a sphinx guards the door marked ‘exit’

‘ethiopia produces plenty of sphinxes... great avenues of guardian sphinxes lining the approaches to tombs’ and there is the sphinx on the road to thebes (horsemouth was desultorily watching pasolini’s edipo rei and then a documentary on pasolini with subtitles autotranslated from the italian).

horsemouth hasn’t got much done. he’s kind of ashamed of his reading (louise wener’s the big blind, she was the singer in sleeper way back, horsemouth met her, very briefly, once, it’s a decent enough exploitation novel). salammbo sits around here somewhere. he’s almost out of lrb’s. he’s getting antsy. he might have to go out of the house for a walk.

later thebes suffers from the plague. eventually oedipus discovers the truth.

boris hasn’t been seen much (woop woop he's back - or maybe he’ll just leaving matt handcock out front to take the bullets). dominic cummings and one of his computer bods from the leave campaign) has been sitting in on the sage (scientific advisory) meetings for the government. now this is unusual (and probably politically dangerous). horsemouth had assumed cummings was just sitting in his house in a sulk (he bests the westminster establishment and just as he was about to do great things... the coronavirus blindsides him).

they have been knocked sideways by events. they have been forced to get the chequebook out. but they look slow out of the starting blocks and woefully under-prepared (on testing, on tracking, on PPE). they look to have miscalled the progress of the epidemic so that the UK will eventually end up with one of the highest deathtolls per head of population in the developed world (just behind america probably).

but they have also been lucky, the infected have not over-topped capacity in the hospitals, the old have died quietly out of sight and out of mind in the nursing homes, the medics, the cleaners have not downed tools, marched and protested, the daily briefings mean they look like they’ve tried. on PPE plucky little matt has rolled up his sleeves and carried boxes.

’we’re all human, cathy’ protests matt, jeremy hunt (the man who for years presided over the running down of the NHS gets to be interviewed as the governments main critic (parachuted in as chair of the parliamentary health committee - smart move), kier starmer protests forensically, loyally, ineffectually.

what is the route out of this if any immunity is temporary? what is the future for cities? how can the city function if rapid mass transit can’t be used? how will horsemouth survive?

a sphinx guards the door marked ‘exit’. it’s a grey morning. but it should clear later. horsemouth will carry on with his reading.