Plague Days: Twenty-two-Twenty-three

It will be the remembered in lots of ways, this year. It will be remembered as the year of the Zoom meeting, of everyone stockpiling toilet paper, and of the US President suggesting people inject themselves with disinfectant. It will also be the year we all started making sourdough. That it must be sourdough is no mystery, with yeast being one of the essentials disappearing from supermarket shelves, along with flour, pasta, bread, milk. I’m enjoying thinking about those panic buyers  defrosting their milk and discovering waht an abomination defrosted milk is. That it must be bread baking is odd but also no real mystery. Early on when the panic buying started, I stopped by the baker on the way to work, early, 630am, and bought a loaf of bread. He gestured around his shop and said “I don’t know what is wrong with people, they come in here and buy six loaves. I HAVE PLENTY OF FLOUR, I MAKE PLENTY OF BREAD, THERE IS NO SHORTAGE!” But of course, we have learnt through this time that shortages are self-fulfilling – if you worry there’s going to be one, it can be guaranteed you’ll be part of what causes it. And bread has a strong comfort place in people’s hearts. You have bread and even the most inept person in the kitchen can make themselves something to eat. The miracle of the loaves and fishes taught us – you have bread and you will not go hungry today. You have bread and everything will be ok.

And if you can bake bread yourself, well, you are ahead of the curve. You can provide for yourself and your people without needing the baker, or the supermarket that has become unbearable to go to, or the unreliable kindness of neighbours. You got this. Everything will be ok.

Today I’m baking sourdough. Everything will be ok.

Plague Days: Twenty-one

There’s an app. Many people, over a million already, think that if they download it, they will be allowed out quicker. They think that it is worth the trade-off of long-term risk to privacy for the short-term gain of getting back out into shopping malls and footy games. They say “meh, Zuckerberg already owns all my freely given data anyway”. The people who got a Robodebt, or grew up in the shadow of Social Security, know better. They know exactly what it is like to have a government know, and want to know, every tiny detail of their private life and movements, a government that can, with the snap of its fingers, deliver devastating, life changing consequences – a loss of income, an unpayable debt, lost home, lost children. I worry that we are at the start of something we are going to regret – and that, like all such things, like this plague itself, it is the people who live in poverty that will pay the biggest price.

Plague Days: Nineteen-Twenty

Yesterday my mother refused medical testing and treatment for a condition that could cause permanent blindness because she could not bear to wait five hours sitting in an uncomfortable chair in the Emergency unit of a major metropolitan public hospital. I get it, she felt she was too sick to bear that, but she was also not sick enough for it to be possible for someone to make the decision for her. It’s not the decision I would have made, but I get it. It’s my first visit to a public hospital since COVID. Packing too many people into a small space like an Emergency waiting room is a logistical challenge in a time of physical distancing. Every now and then a nurse would swoop through announcing “Any carers who do not need to be in here need to wait outside, because social distancing”. Outside being literally outside, in the rain. If you must use a public hospital, nothing reminds you more that no one wants to spend taxpayer dollars on your comfort than those hard-plastic seats into which they cram sick people while they wait for medical care. And it got me to thinking again about the ways in which, of all the privileges and comforts afforded the wealthy, it is the access to space and light that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. The real social distance is that between the large light comfortable homes where everyone has the space they need to work and study comfortably and the places the rest of us are crammed into, trying to make this thing work. No wonder we’re all so fucking exhausted.

Plague Days: Eighteen

Most of what gets said about Anzac Day is a steaming pile of patriotic bullshit. It shits me to tears that people don’t get the link between their misguided sentiments of national pride and the kind of thinking that fuels wars. But I observe it in whatever way I can, and include my kids when I can, because I believe in the power of rituals to inscribe things into our being in ways that just reading or watching can’t. And I don’t think we should ever forget the abominations that have been inflicted on young soldiers and civilians of all ages by people in power. This year, our elderly neighbours brought out a PA at 6am and we stood at the top of our driveway with candles. A few others dotted the way down the street. After some iPad fumbling, they played a recording of the Last Post and as that died away, we heard someone streets away playing it for a real on a trumpet and, well, it was really something. The kids and I then went for a walk in our pyjamas and coats through the streets. Here and there were small groups of neighbours chatting at the tops of their driveways. Elsewhere, just candles. I’m glad I did it. Now seems like a really important time for rituals.

Plague Days: Seventeen

Last night I dreamt that I packed up and left my family and flew to Israel, just like I did when I was 19. I was returning to the same kibbutz in the Golan Heights – never mind that I am 30 years older, 20 kilos heavier, that I do not have the physical strength for heavy agricultural work let alone the fortitude to re-acquire the phenomenal drinking and smoking capacity I had back then or that my politics wouldn’t allow me to throw myself into the Zionist cause in occupied Syria again. In the dream, I imagined myself as the older stateswoman of the volunteers – thin, hard muscled, tanned, dark haired (pretty much the exact opposite of what I am). Dreams of leaving are much more intense when one is not allowed to leave. Every day the smartraveller daily update, the one I subscribed to when I thought travelling again was a thing I would get to do, comes into my inbox. Of all the things that are chilling about the current circumstances we are in, it is not the images of makeshift morgues, and workers in Hazmat gear, and the 15 pages of obituaries in The Boston Globe, it is not these things that scare me. It is the litany of “borders are closed” announcements each day that makes me afraid for the new world. My entire life has been held up by a safety net belief that if everything in my life really turns to shit, I can pack up and leave, go to another country, reinvent myself (thin, hard muscled, tanned, dark haired). That is not an option now. We are stuck here. There is no leaving.

