Month: May 2020

Today’s lockdown piece is a brief tale of pandemic fiction, by Tom Vater. 

Deconfinement: They’d barricaded themselves in the Blue Parrot Restaurant. Neil, Brian, Amber and Eric. Long out of masks, the four friends could no longer go outside. There were too many infected. But they were starving. 

No one would come and save them. The shortwave radio on the cash counter told them as much, perched next to a porcelain ashtray from Venice that featured the restaurant’s owner’s face. Guido. Guido was dead. He’d become infected weeks ago. Brian and Neil had killed him with saucepan lids and rolled him out of the Blue Parrot Restaurant.  

In their defense, they’d been following government advice. Kill the infected. There was no vaccine. Anyone catching the virus would stop eating and keep spreading until they collapsed. If they collapsed. The authorities were overwhelmed. Business had long been shuttered. The media had collapsed. The Internet was gone. The Blue Parrot had been the center of the universe these past six weeks. At first, the food had been excellent. Then it had begun to run out. 

Amber emerged from the freezer triumphantly, a large frozen bag of something in her hands. 

“I found something.”

The others looked at her doubtfully. They’d been through that freezer. They’d scratched even the moldy packet of durian ice cream off the side and devoured it. Brian, Neil, Eric and Amber looked at each other. Brian was the first to speak.

“That freezer was bone empty yesterday. Someone’s put that bag in there. We had a deal. We’re friends. We agreed to stick it out together to the end. But someone’s broken the deal.”

Amber looked crestfallen. Eric had gone pale. Neil lit a cigarette. 

“Isn’t that your last one?”

“As you said, Brian, we had a deal.”

Eric stepped to the radio and turned it up. 

“The Ministry of Health advises all non-infected citizens to stay indoors and wear their government issued masks. Our air force will drop an aerosol campaign on the city this evening at 6pm, in fifteen minutes. There will be a bright flash of light. Do not venture outside for at least two hours.”

The announcement gave way to static. 

Eric turned to Amber,

“What’s in the bag?”

“Someone fucking cheated,” Neil interjected again. “Guys, we promised each other to survive together, keeping each other’s backs. Someone’s been eating and the rest of us have been starving.”

“What’s in the bag? Open the bag,” Eric repeated. 

Amber stepped up to the largest table, opened the bag and poured its contents on the shiny wood surface. She threw up almost immediately. Eric, Brian and Neil shrunk back as one. Perhaps not quite as one. But they all shrunk back. Amber was crying. No one said a thing. They’d promised to share. They’d also promised to keep their humanity. But one of them had failed. 

Neil shook his head, disgusted or broken, and took a few steps towards the door. He looked at his watch and grinned sadly. Then he shrugged and raised his hand and turned. 

“See you guys.”

“No,” the others all shouted. He hesitated, then shrugged again, a gesture his friends knew so well. A gesture they loved as much as they loved anything about one another. 

“Well, every cloud has got a silver lining,” he said and stepped out into the light. 

Lisa Arensen is riding out the coronavirus in Siem Reap, and stays sane and open to wonder by walking in Angkor Park.

Angkor Coronavirus Diaries, Part I

The descendants of Angkor

I.

They keep saying, in the papers,
that Angkor is empty; but
it is only empty of tourists.

It is inhabited by Cambodians, as it 
has always been. In fact, without
the lumbering buses, the rows of
tuk tuks, the crowds of visitors,
Angkor feels reclaimed. There
are families and lovers picnicking 
by the 12^thcentury moats in the hot 
afternoons, wading in Sras Srang 
reservoir with their trousers rolled 
up, fishing off the sandstone steps. 
City folk cycle on every road and forest 
path, obsess over the troops of long-tailed
macaques, and go up on their toes to pick
fruit like the Javan plum. Brave young men 
play football, gleaming with sweat.

It’s quieter, yes, and we who visit now are not 
quite like the foreign tourists or the ancient ones. 
Our modes of conveyance and our technologies
of communication have changed, but
the descendants of Angkor are still here—
walking, feasting and worshipping
underneath their sacred trees.

II.

I was on the south wall of Angkor Thom early
one morning when I heard the singing. He
was in the moat below me, a trap over one bare 
shoulder, a cast net slung over the other, and he
called out to me and I answered back, and he
said there were no guests for the boats, so he was fishing. 
I said I lived in the city and walked on, leaving
behind a boatman wading in still clear water up to 
his chest, singing an ancient love song.

Angkor Coronavirus Diaries, Part II

When death brushes closely by 

I.

We were coming back from the temples at dusk,
a wet sandy dog lying at our feet, and our tuk tuk 
swung around a corner and there was a woman 
lying on the side of the road with two men 
standing over her.

