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This Town…28 days later.

It is exactly 28 days later since they imposed the London Lockdown and when you walk the desolate deserted streets of the West End it is exactly like waking up in that movie. There is not a soul around and it is extremely eerie. It has truly become a ghost town. And the further into the middle you get the quieter it becomes. There is no traffic noise, no drilling, no voices. Only the sound of silence.

There is a stark contrast to the calm stillness of the city centre with its abandoned streets and the tension within residential areas, driven by the need for human avoidance where ever you go. The irony is that the busiest part of London has now become the quietest. In all my life I have never seen the city like this. It is beautiful but also chilling at the same time.

These shots were all taken on daily allocated walks over the Easter Weekend and all people photographed whilst maintaining social distance.

Music is written, performed and produced by Charlie B. Lyrics taken from Ghost Town by the Specials .

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Society in Meltdown Ep 11: Anger Management

If you can’t see this vid please click on this link: https://vimeo.com/408869039

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10 things that are fucking weird that now seem normal which is fucking weird.

  1. you can go around wearing a mask, shades and a hoody and not get arrested.
  2. physical contact is over
  3. you have to stand 2m apart to have a conversation
  4. Our entire existence is now online
  5. the streets are deserted
  6. there is no pollution, neither fumes nor noise.
  7. you can hear birds sing
  8. people look at you like you are going to kill them
  9. everyone is now a conspiracy theorist
  10. we have all become OCD germaphobes

It’s life Jim, but not as we knew it.

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If anyone is paying attention to the titles of my post, you haven’t missed 23 posts. It is now day 24 of London Lockdown so thought I should jump in there. All shots from now on have been taken since the fall of the pandemic and were taken on my daily allocated walk. The shot from yesterday was taken in that strange twilight zone of a week or so when Corona was out there but they were still trying to maintain normal life despite knowing they probably shouldn’t.

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Society In Meltdown Ep 10: Karl

If you can’t see this vid please click on this link: https://vimeo.com/406172667

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And so endeth MYLSBN – which ,for the record, has nothing to do with lesbians contrary to what some might think (yes Tennyson crew, I am talking about you!). The shots over the last few weeks were designed to give you a virtual trip to Lisbon during this lockdown. A way to travel without moving. This pandemic has given our species a golden opportunity to show how we can live differently to how we lived before.

And now that we have been brought to a standstill we can hopefully see we are at a junction in the road. The path we were on was a dead end and we knew it but we couldn’t envisage an alternative. But now we have been given a glimpse of what life would be like if all unnecessary travel and excessive consumerism and relentless pollution stopped. And as restrictive as it it is, life carries on.

We can now see a different path because we are effectively on it. Already emissions have dropped all over the globe and it has been proven we can completely change the way we live almost overnight. Those that opposed change convinced us it wasn’t possible but the response to Corona across the globe has proven otherwise. Let’s use this devastating and destructive virus to save mankind by halting the rise in global temperatures and preserving the goldilocks zone on this planet that allows us and most other species to live upon it.

I know it maybe seemed strange that I was showing you photographs of a former visit to Lisbon as the world went into meltdown but it was designed to serve as a form of escapism from the relentless feed of horror. I realised very early on that it was crucial for us to have breaks from this thing to preserve our sanity. I enjoyed being elsewhere whilst I worked on the pictures and yet, inevitably, they always brought me back to the current situation and all my articles have revolved around the virus rather than the trip they came from.

The bulk of the pictures from my documentation of Lisbon came from a single procession on the last day I was there and pretty much every shot was taken within a single hour. Sometimes a slice will encapsulate the whole and felt that this event which pretty much the whole town turned out for, gave me an insight into the city and showed what was most important to the good folk of Lisbon, namely community & tradition. The procession was of a religious nature but for me, it was more to do with the people coming together as it was to celebrate their beliefs. It also felt like going back in time to an era where there was more solidarity amongst citizens and from a time when you could be in large crowds en masse together (remember those days?) and maybe that was why I was so keen to stay in this little virtual travel time capsule bubble.

