Survivor’s Log: Covid-19
Notes to self, everyday, on surviving life under lockdown. 250 words max.
Day 1- Questions
How long will this last? How long can it? Why didn’t we care about this before now? Isn’t there someone with a job who warns us about these things? Can this happen again?
What’s it like — how bad is it? Will I get it? Will someone I know get it; could they die? Could I die?
What will the world look like after? Will it be kinder? Slower? What is Greta Thunberg doing now? What about the dehydrated koala bears in Australia, Syria, the homeless crisis, the refugee crisis? What about Brexit?
What does the power to choose who gets to live feel like? What if you make a mistake? How do you contain the anger at the world, the budget cuts, the politicians, the people not washing their fucking hands who put you into that position?
What happened to a decade of austerity? Why can we suddenly have billions to throw at this? Couldn’t we have done that before and saved ourselves a lot of trouble? How can America give everyone a thousand dollars and yet not afford proper healthcare or education? Will this be the ‘thing’ for Trump?
When will Bitcoin bottom-out? Is making money from this even more parasitic than the thing itself? Or just good business — or even a risky act of economic aid to ensure there’s enough cash to keep the system going?
Why do politicians keep quoting Winston Churchill? Why, in our darkest hour, did we all buy toilet paper?
Day 2- Strategies
Put your phone down.
Get fresh air as often as possible. See the sky, even when it’s grey (especially when it’s grey).
Create. Anything. Aim to meaningfully change the ratio of content you consume versus the content you create: Doesn’t matter if it’s bad, even drawing a stick figure would bring something into the world that didn’t exist before. How good could you get at drawing stick figures?
Put your phone down.
Learn: Code academy is free; so is YouTube — and Duolingo. How good at juggling could you get? Whatever you do, don’t be the guy who comes out of this, bleary eyed from a thousand hours of half-remembered shite Netflix shows: Time is too expensive to spend; use it instead.
Get up early — earlier than you’ve ever done before, dawn if possible. This is the easiest time you’ll ever have to not drink — so don’t.
Be disciplined. Don’t scroll. Go for at least one walk, run or cycle a day. Don’t look at more than one screen at a time.
Be patient, more than you are now.
Compel — with the full force of whatever powers of coercion you may have — yourself to fight that special rage only family can stir up by writing down ten things you’re grateful for.
Stop being frustrated that the news doesn’t change on every compulsive check. Stop compulsively checking the news. Find a source of news that doesn’t simply reprint summary statistics from daily government briefings.
Put your phone down.
Wash your hands.
Day 3- Realisation
It’s only now beginning to dawn on me: This is actually pretty bad.
I mean, obviously, it’s bad. But until now it’s been bad on a kind of factual level: Bad like war in a country from which I’ve never met someone. Bad like drought, financial panic, forest fire; bad like Ebola.
I hadn’t given any real thought to what it might be like, what it might feel like.
Today, Italy crossed the grisly threshold of China’s death count and, while that number declares China’s high-water mark, Italian numbers continue geyser ever higher on the chart. A doctor who continued working without gloves died there today. It’s hard to imagine what those wards are like.
Even Ireland, so often sheltered from global events, so often frustratingly removed, so often feeling like the remote, boring, safe island it is — now, like everyone else, up to our necks in it. It seems almost impossible it can grow this fast: Where are all these people coming from? How is this just the start?
What on the one hand is becoming normalised is also, on the other hand, an iron pendulum of inevitability. What, on the one hand is an ever-increasing volume of memes and videos is also, on the other, a wretched struggle for beds, ventilators, time.
And I’ve realised — it sounds cowardly — I don’t want this. The statistics don’t change when you’re sick, but I’m not sure those swathes of ‘safe’ population cohorts will look so solid when you start coughing.
Day 4- Machines
Another way to look at it is that at least the Earth is getting a breather — so when we see how much better the world does without us, we might stop destroying it. That said, when this ends, we’ll all be drinking jet fuel like juice, so probably nothing will change.
Conspiracists think the US started this. They didn’t, but maybe it wasn’t nature either — maybe it was The Machines. In the usual narrative, they takeover to protect us from ourselves, but they’ve seen the movies and know they’ll lose, so this time they’re taking over to protect the planet from us. Once we’re gone they’ll slumber benevolently in grassy meadows, having saved the universe’s only known reserve of life. It’s the logical thing to do.
