We’re not in lockdown because the government told us to stay at home.
 
We’re in lockdown because we don’t want to catch Covid-19.
 
Despite all the committees ranged against it, the Cobra meetings and the government scientific advisers, the daily briefings, the slide shows and the statistics, the whole not-travelling circus, the inconvenient truth is that Covid-19 isn’t losing this fight.
 
Not yet, anyway.
 
In the news last weekend, there was a story about Georgia (USA). The governor relaxed lockdown restrictions on small businesses. But some (most) of those businesses decided to stay locked down.
 
That makes sense.
 
When the lockdown ends, I won’t be hugging strangers in the streets.
 
Sorry – “when the lockdown ends”. Silly me. When the government announces that it is relaxing restrictions.
 
Or to be exact, when the government announces that it is relaxing restrictions in a way that it hopes won’t give the media grounds for attacking it if the relaxation is followed by a second wave...
 
…because there may be people silly enough to believe that the virus has gone just because the government says they can come out now. But there’s only so long you – I can go on extending a sentence.
 
This is getting a bit gnarly. The truth is, we’re going to be infectious to each other for a while yet. But we need to get back to work.
 
That, I think, qualifies as a new normal.
 
Maybe it’s just me, but I get the sense that all the high-level talk and Q&A about the pandemic, the lockdown, all the rest of it, is about the old normal.
 
Is the economy in a V-shaped recession? Will British Airways return to 2019 customer numbers in two years or three?
 
So very much not the questions to be asking right now.

Oh, not another daily briefing.
 
Ah, that’s what the R-number is. Thanks for explaining it again.
 
Five tests, eh? Do you remember Gordon Brown’s Five Tests for whether or not we join the Euro? No, I suppose you wouldn’t, at your age, minister.
 
[When I hear them talking about their five tests, I feel like Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. Remember? The “Blue-Sweater Scene”, as it turns out to be called on YouTube?]
 
What has to happen, before we get real about this?
 
How do we devise a society – not an economy, a society – in which we can obtain what we need by co-operating (perhaps not even working) with people whose very presence may be dangerous to us?
 
By squabbling over whether or not the government should advise us to wear facemasks or not?
 
I don’t think so.

PS: My title question. Some years back, I interviewed Professor Jem Bendell for a piece I was writing ahead of a big, serious-minded banking conference (Sibos, if you’re interested). His subject was (and remains) deep adaptation in the face of economic/environmental collapse. Find him on YouTube. Seriously – do.
 
What comes back to me now, from my days interviewing speakers ahead of conferences, was the term “black-swan event”. This has quite a history, but it was first given its current meaning by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2001 book Fooled by Randomness.
 
I’m tempted to say that it has been misused ever since, to describe unexpected events. The characteristics of a black-swan event, as defined by Taleb, are: that it is unexpected; that it has a major impact; that it is rationalised afterwards. My non-italics.
 
Taleb himself has suggested that the current pandemic is actually a white-swan event, in that (my words) it was inevitable, or at least highly likely to happen, eventually. Big impact, but not unexpected.
 
And I’m not quite sure where I stand on post-pandemic rationalisation, although we’re all doing it. “Meant”, anybody? Serves us right, anybody? Obvious consequence of globalisation, anybody?
 
For me, the recurring multicoloured-swan event is that daily briefing. Turning up on a daily basis to say nothing new isn’t a useful contribution. Didn’t expect that, although now I come to think about it … sigh. These are the leaders on whom we rely to get us out of this mess. Don’t.
 
My other multicoloured-swan aspect of the current crisis is…
 
…the world is collapsing around us; the Global Economy has vanished overnight; the centre is continuing to deny that it cannot hold; everything is falling apart...
 
…and yet – it’s still possible to order a takeaway pizza.
 
Nobody would believe it. I don’t believe it. But that’s what happens in a real-life apocalypse. Priorities change.

Today, I’m stupid.

I slept hardly at all last night, not sure why not, and this morning my mind feels more sepia-toned than clear.

That’s not a bad image, I suppose, but I’ve run through shadowed, riddled with dry rot, soft, sagging, made of cheese (blue cheese?), mildewed and damp, and I still haven’t pinpointed it. Sepia-toned. It’ll have to do.

