

Yes, it's that word. Liminal is something we get quite interested in, in the study of literature, and I teach children's literature. And of course, liminality occurs quite often. So when we talk about it, it's the bit between. So if we think of Alice in Wonderland, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, what does she do? She goes down a rabbit hole. Or if you think of Hogwarts, think of Harry Potter. He gets on a train. The train is the liminal moment, it's the bit between. So literary people are quite interested in all this stuff. Because some books or poems or plays exist in the liminal space, it's neither here nor there. So for example, a famous trope to use in literature is going away on holiday. So you're neither at home, nor permanently away somewhere else. You're in this temporary place called holiday and guess what? Nice romances happen, or odd events, and it's also self-enclosed. So literary people are quite interested in holidays. Well, hospital is, of course, another liminal space, at least, assuming you don't die there. So it's liminal, because you're not at home and it's not permanent. But also, I started to think that the bed itself, that the bed was kind of home, but the edges of the bed were liminal. And so you can see this is me in a kind of frame of mind at night, and the edges of the bed started becoming to feel alien, and I got quite almost upset that it was sort of this this hard fence thing, this metal fence by the side of your bed. And I'm tall so my feet were over the edge of it. And so I felt somehow rather I've got to pull myself into my core. And what I did that night and what I've written about in the poems, I put my hand up, I'm doing it now physically because I have to do it. So to put up by my cheek and I lay on my cheek, and then I felt less liminal. That felt less on the edge, that I'd kind of found my core and that I was back away from sort of living on the edge quite literally because it's very easy – in fact one night, I did fall out of bed.

SS:

You mentioned there about not quite fitting in the bed and so on. And this was something I was really struck with in the book. It's obviously subtitled “A Story of Life, Death and the NHS” and you, you describe the incredible care that so many staff gave you, you compare it at one point to parental devotion, but you also do talk about the ways in which being seriously ill can be quite dehumanizing, being in hospital, you know, kind of being poked and prodded at all hours or the discomfort not quite fitting in a bed. There was one point, I remember, where a nurse is cross with you because a tube comes out of your nose, or you feel that the nurse is cross with you. And I found that very striking, because I think there's often a reluctance to voice any criticism of the NHS or its staff at all, perhaps because it's become a sort of incredibly politicized conversation, and there's maybe a sense of not wanting to encourage its detractors, if you obviously broadly support the institution of you know, there’s also this idea that the NHS is Britain's religion, and so on. That's a phrase that gets mentioned a lot. So I wondered what you make of that. Have you noticed that tendency? What do you think about that?

MR:

Yes, I've noticed about myself, I'm reluctant to criticize the people who were looking after me, they were under the most incredible pressure. You know, one night I call for a nurse, and she doesn't come and I soiled myself and, you know, she says, “Sorry”, and I say “sorry”, and, and I feel kind of guilty that I've sort of put her under pressure. And of course, she's been dealing with other patients. And I think I described the image that came to me are those pictures of First World War soldiers lined up in those wards, almost like barracks, aren't they? And they're in hospital. And, you know, you see one nurse and about 30 guys with legs and arms and whatever shot off. And I sort of felt at times it was like that, that they were so short staffed, but at the same time, in your selfish way, in my selfish way, I'm sitting there thinking, you know, “look after me look after me,” you know, you are very, very selfish. And it's very hard to get the balance. And so yes, one night I, I think I pulled the nebulizer out of my nose. And I brushed it, I think I didn't do it deliberately. And I did sense the nurse was kind of cross with me, whether she was or not, I have no idea. But that was my immediate feeling. And I've recorded that, because this is sort of, it's part of the discomfort. And also, it's meant to be slightly ironic, the other bit that you mentioned, which is that there's a way in which you, you surrender yourself, you're confined and you surrender yourself. And it's kind of analogous to prison, in the sense that they almost know more about you than you do. So in hospital, they're documenting everything about you, and they know exactly what your temperature is, and what your blood pressure is. And they even do this thing of doing the ops, which is where they stand at the end of the bed and watch you for 30 seconds, and then write it down, which I found almost funny. So of course, it's so intimate, you know, we by and large, you know, when we live, we don't talk, immediately come out the loo and explain to our loved ones, what we did in there and what it looks like and so on. But of course they're interested in all that, of course, great. But it feels so sort of, well, the analogy I thought was they've got a ledger, you know, they've got an account, and then you have to try and afterwards, I had the feeling of having to free myself from that, of trying to reopen myself. So, but yes, I take your point, you know, obviously, the NHS has saved my life. So of course, I feel immense gratitude, and it is in its own way, a sacred cow for me. Yes, it is. I won't call it a religion, but I might call it a sacred cow. In a sense, I do feel it's my, our, sacred NHS. And of course, I can think of occasions when, you know, we've got each other's backs with nurses or whatever. And that's, that doesn't detract from the fact that it is for me a sacred cow.

