All Breakages Must Be Paid For


CoVID-19: Day 20


Its been an interesting day. Fractious exchanges on Facebook yesterday spilled into this morning in what appeared to be a singular episode and yet similar issues have cropped up elsewhere in what a conspiracy theorist’s might describe as copycat. Except they are all explainable as expected fallouts from similar tensions. The isolation being experienced as we try to mitigate the worst of the pandemic was clearly a factor but I found my midday walk to be exceedingly therapeutic precisely because so few people were about.
The management apologises that there will be no service available today but feel free to browse

If you’d planned the scene you’d have set the conditions such that the mountains would stand out and frame it but they were entirely hidden behind a veil of mist. As it was, the misty edge to the horizon spoke to not only the quiet acceptance of our lot but to the majesty of nature that would consider us less subjects than annoying incomers. It felt like nature was having a day off and I was privileged to observe it at rest. The glorious mountains were locked away in the cupboard and the sky had donned its silk slippers. “The management apologises that there will be no service available today but feel free to browse”.

It has been a day for balancing the books and taking stock. I left the Facebook group that was experiencing the fractiousness, in sorrow but with relief. The same day a report has surfaced revealing the skulduggery practiced by Labour Party officials in 2015/16, known to many of us but consistently brushed under the carpet. And a combination of Matt Hancock’s veiled criticism of NHS workers over the use of PPE and Priti Patel spouting her usual vacuousness framed the picture of a callous and out of touch government perfectly. As I see it, many of us are going through the grief you would experience at a funeral when the body is finally laid to rest. The universal acceptance of the person’s fate allows you to bury or burn your own angst and live with a memory rather than a corpse.

My day ended with an online gig (Stafford Live), singing to an audience I could neither see, hear or even know were listening. I was streaming from Morecambe to what in theory was an audience from Stafford, my home town. Again this was an experience that had its own reckoning. With limited feedback I was playing blind and needed to rely on my own internal foldback system. From the feedback afterwards I think I did fairly well despite the internal mic in my MacBook that doesn’t pick guitar up well.

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