Thursday 16th April 2020
Broke the record for staying in bed doing sweet FA, watching TV and the internet mindlessly. It’s sickly. Hopefully the lowpoint of my daily lockdown experience, and the only way being up from now on.
I realise increasingly I’m gonna have to ditch the internatz sessions if I’m gonna use this time to write a book, as well as the blog. Less bullshit, more conviction. Less keyboard warrior, more slow time scribe. I’ll need to remember people pay money to isolate themselves and write, they go on retreats, become fire-watchers or hermits and wall themselves in at great expense.
I think the realisation has come from watching Kong Skull Island play luridly in the background while I put together a whole bunch of useless map comparisons (who knew Ecuador was bigger than the UK?) for a random architecture forum. Ah, yes, life, the one I forgot to get even in lockdown. And through it all, comparing Iceland to England, Bangladesh to Russia the surreal series of background explosions, choppers, and a big ape stomping on people.
This is my life at the mo:
Seriously, what a shit film. Cartoonish, absurd, and quite jarringly gory. And don’t even get me started on John C. Reilly’s character, the only local with an actual role or speaking part -endemic to every exotic King Kong/ Tarzan/ Jungle Cruise/ Anaconda film where leaving the West to get sticky equates to Here Be Dragons. He achieves characterisation by dint of being the only American (his Japanese comrade conveniently dying beforehand, the tribe conveniently mute and er, unsmiling) -and thus obnoxiously endearing at every interaction with the camera, drop a kitten and he’d probably be there to catch it with his face. Gurning between your legs.
I think though what irked me, and kept me up at night was the pulping of humans by giant feet, fist and teeth, which was a tad too inhumane despite the dodgy CGI. Much more palatable when you see them scream a bit and get chased before being bitten, rather than casually obliterated. Human flies.
Tom Giggleston does however redeem himself as having the world’s most velvety man-voice throughout. He should be doing Sheba catfood ads, or Milk Tray, that perfect tine of Englishness without being too posh, even when he is pretending to be a gun-for-hire. The kind that isn’t creepy, no, having just stepped out of Claridges, possibly a Bentley, with a squirming binbag on the backseat.
The rest of the day’s viewing was Netflix’s The Windsors series, that also droned in the background, and looks like the setup for The Crown, who just cobbled their storylines off this research, including never-before-seen footage and letters from the Royal Collection archives. Quite a segway, King Kong > Queenie.
The weekly shop had to happen, the fridge looking like a wasteland of leftover veg, a cleaved carrot, a half swede, some mushrooms, none of which I have any interest in getting to know. In Lidl I treated myself to a German bartkartoffeln (read: fried potatoes with lardons) as my first semblance of civilisation. There was no queue for the supermarket, despite being quite crowded inside, and hardly anyone wore a mask, which we’d happened to have forgotten also. I know some of my East Asian friends only go out with shades, hat and mask to avoid recognition, like they’re Donatella stealing through Primark, or Gary Glitter in a playground. But you’d do that too if you were EA and opened up any random comments on say Asian pet food supplies to the local weather, and see the hate. Got stared at a few times on the street and in the shops, one with a real look of fuck you, so had to give it back. It’s hard to work out sometimes if they wanna fuck you or fuck you.
For all the hate -and yes, let’s pretend China can be vilified for that local cover-up at the start, and not knowing what they were dealing with – it’s still a month’s lag that many Western nations had, but squandered. CNN published a story today on it, on why Europe/ NA delayed their response despite knowing it was human-to-human and highly contagious by then (not to mention having seen all the Asian nations enforce lockdowns), with the US and UK particularly late to the table:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/16/asia/asia-europe-us-coronavirus-delay-intl-hnk/index.html
For perspective, Wuhan took 2 days to go lockdown from human-to-human confirmation (or 8 days from the first suspicions raised on Jan 14th), while NYC took 22 days from its first (and even with the benefit of watching a similar-sized city in China go through the rigmarole a month beforehand). Animal>human infections never result in lockdowns or even quarantines, as seen in the periodic outbreaks of Bird Flu round the world, or the 3-4 new zoonotic viruses we annually find. China’s mistake was believing it the same, with the local police covering up news for a week before the State warned those doing so ‘would be nailed to the pillar of shame for all of history’.
The US squandered a month it could have prepared/ prevented, and was still repatriating 40,000 Americans from China after the travel ban.
Meanwhile, the UK waited a full 2 months after the first case to enforce social distancing, business closures and stay-at-home. It may be gauche but I’ll say it now: surely there’s blame in that too? If one’s to point the finger at China, all sweaty and fat-handed, weaving from side to side, for dropping the bowl, it kinda figures us doing the same makes us as culpable, especially granted the foresight.
Anyhoo I digress, gotta stop bitching. On the forum that I’m addicted to occasionally browsing, there’s a 587-and-counting page update on C-19, frothing for blood at every turn -and that’s a skyscraper architecture forum. For the Good News To Restore Your Faith In Humanity post asking for admissions, there are just the two pages, and it’s been like that all year. Good news just doesn’t sell (you only need to ask those Jehovah’s Witnesses bored AF by their bookstalls). Albeit the one about the kindly centenarian who’s doing a garden marathon in his zimmer, while raising £14 million for the NHS has just been added. I raise a glass, with dry hands.
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