I have met many people both locally and across the country who have been left with serious medical conditions as a result of having Covid-19. Not forgetting those who sadly passed away, there are many often younger folks left with chronic fatigue, a degree of sight loss, temporary deafness and so on.

I did my best to avoid Covid back in the Spring of 2020 because of my lifelong compromised immune system following successful treatment for leukaemia between 2011 and 2013. The bone marrow transplant I had damaged my spleen, which is the seat of the immune system. I have to take a precautionary dose of penicillin for life.

However, I am pretty sure many of our family had Covid right at the beginning in March 2020, although we were also in the cohort who had something even more unpleasant late in 2019 which is now a matter of interest to scientists looking at long-term effects. The oddest effect I was left with was the inability to sit and read any book of fiction. I have heard this is not uncommon.

Non-fiction I could still wade through as much as ever, consuming many books on the history of Fascism in Britain and Ireland in preparation for writing my own take about the lingering influence in the resurgent far right today, via Oswald Mosley, the National Front, Enoch Powell and the chilling oddballs of the Conservative Monday Club in the 60s The huge demands of council work have kept me from beginning the book, and I wonder if I ever will.

Nevertheless, this bank holiday weekend was one of the most bizarre of my life. On the one hand, I wanted to read a new novel called “James” by Perceval Everett, the great current American author. It is his take on the story of the enslaved Jim in “Huckleberry Finn”. It was clear to me that I needed to reread Huck Finn for the first time since school in preparation. Therefore, in three bank holiday days of rare rest I read both books, my head getting around about 500 pages of fiction for the first time in more than four years. I was relieved.

Yet that weird reverie was constantly interrupted by bulletin after bulletin on the ongoing civil emergency, in my view, of beaches having to close repeatedly from Seaton to Sidmouth because of sewage discharges. Yes, on the August Bank Holiday. As a council we were having to put Red Flags up and down all weekend. Sadly, for our tourism industry, national papers and broadcaster were all over it.

As with Covid, all this is an after effect. Water utilities have been borrowing from the international markets to do what inadequate infrastructure work they have done in the last two decades. The profits from their operations are paid as dividends to shareholders. The corporate system is broken.

Labour talked a good game during the election, but Feargal Sharkey who backed them big time has already called foul. The new governments plans do nothing to address that fatal failure in that corporate system.

This weekend was like a fever dream for me, Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi, while excrement floated into East Devon’s bathing waters. This issue is now with the new government. Only it has the power to save us. Get it done, please.