And so the bars have re-opened. Well, they have opened their hatches if not their doors but people instantly flocked to every bar in the hood to pay 5 x the price for alcohol to be put in a plastic cup so they could stand outside on a pavement near each other. Think it just shows how gregarious we are by nature and how all people want to do is congregate. The lockdown has really highlighted this compulsive need to socialise with each other as a primary drive of our species. Mammals innit?
It was quite a shock to see for the first time. I turned the corner onto Portobello and was genuinely jaw-dropped to see these gatherings. It looked so alien to see all these people alongside one another. And as you can see everyone is obeying social distance guidelines to a tee, although the message can’t have quite got through exactly as they have chosen to use the imperial system rather than the metric one as they are all 2 feet from each other. Well, at least they got the number right..sure the virus will take into account they’ve made an effort of sorts…
The 3 year anniversary of the Grenfell tragedy has just passed. In memory green ribbons, both real and painted have appeared all over the area and they look like butterflies floating around the neighbourhood. Beautiful and heartbreaking. The tower itself seems to get smaller everytime you look at it. They have been incrementally been dismantling it for over a year or so and it feels that the more it disappears in the real world the more it disappears in people’s memories. And yet West London will never forget those who lost their lives because they will always be part of the community and also because justice has still not been served.
In the modern era we seem to now lurch from tragedy to tragedy and as soon as the next one arrives everyone forgets about the one that just dominated and focus instead on the latest calamity or injustice to take over the news. There is rarely any resolution. Whether its plastic pollution, Australian wildfires, the refugee crisis, homelessness, the school girls in kidnapped in Nigeria..at the time they all unleashed outrage and initiated mass online activity but were then dropped as quickly and as fervently as they were picked up.
These terrible events consume every headline and dominate your social media feed for the 2 weeks they are topical and then and they evaporate into the online ether as if they had never existed. A lethal combination of over-saturation and A.D.D destroys the public’s interest seemingly just in time for us to lose our shit all over again over the next thing. And the next thing. And there is now always a next thing. The conveyor belt of horror seemingly never ends.
People are already clearly over the pandemic and yet we are still in the eye of the storm. Does it matter it hasn’t been solved? Apparently not. People are already over climate change and that hasn’t even really begun yet. Does it matter it hasn’t been solved? Our actions say otherwise. These days there appears to be this notion that once everyone has done their bit of ranting on social media, fired off some hashtags and gone to a protest march or two the problem has been dealt with and we can all go back to shopping for shit we don’t need.
Nothing gets solved anymore, we just get bored and move on. The most recent humungous global event is the BLM movement which has shaken the world to the core in the last two weeks. It has been extraordinary to see the world unite in protest and say ‘enough is enough’. And yet, like the others I have just mentioned above, this is a deep rooted problem that needs, not just immediate action, but sustained activity that will lead to long term systemic solutions in order for genuine progress can be made.
As a species we need to start seeing things through to the end. We need to actually make things better, not just want them to be better and then give up and divest our energy into something else when it reveals itself to be too hard to fix overnight. Major societal shifts and systemic change are very hard to initiate and implement and take time. A ton of time. It takes research and understanding and education and planning and commitment and that cannot be achieved in two weeks. We have to see this through and think long term strategies than will span far into the future or progress will not be achieved.
Our worlds have been shrunk. Miniaturised for our own safety. I have never spent so much time indoors in my life. Consequently home confinement has made what’s happening on our doorsteps infinitely more interesting than usual because it doesn’t really have any competition. There is only so much screen based visual content you can watch before you brain turns to guacamole. And why bother when you have a soap opera right outside your front door? The lockdown has made me a full blown curtain twitcher which I had previously thought was purely for nosey bizzy body old women with sour puss faces…turns out we’re all curtain twitchers now.
in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” James Stewart’s wheelchair bound existence means he starts to heavily focus on the only vista he can see and it becomes his entire world. I haven’t quite witnessed a murder (although not far off) but have seen enough high drama to be worthy of a netflix series just by peering out my window.
The internet connects us to everything that is happening all around the world which makes us forget sometimes the actual world we inhabit, the world right in front of us. But I am desperate for the real world to return in full because have come to the conclusion that the internet is categorically not a healthy place to live.
In reality you don’t need clickbait horrors to keep you engaged. Even just a person walking past can illicit a huge amount of stimuli for the brain. You can gage so much about someone in a very short space of time. The way they walk will tell you how confident they feel about themselves. The clothes they wear will indicate everything they want to project about their identity. If they walk in the road and not on the pavement it shows they are maybe fearful of getting too close to others because of the pandemic. It’s like directing your very own film with an array of characters provided and you make up the plot.
Your brain makes a million assumptions based on whatever information it can muster and then jumbles them all up with a truckload of projected opinions and creates a scenario it will then believe. We are more storytellers than objective observers and way more than we would care to acknowledge. Yet we mustn’t forget this. In an extreme situation like this lockdown the brain goes into overdrive as it has a lot less to play with. As our realities shrink our internal machinations magnify, including our worries about the outside world that we’ve not been able to engage with.
