Did you ever play hunt the thimble? Probably not. It is not oneof the games we offer to today’s youth. You would probably have trouble finding a thimble in the first place. It was a game I used to have to play when I stayed with my grandmother in Gorton, East Manchester. It was how she thought she’d keep a hyper-active six or seven year old happy. Fortunately, she had a thimble to hand. I would close my eyes and she would place it somewhere on the mantlepiece. It could be anywhere: behind the carriage clock; at the back off the letter rack; behind the postcard from Uncle Jack. Anywhere. Then I had to hunt it, knowing that the mantlepiece was the only place where it could be concealed. Two seconds later I had found it . Yes, it was a short-lived game. We would repeat this three or four times. The fun was soon over. Ah, the kids of today don’t know how to have fun nowadays. Ipads and computer games are no replacement for the humble thimble.

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In Totem and Taboo Freud has a notion later termed priority magic to designate the sense of permission that a powerful person can give you when he or she does something that maybe is not normally permissable. The initial powerful actor takes all the guilt onto themselves and makes that act available for others. Once the unspeakable is spoken it is no longer unspeakable. In general, we do not allow ourselves this role. We wait for another and then we follow. I suppose you would call the initial adumbrator of the act a creative perso; he goes into the unknown. People are loathe to go there. They and society prefer trends. In other words, well worn paths. There are commecial reasons for this, of course. The actor of priority magic is not necessarily engaged in a moral act. Indeed, most of the charismatic evil leaders of recent history have sprinkled priority magic and made acceptable to their followers fascism, brutality, racism. You would not want to follow someone because of charisma.

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The omnipresence of covid 19 finds us all modifying our habitual fields of reference for metaphorical language. Teaching French to GCSE students I find myself referring to the so-called etre verbs as a spikey variant strain of the past tense. We have always adapted our discoiurse to suit the times. ‘A plague on both your houses’ in Romeo and Juliet echoed the more virulent issue of the late sixteenth century. Until recently the most common use of the word virus was as a metaphor for computer problems. Now it seems disrespectful to the many victims of Covid 19 to have this term still maintaining its currency in computer world. At least with plague you had the properly horrendous plague of locusts as its extrapolated image.

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