other than that he’s barely been out of the house (up to the local shop once a week. the dudes up the local shop, all the people they see, their distressing habit of not wearing masks and handling the produce without gloves). horsemouth has gone all howard hughes in the crisis.
yesterday he wandered out onto the marshes (he picked some wildflowers they are in a jar here with him). the lockdown suits his lifestyle (sit around, read books, sunbathe, fart about on facebook). pretty much it is what he would do anyway - well, mostly. he’d like to get on with some music. he’d like to get up to visit his parents. (hell he’d like to hide out there in the countryside for the duration).
his folks are halfway up a hill in the middle of nowhere (with minimal points of contact with the outside world, the daily run to the garage on the motorway for the paper probably) this gives them a decent chance. later this evening a phone call to them.
ideally horsemouth will have had it already and survived (he doesn’t think so but maybe - of course if there were an antibody test widely available this would help enormously). failing that he will catch it at some point and be one of the 80% to whom its a pain in the arse but no more - he doesn’t like to think about the scenario where he’s one of the 20% who gets it and ends up in hospital (or indeed in the percentage that actually dies). he thinks he’s a bit young to actually die of it (but it’s not impossible).
he hopes he doesn’t catch it. (he hopes he hasn’t caught it). he hopes he doesn’t give it to anyone.
it has swept through the care homes, it has swept through the old people living in extended families. the government are arguing that the infection rate and the death rate among the doctors and nurses is no higher than the general population (so failing to provide them with adequate PPE can’t be killing them no?) but surely their rates of infection should be a lot lower (because they have the kit and the kit works) even though they are exposed to more people who have it.
cummings (sick with covid) and his wife (sick with covid) drive to durham to drop the kids off with his folks. were they making a run for it? was it like weekend? she’s a spectator editor - horsemouth always assumed it was a style sheet for tory morons he hadn’t realised it was actually the in house magazine of the new regime. (he’ll have to try to actually read it).
cummings is the tories’ best hope because he wants to (re)configure them as a modern technocratic managerialist party that can continue to win elections. without an utterly radical reconfiguration of the ruing class/ the electoral system and an economic rebalancing of the country the ongoing failure of democratic legitimacy cannot but continue. it is thus fertile ground in which to plant a flag (as cummings/leave/boris proves).
what we are heading into is a double dose of radical shock therapy (a covid brexit) that may well overstretch the ruling class’s ability to manage it (and the people’s ability to keep calm and carry on). boris has to take the conservative party into this radical change and encourage them to stick to it even when their desire to keep their noses in the trough conflicts with their sense of who they are. the genius of the thatcher construct was that she was simultaneously one nation tory (socially conservative) and radical neo-liberal freebooter and this allowed her to get away with a lot.
globalisation may be over but the neo-liberal looting is not. we are entering a phase where the state is assuming more importance.
horsemouth takes the second title for today’s epistle from a documentary on the french new wave - the jump cut, the montage, the experience of the film is not seamless, the artifice involved in making it is foregrounded, made the subject of the film, the film becomes about film.
yesterday horsemouth failed to go for a walk (how useless is that?). he will try and rectify this today.
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