Hope you enjoyed too. I will back on the streets of London as of next week, well as much as the lockdown will allow me. Stay safe people!

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These are all mourners. Holding a candle for their dearly departed. It is only when you experience grief and see it at close quarters do you realise the impact it has on individuals and how massive the sense of loss is. It might diminish over time but it never quite leaves you. It must be even harder to lose a loved one to Corona when you aren’t even able to see them or even have a funeral. This is why we must do everything we can to follow the lockdown rules. Our vigilance can prevent death and if you can save just one life, you can save the world.

Everyone seems to be watching the death stats round the clock. We feel we need to be constantly up-to-date with the figures but it also tapping into our sense of morbidity. A fascination with death is integral to living but we musn’t forget behind every single one of those numbers is a real person who lived and breathed and has left behind grief-stricken family members. Our government casually mentioned that we would be lucky to keep deaths under 20,000 and Trump said the same but with a zero added for the U.S. But I find it quite chilling how can they be quite so nonchalant about it. These are actual human beings. They are not just statistics.

We need empathy right now, not cold detachment. Everyone’s pain is our pain. We should not wait until it directly affects us to realise that every preventable death is on all of us and that is why we must adhere to the quarantine rules with vigilance. It might not be your loved one today, but it could be any of ours tomorrow if we don’t reign this thing in. And for fuck’s sake, get every NHS worker tested, for theirs and their patient’s sake. Their lives depend on it and they deserve that at the very least when they are risking so much for us all.

Our government is busy bailing out EasyJet whilst still not providing enough PPE to NHS staff. If you want to support them you can easily donate £5 by texting the word CLAP to 70507 and it will go directly to staff for food/travel etc. This is something every single one of us can do but in all honesty we shouldn’t really have to. They should be provided for. So we must also pressurise the government to properly fund our vital health and welfare services and their staff instead of giving our money to private companies who are doing nothing but pollute the atmosphere. Let them stand on their own two feet or fail. We can all now live without unnecessary travel. Corona has shown us how.

This post is dedicated to Jim Morrison who sadly passed away in hospital from the Corona virus yesterday. Deepest condolences to his family and also to everyone who has lost someone from this pandemic. Our thoughts are with you.

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Religion is providing solace to a lot of people right now and if it’s getting you through these turbulent times that is a great thing. Yet was disturbed to read that some religious communities around the world were ignoring social distancing rules. Bolsanaro in Brazil for example, rejected scientific advice (nothing new there) to allow religious congregations to continue amongst all of this.

This will only serve to endanger the lives of those who attend and, in turn, those who they then come into contact with. Maybe they are prepared to die for their beliefs but it is utterly irresponsible and morally wrong to put others into the same risk category.

It is also wholly unnecessary as God is, according to these religions, omnipotent so you don’t actually have to go anywhere to find him. He will come to you. And you can still have faith and listen to the science because that is ultimately what will keep you and everyone else safe.

But its not just religious folk not following the rules. Every day when I go out for my daily walk I see so many people not social distancing. Not obeying the 2m rule. Not even bothering to consider that the interactions they are having could lead to someone getting seriously ill and even losing their life.

And I do not see anyone out on the street enforcing this. There are no police around. Not anywhere to be seen. We are the only country in Europe that is not enforcing it rigorously and consequently the U.K is now set to become the country in Europe the most affected. Coincidence? Of course fucking not. So if our governing bodies still aren’t treating it with the severity it deserves we need to…so stay the fuck away from each other and we can kill this thing instead of killing each other…

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Congregations organised around live music were always for me the most positive display of humanity coming together – always said it was us at our best. All united with no agenda and bonded by a shared love rather than becuase of being in opposition to an out-group. I used to think it was just a distraction from the daily grind but over time I realised that it was potentially way more than that. It was the solution to disharmony and division. It was the antidote to tribalism even with it being, paradoxically, a form of tribalism in itself.