SS:

Yeah, that makes absolute sense. And I think lots of people will probably share that experience, I certainly have, you've had some sort of life saving intervention from the NHS. And so regardless of the fact that there are elements that are a big, creaking bureaucracy that's underfunded in some ways, or whatever, you still have that immense gratitude that it's there, and that the people in it are there as well. Your poem, “These Are the Hands” commemorating the 60th anniversary of the NHS became a kind of anthem while you were unwell. And it's also the postscript to your book. And I was struck by the image in the poem, which also comes up in other points in the book, about touch as a kind of language and a form of communication. And I think that's particularly striking in this year, where so many of us have been deprived of touch or have been deprived of, you know, as much or as many variations of touches we might normally have had. So I wonder if you think any differently about that after this pandemic year.

MR:

Yes, it's become a touchstone, hasn’t it? become a way of thinking about us that we have reduced the extent to which we touch each other, shake hands, put our arms around each other, whether that's with intimate people, but also, you know, we're used to, you know, you only watch footballers, they can't stop themselves. When they score a goal, they will rush up to each other and embrace each other. I mean, every time they do it, I think “are they allowed to do that?” It’s a strange thing, just at the moment I'm celebrating, you know, with my sun, and we're watching football. And occasionally when Arsenal score, we, you know, we want to embrace each other, we see the football is embracing each other. And it's a little block comes in a little monitor goes, “Oh, no pandemic. And it's a terrible thing to do.” Because as I saw somebody saying, I think it was on telly, they kind of looked out the screen and said, “But we're mammals!” And I just sort of thought, yeah, I mean, look, what do cats do? They lick their kittens, they do that to get, and all mammals, nearly all do this to get the circulation going, when their babies are born. When our babies are born, we use some form of massage or, as I say, with animals, they tend to lick each other. And then, you know, you see them, we had two cats who were brothers, and they used to groom each other. And you think, wow, I tried to think whether I used to groom my brother. But it's a very mammalian thing and it's got broken, hasn’t it? it’s intervened. And it is language, touch is a language.

SS:

You're listening to With Reason. I'm Samira Shackle, editor of New Humanist magazine. And I'm talking to author and poet Michael Rosen about his book Many Different Kinds of Love. It's a conversation about health, humanism, and the power of writing. And if you like what you're hearing, take a few seconds to press pause right now and click subscribe on the app that you're using, it costs nothing and helps us to bring you more episodes. Time now for a quick word from our producer Alice about another excellent listen from our friends at Prospect.

AB:

Prospect is Britain's leading monthly magazine of ideas, politics and culture. Their weekly podcast, the Prospect Interview, offers in-depth interviews with the brightest minds to discuss all the things that matter. Recent guests include Kyle Flynn on abandoned wildlife, and George Saunders on the Russian short story. You can find the prospect interview at prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts, or subscribe through your usual channels. I'll be back at the end of the show.

SS:

So Michael, you describe a moment after coming out of hospital where one of your neighbours asked if you see the world differently now. So do you? And in what ways?

