J got sick, feeling back pain and a headache. Then he woke up drowsy as if a hangover, enough to have to get me to do his shopping. No runny nose, cough or fever, taste and smell fine. But still.
So we had to have that conversation, something we should have had way before any of this, months ago: what to do if anyone gets it.
Standing 2 metres away from someone at all times is pretty awkward in a flat like this. J cocooned on the sofa in blankets while we stood in the opposite corner by the door, I might as well have gotten a stick to prod him with, maybe a crucifix.
So we’ll isolate him in his room, and do all the feeding and tending, though J’s idea is to go his partner’s place and sit it out there. I advised against, considering there are other flatmates on that side to consider, who may get infected.
We then awkwardly retired to our bedrooms for the early night; the living room feels a bit in bad taste now.
Next morning we checked up and no sweats, chills and headache had gone, no blue ‘Covid toes’ and the pain had moved down his back. We think it’s been back pain all along.
Lockdown is easing now across the country, people now allowed out for as long as they can exercise, and commuting set for tomorrow. Life is starting again, but it remains to be seen how fast and how large a second wave will be. In Seoul, one super-carrier out at the newly reopened nightlife, visited 5 clubs in one night, infecting dozens. They’re now trying to trace nearly 2,000 other punters.
Greece, a vision of how to do things, with 2,700 cases and only 150 deaths, will reopen for tourism in June. Brits will be allowed by our government to partake.
In contrast NYC is still hammered down, whose death toll is now past 26,000. By contrast San Francisco, who locked down on the same timescale, has only 35 deaths. That’s no mistake, not even a week’s difference, and change in population density take into account such a discrepancy. They believe more strongly it’s due to different strains, NYC infected from a more lethal, contagious mutation from Europe, California a milder one from Asia.
The bungled efforts of the government has doomed much of the nation -epidemiologists say 60% of the 83,000 deaths (about 50,000) so far could have been avoided if they’d locked down a week earlier – a clock has been set in Times Square advertising the fact. The BBC has looked in-depth at the response, comparing it with other nations, and finding that Democrat governors locked down on average after 2.5 days when deaths hit 1 per million. Republicans locked down on average 13.5 days – nearly two weeks later.
New York is currently the world’s deadliest place per capita. The global Top 20 at the mo:
New York – 1,397 San Marino – 1,208 New Jersey – 1,074 Connecticut – 853 Belgium – 756 Massachusetts – 746 Andorra – 621 Spain – 576 Italy – 511 Louisiana – 505 UK – 482 District of Columbia – 476 Michigan – 468 Rhode Island – 419 France – 414 Sweden – 328 Netherlands – 322 Pennsylvania – 306 Republic of Ireland – 301 Maryland – 290
The excess deaths in New York are six times the average, and very likely c-19 is being undercounted. The same for the UK, which if connected would almost double our current total of 33,000 dead. Both New York State and the UK are now seeing a decrease in cases and deaths, but in Italy they are rising again. Russia now has the second highest amount of global cases.
In other words, we’re knowingly opening up again, knowingly killing. Like at the start of the pandemic, we can see it coming, we can work it out personally. But we’re trusting our government to take action despite.
Back in the day, the city calling. Offering up its coolness and grit, but a clean grit. That something in the air where anything’s possible.
And before all that pesky adulthood and reality, responsibilities, history.
Sun’s out, guns out.
Parklife.
Clapham Common busy as always, the temperature hitting 24C at about 3pm. All along the way people strolling, queueing outside the few shops. The usual keep-fitters skipping and cartwheeling but vastly outnumbered by sunbathers and picnics.
PC Plod nowhere to be seen, but the signs everywhere, littering the flat surfaces.
A big no-no the outdoor gyms, now unsightly.
Looking like exotic, unreachable zoo animals, or edgy art.
The bandstand also (apparently the biggest in London), uglified as if to barricade there being nothing to see, nope. Rightly so, it’d be a prime vector from the sun.
The park caff fully open, and suspiciously looking to provide picnic fodder. A queue in and out, with almost a carnival atmosphere surrounding it.
Everywhere else nature returning. Although the parks now more used, quietude still to be found.
Once upon a time a ranger house, or public loos disguised as a wee cottage, pun intended. Looks like the mfing future.
The surrounding streets their own bubble in a quiet decay.
For so many a meaning lost without selling, buying, shopping.
I’ve no idea if that circus ever got there.
The ice cream shop does a roaring trade, and the closest thing to a break we can get. The queue snakes round the corner and down the street, with each punter looking a little embarrassed.
Today’s meant to be the first day of summer, traditionally the windows open, the radios blaring, the lawns littered with bodies and streets drunken. Instead a furtive atmosphere like a held note -fun is not to be had but if so, surreptitiously.
Tomorrow will be Saturday, and even hotter. It’ll happen then.
Homelessness charity says it has ‘never witnessed a more distressing situation’ than during coronavirus crisis
Trafalgar Square at night is silent and almost empty, the usual crowds of noisy tourists visiting London replaced by clusters of homeless people, who wait on the steps of the National Gallery for food to be distributed. But these are not all long-term rough sleepers: central London is seeing a surge of newly unemployed restaurant and pub workers forced to sleep on the streets because they can no longer afford to pay rent.
Rough sleepers like Martin, a recently-sacked chef from Poland, are finding life under lockdown increasingly difficult and dangerous. “London has become so strange and sad. The only people who are out look like they are looking for drugs. There are a lot of crazy people with knives,” he said.
The government says it has housed 90% of those who were sleeping rough nationally by paying for hotel rooms, in an unprecedented drive over the past month to stop the spread of Covid-19, with 5,400 housed including 1,800 in 10 hotels across London. But in the capital, hundreds of tents and cardboard box encampments remain and conditions are getting much harsher for those still – or newly – on the streets.
The city’s day centres have been closed to prevent the transmission of the virus, leaving the homeless with no place to shower or wash their clothes, no toilets and nowhere to access regular food supplies.
The disappearance of commuters means that no one is offering money to the destitute, at a time when most soup kitchens and food banks are not operating, and when the closure of cafes has meant the homeless no longer receive unsold sandwiches at the end of the day. It has been left to a few small groups of volunteers to provide thousands of meals a week.
Although a minority of those who remain sleeping rough are there by choice and have rejected offers of hotel rooms, most of the newly homeless are still hoping for help, and feeling very vulnerable in the deserted backstreets of central London at night.
Martin, 27, worked his way up through London’s kitchens, starting as a porter when he arrived in the UK eight years ago to his most recent job as chef de partie at a fashionable restaurant in east London. He was abruptly sacked shortly before the lockdown began, and had to leave the room he was renting because he had no savings. He has been sleeping on a bit of pavement near Charing Cross station for six weeks. Advertisement
He said he has been told five or six times by outreach workers that someone will call him to organise a room in a hotel. “I waited for a call. I’m still waiting. Maybe the hotels are full,” he said. In the last couple of days his phone battery has in any case gone dead, and with cafes closed there is nowhere to charge it. He finds sleeping on the street unsafe and alarming.
Brian Whiting, a volunteer with the organisation Under One Sky, which started nightly food deliveries at the end of March, said he was disturbed by the number of newly homeless ex-hotel and restaurant staff. “One of the really distressing new things is the hospitality homeless. We’re seeing so many people who were working in kitchens, hotels and pubs until a few weeks ago. They’re so obviously ill-equipped to be out there. The long-term rough sleepers know how it works, but for them it’s very new. They look shell-shocked.”
