June 2020
RICHARD HARVEY
RECREATIONAL
HOOVERING
Irrefutable evidence that lockdown has finally got to the usually irrepressible Richard Harvey
D
uring these tiresome times The Gospel According To Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, which inveighs us to “accent-uate the positive, e-lim-inate the negative” seems sound advice, and might keep you hurling yourself from a top floor window. It ill behoves me, as someone who earns his monthly crust with the written word, to cavil at the exhaustingly negative approach taken by Fleet Street’s vultures at those early evening press conferences. When, a few weeks ago, the earnest man from The Guardian was patched in, only to discover he was talking to himself rather than the nation, I fleetingly wondered if some Number Ten spin doctor had niftily pulled the plug.
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Perish the thought….. Thus, in an increasingly desperate search for something – anything – to lift the daily gloom, I’ve been a loyal follower of Arlen and Mercer’s advice. As a result, I have discovered…. • Renewed hoovering skills, long forgotten since my days in a seedy bachelor pad that my father described as “being only one step removed from the town tip”. •
Joe Wicks isn’t entirely irritating: his online workouts| for ‘seniors’ are sufficiently brief to invoke a smug sense of satisfaction, even if his encouragement to touch your toes is ridiculously over-optimistic (go on, admit it: can you?).
I FAmagazine.com