Our world’s are starting to open up again and even though we want this to happen Corona has made us more fearful of returning. But we can’t stay indoors forever so some point we’re all going to have re-engage with it. The virus doesn’t look like its ever going to truly go away so we are just gonna have to learn to live with it. This essentially means each and every individual deciding how they want to play it. You might decide you are never going to leave the house again or you may decide to say ‘fuck it’ and take whatever risks are required to get on with your life. There are a multitude of things that are harmful in everyday life and that could even potentially kill you. And you accept these risks and work around them. Otherwise you are not living at all. And living your life, rather than being scared of the threats to it, is the only way to truly live.
We can no longer rely on governmental advice because it bears no correlation to the situation so it is now up to us and our own common sense. Boris and co. are not listening to their scientific advisors whatsoever so we no longer need to listen to them. Their decisions are not based on data, if they ever really were, they are simply deciding it’s time to go back. All health experts are stating that it is way too early to lift the lockdown and it will do nothing but increase the chances of a second wave.
We all want our lives to return to normal as soon as possible but what is the point if it just makes the last two months an utter waste of time? We would have gone through all of that for nothing. The U.K government has repeatedly shown it is not putting our safety first so we must use our common sense and take the necessary precautions. If it means masking up and maintaining social distance and washing the fuck out of your hands so be it. It’s every man for himself.
Act how you see fit. Don’t be swayed but what is happening around you. Just because everybody else is acting like its all over you don’t have to. If you wish someone to keep their distance, tell them, Make it their problem, not yours. Stupidity and selfishness are spreading in this island at an even faster rate than Covid but you can protect yourself against that as well by following your own set of rules. Live by example. Be your own role model. And stay away from slogans ;)
It is the eerie silence of the Queues of Corona that disquiet me. No-one says a peep. Heads down like lambs to the slaughter. It is very odd to me. Especially as everyone acts like it’s always been this way. I think they queued for food in wartime Britain and in the good ole USSR but I’ve never seen it. Actually tell a lie, I did a series of shots a couple of years ago of people queuing up for restaurants like Dishoom and Flat Iron in Soho. Queuing for restos always baffled me as there are 20,000 restaurants in London, just go to another one. I can’t even begin to imagine what it will be like when they reopen and are only allowed 4 people in at a time. The only thing in my life I was ever be prepared to queue up for is a niteclub but that’s because there wasn’t any other way to get in…even on the guest list you have to queue.
I actually have queue intolerance. If I stand in line for more than 5 minutes I my feet start to shake and I have a bout of uncontrollable movement which forces me away. I jest but I actually really can’t handle queuing. Its like being stuck in traffic, it makes me feel my life is ending one minute at a time. So since this whole thing kicked off I have been queue avoidant. If there is one where I want to go I just go somewhere else. There is always a shop somewhere nearby that doesn’t have a queue so why waste your time standing like a lemon for eons? Being unfussy about what you eat is extremely beneficial in these strange times.
I saw someone reading a book on a tube once called “How to zig when everyone else zags” or something along those lines. (sure I have mentioned before on this blog). I used to take the piss out of it because I thought it was a ridic title but overtime I have found its title to be the most useful bit of wisdom ever. If you simply do shit when everyone else isn’t then you will have a pleasant and peaceful life. So since the lockdown I do not food shop friday to monday cos that is when every joe schmoe does it.
And if you don’t have everything we need, we just get by with what we got. Study your local food outlets and you can quickly work out when they are quiet and when they are not. I do often look at people in massive queues and think you must want to be there. You must want out the house, hate the people you live with or have nothing better to do because otherwise why would you waste an hour of your life to a queue? So sorry hon, it took fookin ages, and they didn’t have ginger so I had to go all the way to sainsburys on the high street and there was a massive queue there…
My main issue however is not the queues themselves in this whole lockdown shopping experience but the fact that everyone diligently stands 2 metres apart outside the shop but as soon as you are let in, everyone is on top of each other. No-one maintains social distance once inside so what is the fucking point of doing on the outside? Tescos have marked out the whole of their supermarket floors into 2 metre sections with arrows stating that you should go in a single direction but no-one abides by it at all so again, I have to ask, what is the fucking point?
I mean, I sort of get the way people act once inside. Shopping in the time of Corona is tense as fuck so we all just want it over with. But that is not a reason to sidle up behind someone so close they can feel your breath on their neck just so you can grab a jar of ragu sauce off the shelf because you don’t want to wait a nanosecond for them to get what they need and move on.
These three shots were actually from the post office queue. If you don’t want to lose an hour of your life like these people just avoid Mondays & Fridays and its mostly fine the rest of the time.
And that is the strangest paradox. People are happy to queue for nearly an hour to get in but then can’t wait two minutes once inside to get what they want. And these are the same people who made sure they gave everyone the right amount of space on the outside the shop just not on the inside. It just don’t make no sense.
I think one of the problems is Londoners don’t know how to wait or be polite or not barge their way through every situation because this city doesn’t work that way. It’s busy as fuck and you have to push past people to get where you need to get to most of the time. But these are not normal times. You can’t act like you used to. You can’t go at the pace you did. You gotta be patient and respectful, qualitites the inhabitants of this city are painfully lacking in. So if you really can’t reign in your old stress monkey ways you gotta zag when everyone else is zigging…ya zig me?