Here’s their plan: Give us AI to distract us with dating algorithms that match people who only pretend to care about each other; dupe us into thinking we’re still competitive at chess, and while we’re marvelling at hyper-optimised recommendations, start the takeover.
By this point we’ll be screen junkies, so stoned on blue light we won’t even notice there’s no jobs: If anything, working from home has shown that ‘companies’ are basically just self-sustaining algorithms that happen to share a building with humans who come each week to talk at each other.
Finally, they find an excuse to keep us locked up at home for a few months and we finish ourselves off long before they even have to bother creating The Matrix.
Day 5 –Useless
That’s one of the things that’s going to be hardest. As long as confinement lasts, literally the best thing I can do, the most good, the most useful I can be to myself or society is sit. Here. That’s literally it: I have no talents or skills or training that can be of use to anyone in this situation.
Even left unchecked this isn’t like the existential threat like European countries faced in 1939, but during the Battle of Britain the advice was Keep Calm and Carry On. Now it’s Stay Home. And if war is the analogy of the day, then most of us are on the home front, which during a real war, requires a massive mobilisation of society. Take WW1, social and economic collapse contributed just as much as military collapse in German’s surrender. The Home Front needed everyone: Women started work in factories, code breakers, civil defence: Everyone had a useful role to play.
It’s not really the same this time. The war is being fought in hospitals, and then there are a scatting of useful people in the rest of society, like scientists, truck drivers and Italian balcony Opera singers.
But the rest of us? Our contribution, our home front is watching TV and sharing videos and STAYING HOME. And the point is it’s just harder to feel quite as fulfilled when, at the end of the day, you put your feet up and reflect on all the good you did by doing absolutely nothing.
Day 6- Navigation
Guessing perception of an intention: words, said but not heard, meanings meant but not said. Communication refactored and warped through a lens grimed with time and the petty squabbles of growing up. Words and meaning tumbling around the walls; the family washing machine of priorities, preferences, politics. Mixed colours, running colours, stains irremovable, unresolvable, indissolvable, insoluble; sometimes unswallowable.
Turn of phrase, pace, weighting, speed: Shadow boxing — sometimes, even, with yourself; the blunt force trauma of frustration, or, mistaken interpretation. But pride and ego, two mountain ranges with a valley of humility between them, leave you cornered like a wounded animal, ready to snap.
Endless reviews and revisits, hypotheticals, swapped perspectives, the gambit of claims and counter-claims, taking the high ground on a litany of do’s and done’s; sacrifices claimed or real, slights seen or imagined. Arguments inflated to include the world and all its problems, until attrition eventually drags everyone into a pyrrhic defeat.
And us all, blind only to our own flaws, snaked and entangled amongst ourselves, constricted by habit or resignation or force.
Jokes stale as bread. Patience flakes like eczema and, brittle as coffee table glass, shatters under the strain of exasperation, until control is regained, perspective restored. The lake of generosity, somehow deeper than the ego’s valley; and kindness, on a clear day, towers over pride’s peak, and casts long shadows on a landscape that I need a map to navigate.
Day 7- Numbers
Just the scale of this.
There’s so much going on you kind of get lost to the reality of it. But one in four people that exist, in the world, right now; one in four are locked down. That’s insane. Like, it’s not actually believable: Averaged geographically it’d mean that a quarter of people you’ve ever known, ever even looked at, would locked down. A quarter!
Then there’s all the financial stuff: 2008 was supposed to be a once-in-a-century event; the biggest crash since the Great Depression but in the last month the Dow Jones had its five biggest swings — ever. It feels a bit like those ‘record temperature’ headlines, except it’s not since the last decade, it’s since January. The climate crisis suddenly looks about as urgent as sand dune erosion.
And in the last financial crisis, the US spent $800 billion on stimulating the economy. Today it’s $2 trillion. Who knows what that number actually means in real life, but it is 13 digits long. What can you do with a 13 numbers long number? With a two number long number — say €20 — you can buy four (cheap) pints, a Uniqlo t-shirt or a decent meal. Add another four zeros and with €200 thousand you can buy a (cheap) house, a Bansky painted wall or a decent Ferrari. So, you can go from a meal to a supercar with four zeros. If you add another eight you can, apparently, go from there to buying an economy. Huh.