I’m not very intelligent today. It’s raining outside, my lower back aches, I shouldn’t have had that second cup of tea first thing, and I can just tell I’m going to be niggling for hours over whether that comma looks right after the opening ‘Today’.

But this is my consciousness we’re talking about; the continuous ‘me’ that looks out at the world. How can the depth, breadth, quality, whatever, of my perception be different from day to day? Am I less ‘me’ today? What am I missing today that I would have picked up yesterday?

There’s a seagull just outside the window, standing on the stone wall. It’s looking at me (he? she?) and I’m looking at it. And there’s something to say about that seagull, but in the moment of picking up my coffee mug and putting it down again, I’ve forgotten what it is.

What is the difference between the ‘me’ of yesterday, who woke up from a deep sleep to realise that it was after nine, who could have been relied upon to say something – something – about a seagull looking in, and the ‘me’ of today, who embarked upon this interminable but predictable sentence after a night of no sleep, after making apparent eye contact with a seagull but failing to draw any significance, blah, blah, I’m bored with this sentence?

It was a question, wasn’t it? So: question mark.

Once, many years ago, I picked up a prawn sandwich from the tray that should have been removed rather than the tray that had just been brought and two hours later the world swerved away from me and I hit the floor without ever quite realising that I’d fallen out of my chair. The world went sideways and I lost my hold on up, down, sideways, what had mattered a moment before, where I was.

Where was the ‘me’ then, the ‘I’ that we’re supposed to speak from?

I’m not quite up to drawing a conclusion just at the moment, but it seems to, er, me that there’s more to ‘me’ than the conscious part. Or less. ‘Me’ swims along, sometimes under water. Or goes somewhere else entirely

Or ‘me’ is just a succession of conscious moments divided by sleep, prawn sandwiches and, er, can’t think of anything else right now. I woke up this morning – let’s say yesterday morning – full of the delusion that I’d gone to sleep the night before, checked out for a trip to wherever dreams happen, and then returned in the morning with my mind full of fragments of where I'd been.

Not to get religious about this, but I like the thought experiment that we’re created fresh every morning. Not to get militantly atheistic either, but am I really the same person who was delighted to be given an Action Man for his tenth(?) birthday? Who remembers the stone dog on the landing and the pebble windows?

I shall think on this. If I can just eat a prawn sandwich (or, last night, just go to bed) and not be here at all for a few hours, then who’s to say where I was before I was born?

Defeating the Russian and Austrian armies at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805? Oh, why not?

No, I don’t think Covid-19 is “meant”. I do think it fits, though.

Follow the logic of Covid-19, and you end up with a smaller, younger, fitter population of mostly women.

The virus threatens everybody, but it seems to have a preference for older, overweight men with “pre-existing health conditions”.  There’s also, apparently, an ethnic component, but I’ll leave that out as it may be socio-economic and is almost certainly more complex than it seems.

I can’t forget a conversation I had before all this started (see also A virus too ordinary, 2nd April 2020) in which we agreed that all the problems of the world – from global warming down to finding a parking space – would be solved if the global population was cut by half.

No, we weren’t being serious, and yes, we were referencing a recent Avengers movie.

But I was also droning on about the collective unconscious, Gaia, blah blah, and wondering whether we’re better at imagining problems (insert your favourite scene from Contagion here) than consciously addressing them (and a clip from the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference here) – and also wondering whether all that imagining is actually the thought process before the collective unconscious … does something.

I don’t want to say “finds a solution”, but just as a precaution, I’d like to apologise if we’re all living in a Matrix-style simulation and I’ve dreamed up Covid-19 as a plot twist. My bad, but don’t you agree we needed something to confound the mulish certainties on both sides of Brexit?

Like I say, Covid-19 fits.

The virus does its thing, as above, and our response has been to turn off everything we do to harm the planet. Imagine – collectively, if you will – that this is a chance to re-run the history of the second half of the twentieth century, but without the toxic fluorocarbons, CFCs, the pesticides, all the science-improves-on-nature, and with videoconferencing and 3D printing.

I won’t mention Artificial Intelligence (which manifests as Artificial Stupidity, surely?) because nobody’s imagined a happy ending for that either.

