Not that this changes anything, but I picked up an old copy of the Weekend FT magazine (25/26 April 2020) and found a piece by the author Siri Hustvedt in which she describes the virus as a "biological zombie".
So we are, after all, facing a zombie apocalypse. Not important, makes no difference, I know, but I like the reminder of how persistently The Unexpected makes fools of us.
Don't be ridiculous - of course there's no such thing as a zombie apocalypse.
Except that now, there is.
Such confidence! The world fits within our understanding.
Except that now, it doesn't.
Today, I'm not so much bothered by the prospect of a Second Wave of the pandemic, as I am impressed (but not in a good way) by how clearly, and in what detail, we can describe what's coming.
Just as we've convinced ourself that the present pandemic - the exact problem we face now - was foreseeable all along in just precisely the form it's taken - look up all the measured explanations of the recent past - so we're clear on the form that the Second Wave will take.
Autumn is Coming, and with it the flu/Second Wave season.
No. Don't see it. The predictability, I mean.
The virus has a morality to it - Dr Fauci was just on my radio saying that people should think of others when they refuse to, ah, socially distance - and it seems to challenge every attempt to reduce it to a known quantity. [See also Is Covid-19 meant, and if so, what does it mean? from a few weeks back.]
Once The Second Coming Of Covid-19 has decimated the population - and feel free to look up the correct meaning of the word 'decimate' - perhaps we could also talk about the role of central government.
There was the farce of the 100,000 daily tests, not, and now my radio is telling me that local authorities have been fighting to get infection data out of central government. Boris is jumping up and down shouting "Build, Build, Build" and we're all supposed to get the hint that this is a New Deal, geddit?
I know the people in my Nextdoor group - my neighbours. I know several of the people on my local council. I'm a moderator on a local self-help Facebook group. We sent a woman to Westminster in the General Election, but her voice is one among hundreds. I don't remember her name.
I'm not so much exasperated by central government's incompetence, as exasperated by the whole idea that central government could be competent. Whatever "government" is, it doesn't seem to work at that scale.
I'm unequivocally a local, and as I write that - intending to continue with something vaguely sarcastic about fragmenting national identity - I remember the local feeling about non-locals coming down here during the lockdown. Burdening our one hospital ... all that.
PPE, testing and tracing, that app - I don't want to get sidetracked. My point: incompetence by virtue of scale. My follow-up banging-on-about-it same-point-again: they're too far distant from us to do any better. In a crisis, in practice, England is too fragmented to be a viable administrative unit. Maybe economically, maybe internationally, but not when we're facing a social, cultural, health, existential crisis.
Maybe after all, the New Normal won't evolve in response to people not going out even when they can. Maybe the New Normal will be forced into being by local authorities wresting control from the centre and closing their own borders.
Or maybe we'll just change without realising we're changing. We'll look back one day and say, did we really behave like that?
So many deliveries. So many parcels. My innovation of the day would be re-usable packaging. Not just plastic that mulches down into fertiliser, or whatever it does, but cardboard boxes printed on the inside with puzzles and games. Perhaps also large-item cardboard boxes that can be refolded origami-style into tables and children's castles. Dotted lines and silhouettes of scissors.
So we are, after all, facing a zombie apocalypse. Not important, makes no difference, I know, but I like the reminder of how persistently The Unexpected makes fools of us.
Don't be ridiculous - of course there's no such thing as a zombie apocalypse.
Except that now, there is.
Such confidence! The world fits within our understanding.
Except that now, it doesn't.
Today, I'm not so much bothered by the prospect of a Second Wave of the pandemic, as I am impressed (but not in a good way) by how clearly, and in what detail, we can describe what's coming.
Just as we've convinced ourself that the present pandemic - the exact problem we face now - was foreseeable all along in just precisely the form it's taken - look up all the measured explanations of the recent past - so we're clear on the form that the Second Wave will take.
Autumn is Coming, and with it the flu/Second Wave season.
No. Don't see it. The predictability, I mean.
The virus has a morality to it - Dr Fauci was just on my radio saying that people should think of others when they refuse to, ah, socially distance - and it seems to challenge every attempt to reduce it to a known quantity. [See also Is Covid-19 meant, and if so, what does it mean? from a few weeks back.]
Once The Second Coming Of Covid-19 has decimated the population - and feel free to look up the correct meaning of the word 'decimate' - perhaps we could also talk about the role of central government.
There was the farce of the 100,000 daily tests, not, and now my radio is telling me that local authorities have been fighting to get infection data out of central government. Boris is jumping up and down shouting "Build, Build, Build" and we're all supposed to get the hint that this is a New Deal, geddit?
I know the people in my Nextdoor group - my neighbours. I know several of the people on my local council. I'm a moderator on a local self-help Facebook group. We sent a woman to Westminster in the General Election, but her voice is one among hundreds. I don't remember her name.
I'm not so much exasperated by central government's incompetence, as exasperated by the whole idea that central government could be competent. Whatever "government" is, it doesn't seem to work at that scale.
I'm unequivocally a local, and as I write that - intending to continue with something vaguely sarcastic about fragmenting national identity - I remember the local feeling about non-locals coming down here during the lockdown. Burdening our one hospital ... all that.
PPE, testing and tracing, that app - I don't want to get sidetracked. My point: incompetence by virtue of scale. My follow-up banging-on-about-it same-point-again: they're too far distant from us to do any better. In a crisis, in practice, England is too fragmented to be a viable administrative unit. Maybe economically, maybe internationally, but not when we're facing a social, cultural, health, existential crisis.
Maybe after all, the New Normal won't evolve in response to people not going out even when they can. Maybe the New Normal will be forced into being by local authorities wresting control from the centre and closing their own borders.
Or maybe we'll just change without realising we're changing. We'll look back one day and say, did we really behave like that?
So many deliveries. So many parcels. My innovation of the day would be re-usable packaging. Not just plastic that mulches down into fertiliser, or whatever it does, but cardboard boxes printed on the inside with puzzles and games. Perhaps also large-item cardboard boxes that can be refolded origami-style into tables and children's castles. Dotted lines and silhouettes of scissors.