2020: The Half-Life
Monday,
4th May 2020
Do you remember when you used to go out after dark?
That used to be quite good fun, didn’t it? Now, you can’t move out there for
dolphins and goats and wild boar. Apparently, in the absence of people, the
clubs of Ibiza are rammed full of fish eagles and Ferreret toads (who are
usually turned away for not wearing the right footwear).
Anyway, today I am fixated on absence and things that
are not there. The difficulty I am having with lockdown is emptiness. As the
weeks go on, it is the absence of things that I notice most.
Yesterday afternoon I took the Cine-Teen and the
Voodoo Parsnip out in the car to do some filming with the Cine-Teen’s early 18th
birthday present: a Nikon digital camera. As we drove around Shoreham and then
Brighton and Hove, what he was recording was what wasn’t there: traffic,
people, noise, joy, lights (the Palace Pier was a dull, boarded up fun-ghost).
We stopped to film signs telling people to stay apart, and signs thanking the
NHS, and signs explaining why the pub/restaurant/club/shop/business was closed.
We filmed the spaces between people as they queued in silence at the Tesco Express
or the petrol station. There was also a fine drizzle over everything which the
Cine-Teen said was perfect for the mood as it added a still, ethereal quality
to a city under lockdown as if without the lifeblood of its people, the city
itself had died and now floated, detached from time and space, in an urban
afterlife.
Distance. Remote working, away from colleagues. Teaching
without classrooms or children. Learning without teachers or classmates. The
general shut-ness of everything is depressing. Even the sea looks kind of empty
and on a sunny day I look at it and imagine myself on the paddleboard, gliding
across the water. But I’m not there.
Even the coronavirus is largely absent. It’s felt in
its displacement of everybody; the cars not driven, the people not congregating.
It is a poltergeist, shifting the furniture of the world around and leaving
everyone spooked. Is it in the room with you right now? Or not?
For the worst affected, who have lost a friend or
family member, there is, of course, the person’s absence but also an enforced separation
if one cannot visit them in hospital or attend the funeral. The person becomes
spirited away. No wonder conspiracy theories abound: the proof, the truth, is
presented in speeches and graphs and the numbers are bodies, are people, but
every country is riding the silent wave and waiting to surf the flattening
curve back to normality. Here comes summer, I’ll ride this baby straight onto
the beach…
And the silence. All the sounds I hear seem to be
false, forced. Neighbours singing along to the radio over-loudly, the foxes
screeching at night, the Thursday night NHS/carer crow-scarer. Apart from on
the one designated evening, people seem reluctant to make any noise, as if it
were sacrilegious to do so, as if it might tempt the Devil (in the form of invisible
contagion) to one’s door. Joy is frowned upon – people are dying.
It appears we are all Schrodinger’s cat,
simultaneously alive and dead, living a half-life in our boxes, waiting for the
experiment to be over and someone to lift us out of the darkness or to declare
we were dead all along.
Latest data for the UK (as of 8pm):
Infected: 190,584
Deaths: 28,734
Celebrity Deaths: 4 Thanks for the music: Dave Greenfield – keyboardist
with The Stranglers
People I know who are infected: 1 (one of my wife’s cousins)
Song of the Day: ‘Gone Daddy Gone’ – Violent Femmes
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