“I’m still hanging on to my sanity, just,” a man from South Africa, who had been working for five years as a waiter in London, said from the office doorstep where he has slept for the past three weeks since losing his job. He laughed when the volunteer asked him if he was eligible for furlough payments, and said the job came through an agency, and there had been no mention of financial support. Most of those pushed into homelessness had insecure jobs and precarious living arrangements, and no ability to navigate the benefits system or wait for payments.
On the other side of the street, Whiting was dismayed to see Katarina, 34, a recently-sacked waitress from Italy, preparing to sleep again in the doorway of a cocktail bar. “It’s nice to see you, but I wish you weren’t here,” he said, giving food to her. He was concerned about her deteriorating mental health, and suspected she had started taking class A drugs. He has reported her to Streetlink, a charity that connects rough sleepers to support services, a few times, but she remains in the same spot. “She wants to be helped. I don’t understand why she hasn’t been picked up.” https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Aside from the practical difficulties, everyone remarks on the disconcerting silence of the capital.
All the normal sounds and smells are absent – the salty, greasy smells from fast food restaurants, the wafts of coffee from snack bars, stale beer odours rising up from sticky pavements, the stench of rotting food seeping out from kitchen dustbins, even the trails of diesel fumes, have all gone.
There is no noise of people laughing or shouting, no one bellowing into their mobile phones, no sounds of plates clattering at pavement cafes. Bins are not overflowing with coffee cups and discarded newspapers. Even the pigeons seem hungrier, rushing to peck at food parcels placed on the pavement by volunteers, who are instructed to not to hand them to people in order to maintain a 2-metre distance. A woman picking up cigarette butts has to search harder to find anything worth collecting.
Amrit Maan, the owner of the Punjab restaurant in Covent Garden, who has kept his kitchens open to cook around 2,500 meals a week for Under One Sky and a Sikh charity, Nishkam Swat, to distribute, said he was troubled by the emptiness. “You can hear the wind rushing through the streets. It feels so eerie, like waking up in a post-apocalypse movie.”
A welder from Poland, sleeping in the park behind the Savoy, declined food but wanted information about where he could wash; he said he had been unable to have a shower for the past five weeks since arriving in London speculatively to look for work. Whiting left food for a man asleep beneath the stucco columns of the Lyceum Theatre, where the Lion King is no longer showing. “There’s some human excrement. I’m sorry to point it out, but it’s inevitable. Everything is closed,” he said. Advertisement
Alexander, from Romania, who worked as a cleaner and caretaker at a pizza chain until he says he was sacked just before the lockdown, was more experienced at sleeping rough in central London, since he was already unable to afford to rent a room on his minimum wage earnings even when he was in work, and has been living on the streets near Leicester Square for 18 months.
But finding enough cardboard to build himself a sheltered space to sleep in has become much more problematic since all the businesses closed down and stopped throwing away packaging. He spent the past few weeks recording thousands of videos on his phone of deserted London streets, from different vantage points, and posting them on Twitter – providing fascinating pavement-level footage of a city in lockdown – until his phone was stolen.
Adrian Potcki, 24, from Poland, also had his phone stolen while he slept in a restaurant doorway, in St Martin’s Lane, next to the now-empty Coliseum. He was working as a night cleaner for a bank, an agency job, before being sacked when lockdown was announced. He found himself unable to continue paying for his room in a flatshare in north London. “I think the bank closed, and didn’t need cleaning,” he said, but he is unsure, because the agency simply told him the job was over. “I couldn’t pay the rent for my room. I tried to ask the landlord to give me time, but I couldn’t work it out with him,” he said. He was finding his first exposure to homelessness very difficult. “It’s a really tough time. I don’t feel safe.”
He, like most of the other recently-unemployed new rough sleepers interviewed, said he did not want to have his photograph taken. “I don’t want to become a famous person because I’m homeless. This is something I would like to forget,” he said.
Previously Under One Sky has only organised food handouts in the winter, but began providing food for rough sleepers when it became clear that lockdown was causing unprecedented difficulties. “In the eight years since we have been serving this community, we have never witnessed a more distressing situation for those sleeping rough in London than the one unfolding right now,” said Mikkel Juel Iversen, who set up the organisation in 2012.
“Two days after lockdown we went out on the streets to see what the situation was like and we met people who hadn’t eaten for days. There are now large parts of central London where the only people you see are homeless people, drug dealers and police. There is a growing sense of desperation. We have been ramping up numbers every week.”
The newly-homeless also include people like Robin Clark, released last week from prison, and still trying to get his life together. “I can look after myself but it is hard with no showers or toilets.” Lalji Kanbi has been homeless for a while, and is hoping for a hotel room. “The hotels – it’s like a lottery, if you win, you win. I’ve given them my details twice.”
Within the rough sleeper populations there are hierarchies of destitution. There are those like Colin Reynolds, 47, currently sleeping in a tent near the Thames because he was unable to live with his parents during lockdown, who feel they are just about coping. But there are others who look close to death.
About 10 people are sheltering beneath a scaffolded shop front near Charing Cross station (where the underpasses that used to shelter dozens of homeless have been closed off); volunteers said most had long-term drug and alcohol problems. One man was lying in a foetal position on the cold pavement, passed out, watched over by his girlfriend. No one here was hungry, but they accepted water and biscuits for their dogs.
Tom Copley, London’s deputy mayor for housing, acknowledged that there was more work to be done, noting that a count last week had registered 498 people still sleeping rough. “It’s possible that the actual number will be larger, but we’ve been working at this as fast as we can; we’re trying to get more people in every day.” But he remained optimistic that the government drive to get most rough sleepers in for the duration of the lockdown could have positive long-term consequences. “We could transform the way we deal with rough sleeping and homelessness to make sure that the issue is dealt with in the long term,” he said.
There is caution from others involved in the process. “There is no clear exit strategy from central government. Some councils are working to make sure that no one is returned to the streets, but that is very difficult to sustain unless there is a commitment to funding because the cost of that is so beyond what’s available from central government,” one official, working on the national drive to house rough sleepers centrally, said. Advertisement
Jason Moyer-Lee, the general secretary of the Independent Workers of Great Britain Union, which represents agency staff, said more needed to be done for people made homeless after being sacked. “Low-paid service sector jobs, with zero-hour contracts and agency workers, were extremely precarious before this situation, and the fact that, despite the government schemes, some people are being driven into homelessness demonstrates the inadequacy of these schemes. This needs to be sorted now.”
^This article that appeared yesterday needs to be heard. These people could be us, they are us.
A has been on bike rides past Trafalgar Square recently, and noted how there were quite some daytrippers seated on the steps, just watching the space. No police were moving them on, they appeared well-dressed, just like you and me. Now we realise who they were, the newly homeless.
If you’re looking for escape this, today, is not where to find it. For never was a story of more woe. Thus following, reality.
Another day another dollar. Scroll. Brush. Scroll. Sleep. Scrub. Lunch. Netflix. Scroll. Sleep. Film. Sleep.
