Covid, lockdown and a changing society?

I don't know about you, but the world has really changed.

That freedom to roam the globe, we all had before this virus struck is unlikely to return in the same way as we had before, and the conditions of travelling anywhere will be almost draconian with countries demanding a full vaccination [probably with boosters every year] to even contemplate entering their shores.

Travel will be more expensive as the companies strip themselves back to more streamline businesses, aeroplanes sold off, pilots not returning after furlough ends, ground staff, baggage handlers, taxi companies, hotels and food and coffee vendors all being impacted by the changes which are already creeping in.

Ports will have to change as well, restricting those who travel by sea to fewer in number per ship thus making each passenger pay a higher proportion of the overall costs. Fewer travellers means a smaller ship’s company, fewer ships [many already sold for scrappage], fewer berthing demands and the list of those affected goes on.

That’s just one industry, what about the High Street? The shops which supported the cafes to flourish, the small entrepreneurial establishments which grew from the footfall created by the browsers, the cafe crowds, the office workers?

Yes, the world has really changed and will never return to what it was, the world will turn and something new will emerge to take into account a much needed re-balance.

To me that’s good, it’s accelerated progress caused by a world catastrophe, ironically like the two world wars and the irreversible changes they created.

So what will emerge? I’ve no idea but then I am one of the Baby Boomer generation who saw to the changes after the war recovery years, now its time for us to hand the baton onto the millennials who need to carry the torch until the teenagers of now take hold of the reins and wield the whip and wield it they will. In many ways they remind me of a baby boomer mark two generation. High ideals and ready to take on the world at all costs.

They look at our wasting of the planet and are calling Time.

Good on them and more power to their elbow is what I say. Let’s hear their words and start that journey with greater intensity than we are giving ourselves now.

The boys are back.....

 

The crew sat in their rooms, alone and bored. They slowly gravitated to chatting over social media and having demolished girls, football and their usual watering hole, they sank into a space of abject boredom.

Gary decided Assassins Creed was called for and for the next couple of hours they lost themselves in their latest battle. They had a laugh but they were still bored. They needed to get out.

Lockdown or not they just had to go and agreed to meet up down by the boarded up arcade, Gold-mine, on the seafront. Usually the arcade was open and they loved meeting up down there, playing some of the games, popping to the cafe at the back and maybe having a laugh on the beach if the tide was out. Even in the winter the arcade could be relied upon to give some sort of social interaction but not now, not since covid started. Stefano had tried to keep it open but the restrictions were just too much and he decided to cut his losses and close up until the worst was over and people wanted to come back to the coast. Everyone in the small businesses along the seafront prayed for three things; the government opening up the country, the weather to be good and people to just want to spend money on having a good time.

Cold and shivering, they got together and laughed and larked about for what seemed like forever. They needed this, their pent up frustrations escaping in mindless acts; graffiting walls, smashing old bottles, chasing each other with bits of dead rat on the ends of sticks and breaking into their arcade.

Having run a muck inside there for some time one of them bumped into a game console that was still on. Blowing off the dust and clearing the mess away they found the games switch, tried it and amazingly it bust into life.

Their luck was in, and they fought over who would have the first go. The fact no other machines worked didn’t cross their minds. The fact none of them had ever noticed this machine before didn't either. At least they weren’t in their bedrooms under the watchful eye of mum or dad.

Shane managed to bag the first game.

It was about strategy, the aim of which was to kill as many people with one strike as possible. The first strike created two hits and then four and so on, but the targets were blank people at the lower levels, these were the training levels; by choosing the right one out of the crowd they were able to spread their death rays throughout and eventually throughout the continent.

It seemed to be similar to one of the games they’d often played called Contagion, but older and the graphics were pants. Larking about, jostling and shoving each other eventually they each had a go to varying degrees of success but after about forty minutes they got bored and stopped playing choosing instead to take the piss out of each other’s prowess.

The game station was abandoned and they retraced their steps back outside into the dreary weather.

Kicking cans and anything they could find that resembled a ball, they headed down to the canal and larked about throwing things into the canal for no other reason that it was something to do, but hunger caught up with them and reluctantly they had to head back.

At least they’d been out. At least they’d had time together with their mates.

They got shouted at by family for going out but with a customary shrug, it soon passed. Dinner followed by more time spent on the computer leading to sleep and another day of abject boredom.

Again they got out and met up and again they played the games machine and messed around on the canal. They got better at that cheesy game every time they went down until they managed to reach the platinum level where you could name the puppets and try to bump them off.

