Lockdown sucks. The coronavirus pandemic sucks. We are due to visit Kiev, Ukraine in October and I hoped to fulfil a long term ambition of visiting Chernobyl with my friends. It took a bit of persuasion to get them to agree to enter the exclusion zone in the first place and now, due to the restrictions on travel and requirement to quarantine upon returning to the UK it looks like the trip will probably be cancelled.

Chernobyl is number one on my list of places I want to visit. Ever since I stumbled upon the Kidd of Speed website I’ve been fascinated by the Chernobyl disaster. It happened in 1986, I was 9 year old at the time and I have vague memories of seeing it on TV. Watching reports of a deadly cloud of radiation spewed into the atmosphere and drifting hundreds of miles. Here in the UK, 1500 miles away, toxic heavy rainfall hit farms in North Wales in April and May 1986 with radioactive caesium and iodine. The government responded by banning the sale of sheep at thousands of farms to stop radiation entering the food chain.

Now, 34 years later, with the radioactive core of the reactor encased in steel and concrete, Chernobyl is ‘safe’ to visit.

And I want to go.

I’ve always – well, for as long as I can remember – had an affinity for dystopian settings. Places like this which are desolate and ruinous or abandoned hold a fascination for me. If we don’t get to Chernobyl this year we shall go another time.

I’ve been sat looking at this blank page for 30 minutes trying to think of a way to sum up my weekend. Between domestic violence, assault and sex offenders, its been a fairly standard weekend.

Crazy, huh? That violence, assaults and sex offenders can be seen as ‘standard’ but welcome to the world of the police constable.

Saturday and Sunday dayshifts made up my ‘weekend’. When most people are choosing to kick back and relax, have a beer or fire up the barbeque, my colleagues and I are strapping on body armour and facing down threats to society.

I walked back into the house on Sunday evening and tried to switch off the awful things I had seen. One difficultly you face doing my job is keeping your family safe from your trauma. It is traumatic. It may be that someone else has suffered a beating or someone else’s children have been abused, but we are all human beings and you cannot help but feel a small part of the trauma that victim’s feel. Some choose to speak to their loved ones about their experiences. Others choose to keep things to themselves. Some will fall somewhere between these two extremes and give sanitised accounts of what has happened during a normal day at work.

Saturday was spent dealing with a domestic incident where someone broke into a flat belonging to the family of his ex-partner and damaging items within. Burglary is not a crime against property – despite what people may think. Having your telly nicked is only part of the story. Someone has violated your private property. What else did they do in your home? Will you ever feel safe again? Its easy, when you’ve been to twenty burglaries, to forget the human impact of this crime. Victim’s often feel very vulnerable. The place they should feel safest suddenly feels very unsafe.

Sunday morning a young man was violently assaulted walking home in broad daylight. A bright and sunny day and suddenly your peace comes to an end at the hands of unknown attackers. Working with ambulance crews to ensure the safety of the victim is the priority before trying to locate suspects. CCTV enquiries, witness appeals, searching the location for evidence of the attack. Just as people are settling down with a cuppa and the Sunday papers, officers are sifting through the dregs of violence on the streets of small-town England.

As most are thinking about Sunday lunch my colleagues and I were considering the best approach to an online paedophile hunting group operating a ‘sting’ in the town. Its not as simple as ‘bad man do bad thing,’ there’s far more to it. Arrest, gather evidence, seize electronic equipment, consider the community impact, safeguard victims and also safeguard suspects. There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes. Most people just see a Facebook livestream of the ‘sting’ but not the hours, days, months of work that goes into the subsequent investigation.

I walked back into the house on Sunday evening tainted by the things that I have seen.

How was your weekend?

Let’s be honest here. 2020 has been a strange and terrible year. From the millions of acres of land destroyed in Australian brush fires, to the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, to the official withdrawal of Great Britain from the European Union, to the Harvey Weinstein scandal, to the coronavirus outbreak which has seen 700,000+ deaths worldwide, to the widespread disorder in Hong Kong, to the global #blacklivesmatter movement proving that the fight for civil rights and equality is still a struggle in the 21st century, to the… take breath, 2020, you’re only half done.

I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times.

Roll on 2021 and a promise of better times for all of us. The sooner we put 2020 behind us the better for all humanity.

What am I hoping to achieve in 2021? Let’s talk about something positive.

Joe. I referenced my brother Joe in my last post. He lives a long way from here and between life, jobs and financial issues we have not seen each other for several years. Off the top of my head I can’t recall our last meeting. That situation needs to be fixed. Lucas will be two when 2021 starts and he’s never met his uncle Joe. Next year we shall meet. Be that here or there or someplace in between, the situation must change. My first plan for 2021 is a reunion with my brother.

Holidays. No summer holiday for us in 2020 and my planned trip to Kiev, Ukraine in October is looking like it may fall flat too. The requirement to quarantine for 14 days is just too much of an ask. People gotta work, you know? What was a promise of fun and adventure with my pals is looking bleak. We should be going to Portugal in September but that too is unlikely. Flights get cancelled, the government doesn’t know where it stands on the subject of air-bridges and their decisions are typically no sensical. The recent reintroduction of a Spanish quarantine came on a day Spain had significantly less deaths than the UK. It’s just not worth the risk of booking flights knowing we could be denied a chance to travel that same day.

A proposal? And not an indecent one ala the 1993 Robert Redford/Demi Moore ‘drama’. Fran keeps promising to make an honest man of me. Don’t tell her, but maybe, just maybe, 2021 is the year the question of ‘will you marry me’ gets asked.

What are your goals or aims for 2021?

Far from fearless I do consider myself to be ‘brave’. Doing the job I do I have to put aside my concerns around self-preservation to a degree. When there is a man with a knife everyone runs away. I’m required to head towards danger when everyone else moves in the other direction.

Nelson Mandela said:

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

I’m often scared but I have to overcome that fear and proceed. To the outsider it looks like fearlessness but there is a difference between being fearless and being brave.

What does frighten me? Am I afraid of death? No. I am concerned that should I die my family will lose a sizeable chunk of its income and I would hate for my children to grow up without their father. But death doesn’t scare me. Eventually, everything and everyone dies. Why would you be frightened by that? It is inevitable. The only thing not certain is the timing of the event.

I have long considered myself a proud atheist and have poured scorn on those who cling to the notion of god and heaven. The ‘afterlife’ is a device designed to prevent fear of death, but understanding that the only thing after life is oblivion is, in a perverse way, comforting.

Oblivion is the absence of pain, the absence of fear, the absence of caring. Its difficult to fathom being the self-aware species that we are.

I’m not afraid of death but I am afraid of pain. I have never liked pain. I am afraid of heights. I can’t climb a ladder without quaking with fear. Its not irrational either. Heights equal falling and falling equals pain.

Give me death and oblivion over falling and pain.

Perhaps that’s a bit bleak and morbid. In my next post I will tackle something much more fun!