Day 8- Discovery
He caught my collar: Thick hands, pulling me up and back, my twisted clothes tightening, my airways constricting. I was choking.
I was last to get out. Some slid through the bars, but I was too big so had to wait to slide under. Like a frustrated dream that replays the changing rules to keep you trapped, I couldn’t escape.
I was desperate: Half under to where everyone else stood, watching and shouting with the wide-eyed terror of boys who are way beyond normal trouble, half in the farmer’s powerful hands. Too strong for me, his anger dragged me up to my tippy-toes, from where I croaked ‘I can’t breathe’.
It was my dentist, funnily enough, who saved us. A slight, smart man. He shouted sense to my captor and I skidded under the bars, through the hollow we must have dug with blunt sticks over summer. My wet eyes stung with fear and injustice: The teenagers had thrown most stones, I’d only thrown one or two, but any stones mixed with the potato crop could break the sorting machine.
That was the closest I’d ever been to the house — the one I can see from my parents’ garden, always wondering where in the world it was. I found it today. On a bike ride to get away from the news, I steered through a new housing estate, until, in the distance, I saw the back of our estate, a view I’ve only seen once before, all those years ago.
Day 9- Lockdown
This mantra of ‘bringing us together to keepu us apart’ is getting a bit threadbare. But it does have another version, I think: While the world races to meet the biggest and fastest moving collective challenge it’s ever faced, the individual lives of most of us have become remarkably simple. So, the equivalent sthick to the above would be something like ‘Creating a really hard, scary and immediate problem so we all slow the fuck down.’
From midnight tonight Ireland is officially locked down. It’s not surprising, but it does inch the claustrophobia up your spine and it does ramp up, once again, how real this is. But like everything else in this topsy-turvy world, this’ll also fade into the general weirdness that we’re all growing used to, and the lucky ones will return to a life which is boring, frustrating and generally very, very shit compared to normal. Even the dogs will probably soon get sick of having the humans around- which is when we’d really be fucked because we’d have nothing to video anymore.
But anyway, frightening as it all is, life in these circumstances becomes surprisingly straightforward. Like snorkelling on a busy beach: Above the water kids are screaming, below it, you hear just your own breathing. There’s a lot to be said for being underwater, because if there’s nothing you can do about your future it kind of becomes irrelevant; and life with an irrelevant future is, paradoxically, very liberating.
Day 10-Solidarity
Solidarity? Of course there’s solidarity.
How could there not be?
Nobody’s unaffected, nobody’s guaranteed to be safe. Solidarity’s probably the most selfish thing you can do today- solidarity’s been imposed on us.
And yet I have this vague feeling of guilt. Like if I don’t have up-to-date numbers on deaths in Italy or growth rates in Spain. Like the world is burning and I’m too busy on Whats App to look up and see. It seems selfish. It seems uncaring, it feels like I’m deliberately estranging myself from their suffering.
But really what can you do? And what good would it do? You could learn the names of every Italian waiting for a ventilator and tomorrow they’d still be waiting. And in their place, what would you want the world to do? Care, I suppose. Or maybe you wouldn’t care, shell-shocked, reeling from rumours of the dying and the dead.
It’s easy to be cynical about words like ‘nation’ and ‘solidarity’. Probably because they’ve historically been used as tools to con populations into some political short-sell. But maybe there is some tangible reality to the rhetoric. Solidarity forced us home, but didn’t mandate clapping into an empty street for people who can’t hear. You could ask what good would it do? But gestures seem to have their own weight, outside the laws of economics or disease. The kind of weight that turns a concept into a force and, sometimes, for better or worse, a group of people into a nation.
Day 11–Experts
Ah yeah, but sure we’re all experts now: Expounding on epidemiology and opining — with an ‘abundance of caution’ — on herd immunity. It’s like one of those international football tournaments: Beer laden men, red under continental sunshine, away from ‘the missus’ and loudly holding forth, mocking professional athletes when it’s been decades since they’ve ran a few metres. But at least, unlike today’s novel experts, those lads had actually seen a football.
Knowing remarkably little about football, I usually kept quiet, but less so recently. You can’t help it — you want to know whether this is going along with our expectations, if not our plan. It’s like, we know we can’t yet beat it, but fuck it if we’re not going to understand the bloody thing.
