Going Viral – The Blogalypse 9 – A tin foil hat is not PPE

When I said ‘embrace the crazy’ last week, I really should have been a little more specific about the limitations and boundaries of that advice. I was talking about having a little fun with your zany side, embracing your inner Gonzo, your inner Lady Gaga, your inner Sue Pollard at most. What I wasn’t suggesting was that you get out your tin foil hat and start licking random pieces of fruit in the supermarket before putting them back on the shelves.

Do I really have to tell you everything?

OK, fair enough…so here is everything I know as of this week:-

Some people think the Coronavirus is a hoax. Some people in American churches believe so deeply that God will protect them and that it’s all caused by ‘the gays’ that they are still congregating in their masses, sharing communion wine cups and kissing the same priests. Some of those people are dead now, unsurprisingly.

Some people think the Coronavirus was created in a lab in order to control the masses, make us all put trackers on our phones (they can do that anyway if they want to, to be fair), make us all have an injection by force which will a) do some sort of mind-control on us, b) inject trackers directly into our blood stream, or c) make Putin very happy. Suffice to say, I’ve seen nothing to convince me this is anything other than full blown window-licking, excrement-smearing nonsense.

Some people in the USA are actually saying on the TV that African Americans can’t get the virus (they can) and some other people in America have been stock piling guns rather than toilet rolls. Maybe so they can mug people who have bought all the toilet rolls and steal them away. Who knows. I just know it doesn’t bode well.

Other things I have found out this week – there is a ‘turd’ in Saturday. How did none of us not notice before? Junior school children everywhere will be made more happy by this revelation.

And finally I learned that my limit of absolutely strict life-preserving self-isolation regime reached its zenith at four weeks to coincide with when I got PMT, and now André is going out on masked and gloved reconnaissance expeditions to find us icecream, chocolate, beer and ingredients for my new obsession – microwavable mug cakes. We aren’t supposed to leave the house for non-essentials so he has deliberately timed these expeditions to coincide with needing something more earnestly essential…like eggs, bread, cooking oil, dog food, soap. But the truth is it was always the beer and chocolate we really wanted and that he’s now potentially risking both our lives to retrieve. We are not proud of this at all.

But the truth is our lives are largely so idyllic in so many ways that we have to keep reminding ourselves that this shit is REAL. People we know have died. People we know’s parents have died. People we know are serving on the NHS frontline in the most hellish nightmarish work situation of their lives, and as hard as it can be to hear their stories and comfort them as best we can, it’s actually something we need to keep doing to remind ourselves that this invisible enemy is still out there and will be for the foreseeable future. It could take any one of us at any time.

Because so much of this feels like a movie, or a dream, or an early episode of The Walking Dead that it’s easy to forget it’s real. And it’s really easy to somehow self-soothe to the point that we can imagine we can just turn off the telly, or switch the channel or say ‘I’m bored with this’ like it’s a computer game and we can just make it stop now. Much harder to acknowledge it’s still really well out of control, and no amount of tin foil hats, evangelical praying, finger pointing or interpretive jazz dancing is going to change that in the near future.

It’s a bit like having a really painful zit – the kind that’s buried under the skin surface but doesn’t have any sort of tangible head yet. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there, and to remind yourself it really is there you have to keep pressing it now and then, even though it hurts like buggery to do so. This really really hurts, but somehow I’m still prodding it to remind myself it hurts. Covid-19 I know you’re there.

So easy to forget when the sun is shining, I’m out walking the dog with the man I love amongst bluebells and daffodils and blossom-clad cherry trees. So easy to forget when there’s work at home piling up waiting for me to finish (like usual) and we have food on the table and a comfy house to quarantine in and we always had a shitty social life. I know many aren’t so lucky.

I find I’m still self-soothing by trying to control and organise things. Like some girl guide pack leader I’m arranging poetry competitions amongst friends, a children’s art exhibition in the windows of my surrounding streets, trying to help recruit local sewers to make and deliver scrubs to the NHS, and so on.

If there were a girl guide badge for styling my dog’s hair I’d be well on my way to getting it now. And as for my Duolingo French lessons…let’s just say winning, yes coming first place in my class of fifty students (now silver level shortly to graduate to gold) has become so much more important than learning the actual language that I have real concern about myself as a person.

A lady called Bijou kept trying to steal my position in the rankings so I found myself using every spare waking moment to obsessively pass French test after French test until I was over 1000 points ahead of that cow. I may not be able to beat Coronavirus but I can beat Bijou in beginner French and beat her so badly I think I’ve made her feel like there’s no point continuing because after struggling to get a couple of hundred points yesterday she’s not even trying to catch up any more.

I’m a bad person. I enjoy winning too much. I need to be best. I could just try Trump’s techniques and tell everyone I’m best, first, most bigly, etc. But I don’t think it can feel anywhere as good as really thrashing someone and then getting so far ahead of them in the league tables that you make them feel ashamed for even thinking they could take you on.

I’m still the same 8 year old girl who would go to computer fairs with my dad and queue up to have a go at the video games just so I could thrash and shame the 20 something male youths who thought they ruled the scoreboard, the glint in my eye sparking ever more brightly with evil delight as one by one I knocked them off the leader board and replaced their names with mine, watching their adolescent egos be crushed…yes, you have all been beaten by a 8 year old girl, losers! I was that little girl. I AM still that little girl. I’m a bad bad person.