A Friday so I treated myself to takeaway for lunch, which turned out to be the stodgiest fried calamari in the city, like chewing on bread crust. Our local really is the worst, but beggars can’t be reviewers. The night’s film was the other highlight, a tankard of cider to go with An American Werewolf in London, and a good catch up with J while A is getting ever more islanded, which he may be enjoying. It was Orthodox Easter recently, the equivalent to Greek Xmas (regardless if you’re religious or not) which he’s not celebrated, separated from family all these years. We’ll try and do something later maybe, though he’ll typically veto it.
The C-19 death toll in the UK hit 20,000, which is only counting those from hospitals. It’s significantly higher if they tally up those in care homes and residences, so we may be closer double that. This could yield the world’s highest deaths per capita, over current leader Belgium, who counts live fatalities and not just in healthcare. It all depends whether the UK extra deaths are at the 40% or 100% ends of hospital totals.
I’ve been increasingly worried about the ‘biblical famines’ the UN is warning may transpire within months. They will start in the world’s current war zones where infrastructure is broken and farming majorly disrupted by fighting. DPR Congo, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Niger. It’s also unlikely for people or countries to give aid, such is the situation in their own backyard. DPR Congo is a prime example of what a disruption of infrastructure results in. The Second Congo War ended in 2003, where fighting killed an estimated 20,000. However excess deaths continued well after taking 5.4 million by 2008, due to the complete collapse of food industries, healthcare and transportation networks.
Likewise the UN sanctions before the Gulf War against Iraq, that resulted in an extra million deaths (560,000 of them being children). They targetted the populace not the regime as hostage -banning food, water, medicines, medical equipment, water purifiers, even baby food and milk powder. And lasted for 12 years after the US and UK repeatedly blocked UN attempts to end them, plus three successive UN Generals resigning in protest. When Ambassador Madeleine Albright was told in interview that half a million children had died, she infamously said: “we think the price was worth it”.
But would that even be worthy of a headline in our lifestyles?
This scenario is even keeping me up at night, and becoming one of the things when waking. It’s not normal for me, and I doubt for anyone. When we hear of untold horror and misery abroad we may well shed a tear at the news report, given it’s sufficiently graphic enough. But no one really takes it home with them, into their daily thoughts and fears and dreams. The only time I’ve seen any kind of widely depressionable story has been for the death of a single person, Princess Diana. Forget the 250,000 killed in the 2004 tsunami, or the additional million in Iraq following invasion, it’s the death of a celeb people grew up with, who felt they personally knew that got people crying beyond the screentime. Witness footage of her funeral, as thousands of mourners spontaneously burst into tears as her cortège rolls by (one of them myself). It’s like something out of North Korea.
On that subject Kim Jong Un, rotund dictator of said country is currently MIA on the global stage, with rumours thick and fast that he may be dying after heart surgery. All eyes now on his sister who will likely take the reins if he expires. Now, I’m no fan of an autocratic regime that has in the past kidnapped random South Koreans, taken down passenger planes and operates internment camps, but the South Koreans are just as gung-ho, trigger-happy and belligerent. Just as liable to be the first to shell the opposite side, shoot over a prow, or hold mass army drills on the border, in a giant show of two fingers against the horizon.
The US is also increasingly seen as playing both sides off each other -the situation allows them to keep foreign bases on the peninsular and Japan, thus controlling the north Pacific and hemming in China. Notably George Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ speech even after NoKo had agreed to dismantle it’s nuclear capabilities, that subsequently made Kim restart them in defence, and defiance. Or the abrupt ending of the 2018 thaw (both sides had even competed as the same country in the Olympics) when the US held mass joint-training exercises, thus restarting the arms race.
South Korea is also quite propagandic and equally dogmatic. All the lurid tabloid tales -on the uncles being thrown to bloodthirsty hounds (in fact he was shot by firing squad, following an assassination attempt he’d commandeered) or execution of former girlfriends for prostitution (she turned up a year later as a newscaster), of the Pyongyang Metro being fake, and that everyone on the streets are actors (thousands of them) -are all sourced from the south, via media agencies citing ‘cross-border sources’.
In fact South Korea is studied by sociologists as a prime example of how propaganda is just as rampant in democracies, fueled by complicit media agencies as well as their avid audiences. One only has to look at the partisan politicking in the US (**cough Fox News /cough**), or the Rupert Murdoch/ AN owned press at large here (**Daily Mail, Sun**).
When Kim Jong-Il died NoKo released its usual dreary propaganda to the world, showcasing endless streams of people distraught at his death (the kind who’d throw themselves on the coffin as it gets lowered), of course the world took this as how very indoctrinated the North Koreans were. Then people started pointing out that in the background, no one was crying, only those in front facing the lens were suddenly found to be apoplectic with grief.
Thus SoKo subsequently followed up with lurid tales of everyone who didn’t cry getting 6 months free stay in a labour camp.
At the end of the day North Korea is a study on journalistic integrity and standards. Almost no stories coming from there can be fact-checked or corroborated… but neither can anyone call them out on it if they decide to go to print. Thus much of the world just ends up reporting it anyway, straight from South Korean tabloids, even if you’re a respected broadsheet. Which is telling -it fits with the narrative.
It’s also telling which papers are reporting the dictator’s death (Daily Express, Sun, NY Post), as rumour-milled via a Chinese social network, and which are waiting for official confirmation, or at least putting a question mark in the headline.
The fat twat.
And talking of convenience, where for example is the coverage or navel-gazing (surely one story?) for the current human tragedies of the US/UK-backed sanctions: Iran, Venezuela, and of course North Korea? Despite sitting on vast commodities or one of the leading science powers, they’ve been denied medical equipment and ICU’s they could otherwise have afforded easily. We even cover Iran building mass graves, and tut at their imagined cover up of figures, without nary a mention of our role in it. The latest humanitarian crisis on the now closed Colombian-Venezuelan border likewise ignored, as has been the US calls for the country to hold new elections (read: exit President Maduro) in order to allow the meds in, plus access to the world’s largest oil reserves. Sounds a lot like a ransom, and exploiting a tragedy to do so.
It appears this global crisis is only spewing division and geopolitical rivalry, as opposed to the Bennetton ad we all imagined a shared experience would engender, and cooperation between states. That democracy is really a veil over ignorance, selfishness and prejudice, if not a platform for it. Witness country after country stealing vital equipment before being sent off, or even en route, and ignoring all calls of aid from its neighbours. See the comments following any, ANY news story.
How depressing, but it had to catch up some time. The air weighs heavy so it’s time to take a walk, chew some cud and maybe take in an 80s film, back when it was all so much simpler. Life is but a scroll away.
Oh and the Great Orange Dolphin just suggested we all inject bleach and sunlight into our lives and limbs, to vanquish the plague. His wranglers are now desperately attempting to shut him the fuck up and wind down his daily updates. Perhaps throwing playballs in the other room and bustling him out -today’s was the shortest yet, at 22 mins, rather than the hours he normally courts. This I think would be a mistake.
As a great woman once said, I’m not saying kill all stupid people, just get rid of the Health & Safety signs and let the problem sort itself out.
So there was a knocking on the door, and somehow or other I was through it in a blink and into a darkened hall. On the stairs a woman, draped in well, drapey things. All operatically b&w, lightning flashing, then I recognised her from the film I saw last night (the magnetic, bitchy love interest from the party, the one who got vommed on), and suddenly she was no longer The Grey Lady, more goth chick having a chat.