When you are at a gig, you could be surrounded by people who are from different countries, cultures, religions, political beliefs and none of that mattered. For as long as the music kept playing. Afterwards that feeling of togetherness would fade and you might return to your various in-groups but the sense of connectivity would remain and it showed not only was it possible but preferable.

I have been banging on about this concept of unification via live music events (clubs, gigs, festivals) being our salvation as a species for donkeys but now that it has been taken away from us and no-one knows when it will return, it feels painfully absent. And I know a lot of bands, artists and djs are trying to do digital streaming as an alternative but it just ain’t the same. The magic happens in the transference of energy between the performer and the audience and vice versa but you have to be in the same place – you cannot get that through a screen.

In the meantime it might be all we have but I personally have no interest. I have no interest in the digi version. For me it is just too much of a drop off. It can’t deliver what I want it to because so much of the experience is missing. So I will be waiting patiently until we can congregate together in the real world once more…and we will…so see you on the dancefloor!

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I am reading some very disconcerting articles about how governments are already using Corona to usher in legislature that will give them more authority and less accountability. They are calling it the pandemic power grab and everyone, is taking advantage just like they used 9/11 to strip citizens of their civil liberties. And just like then, while we are all scared and looking the other way, they slip these measures quietly through and hope no-one notices.

For example included in the U.K emergency Corona Bill are alarming law amendments that relieve them of certain legal obligations to the disabled and to the mentally ill (like that’s the first thing you thought of amongst all of this ?!) whilst Trump has dropped many environmental protection policies as part of the deal in his 2 trillion stimulus package he just pushed through. They did not cause this situation but they are taking massive advantage to further their own agenda, all in the supposed name of protection.

We must pay attention. And we must fight for our freedoms as they chip away at them on the sly. This is essentially ‘opportunistic fascism’ and we will all suffer as a result, once the threat of this calamity has subsided.

So yes, keep your mouth covered but keep your eyes & your ears open…

p.s If you want to read more about this Naomi Klein’s book the Shock Doctrine highlights this very machiavellian process or you can look up the terms and conditions of these emergency laws or read about other governmental implementations across the globe in this article here

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Society In Meltdown Ep 9: Netflix

if you cant see this vid please click on this link: https://vimeo.com/403688255

This series as you might have guessed was made pre-corona but if there was one episode which could be about our current lockdown existence it’s this one…

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More shots this week from Lisbon. As life is on hold it feels somehow appropriate that my photographs are trapped in a moment in time. It’s as if the world has been frozen like that moment in the Matrix when they pause the program. Maybe we are in a computer simulation after all and this is just a glitch in the system so everything has to stop while they fix it. Maybe it’s a software update and once its done we’ll all be shit hot at kung fu.

For the record, I don’t think we are actually in pods hooked up to a giant mainframe being used as human batteries but we are all now technically living in a digital world as the real one is effectively a no-go area. And we were heading that way anyway. The battle for our lives between reality and our digi-existence has been going on for a while but it looks like it’s now over. And the real world lost.

The photographs this week all feature elderly people, from a time when they could be out on the streets and not be terrified to be within close proximity of people. Most people are feeling vulnerable and afraid so my heart goes out to this older generation who must be feeling it infinitely more so. And at a time in their lives when they would naturally be feeling more fragile.

And this experience has made us all feel more fragile in a world where we were already feeling less safe and more apprehensive. And yet fear is the enemy and we must fight it, just as we are fighting this virus. We must accept that life comes with threats. It always has and always will. They just need to be managed, they don’t have to define us.

Fear is a built in survival mechanism but you cannot live in the ‘fight or flight ‘mode 24/7. It is incredibly harmful in the long term. It generates the stress chemical cortisol which attacks the immune system which in a twisted irony could actually make you more susceptible to getting infected so you must try and protect yourself from worry as much as you do from Corona. And you can do that by not being permanently plugged in to the feed. We don’t need to hear about every single update the moment it happens. We can disconnect. We aren’t in those pods remember?

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