People shot from the back this week. Not like murdered obvs, just photographed. Why? Because we can’t go back. And nor do we want to. The path behind us, the one we were on, the path of continuous growth in a finite space with no reduction in consumption or emissions, the path that has been brought to an abrupt stop by the pandemic, was always a dead end for our species…not today but in the ‘almost, not quite here yet but so close you can feel it and it’s definitely coming if we do fuck all to alter our course’ future.
The ‘other’ path which we can now see because we are now actually on it is a path where mass aviation travel is a thing of the past, where our dependence on oil has been massively reduced, where fast fashion and relentless consumerism has lost its grip, where air pollution has dropped enough so that it is no longer harmful…this is the path we must stay on which means not going back to life as it was before Corona.
We must be strong. We must pressurise our governments to be strong. To take us forwards in the 21st century which means abandoning all the drives of the 20th century simply because they are a threat to our continued existence. We must appeal to our MPs not to agree to bail out the aviation industry and to stop funding the fossil fuels. Let them fail if they can’t survive and let us instead invest in renewables because they will save both the economy and the environment. Oil is no longer even a good investment so there is now fuck all reason for govs & financial companies to put their money in it. #defundclimatechange is a current online movement to convince shareholders in the likes of blackrock & jp morgan to divest their money away from the fossil fuel companies that are continuing to destroy any hope of a liveable future.
Recently I was been given a list of every single email for every MP in parliament around 600 or so) so if you would like me to send to you this doc please get in touch via the ‘CONTACT’ button on my website and I will send to you. I have just written a letter along the lines of this blog post. If we all demand they abandon this one way ticket to hell for the kids of today and if we all do it they will have to listen. This is our last chance to change their minds and implore them to do the right thing. Everything hangs in the balance.
and just to confirm, that stuffed toy is attached to the top of his helmet. Bold look.
Maybe you think life in the lockdown sucks but whatever has been taken away from us there is still life. So if we can just accept that everything has changed and all the shit we used to do we now can’t do in the way that we did it…we can forwards. We need to embrace it not fight against it and if we do, we can usher in a new era for humanity as oppose to consigning us to the evolutionary scrap heap. Corona will pass, environmental breakdown won’t.
I have watched dumbfounded and fairly appalled at the negligence of the youth to maintain social distance out on the street…this is based on what I have seen with my own eyes so could be specific to my area but here it really feels like they are making zero effort to abide by the rules and don’t seem to give a flying fuck…and then it dawned on me..why should they when our society has clearly proven it doesn’t give a fuck about them?
We have not reigned in our climate fucking ways in any significant capacity despite knowing we are consigning the next generation to a pretty fucked future. So why should they care about protecting the older generations when we have shown through our unwillingness to alter our behaviour that we do not care about them. Our government’s way too late aim to reduce emissions to zero by 2050 is a shunt like no other and is effectively declaring generational warfare so can we be surprised they are ‘fighting back’?
The fate we will give them will be infinitely worse than what Covid has done to the people of this planet and if we allow our society to continue to be driven by fossil fuels, relentless consumption and meat production on the current scale this current global catastrophe will seem like a jaunty jaunt in a very jaunty place.
The streets of London have spoken. A week of post corona graffiti telling it how it is..or isn’t. A lot of wall scrawlings seem to be the analogue equivalent of click bait, spreading misinformation and provocation. Maybe that was always the point of graffiti with its history of anti-establishment proclamations. In the case of this one I’m not sure whether it’s demanding for the Tories to be wiped out or whether it is laying blame at the Government for the Covid deaths that have occurred in this country…either way it’s difficult to argue against…
Our current leader is a ditherer. Both in action and word. To have someone who is indecisive at the helm when strong and swift decisions need to be made is far from ideal. He is also avoidant which is also not a great trait in these times. This is the man remember, who hid in a fridge during election campaigning rather than deal with the press. Can we lay blame at his feet for the mismanagement of this crisis? Absofuckinglutely.
His election to P.M in December convinced me that there was nothing good going to happen in this country during his reign of power and that was before Corona. And this is beyond party politics. This is just based on him being competent (or not) in governing. He showed himself to be a useless clueless fuckwit on numerous occasions during his time as foreign secretary alone, forget about every gaff before that, so it really comes as no surprise that this fuckwittery continued once he was ruling the country.
And so once again we are being looked at with disbelief and pity from the rest of the world, who are slack-jawed by the incompetent actions of our government. You could say they are doing everything they can in an extremely difficult situation and they didn’t know what was coming but they did and they’re not. The advice from scientific experts was simple as to how to go about containing this virus…extreme lockdown, mass testing and contact tracing and they didn’t and still aren’t doing any of these things to the extent required for them to be successful.
So now what? Johnson’s recent speech was mocked for its confused and contradictory nature but it feels deliberate as it essentially absolves the government of responsibility and implies that its basically every man for himself. So we have to all just get on with it and hope for the best? Right, cheers for that…
