In those uncertain times.
15/03/20
Last reading session with J. ‘Let’s have a final hug before the apocalypse’.
‘Cough etiquette’ tips from the Vice Chancellor. Solidarity messages from China to Italy: the epic tone of the prize-giving address.
Teenager sent home after selling shots of hand sanitiser at 50p a go. His mother, Jenny Tomkins, from Leeds, posted a picture of him arriving home after his entrepreneurial exploits at Dixons Unity Academy. In a post on Facebook, she said it was hard to discipline her son when his ‘dad called to say he was a legend’. The school denied it had excluded any pupils for selling hand sanitiser.
The sensation of pushing buzzers or tapping in codes with your knuckles.
Wash your hands like you’ve been chopping jalapenos and are now going to put in contacts. My mother-in-law is wearing a face mask, red woollen mittens, texting on phone in a ziploc bag: entering into the spirit of the thing. ‘Oh I suppose it’s an epidemic they’ve been having.’ The Father’s eyes were smiling behind his big round glasses.
It has spread across languages, cultures, even out to sea…The British tourist stuck on a cruise ship in quarantine: ‘The started putting food outside our door. It was nothing like the food from the buffet, the week before’.
WASH HANDS in skywriting. Meme: Rest of world: *Cancels everything*. Cape Town: MAVERICKS, NEW DANCERS.
Empty Coliseum, cathedrals, Mecca: places of worship absent of worshippers.
Bridlington arcade owner fills grabber machine with loo roll. Sewage system in danger of gridlock from toilet paper substitutes. Shortages amid coronavirus panic buying could cause wet wipe and kitchen roll fatbergs.
‘You may not like who you’re about to become’. 1918 Spanish flu and how absent it is from world memory: embarrassment, spiritual torpor, ethical failure, unremembering.
Lifestyle Centre Woolworths: meat aisle is entirely empty, along with TP. ‘Some tins, ok’, says the cashier, ‘but meat and toilet paper? I think it’s monkey see, monkey do.’
‘Drunk steals a McDonalds then defecates in his police cell: Reading 2-week-old Chronicle stories like they’re testaments to a long vanished past, like they’re the very walls of Pompeii.’
Libraries have shut down: only the books you now have (at last).
…though this is a very particular type of chronicle in that it seems to adopt a deliberate policy of insignificance. The writer seems to make a point of understatement, and at first sight we might almost imagine that Tarrou had a habit of observing events and people through the wrong end of the telescope. In short, in the midst of this general confusion, he determined to become the historian of that which has no history.
Four people in yoga, the communal mats stashed away in the men’s changing room. ‘Mandisa is so classy – it’s the second time she hasn’t made a single reference to it’.
But no more adjustments. And she doesn’t touch some oil to our foreheads anymore in corpse pose (like the little cross of ash in Lent: a body memory). Wafts some burning impephu over us instead, keeping evil spirits at bay.
Walking down Kloof Street: beautiful day, the restaurants and cafes quiet. The waiters stand in doorways; those in EatStanbul wear latex gloves. Clusters of food delivery bikes and their drivers. Beggars and car guards suffering. Give money to the old man who pushes those little drummer toys up and down all day. Comes to find us at a café and asks for some more. We are the only people around.
Corona as a rich person’s disease. Most cases from holidaymakers returning from abroad. G. and L. have abandoned their overland African trip. Suspicion and antipathy towards white foreigners. Europe as epicentre.
‘Unwilling to pay New York rents when the flat no longer comes with New York.’
People were not ready to give up their lifestyle without one last hurrah. In a display of juvenile gallows humour, the hashtag #BoomerRemover, a nickname for the novel corona virus, briefly trended on Twitter last weekend. Inside the stylish Wagemont cocktail bar, a young woman pretended to sneeze in someone’s face, unleashing thunderous laughter. Where night clubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity…
Italian mayors haranguing the residents of their towns: ‘Getting in a mobile hairdresser. What the fuck is that for? You know the casket will be closed!’ ‘I saw a fellow citizen jog up and down the street, accompanied by a dog that was visibly worn out. Look, this isn’t a movie. You are not Will Smith in I Am Legend.’ Visibly worn out!
