Dr Anthony Clare's 6 Rules for Surviving Covid-19
I wrote a piece for the Telegraph this week about my experience of self-isolation (so far) and in it shared the helpful stuff I learned a few years ago from the celebrated Irish psychiatrist, Dr Anthony Clare. He was a wise and wonderful man - so you might find this interesting and, I hope, useful.
This thing is beginning to hit home. I now know someone who has died of the virus – and she was ten years younger than me. The Prince of Wales has had it – and we are exact contemporaries, both born in 1948. Five weeks ago, I went to a friend’s retirement party. The next week he and his partner set off for Thailand and a long-awaited ‘holiday of a lifetime’. He is now in an intensive care unit in Hua Hin with double pneumonia and Covid-19. This isn’t the game it seemed ten days ago when I was having fun setting up my self-isolation home studio in the attic so I could go on recording my podcast and keep popping up on The One Show. This is real and it’s deadly.
And if it can strike the heir to the throne and a Palace footman, it’s clearly no respecter of rank or age. Young people are dying, too. I have three children and seven grandchildren. Two of the ten have ‘underlying health issues’ – a phrase I had never used until this year: now I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s all too close for comfort. I am anxious. I am worrying. I am not sleeping well. I am having more vivid dreams than I am used to, and dreaming of people I have loved and lost. I have dreamt of my parents several nights in a row and on Saturday night, bizarrely, the satirist John Wells (famous for his Dennis Thatcher impersonation) turned up in a dream. Truly strange since he died in 1998 and I did not know him particularly well. Asleep and awake, I am thinking about death much of the time.
But I am also a seasoned old codger and a pragmatist. I am rational, too, and I realise that this self-isolation nightmare could go on for months, especially for us ‘vulnerable’ over-70s. What’s the plan then – beyond jigsaws and three extra pages of puzzles in the Telegraph? How am I going to live my life for the foreseeable future?
Twenty years ago I became friends with the Irish psychiatrist, Dr Anthony Clare. Famous for his Radio 4 programme, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, he died of a heart attack in Paris in 2007, aged only 64. I dreamt about him last night and this morning I began to recall some of the lessons I learnt from my conversations with him. He was a wise and caring man and he taught me his rules for staying sane and happy, even in the most testing of circumstances.
He said, ‘To be happy you must be a leaf on a tree’. What does that mean? Well, we are all unique, just as every leaf on every tree in the world is unique. A leaf off a tree feels free – and that’s exciting. When the self-isolation began I loved the freedom of being in my own space doing my own thing in my own way. But the free-floating leaf quickly falls to the ground and it dies. We all need to be leaves attached to a tree, part of a living organism that is larger than ourselves, with roots, alive and still growing. That’s why in good times you need to belong to a club, or a choir, or any kind of community. That’s why in these times, confined to home, I am having a regular cocktail hour with my children and grandchildren via the Zoom app and taking and making calls to old friends on the landline I had almost forgotten we’d got.
Next, said Dr Clare, ‘break the mirror – stop thinking about yourself’. That’s tough to do right now, when every time I cough I suddenly think ‘This could be the beginning of the end’. But it’s clearly essential. Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, observed that his least-happy patients were always the most self-absorbed, and the most happy were those most interested in other people and the world around them. Look up and out, not down and in.
My psychiatrist friend’s third rule was ‘don’t resist change’. Fighting change does not make it go away, it simply makes it feel more oppressive. I am telling my Luddite near-contemporaries (especially those in their late-seventies and eighties) who have resisted the new technology until now that they need to embrace their laptop like a late-life love affair. If I can manage FaceTime, Skype and Zoom, you can, too. The App I am using to record my weekly podcast about words and etymology glories in the name of Reaper – which feels appropriate, since ‘Grim Reaper’ as a euphemism for death first came into the language in the fourteenth century, at the time of the Black Death.
‘Cultivate a passion’ was Dr Clare’s next tip for sane survival. My lifelong passion has been words and language – hence the podcast which I co-host with Susie Dent, the lexicographer from Countdown’s Dictionary Corner, hence the twenty-second poems I am putting out on Twitter and Instagram every day (dressed in one of the novelty jumpers I used to wear on TV in the 1970s and 1980s), hence the fact that I have decided to unearth a DVD or online production of each of Shakespeare’s 37 plays and watch it as a Sunday afternoon treat. At one a week, that will keep me going until Christmas. What’s your passion? From painting to gardening, Prince Charles has several. He is blessed. Without a passion to sustain you, Dr Clare told me, ‘you’re lost’.
He also told me to ‘audit’ my happiness. He meant it literally. He said, ‘Make a list of things you enjoy doing, the things that give you satisfaction. Make a second list of the things you don’t enjoy. See if the first list is longer than the second. If it isn’t, do something about it.’ I am doing that now. I have felt overwhelmed by emails and calls in the past few days. Instead of moaning about it and battling to respond to each and every message as it comes in, I am restructuring my day, focussing on my work between 9 and 5 (I am writing a book) and parcelling up the emails and calls to deal with (with a drink) between 5 and 7.
Dr Clare’s sixth rule was a good one, too: ‘Live in the moment.’ As he pointed out, we don’t have much alternative. Present is the time we’re always in. Hankering for what’s gone is pointless. Living for the future is a mistake: this lockdown could last three weeks or six months. No one knows what the future holds. All we have got is the here and now, so make the most of it, one day at a time.
When I saw Dr Clare last I was quite stressed, but coping. ‘You might like to know,’ he said, ‘that there’s research showing that, in retrospect, people often look back on the most stressful and challenging periods in their lives as the most memorable and rewarding. In an odd sort of way, the worst of times can turn out to be the best of times.’ Here’s hoping.
PS: Good news. My friend in Hua Hin emailed this morning. He is out of hospital and on the mend.