NHS and Health

Earn

Learn

Wed

Be dead

Compete

(if you're elite)

Britain needs pickers
We have a picking drought
Particularly since we’ve kicked our usual pickers out

So pick yourself up
and dust yourself down
Pick up a lift heading out of your town

Here’s your harvest
basket – fill it!
Harnessing the wartime spirit!

Dig for Britain
saw us through
Let’s pick to fight off Covid too!

Let's keep this briefing brief

We don't want the grief

I'll shuffle my sheaf

Turn over a leaf

and pass that question to the medical chief

Janine's video contribution to We Shall Overcome's Isolation Festival, held online on 11 April 2020, featuring the poems:

• Disaffected Middle-Aged Women
• Clap for Carers
• Wherefore Art Thou, Capitalism?
• Unskilled
• Thoughts and Prayers

More than twenty poets read their contributions to the anthology Coronaverses: poems from the pandemic. Buy the book here.

Lyrics by "Borissey"

He was socially close, untamed, unmasked
His magic medicine uncasked
He didn't care so he never asked

He'll brush it off, he's so athletic
The tough guy, leading man aesthetic
No chance it makes him empathetic

He'll rise above like Kilimanjaro
Always survive like the Cult of Skaro
Covid can't hurt Bolsonaro

Last year, I wrote a poem (a pantoum) called 'This Place' about visiting my son in the adolescent psychiatric unit where he spent four months (read it here).

He now has his own flat, living independently with support. So I decided to write a follow-up poem of the same length in the same style, hoping that this will illustrate the wonderful progression.

Janine speaks as part of a panel on Covid-19, democratic ownership and the future of the economy in May 2020. - organised by Another Europe Is Possible. Video plus text of speech below.