It’s Easter Sunday. We ran 10k, to the river and back; it was sunny and the paths up the banks were quiet. The residential streets were even quieter, though every house was full up with its residents. These’s no simple phrase to describe a street that is quiet in the sense of traffic coming and going, but packed with everybody who lives there being at home at once.
Yesterday we celebrated a birthday by cooking and eating a lot of food, drinking, playing games, and getting high. The birthday girl’s parents surprised her by knocking on the door after having laid out a birthday spread on the doorstep. The family caught up a few feet apart, and then headed home. They sang Happy Birthday to her from the street like springtime carollers.
The Prime Minister was moved into intensive care last night. They’re trying to downplay the seriousness of his condition. They’re emphasising that he hasn’t been intubated.
Today some artist friends of ours, who we bought lots of art from at a show a few weeks ago, dropped off a parcel on our doorstep. It was a nice package of beautiful objects and warm wishes presented in the chaotic and pleasing way artistic people are seemingly able to carelessly toss together.
The bike and the cat have both arrived. They’ve shut the local park, a preemptive action ahead of a hot and sunny weekend. The endless internal and external dialogue about what is okay and not okay to do to stay happy continues. The cat gives some respite. Our minds can be filled with fretful thoughts about her instead of about the virus. The death toll is climbing quickly here, as in other places, but it feels much less visible now. We are in a kind of stasis now that the conditions of how we should live have been established.
The hospital ship the USNS Comfort docked in New York Harbour a few hours ago. From the news images it looks like something from the Second World War: a long, narrow, white thing covered in lifeboats and bearing the red cross. Presumably it’s painted like that to stop enemy bombers from firing at it in wartime. Everybody keeps comparing this to wartime.
I’m filling my time with exercise, reading, and work — and to some extent it’s working. I’m taking pleasure in the small things. I don’t have it the worst out of anyone. Lots of people, thought they’d never say it, would like to come out of this with a great body, all those books that they’ve been meaning to get to finished, having perfected a new skill. I’ve bought a bike.
Boris has the virus, as has the Secretary of State for Health, and the Chief Medical Officer*. They’ve built a hospital with 4000 beds inside a big conference centre in London. They’ve built another at the NEC in Birmingham. The one in London has been dubbed the NHS Nightingale. I don’t know if the Birmingham one has a name. A hangar at Birmingham Airport is being repurposed a temporary morgue.
Emma’s gone up to the Midlands to collect the car so that we might have some means of getting away from London without breaking social distancing. I was anxious when she left, I don’t want her to be stuck outside of London if the government suddenly announce stricter travel measures. They’ve already started shutting down the trains bit by bit.
Yesterday they shut the pubs and restaurants, and the gyms too. This morning I tried to do a workout at home and I’m still going to go for a run. Cycling around deserted streets appeals too. I feel like my body will get soft and weak in quarantine if I’m not careful.
We got back from seeing Tom in India on Monday, and ever since then the world has gotten increasingly strange. Though it isn’t completely enforced, we’re all supposed to stay home and work from home to limit the spread of the virus. All the bars and restaurants are empty, people aren’t going to them and so instead they’re all online chatting away in the evenings. It’s like getting back home from school and everybody jumping straight onto MSN. Apart from today, every day this week the Prime Minister has come on TV and announced some restriction measure. Yesterday they announced they’re closing the school except to babysit the children of key workers like nurses and doctors.
At my day job at BuzzFeed I’m a software engineer, building stuff for the web.
I use my company-issued MacBook Pro “16, 2020 (2.3GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD). It’s on a Griffin laptop stand, which isn’t quite tall enough to bring the screen up to my eye line, so the stand is piled on top of a couple of thick hardbacks that were lying around. I have an Apple Magic Mouse and the standard wireless Apple Keyboard.
I just finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. I really enjoyed it without really knowing what to make of it. It’s structured in a stream-of-consciousness way, with distinct sections (which aren’t quite chapters) that sometimes relate to what’s come before with a dream logic. Here are some of my favourite sections, or at least a couple that got me thinking.
There are countries where people speak English. But not like us — we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt.
When I was at university, me and some friends founded a music magazine and ran it for a few years before handing it off to the next generation of students when we graduated. It ran on for a few years after we left and then closed.
I noticed recently that the hosting was about to expire, so I exported the magazine’s content and turned it into a basic static site so it wasn’t lost forever. It’s the PearShaped Magazine Archive.