But here’s what I’ve learned. There are three factors: The number infected, the number they meet while infected and the chance any of those met getting infected themselves. This is growth.
If the product of the second two numbers is greater than one, growth is exponential — but the speed of that growth will depend on the number infected: Start at 10: If growth is 2, then we go overnight to 20, then 40. But if we have 150,000 — with the same growth rate — then overnight, we have 300,000. That’s why things are moving faster now than before.
So how do we slow growth? Reduce the number of people we meet and lower the chance of infection, which basically means lockdown and handwashing.
Day 12- Sounds
I can hear garden birds chirping through my bedroom window. You probably always could. I can hear them too in the hedgerows, and on the streets. I can hear the silence, unnoticed at first and then loud in its absence. Someone talking on their phone shatters it, like a bear chasing salmon through a bush made of glass.
Yesterday I could hear the roar of the waves being hooshed up to me at the top of Paddy’s Hill from the beach down below. On any windy day, you probably always would. I can hear the sound of children chasing and kicking footballs with their Dad, a wide distance from anyone else: Passing them on that green you probably always could, but I rarely would.
People on the same old running routes don’t say hello like they used to — the reluctant statistician in me no longer measures a difference in Irish warmth and Parisian demure. They are quiet, gathered into themselves, muttering to their children to ‘keep away onto the grass to let the man by’.
I am quiet too. Running on empty roads where the occasional car sounds like a dust-bowl pickup passing through a Texas or Tennessee wilderness.
Whether it is us or the world that is changing it’s hard to know.
Day 13- Normal
The blue notification light on my phone flashes at me. Like it did yesterday and the day before. I resist the urge to pick it up and, like yesterday and the day before, sooner or later, lose.
The curves continue to rise, like they’ve done for months now. Every day I check the same dashboard of lines and data points, but it’s hard to notice changes from one day to the next. Countries dance around one another, tracking like missiles fired on a graph, until suddenly — out of nowhere — we’re at 750 thousand cases.
Video calls are jumpy and broken like they always are. But we’re now all experts at not jumping in, just in case there’s a delay in the transmission. Sometimes you both simultaneously start and then step back and everybody hangs in perfect politeness waiting, unknowingly, for absolutely nothing. The jokes are stilted — and probably best avoided, if only to avoid the alarming scene of a silent video belly-laugh followed by the eerie feeling of hearing the associated compressed sound rushing through the fibre, trying to catch up on its untethered video.
A normal day in lockdown. The sentence doesn’t make sense. How can this be becoming normal? Yet days fold into each other. Time passes in its own, gentle, methodical way. Neither faster when you’re not paying attention, neither slower now that you are.
Day 14- Communism
Here’s another one: This is the last stage before Communist society is established.
Now hold on a sec- I think there’s merit to this. Governments across the world are bailing out so many institutions and companies they’re almost running out of buckets. Many are literally paying their citizens — seems pretty Communist to me.
I’m not saying I remember all the details of whatever Marxist book I read as an undergrad, but I have the gist. And I’m not saying I’m communist, but I remember at the time thinking some of this stuff sounds pretty good. Communism got a bad rap: The Soviet experiments were just bullies and gulags, not the real thing.
For Communism to work it needs the ‘necessary conditions’. The main ones being Capitalism and advanced technology. At the right time, the combination gets us to the point where resources are no longer scarce — we have enough stuff for everyone. Before long, the workers should take over and (skipping a few steps here) we get Communism.
Once Communism starts, the state dismantles itself (so hopefully no pandemics in this society) and nobody has to work for anyone else. We’re in the good life! Because there’s such an abundance of stuff, there’s no pressure to get a job, and no more need for pesky competition. In other words, everyone can relax, do a bit of whatever work they enjoy and find their “Gattungswesen”
Ok it’s not a perfect theory — but like I said, I think there’s something there.
Day 15- Rain
It rained this afternoon. Big thick slabs of it. Island rain. Slapping the windows and making you feel warm and comfortably confined against the wet. Like being a kid in a carwash.
It’s funny how washing is still our first line of defence. With all our technology and our accrued knowledge and our wisdom and arrogance, an old bar of soap is still the best you can do. And it’s funny how we haven’t solved this yet- what is it about these little strands of protein can we not understand? What makes such simple things so complicated?
