Yahoo News Coronavirus is ruining my happy memories
Why must things change, I wonder? Why can’t they just be the same for ever? It is a common grievance, and one of the main factors that drove the pro-Brexit vote. Thankfully, soon “things” will be able to go back to being “like they were”. A Clarks Commando shoe, with white dog muck in the treads, will moon-stomp on a Remoaner’s face – for ever.
Words, however, have a habit of changing their meanings, and the fact that I am submitting this week’s column from a medical isolation tent at an undisclosed emergency location proves their fluid nature. Bear with me. Imagine, for example, that I were to come into work and say: “Hello. I am gay today!” Once, not long ago, everyone would have assumed I meant I was happy. But the word “gay” officially transitioned to meaning “homosexual” on 5 July 1960, its new coinage minted by Benny Hill in the Tommy Steele vehicle Light Up the Sky!, a Brechtian comedy about a man trying to get his wedding cake iced by a recidivist Northern Irish baker.
The last people to use the word “gay” to mean “happy” were the Flintstones, who were still promising viewers a “gay old time” as recently as 1966. To be fair, The Flintstones was set between 9000 and 2000 BCE, so it is possible they intended to hold up a mirror to the prehistoric attitudes of the era, while not necessarily endorsing them, like how “the ironic standup comedy of ‘The Wokefinder General’” (© Sarah Vine, The Daily Mail, 2020) Ricky Gervais does.
By the 80s, however, the word “gay” was an insult in some circles. Indeed, when asked, by Metal Mania magazine in 1986, if he would ever use keyboards in a song, Anthrax’s drummer, Charlie Benante, said: “No. That is gay.” In 1990, I found myself in a music shop watching an instruction video in which Benante explained how some drums were in fact gay. Then, in 1992, I accidentally saw Anthrax live. They had a massive clock on stage, but its speeding hands, intended to illustrate humanity’s race to oblivion, got stuck at 4pm, leaving Anthrax thrashing furiously and for ever in an eternal tea-time time-loop. Which was gay.
Today, liberal values have been inculcated into society so thoroughly, only the drummer from Anthrax would still use the word “gay” as an insult, and even then only to a musical instrument. The best way to insult homosexuals today is to call them “bumboys”, as we have learned from the sterling work of our prime minister, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-A-Bob-For-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Johnson.
Like the word “gay”, the word “Corona” has changed its meaning too. When I thought of “Corona” as a child, I did not think of a planet-ravaging virus. I thought of a colourful range of Welsh carbonated soft drinks, sold in bottles with 10p returnable deposits, and delivered direct to our door by the be-aproned Corona Man himself, And he was a jolly ruddy-faced tradesman, not an embodiment of global viral doom.
The Corona Man would park his yellow flatbed truck in the communal car park, and scamper along our row of terraced houses with his basket of joy-inducing psychedelic fizz-milk. But the Corona factory in south Wales closed in 1987, after a eulogy from Tom Jones, who drank an entire bottle of dandelion and burdock and then retched The Last Post in burps into the microphone. It was the Corona Man, incredibly, who taught me how to ride a bike, taking pity on me as I fumbled and fell on the shared grass out front, and perhaps eyeing my obviously single mother, like a tartrazine Robin Askwith. Within a few months of The Corona Man’s brief weekly instruction, I stopped crying and I was stable in the saddle. I was 28 years old. I’m joking, of course.
As the 70s shifted into the 80s, Corona’s fortunes wavered, and the humiliating outfits the Corona Man was forced to wear on his Corona round reflected the company’s desperation. In 1979, he delivered dressed as a giant bottle of Corona, his eyes peeping mournfully through tiny slits. By the end, he waddled round in a rubber fat-suit, his face painted bright orange like the anthropomorphised bubbles in the company’s “Let’s Get Fizzical” adverts, and The Corona Man was too ashamed to meet my gaze, despite our former intimacy. I got my fizz fix from cider now, and left for university, never to return. Deliveries ceased.
Last week, a man came up to me after a standup show in Sheffield. He said he had lived, as a child, in the room I once lived in, in the house where I grew up, after my mum moved to Worcestershire. I suddenly felt humbled. After two-and-a-half hours of pretending to be someone, and something, else, I knew that this stranger would be able to locate me, socially and historically, and that he knew exactly who I really was.
“Did the man still deliver Corona when you were there?” I asked. “The virus?” the stranger said, “someone delivered a deadly virus to your home? What do you mean?” A mild panic ensued at the merchandise table and people reached for their hand sanitisers before hurrying away. “No. Corona!”, I shouted, “Corona. A man gave it me every week and I drank loads of it. He’ll be dead by now I expect.”
This, to be fair, only added to the confusion, and suddenly I found myself spirited away by insistent health officials in protective clothing. Perhaps when boffins christen the next virus, they could spare a thought for the fond childhood memories they may be trampling under their sock-and-sandalled feet.
