When the Wind is Singing Strangely
Something odd is happening. I looked over some recent articles about ‘how life is going to change’ and ‘what 2021 might have in store’ and noticed they all assume that changes brought about by Covid, as they understand them, will be permanent. The articles are also tied up with their origins–Americans set things in the context of a post-45 era, Brits in a post-Brexit country. Climate change usually gets a passing nod, though I think it will be the more important factor, as will how China chooses to push its strengths.
I understand the urge: I did something similar early in the pandemic. I’m more wary now, even if I do throw the occasional comment in, for example about international transport.
Covid as we know it still has a long way to go: I’d guess another couple of years of local restrictions and turmoil world-wide. it isn’t just that it will take time to roll out vaccine and the pandemic remains in full swing meantime, it’s that while we’re doing that, other things are happening. Other lineages of the virus are emerging, for example, and the transfer to mink that spooked the Danes has already begun in the US too, providing another reservoir in which the virus can mutate and slip back into humans. We’ve been here before, when Yersinia pestis mutated and brought us the Black Death (on which, Dr. Monica H Green’s recent paper, currently downloadable as a PDF for free is fascinating: The Four Black Deaths). The pest last visited and devastated Edinburgh three hundred years later in the mid-seventeenth century, but the historical accounts take time and trouble to seek out and read. We talk about the 1918 influenza pandemic, but we’ve lost personal memory of it. We survive, at a population level, and forget. But Yersinia pestis is still with us, as is influenza, as will be Covid-19 and whatever else emerges over time.
Covid-19 will not go away, and it’s useless to pretend that it will; we’ll just work out ways of mitigating it or avoiding it.
I mention this because I’ve been pondering the imminent end of the calendar year and what, if anything, I should write about it here; how much I should add to the steaming spoils of bullshit coming your way.
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After posting yesterday I wrote 750 words or so of fiction, and I was pleased with that. Actually I wrote more, then deleted some of it. Today I have napped and eaten Christmas pudding and custard as comfort food. I’ve also posted another pair of 1970 music posts, and may post another later.
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Music: back in the day I used to love going to see Lindisfarne, and saw them often. I stopped when Alan Hull died. They were able to turn any gig into a party. I’ve recently written elsewhere that
There was a time when, in the days I counted these things, Lindisfarne were probably the band I’d seen live most often. I have happy memories of being blinded by the halogen spots they’d turn on the crowd at the chorus of Clear White Light, their long-time closing song. They were also the loudest band I ever heard, believe it or not. It was a fluke, I suppose: they used a full touring PA in a low-ceilinged university refectory. That was in 1983, when I’d not long started work and I had to go into a training day unable to hear much beyond the ringing in my ears. It’s possible I was hungover too.
A highlight for me was always when Alan sang Winter Song.
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