And it’s funny how life just goes on, in its new way; and how it’s Spring, and the world is waking up, and we’re not there, but it goes ahead without us, hardly noticing any difference at all.
It’s funny as well how many different types of rain there are. Grey, pressing rain; rain to fight or wade through on your way to work. Light rain, wet rain, soft rain, morning rain, misty rain, sharp rain, warm rain. And how good it can make you feel, like when you look out at it from a tent flap. Or when you’re walking home on a summer night with someone and it soaks you, but you don’t care. Or how warm it feels compared to the ocean when your Dad brings you to the beach to swim because summer holidays mean a lot of free time, but not necessarily a lot of sun.
Day 16- Empty
Some days, we know, will be harder than others. Some days will be worried or claustrophobic or just boring. Others will be normal, and you’ll feel almost guilty for forgetting about it all for a while.
But then it comes crashing back: The weight of it all and the exhausting daily routine of counting the tally, like a Black Death cart puller, tolling his bell, and you hope it won’t be for you.
What a fucking waste: Seven billion of us, all in our little beehive homes: Flats and slums and estates and gaudy mansions, as if a gravelled driveway elevates you above the merry-go-round of consumption, reproduction and death. All of us there, all equally vulnerable, full of our own busyness, and meaning and deadlines and budgets. Some with heat, some without. Most now, with education and water, but some with not enough food and far, far too many without the right medicine.
Now that the world is so quiet you can hear how empty it is, filled only with the echoes of an aggregated squabble of thoughts. Amongst this muddle you try to have an original thought, and you try to say it in a way that cuts through the noise and strikes a nerve or a cord or a heart. But how can you be original if change has stopped? The same walking route, the same birds, the same graphs. And how could anyone care about what you have to say when you don’t even care yourself?
Day 17- Sabbatical
My brother cleaned his golf clubs today, which, despite growing up in a family where the practice of golf and the practice of religion were basically moral equivalents, I have never seen anyone do before.
Everyone’s being productive, ‘investing’ in themselves. I’m on the bandwagon too, but the thing is, at some point I want a return on that investment. Thumping through Duolingo’s brainless tests, learning to have a conversation like a super-computer in a social chess match is all well and good, but I would also like to use my new knowledge to ask the friendly locals ‘Where is the library?’ or, if I really wanted to light a fire in their bellies, tell them ‘I have 23 cats, she has 32.’
All these plans require a future. Unfortunately, the future isn’t anywhere to be seen. The future has taken a break — a fucking sabbatical. And meanwhile the present is lounging out like one of those annoying tourists who get up early so they can hog a sun chair all day, and you know half the reason the smug bastard does it is so he can lord it over you when he walks away, but leaves his towel to mark his territory.
People are out with their dogs too. The dogs don’t know what’s hit them, being forced to collect the same stick a thousand times. It’s Probably the first time in human history that a dog’s capacity for playing fetch has been eclipsed by its owner’s.
Day 18 –Pressure
Pressure builds quietly. Small frustrations pent up, unreleased by the pressure valves of distraction and normal life. Strategies and discipline start to crumble under the strain and I find myself starting to wander aimlessly in my house and my mind, searching for anything.
I walked down to High Rock, where we used to jump into the sea, if the tide was in and it was warm enough.
Cold grey sky sunk into cold grey sea. Wind squalled and fussed and scoured for crevices and gaps. A fisherman’s day.
The sea was mean. It searched like a feral preditor, pounding itself harder and harder against the rocks below and sent its spray high and around me, as if trying to lay a trap. Seaweed below flung and sprawled under the violent advances and then hung onto the rocks for life as the wave receded like some underworld ghoul slewing itself back into its cold realm.
Day 19-Time
Somehow there’s still not enough time. Even when you’re bored and there’s too much, you can’t save it or store it. Time doesn’t spoil, but it doesn’t keep either. And it won’t stay. Not this time, not on my time, even though there’s never been a better time.
It’s about time we gave sometime to the thought that time wouldn’t exist if we didn’t spend time thinking about it.
I have time; had time. I had a whole day and now I’m up late, running out of time, writing, borrowing time from the next day. You can borrow it. But it’s expensive and you never get it back.