And of course I went through the usual BS imminent victims do in any Hollywood cliché, that of wandering blindly from room to room and trying to ignore the skittering sounds.
Kept seeing reflections that didn’t marry with reality. Till finally it was the long mirror by the bed, in which I caught a glimpse of a figure passing.
The more I looked, approaching, the more it materialised in the image -that of an armchair, and in it seated a figure. When I turned to the seat for real, it only had drapes over it, but in the reflection however, a man staring back, caped in the blankets.
I think a dream is like the nth dimension, where we know without really seeing. As if inhabiting with black fingers the space, projecting in real time, being each whoever speaks. A black hole between planes.
That is of course the essence of a night terror, culminating in the knowing of abject fear -actually being that fear as if falling from height yet never reaching bottom.
I managed to shout ‘holp’, aka HELP -one’s attempt to get woken but numbed by drugged limbs and an implausible paralysis, lying there and just taking it. When I did finally come to, my eyes already open, were staring at the long mirror opposite.
Just as bad: the door open a crack, holding a seething black and emanating another’s presence, even with the light on.
OMG needed to pee so bad, but the corridor lined with antique mirrors thanks to J’s silver dealership. There’s so much mythology associated with one’s reflection, from urban myths /movies such as Candyman (say his name seven times while looking and he’ll appear), to the old tale that if you look into the mirror at night you’ll see the Devil, notably yourself looking back.
Now, I’m not the superstitious type, and neither am I a small child needing a teddy. But dearie me, that place in the brain after dreams does send out raw feelers. To the darkest of memories and weirdest of fears -it makes you believe in all manner of shit. Forget the sleep paralysis/ disorder, the apnea, the hypnea, that perhaps your subconscious is in terror to wake you from the fact you’ve stopped breathing, and is manifesting as a nightmare. That the paralysis is normal, to stop you acting out as you dream. It’s just that everything dark now holds a shape within.
In the end matter overcame mind and just did it, prancing down the hall like a jittery Pan. So that was me done till daylight, and the setting up of my day.
-To become painfully lazified for the rest and pooling into shadow. I promised to just go with the flow. And not to beat myself up about it either. So no writing (just see yesterday’s entry), no cooking, no shopping, or walks, or bike rides, or emails, or worrying about no cooking, no shopping, or walks, or bike rides, or emails. Just lying in bed scrolling, watching TV. I barely made it out the bedroom, the day settling like a miasma, fitting for the time period.
And felt just as shit at the end of the day. I hope that that’s it now, got it out the system.
As night falls I count my worries, as if checking for wounds -26 of them, assigned to tabs that must be closed down slowly in order to sleep. Many of them chasing refunds from the 3 holidays canceled, the furloughing that work will likely instate tomorrow, the family, the flat. These threads of bureaucracy becoming binding, that slowly make you sink. Oh the fucking horror.
Small weights add up, the curtains never open, nor close. And something is always behind, beyond, and festering. I sometimes think there’s a certain pitch between reality and imagination, sleep and awake, looking and not looking that makes everything possible, and what you put into it changes that path on the multiverse.
I feel if I stare into that reflection, at that certain time and pitch, and recognise that kernel as truth… the nightmare will become real. The insanity will become sanity -they say if you don’t wake up in time you go mad.
-What is it that we fear then? That it’s real, or it isn’t? The darkest part of the mind may not be so black and hidden, but grey, inconsistent as any ghost.
There is a horror in realising you’re mad, or unreal. In realising that reality has betrayed you to become surreal. And always had been thus -the new here and now.
The world projects all too often that we are to be warm and safe, with entire societies set up to never reveal what lies beneath. But when that vast masking cracks, or fall entirely we find ourselves lost as to be falling.
J found this the other day in the lawns:
Perhaps we need not fear the unknown -unless we know what’s really out there lurking in our collective subconscious – and that what we find within, in privated moments and dream selves, can manifest darkly in everyone else.
This is why so many share The Shadow, the selfsame one sitting on our chest, or standing by the bed and glowering a presence. This same dream since time immemorial that is merely us, the demon looking back.
In the same ways numbers become meaningless, and stories ever more distant (so long as we’re not experiencing it ourselves), lies the same fear of abandonment by an impervious people who do nothing but watch.
Thus the monstrosity may not be what we do but what we don’t. And through the glass darkly each night, the mollycoddling binds fall away to reveal a truer truth. When we allow ourselves to look at The Presence, that Face and drink it in.
I sent the book off today to two agents, feeling myself dandy for doing so too. Then had another long trek, this time into Clapham via the Common. In terms of rating London’s green spaces there’s not a lot to say about it, it would maybe score 2 or 3 out of 10. It’s first and foremost a common, delineating itself from parkland by being relatively open ground and unplanted. No acres of flowerbeds, no landscaping a hill to the right or left, though there are two pretty ponds, and a windswept one. Everything is left as nature intended, kind of, with a few statues here and there and a playground/ outdoor gym/ skatepark. The scraggly collection of woods on one side is pretty scant in terms of biodiversity, being mostly grass and small, young bushes, studded with condoms. It is of course a favoured dogging site, almost legendary, though these days populated by the kind who cannot pull online or via an app (read: old, unsexy and unkempt, possibly murderous).
The rest of the park is plain – large empty spaces of green or gravel, popular for sports aficionados and event staging. It is dare I say it, boring. The Attenborough equivalent of an Asda carpark. Inside the ponds we saw a dead and rotting fish ( a fat, white carp), studiously being ignored by a heron, and two potatoes, possibly jettisoned by fleeing BBQers. The fun police were out in force, cruising ominously along the running paths and stop-searching drivers for evidence of commuting or shopping.
I did spot an interesting tree, as pique among dross. Very Easter. J said it may have been diseased (apt). I’m pretty sure if I draw a 5 pointed star on its arse and lay out a few candles, we could start worshipping it.
Then it was Clapham Old Town, a nondescript part of London tarted up into prettiness. Although every building is not that old it’s been done up as if they are, even the 20th Century additions, complete with flowerboxes and fabric awnings, scrubbed brick and pistachio paint. This is what all of London could look like with a spirited makeover, given this end was also traditionally poor throughout the centuries. Mostly residential but gracing a tiny corner of shops and businesses, almost all closed but for the delis, organic cafes, bakeries and ultra-expensive grocers each with a queue (how very Clapham). Sainsbury’s had a very long line outside, Tesco directly opposite nary a soul, not even a guard. UK has a curious hierarchy of supermarkets/ grocers not always evident abroad, from the department store emporia at one end who deliver in 1920s horse-driven cabs, to the panic buying, zombie-baiting megamalls at the other:
Fortnum & Mason -not as bombastic a building as the one below, but smaller and thus more elite than the Gucci brigade
2. Harrods -formerly top spot but they lost their royal charter ever since Dodi, son of arms dealer Fayed, got into a car with Diana and it went tiddlywinks in tunnel in Paris with a drunken driver and chasing paps and they all died. It’s now owned by the Qatari royals.
3. Harvey Nicks (do they even do food?). Fell a few spots after being bought by a Hong Kong billionaire with ideas on turning it into a global brand. His opening of a second branch ended centuries of exclusivity and backfired, despite all northerners now considering Leeds the ‘Knightsbridge of the North’. Which is like calling Slough the Vatican because it has an RC charity shop.
