Wednesday 1st April 2020

 

So A just told me about the coming powercuts next week from 11pm to 5am each night, the planned closure of the BBC and talks about the Internet going down to stop the spread of misinformation, and the fact its workforce is not an essential service. That we’d better start downloading films to watch. I was a bit nonplussed but not that bothered either (have plenty of books) but posited it could be the period when the shit hits the fan, and a crackdown on reportage would mitigate public unrest.

I was just about to fact-check it for the blog, sending feelers out already via WhatsApp, when it hit me what date it is today. The fucker.

Yep, hook, line and sinker.

I had to squash him a bit after that.

Dark humour, indeed. Some K-pop star (Jaejoong, from Girls L-Owed or ABCDEFG or sommat) got into a lot of trouble along the same lines, drawing quite some telling off from his 1.9 million followers after claiming to be stricken in hospital, from flagrantly ignoring the regulations.  He later claimed it was to draw attention to the rules we should all follow. Now, it’s one thing to be told off by strangers, another by someone who admires you, the scales fallen from their lurid doll-like gaze and replaced with character assassination. And another thing entirely to have it happen again and again and again, for hours of scrolling. Yes, the public spotlight/ social media is brutal, soul wrecking, personality changing, dark. And to lay it even thicker, now the Korean Center for Disease Control (aka KGB) is looking into punishing him. With a name like that you know they’re going to be very dour and formal about all this, like being taken to the principal’s office after filming him on the bog.

Oh you.

In more sobering news, 563 people died yesterday in the UK, our death toll starting to approach Italian levels -that dark marker all countries are now measuring themselves against, having taken the baton from China. Spain, where over 900 died, is likely to grab it tomorrow, or perhaps the US. For the UK, infections are now plateauing, with a good response thanks to enforced social distancing and lockdown, but the deaths will still climb, whereby the fatality bulge follows a week later. The finishing touches are being put to the vast new, 4,000 bed Nightingale Hospital, appropriated from the ExCel exhibition centre in East London, and built with army labour.

My German friend linked me to a Swiss conspiracy theory she’s heard, about the fact C-19 is not more deadly than a seasonal flu, just more contagious, but governments are taking the chance to redact our civil rights -and that they won’t be withdrawn after (all eyes on Hungary when this is over). I am however at the stage where whatever happens happens, dangerously apolitical at a time when we might need to be. One day at a time.

I’m now with a new routine. Wake, internet, br/lunch, siesta. Read, internet, shower, Netflix, exercise, write, dinner+film. Sleep. I feel a giant fucking slug. The randomisation of a siesta offsets the afternoon shower, a battle between structure and sloth. Today’s national toll is keeping me indoors, for a time I’d envisaged as a critical infection period. The sun came out today, we planned for a bike ride until I heard the stats, and the sun had gone by then too.

But it did light up this motherclucking feather. How beautiful, this little thing.

Tonight was Terminator night, the latest edition with Arnie (tick), Linda Hamilton (tick) and everyone else new, with a terrific role for Mackenzie Davis, a semi-termie, who sadly won’t be reprising her role (no spoilers!) due to an er, plot technicality. And ba-limey, does it drag out the nonstop action, plane, trains and automobiles, though Mexico City (and country) still suffers that malignant orange filter and a strong aversion to the swanky city centre, and its skyscrapers, Old City and elegant street cafes. No, what we want is dust. Dust! People smuggling (tick), dodgy cops (tick), desert scrub (tick), guns (tick), legions of the poor/ refugees (tick), oh and a US car plant replacing Mexican labour with robots (tick). But easily backgrounded in the roller coaster ride, and a welcome lesson in losing yourself, even if it is to an oily, shapeshifting robot throwing javelins at your face.

Dust!

And after all that gunsmoke pizzazz, silence. Like a sudden cliff; I even felt bad to end the credits with the score meandering comfortably to a stop. When night falls, the city is a tomb. There is no longer that murmur of traffic, the endless shunting of trains in the station opposite, the chatter on the street from the local bars, the clip-clopping of the late night commuters, or the planes cruising ever skyward. We look out the window at the lights, and it is in every sense of the word, a deafening silence (I’m not gonna say Dark Fate, but greyish trajectory maybe). I worry about the pigeons, who’s gonna feed them? Are they dying en masse, without our trash, crumbs and vomit to peck at? Maybe we should empty a few bins liberally over the streets, also for the foxes, which I used to see every time I stumbled home late.

Netflix’s World At Night nature series, narrated by an insanely annoying woman oozing righteousness with every cadence, had an episode on the city today. Notably a section on leopards, the night stalkers of Mumbai, which now happens to be the world’s largest concentration of big cats anywhere in the world, counting no less than 50 in town, along with the 20 million humans. Chillingly the night cameras track them in the shadows, sometimes as they brazenly follow people around, though they’re really out for piglets. Other CCTV footage shows them creeping onto verandahs, balconies and through front doors to grab dogs, of which 1,000 are killed annually. Now that is some other level of exotic I need -other segments showing the elephants in ‘southern Africa’ (they didn’t even bother with the country, as hey, what would that matter) rumbling through a darkened town centre to stunned pedestrians and window peeping kids. Or in Halloween, where huge moose (meese?) invade Alaskan streets that one night to get at the jack o lanterns, before melting away again for the year.

Then to Singapore, which is the vision of the future, and where animals now frolic openly as part of city life, where even otters have returned to the busy city waterways, sharing pavements with joggers every morning. I look out, and it is another world, another time. And all I see are streetlights with everyone home. Dang, I wish there was a black bear rooting through Recycling; I’d maybe settle for a ferret under some leaves. Or a rat holding a condom. Reality is all a bit too mundane, even in these most surreal of times, and I feel myself too demanding. That I am healthy touch, touch, TOUCH wood.  Though perhaps a fool to want otherwise.

To finish off, the Mexico City we don’t get to see. We really should give the place her moment.

 

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