Life? Don't talk to me about life

Some might remember Marvin the paranoid android in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This was one of his many sayings. Years ago, I was working for a bank and visited the site where most of their IT work was done. One room contained examples of all the ATM machines they'd ever used (there were lots of them) - but the one that caught my eye must surely have been the model for Marvin for the TV series of the Hitchhiker's Guide. Sadly, my colleagues didn't get the reference.

Looking back, I see that the last blog entry I wrote was about a British Prime Minister and some of his antics. That was in July 2019. It's now July 2021. The world has lurched off in a somewhat different direction, thanks to a virus that first appeared in China. I remember thinking when I heard the first reports "oh, here's another virus - probably like SARS, it will just affect China and a few other places". How wrong I was.

I recall taking my car in for a service a few weeks later. It was already clear that Europe was going to be affected, and I remembered the TV adverts about colds and flu from years ago that showed people sneezing and how droplets would land on things like train door handles and the grab handles on buses. I was sat on a bus, going back to pick up my car, and I wondered how safe the bell press was to get the bus to stop to drop me off. As I looked around the bus, I realised how impossible it was to work out who might be infected (or how likely it was that a local bus would have anyone on board who actually had the virus).

A day later, I was sitting down with a friend of mine to eat a Chinese meal before our choir rehearsal started. He coughed a couple of times and I tensed up. A few days later I felt what seemed like a cold coming on, but didn't get the usual collection of symptoms. I remember scurrying down to the local pharmacy to pick up a few things, hoping I wouldn't sneeze or cough and scare the few people in the shop (I didn't). So, I went into a kind of isolation a week or two before the national lockdown was announced. That gave me a head start on organising home deliveries, though the severity of the collapse of online services shocked me. I found myself facing the prospect of eating only noodles, oats and lentils for the foreseeable future. Anyone want a bag of lentils? Jokes about people buying only toilet paper and no food rang a little hollow for a while.

Over a year later and where are we? I've lost count of how many lockdowns we've had; how many public figures have told us to do one thing, while they did something different; how many people have ignored whatever restrictions have been announced; how many changes to restrictions we've had. The one consistent thing is how slow our government seems to be in imposing controls and how loudly they've said that restrictions aren't the way to go. But then, we do still have the kipper man and his lack of hairstyle.