We pulled over by a roadside fruit stand,
I found my latex gloves and went to see 
if I could offer assistance. She was conscious
when I arrived, the others lifting her to 
her feet. They helped her limp across the 
road to the fruit stand as I quizzed her 
about the nature of her injuries. Nothing 
was broken, she insisted, and she longed for 
Tiger Balm. So I got her some, and rubbed it 
gently onto her swelling upper arm. There was 
red dirt ground into the side and back of her pretty 
gauze blouse, which she refused to let me rip
open to inspect her arm. There was dirt in her dark 
hair, and she was talking in that 
scattered startled way 
one does when death has brushed closely by. 

The car’s tire struck her motorbike. She toppled off 
to the side of the road rather than rolling under the 
wheels. The car, as is customary in Cambodia, was 
long gone. The other men were strangers like me, 
stopping to lift a fallen woman out of the way of more
danger. She hadn’t worn a helmet, she said, because 
she wasn’t going far from home. She had five children, 
she owed $10,000 to a microfinance institution, what 
would have happened to all of them, 
had she died that afternoon?There was no lump forming on her head, only the injured leg and arm from where the motorbike 
landed on top of her body after the collision. 
She was lucky. So I left her there with my red 
Chinese balm, the vendors talking her back to 
calmness, and I remembered that death can wait 
anywhere—not just in the spiked proteins of 
this new coronavirus, but just there, in the shadow
of the evening trees, around the corner, around the 
bend, just down the road between the market and 
your small wooden home.

II.

Last Saturday, we stepped through the ruined sandstone 
pillars of an Angkorian bridge to see the river and stopped short. 
Far below us, two young women lay side by side in the water,
fully clothed, their bodies arranged upon small boulders. 
It was an eerie tableau. Their purses and shoes lay on the 
far bank, the clear water flowed shallowly over their feet 
and jean-clad legs, their faces were pillowed on stones, limbs 
tucked beneath them. They were still as death.

My companion thought she saw one’s chest rise and fall, but 
I saw nothing, nothing but the gentle tug of the river on 
their clothes, the odd curve of one bare foot propped against 
a stone, and we could not leave them there, unsure of their fate,
so I climbed down the bank towards them, and still they remained 
unmoving, until I was only a meter away and could no longer bear 
the silence and called out, Sister! And one girl’s eyes fluttered 
open, startled, surprised, and she declared them both alive and 
well, simply two young women asleep in a shaded bend 
of the river three hours before noon. We left them there,
hearts pounding.

Philip Coggan shares a ‘lockdown day’ in Australia’s national capital.

Today is . . ?
I forget. It’s Tuesday, I’m sure of that. But I forget what day it is in the count of lockdown days. 

This is how I spent my day:

I ring my friend Gary. He lost his wife last year, but it was long-expected and he’s coping well. We’ve been meeting for coffee on the first day of each month but that’s on hold. He tells me he spent yesterday watching Netflix. He recommends Detectorists. ‘Understated British humour‘, he says.

I go to Molto Italian restaurant, across the toy lake where I live. I like Molto, I like Italian. It’s doing take-aways only. All the restaurants are doing take-aways only. I ask Carlo how’s business. Business is ‘ratso’, he says. A man goes past carrying a glass of red wine. ‘That’s Pete’, says Carlo, ‘he goes past every lunchtime, with a glass of red wine. Don’t like to ask why’.

The day is sunny and windless and there’s alot of people around – people walking dogs, people in cycling gear riding new bicycles, dads with small children, men of a certain age in sleeveless puffer jackets and flat tweed caps, groups of women of an uncertain age out for coffee in takeaway cups. 

I go to the supermarket to buy marmalade. There’s a homeless man begging outside in the sun, where it’s warm. He has a hat in front of him with lots of coins in it. I ask him if he’s alright, he looks unwell. Not corona unwell, but about to pass out from fatigue and/or lack of food unwell. 

Yeah.

What’s it like?

Cold at night.

Where (I really shouldn’t be getting into this conversation) do you stay nights?

Mumble. The guy talks like he has a mouth full of cotton wool. I’ll pass on that one.

Are people being more generous?

No. They’re tight.

Right.

Right.

Back home I phone Greg, a friend in Sydney; he was in the middle of completing the purchase of a new house when the hammer fell. I ask him for news.

‘News is good and a friend from Melbourne is coming up to help with the move’, he says. 

Melbourne? The rule in New South Wales is that you can’t travel more than 50km from your home without good reason. I fear that somewhere north of the border a New South Welsh patrol car will pull my Victorian-plated friend over and ask him what the problem is, and I doubt that helping a friend move house counts. But I don’t feel it’s my place to mention this. 

