All the Good Boys Bend Over. Degrading Democracy.

Permitted exercise

Pulling the door behind me and stepping out on to the path, I take a breath of the good clean air.  I  check to see who's in my path, who's breathing my air as they pass, and who might object to the space I'm intending to claim for a walk.  Permitted Exercise.

                               cocooning

Navigating the brave new world ordained by our (good boy) Government is not for the fainthearted, people.  It's a trip down the rabbit hole where the public space is forbidden the Over 70s. Period. Regardless. Well or ill or robust, doesn't matter.  Makes no difference. They can stay in their houses can't they? They can be left in there alone, can't they? Just a few months we can steal from what's left of their good living days, can't we?  Sure, it won't be the same for them, Limbo.  Not as though life moves with any felt tumult through their ageing veins. Not as if the sweet song of sound and vision, birdsong and burgeoning nature sings to them or for them.   Nor connection, fined tuned over a lifetime, with God in the ground you walk, the long line of trees on the river road, the first pale pink hint of the apple blossom, needs preserving.  Cocooning.

                                                     within two kilometres              

I am developing an etiquette out there on the open ground. Sometimes its like Easter. Open-ended Easter. The light, the calm quiet spaces you find on that holiday, that gift of days when work stops, schools close, traffic thins, a holiday without Christmas frenzy,  summer crowds.  It's Easter, there are only chocolate eggs and Christ dying and rising again in the gentle melancholy of Holy week. On those days, my brain says it's Easter! I'll take it!

Sometimes it's End of Days, Mordor.  You are a wraith meeting wraiths and Winter is Coming.  Grey sky only slightly less ominous than the silent spreading gloom in your house, the stale air in your living room, redolent of sanitiser, bleach. Your hands in your pockets close-fisted,  skinned red. Within two Kilometres.

                                                                             with (un)social distancing

Days where the people cross the road 20 metres back when they see you, when you see them, or else shuffle out to the edge of the pavement as you segue unto the grass margin, to pass.  When you catch the eye of the other out of stubbornness, need,  exact a wavering smile, a blank nothing, depending.
                           
Days you reach Main Street, hear your shoes slap the pavement as you pass shops shuttered, doors closed, an emptied out world.  But wait, just up there on the corner, a gang of men calling loudly, talking loose, claiming space. You will not cross the road, you do not walk around them but though them to throw them off course as you have learned to do.  Scattered,  they separate, the sense of tension that is not quite menace, easing. For that day, for that time, at least. Social Distancing.

                                                                                                              and tell on your neighbours (do)

A speeding jogger,  a flying cyclist, two girls softly chatting, a woman pulls out her phone...to report them? Well maybe.  I listen to one such on the radio yesterday,  enraged by joggers,  indicting flying cyclists, pleading for policing, arrests!  You are invited, no, encouraged! to unleash your inner paranoiac, your instinct to judge, your will to control.  All the glad haters come in from the cold!  The Swedes says their people have judgement, discretion, control. Go, Prime Minister Loften! They hold the line, the public space, as the rest of Europe watches and waits for them to fail. Anticipates failure. And tell on your neighbours.

                                                                               
                                                                                                 necessary journeys

I remember the scattered men later, alone in my car on my solitary shopping trip for groceries, medicines.  Alerted, the hair standing stiff on the back of my neck, as a lorry drives tight to my bumper, trailer rocking perilous behind,  never once falling back on a ten km journey.  I speed up, he speeds up,  he does not pass.  I slow below the speed limit, grit my teeth and watch him through my side mirror as he watches me, slowing, revving, slowing, bumper to bumper until I turn off the road for the shop.

A few days later I get out of the path of a carload of howling boys, slipping unto the hard shoulder sharpish from necessity. Necessary Journeys.
 
                                                                       so why as I doing this again?

I'm going with this lockdown, this shutting down, for now.  This slowing down of a lung eating virus, dispatching those of us already in the departure lounge,  threatening those beloved others living by grace of Vaccine, Transplant, Chemotherapy, but tell me this good boy Varadkar, all of you good boys voting in your emergency laws on Friday last,  giving way everyway to a virus, (as you gave way to Bankers, a decade ago) to whom do you imagine we're ceding our public space. Who and what will colonise, gain ground, in the spaces we have so obediently vacated. Every idle bad actor, every dispossessed, untethered soul, rocking up from the highways and byways vacated, that's who.


Even as Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, gain ground in the world.  While we carry on carrying on, turning back a Virus that keeps on coming regardless.  About which the science is not clear. You think you can easily turn back this tide boys? can whistle back an abandoned economy, throw in a shifting Sunset Clause to a Charter for a Police State, an Autocracy.  And afterwards, Pandora goes obligingly back in her box?  Do you know you don't know what you do? And why am I doing this, again.

                                                       degrading oppression.                                                                            

I talked with a man last year,  a refugee to whom asylum was granted after long years in Direct Provision, after endless Requests, Appeals, and Court applications.  He told me every counted hour of trying, waiting, disappointment, was worth it to be here and not there under the dictatorship he escaped. He told me how the very air in that country was poisoned from top down, how the stealing of personal space, of any say, of human rights, degraded all.  All.  Those who assumed the power and those who allowed it to be taken from them, whether they could stop it or not.  You did what they said until you could not,  he told me, and then you ran for your life from your own hopelessness, depression, despair.  Degrading Oppression.

