Joey Jordison – Dead and Alive

 

Joey Jordison... man in the Slipknot mask

I confess to once buying a Slipknot album... but found only one thing about its intensely dark metal that impressed... the impossibly brilliant drumming of Joey Jordison.

It's truly sad news that he has died, aged only 46, after a musical career that probably inspired thousands of young drummers to pick up the sticks.

Jordison was a master of double-bass-drumming and mesmerising technique. The fact that he suffered from acute transverse myelitis, a disease that at one point robbed him of the use of a leg, was a terrible irony.

His determination to keep playing had helped him overcome even that setback, yet in the end it wasn't enough to keep him alive...

But, as with all of the drumming greats, he will live on in the playing of his successors.

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Back to Black

It all started with unfathomable things happening in China.

Initially, no one in the West paid much attention to it.

It travelled via the trade routes and port cities.

It affected the poor far worse than the rich.

The authorities were at a loss to know how to deal with it.

Conspiracy theories regarding its cause abounded.

Doctors were at the forefront of being victims of it.

And then doctors began refusing to see patients.

Some people shut themselves away and avoided contact with everyone else.

Others just partied and didn't care about anyone but themselves.

Does any of this sound familiar?

This is all chronicled in the excellent Philip Ziegler book The Black Death. It's all about the 14th-century plague of course – but it's also about how humans react to such calamities – and perhaps how we have learned nothing at all...

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – 0 Out of 1010

Could the 1010 Labs story get any worse?

Of course it could. After chasing them with emails and phone calls, they finally sent me my test result... but they managed to send me my Day 2 test result for the second time, rather than the result of my Day 8 test, for which I had been waiting a week.

After yet another email to them, pointing out the uselessness of what they had just sent me, I finally got the Day 8 result... on day 16 of my 10-day quarantine.

It was negative – which was just as well, since I had given up waiting for it and returned to "normal" life.

It seems I am far from alone in my dissatisfaction with 1010 Labs.

The Telegraph reports: "Ninety-five per cent of its reviews on Trustpilot were rated 'bad', with one customer saying they were still waiting for their test result after two weeks. 'I am appalled that operators like this end up on a Government website, with the appearance of being recommended,' they said."

Absolutely. And we're paying large amounts of money for this shambles.

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Test and No Trace

1010 Labs – the company that managed to send a quarantine testing kit to my address in the UK while I was yet to return home from Greece [see this blog An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Great Britain?] – seems to go from strength to strength.

I got the result of my Day 2 test from them a couple of days later and that was negative.

I posted my Day 8 test off on 1 July – and on 8 July (that's Day 15 of my 10-day quarantine) I was still waiting for the result.

So I emailed them - no response.

So then I phoned and spoke to someone called Asal who promised the result would be emailed to me that very day – and also that they would ring me back to tell me why I had had to wait a week.

They didn't phone – and I didn't get my result.

I phoned again and after queueing behind seven other callers (complainants?) I was told they had "been very busy". That didn't seem to cut it as an explanation for why I was still waiting for a 48-hour test result after seven days.

This time I was promised that I would have the result "by the end of today".

I asked the name of the call-handler. She said she wasn't allowed to identify herself. But why not? The previous call-handler had done so. We're not allowed to, she repeated. I asked for the name of the head of the company. She didn't know it. I asked for the address of the company. She didn't know it. I asked her where exactly in the world she was. She said she wasn't allowed to tell me.

So this is 1010 Labs – a company that has been charging travellers (who have had little choice) nearly £130 for two tests during a 10-day quarantine – or in my case, it seems, £130 for one test during a 10-day quarantine.

I'll write to the company, to the Department of Health and to my MP about this sorry mess. But I think we all know where this is heading... the same place as where the UK is going to...

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Mail Bonding

I've been asked to report any unusual symptoms while in quarantine... The only one I've noticed so far is that I keep reading the Daily Mail and nodding in agreement...

After identifying with the complaints of Dame Joan Collins about the Covid Stasi [see this blog An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – I'm with Joan Collins, 28 June 2021], I now find that I'm heartily in agreement with my former Oldie magazine colleague and Mail columnist Stephen Glover.

Like me, he is at home under quarantine, having returned from an amber list country. 

"It is practically ludicrous that I should be forced to quarantine since the current covid infection rate in Italy is less than five per cent of the UK’s, and in any case I am double-jabbed," he writes.

"Yet every day I am telephoned by someone from NHS Test and Trace who asks me whether I am quarantining at home"

Unlike Dame Joan and me, he has not yet had the knock at the door...

But what angers him the most is the long list of exemptions which means that we are the poor suckers who are having to obey the rules, while others don't. "How monstrously unfair that a government which has the gall to subject its citizens to this ridiculous palaver should arbitrarily exempt hand-picked business people and football grandees from its meddlesome restrictions," he says.

Quite.