4. Selfridges -the best imo, far more choice, and surprisingly, deceptively affordable. A big HBO series has elevated it some more, though dangerously, scandalously courting tourism
5. M&S -can be swapped with below. Only does it’s own exclusive lines, and award winning adverts of food in slow-mo.
6. Waitrose -far more choice than above, lovely staff but with brighter, less leafy lighting.
7. Sainsbury’s -can be slightly naff, all the usual brands but pricier for no reason whatsoever.
8. Tesco -naff, but all the usual brands.
9. Morrisons -normally bottom of the pile. Wide use of the cheapest sugar, the offcuts, the sweatshops, despite rebranding.
10. Asda -the new low, having seen the kind of supermarket sweep and panic at the disco behaviour relevant to these climes. Part of the Wal-Mart fam (edit** soon to be sold to Indian billionaires during this pandemic).
Once home I was face-down and asleep, as is usual nowadays whenever popping out, as if the toll of sunshine and fresh air weighs upon the shoulders, along with possible contagion. Out of it for hours. Then cut my hair, and joined a group chat with some buddies via Zoom, the place to be this season. Despite all that had a low mood, surly even. A part of me is constantly worrying, one housemate becoming a hermit, the other needing contact, and myself trying to provide both or neither.
I miss going out to have a meal, going shopping, going on holiday. The NYC trip for May is now a no-go (had that coming) as BA has finally canceled the flights; the supremely dodgy travel company wanting to charge us £150 for an admin fee still and that’s eating me up. Canceled the Airbnb – with now over £400 in vouchers to use. Also found out the museum is looking at July or even as late as October for a reopening, so I’ll likely be furloughed.
Across the US people have been demonstrating to reopen the country, and get rid of lockdown, plus the usual barmy anti-vaxxers. There’s been a counter-demo by two fearless healthcare workers, dressed in their scrubs, standing in the street to block the traffic from joining. In the face of hooting car horns and a woman leaning out and yelling at them to go to China if they wanted communism, and that it wasn’t fair they got to work and she didn’t.
Democracy is being given a bad name. This pandemic is showing the flaws in the system, when ignorance is given equal standing as information, when the leader himself goads it as a device to keep himself in power. We kinda forget Nazism was a democratic rise.
This is why we need constitutions, as we the people can’t be trusted, as history has shown. Of course we’re going to vote for ourselves, of course we’ll step over others to get to the top, of course we’re going to lie, cheat and steal to furnish our bigger piece of the pie. I do wonder why giving freedom so often means giving free rein to abject competition.
I’ve looked at the news fora for the first time in a while today, and the comments are starting to die down, less demands for lynching, less arguing, insults and vitriol. It appears we’re getting used to the new normal. C-19 may be on the verge of getting boring.
Another 823 died last night in UK hospitals. Deaths in general have doubled -a 20 year high, added to by unconfirmed virus fatalities and a great deal of people avoiding hospital treatment for fear of cross-contamination, or thinking they’re overloaded (the reality is that beds are now at record vacancies due to this). They’re hoping the worst is over despite the high tallies. The city remains silent to the core.
News of vaccine trials to start next week are encouraging, though we’re still a good year off from being able to medicate it should it succeed. The orders for more tests and PPE are being stymied by bureaucracy, the govt promising new supplies from Turkey for the following day, then realising they’d forgotten to formally request it even. At times like this paperwork fuckups can kill, on a huge scale.
The night’s film was Fantasy Island. I wouldn’t call it run-of-the-mill despite using the usual jump scares and idiot decision-making (let’s split up! Let’s stage an argument now!) from the dwindling arsenal of Hollywood storytelling. The film’s premise is each vacationer gets to live out a fantasy, but of course one that turns sour and increasingly deadly. There’s a refreshing lack of gore and overt sadism, and an interesting landscape of a storyline (SPOILER) in which one finds the disparate scenarios for each guest are related. Large plotholes withstanding it was an interesting enough watch, and a big part of my life for 2 hrs, becoming the highlight of my day.
I need to get out more. Maybe all this was just some numpter wanting a bit of me-time.
Frozen has got to be the world’s biggest hatchet job. On first viewing I mistook it for a straight-to-DVD offering, despite the refreshing take of having two female protagonists rather than the usual Disney woman-chasing-man, whose main preoccupation was to instill the universal truth of beautiful=good, ugly=bad. I swear, Disney has a lot to answer for in terms of setting up generation after generation to subconsciously believe that crap, and act out, like WWII.
OK, so one sister has zappy powers (bizarrely it has all to do with that everyday substance in our lives and loves, ice). And it all turns into a big misunderstanding whereby the villain is understandable, and good and evil aren’t so black and white. Plus there’s that nice sideline in the handsome prince (SPOILER ALERT) turning out to be a baddy, and the lovable idiot actually being the love interest. How refreshing, for the world’s most heteronormative, White-washing, nose-pinching, gender misaligning, hierarchy promoting, Nazi courting media power of our age. That’s why the critics loved it, and yes, that belter of a song too one may have heard on every radio in every child’s room in every karaoke at every point in time ever.
I do think pre-teen kiddies are a little undiscerning, and easy, avid voters. Make the dictators protagonists pretty and singy and they’ll be invested, add some cutesy idiots and toys/ animals with human personality and they’ll be entranced, then committed, then enshrining it to memory – forever yours to their dying day. Even when there are about 17 writers jostling for position, and a storyline by a drunken, trashy committee waiting for pizza.
Frozen was meant to be very loosely based on The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, one of his most popular and timeless of classics. ‘Loosely based’ in the most generous understanding of the term, insofar as it has snow and a queen in it, like how Jaws must be a retelling of Finding Nemo.
Well Frozen II doesn’t disappoint. They manage, within the first 20 mins, to fit in (BEWARE SPOILERS):
A new race of people next door, a tribe everyone forgot to mention in the first film
A war
A flashback to parent memories
An enchanted forest
A ‘transformation’ of the lead characters
Giant footprints, giants
A rockfall of gnomes/ baby trolls
A random forest tornado
A game of charades involving a talking snowman, a caribou and a misunderstanding
A mystical, onset-of-schizophrenia voice only Elsa can hear, day and night
The three most annoying notes every conjoined in time or space, akin to a delivery truck backing out or car alarm as sung by Enya -oooh-eee-ohhh (see above)
A vast, 700ft tall interstate dam that is source of geopolitical instability
Floating coloured ice crystals evenly peppering the air (Elsa’s latest psychosis-induced party trick)
The evacuation of the townsfolk in the middle of the night
The blowing out of all light/fire with a sudden pink fizzle
Rippling urban earthquakes
A big mist that blocks out the sky and pushes out newcomers -source of geopolitical instability
A pink forest fire, set by a cute arsonist salamander (like a baby Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon)
A talking fucking little snowman
Oh and three songs squeezed in already.
You can imagine the Disney team sitting in LA, a bit bored, scrolling through IG and porn, then Hank brings the coffee in. Yeah! Let’s introduce an avalanche! Yeah and under it they’ll find pink earth that makes them sleepwalk! Yeah and a cave which lures them into a place of… of… magic earthworm world! Yeah and one of them talks and we can call him Bingo! No Boner, with an Irish accent! Yeah then Elsa can sing her way out, yeah coz one of her notes makes her hand freeze thing go crazy… and man, d’you have Bono’s agent?