MR:

Yes, I mean, one way is quite obvious really, is that I feel quite precarious. I mean, I wouldn't know particularly that I had a near-death experience. I keep using this phrase, but it's only because people keep telling me I did. And that does get to you, you do think, “Well, I was on the edge”. So that does make you have a sense of precariousness. You know, all of us know, you can die any second you go out to the street, plane could fall out of the sky, you know, you only have to open the newspaper and see the arbitrariness of death. It's not as if everybody as it were goes through several weeks while they say “I am dying”, and then they die. But some people do, obviously. But for others it's just sudden and unpredictable. So you always know that. But I guess we also have a twin feeling when we're walking around in a bubble and thinking “I'll never die”. So you know, there's a kind of omnipotence that we sometimes retreat into, in an irrational way. So if you have one of these experiences, it's a reminder that it can happen at any second. So I sort of, I've seen the response that people made when they thought I might die. So I've seen that. And so that's very, it's kind of disturbing, in a way because people are so kind, they kind of maybe, I thought they were …. I don't mean loved ones, I mean, out there. It wasn't that they were horrible to me before. But I mean, it's just that sort of huge well of kindness that's come my way. So that's another feeling. There's a regret. So saying, “have I change?”, there's a sense of regret that that person who I quite liked, who existed before I got ill isn't there, the same, you know. My eyes are damaged, my ears are damaged and certain other things. So there's a sense of regret. And there's also a sense of anger with what the government did not to do. So there's a political anger there as well, which is no surprise because I'm a political being. But even so I think they made some calculations in February and March 2020 that were unethical and immoral, about attitudes to old people and people who are vulnerable, people with so-called underlying health problems. Life is an underlying health problem, what are they talking about? So that makes me angry on behalf of all those people who died. All the people are getting ill now because that was when the virus took root in the UK.

SS:

So we'll come back to that in a minute about the kind of political anger, but I wanted to ask about social media. You mentioned how kind people have been people out there in the world and in your book you talk about that kindness from the public at large and people getting in touch with you with these moving messages, but also the other side of that which is the people accusing you of being part of a grand COVID hoax and this kind of unpleasantness that we get on social media. So I wondered, you know you're obviously an active user of twitter and social media, do you think there's been a net gain or net harm done by social media during the pandemic period?

MR:

I wouldn't know whether it's net or not. But clearly, social media has become a platform in which you can run the whole gamut from the wildest conspiracy theories, denying one sort or another through to incredibly informed opinion, that quite high medical level in which doctors and nurses are putting stuff down there into the public domain. Sometimes it was more detailed than you're getting from the mass media. So it covers the whole spectrum. So it's been difficult for me to work that out, work out an answer to your question about whether it’s a net gain or loss. But certainly, yes, there's a lot of scope for the conspiracy theories to work is that more than otherwise, if these things didn't exist, it is difficult to say. I suppose you can say there's a sort of way in which conspiracy theories can run internationally very quickly on social media, and particularly if you've got someone amplifying it, like Trump did, but at the same time, it is amplifying, you know, good factual stuff. So, and more than that, I was lucky to take part of a webinar with Professor Hugh Montgomery who looked after me in intensive care and some other physicians of one sort or another. And they were saying, and it was quite striking that they were talking about long COVID and whether it exists or not, and obviously, they think it does. But they were saying that in order to know more about it, they've got to go on to the websites, go on to social media, look at long COVID support groups and hear what it is people are saying to each other. Doesn't mean they believe everything, you know – they’re doctors, they know what they're talking about. You know, that's good thing that's come out of social media.

SS:

Yeah, that's fascinating to think about it almost as an extra diagnostic tool. Yeah, I wanted to come back to this political question, because I know you've been very vocal on that. And there's the question that you mentioned earlier of the value that we put on different ages of life and different qualities of life and so on, which I think has been quite an unedifying debate, actually, the way it's played out, you have thinking of our Lord Sumption talking about certain lives having less value than others, and so on. So I know that's something you feel strongly about. And I know you've also backed calls for a public inquiry to be held. So yeah, why is that important to you?

MR:

Right, exactly, as you said, quoting Lord Sumption and others, I mean, I had a conversation with a famous, quite famous journalist, and she had rather gleefully put on her Twitter account, that some of the people's descriptions of long COVID were probably untrue. So in my jocular way, I reply to her and said, “Yes, I made it all up. I was hiding under the table.” And she came back to me and said, “Look, no one doubts that you were ill, Michael, but you're 74.” Let's unpack that. Back to “you’re 74.” What's bad about being 74? As it happened, she's 66. So it's quite an extraordinary situation. And it's not just personal. This is social, that we've got ourselves into a situation in which very reputable journalists and ex High Court judges can sit there and say that some people in society are of less value, and that being 74 is a negative state. It's bad. It's a contradiction to what is normal. That's what that is doing some heavy lifting, as they say. But you're 74. And I think I put it in the book, I said, “What's bad about being 74?” And this is where we've got to, and I think we got to it in February and March 2020. When, quite clearly, calculations were being made by a mixture of politicians and top scientists talking about herd immunity without vaccination, saying this was necessary, and we need to create it in the words of one of them. Now, herd immunity, I think is rubbish biology applied to human populations. It may work for confined herds of animals who aren't running about the world surface, and flying in airplanes and so on. And it may work in confined animal populations that breed quickly, but we human beings breed rather slowly. And we don't know what resistance is set up when we're faced with infection. And yet the scientists and some people in government clearly thought this was possible and that old people's lives and people who are ill are of less value.