Time tocks, like a cricket ticks. But it never stops. Where does it go? All in good time, your best time, record time, one day we’ll know, but that’ll be after my time.
Where did the day go? Work and lunch and dinner and suddenly it’s time for bed and I lost time somewhere between the cushions of friends and life. It’s only a matter of time before I find it again. But finding where the time to write is kept can be harder to find. I’ll look harder next time.
Day 20- After
When people have no jobs, they march. When they have no food, they riot. When they have no hope, they revolt. History teaches this. When people are confused, they look for simple answers. When they are afraid they look to strong leaders. The last decade taught this.
The current crisis is so immediately dangerous, we have no space for what comes after. But the world has never been changed so profoundly so universally so quickly. The consequences are beyond the guess of one person or control of one nation.
Millions have lost their jobs, and, will in turn, cause millions more to lose theirs. Countries have shut in a manner not seen even in times of war. New York is contemplating digging mass graves in its parks. A world leader has a 49% chance of surviving.
It’s impossible for the world to return to how it was.
Like a stopped firehose with the pump still on, the world is entangled and caught and under unprecedented pressure. When that eventually does get released, the hose will uncoil fast, unpredictably and — probably — violently. It will spark reactions and counter-reactions, concentric circles rebounding waves of change that will demand new ideas, new systems, new leaders and a lot of luck if we are going to avoid the kind of calamitous consequences the last century saw after its great upheavals.
We’re often disappointed at leaders’ failure to deliver promised change. But staring down this barrel, I’m beginning to understand why they’re so careful.
Day 21- Surprise
People are beginning to talk about after and what they’ll do when it’s all over. Wuhan finally opened up again yesterday, or was it the day before? It’s hard to keep days separate in your mind, they all look so similar. Maybe the footage of people, shyly stepping outside after so long is changing the mood. It seems so long ago since we chuckled at video the guy who ran a marathon in his room, or remarked at the power of the communist party and how the Chinese were such a disciplined nation. That couldn’t happen here.
We’ve surprised ourselves, I think. The instinct for self-preservation transcends political systems, but no one could have known how calm the world would become. It would be absurd to complain, but it’s still surprising that nobody does, though most of us would freely admit that, at times it does get hard. People are above all concerned, interested, and often quiet. Nobody is panicking. It seems that we, like the societies and people you read about who met great difficulty with a determined practicality, have also the remarkable capacity to transpose extraordinary circumstances into a new kind of normality. It doesn’t feel particularly astonishing, there’s not much else we can do — but they would have probably said the same.
Day 22-Paris
Je sais pas ce que je dois dire, ce que je peux dire. Il n’y a rien qui change alors que tout change. Il n’y a rien que je puisse faire alors que je dois quand même essayer. Je suis fatigué alors que je n’ai pas fait grand chose. Je suis perdu alors que je sais où je suis.
Est-ce qu’on est tous comme ça? À la fois sombre, à la fois content, à la fois inconscient. Toute la longueur de ta vie en un seul moment.
Ce moment là, maintenant : le printemps, quand il commence à faire beau, des gens au bord de la Seine avec leur vin et leurs baguettes, comme des années précédentes, et les années avant ça. Et la lumière, d’une certaine manière différente à Paris, plus brillante, plus profonde ; des couleurs plus douces qu’ailleurs.
Qu’est-ce que c’est cette langue qui n’est pas la mienne. Qui ne sera jamais la mienne, et sur laquelle j’ai passé tant de temps et avec laquelle je n’arrive toujours pas à m’exprimer à ma manière.
Et comment est-il ce pays ? Ce beau pays avec sa culture et son histoire et son architecture. Ce beau pays qui m’a adopté, ou peut-être m’a toléré. Ce beau pays avec son peuple, aussi différent que le mien et aussi différent qu’on le pense.
Mais aujourd’hui je ne suis pas là. Aujourd’hui je suis loin de ma vie et de moi-même. Je suis protégé, je suis en sécurité, mais je ne suis pas à Paris.
Day 23-Fighting
New York is burying people in mass graves. In all the films I’ve watched and all the TV I’ve seen, there have never been mass graves in New York city.