I think their CEO of storyline must be a 7 year old girl. Who is really the daughter of a real Disney CEO. She’s called Emmy and must be obeyed.
Of course, she works a treat. Frozen became the 5th highest grossing film of all time when released in 2013, and the biggest grossing animated feature ever- only to be usurped by Frozen II (and er, the live action Lion King).
Though tbf to Emmy, Andersen’s offering was along the same lines. It did also throw up a set of questionable fictional devices. I’m not kidding, you’ll need to take a seat..
Semi-siblings in love, a magic laughing mirror, the devil, trolls, a murderous snow queen, a pandemic of evil mirror crystals, a magical rose garden, talking flowers, a talking crow, a fake prince lookalike, an evil sorceress, a bush that can see the dead, a robber band, a robber girl, a robber girl’s pet doves, a frozen lake called the Mirror of Reason, a winning pair of skates, red shoes, a reindeer called Bae (Disney surely missed a trick on that one), a Finn woman, a Lapp woman, and a spelling bee.
Maybe the Frozen series is just a majestic retelling in the spirit of northern European folk fables. As in you start off with some adorable 1 percenters then add whatever happens to be dawdling along in your mind at the time, preferably after a heavy bong/ green fairy sesh (might as well throw in breakfast/ Fido’s dinner). All as filler before an Abrahamic happy ending.
Though I still have yet to see a Disney princess as anything other than a catalogue model, or fat -and no, Moana is not.
As with all sequels, not only do they have to contend with the previous cast of characters they now have to introduce new ones. Each time there’s another instalment they try and keep the favourites -or forever court fan disapproval, though in the end they’ll be dragging along a Big Brother House of cartoonish characters in a cartoon. Each vying piteously, shamelessly for screentime, with a dedicated writer (the one who thought them up in the first place) to battle for their segment.
Just look at Ice Age, once one of the most lucrative sagas and its gaggle of rabidly intrepid explorers, denigrating into a repetitive series of comedy shorts for each of its 25 characters (no, really – 25). Thus the franchise had to end, after winding down into vastly confusing storylines borrowing one personality after another on multiple leads, in a total fucking shitshow mess. A winning example of profit over art.
In other news Disney has stopped paying about half its employees -100,000 of them, saving it $500 million a month despite announcing $1.4 billion profit for its shareholders from the last 3 months alone. The new streaming site Disney Plus is also seeing extraordinary growth with the international lockdowns, clocking up 50 million subscribers since launching 5 months ago. Rest assured, Chairman Bob Iger has selflessly given up his paycheck for the duration of the pandemic in the spirit of comradeship, though his $47.5 million from last year ($130,000 per day) might help him cope. Chief exec Bob Chapek has also vowed a full 50% paycut, that’ll limit him to only one new mansion a fortnight.
So yep, I sat through that for the evening’s entertainment. Such a big part of my life.
This is the shit I have to put up with in lockdown. Rant OVER. Should just let it go.
Took a walk with J, all the way to the river and back via Battersea Park, stopping off at an old church looking like the original template for the ones in New England. It had a graveyard which J was most interested in as it reeks of history. A lot of the gravestones had melted away after a century or two of acid rain; it’s a shame if they’ve ever been recorded, and are now just slabs of rock, to be used as paving, which is a thing in the UK in every old church.
A transcript of the above will show that Mary Stringer, born 1751, outlived her husband Edward, who died at only 33. She became his widow for the next 50 years till she died at 82. She also outlived her three sons, John aged 3, Edward aged 5 and Thomas aged 22. Only her daughter Mary Ann survived her.
Another gravestone speaks of possible emigration, rift or perhaps fall in riches. A family tomb bearing only one name, whose ancestors ultimately chose a different plot, if at all they existed:
These are what we’ll be remembered by one day, if anything. What legacy will remain, perhaps electronic, or lost to ether, given that Facebook or Instagram are unlikely to last the next century if not decade – my gravestone may well turn out to be that arm poking into a TikTok of a cat vomiting, for a full 4 milliseconds. Or a shoe.
Maybe we’ll be remembered only in abstract figures, via transactions made and algorithms changed. And some day one of those equations will become alive, a new god, and remember us. Thanks to my little hand tapping coyly on that keypad, my darling porn History adding to its journey to sentience.
Perhaps my heart will go on as one of the billion fuckers to ever watch a Frozen film and contribute to their $2.35 billion takings. I am that $7.96 back in 2014 and 2020, that bottle of water CEO Bob ordered in Cannes, that so sated his wonderful lips. We can but dream, as ever furnishing the lives of the rich and powerful and ice zapping, that is so much of what our lives amount to. To spread the magic.
My friend once did a gig as a photographer on a Disney ship, where they worked her every day of the year, made her pay for the camera and equipment, and wouldn’t let her off the damn boat or break contract. While playing to the oafish hordes -the type of people who go on Disney Cruises. She said it was shit.
And I’m not even going to mention Walt’s admiration for fascism (note how everyone in say Monsters Inc are just SO happy to work in a vast, inhuman factory that rules their every waking thought and identity). Celebration, the Floridian Disney town whose residents are banished if they get a criminal record, and whose strict rules made them refer to it as Mauschwitz, issued an edict that they’d be turfed out if the term was heard.
Nadir Shah, ruler of the Persian Empire attacked the Mughal Empire in 1739. At that stage India under the Mughals had been the world’s largest power (vying with the Ming Dynasty in China). They commanded a subcontinental golden age -a quarter of world GDP and industrial output, one of the three Islamic Gunpowder powers and ruling from the world’s largest castles, stationed over the Hindu and Sikh populace. Then Nadir came along, beat back a 300,000 strong army and sacked the capital, Delhi, massacring her inhabitants and taking 10,000 slaves. They also carted off the fabled Peacock Throne, Koh-i-Noor (Sea of Light) and Darya-i-Noor (Mountain of Light) diamonds, plus enough gold and riches for the entire Persian Empire not to be taxed for the next three years.
That helped considerably in the downfall of the Mughals, already embattled by the native Marathan uprisings (which in turn would go on to fragment into civil war, and allow the British and Dutch to keep bribing their way across the minor fiefdoms in a 270 year process). Thus the world’s largest manufacturer, steel, metal, minerals, food and textiles producer, shipbuilder and tertiary employer, with one quarter the global population and per capita wealth higher than in Europe, had by the 20th Century been transformed into a vast resources mine for the UK, and the world’s most profitable colony ever. A sum of $45 trillion in today’s dough has recently been estimated as to how much India bankrolled Britain.
Next time you look at our glorious Victorian architecture of the era, you can thank India for funding it -or Mr Nadir for putting it in process, the world’s greatest empire so fallen as to furnish the feet of the next one. So what a tangent.
Today is a nadir, from where the phrase was coined.
I have been thoroughly invaded by foreign foe, culture made stagnant. My industrial output redacted, trade winds poisoned and society curtailed, riven by domestic dispute and a new policy of isolationism. Kingdoms have fallen in this small flat.
