“You’ll let me know if I become odd won’t you?” I asked a friend last week.
I’d been fretting that living alone (apart from the dog) in lockdown had left me even more introverted than normal. Was it concerning that, although I had always consulted the dog about his food, drink and walking preferences, he was now starting to answer at length and complaining that he didn’t want to watch another episode of The World at War on Yesterday TV, not even the one about Stalingrad?
“What is odd anyway?” my friend said, being polite enough not to ask why I’d developed the viewing habits of a retired man who writes angry letters to the Daily Telegraph about its cryptic crossword. “I think being odd is a good thing.” I’m still not sure whether I should be reassured by this answer.
Someone who should also ask a friend if he is becoming odd is foreign secretary Dominic Raab - a man who, frighteningly, was de facto prime minister while Boris Johnson was being treated for coronavirus.
When asked during a radio interview whether he would follow the lead of Black Lives Matter protesters and take the knee, Mr Raab appeared to confuse the symbolic gesture with a fictional TV series about dragons.
“Maybe it’s got a broader history but it seems to be taken from the Game of Thrones,” he wittered. “It seems to me like a symbol of subjugation and subordination, rather than one of liberation and emancipation.”
Should we take our lead on foreign policy from a man who likened complex race relations to a fantasy series known mainly for excessive nudity and characters who kept being killed off then returning from the dead?
Even if he wasn’t aware that taking the knee has its roots in the British anti-slavery movement of the 1800s; was later popularised by US civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who kneeled in prayer in solidarity with protesters, and later re-emerged as a powerful gesture during anti-racism protests by American football players, it seemed a huge leap to assume that the pose was just something people picked up from a fictional TV show.
Listening to Mr Raab’s further explanation, that he would only take the knee for Queen Elizabeth and “the Mrs when I asked her to marry me”, left me wondering if lockdown had done something strange and terrible to his brain. Incidentally, do men still refer to their wives or partners as ‘the Mrs’? Or is the phrase only common among people who watch a lot of repeats of Minder and The Sweeney on ITV4?
Watching Mr Raab’s stunning performance, I regret to say that he’s clearly suffering from lockdownitis - a scary condition, for which there is no known cure - in which people forget how to talk to others. After weeks of having to make policy decisions over Zoom, while also fearing if Dominic Cummings would try and ring in, Mr Raab simply got mixed up about who he was actually talking to. The ‘I am speaking to a national broadcaster’ part of his brain simply crossed streams with the ‘chatting to Boris about real ales’ bit.
It’s easily done. In an amazing interview with the Guardian some years ago, Cher admitted that she’d been scathing about a performance by fellow pop star Miley Cyrus, mainly because she’d been doing interviews all day and had “started liking the sound of my own voice pontificating”.
Unfortunately, lockdownitis can also strike those of us who rarely hear the sound of their own voices, unless they’re asking if the dog would like a Bonio now or after his walkies. I bored my poor younger sister earlier this month by engaging in a solid 10-minute telephone monologue about floor coverings - until she quite sensibly decided I had ‘gone a bit strange’ and needed to speak to other people. Preferably those with counselling qualifications.
Hopefully, the condition will resolve itself once us office workers will be forced back to our desks and cannot avoid making small talk with our colleagues. That being said, it’s troubling that the man with one of the most important jobs in government may have found time to watch 73 episodes of Game of Thrones.
We really are living in strange and difficult times.
