'technology, guarantor of peace and progress, is an angel sculpted on a sarcophagus' - claudio magris, microcosms.
horsemouth is out in the wilds of herefordshire and it has started raining again (this fact bears repeating). possibly there will be a break in it mid morning (maybe).
he is up early. he has made himself a coffee and let the dog out. his dad has been up and has gone back to bed.
yesterday the sun shone. horsemouth went for a walk up on the common. he went for a walk down to the abbey and out to the bridge with his mum. he sat and read outside (claudio magris, microcosms). and he put the mower round the lawn (and made some steps towards earning his keep). it cut the grass yes but it also cut some wildflowers (which he felt a it remorseful about but still there are plenty more out there).
today it is raining so the cutting of the wildflowers looks less tragic. soon (perhaps) horsemouth will put the strimmer round to tidy up the edges and it will look less ramshackle.
on this day in 1880 edmond de goncourt hears of the death of flaubert. later he will become annoyed at flaubert's friends capitalising on the relationships with the dead author (see he really was a much more soft-hearted fellow than his brother jules).
sweet earth flying/ eleven lights city weekend is over. we are into the royalist approved bank holiday (which horsemouth is doing his best to avoid).
horsemouth is thinking about the pandemic, the lockdown and 'the great reset'.
he has discovered that the term for the deliberate implementation of lockdown, home-working, the total surveillance society is the plandemic. the argument is the bill gates foundation funding meetings of scientists and decision makers to roundtable and role-play possible future pandemics was really a planning exercise for a planned pandemic - the plandemic, rather than a well-intentioned attempt to get governments thinking about the dangers of possible future pandemics.
horsemouth knows few people who believe in the plandemic. but he knows quite a few people who now doubt the wisdom of lockdown.
it all depends on your assessment of how many people (and who) the virus will kill and how many people will die as a result of economic contractions as a result of anti-virus measures (such as lockdown) or because they were unable to seek diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic or after.
horsemouth argued (for indeed this was a family roundtable round at angela and martin's house) that it would be difficult to know if any of the decisions made were the right decisions until much later. really there is only excess deaths to guide you - and the excess deaths contain both those killed by the virus and those killed by the counter-measures.
his brother pointed out that there was sweden as an alternative strategy to lockdown.(let the statistical analysis commence).
the government strategy was marked by vacillation and the lack of a decent plan. the whitehall wisdom was to let it rip - curiously enough dominic cummings emerges as the hero of this for pointing out that this would rapidly overtop the resources of the NHS (resulting in more death than necessary). the eventual strategy was a half-in-half-out okie-cokey type bodge (lock - unlock- relock repeat until people can no longer be bothered).
the PPE debacle, the run down condition of the NHS, the focus on work-from-home (failing to see the 50% plus of workers who had to carry on going to work throughout the pandemic), none of this inspires horsemouth with confidence for the next pandemic ('coming sometime, maybe').
(similarly people can see this in building safety with the lakanal house fire predating grenfell by some ten years.)
horsemouth failed to answer the real question - did it change his lifestyle?
well yes it did. horsemouth has taken advantage of the post-covid restructuring of work to strike out in the direction of retirement and economic inactivity. he is much more crowd-avoidant. all of this is treating him well so far.
No comments:
Post a Comment