As has played out across the land, and world. I think it’s all getting to us just about now, the 3-4 week mark tempting the winds of rebellion. My highlight of the week has been to get a takeaway. Salt baked squid with chilli from our local Chinese, though I suspect they kinda forgot the salt and we had to add it ourselves, and the squiddy itself wasn’t squidgy, more rubber as a sign of overcooking. But it was like a Michelin restaurant with ambient light and a piano tinkling, just to the screams of a tacky Netflix horror (The Girl From the Third Floor, 23 out of 40 on the horror cliché list) while the world burned.
Before this I’d been lost, sick of the computer, any gaming, any writing, any TV, and unarsed to read. I lay on the bed till I fell asleep, which has been the MO for the other two, who have taken to siestas midway. I even tried to cut n style my hair for something new, but chickened out into a halfway monstrosity, which is about as dispiriting as it can get. My futility exemplified by a hair crisis, like when you lose it in dreams and are utterly crumpled.
We’re all getting the cabin fever, and today marks a change. Tomorrow I’m going to read. Maybe write a bit. Fuck installing a rota, that doesn’t work. I’ve no energy to keep it up. I’ll need to go out and get some sunlight at some stage, though it may kill me, such is life at the mo.
Have been following the darling #VeryBritishProblems Twitter page,which is a sign things have reached a lowpoint. So not Twitter interested; my profile embarrassingly made up of nothing but complaints on public transport over the years -the only time I feel Twitter useful -as vent when no other avenues are available. So much so I had to change my handle to Transporta, like some kind of network nerd to justify the whining.
#VBP though is funny AF, though not quite reality. It goes far to portray our species as affable, endearingly ingratiating and anxiety-riddled. And yes, there are many of us far-too agreeable Brits about, but when interacting it’s not always the same apologetic partner to play off. And that congeniality only survives if it’s reciprocated.
Instead you’ll sometimes meet that steely gazed Ukipper/ Tory you pfaff and ingratiate yourselves around, making yourself suddenly ridiculous and public interaction a gauntlet, #VeryEthnicProblems. As a fellow Southerner there is a code which we all partake, and it only works if everyone is in on it. At once adorable and infuriating, often requiring a translator.
If a Southerner says:
“Yeah we should definitely catch up some time!” = Let’s never see each other again. Ignore me the next time, fool.
“If you don’t mind” = You’d better do this
“EXCUSE me/ SORRY, but” = How fucking dare you!
“Are you sure?” = I want you to do it but am embarrassed to say so
“Not bad” = quite good/ very good
“(pause)…lovely” = shit/ ugly
“fine” = shit / ugly
“interesting” = shit /ugly
“I’ll definitely” = I probably won’t
“so… planning any holidays?” = You bore me
“I don’t want to make a fuss” = I’m about to make a fuss.
“How’re you?” = I don’t care
“I’m fine” = I know you don’t care
“I’m fine. No really!” = fuck you
sigh/ slight flaring of nostrils/ upturned eyebrow/ look aside = fuck you
“I don’t want this to sound racist/ I’m not racist, but…” = I’m about to say something racist
“Many thanks in advance” = if you don’t comply there will be repercussions
Signing off an email with “Regards” = I hate you
Not putting an X (kiss) after every text = I hate you
“I’m a bit worried about Helen” = I’m about to character assassinate Helen. Let’s take her down, publicly.
“I’m just wondering” = I am about to make a statement/ confront you
“I’m a little concerned” = I’m very fucking concerned and disagree with you
“I’ll ring you right back” = I may ring you within the hour
“You’re gonna love him. He’s so funny” = he’s very ugly but you’re in his league
“sorry, it’s just not my vibe” = I do not like you, I do not want to be seen with you
“have a great time” = I really don’t care
“sorry to hear” = I really don’t care
__(nothing) = I hate you
__(nothing) = I’m secretly in love with you
__(nothing) = 42
To finish off, some castle porn. The world’s largest fortifications from Mughal India, though by dint of the British Raj’s decision to term them ‘forts’ (claiming their garrisons were stationed therein, and ignoring the royalty still inside), they aren’t recognised in the Guinness Book of Records. This despite several larger than the record holder, Hradcany in Prague (which isn’t even particularly defensive, a moniker in name only). Once again, the nuances of the Brit lingo perpetuates. But for what it’s worth, enjoy -the last vestiges of an empire:
Dark house, where multiple 20W lamps are needed in every heavily curtained space. Even in daytime, thanks to broody, rainy locations like Southern California. Firelight.
A basement/ attic stuffed with middle class clutter and weird AF shit.
A basement door to the garden that is jammed. Extra point if a spade is resting outside, with a wooden handle.
An unlocked front door. All exteriors are pretty much unlocked, the opposite once inside.
Creepy doll
Jewellery box with a twirling ballerina.
Painting close up. The eyes.
Door knob slowly turning.
Looking through a slat. Surprise!
Key doesn’t work. It will later.
Old newspaper/ photo album with grainy black and white of an unhappy loner.
A diary/ investigation wall. Tortured drawings.
Upper middle class family. One of the parents is creative.
Pale, sickly looking child. Very serious. Nerdy, independent.
Pale, sickly looking service staff. Extra point if they look and act Victorian, despite hitting their twenties in the 1990s.
Creepy old person/ disabled person. Extra point if they have a foreign accent.
Skin disease.
Teen sex scene.
School angst. Bullying.
Southern accent
British accent.
Someone innocently bursting into a room, or grabbing someone by the shoulders from behind, to greet them as you do. Or just walking past with the sudden sound of screeching strings.
Walking into a room. Stopping. Freezing.
Calling on someone and finding them violently compromised by a household object.
Explosive flurry of urban wildlife: birds/ bats/ rats/ a cat.
A barking dog, that becomes a whine.
And then I woke up!
Secret room.
Sharpened bench/ farm tools.
Shower scene, eyes closed. Extra point if she doesn’t check the heat/ wait for it to warm.
A fall from height.
Woman/ child calling stupidly, announcing herself at all times no matter the glimpsed shapes and skittering sounds. Half a point if it’s a teenage guy.
Quit it guys! This ain’t funny guys!
She who runs falls.
I have a great idea: let’s split up.
No one believes me! /I’m going mad! Can I trust mine own eyes?
Noises on the level above. Tracking them.
Hiding in closet/ under the bed scene.
Blissful diorama at the end. But it’s not the end…
Score for this evening: Child’s Play (2019) – 11/40 Surprisingly refreshing, though everything as trashy as promised and quite a dalliance into torture porn, ewww.
Another blanket-drowned day. Up at 5am, back to bed again by 8. Then awake by 11. No breakfast. Attempted lunch at 4pm.
Grated up a swede, threw in a potato too why not. Garlic and onions. Bacon. This’ll be like one of those German potato cakes, or latke, yeah!
Dash of soya, green tabasco. Some of that Bosnian spice mix why not. Fry, till crispy on the edges.
Doesn’t work. Crispy, yet soggy. Smoking AF. Tried it anyway.
Waaay too salty, it’s that Bosnian stock mix thing. Better make rice to water it down. It’ll be like what rice was designed for, a few choice slivers of flavour intensity like jewels in creamy fluffiness. Yes.
Gawd, it’s still awful. This calls for an egg, no three. A full on omelette. Like a tortilla. Yes. Separate the rice, return it to the pan.
OMFG inedible. Salty, sludgey, eggy. Like super eggy. Burnt.
