at rest

Coffee, the scent rising from the cup reassuringly having read that the virus can remove your sense of smell it's my new unofficial morning test, although in fairness it would probably take me a while to figure out that there's no smell, my brain being something slow and pudding like at the best of times and a primeval swamp before the first coffee sparks the synapses into something approaching functionality.


Last night the first long talk with a friend in Scotland, still working with vulnerable people, tacit acceptance that he'll get the virus but he's now a key worker, not that his wage packet would tell you that. Much of the chat was about the social pyramid, how it's interesting that those that we rely on aren't those who siphon off the wealth, that the profiteers are, in the most part, not actually necessary for society to function; that the market is not some all powerful mechanism, or the new god. And yet it's easy enough to imagine them hiding in their splendid isolation and plotting how to subvert the crisis for their own ends, supported, no doubt, by the political right; “ the actions which have been taken are only plausible in an emergency etc etc, normal business can resume now, feed the rich...”

Today another wander, on foot, hoping to find something interesting to blip, wondering about words, distances which protrude into the ether. Daan park opens up, unexpectedly, before me. Walking along, past readers sitting at a safe distance from eachother, masked, other walkers, carers with wheelchairs, groups gathered in the pavilions where the sound of a saxophone wails an attempted scale ending in a squonk that's just beyond his reach, another joining discordant blasts, jazz but not quite, close enough to listen, to find a seat, watch, listen, breath, the city continuing, traffic distanced as the squonk is found, discordance into melody, jagged and ragged but quite beautiful. 

And then, tonight, the UK made the local news, interviews with idiots and disbelief at the scenes unfolding upon the screen, the idiocy of the populace held up as how not to face the threat of the viral spread, you could hear it in the newsreader's voice, a tone of what the fuck do these idiots think this is, a game? And I think of friends in the front line of this, of others at the apex of the virus' chain of effects while the moronic minority transform themselves into a Pythonesque sketch lacking only the wit required for humour...