Ryan chose his maths teacher, science teacher and RE, oh how he disliked that woman. Harry suggested his uncle for reasons he never would say, the English teacher because she was soo boring and Chez his boss at work because he made him work to hard for £25 for a Saturday morning. The others stood around and watched as they bumped off half the teachers at school, the swats and some of the ugly girls who they just added just for fun.

Then the strangeness started happening.

Harry’s uncle was admitted to hospital and was on the intensive care ward for three months. They worried he wouldn’t recover but he did. He had many problems when he came out and to Harry it seemed as though he had lost the will to fight.

Chez was made redundant. His boss had had to sell up. His wife had died of covid recently and he wanted to go back to Denver where his parents were.

Ryan’s school had a massive covid outbreak and most staff and over third of the students who were attending became ill; several died, most of them from the vulnerable group of kids who had attended all the way through the lock downs and had been fine up until now.

An inquiry started and found nothing; no smoking gun, no obvious cause but the maths teacher had a heart attack from covid damage and later died. 

The RE teacher ended up having to look after her mother full time because she was shielding. Mum  had somehow contracted the virus, possibly from her daughter's quick visits to the supermarket, there were no delivery slots to be had. The RE teacher blamed herself and already on anti-depressants she had just done a second test as she was worried; was she the carrier. How could she look after her mother?

As time rolled on, the people who had had the targets on their back in the game, fell ill and Ryan became all the more alarmed at what he heard. That group of girls he hated because they were swats were slowly ending up in hospital or laid up at home. Not one of them was spared and it turned out they had all attended a revision class at school and spent time together.

He went back to the arcade and moved the boards back; the game still purred away, the contagion was into its fourth or fifth variant and he stood and watched as the screen flickered away slowly killing off or eradicating other nameless people, further and further away from where they lived.

He tried to stop the game.

It flashed up a message; “Thank you for playing and this program will now proceed into random generation”

He turned and promptly threw up on the floor, what had he done? He called his friends.....

March time musings

 Well, its now March and we are still locked down and I am getting rather in need of...well, getting out and about really. It’s been some time since I have travelled anywhere and this is so unusual for me. This is more like confinement rather than lockdown and if it’s getting to me I dread to think how it is affecting the less stoic individuals in society.

There's a lot of news around mental health, crisis and the like and its good to hear it coming out into the open, but some people do seem to enjoy being the victim and wallow in the story too much for their own health, and ironically, well being.

I realise I may sound unsympathetic and I’m not, I have empathy for where they find themselves and I know it’s hard to get out of that hole. I’ve been the martyr, the one lost in my story of wow and loss but as I qualified and learnt more about the human psyche, I realised this makes the whole situation worse.

By turning towards the Present and working towards a Future, not staring deeply into the Past all the time, we can move on. We can get over everything if we choose to and there are so many people out there capable of teaching these skills, they are worth seeking out. Even talking about the Future and plans you’d like to make will add the flesh to the bones of Desire and start stripping the power of the Past back where it is, the Past.

What’s the phrase? The Past can only make you stronger. So true, so very true, and in my experience, not only stronger but so much wiser too.

What I learned was there is a great deal of difference between breaking down and suffering from depression; the former we can work our way out of, the latter invariably requires medical intervention before strategies can be learned so as to avoid the body sinking into its unbalanced state.

I deal with the whole thing by concentrating on what I am going to do next. I am ever the optimist now, booking adventures away from home, seeking out new places to visit, exploring my love of art, nature, music and anything which grabs my attention, bringing pleasure to this brain of mine. I love wandering, travelling on trains and buses, staying in hotels and just being nosy. These days I really don’t have time to be depressed, I make sure I have things to do or things to get excited about. My latest is a trip back into the Arctic only this time I am going even further up the Norwegian coast to the very top and hunt for the Northern Lights, seals, whales, birds, wow, just everything. Stand at the edge of the fjord where the whales were brought in to be butchered and cry at the cruelty of it, visit the hamlets up there and of course go into Tromsø. So excited I can feel me bouncing up and down and squealing inside.

Racism has hit the news in a big way too and I am so glad it has, it is something I have actively worked to reduce. For all those years I taught secondary students I worked hard to get them to appreciate there is no difference with how someone looks, walks, talks or the fashion they wear, underneath we are all pretty much the same. Some of us enjoy the outdoors, others enjoy skate and snowboarding, whilst others would rather stay indoors and write poetry or prose, paint a mural or record music. We’re all different but fundamentally the same.

One of my closest friends is part Irish part St Lucian I think it is. Anyway, it wasn’t until we were in a local cafe close to where I live, I noticed hostility toward him. We’d invariably met in London, had a great day together exploring art galleries, museums and vegan restaurants and to be honest I’d not noted his skin tone. Why should I? We shared so many common interests it is irrelevant to me. He always reminded me of an Irish gypsy more than anything. He walked, dressed and talked like one. He is itinerant too travelling between London, Germany and Ireland showing and selling his art in galleries. He’s very talented and starting to get a following which is really great.