I watch the news. There’s been one more coronavirus death in Australia, bringing the total to 97. Here in Canberra we have one active case. Prime Minister Morrison offers us all his congratulations. Attention is now on getting Australians back to work. His personal popularity currently stands at 70%; pretty good for a man resembling a used car salesman. 

And so to bed. Tomorrow, as the man says, is another day.

In his third lockdown piece Ross Sinclair—Wellington, NZ—lays the groundwork for never being invited to another family BBQ while sharing some thoughts about his country’s Prime Minister.

When the kids are busy I catch up on emails and news. I find my way to a ‘human interest’ clip from CNN on YouTube. I cry and so does the interviewer. The news is not supposed to be like this. I stop it before it ends, like I stop bad dreams before they become nightmares, and I sit there remembering why I don’t watch TV. 

I get my news from Radio New Zealand. Smart people asking other smart people insightful questions. Very little ‘human interest’. 

I also listen to the Prime Minister’s daily briefings, marvelling at how lucky we are to have a compassionate leader in such a crisis. If the centre-right National Party had been in power my friend, a monumental mason, would have been busy next year—twelve months after death—when families erect headstones.

My wife wonders if Jacinda is heralding a new era of compassionate female leaders. I hope so. 

I don’t feel compassionate, I feel bored, so I post on the WhatsApp group I share with my 10 first-cousins.

“Two questions for you dickheads” I post.

“I was wondering if the antivaxers among us will be lining up for the Covid-19 vaccinations when they arrive? And to the rest of you, how do you feel now about the years of chronic underfunding of the health system under National?”

I try and offend both ends of the political spectrum. 

I succeed. 

These exchanges always descend, rapidly, into me being abused ; myself insisting that they should really listen to what I say as I am the only cousin with a PhD.

This sends them apoplectic. 

Mission accomplished. I go and make the kids a snack. 

Ross Sinclair

Today HOWL presents its esteem awards for the most interesting media headlines and bylines from these ‘Covid times’.

‘Justice of a Poetic Kind’ Award:

Shopper who used team to stockpile $10k of toilet paper, sanitiser refused refund

RNZ, 16^thApril 2020

Puns: ‘Oh dear’ Award

Selfish surfer’s behavior far from swell

Stuff, 16^thApril 2020

The ‘Not Keep Calm and Carry On’ Award

‘Shambles, chaos, ridiculous’: what the UK papers say about Covid-19 testing

Guardian, 2^ndApril

‘Interesting Question’ Award

Coronavirus: Where will be the last place to catch Covid-19?

BBC.COM > News

‘You Should Never Bake Your Covid Heroes’ Award

New Zealand TV presenter ‘deeply sorry’ for her disturbing Jacinda Ardern cake

Guardian, 16^thApril

The ‘Say What!’ Award

Coronavirus: German zoo may feed animals to each other

Stuff 16th April

‘The Purr-fect Headline’ Award

You can’t leave that lion there: big cats nap on road in South Africa amid lockdown

Guardian, 17th April

The ‘Headline that I Dream Of’ Award

‘It’s Over!’

Diary Entry No. 2: Walking a beach in Lockdown – Reflections from Ross Sinclair, Wellington, New Zealand.

Sometimes our exercise is a walk down the beach. Other days it is online dancing where I am apparently a complete embarrassment even though no one is watching.

When we were walking down the beach yesterday, we saw two police officers come down through the dunes in their day-glow vests. We had not seen police on our beach before. The authorities had ramped up police checks over the Easter weekend, ensuring people were not driving for walks. Rather than questioning beachgoers, the two officers proceeded to draw giant hopscotch squares in the sand and then play hopscotch. We walked past them without being questioned. 

Since we danced today, tonight I take the dog for a walk down the beach. All the streetlights are blazing like a normal night but the streets are empty. I try to pretend it’s after a zombie apocalypse, but disappointingly it just seems more like Christmas day night: everyone away on holiday except a few lonely souls. If it was Christmas day night at least there might be one drunken fool stumbling home like a zombie that I could have daydreamed about. 

The walk is along the beach is towards the airport where there is usually a procession of planes taking off at regular intervals. Tonight there are only two private jets taking off. Perhaps carrying PPE that billionaires have generously donated using the millions they don’t pay in tax. Or perhaps it’s just billionaires going where billionaires like to go. Like to Davos. Or to tax-free havens. Or perhaps they carry National Party politicians flying private to avoid infections from economy. All in the name of the economy. 

