In the opening line of his major poem The Wasteland, T S Eliot declares April to be the cruellest month. My A level studies of many years ago persuaded me that, the frivolity of his poems about cats apart, T S Eliot knew a thing or two about the less cheery side of life, but January 2021 may have given even him at least some pause for thought about April’s claim to the title.

It’s been a tough month for a lot of people. The announcement of the breaking of the 100,000 barrier for Covid related deaths in the UK was momentous and awful. I’m not the first to make this point, but the figures as announced do not cover the human story which lies beneath them. These are not just statistics. Each one of the 100,000 was a person with a life, family, friends, colleagues, carers.  Millions of people are affected by those deaths and the implications far reaching. One of the likely effects is a need for further mental health support to be made available, which, with the other growing pressures on mental health and wellbeing, will pose a considerable challenge for the already hard pressed NHS but are crucial.

Mental health and wellbeing have also featured prominently in this week’s discussions about a return to school. My children are now past school age, but I have great sympathy for those locked into a domestic pressure cooker where children are missing the social aspects of school and friends and parents are having to fulfil the multiple roles of parent, teacher, worker and breadwinner during days which, for children, must seem interminably long and for their parents, whilst long, just don’t seem to have enough hours in them to do everything that they need to do. It’s important not to rush a return to school in a way that risks further infection spread, but it also would seem to make sense to take every available opportunity to speed up a safe return.

This has also been the week in which Covid has, distastefully in many respects given the distress that’s going on, been used as a political football. Whether it’s the Astra Zeneca vaccine row with the EU, the German stance on the Astra Zeneca vaccine’s efficacy in the over 65 age group or Boris Johnson’s visit to Scotland and the SNP’s reaction to it, it’s all felt pretty tawdry. The EU seeing fit to cut up rough over a vaccine which it had yet to approve due to a notably elongated approval procedure and which, in consequence, it ordered late has had even ardent remainers pondering whether it’s better to be out. Boris Johnson’s use of Covid to try to support the faltering union with Scotland and the predictable counter-grumblings about travel restrictions are unedifying and miss the point. The future of Scotland and the UK is important, but surely there are less insensitive ways of conducting the debate.

It's been another tough week for the High Street with the demise of Debenhams as a physical presence there, and the likelihood that many of Arcadia’s shops will suffer a similar fate. There has been some relief in the form of a likely partial rescue for Paperchase, but the future of our town and city centres is a debate which must move up the agenda if they are not going to have tumbleweed blowing through them for a decade or more.

So what’s been good? Well, depending on how you view it, the recent wins for an unconnected (other than by social media) group of amateur investors over the mighty hedge funds in the case of Gamestop may be. There are arguments about market stability and the effects on, for example, pension funds and an unease about stock markets being shown to be, in part, less an economic indicator and more a betting platform, but it’s been interesting to see such effective opposition to major organisations. Given a report earlier in the week that indicated huge increases in net wealth through the Covid period for the world’s wealthiest people, often gained via transnational companies whose trading activities are boosted by lockdown, it would be interesting to see if consumers could exert a pressure in encouraging those large entities to pay more of the Covid bill than governments have so far been able to do.

Another entry in the good news column has been the Novavax vaccine’s recent results in relation to new variants of the virus. It’s not often that you see newscasters smiling at the moment, but the news about the Novavax vaccine certainly had News at Ten’s smiling last night.

The next time I write will be in February, which surely will be a less cruel month than this January has been. With that in mind, I’ll put away the TS Eliot and look for something jollier to read over the weekend.

Enjoy the weekend whatever you’re doing