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Friday 8th May 2020

6374/19294

Say what you like about lockdown, it is somehow making time move super fast. How can it be Friday again? On the negative side there is no end in sight and so time to normality remains infinity weeks away, so a week passing in the blink of an eye is meaningless.
It’s nice in a way that time is whizzing by like we’re in a montage depicting days and months passing via spinning clocks and calendars shedding pages in a film. But we only get a certain span of life and it’s a pity to miss out on a year. I’ve got plenty of time for spinning clocks and self-destructing calendars when I am dead. Let’s not waste what might be 2% of my life on stasis. I am prepared to experience stasis for the next few billion years, but would prefer it not to start til 2067ish.
Will there be any more live gigs in 2020. Or 2021? Rather optimistically my Leicester Square Theatre dates were rescheduled (in theory anyway) til June and July, but there’s no way that they will happen. The secret TV show I am doing was meant to be recording in May, but now I have July pencilled. It’s possible I guess, but not with much of an audience. Other shows have been rescheduled for September and October and I had more RHLSTPs in for the autumn too…..
Well - we’ll see. The government is doing so badly on all this and their fudge over possible changes to the lockdown next week have probably caused enough confusion to prompt another spike in deaths. It’s all heartbreaking of course.
Will there be enough relaxation in the next month for us to have any help with the kids? Would we take it if we can get it, when it will just increase the chances of us falling ill and maybe dying? But if there is no vaccine or cure are we giving up on ever going out again?
I suppose in a way we have been fortunate that the first major worldwide pandemic in a century has a death rate of about 1%. That’s bad enough, but it’s only chance that it isn’t something much more lethal, like Bubonic plague levels. Hopefully there will be some preparation for this happening again and maybe if people had heard the disease was killing every other person then things might have been taken seriously a bit earlier. 

But on we trudge (or don’t), our short term memories seemingly sucked out so that days and weeks bleed into each other. I did manage to get some writing done today, but somehow managed to lose a couple of hours work when Word crashed and it turned out the autosave hadn’t been working. It’s been a long time since that’s happened, but it was super annoying because I’d just nailed some points that I’d been struggling over for a few days and I really couldn’t remember much about how I’d phrased things. Memory isn’t working in these weird times.
I managed to rewrite it all in the afternoon and finished another first draft chapter (though a much too long one) and am impressed that I got over this set back at a time of emotional fragility. It means I am about a quarter of the way into the book. I feel fairly confident that I can do the rest in time, assuming I don’t get ill, or I wake up tomorrow and find it’s somehow May 31st.


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