We live for that tomorrow. That UK tomorrow being promised by talking heads on TV.
End of June they say and we can be free.
Or as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
But we’re not holding our breath, with a mask or without one.
Fear of open spaces is called, “Agoraphobia,” I imagine we’ll all suffer from an agoraphobia whack on the head, when we once again venture out into the great outdoors.
The UK does not yet have the strictest lockdown. But we’re getting there.
Our balcony is our little space to view the world going by.
The trip to the supermarket is now our version of Marco Polo’s trip up the Silk Road to the Mystic East.
The fear is of contagion, from strangers we would not give even a second glance,as we passed by. When things where, in a galaxy far far away,more normal.
Remember normal?
“Normal? Yea I remember him. Tall chap, wore a funny hat. Liked to take holidays to those foreign lands. Had a fancy waist coat. Well dressed. Went away. Never coming back they say.”
Sad all the same. It was all going so good. Then again maybe not.
The UK was worried about leaving Europe and now we can’t even leave our own house.
Ibn Khaldun wrote that pestilence was an integral component of civilizational collapse.
We build them up and they will crash down.
It’s the way of the world.
They say history does not repeat itself, but it generally rhymes.
So we sit in our tiny boxes and look out of our tiny windows, drunk on pity for ourselves, our future, our children and the six empty bottles of Malbec from Aldi.
Checking out the sale on prepper survival websites. No need for a bug-out run for the hills bag now. That’s much too late.
I never knew I needed a survivor shovel. It has serrated edges to fight off wild animals. And what abouta trauma shears for cutting through clothing, after a gunshot wound. It can also double for cutting firewood.
I mean, who knew?
How about a three blade rotating razor that doubles as a face shaver and wannabe skinhead shaver.
Do I really need this stuff?
Covid-19 has been called an extinction level event for our economies.
Smallpox, measles, influenza, yellow fever, and malaria have devastated humanity in the past. Covid-19 is small fry compared to these.
But Covid-19 has hit the most technological media savvy society the world has ever seen. And the results are not pretty. Just check out those terrible memes.
So we can expect more of these plague’s, we should also expect transformation, change and hopefully progress.
Boris gets the Covid-19 and some smart wit says it shows it’s a great leveller.
And no, it’s not a Bio-weapon.
If it was a Bio-weapon it would laser target the poor. Not Boris.
Covid-19 has also exposed what one British professor called, “Bullshit Work.”
John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end we’d all be working just 15 hrs a week. But the bullshit jobs put a stop to that. Churning out pointless job after job to ensure we work even more hours than we need to.
Until now.
Whole swathes of this branch of our bullshit working society have been sent home. And nobody really misses them. Think, corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. Do we really need so many corporate and public relation morons in suits?
The people left working. The essential workers, are generally the lowest paid. And we need every one of them to keep our economy going.
So let’s give a shout out to everybody keeping the wheels turning and the lights still shining in our great civilizations. And while you are at it. Give them a pay raise.
And now Easter is upon us and lots of time off with nowhere to go.
I’m looking forward to going back to work as it occupies the mind.
I read a science fiction book that maintained only the rich in the future would have real jobs. All the boring work would be done by robots. And the rest of the population would just be consumers. Bored consumers. Even having a bullshit job in that version of reality would be good.
It is a scary thought to think when it all ends. We can just go out and walk as far as we like. Jump on a plane or train and travel to the ends of the Earth.
Latest news in, Boris is out of hospital.
So we can expect the new party slogan to be.
“Get Covid Done. No Testing Is Better Than Bad Testing.”
Let’s get Britain moving again, is the new coming mantra. “Out!Out!Out! Everybody Out!
Let’s be having you!”
Sounds so much like the German, “Raus! Raus! Raus!” As they harried the transported Jews out of the railway cars from the railway sidings. And into oblivion.
We might even get a sign to pin on our cloths to prove we are clean of the plague. And stamped Government papers to show to the Storm Troopers that will be checking, to see who should be allowed to run around in the sun.
“Mad Dogs and Government Stamped Covid-19 free Englishmen, go out in the midday sun.” Will be the new Noel Coward hit song on the Costa del Sol, if we ever get to go back there again.
Just reading, we can expect a plague of hungry Rats in all our major cities, as the restaurants that usually feed them are closed. Get in line say I, we have enough disasters to worry about, without having to fight off hordes of hungry Rats for a crust of bread.Then again, that serrated survivor shovel may just come in handy, after all.
In Chernobyl there is a fire raging and heading for the remnants of the nuclear plant. All the plant life that survived the Chernobyl disaster, learned to live with and absorbed the heavy radiation. This is now literally going up in smoke and will also be heading our way on the winds of radiation change. Must add to my,scary as shit list.
There is also talk of a, “Great Reset,” when the world will stop, take a pause and then fork, like some crypto currency starting point for a new idea,of a brave new world.
Now what a great song title that would make.
Meanwhile we sit on our balconies and watch our lives drift away.
Even if we were all on a Great Space Ark heading for Alpha Centauri Cb, an exoplanet circling the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. We’d have more leg room. We could at least take a walk around the ship.
In the UK, people are being chased out of their gardens and back into their houses by over enthusiastic Storm Troopers.
Let’s hope it’s coming towards the end. Or as Churchill put it, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Either way, we were never built for this. We are descendants of great explorers, the great travellers, the conquistadors, Lewis and Clark, Saint Brendan the navigator, Magellan, Neil Armstrong and Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
“To boldly giant step where no man has giant stepped before.”
We were never meant to be a Hiber-Nation. Let’s leave that to the bears.