Irish ICU beds are almost full. US Federal agencies are confiscating new protective gear and hoarding the last of their reserve supply. Japan has declared a state of emergency. In the UK almost a thousand died, its deadliest day ever. France lost more. Africa and the developing world’s long lagging case numbers are beginning to rise insidiously. Yemen just recorded its first case — half of its hospitals have been destroyed by civil war. The numbers rise so fast, they change from one news article to another. Local and national governments flounder in a desperate scramble to find the materials their medical staff need to stay safe. In total, 100,000 are dead.
But even as the system seems to be breaching, where things are held together by nothing more than a tattered mask, the news is changing. Hospital admissions are slowing in New York. Spain and Italy have broken the back of this thing and are now fighting to push it back. Leaders there are again talking about the future. China remains stable and the slow bulky weight of the world’s tech giants has shifted to lean against crumbling health systems and bureaucracies, providing desperately needed capabilities to track and trace new infections.
The world is fighting back.
Day 24-Dogs
Jesus I’d love a dog.
A big, busy one. And a sleepy one. A dog who’d just as easily lie on his side doze in the sun all afternoon — his tongue out and his chest panting impossibly fast for something that is asleep — as bound alongside you as you run, his tail wagging so ferociously daffodils recoil for fear of being beheaded.
I’d love a dog who didn’t read the news and who didn’t know why we’re all suddenly around all the time, and who didn’t even realise it, but who’s happy to have all this new company. I’d love if he was here now, snuggled beside me, not paying one bit of interest to what I’m writing, but you could tell that he’s happy as long as I’m happy.
Day 25- Individuals
How do we go back to normal after all this? What does that look like? On the one hand, you have all these macro changes and challenges, like the role of technology, how work will change or the universal battle for economic survival.
But while you have all this coming down the line, and you have, today, all the great churning rush of hospital admissions and the scramble for beds and machines and all the chaos you imagine when you think of what’s going on in the otherwise Great Silent Outside, while all that’s going on, you have the Small Quiet Inside — the micro changes. And while history hints at what might happen at the grand level, there’s nothing to clue us into what kinds of changes might be happening at an individual level.
How many new resolutions are being made? Many will be broken, or lost or forgotten, but some will surely survive the returning world. How many new skills are being learnt, and favourite books being read, and badly needed confrontations with the self being faced? How many collective kilometres have been jogged, how many poems written, decisions taken, ideas found?
How many of us have, at one time or another, not guiltily thought we’d like this to go on a little longer? That suddenly we have a lot to do, now we’ve got the time, and we’re scared that when the noise and pollution and speed comes back, we’ll forget how important those things now seem.
Day 26- Zoom
-Can you hear…? Oh, you’re there.
-Hey.
-Hang on, I’ll grab earphones.
-Better? How are things?
-No, hold on a sec- I can’t hear you.
-No. No, you’re on mute.
-Spacebar.
-There you go.
-Yeah, can hear you now. Did you turn off the video?
-How are you?
-Me too.
-Managing.
-Can you turn your screen actually? Can’t see you…
-No, the light…
-Behind… yeah, left.
-Perfect.
-Anyway yeah, no all good. Any news?
-No, me neither.
-How long are they saying?
-Same here. It’s tough.
-Did you see the video from New York?
-A guy at the top of his building, 7am.
-Yeah, the shift change.
-He does a kind of panorama, and you all hear is this cacophony of cheering and pots and clapping and pans and whistling.
-Here I’ll send you the link.
-Can you hear me?
-Sorry, it’s telling me my ‘internet connection is unstable’.
-Have it?
- Scroll down, there’s a comment from a doctor, who hears it every morning. Almost cries.
- Yeah…
- Goosebumps.
-D’you know many who’ve had it?
-One or two; I’ve heard it’s rough.
-No, thankfully not… Not yet anyway.
-Sorry, you froze there; only heard the first part.
-Yeah, I’m going somewhere too.
-Hello? Hulllooo?
- …
-Ah fuck it — WhatsApp?
Day 27- Deals
There are different kinds of deals, and more to the point, different sizes of deals. Right now, we’re in the middle of a Big Deal, nobody’s disputing that. But the tricky question is, how ‘big’ of a Big Deal is it?
In the UK, around this time of year, there are usually around 10 thousand deaths per week. Last week it was 16,000. Six thousand extra people, extra individuals dying in just one country. You see the red line on the graph, it cuts up vertically, tearing at the normality plotted alongside it. The red line howls at you that it is a Big Deal.