‘The coronavirus originated in China. Therefore it is the Chinese virus. End of story.’ @LisaM_Botha: ‘You originated in your mother’s poes, but somehow people still call you Lisa.’
News broadcasts here are filled with the schedule of people who have tested positive. It’s a surreal sight: doomsday anchors reading out the trivialities of a person’s day: 8:30 am: ATM on Yehuda Maccabi Street. 9:50 am Shufersal (a popular supermarket chain) in Yahud. 12:30 pm Zion falafel joint. ‘Live your life as if each day will be plastered on social media.’
‘To everyone saying: I hope this will be over soon and we can go back to normal: be careful what you wish for.’
Weddings can’t have guests.
The reveries of self-isolation…
I’ve been having a feeling, on and off, that I can’t describe – an inability to name it is its most distinguishing feature. I can’t decide if the symptom is confusing or confusion is the symptom…In a way I’m expanding my idea of pain, to include this new namelessness.
Earnest excerpts from the ‘Pandemic Journal’ in the New York Review of Books.
I had considered the numbers, as though they were real and meant something – I forgot you have to collect them first. The US was not treating people, because America values private medicine over communal health. That is why the numbers were low, because Trump said, ‘I like the numbers being where they are’. I don’t even have the wherewithal to feel stupid about this. I cannot find a tone.
The pandemic feels both futuristic and biblical, eschatological and utterly banal.
I touched my wife’s body under the blanket and it felt warm. Too warm? Then I fell asleep.
25/03/20
Two days before national lockdown. Actually the closing of the gates took place some hours before the official order was made known to the public. Beaches already closed – didn’t get to have final game of bats with O. ‘Very Camus’
Go to the park and record into my phone. How unhurried, methodical, meticulous the writing is. Not afraid to sound a little dull and pedestrian, as if it really was written by a doctor with his documents. Aiming for the opposite of sensationalism, clearly. Dogs and conversations in the background of the voice note.
Literary Twitter:
Lost sense of smell (anosmia) may be peculiar clue to Coronavirus infection. Saramago rolls in his grave.
Glad to hear of the federal, state and WHO bans on COVID fiction written in the second person, present tense where the narrator dies at the end.
Viral video: young child being tormented by mother: KFC is closed darling, and McDonalds. You’ll have to eat mommy’s cooking now. Noooooohhhh! (operatic misery). And Nando’s. What about Chinese? Also closed. Nyaaaaoooooooh!
Marijuana dispensaries staying open: ‘It’s probably the easiest way to get high without touching your face very much’. ‘They’ll say things like: I’m going to be locked up with my husband for the next God-knows-how-long and I need this desperately.’
The traffic lights near the Lifestyle Centre: pedestrian crossing buttons beep in the silence, strangely loud. Homeless sleeping on Victorian porches that would normally be full of restaurant goers and drunkards.
An empty cloverleaf tells the story of a city in lockdown…
She was laid off from a bank a few months earlier, and said she was using her savings to buy essentials like rice, flour and eggs. ‘If you can’t go out, at least we can make a dumpling’, Ms Molubi said.
It is calm like a pond, because there are no more waves caused by motorised boats transporting day-tripper tourists. And of course, the giant cruise ships have disappeared.
Now the membrane has ruptured, and we find ourselves naked and outraged, as the biology we appeared to have banished storms through our lives. Arundhati Roy and Furious George in The Guardian, quick off the mark, hitting the high notes.
R. doing scenario planning for Foschini Group: ‘Friday I did currency collapse. Riots and nationwide looting due Monday.’ Lets out his signature giggle.
Stuck at home, she used the side of her refrigerator as a whiteboard. (Maths teacher in Iran)
Walk down Kloof, another glorious day. Young guy chatting to an old woman in a block of flats. He is in garden, she on a balcony. I greet them. ‘Another shopping trip?’ ‘I forgot to get toothpaste.’ He smiles: ‘I know how it goes.’
‘Privileged people going to the shops for just one item. WHY ISN’T THIS MORE OF A STORY?!?’ Online mania, peace IRL. As usual.
DO NOT MAKE A PODCAST!
