Are we ever going to return to normal?
We have been in this situation for 4 months now. This is unprecedented, and yet everything has the same veneer. Just wearing a mask. Despite how I feel about the anti mask conspiracy clowns, it does feel strange wearing one. Seeing and wearing masks just reminds you of the reality; as if you can wish it away by refusing to participate. Perhaps that's why those people hate them so much.
Calling them muzzles though is a deliberately provocative and political statement. It's also pants on head stupid.
I have been more strongly considering travelling. I have not left the local boundary in all these months. I cannot think of a comparable time. Yet it is as if there is an invisible barrier preventing me - or maybe those weird beach balls that rise up from the sea in the Prisoner. I am not a number, but I'm certainly not free of the virus. The local area has quite a high infection count: 421 cases per 100k people. There are about 200k people hereabouts. 4 new cases this last week. 1 more than the previous week. That doesn't sound a lot does it, but...is it? It's hard to know. I could be quite safe travelling - I hope. But you just don't know. Uncertainty has been bred into our social DNA now and it's going to be a long process extracting that. Despite how much our useless lump PM wants us all to go to Greggs or Pret.
It simply doesn't feel safe and, without an absolutely essential reason (I don't think socks counts), it also feels frivolous. We may never be free of the virus; it may remain, lurking here and there, threatening the flare up. This is the reality we must adjust to. Unfortunately the people doing the adjusting are monsters still hell bent on driving us off a cliff come December.
You might think that, given the crisis and its effects on the economy, that the Brexit headbangers now populating government (the rest got purged) would at least postpone Brexit. That's reasonable, right? But nope. They are hell bent, it seems, on pursuing this to the bitterest and most severe end. No deal, no future. It won't be them that suffers either, be sure of that. Nobody elected Dominic Cummings and so he will face no consequence.
Meanwhile there's cricket on the green, kids playing in the river (gods' I didn't have the strength to tell them about Lyme disease) in the heat, and the play areas open again. It's like the summer holidays begun early, except framed in disease. A Covid Constable.
Nothing except everything is different and it is very confusing. You?
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