Together, alone

Colombo In January, I promised a visiting Army reservist friend that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when I came down with dengue fever. But I’d climbed Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas 2004, when the tsunami struck, probably saved my life) and there would always be another chance to do it, right? Things change. Like everyone else in town, I was already bored and irritable from the first week of our lockdown when I saw a burst of British news items on COVID-19 nixing Everest expeditions, pensioners trying to keep fit indoors and some chap figuring out how many stairs it took to ‘top’ the mountains of the British Isles. Challenge accepted.

Everything to do with this virus is now false news. All the statistics are meaningless: we have no reliable means of calculating the spread and depth of the disease, either from country to country or even within a single country. Pompous dumbos, a vibrant and important tranche of our respective commentariats, insist we must pay no heed to anything but the ‘science’. But nobody knows what the science is. The epidemiologists disagree among themselves. Other branches of the medical profession (those whose interest is in, say, malaria, or cancer), as well as statisticians, are astonished by what they see as an overreaction to an illness which really isn’t quite punching its weight in the Grim Reaper stakes.

Christmas Eve 1944, and the airfield near the tiny Suffolk village of Lavenham shook with the noise of bombers from the 487th Bomb Group, part of the 8th US Army Air Force. The commanding officer, leading more than 2,000 aircraft from various airfields, was brigadier general Frederick Walker Castle, and today was to be his 30th and final mission. Over Allied-held territory in Belgium, Castle’s B-17 Flying Fortress developed engine trouble. Dropping back from the bomber stream so as not to slow it down, he refused to jettison his bomb load on the Allied troops below. He was a sitting duck. After repeated fighter attacks, his plane on fire and in a tailspin, Castle ordered his crewmen to bail out.