This is the red wall that really matters
You see it as you cross the river from Westminster.
A wall of red stretching 500 meters along the river bank from Westminster to Lambeth bridge.
And as you get closer, you can see it’s made of red hearts hand painted on the wall.
One hundred and fifty thousand eight hundred and third seven hearts on April 8th 2021:
And still growing.
A heart for each person that died in the covid pandemic.
And as you get closer still you can see the names.
And you can see the inscriptions:
granny we love you.
Sorely missed.
Rest in peace.
Best mum.
Best dad.
I couldn’t go all the way along. It was too far and my ankles got sore.
But you can do it virtually:
go to
https://nationalcovidmemorialwall.org/
and click on “Walk The Wall”.
As you scroll along, you can hear the stories of those whose family members are remembered here; and the stories of those who painted the hearts.
The fifteen hundred volunteers who painted the hearts over ten days in March 2021.
It is extraordinary and beautiful.
It acts both as an expression of love and memory
And also denounces a crime.
We know that many many thousands of these people did not need to die.
They died because the Conservative government thought profits were more important than human lives.
So they delayed lockdown. And people died.
Old people were decanted out of hospital beds and put into care homes. And people died.
Government contracts for the supply of personal protective equipment were handed out to government cronies, irrespective of expertise, and it was often useless. And people died.
And the story goes on and on and on.
You can follow it here: https://www.facebook.com/ledbydonkeys
And the length of the wall directly reflects the failures of the Westminster government.
Tory MPs can see it when they take their subsidised drinks on the terrace.
But I doubt they have the courage to look their failures in the eye.
They certainly show no sign at all of being able to learn from them.
I doubt also that they look at St Thomas’s Hospital behind the wall and reflect on the state they have left the NHS in.
Reflect on the people dying in their homes because the ambulance couldn’t get to them on time.
Reflect on the people dying in the ambulances because they couldn’t be admitted to hospital.
Reflect on the people dying in their chairs in waiting rooms or dying in hospital corridors because the cruelly underfunded and over stretched health service doesn’t have the capacity to care for them.
People dying because the profits of hedge fund managers and property speculators are apparently more important than the welfare of ordinary people.
And the deaths go on, and the suffering goes on, because the pandemic was a wake up call.
A harsh lesson that our society needs to learn and that we seem so far to have conspicuously failed to.
Because the values we live by are no longer adequate to the demands that are made of us by the world.
We cannot continue living in a society that regards the pursuit of individual profit as the purpose of human existence.
The pandemic taught us that the suffering of one is the suffering of all.
That we have to take care of, and take responsibility for, each other.
And we have to take care of our world.
The origins of this terrible outbreak came from our merciless exploitation of the natural world, our destruction of wild animals’ habitats and the hideous cruelties of industrial farming.
The UK government, like most governments, knows all this and wilfully turns a blind eye to it.
And we let them.
I stood and looked at the wall a while. And I saw it was also a warning.
I remembered that time of fear, in the first stage of the pandemic, when I had to confront the possibility of my own death.
And confront the possibility of the death of those I love.
For these people who wrote their loved ones’ names on the wall, the worst has already happened.
I thought of what The Man says in my EVERY ONE:
An old woman in a mental home. Heart failure.
A young woman in the middle east. Burnt to death.
Self immolation.
Apparently she loathed her husband.
A young man in the south.
Slowly being clubbed. Twitching.
Seems to belong to the wrong ethnic group.
Or maybe the wrong political party.
Older man in the west.
Eating himself to death.
It all takes a very long time.
He’s complaining life’s just meaningless
And besides, he says, the service is just so slow.
Baby in a transit camp. Malnutrition. Diarrhoea.
Woman in a prison cell.
Slowly dying of solitude.
Woman in hospital bed. Brain tumour.
There’s a cancer of the lung.
Cancer of the kidneys.
Of the throat.
Cancer of the penis.
There’s one being drowned. Thrashing about.
Radioactive poisoning.
Alcohol. Alcohol. Alcohol.
There’s an overdose.
A child dying from lack of love.
Another of leukaemia.
Road traffic accident.
Throttled by a noose.
Smothered by a pillow.
Raped and left to bleed to death.
Died in her sleep.
Quiet and peaceful. A rarity.
Gunshot wounds.
Fell down a mountain.
Choked on a piece of fruit.
Heroin. Massive heart attack.
And amid all these gasping sobbing blaspheming screaming sounds
Sometimes I think I hear a greater lamentation:
The slow majestic dying of the planet earth.
I wrote that long before covid. Perhaps I should update the lines.
And then I approached the wall and read the inscriptions, and thought of all the individual tragedies spread out along the length of it.
And remembered Mary’s words in the same play:
I loved a man
And lived with him.
It was very hard,
I think
But we loved each other as best we could
And we tried hard
To bring up our children
And know they are loved in the world.
I made many mistakes, I think.
I did what I could.
My life seemed so big
When I was living it
Now it seems so small.How weak we are, we humans.
How frail our light.
How easy for you to put it out.
I spent a lifetime becoming myself
Giving birth and bringing up my children
Loving my husband as best I can
I always wanted to create a better world.
How feeble it all seems. Pathetic really.
Because you can sweep it away
So simply, without even the blink of an eye.
And it means nothing, my death,
My husbands sorrow, my children’s loss
Count for nothing in the greater sorrow of the world.
And I thought: is that true?
Does it all count for nothing?
Is there nothing to be done?
And of course there is, and one answer is this Memorial Wall, and I felt grateful for the people who created it and continue to maintain it.
And it made me happy to think that me and Lesley Orr and St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral and the Traverse Theatre have all got together for THE COVID REQUIEM on November 10th and 11th.
Me and Lesley will be performing the words we created for Pitlochry last year; and the St Mary’s choir will be singing the Faure Requiem…
… and I hope it will do something to bring healing and honour remembrance.
Because in commemorating the dead we also value the living.
Tickets for The Covid Requiem in St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh, are available here: