Some time ago I set this up, and then life, the pandemic, a shed and campervan stuffed to the gunnels with the contents of a shed sidetracked me, and the well-pool of creative writing was dammed for a while... I reckon six years... unless you count various posts on various forms of social media. So the above is nonsense I have been writing thousands of words, just not here in my personal space. And suddenly I wish I could gather them here to demonstrate that I have written. How odd.
So have I spent my time wisely? Probably not as wisely as I could. However, I have achieved much in spite of a lack of focus outside the current crisis, furlough, redundancy, change of `job' (I don't have a dictionary definable career anymore).
This is an awkward write, who am I writing for? I think me, but I'm subjecting you to my musings. Mostly I'm subjecting you to my musings because I am going, being, have been, a little mad for a while. I suspect you have too.
On the computer I'm typing on in a directory there is a story I started writing in 2011 about an incident that results in a `Stand' level depopulation event `The Stand': (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stand), and the aftermath and re-build of a pocket of civilisation. Life got in the way, and I for want of a better phrase `abandoned the effort'.
Neither The Stand, nor my own attempt, imagined a year of not much lethality, but high transmissibility, and the `nuisance' of lockdowns.
Pandemics are supposed to be wildfires of contagion, like in the film named Contagion or the earlier film Outbreak... martial law, megadeath civil unrest, troops in gas masks on every corner, curfew breakers and looters shot in the back and left for the rats. They aren't supposed to be middle-class angsty, work from home, wear a mask wash your hands and don't meet other people indoors, and not being allowed to go to the pub events. They are supposed to be rapid and over and back to some normality a week after the vaccine is developed... oh how science has turned us over its knee and spanked that silly notion out of our noggins.
This isn't the pandemic we expected, and it isn't the Pandemic we wanted (we didn't want a pandemic at all). But here we are eleven months in, going stir crazy, work home, work home, work home, furlough for six months, redundant, unemployed for two months and then back to, Work home, Work home. Waiting for our turn to get a vaccination and hoping that it trains your immune system well enough after two jabs to recognise the future variants well enough that we don't need to go into an annual cycle of winter lockdown-lights (it is a possibility at least for the vulnerable), and annual vaccinations on a best guess of which variant may be lurking.
I'm no epidemiologist, but from the 6th of January 2020, when Kate Silverton first reported the outbreak of a what looked like new pneumonia-causing disease in China I've followed every twist and turn here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/coronavirus-alert.
When Kate first dropped this story on the late bulletin, only six people had died, it was confined (we thought) to Wuhan or hopefully just China and that it would do what SARS did seventeen years before and fizzle out.
This is the first proper article I read once I'd followed the mainstream reporting, which was inadequate and didn't really tell you what you were facing:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2761044?guestAccessKey=f61bd430-07d8-4b86-a749-bec05bfffb65
I searched for this kind of stuff after it was reluctantly disclosed by the WHO and the Chinese Communist Party that some doctors and other medical staff were getting ill and that it was likely that the infection was being caught as readily through the eyes as by breathing in viral particles.
That was when we did a bit of gentle stockpiling, some six weeks before panic buying toilet rolls became a thing... I watched aghast as morons did the exact opposite of best practice for the prevention of disease, and wondered where they got this diarrhea notion from? Later (and still) it became apparent that most people got their news from headlines (without reading articles), or worse still from memes, based on nothing more than shit-stirring trolls `ironically' doing dis-information.
So did I make good use of 2020 in spite of Covid? Probably yes. Could I (in hindsight) have made better use of 2020. Probably.
It was a protracted and long year, a never-ending cycle of mainstream media moronism, of water muddying, blame-storming, virtue-signalling and personal tragedies by the hundreds of thousands.
None of us were prepared for pandemic in slow time, none of us were prepared for the levels of boredom that have ensued. And the NHS was unlikely to have been prepared for this to go on and on and on like it has. But there is now light at the end of this long twisty tunnel. And I for one hope to have a more productive 2021 (within the confines of yet again being in a miserable forty-hour week desperation job).
You couldn't make it up.