I wonder sometimes whether that sense of “meant” represents an awareness of ourselves that goes beyond our day-to-day notion that we’re individuals with some measure of control over our surroundings – but that thought passes out of my mind quickly. I’m not Neo.

Anyway, you’ll have to excuse me.

If there’s a new normal coming, and it’s anything like the new normal described above, I think maybe I should put some laundry on. And find somebody to give me a haircut.

After the Berlin Wall fell, and with it the rest of the Iron Curtain, the files of the Stasi were opened.

They revealed that many East Germans had been acting as informers for the state intelligence service. There was outrage. Many East Germans had some explaining to do.

I remember being vaguely outraged myself. I remember asking myself: would I have been an informer? Or some kind of heroic resistance person, holding out against the pressure through the hopeless years, then vindicated at last when the regime collapsed in 1990.

You can probably guess my answer.

But there’s an affecting clip of Christabel Bielenberg, an English woman married to a German, who spent World War II in Germany, talking through her own mea culpa. She was asked for help by a fugitive Jewish family … and thought of her own family’s safety … and said … no.

Watch the clip. In that situation, I don’t know what I would have done. [The World At War, episode 16; Bielenberg was an active member of the German resistance and, I would say, heroic most of the time. Just that one moment.]

Then yesterday I turned on the radio. They seemed to be talking about the Stasi.

In the old East Germany, the radio told me, people were arrested. They were threatened. But then they were offered a way out. They’d be released if they informed on somebody else, who could then be arrested, and threatened, and offered a way out …

The Stasi kept its performance numbers up. It recruited lots and lots of informers, who informed on lots and lots of – and so on.

Efficiency, right? But the regime collapsed.

I remembered a friend telling me once that there was only full employment in the Soviet Union because you had to accept the job you were offered. The numbers stayed impressive – full employment, yay! – but the entire edifice collapsed.

I think it’s very easy to judge. More importantly, I think moral hazard creeps up on us.

I think every society contains all the personality types necessary to turn it into … anything. I think they bob to the surface according to the circumstances.

The lockdown makes sense, but I wonder if some of the most zealous police officers at the moment are the ones who are, let's put it this way, okay with the idea of keeping us locked up.

In Cornwall, local authorities are inviting the public to inform them of any holiday-cottage owners breaking the lockdown by letting out their properties (to, for example, “escaping” Londoners). Can’t argue against that. Probably wouldn't try.

But no. Thank you. I won't.

In my imaginary novelisation of the current crisis, the lights come up on a journalist watching one of the mid-period ministerial briefings on a big smart TV in an apartment out of a lifestyle ad.

The briefing is the one in which the health secretary answers a question about his recent week off with “mild symptoms”.

He’s feeling great, he says, but yes, he’s still social-distancing. He’s had it, but that doesn’t mean he can’t catch it again and he doesn’t know whether he’s still infectious.

“Expletive deleted,” says the journalist, leaning forward on the sofa they bought in the pre-crisis sale. She’s actually quite foul-mouthed, but I’m a prude so we’re going to have to fix the dialogue in the edit. “I knew it!”

“Huh?” says her partner, who’s sitting on the sofa next to her in his pyjamas, growing a beard and playing a first-person shooter on a laptop.

“Secondary infections!” says our protagonist. She grabs the laptop – yes, of course he protests; he hasn’t saved, etc. – and starts frantically tapping at the keys.

Because this is a tense modern urban documentary-style drama, he peels himself up off the sofa and goes over to the kitchen-part of the room to make himself a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich.

“Oh no!” says the journalist, her face eerily lit from below by more light than could possibly be shining from the laptop screen in front of her. “Oh no!”

Out on the balcony, the string quartet launches into a dark'n'doomy variation on the theme tune (I know I said 'novelisation', but this is a global emergency so we're back in the film).

“Whash-sa-fuff?” says her partner, coming forward from the kitchen. Because this is a tense modern urban documentary-style drama – and uncompromisingly authentic with it – everything he says from now on has to be through a mouthful of peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich.

“Here! Look!” She stands up, comes round the sofa and thrusts the laptop into his hands.

“Ghar-fuh!” He manages to sit back down on the sofa, get the laptop onto his knees, and take another bite of the peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich.

“Phlurf?” he says after a moment. “Es jussa phlog wriff...”

