Danger-Weir

I took my car for an MOT the other day*. It felt like an expedition to the far beyond and I was greeted at the garage with a “There’s a customer!”. Oh the joy of seeing an unfamiliar face! Or at any rate, top-half of an unfamiliar face. These days any contact with folk we don’t know is such a novelty that we are eager and enthused by the simple act of sharing space. It’s hard to remember what it was like to take all those strangers for granted.

The car was going to be in the garage for a while so I took a walk to the river and then turned left. Left at the North bank of the Cam is a very long commitment it turns out. After walking and walking, and then walking a bit more with no way back into town, going under the motorway I came to this sign:

I am not a boat person, the very few times I’ve found myself on a boat, time has become extremely long, but I do enjoy boaty things, graphics, terms and knots.

To me it said: Which way are we landing out of this?

You can see how I’m a land person that yearns for the solid that isn’t in the picture. Here we are spring almost upon us and our collective destiny seems to be balancing just like this boat, undecided if we are going to make it or not.

I hope we do. Those of us that have made it relatively unscratched we are lucky and privileged, and we cannot possibly move into a covid free reality in a full celebration knowing that this virus has taken or permanently changed millions of lives. Nor can we splash land into a future where we can relax out of the wider understanding of how we are facing one virus but we are all nowhere near the “same boat”.

For now we can only adjust and continue in whichever way we can. It is easy to forget that the now is demanding a lot more out of us than we have grown used to. Every day brings a new glut of how to dos that used to be automatic and now require planning. This constant adjustment is occupying head space and pushing things that are dear to us out of the way. But perhaps this is not necessarily a bad thing. Because the “normal” wasn’t really all that good or fair.

We are yet to find out what/when the end of covid will be. Or who we would have become.

*: It was February and we are edging now towards May. Back then when nothing but essential mode was on, every trip out did feel back then like venturing onto the unknown. I’m yet to travel outside wider Cambridge, but while I yearn to be free again to move about I am very aware that the collective danger of Covid is still around and still capable of terrible things.

I am very forgetful and find it hard to concentrate, else I would have posted this in February.