It has been this way for a long time, and part of my nature I suppose, that I play the part of a small cog in the running of things. Andrew, on the other hand, tackles the ‘big’ things. So while he amasses and uses builders’ kit, materials, plumbing, wiring, plaster, carpentry things, tools, gadgets etc and achieves works which are relatively public and long-lasting, my works tend to be very small, routine, anonymous, lubricant really - laundry, washing up, wiping down, tidying. I pull his clothes the right way round before they dry so that they’re ready to put on, and he doesn’t know that. I dead-head, water, repot, sweep, clean. I do these things because they need doing, I quite like doing them and get some satisfaction (even though I do get irritated when the clear tidied spaces I have made get mucked up almost instantly….sigh).
This has been noticeable in the longer term aspects of my life too. It wasn’t that I was short of grand ideas - things which might make a difference in the world, but I had no instinct for making big changes or improvements. The thought of being an engineer in charge of building a motorway or a bridge would leave me very cautious indeed. I have plenty of ideas about new things which could be manufactured but no impulse to set up a factory or find people to design and make.
So, during this strange locked-down life, where I barely leave the house, and everything is quiet, I find my small activities are fine - ordinary, really, not much change. But whatever fantasies I have about large-scale things are almost entirely lived online. That includes picking up stray ideas and kooky notions as well as considering in an almost totally unconscious way what is happening. I am mostly avoiding the news programmes, but seeing what happens via Twitter and FB - anything really big filters through. Some of my anxieties, therefore, are about the global politics - the way ‘we’ have swung into not just agreeing to but wilfully wanting to be confined in our houses. We have discovered informers among us, people gleefully willing to snitch on neighbours, criticise and blame. We had the supermarket gannets who plundered the shelves leaving nothing for others (and then threw so much of their ridiculous over purchasing away…. What a terrible waste!). We saw and remarked on two spectacular and high vapour trails yesterday... today online people are saying these are chem-trails, military flights with sinister import. Who knows? We actually are seeing how ‘they’ have successfully commoditised the air itself…. some (NestlĂ©, in particular) have held that no-one has the right to fresh drinking water, and I always felt someone would want to do the same for breathing…. Now they have managed it. I can easily foresee how governments might require us to buy licences to step outside our front doors, or our neighbourhoods. This would be a tax on access to sunshine and fresh air, exercise, distance, landscape. They’ve done it.
I was amused to try on a bra which I bought online a year or so ago... claiming to be v comfortable, zipping up at the front. It took me TWENTY minutes to do it. I posted a short note about this on FB, and have had some predictably amused responses. Twenty minutes! Damn thing kept bursting asunder.
Meanwhile a doctor in New York (Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell) has bravely pointed out via YouTube that the disease does NOT appear to be pneumonia, but more like altitude sickness - and he tried to amend treatments accordingly but that was too difficult for the medical teams in his ICU. So he has resigned and gone back to being an ER consultant, where he can set up different treatments - ie. applying oxygen but NOT under high pressure. He points out that whereas pneumonia patients cannot complete sentences, CV19 patients can… .in other words the way they fall short of breath is different, and the exhaustion is different. I initially posted this in a slightly unfortunate wrapping - it had been picked up first by one of the loony brigade who said it confirms their belief that the new 5G mobile phone systems are producing similar oxygen absorption problems… and she did a top-n-tail on his otherwise faultless video. I had no idea how to share his video without including her thoughts, and I even suggested people should listen to what she said… And for this I received some nasty responses. It may yet turn out to be the case that 5G does cause this illness in some way, or exacerbates it. Who knows? I loathe and loathe the self-appointed curators who try to stop people even mentioning these things. There are a lot of them. I challenged one - AB - and asked her how my post endangered lives (her reason, she said, for demanding I take my post down), and she said she’d get back to me, but has not yet.
So - the calm and peace is welcome. The light and the arrival of spring is wonderful - birdsong, blossom, quiet, streets eerily empty. But today I heard from quite a few people who are really getting wobbly about being so isolated. TF said with his impaired eyesight he cannot see most of the online communications which arrive. BL - I think is a depressive at the best of times - really finding it hard being so cooped up. And there are others online saying how hard they find it. Though later in the day we heard that Spain will be the first country in Europe to bring in a Universal Basic Income - another deeply socialist move, eh? At the very least it must be antipathetic to their arch-rightwing financialist hearts. Good.
No news of the PM. No news of that rat, Dominic Cummings. No sign of the Russian Report, either.

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