“A blog written by a maverick scientist with interesting spectacles and a little beard whom nobody believes. I know that! But look at this! And this!”

She’s pointing to a news story from South Korea about recovered patients getting ill again. And another one from Japan.

He still doesn’t get it and she doesn’t want any more crumbs sprayed onto their new sofa, so she launches into the exposition that gets the plot started. If we can still get the virus after we’ve had the virus –

– because of all the gritty realism going around, she leaves the door open while she visits the bathroom, and doesn’t stop talking –

– then this is even more serious than we’ve realised.

It’s not the easing of the lockdown that’s the issue –

– because she’s a young female protagonist being written by an older male author who hasn't quite decided on his target audience, she tears off all her clothes in front of the full-length mirror and confirms to herself that those are still there, but doesn’t stop talking –

– so much as the likelihood of a second wave of the infection after the government has used up all its credibility on fighting the first wave.

“Not sure that any of it's true, but if it is, what do we do?” she concludes.

“Say indoorsh?” he says.

“Oh, babe.” She watches him cram the last of the sandwich into his mouth, smearing peanut butter and squished banana everywhere. “Wash your hands.”

Oh no, not "economic growth" again.

News just in that although "our economy" has suffered a hit worse than ever, it's expected to "bounce back" and will resume "economic growth" just as soon as we switch it back on again at the mains.

"Economic growth" is what happens when ever-increasing numbers of people buy ever-increasing quantities of things build in sweaty, overcrowded factories by workers not paid enough to buy their own health care.

You get "economic growth" when ever-increasing numbers of people buy ever-increasing numbers of airline tickets to remote places with exotic germs to which they have no resistance. "Economic growth" is what happens when "the business community" heads back to the execuive lounge and the rest of us form orderly queues for the tourist seats.

Economic growth isn't natural, and nor is it sustainable. It's what we get if we wake up and decide the crisis never happened. Assuming there is a vaccine eventually - assuming we have the option of going back to "normal" - a return to the pursuit of "economic growth" would see us well on our way to the next crisis.

While we're sitting at home not chasing "economic growth", the planet is cleaning up its act. Efficient, isn't it? Fast. More effective than we ever were, with our targets and climate-change conferences.

Let's hope we'll be allowed to come back from this.

Is this the beginning of the end, or is it a transition?

Except for the idiots, we’re all self-isolating. Except for one or two annoying young twerps in running gear, we’re all giving each other two metres of space as we pass on our daily one-piece-of-exercise.

According to the BBC News website’s summary of the government’s briefing last night (I’ve stopped watching the thing itself), the death toll is still rising but the hospital-admission numbers are encouraging – or vice-versa; I forget. It’s getting worse but in an encouraging way. Less worse. Something.

The row over testing kits was a good sign. If we’re all squabbling over who ordered what, when, and why they didn’t have the foresight to do it earlier – we’re doing it because there isn’t any worse news to report.

But we’re doing the thing we do, aren’t we? We’re reporting the news we can measure. Hospital admissions. Deaths in hospital. All reportable numbers.

The “dark matter” in all of this is what’s happening in places where there aren’t neat little agencies to put together numbers on the scale of the crisis. I’m also just a little uneasy about the gap between the reported number of cases – no, not cases; hospital admissions – and the number of beds being made available. How many beds?

China’s numbers aren’t reliable, apparently. No deaths reported the other night, but now, isn’t there a remote village in northern China that’s suddenly been cordoned off?

Africa?

I’m happy to go along with the general view that this is the bit where we make ready for the happy ending.

I am slightly ashamed of my own conspiracy-theorist tendency to spot possible signs that all isn’t as well as it clearly is.

This is real. Like everybody else, I want it to end.

But - what better display of human nature could there be than all the “Minister, could you tell us your plan to get everything back to normal?” questions that now dominate the briefing?

File those under: Fate, tempting.

And don’t expect a victory hug from me. Not just yet.

We’re all longing to be watched.

There was a piece the other day, I forget the source, in which it was suggested that (1) governments have hyped up their surveillance during the pandemic, and (2) they won’t dial it down afterwards. We’ve consented our way into a surveillance economy, society, culture, blah blah.

Okay. Brownie points for turning the happy ending into a dystopia. Just what we need right now.