I reach the end of the beach near the end of the runway, and turn around to walk home. It seems darker walking away from the bright lights of the airport. The dark carcasses on the beach that I’m not imaging to be zombies are kelp washed up by a recent storm. Above the sound of the breaking waves is the sound of trucks. 

Beyond the airport is the sewage treatment station. The pipe that carries it’s sewage-sludge to the landfill has broken so there is a constant procession of tankers passing along Lyall Bay Paradeat regular intervals. One every 10 minutes. 24-hours a day. 

They are an essential service.  

One contractor has named their fleet the “Turd Taxis” and uses the colour scheme of NY yellow cabs. Another is a converted milk tanker, which just seems so wrong. At least they got it the right way around, and hopefully the tanker won’t return to the milk run once exports pick up again.

The trucks drive to fast. They must be paid by the load. When they pass there is a faint whiff of faecal material. It last just long enough for you to register it – “What’s that smell? Jesus that smells like…” – and then it’s gone.

Before Covid-19 when the parade was packed with people out enjoying the seaside, I imagine the drivers were also enjoying themselves by drawing attention to their trucks by driving too fast, and then appalling bystanders with that smell. 

I know if I was driving a Turd Taxi I would have enjoyed that. 

I feel sorry for them now as there is no one to disgust. The streets are silent as are the living dead. 

Ross Sinclair

The dawn chorus takes on a special meaning for Yaeayi, a Japanese native ‘locked down’ in France.

Like ‘other / previous’ mornings since Day 1 of this ‘world-famous / worldly-shared’ lockdown, around 7am several sprightly soprano notes commence tapping my brainwaves, and then my soul is introduced gently and connected to the natural world that lies outside my window.

I fix my ‘regards / looks’ onto the infinite horizon, infused with skyblue, embracing the universe with a spirit of ‘Peace and Love’ that I have never felt before.

I defy the power of gravity on my eyelids and let my ears fill with the notes of harmony played by the precious creatures that remain free, outside, in the ‘Covid’ world.

The notes, sometimes, are like an orchestra composed with different players participating in a movement or symphony. Other times more like a soft ballad played on some plucked guitar strings.

Each night, before navigating  my feet to my cocoon, I studiously wander towards my front window, in order to slide them carefully to make just the right space. This should not be more than 5-7cm—not too wide or it will allow in the chilled dawn air—but sufficient for the morning melody to make its way inside.

This night-time ritual is a new habit, borne of this ‘lockdown’ world, but one that has become part of it, ingrained. Now nature, not my cell phone, is my morning call; entering through the window and waking me each morning. Nature now has dominion of the land and sky beyond the glass.

So tonight like other days, I am wandering past the window, and preparing to dive deep into my blanket cocoon, wondering what notes will greet me at sunrise…

A new habit, a new ‘normal’, and one which I have come to hold precious.

PyunponpiiipoooSaasaasaa….. Piyopiyo…kasakasa–♪♪♭♭♯ 

Today’s Lockdown diary piece comes from Ross Sinclair, Wellington, New Zealand, for whom the term ‘essential service’ has spawned a whole range of new responsibilities.

My day starts early.  Usually woken by a ping from my wife’s phone or her tapping answers to one. It is usually around 5 am, sometimes as early as 3 am. Odd numbers. I find odd numbers much worse to wake up to than even numbers, as if they are going to somehow throw my whole day out of kilter. 

With these loud little noises, my wife is clearly breaking our pre-Covid-19 pacted of no work phones inbed.  

But lots has changed. 

And this is the least of it. 

I get up and make her breakfast and a coffee. I know she knows how to drive the espresso machine but when I am in residence, she insists she can’t stretch the milk. 

I am an essential service to an essential service. 

It is nice though, some early morning time together. I don’t see her much during this lockdown. She usually gets home late. 

She calls herself a public servant. She’s working on the policy response to Covid-19 as a shift worker because they have so much policy to shift. She tells me they used to take weeks to write a cabinet paper, stressing over where to place a verb in a sentence. Now it seems they have only a few days to stress over where to place masses of potentially infected people.

My wife leaves for work with all the other early-rising essential-workers, but rather than their day-glow vests and sports utility vehicles or buses or trucks, she’s wearing a power suit and driving a small EV. 

Very Wellington. 

My wife is so grateful that I’m looking after the kids and cooking and cleaning and tears up when she tells me this. She’s saving the fucking world while I’m vacuuming and she’s thanking me!

I tell her I’m proud of her and I feel empowered by supporting her to do what needs to be done. I don’t worry about it sounding condescending or cheesey because it’s genuine and one of Zoe’s many talents is taking a compliment.