‘God grant me the serenity’: pic of people linking feet. S. talking about AA meetings via Zoom, which can now be joined by anyone with the meeting ID: ‘So now you’ve got some recovering meth head from LA taking up all the airtime. And our local chair, Aamir, who’s a weak chair anyway, just sort of looks at his screen looking perplexed. You don’t mind tolerating your local bores and blowhards because they’re your blowhards…’
‘Kurt Cobain phoned from 1991: he says you’re stupid and contagious (ask your parents who Kurt Cobain was).’
‘This is not the apocalypse we wanted.’ Article on how we are all shuffling around in dressing gowns. ‘It’s less Danny Boyle and more Douglas Adams.’
The MyCiti bus mascot in the empty bus stops: a little blue humanoid bus giving the thumbs up: GOING PLACES! There are many variants. In one, the little man-bus is even wearing a French beret.
Then after reading for the hundredth time the signs on the shops opposite and the advertisements for great aperitifs which were already no longer available, he would get up and walk aimlessly through the yellow streets of the town….Rambert also spent long periods of time on the station. It was forbidden to go on the platforms. But the waiting-rooms which could be reached from outside remained open; sometime beggars would settle there when it was hot because the rooms were shady and cool. Rambert came to read old timetables, notices forbidding spitting and the railway by-laws…
Cycling through the empty thoroughfares: Adderley, High Level, Buitengracht. Swooping through a deserted Waterfront. My inner anarchist rejoices.
The suburbs so quiet and twitchy. Downtown is full of people.
Shelter in place order. The homeless and rough sleepers are masters of the streets and parks. Blankets and clothes drying over the nets of the tennis courts at the Virgin Active in Green Point. Have been buying peanut butter for a young guy with a black polo neck and flirtatious manner – gradually realise he’s a sex worker out of work.
The Zimbabweans, Congolese, Somalians and other African nationals who have been moved on from the Methodist Church in Greenmarket Square. Now they live off Buitenkant and Harrington under tarps and lean-tos. They were campaigning to be treated as refuges by the UN, since it was no longer safe for them to live in South Africa.
Cycling parallel to the promenade but not quite on it – that would be tempting fate. Police have stopped some cyclists on pavement ahead of me. I zip cross to the other side. ‘Look at him!’ One of them points at me: ‘What about him?’ Such solidarity.
‘At least we can still eat’, says A. ‘You get the sense they’d like us to do that online too, if possible’.
Neighbours booming out Toto, Johnny Clegg and Michael Jackson each evening at 8 pm (to salute the front-line healthcare workers). People bang pots and blow vuvuzelas from the slopes above. Always followed by the National Anthem, with its tremendous crashing of musical gears. I think it’s the Soweto Gospel Choir version. The willingness to pronounce the stanza from ‘Die Stem’…Oor ons ewige gebergtes…The black Afrikaans accent, delivered with such gusto. The heart goes out.
Chatting to D., our resident, unflappable GP, as she does the gardening: ‘I’ve never put in so many stitches. People are cooking at home and cutting themselves’.
People queuing with expensive luggage (stranded tourists?) to get into Cape Town stadium. (Like the first draft of Waiting for the Barbarians, when Europeans are all being evacuated by UN ships.)
Psycho geography: People with shopping bags careful to walk on the town side of Beach Road, rather than the opposite pavement, nearer the seafront promenade. Anyone who strays across to the opposite pavement likely to be denounced or reported (a little taste of totalitarianism, soupçon, an inkling). But occasionally, a brave soul walks along the promenade proper. A woman with flaccid shopping bag (clearly a prop) cuts right across the grass and stands at the breakwater, looking shamelessly out to sea.
Another time, I see someone ramping up and down the concrete skate humps on a bike – it does me real good, seeing that. Someone disobeying the unspoken edict not to enjoy anything anymore.
The weather remains outrageously, mockingly, indifferently fine.
