I certainly miss friends, family members, socialising, and going to gigs, and worry very much about the future of music venues, festivals, musicians, not to mention many favourite pubs. But wearing the new mask of ambiguity, a madness has descended, perhaps ramped up by a few weeks of briefly being sensible. That certainly takes a big bite out of other examples – such as the comparatively mildly annoying person who doesn't give you quite enough space in a shop, or those awkward moments of personal space Tetris when you're try to pass by a family taking up the whole pavement. No masks, no gloves, but plenty of burgers and chicken, finger lickin' good, all eaten right out in the open, touching, breathing in.
Two massive BBQ parties in three days, with around 60 people jammed together in a small garden, spilling onto the street. However, across the road from our house, some neighbours have taken the latest Boris Johnson nebulous 'stay alert' soundbite as an excuse to do anything they want. But that's not really a crime, it's just on the edge of careless. It started here with panic buying, and, now habitually, as soon as the sun comes out, everyone seems compelled to strip off to their Eddy Grundies and sit about on park grass, crowded together like puffins on a rock. Perhaps that comes from a culture of politeness and natural repression. In the UK we tend to go from polite queuing and mildly throat-clearing awkward reticence to mad, greedy extremes. We all have our own personal horror stories.
The virus has certainly brought out both angels and monsters. Please just die you nasty, narcissistic fucking psycho. And remarking, like the utter psychopath that he is, that it is “beautiful” to see “nurses running into death just like soldiers running into bullets”. Death and dollars walking hand in hand, arms 2 metres long.
And the Trump, also blaming everyone but himself, lying continuously as usual, but upping the game to a new level, setting US states in a bidding war against each other to buy protective equipment at inflated prices, making dangerous and absurd health suggestions about drinking bleach or shining light into the body, and touting dubiously inappropriate pharmaceuticals as cures, perhaps strategically for his cronies to sell at profit. So then, Boris Johnson and his band of incompetent, self-serving, self-entitled, make-it-up-on-the-spot, bumbling Inbetweeners. From clapping for health workers, who have become national heroes, a spectrum of governments rallying and testing impressively (South Korea, New Zealand, Germany) to others be an utter shambles (UK, USA, Brazil). From shops selling paracetamol for 10 times the normal price to volunteers delivery groceries to the vulnerable they've never met. Lockdown is a profound scenario, affecting all sides of society, and it brings out the best and the worst in us. But we'll learn from history, won't we? The only thing that could top this to affect the human race is a massive comet collision, aliens landing, or a sudden huge climate disaster. It's a quite sobering fact that after that war was over, lockdown restrictions on the so-called Spanish flu were lifted to allow for Allied celebrations, but then over the period into 1919, total deaths rocketed to between 50-100 million. Surely nothing since the Second World War, and perhaps more pertinently, the First World War, with the flu epidemic that came during and followed it.
Not even 9/11, Europe's Iron Curtain revolutions of 1989, JFK's assassination, the Cuban missile crisis, or even the moon landings come close to such universal effect, and have made such a profound effect on everyone.
TUVAN THROAT SINGING SOUNDBYTE SERIES
I think the most astonishing thought about the Covid-19 crisis and lockdown is that it is the first situation, or series of events, in living memory that has affected the daily lives of almost everyone in the entire world, almost simultaneously.
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