Now this is, to me frightening. I'm not going to call it fascist, I'm going to call it fascistic in the sense that these ideas that chunks of the population, whole sections are either superfluous to need or matter less for some reason or another. It's not just a slippery slope towards fascism, it is of itself fascistic. So the moment you start writing off whole slabs, and chunks, 10s of 1000s of people, we are in a time when we're at war with each other. And this for me, it is actually the complete opposite of humanism, of a humanistic view of humanity, namely, that we have the right to live. And that that is embedded in our culture and society. And we have the right to life. And here we were, in the 21st century. And these people were talking rationally on television, on Newsnight, on Radio 4’s Today program, saying things like, “we need to create herd immunity,” and sort of almost brushing to one side that this meant the deaths of 10s of 1000s of people, and specifically the deaths of people who they knew were old. And then you saw generally, on social media, this idea that the moment people were described as ill you'd see people coming back, “well, how old was he?” “Oh, well, he was 81.” Right. Okay, then we think, it’s your grandmother, this is you in 10 years time, you know, it's a complete refusal to see that you're part of the human family. And we are in a very dangerous position. If we regard a section of society as not part of that human family.

SS:

I think that's quite a powerful place to end the main part of our conversation, thinking about those big ideas and thinking about how we might have a kind of reckoning for the mistakes that have been made. I want to come on to the part where we usually turn to the New Humanist archive and talk about something that speaks to our guest work. So today, we thought we would talk about your columns for the New Humanist. There’s a regular column called In a Word in which you delve into etymology, looking at words and how their meanings changed over time and what their origins are. I actually was thinking just as you were talking, then, that herd immunity might be a good one. But you've done one, when you were coming out of hospital, one for us on “quarantine”, you've done one on “deniers”, which I really enjoyed. And so between that column that you do for us and your Radio 4 show Word of Mouth, you obviously really take a lot of joy in words, and not just the use of words, but also their history and the way they evolve. So I wondered if you could tell me about that. Where did that passion come from?

MR:

Oh, it came from my parents. My mum and dad had their first years of their life, they were either speaking most of the time in another language, the additional language of Eastern European Jews, originally, and so words would come out of them that were both at the same time very familiar, but also, my friends didn't know them. So. And if I went to see my grandparents, they spoke in Yiddish to each other or to my mom sometimes. So I was surrounded by these words. I mean, I didn't have the word for a dish, for, finding it difficult even say that the cloth you use to dry it with. Sometimes people call it a tea towel. Sometimes people call it a drying up cloth. My mum called it a schmutter, my parents called it the schmutter, which is a rag in Yiddish, right? So I just assumed it was an English word. I remember going to school and talking about the schmutter and my mates going well, and having to say that it was this thing you dry out with and they told me no, that's a tea towel, and going home and saying to mum, they say tea towel in school, and mum saying no, it's just a schmutter. She was like that: nice ironist, my mum. And so you know, there are lots of words like that: the first word I knew for a belly button wasn't belly button, it was a pipik. So my parents were doing that – it may may be familiar to you too Samira, is this sort of hopping between dialects and languages?

SS:

Of course, that's definitely very reminiscent to me. My mum's Pakistani and although I don't speak fluent Urdu at all, there's still words, particularly cooking words, spices and things like that, which is, I just often even now have to really think for what the English word for it would be, which is funny because English is the only language I really speak fluently.