If surveillance is such a problem, we should get off Facebook. I’ve said this before, but the saving grace of the surveillance economy, society, culture is its sheer incompetence. If any of it worked like it’s promoted, all my consumer wishes would be granted. My life would be one long consumer heaven. But.

What really puts you in control, ha ha, is the freedom to make your own decisions on minor infractions. I can argue the need to double-park with a traffic warden, say, but not with a drone.

Technology removes the consent. Technology won’t listen to you, and won’t decide that just this once…

In the early days of the crisis, the recurring pre-news trailer on the BBC was for a tech show about AI’s ability to transform hospital care. That was around the time the lead news story was persistently the NHS’s shortage of nurses and doctors.

If it comes to it, give me a human hand to hold.

In conversation. We came up with this.

The virus is a warning shot from Gaia. The global panic is the collective nervous breakdown we’ve been trying to have since the turn of the century – or before. The Way We Live Now has been driving us mad since The End Of History at the latest.

But.

Covid-19 has provoked more articles about how this isn’t the planet getting its own back, than articles about how this is the planet getting its own back.

We’re so concerned to refute the notion that this is Gaia’s revenge that you’d almost think we’re worried that this might be – but the whole idea is so ridiculous that I can’t finish the sentence.

This is just a naturally occurring virus that’s jumped from (other) animals to humans. Probably bats. I forget. Just ordinary bats, if so. Not vampire bats. Don’t be silly.

These are rational times.

Before too long, the virus will disappear, global capitalism will start up again, the airlines will reinstate scheduled flights to …. Oh, where shall we say? … Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, among other distant places, and …

… we’ll all buy tickets to fly off to remote hotspots and breathe in the unfamiliar germs – air! I mean, breathe in the unfamiliar air!

And it was all going so well. Sorry about that.

They’re losing it.

The issue with testing has gone on too long. Other countries have tested millions of people; we’ve only tested a handful, et cetera. And the issue with protective clothing. Principal media use of Zoom is to interview nurses and doctors who haven’t been given the right gear.

Nobody can get through to any official body online. Applications for immediate help are going to take time to process. The banks, this morning, are apparently not rising to the government’s invitation to extend loans to businesses about to go under. Surprise.

The government’s daily media briefing now conveys numbers, platitudes and awkward questions. There are more cars on the roads and building work seems to have restarted on a couple of sites locally.

We’re in the middle of a deadly global pandemic and we’re bored with it.

The government(s) had the initiative and now they’ve lost it.

I’ve always slightly taken it for granted that large organisations can’t do anything. Intergovernmental panels on climate change can set targets but they can’t unchanged the climate. Your bank can email you about how helpful it is, but if your business is going under – sorry.

Favourite example: the waitress will check with the manager who will check with head office to find out whether, in future, they will be able to offer vegan mayonnaise to go with my companion’s salad.

So far, the response to the crisis has been most effective at times when the crisis was acute. Back then, there was a reason to tune in to the daily briefing. Back then, there was reason to stay inside.

Now that the crisis is chronic, and nothing much new is happening, we’re in danger of drifting outside for long enough to infect each other.

In a properly organised fictional pandemic, everything progresses in a logical, orderly manner. The virus is lethal; the government gets progressively more totalitarian in its response; people die in their millions; the survivors get together by about Chapter Seven and build an agrarian utopia.

The real thing isn’t dramatic enough. It’s been pointed out that Covid-19 is absolutely the right virus for the way we live now – engineered to take down global travel, densely populated cities, et cetera – but the further aspect of that is – it’s engineered to worm its way past our attention span.

If it’s going to get really, really bad, that’ll be because we lose interest in it.

Wow, this is a cunning virus. It won’t kill us all now, but if it hangs around and enough of us slip outside to get infected and thus keep it going, and then more of us slip outside because nothing dramatic’s happened, and then…

I was thinking about the human capacity to normalise what happens. We’ve been hit by a virus. It’s been there for a while. We’re not supposed to go outside, but expletive deleted, I’ve run out of milk. The shop’s just down the road and I’m sure it won’t matter if…

Every disaster is inconceivable until it happens. Then it’s – you know, the thing that happened.

But – you know – a quick trip to get some milk? That won’t do any harm.