The drive to self-righteous censure is so strong within human beings that sometimes you can see, in someone’s face, their desire to scold you for doing exactly the same thing they are doing. It was there in the face of someone on the bridle track, a woman carrying a toddler on her back. ‘Hi there’, I said politely on approach. She swivelled round and had that look on her face. A complex look, given all that was going on there: the reluctant self-knowledge only just about masking the outrage. And all of this just in the eyes, glimpsed above the mask. But the human face, even half the human face, can carry off this kind of complexity. I see it sometimes in dog walkers, as if their pet gives them greater right to stray from the social contract. Well maybe, but gee, it’s a complex ethical discussion to broach with a stranger just passing by with a friendly, knowing grin and being on his way…
In the headlines: Man who has been feeding the homeless in Sea Point – his car torched after the reg. had been posted (doxed?) online by a right-wing ringleader, also the owner of (wait for it) Vondi’s Holistic Pet Nutrition.
At 8 pm one evening I briefly toot my saxophone out the window, until I am severely reprimanded by Jax, who lives in the basement flat: ‘Why don’t you actually do something instead of just making a noise!’ Then she realises it’s me: ‘So sorry, I didn’t have my glasses on! I thought you were one of those hypocrites who make a noise without doing anything.’ Jesus.
People in R.’s block are booking half hour slots to run around the building, via WhatsApp and a complicated online timetable. I thought she was cultivating a white Sontag stripe, but apparently it’s because she can’t buy hair dye anymore and her roots are growing out. Dye fell the wrong side of the essential / non-essential binary. ‘Huge philosophical calls are being made by the branch manager in Gardens Centre Clicks’.
S. talks about MSF and the camp for the homeless in Strandfontein, how everyone is coming off heroin, or some kind of street drug, and absolutely jonesing for a cigarette, hassling the guards all day long through the fence. Tobacco ban still in place: ‘The entjie is not nigh’.
Smugly pumping up my bike tyre on Easter Sunday, readying it for a cycle along (or alongside) the Promenade. But I destroy the valve and it deflates right in front of me.
In early lockdown, Basement Jax used to harangue a mild-mannered resident of our block for running up and down the driveway (at night with his mask on). Now she lolls on the lawn all weekend with her buddies. Right moral action just happens to correspond with what you feel is ok. Never once taken the bins in. Only posted about them, when one was lying on its side in the driveway: ‘Look, a man fell over outside my flat!’ (i.e. men are trash). I scroll down and see lots of rude comments about saxophones.
Dreams about being a bad conversationalist: you catch it like a virus, then you’re a bad conversationalist.
‘What am I doing with my life?’ (day after day of tinkering with opening chapter of a manuscript). ‘You’re putting the novel in novel coronavirus’.
Forty days and forty nights of lockdown.
After enthusiastic early adoption, the (middle class) populace is beginning to turn against the powers that be. Reminds me of that unimprovable definition of a sentimentalist: someone whose opinion turns to its opposite at the first touch of reality.
Stage 5 to Stage 4: exercise now permitted at 9 am. But beaches remain closed.
Surfers and paddleboarders protest at Muizenberg: man arrested for standing still – like a headline from The Onion. ‘No, I’m exercising’, he says, swivelling a paddle through the air, ‘I was just taking a little rest’. Gets bundled into a police van.
Above the quarry, the mountain has been cordoned off with red and white tape. ‘Like a crime scene’, says a man I encounter on the path: ‘Hello fellow criminal’. I start to pull it down but then realise I will be glad if it keeps some of the dogshit off the path, so leave it in place. V., who sleeps in the bushes nearby, says he hears people flowing past each morning: ‘There’s a police man with a whistle up there – sometimes he gets abuse’.
In the proteas above the quarry: desire to do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. Stand still and watch the sunbirds. Who seem to have such big personalities for such small birds, seem to be joshing and soeking with each other, chasing each other from flowerhead to flowerhead.
Day 50: adding last shots of vodka to non-alcoholic beer.
D. calls for a blanket ban on the snappy journalistic opener ‘In these uncertain times…’ As well as any variation on the theme of ‘Love in the Time of COVID’: ‘Sub-editors, you’ve had fair warning – the window has now closed.’
Abandoning this notebook because the COVID diary genre has become an absolute menace.
‘This thing has given everyone the licence to consider their own lives so important.’
‘That’s the real pandemic.’