Every surface smells of egg, room is noxious too with weird smoke pong. Open window, re-wash all the china, glasses and cutlery.
Let’s try rice porridge. The kind that actually demands a salty accompaniment, commonly duck egg or thousand year egg. That’ll surely utilise the flavour. Yes.
OMFG it’s literally poison. Burning a hole into the bowl. Complete fucking giant egg write-off. Half my larder gone on it too. This is like McCandless’s existential nadir when he kills that moose in Into The Wild.
Pounding, vomitous migraine from disrupted sleep plus no food.
Looked up some foreign cinema, after my diatribe about Americana yesterday. After an hour of research, downloaded a Chinese film noir, The Wild Goose Lake, apparently second place to the Palmes D’Or. Took an age to get started (clicking away pop ups like Whack-A-Mole, restarting on new tabs, loading up a stream at dial-up speed). Then no subtitles. None found either online.
Have a sudden urge to play whack-a-mole with real moles.
Tomorrow I’ll try and give the chum to the pigeons, they’re probably starving. Though I tried the last few days to feed them.
They have got to be the most stupid animals I’ve met. They watch me throw them crumbs, then whole slices like a performance artist. One of them works out it’s bread, but the minute it falls off the roof, it’s as if disappeared. They do not make the connection, as slice after slice ends up on the floor below. Even when a day later I collect them and deposit them, shrine-like, in the middle of the carpark, they remain like modern art. Speaking volumes about our disposable consumerism at an epoch-changing time of want and the Heiglian ideal. Yes.
They’re probably new pigeons. The rest have starved to death, and these were the chicks that survived. They have no idea what bread is, but if they’re willing to peck at vomit, they’ll maybe be able to peck at my lunch dinner attempt.
In the news.
Trump has had a meltdown, publicly ranting at reporters for an hour and a half, and including a pre-prepared video on the injustice he’s endured, notably under questions on his running of the C-19 show.
Many Africans in China are now facing homelessness following an outbreak of C-19 reinfection in the African districts of Guangzhou, and a nurse who was attacked after a man escaped an isolation ward. A slew of evictions followed, and a sign even put up asking Black customers to please not enter a McDonalds (later the company apologised). Although social media campaigns have now sorted food, clothing and re-housing, and the govt is making a statement they have a zero tolerance to racism, the local police were said to be hassling the unfortunates, and even blocking aid-givers.
It’s seen as an excuse for the council to finally push the community out, once hundreds of thousands strong, inline with a crackdown from 2018 eliminating visa-overstayers and illegals, which China has been increasingly inundated with this last decade. The history of racism and pandemics goes hand-in-hand, and galling given that Chinese round the world have been victims, but now fellow perpetrators. The world is studded with fucking idiots.
World food production is looking increasingly threatened by the collapse of logistical transport networks, processing factories and retail. Most immediately vulnerable are Pacific nations, with desert nations and smaller European/ island countries to follow.
Russia is giving hints it’s gotten serious over there, Putin looking serious alongside. China has recently been having many cases of reinfection coming from across its northern border, notably the border city of Suifenhe reentering lockdown.
Japan is also looking worse, with hundreds more cases. Like Russia it’s been following a light lockdown if none at all, relying on masks and social distancing. China’s other re-lockdowned city is a port that services Japan, Jiaozhou.
Another 778 died in UK hospitals today, bringing the total over 12,000, despite still an undercount. The BBC is no longer reporting the deaths, or at least making it obvious.
Globally deaths are at 120,000 and 2 million infected.
The day has been one of the harder ones, where the four walls do feel justifiably prison-like. The light curtailed, and writing for a good 12 hours in front of a TV. I feel stained by crass sensationalism, evoking so much emotion and memory, yet signifying nothing. The day a write off, excuse the pun.
There is a certain art to domesticity, making things feel snug, and that the Danes have trumpeted throughout their culture, making them supposedly the world’s happiest nation. It’s untranslatable, but hygge (rhymes slightly with boogie/ booger) is that sense of the familial and cosy, which can be brought to anything, from workplace meetings to camping trips. J has it down to an art.
The Queen came on, to tell us about this virus that’s been going round, and to be all stalwart. Many people had reckoned it being on the passing of her 98 year old husband, Prince Phillip, topping Ladbrokes bets every year for the past decade who quietly salivate over his demise (you can imagine the bolly and plumes of coke in the boardroom when that announcement does come). The only other 3x she’s ever had a nationwide address (outside of her Xmas thing) were on the eve of Gulf War 1, the deaths of Princess Di then the Queen Mum, and on her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. 24 million (one third of the nation) tuned in rapt, only to hear her rattle on about everything we already knew about, and to urge people to stay indoors more -which was probably the main aim they wheeled the podium out. Crestfallen we didn’t have anything more to gossip about, or a national funeral to attend it’s life back to normal. Yes, this is normal. And people still out and about, enjoying the weather.
The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson is now stricken with C-19. At first it was him ruling working from home and looking spry, then it was him going to hospital -just as a precaution -and still in good spirits with a lot of media bluster about being out soon, probably within the week. And now it’s worsened and he’s gone into intensive care, though not yet on an ICU. He may be an insufferable fool, but may he get well soon. The papers meanwhile are full of stories about who could replace him, changing their headlines midway through the day from a what happens with a ‘dead’ PM to an ‘incapacitated’ one. Type the word ‘how‘ into Google and it autopredicts instantly into ‘how old is Boris Johnson‘. ‘What ha‘ returns: ‘What happens when a Prime Minister dies in office?‘ Poor sod, he’s mathematically inclined to succumb.
The evening’s film was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which turns out is the world’s most successful romcom, made for 4 million bucks but taking in nearly 100x that amount. It wasn’t as funny this time round, and it’s quite weird how you can date a film you enjoyed and was taken by, then watch it again within your lifetime and see it as newly facile, scales fallen. Back then, when it was also so doable, when melodrama was fun, and life was so granted. I’m getting on.
They revised yesterday’s deaths from 400+ up to 621, after counting post mortem tests and people who’d died outside hospitals, such as in their houses and in old folk’s homes. There’s also always a low count at the weekends for some reason. Hopes for a downturn have been dashed, rather we look to be starting on the high end of the curve, the bit where it’s either climbing stratospherically or plateauing at a high level.
Given that there’ve been no checkpoints, temperature gauging, or app tracking, and most people don’t wear masks it’s likely to climb. And will remain high, given the minimal measures even in lockdown. No checking of behaviour or automatic sanitising of still-functioning vector points, such as warehousing, supermarket baskets/ trolleys/ checkouts (not to mention the products themselves), mail, deliveries, PT, hire bikes, paypoints, cash, cash machines, ticket machines, lifts, lift buttons, public door handles, rails, door buzzers, and the streets themselves.
Unlike most of Asia, which went through the rigmarole beforehand, operating checkpoints every 300m and in every building, enforcing tracking apps and masks across the populace then hosing down every public surface. We need to do the same.
My legs ached all day, enough for me to get worried. But turns out that had all to do with my first bike ride in a year. J has also been worried, having been stricken by a tummy bug for a good week now, which in a certain percentage of cases is the only sign of C-19, but hopefully it’s just a rotavirus, we’ll see after day 10.
A is planning a cake. Greek milk pie it’s called. He’s a little pie himself.
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