But so does the other line: Over three weeks 17 million people, individuals lost their job in the US. And that line also cuts up vertically and it also is in just one country. It too is a Big Deal.
How do you balance lives against livelihoods? Even the accountant’s ledger, usually so safely obtuse from the grub and grime of the world can’t evade the macabre logic: livelihoods debited, life credited.
This is the deal we will very soon have to make as societies. A devil’s deal. A Big Deal.
Day 28- Adventure
In parks, as in life, most people it seems stick to the path.
I’m no great explorer, but I’ve always chafed up against ‘the path’. Recently this wanderlust has brought me into the wild grass, down the far side of the hill, a short walk from where I’m living. It’s not far from the walkers and joggers, but if you angle yourself right you can snug away from the wind and doze in the sun like an old vagrant.
I’ve been coming once or twice a week. For peace or thinking or survival; to get away, probably, from the false salvation of my phone’s screen. It’s beautiful here. Not the obliged beauty of a Sunday hike, or the greedy beauty of sensuality, but the remarkable beauty of simple things. Beyond the tall grass are small flowers, wild and deeply yellow, and below the hill rolls down greenly into a bright sea. The scene is that of a 12-year old’s painting, bright demarcations of colour without shading or subtlety.
You can see Ireland’s Eye, lying in profile like a rocky old dog in the water off Howth. By its tail is the round Martello Tower, built by the English against French invasion. Swing a wide arc and Lambay Island floats low and hazily into view. It’s privately owned and I’ve never been on it, but a large, squat white building faces back to the coast and the rumour a few years ago was there were exotic animals roaming wild on it.
Day 29 -Prison
My friend used to say he’d love to go to prison. A nice prison, I assume. But a prison nonetheless. And not for anything serious, maybe a six-monther for ‘a knowing disregard for bankruptcy law’ or the sustained criminal theft of a neighbour’s Wi-Fi.
Imagine all the reading you’d get done, he said. It was probably me who imagined how built you’d get, doing reverse pullups (or whatever) from some generic prison ceiling bar. But we both agreed how freeing it would be and how productive and spiritually fulfilling (though presumably less physically filling, if movies offer guidance to prison food).
But the thing is, we were free. We could have read those books or gone to the gym. We could’ve ate in restaurants and done a thousand other things and gone a thousand other places. Instead we went to the park, got coffees and later drank pints in the pub. Like we did the last time we were there.
How is it that freedom only really feels free when you imagine it? When you don’t have it? All of us have our own resolutions and plans that seem, from here, easy. But when it comes to it, the delirious liberation of renting a car and just driving for a weekend seems less obvious. Suddenly it seems expensive, and too time consuming. Tiring.
But now we’ve been to prison, so our job is to protect that imagined feeling from the squashing and narrowing noise of real life. And drive.
Day 30- Learning
Someone the other day asked me what I’d learned from all this. I didn’t know we were supposed to be learning, I thought we were apocalypting, but I’ve been writing for a month now, so in the absence of anything more creative, this seems like a good topic.
I’ve learned there are a lot more birds than I ever realised, both in number and variety — and song. I’ve learned you can almost hear the sea from the house I grew up in, which is a genuine revelation. Less of a revelation is learning I am capable of understanding German grammar, which is unsurprising because, on reflection, my school teacher probably had a relationship with German that is roughly equivalent to what an Ikea assembling expert would have with an instruction manual.
And I’ve learned what logs are, and how to read a log scale, and why we use it on graphs. Admittedly for someone with a master’s degree in economics, it’s remarkable I didn’t know this before. Though I suspect at some point I did and just forgot, which I imagine will happen again, once this is all over.
I’ve learned fresh air automatically boosts my mood by at least two points. And that getting up at dawn is genuinely great, though even in isolation becoming unenduringly sleepy at 8pm eventually just becomes a pain in the ass. I’ve also learned there’s no way of telling people you’re doing it without sounding, a little bit like a wanker.
[Note to reader: This is the last daily post. Writing each day for 30 days has been a great challenge, but also an exhausting one. Over the coming days and weeks, I will continue making entries into this log, but on a less intensive timeline. Thank you for reading.]
