It's a different world

FREEDOM!  (NOT FREEDOM...)

Fourteen long days have gone by and I released back into the wild.  In an earlier post I mentioned we were both self isolating and not venturing out until third of April.  Clearly whatever the bug was it affected my brain since I was unable to add up past a baker's dozen.  Today was the day, not tomorrow.

For me it couldn't come soon enough.  Never mind the actual illness, spending day after day in centrally heated rooms is enervating in itself.  My brief forays out on to the balcony were never enough.  So it was good to be back out, albeit alone.  I still have a bit of tightness in my chest, but am otherwise feeling fully recovered.  Not so Barbara who is not yet strong enough to hit the mean streets and still drifts off to sleep from time to time, still has headaches.  But she had it worse than me from the start.  A few more days yet.

Has it been THE virus?  We still don't know.  Maybe we never will.  Strange times.

The official lockdown hadn't started when we shut ourselves away so it's a different world to return to, a world of restrictions, but also a world that feels fresher and more peaceful.  And with better stocked shelves!  First time I've seen a tin of tomatoes in weeks.  How quickly we recalibrate our definitions of joyfulness.

Few people on the streets, few cars, everyone keeping their distance, buses almost empty.  We now have to live under more draconian legislation than most of us have ever experienced, but being out in such quiet (in an area that is supposedly the mostly densely populated in Scotland) brings an odd sense of freedom to being out.  Even though you know you can't be out for long it feels more like a holiday than the apocalypse.

Out of curiosity I went past three supermarkets to see what was happening.  They all looked quiet, but only one, the local Sainsbury, had a queueing system (strictly 2m+ apart of course) and a one-out, one-in policy.  The homeless guy outside one had a sign saying thanks to everyone who'd given him money, but he'd be having to find some other way to survive now.  Nobody is carrying change any more.  Will this be one of the long term outcomes from this crisis - the death of cash?  And a consequent knock on to those who relied on the kindness of strangers?

We don't know yet, will not know for months to come maybe.  But this different world is going to remain different, in ways we can't foresee.  Capitalism has failed to cope and may not recover, at least in the aggressive form we've seen develop over the past forty years.  UKGov daily briefings give us a conveyor belt of identikit lying twats who, defying credibility, are all apparently cabinet ministers.  The only thing that can make Doris look vaguely competent is comparison with the orange manbaby across the water, where a disaster beyond Italian proportions appears to be unravelling.  We urgently need that different world.  We need to be out of this broken UK.