Author: David Bradley

Great to see the police have put a form up online so that we can report on breaches of lockdown rules…but, how do you know that your neighbour, for instance, is actually breaking the rules?

Say you have a keyworker living next door to you, but you didn’t know they are a keyworker. They leave their house entirely legitimately but more than once on a given day. The first time is as part of their important public service work, the second time to take some brief exercise around the local areas avoiding the incessant stream of new joggers on the paths that seem not to care about social distancing and spatter you with sweat as they plough through. Your neighbour was hoping to have a bit of a brain reboot during their exercise allowance to help them cope with the viral situation and the pressures of their work.

You log this in your little logbook from behind you twitching net curtain.

The police receive your report and assign a constable to check it out. They discover your neighbour was well within their rights to do their job and to take their daily exercise away from their home. An hour of that copper’s time less than well spent, one might suggest.

Meanwhile, a bunch of friends has gathered together in a back garden a few doors down. There’s music, but it’s quiet, for now. They’re having a barbecue to celebrate being furloughed on full pay and clinking glasses of punch, double dipping their tortilla chips in the hummus, and generally having a pathogenic time. One of them is looking a bit sweaty though and seems to be coughing a lot…but you can’t see any of that…

Humanity has behaved like a parasite on planet Earth, sucking out all of the goodness from the forests, the oceans, the land and laying its waste at the feet of Mother Nature. It fills the rivers with poison and the seas with plastic. It has spent almost two centuries creating the kind of cloying atmosphere that leads to boundless desertification, washes islands away, and promotes the release of yet more cloying gases from the frozen extremes. Humanity is the parasite that cages and curates all the others species with which it shares the planet, draining the life from them, and reducing its diversity through anthropocenic mass extinction.

In the light of such ongoing devastation perhaps, some outside agency thought, what the planet needed was a bit of pest control…

How about a fast-spreading illness that forces the parasite to curtail the parasite’s airborne activities? One that stops it spreading its pollution along arterial conduits with its countless gas guzzlers? One that shuts down its commercial and industrial activities that the planet might begin its recovery? One that reduces the resources available to the parasite and forces it to retreat into its domestic shells? One that even stops it allowing its bird-killing secondary pests into the outside world?

It seems that already atmospheric aberrations are already declining, the rivers are clarifying, the stars are coming out in numbers not seen for decades, the birds are singing, and wildlife is gently extending its range into the parasite’s silent cities.

Is the world healing?

Might the parasite evolve to adapt to its ecosystem in the wake of this anti-pestilence? To live in greater harmony with the rich diversity of all life on Earth? Might it settle into a more subtle existence, one that does not wreak havoc and devastation but one that speaks harmony and remediation?

Even when the only “online” we had was old-fashioned landline phones, long before, Skype and Facetime, Whatsapp and Zoom, HouseParty, and th rest, people often ended a call with a “let’s meet up soon”. We need that face-to-face, the handshakes, the hugs, the pat on the back, the ruffling of hair, the you (literally) scratch my back…

While we’re all social distancing in our splendid isolation, staying home to stay well, those online chat apps and what have you have come to the fore. Most of us have now partaken of at least one such “event”, a virtual pub crawl, a band rehearsal, a charity quiz…we can see each other’s faces, we can chat, we can message, we can share digital commodities. And, seriously, for now, while the waves of pandemic and panic endure, it really is all we have, thank goodness for the advent of what we used to called Web 2.0 when most people had only just go on to Web 1…

There’s something missing though…it’s that face-to-face, it’s the body language, the subtle look, the full-on laughter, the chance to connect in real-time in real-space without buffering, without dropouts and glitches, without sound delays and the out-of-sync video. But, there’s no way around it until the tech people come up with zero-latency electronics and even then you still have the problem of not sharing the same physical space.

So…is there something that can make it more real, something that triggers the dopamine receptors and boosts oxytocin, something to chemically or electronically substitute for the feelz? If there is, the government needs to roll out that app or send us a prescription fast…