Last weekend, the Saturday morning market in Martel returned
to its customary medieval setting. For the previous three weeks or so, it had
pitched up on the boules terrain
underneath the sheltering plane trees. You entered through a makeshift
checkpoint where it was advised to put some cheap and nasty chemical wash on
your hands before following the hazard tape in an anti-clockwise direction to
the exit via as many stalls as the shopping list demanded. Masks were
obligatory.
Last weekend, the hand wash and the hazard tape were
gone. Masks were at the wearer's discretion and there were as many without as
with. Already, it seems, people are becoming more casual about it all. After a
hundred days of effective solitude, they're desperate to get out and mingle. My
childhood in Belfast taught me all I need to know about the way we adapt to a
situation. One day the place was like most northern industrial cities, the next
day there were armoured cars and soldiers in camouflage everywhere. To access
the city centre, you had to pass through turnstiles to be frisked by a member
of the military. Very soon it became the new normality. You simply adapted to
the new restrictions placed on your everyday life.
So if – and it's a very big 'if' – this current scenario
is part of a master plan dreamed up by the omnipotent elite, reptilian or
otherwise, and if martial law follows social mayhem triggered by the biggest
financial meltdown since records began, then we will shape our daily lives
around it. Artists and radicals will probably flee to wherever they can find
refuge, as a whole generation of Brazilian musicians did when the military reigned
in the late '60s and '70s, but the rest of us will stay put and get on with it.
Just what that might involve, I was discussing with my
friend the tree surgeon while helping him prune the tops of some trees that
were obscuring the view from their holiday home across the eastern Lot. Help in
this case meant tidying up the debris, while he did the donkey work. He's a
major conspiracy theorist. If he were American, he'd be a survivalist, holed up
with his automatic weapons and tinned food in some underground bunker. We
shared a picnic lunch together and were closer than social-distancing
recommends. It's all bollocks to him, but there's still enough doubt within me to
generate unease. Even with a friend that I've known for 20 years. Has it come
to this?
Even kith and kin, for that matter. Tilley the Kid was
restored to us mid-week. She travelled all the way here in a mask on various
trains. Her mum was waiting for her at the clinic, but instead of running into
each other's arms after a six-month separation, our daughter felt the need to
take a shower and wash away any potentially lethal germs before the real
mother-and-child reunion could begin. When
the kissing and cuddling had to stop...
We watched the three-part dramatisation of the Salisbury
poisonings, which was harrowing in the extreme and made this whole coronavirus
kerfuffle seem like child's play in comparison. Not the least harrowing aspect
of it was the fact that such an appalling nerve agent could have been developed
by human beans. Only creatures with a complete absence of compassion – and my
friend would no doubt make a reptilian link – could have dreamed it up, then
developed and tested the compound. Just thinking of it makes want to curl up in
a dark corner and die of shame for my shared humanity. Anyway... this stuff was
so much more contagious and virulent than any virus that the fact that only one
person in Salisbury actually died from contact with it is nothing short of a
miracle – and a testament to the dedication of the public officials who
conducted the clean-up operation. As the Good Wife suggests, it's a damn good
job that the Chief Public Health Officer was a woman. If man's instinct is to
hunt, gather and fornicate, woman's instinct is to protect – and protect, this
one certainly did. The dedication to duty of some people is remarkable. No
wonder I managed only 15 years as a public servant.
The new norm for the citizens of Salisbury must have been
very, very scary. Here, there's still a vestige of fear, but the Chief Medical
Officer or whoever pronounces on these things has now stated that France has
got things under control, so it must all be OK. No worries, mate. The Good Wife has gone back to work – on a
limited basis – and even massaged one or two clients. With masks on. We've been
out on a hot afternoon at the home of friends for a yoga class under the
sheltering lime tree. We've celebrated our joint 30th wedding
anniversary, again al fresco, with other friends. And Dan has been over here to
play records – just as a friend would come over during primary school and we'd singalonga Beatles in front of my dad's
gramophone. Tennis racquets for guitars (then, not now; I've put away foolish things). So, gradually, things here have been slowly getting back to some
kind of normality.
For how long? There's the
rub. France has opened its borders, presumably for FOMO. Fear of missing out on
the great tourist influx every summer. Pragmatic
or unwise, homo sapient? Only time will tell, my son.
Already the Chinese are heading back indoors. So will we even get the summer
off before the next lockdown begins? Now that the football season has restarted
– behind closed doors, which must be eerily weird – I think I'll have to resort
to the clichés of football managers faced with pundits intent on extracting
some rash prediction. At the moment,
we're not even thinking of the title. We're just focused on one game at a time.
One match down and I'm
back to checking the sports news again (and, in the process, glimpsing the
global headlines. Already my dad and I have started bemoaning the ineptitude of
the current Arsenal team. We spoke after their mid-week match against
Manchester City and the pater familias sat
there looking very glum in his reupholstered Parker-Knoll armchair draped in
the Arsenal scarf I bought for him, curiously, at the local bring-and-dump
emporium. Things weren't helped by the fact that he'd fiddled with the settings
of his telly and he thought that his sound-bar was no longer functioning. He
told me quite emotionally how much he depends on his technology, deep as he is into
his form of self-imposed purdah.
Actually and
metaphorically, he and I are focused on one game at a time. I can't predict the
future. I figure that if extra-terrestrial reptiles are in control of our
destiny, then there's very little I can do about it. Rise and shine; take each
day as it comes. Smile and like thy neighbour. Or how I stopped worrying and learned to love potential social
breakdown...
So today, for example, I
got back from the local shops and sat down in the sunshine on the back balcony,
sipping a supplementary coffee while listening to The Hissing of Summer Lawns and
flicking through the regional freebie to read about all the assistance being
offered to local enterprises. It gave me a warm glow. Or was it the mid-morning
sun? A darker thought furrowed my brow. Who the hell is going to pay for it
all? And when?