In the early days of the lockdown, we shared motivational memes and quotes about how we could all use this time to achieve amazing things – to get fit, to lose weight, to redecorate our houses, to learn a new instrument, a new language (I got one thing right at least), to reconnect with our families, to get into pilates, to bleach our moustaches or Marie Kondo our knicker drawers. But within 2 weeks came the memes that said ‘Fuck that!’ ‘Stop trying to overachieve!’ ‘Well done if you even got out of your pyjamas today.’ And these later memes are kind of comforting because I honestly don’t know where my concentration has gone and I feel dreadful that I’m wasting so much precious time when none of us know how much time we have left or what life will throw at us next.

I work each day but even though I love it, it’s near impossible to focus my mind to it for long. I try to keep on top of housework but managed to put my back out whilst cleaning the toilet (the last time I did that I was hoovering…so the universe is DEFINITELY trying to tell me something). I try to eat healthily but now the need for snacks has become so painfully strong that my man is prepared to battle the hoards of Walkers out there (whilst wearing a mask and pretending to be one of them) to bring me back a bar of Dairy Milk just to shut me up. So I’m getting fat, I’m not getting enough work done, I’m completely wasting this opportunity to organise my attic or get up to date on my tax return early this year.

I’m being a bit crap. If it weren’t for my epic French class success I’d be being UTTERLY crap.

I’m jealous of the people rocking at being crap, drinking cocktails in the sunshine in their jim jams and really enjoying being crap who are currently either a) furloughed from their jobs and don’t have to work or b) are unemployed but with massive amounts of savings or c) so incredibly crap that the whole apocalypse even hasn’t even really hit them yet and they’re treating it like some extended bank holiday.

I think some of my neighbours might be like that. During the lock down they have :- ordered a new sofa, had takeaways almost every night, played a lot of video games, and power-washed their patios. Through our thin walls I have not heard them sobbing even once, or even shouting at each other as much as they usually do, nor have they yet planned their apocalypse allegiances so they know which tribe to join for the next phase when the zombies come. They are living in a very different bubble to mine.

In my bubble I am, as I mentioned, getting fat. Not because I’m being completely OTT with the treats but because my body has gone into some sort of survival mode where it thinks it has to make every single calorie last 40 times as long just in case we are about to starve. I now have the metabolism of Jabba the Hutt’s less attractive auntie post-menopause. Not only am I holding onto every calorie, but I think I’m also absorbing the calories of my neighbours’ takeaways through the wall by some sort of black magic osmosis of cruelty. I can’t join some amazing online pilates class because my sodding prolapsed disc feels like it’s popped out to say hi again like the world’s least welcome erection. I have literally zero self-control or motivation right now.

It could be worse, my friend’s pet bunny died this week and all the fleas that had been hiding on that bunny jumped ship and she is now quarantining in a house full of fleas. My friend is understandably very distressed. I tried to comfort her. All I could think of to say was ‘It could be worse. At least we don’t have cystitis…(yet).’

It could indeed be worse. And it will be. Because the death toll keeps rising, the savings pots (for those lucky enough to have them) are running out, and it’s soon going to be summer where staying in in the sticky stifling un-air conditioned houses of Britain will soon start to take its toll on our sleep patterns.

I remember one really sweltering week last summer when one by one we heard every single neighbour from our entire section of the street have a MASSIVE fight with their other halves (including ourselves). The whole neighbourhood was hot and cranky and decided they hated everyone they lived with. Sleep deprivation, poverty, hunger, sweaty buttocks…these are the catalyst for the next phase…we’re just a few weeks away from total societal breakdown and we know it. But at least we don’t have cystitis yet…..that’s another Blogalypse T-shirt slogan right there. Or at the very least a yoga mantra for the nation to chant together in unison.

But it’s not all bad because Andrew Lloyd Webber is attempting to soothe us all with a free musical a week (thank you Andrew). The new series of Killing Eve is being released early (thank you BBC). And my lovely friend Carol has promised to drop round some more chocolate supplies when she does her care rounds next week (thank you Carol).

And no doubt once our local neighbourhood front-window art competition is over and I have safely distributed prizes, I will be onto the next procrastination idea – teaching art on YouTube. How to make salt dough imprints of your dog’s anus into novelty earrings and (if we’re stuck in long enough) Christmas tree decorations.

You may scoff, but there’s a demand for my kind of crazy these days and I intend to enjoy it while I still can. I’m staying just the right side of the tin foil hat scale to still be deemed socially acceptable by my peers. Unlike David Icke who is going all out to be asking for a punch in the face. But we’ve all got to do what we can do to get by one day at time, even if all you can do is sit in your pants and cry along to Andrew Lloyd Webber songs whilst scooping ice cream straight from the tub with your bare fingers.

I don’t know when the ‘other side’ is gonna come, but hopefully I will see you all there soon. I’ll be the chubby one, speaking French, wearing my own home-grown potatoes as a necklace and a bikini knitted out of the shredded pizza boxes from my neighbours’ bins.

Until then, stay safe, avoid the fake news, don’t drink the Kool-Aid and see you soon.

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