From The Darkness of Winter

Feb 2, 2021 | Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water

Thankfully, the forecast heavy snow hasn’t reached Edinburgh, though it has been cold and wet. The day has largely been indoors except for a brief excursion to empty a bin and to come up to the shed.

As I have for the past few days, I’ve focused on revision, which is something I can lose myself in. There’s still a long way to go. It’s remarkable how ruthless I can be when I haven’t looked at them for a while and don’t feel so precious about them. The short stories are relatively straightforward in that their boundaries are clear and they are contained within relatively few pages, though the longest is a 23,000 word novella. The novel that’s up next is a more complex proposition.

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Chatting on a WhatsApp group earlier, I was reminded of a post from 29 March last year–Where Do We Go From Here? The post tried to anticipate some of the outcomes of the pandemic. With apologies for the long quote, I wrote:

Accepting the caveat that it’s easy to over-analyse and misread the capacity of events to change structural norms, even global events such as this one, I think the following are all up in the air (with all the other things that will occur to me as soon as I press ‘publish’ no doubt). I’ll come back to some of these bullets as I think about them more.

• • • Work practices and remote working.
    • Meeting the needs of a large cohort of newly unemployed people
    • Arts and entertainment.
    • Family structures.
    • Modes of social interaction.
    • Retail and the High Street. This was already attenuating but this crisis will be a death blow for many businesses. It will also impact on the landlords of business premises as rents disappear. I don’t expect much more than tiny violins for landlords, but this is part of the financial ecosystem that supports, for example, pension funds.
    • Transport: local, national and international. Just like the liquidity crash of 2008 was amplified by the deep interconnectivity of financial institutions, so this one is amplified by international and national travel.
    • Tourism. Plenty of countries or major cities have sucked deep on the flow of tourist money and become dependent on it. Likewise budget airlines.
    • Pollution: I’m not alone in noticing just how much pleasanter things are without ubiquitous traffic noise, airport noise and clean air.
    • Supply chains and resilience.
    • Economic orthodoxies.
    • General diet and health.
    • Social inequalities: the so-called ‘low skilled’ and underappreciated are suddenly crucial to survival.
    • Structural social inequality: no one can have failed to have noticed the widespread resentment that Prince Charles was able to be tested when health workers can’t, and able to bring his entourage to rural Deeside when us punters were told not to even think of doing any such thing. Gaby Hinsliff wrote a good piece on this: Anger over Prince Charles’s Covid-19 test is a warning sign of divisions to come Nor have we forgotten the activities of Prince Andrew or our appreciation of why Harry and Meghan did the sensible thing and extracted themselves on their own terms.
    • Political orthodoxies. Michael Gove was blathering on again today about Britain facing this as an independent nation. Will the nonsenses of nationalism in an interconnected world facing a global crisis make a dent in Brexit (or for that matter Indy in Scotland)? I don’t know; I tend to doubt it.
      It has to be said, though, and without any disrespect to individual MPs, the last month has put on display for all to see the utter irrelevance of the current Labour Party, partly because of their ludicrously over-extended leadership process that’s kept Great Uncle Chocolate Teapot in post since December.

One of the things that strikes me about that list, by the way, is that many of these are already under strain or changing; the crisis is functioning as a stress test that may, or may not, hasten processes already under way.

Looking back on it, that’s not a bad stab at things. As Malcy said earlier, when I posted that, Mr Cummings was already in Barnard Castle, for which he should have been sacked at the time. I’m not going to go through the whole list again, though I ought to revisit some of them, but just as a straw in the wind, the Scottish First Minister said today that restrictions and controls would be placed on people coming into Scotland, for example on international flights. There were, I think (might be wrong), just three international flights into Scotland today.

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Music : on a family WhatsApp group, people were posting snaps of snowdrops where they live. Snowdrops are often called the Fair Maids of February. Here’s Robin Dransfield’s song about them.