Plague Days: Sixteen

The days have an odd rhythm to them that is not entirely unlike the old rhythm, from when I could still go out to work. The first hours of the morning are quiet and peaceful and under control, then everyone wakes up and the work from home day begins and it is not unlike the workday at work, if you discount occasional interruptions from otherwise older and self sufficient children. But it’s the end of the day I expected to be better. Without the long commute home, I thought things would feel more under control. In fact, it is still a rush to finish urgent work tasks to a point where I feel I can leave it and then feed people. Sometimes I then go back to work tasks, but either way I still collapse exhausted into sleep by 930 without feeling like I’ve had any sort of evening at all. This has not changed. Maybe this is what getting old is – a succession of disappointing evenings where tiredness takes over any will to do anything else at all. What a shit that I got old before I got to travel again.

Plague Days: Fifteen

It takes a bit of bloody mindedness to keep the daily discipline of writing a diary when there’s so little to record. I started doing this out of a sense of wanting to capture history but mostly it’s just captured random morning thoughts and fears. Too much of the present is too surreal to feel like actual history. If I could go back to 25 year old me and tell her that in the year 2020 Donald Trump would be the most powerful man in the world and we would all be locked inside with our little portable video machine phones because of a killer virus, she would tell me to think of a better apocalyptic plotline. At least Skynet hasn’t featured in this plot. Yet.

Plague Days: Fourteen

Even the mornings when I’ve had a solid sleep with quiet dreams, I wake up exhausted. I’m keeping up the semblance of a normal routine for the children – waking them at 8 with chirpy “come on it’s a school day” exhortations, even though they do not have to travel more a few feet to be at their ‘school’. I’m going out for a walk once a day but am otherwise largely immobile. And yet it’s exhausting. In the media, the talk of easing restrictions grows, the feeling of inevitability about this new life we have been forced to lead wanes, an end comes into view. And now a new kind of exhaustion sets in. Another change? After we’ve had so much? I don’t know if I am ready to go back to the world. To go back to the 618 train and 30 mins a day of actual conversation with my kids. To crowded public spaces and choosing which brand of toilet paper to buy. I’ve settled into this exhausting, stressful, weird and lonely little patch of history and I don’t know if I can leave it.

Plague Days: Thirteen

We didn’t have a lot of books in my house when I was a kid. Not because we didn’t value them, but because we didn’t have a lot of money. Most books came from the library and went back at their allotted time. One thing we did have a lot of, given to us by friends and family and my mother’s employers, was women’s magazines. Because I liked reading, I would read every word, absorbing early some pretty terrible lessons about how to be female in the process. Around the age of seven, for reasons that require more than a blog post to work through, I became severely anxious. These days I would have been diagnosed with post-traumatic OCD in a heartbeat. Part of being so anxious was becoming incredibly susceptible to being frightened by things I read or saw. One of the things that completely messed with my head was a small advertisement that appeared in the New Idea every week for many years. I cannot remember what it was even selling. But it told the story of a cottage in a village in Spain where the floor tiles suddenly developed faces on them and then the faces started to move and speak and groan in the night. It became so bad the residents had to leave and no one could bear to live there. As you might predict, when they pulled the house down, they discovered it was built on a burial site from the Spanish Inquisition or some such. There was a sepia picture that accompanied the ad, blurry, but enough to make out frightful, tortured faces in a series of floor tiles. It scared the living shit out of me – to the point where I could no longer look at the floor. Do you have any idea how hard it is not to look at the floor when you’re a kid? Not only are you closer to it, but adults are making you sit on it all the damned time. Even 43 years later I occasionally find myself looking at my kitchen floor tiles and thinking “wow, I’m looking at the floor tiles and I’m not scared”. It frightened me so much I’m not sure I can even, at this age, bring myself to google to find out if it’s a well-known story or why it featured in a corner of the New Idea for so many years. Everyone is complaining about crazy dreams and night terrors right now. My last realisation as I went to sleep last night was that all these Zoom meetings I’ve been doing, with their little tiles of moving faces, look exactly like that blurry photo of the Spanish kitchen floor. So, thanks for that unconscious, this won’t fuck me up at all.

Plague Days: Eleven-Twelve

I lost a day, hanging over a bucket after a Friday night blow out on red wine. By all public health standards, I drink too much, which is to say not all that much – two or three glasses a day – but I very rarely drink enough to get all out hanging over a bucket wrecked by it. I’m seeing lots of people reporting that they are drinking more, sometimes finding that they can hold their liquor a lot better than they used to – it’s like a dangerous combination of stress reflex constant glass to mouth drinking combined with an inability to feel the wine buzz for all the cortisol buzzing through one’s system. So today is all about herbal tea and probiotics and trying not to think about this run of unusually warm and beautiful for April days we’ve been having because I’m finding my brain can only handle one catastrophe at a time.