Then we met near my home and I suddenly became aware. Honestly, I hadn’t noticed before and was thoroughly ashamed of the people in that cafe and pretty damn ashamed of being a white person too. Last thing I wanted to be painted with was the same brush as those ignorant people.

It never ceases to amaze me how all this animosity to each other stems from a simple neurological sorting skill of same or different; if you don’t understand the concept then watch early learners as they learn to make friends. Initially they sort for sameness; a head, two eyes, and the desire to have fun, then a new skill is taken on, that of sorting for difference and its from here acceptance and denial is born.

“I don’t like you, you’ve got funny teeth”

Its the time when bullying starts, separation into friendship groups begins and the formation and cementing of gangs, clans, bonds, love affairs, hatreds, fear, bias, and all the other nuances of the, “you’re different from me” that builds over time and is reinforced by family values.

Why do we need it? Well, to be honest its a hang over from primitive times when we stuck to our clan or extended family group for security and why we invariably bred with them too.

Yet again, the position of women in society has raised its head and with twists and turns which started tragically and ended with an aborted vigil in London which was so ridiculous it was almost comic. How a vigil for the death of one woman at the hands of a man turned into the man-handling of women, the very act most of us fear every day.

I was on Twitter and a feed caught my eye; a man raising cane at the prospect men could be villainised by women and they should learn to live with it. Oddly, it made me so tearful, mainly with the exhaustion of this argument, I shut him up with one tweet which he couldn’t repudiate. As I said, I wasn’t sure when my fear developed but it might have been when I was pushed against a wall and felt up, or a car cruising to a stop and asking me how much for the night. Or was it the attack on the Tube as a gang kicked me to the floor for my bag or then again the knife attack, or could it be the gun held to my head? Silence. Hopefully he might think on it, but I doubt it.

Sadly, with sexual intercourse occurring in the way it does, man enters woman, then the domination will continue by those males who get a kick from doing just that.

Bring on the Dominatrix in all of us I say.

It made me contemplate the whole inequality thing and how if you are not white Caucasian and male then you fall into a hierarchy of positioning which is very much a hang over from days of yaw. For a society which prides itself in being civilised, its very backward in my opinion. We are all homo sapiens adapted to carry out our tasks with differing skill sets. Shouldn’t these be used to their betterment and success not their detriment and segregation? Shouldn’t we celebrate variety rather than bow to the power of a singular-type ruling? Lets face it, look at our governments, if you are from the West, what do they mainly consist of?

The weather’s been a bit odd hasn’t it, what with snowing in Italy and Greece, the almost Arctic conditions which hit parts of the USA, the black outs they suffered and loss of water supply because it was so cold. And yet those is the Arctic have the converse problem of permafrost melting, seas not properly freezing and them not being able to sustain themselves let alone the other mammals who live there. If there is anyone who can cling to the notion that mankind hasn’t had a hand in the changes we are experiences then they are suffering from a very large blind spot, or is it a delusional level of arrogance that says we can do anything because we are Mankind, home sapiens, the top predator?

Mm, I must admit when I look dispassionately at the species, Mankind, I see it as a plague of locusts literally raping the land of every resource it can get its little grubby hands on and sadly, Mankind has the technology to dig very deeply for it too and not thinking this will have a geological effect someday is not only short sighted, but irresponsible. But then, I genuinely think the NIMBY attitude drives a great deal of this stupidity.

Where or even how we gained the title of Man Kind I will never understand, let’s face it, we are far from “kind” to the earth or to each other are we?

I am one of those people who can lose herself in gardening, the natural world, ecology, climate and continual learning. I have been so grateful for that outlet during the three lock downs. Jobs I needed to do, wanted to do and generally decided would be a good idea to do are now in the process of completion. I have all but finished the back garden [as far as painting the allegorical Forth bridge will allow], found a gardener who is interested in plants [a rare thing these days round here] and is keen to work with me, turning my little spot of heaven into a lush Eden.

I have planned routes to walk in Kent and almost wish I had a dog to give me the courage to step out further along them as they look so interesting. Hey ho, such is life and the fears which come with experience.

So the important date for us in the UK is 29^th March, maybe, if we’re lucky, if everything goes according to plan that is. Fingers crossed and I’ll be out those starting gates like a greyhound only I won’t need a rabbit to get me going, just a bus ticket a shopping bag and some money in my pocket.

Hoping everyone is staying well and hasn’t had to face a funeral in the recent past. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for warmer weather, weddings, picnics in the park and outdoor events.