So this year obviously, there are so many words that have entered our lexicon or become used differently or more commonly, I mentioned you've done columns for us on “quarantine”, a word I think we've used more than ever before. I certainly have. And “denier” and there's all these other words as well like “lockdown”, I don't think I'd ever really heard the word lockdown, nor particularly engaged with it, or “furlough” or “bubble” that we se so commonly now without a second thought. So I wonder what you think about those?

MR:

Yeah, well, I jotted a few down. I mean, quarantine is as you say, it's absolutely fascinating because it means 40 days. I mean, if people speak French, you know, quarante, quarante-et-un and so on. And if you speak Italian, you'll know that and if you know, some Latin, you've got quarantina. And so the Romance languages is where it's coming from, with its origins in Latin. So who do we know – even as humanists and atheists – who do we know 40 days is important for? Well, it was Jesus. So Jesus fasted and I think went into the desert as I remember. So 40 days, his time, Jesus's time, in this, in the story was described as quarantine. And then this coincides with the fact, and this is fascinating, is that putting people in quarantine seems to have been developed during the plague. But guess what, we're in a plague now. So the plague that, you know, bedevilled late medieval Europe, and and the Renaissance as well, that, say, in a port like Venice, they realized that if a ship came in, and there were people with plague on board, what they would do is demand that the people, the sailors, didn't come on land for 40 days, so they created a 40 day quarantine. So you've got these different routes to the word, and you find someone like Samuel Pepys using it. And Daniel Defoe, in Journal of a Plague Year, he referred to not to a quarantine of days only but a soixantine, not only 40 days, but 60 days or longer. So their quarantine has got these very fascinating routes, which apply to us now. And we use words without knowing their history. But then if you lift them off, it's almost like lifting a manhole cover. You lift it up, and there's this whole world underneath the word. I mean, take “vaccine”, for example, I didn't know even, as somebody who is sort of nosy about words, do you know the French word for a cow?

SS:

I do not know.

MR:

It's la vache. Okay, so the Latin, so the root of the French word is vacca: VACCA (may have been vacco, we don't know) but so, why would you be talking about cows and vaccines? Because the first vaccines they took the sample of the blood from were samples from cows who had cow pox to immunise people from smallpox. So it's amazing. And you mentioned lockdown. “Lockdown” was a very technical trade term. What it was, was that when in America, they used to bind the logs together or bind timber together to make a raft. You need pegs to do it with as well as rope, you need pegs. And these were called lockdowns. And in the 19th century, it was used metaphorically in prisons, and in psychiatric wards, when they restricted the movement of the prisoner, or the psychiatric patient, because they were very, you know, quite vicious about it. And so they were talking about that as “locked down”. And somebody has taken that word out of prisons and psychiatric care and said, that's what we're in: lockdown. But it starts as a very obvious actual thing in the material world and moves into the metaphorical.

SS:

How fascinating. I think we can probably at least hope that we don't have to use the word “lockdown” quite so much. Maybe we can go back to being more metaphorical in years to come. Or maybe I'm being overly optimistic. Thank you so much, Michael Rosen. That was everything, absolutely fascinating to hear about that. And I think that's a lovely place to end. Thanks for your time.

MR:

Thank you very much.

SS:

That was Michael Rosen. And if you want to have a read of Michael's writings in New Humanist, why not subscribe to the magazine, we're offering you a year's subscription for just £13.50. That's four beautiful print editions straight to your door, just head to newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe and enter the offer code WithReason.

So with me now is our producer Alice, who has been having a listen to my conversation with Michael. And Michael is one of those people who just knows so much about so many different topics, Alice. So I wondered if there was anything in particular from our conversation that jumped out at you?

AB:

Well, I suppose a few of the interviews that we've done for With Reason have been with people who are really alert to language, and Michael Rosen, of course, is no exception there. He said some really interesting things about the language of COVID, of course, and I mean, I wasn't at all familiar with the etymology of “lockdown”. I guess for me that word “lockdown” was one of the words that I really remember kind of grated on me in the very early days of COVID. And just over a year ago, now, I remember feeling almost quite annoyed at the word “lockdown” that it was maybe a word that should be saved really for more serious situations of say, curfew or conflict or you know, it brought to mind for me things like the siege of Sarajevo, which certainly is not what we were living through here last March, you know, difficult as it was. “Self-isolation” also was a bit of an unusual word at the beginning. I felt that was maybe a touch insensitive when so many people in the UK already live in isolation.