  ... only for a little while...

Back home, my daughter's days are entirely virtual. She sits for her virtual lectures, has virtual chats with her struggling, jittering friends, consigned all to virtual reality.  She sings like an angel alone in her room,  Billie Eilish today.  She uploads on Instagram, for her friends, for her virtual audience,  for me.  For us, who have failed to hold the space for her and for all the jittering girls and boys.  Failed... as the good boys fail us.

"Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me".

....only for a little while?

OH CORONA

Having a sustaining glass of wine,  post shopping for (essential) supplies.  Just a quick in and out I figured, just  a few necessaries, bread, wine.  I stand in a snaking queue for the check out, pushed and rushed and shaken by a panicked crowd, wondering whether, maybe, the universe had sent a plague to test us, shake us, hold a mirror to us, people.  I have a notion that the Virus, all the Viruses, have a function, shifting, nudging body rhythms in effect,  altering perceptions ( of survivors ).  The Virus as an instrument that refines, retunes, reboots, releases, human bodies.

Holding up a mirror, showing us what we are, or have become:

1.  Supplies.

We are not short of foodstuffs people. We have more stuff stashed.  Foodstuff, medications, sanitisers,  tissues, loo roll, paper towels.  We have warehouses,  supermarkets, trucks a  trucking across continents with stuff, more stuff,  And yet, and still, and anyway here we are.  Pushing, shoving, grabbing, emptying shelves so that we will have it before the next woman takes it.  I WILL have my sliced bread and my loo roll in my bunker.  I WILL ALWAYS eat (and wipe my bottom) whatever!  Whenever! things run out...on you.

2.  Loving Care.

Don't touch, don't hold, don't speak too closely, whisper kiss, go skin on skin.  Don't accidentally brush, doors handles, people, petrol nozzles.   I think of orphanages, in Eastern Europe before Glasnost,  all the love lorn places, where infants, tiny humans, were driven mad,  irreparably stunted by lack of touch.  Forget the loo roll, people, grab a loved one, snatch a partner, take an infant, a random relative, into the lock-down coming down the tracks.

3.  Go Virtual (at your peril)

And here we'll be corralled in our houses, busy bees  remotely working, living, eating, safe removed from human contact, in the kind of isolated bubble Child Psychologists, Talking Heads, tell us leads to (has led to) to over-weigh, disabled, anxious teens. Teens are us.

4.   Avoidance.

Is this lockdown for a week, a month, a year? Are we shadow boxing with a mystery Virus
which may or (may not) have been here for  a week, a month, a....since November 2019?  Eh?
Who can say? People have been dying, getting better, since November last (or forever).  Of... well ...something! Influenza?  No one panicked? No one knew back then to blame, to name, Corona.

So now we know. What do we know? We know The Virus will be defeated by the young folk who are not, if they are not, immune compromised. There will be an uneven battle with the old, the sick, and all those people whose immune function has been messed up, broken down, un-underused. All the people insulated by vaccine from the common cold, the influenza, everyday infections, whose immune systems sag flaccid and unused. How many are there of those people? Do we know?

5.   Fear:  

The hardest thing to hold steady in the mind, for us poor humans, is that fact that we will die. So we do not ( hold it in the mind)  We cosset children, prolong adolescence, hobble resilience, suck the marrow from the buzz of living,  rather than let life flow to dying when it comes. We vaccine, insure, corral, distance ourselves to the point where children suffer anxious states, self harm to feel,  grow into helpless half baked adults, narcisstic, lost, irresolute. We would not let them face the perils of the world and leave them reaching after chemical highs. We will not face the abyss, or accept the defining, life enhancing clarity, that we will die.

6.  Denial:

I listen to the pundits, politicians on the radio, on the TV,  Social Media, getting off,  enlivened, as they talk talk talk.  Oh, not about the Virus, no,  but about the things we'll do to stop this happening, backs turned oblivious to the Elephant in the Room. We cannot stop this, people? We can delay it, yes, give the always patchy Health Service, our heroic Health Care Staff, a break,  but can't, we can't  close down normal service indefinitely,  or turn the Virus back.  And so we lock-down for a month, six months, a  year, await a vaccine.  And then the next Corona, and the next, and the next one after that.  Each one oncoming sooner than the one before.  Until we learn. We can only live, eat, mind ourselves cannily,  live, until we die.

7.  Consolation.

There is a strange strange turnabout just now between the minders and those who must be minded, that is truly rich.  How often have I listened lately to the young ones blaming, claiming, wailing how I, and you, have stolen their future, wrecked their planet, used up all the good stuff leaving none for them.  How often tried to soothe their youthful terrors, anxieties, about climate change, the carbon footprint, a planet dying while they're on it,  quite before their time.  Apologies, soothing, good attention, silence offered as they speak, accuse, indict.  Rage, against this, that I have not and you have not prevented dying, ending, death. That we will not.

And now it's us, the minders, first, who face this grim and grinning Reaper.  And I'm waiting for the Darlings to step up, get the picture, read the writing on the wall.   See true and clear, unblinkered,  for whom this great bell tolls.

My daughter, my cell mate in isolation, drops a Newspaper article from 2017 in my lap concerning long dormant Viruses awakening.... from frozen places melting,  from buried places unearthed, from forests burned for profit,  headless hardcore fracking.   Elephants in the Room.