The kids get up later but don’t expect coffee. They do expect sugar-coated cereal, somehow conflating lockdown with holidays and an increased chance of breakfast indulgence. 

If it has been a 3 am start to the day, I tend not to sugar coat my responses to their requests.

I think the neighbours would report lots of shouting from our house, if they could hear anything over the din of their incessant power tools. The fervour with which they are doing it themselves suggests they don’t realise that we’re in this lockdown for the long haul.

Of the five residents in our house, Luna the dog shouts the most. She’s just not used to sounds coming over the fence during the day. I recognise them as sanders and grinders and water blasters. She doesn’t recognise them at all, so she barks at them. And she barks a lot.

We are home schooling during lockdown. We had talked about me doing this if Zoe got a posting in the Pacific. Now I am getting to practice, and slowly getting better. I started off being more a janitor and manning the canteen, but slowly I am working my way towards teacher’s assistant. My ambition is, of course, principal. 

When the kids are busy, I catch up on emails and news. I find my way to a ‘human interest’ clip from CNN on YouTube. I cry and so does the interviewer. The news is not supposed to be like this. I stop it before it ends, like stopping a bad dream before it becomes a nightmare. I sit there remembering why I don’t watch TV. 

The day goes on: morning classes, lunch, afternoon classes, exercise.

The day ends how it began, just Zoe and me and her phone in bed. We listen to a podcast of radio news.  They say the Easter road toll was zero. No one could remember when that had last happened, or if it had ever happened before. If it had, I bet it was during the Spanish Flu. 

Ross Sinclair

Today’s Lockdown piece: Words of reflection from Phnom Penh and the magic keyboard of Steven W. Palmer.

“I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.”

― Hunter S. Thompson.

Self-imposed lockdown, Day…what is it again, Priti? Oh yes. Day Thirteenty fortytweleven.

To borrow another quote (and why not, it saves me writing), Philip K. Dick said: “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” 

I think between Hunter and Phil, they have nailed this weird alternate reality we have not only plunged into, but plunged into willingly in most cases. Take a single Scottish exile with Cyclothymia (that’s Bipolar III to you lucky laypeople) and lock him away – voluntarily of course – in a large house with an equally large but fenced yard and watch the adherence to carefully constructed cycles of up and down slowly crumble.

For the most part, my view of the outside world is half-seen bodies passing my gate. For the other part, my link to reality is a slowly crumbling interaction with the rest of the world via social media.

Ah, the sword with two edges. On one hand, it provides a link to people you know and love. It can even offer respite in the guise of ever-darkening memes (at what point does it become acceptable to laugh at death?). But on the other hand, you are also subjected to a never-ending downward spiral of conspiracy theories whose madness, for a moment, make you feel totally sane. 

From that fairly predictable cycle of up and down, the world has shifted this cyclothymic writer into a chaotic unpattern (sorry, George) of morning “guess the mood” gameshows. If I can avoid social media long enough to not see the increasingly orange face of the Trumpoon or yet another 5G rant, then I might manage to make it to the coffee machine and allow that first caffeine – and obligatory accompanying nicotine – hit nurse me into either mild mania or mild depression.

Either version is preferable to a full-blown episode. I can try and find a point of focus – increasingly more difficult as paying work has disappeared – and coax my damaged psyche to deal with the day ahead. 

Then there are treat days. “What are treat days?” I hear you cry enthusiastically. Those are one of the two days I deign to leave the house as a hunter-gatherer. Well, more of the gatherer since mammoths went extinct, to be fair.

Fully masked and goggled, I mount my trusty steed and ride through the village, ignoring the occasional suspicious glance from fearful natives. Enter supermarket, use hand sanitiser, wipe trolley handle with wet wipes, use hand sanitiser again, then off for a trolley dash – at respectable social distance of course – that Dale Winton would have been proud of (for our American viewers, think David Ruprecht, for Aussies, think Ian Turpie). List ticked off, fellow shoppers swerved past, non-mask wearing people scowled at, I make for the checkout, replete with flexiglass screen to protect the staff…or is it to protect the customers? 

Despite the actual, real, truly tangible insanity of the supermarket, those little excursions represent a brief toe-dipping back into reality and sanity. As you ride in the – lighter than usual – traffic of Phnom Penh, you can, just for a brief 5 or 10 minutes, pretend that we are not all trapped in a maelstrom of fear and uncertainty.

You can pretend that you are going out for some beers tonight, maybe a game of pool, go for some nice food, flirt with the waitress, joke with the motodop drivers, gaze at the intricacies of social intercourse on the riverside, all those stupid little things that we took for granted…

I want those stupid things back.

“To complain is always non-acceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.”  Eckhart Tolle