SS:

“Self-isolation” was one I remember kind of annoyed me when it came into circulation originally because it seemed to me like a tautology. So it's a much more pedantic and less sort of moral objection than yours. But just because I thought if you're isolating, then why do you need the self as well? I mean, I'm sure there's a reason for it. But of course, you're by yourself. And maybe it's because it's self-imposed. I don't know. Anyway, that annoyed me. But yeah, I don't know, I guess there's something about how these words do come and go even beyond COVID. I was thinking about Brexit. And I remember, it must have been years ago, but before the referendum when the word “Brexit” was still just starting to be used in news reports, thinking, “Oh, that'll never catch on”. What a stupid portmanteau. I'm not gonna start using that. Obviously proves how good my powers of foresight are!

AB:

But yeah, I had exactly the same feeling about “Brexit” actually, also, separately there. I mentioned how “lockdown” for me has almost connotations of conflict or siege of curfew, that kind of thing. Separately, I think in a Guardian interview, Michael said that, you know, in its own way, this pandemic is a bit like a war, though, he apologizes for the flawed analogy. And but nonetheless, he says, you know, it is a bit like a war. And I guess a lot of people have made that comparison and spoken about what the kind of post COVID deal will be socially for everyone. I guess it got me thinking about really what's going to change when we will come out of this, you know, everyone's been through a collective experience, also a deeply personal one, as Michael has also. And I think at the beginning, there was a lot of chat about how you know, after COVID, everything's going to be different, you know, environmentally, things are going to change, people are going to be alert to climate change, their behaviour is going to change, we're not going to fly so much, will consume less, you know, will care more about each other, etc, etc. I don't know. I mean, personally, I don't feel so hopeful that there's going to be this great transformation in a few months time, I think it will be back to the old you know, “normal” end quote marks, possibly even even kind of greedier at points, maybe.

SS:

Yeah, I think I'd share that view, too. And yeah, I think that that idea of the kind of duality of the collective experience we've all been through, and the personal experiences that have really varied for different people is an interesting one. And in fact, I think when I sat down to read Michael's book, I kind of thought, Oh, God, do I really want to read something else about COVID. And then I was so completely immersed in it, it was incredibly moving. And it was funny as well. And there was something about that, that even though we're still right, within this experiences, collective experience, I think, reading the kind of deeply personal account of it and getting a different view was incredibly powerful and more powerful than I, then I thought it would be well, we're still in the throes of it.

AB:

Yeah. And I mean, we've been in this long enough that we are at a point now, collectively, where we can look back and reflect. There was the one minute's silence the other week to mark a year since the first lockdown. So it's amazing how quickly I guess people are beginning to remember and process this stuff, how much time that will also take.

SS:

Yeah, I think it will take some time, because I didn't I mean, I know we had the minute silence and so on, but I sort of feel like there hasn't been the kind of collective grieving that we probably need for such a large death toll. And, but I think partly that's driven politically, you know. The emphasis very much from politics and media is on the vaccine roll out that's going well, and we're coming out of this, and we're going to bounce back better and all of this stuff. But there hasn't really been this moment of pause for what we've all lost collectively. I mean, it's a huge death toll. And I think that's one of the things that's so powerful about Michael's book, and hearing him talk as well, is that he's grateful to have survived. And he's come through this horrendous experience, but he also doesn't shy away at all from what's been lost, and the lasting impact on health and the kind of precariousness of the body that you're left with and lack of trust in certain institutions and so on. And, yeah, I think that's a really valuable perspective. And perhaps we'll get more of that as more time passes.

AB:

Absolutely. I mean, you have the remembrance, but you also need arguably the reckoning, which is something Michael's calling for. And we'll see where, where that call leads. Well, I guess that's us for today.

We'll be back next week to talk about how we might defeat political tribalism online and on social media with Chris Bail over at the Polarization Lab at Duke in the US. Those subjects are of course, things that we reflected on a bit with Michael there where we talked about conspiracy theories and social media. Remember, you can find reading lists and transcripts for all episodes of With Reason on the New Humanist website and catch us on Twitter @NewHumanist.

SS:

This podcast was presented by me Samira Shackle with series producer Alice Bloch. Our sound engineer was David Crackles. See you back here soon. Goodbye.

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