at Broadway, the hill dotted with picnicking Brits. The lockdown is easing. The council ticket inspectors are back doing their rounds and shops begin to open. But there’s no sense the virus is beaten and the news media continue harrying the government for its many failings, how could they do otherwise. Clausewitz friction dogs our leaders, the mishaps, mistakes, false intelligence and false starts of any live campaign are at play with the response to the virus. The ventilators we didn’t even need procurement fiasco, how much breath and twitter space was wasted on that? The desperate chase for PPE that wasn’t fit to use when it finally arrived. Schools not opening because the government didn’t reckon on recruiting tens of thousands of new teachers in a few weeks, and doubling available class space, didn’t reckon on no good will from unions and councils and didn’t have wartime powers to push the policy through. National data comparisons will mean nothing if there are second waves and outbreaks. The present is all smoke and dust, we’ll only know the truth in retrospect and that will be argued over and reinterpreted and rediscovered according to passions and partisanship. The only truth you can be sure of is what you smell and touch and witness from an arm’s length away – you have to be in the room or on the field – and even then another witness to the same event will see things you didn’t see. But we need narratives that people can live with. Stories where most agree. It’s the human design to take the terrifying immensity and uncertainty of things out of our control or knowing and shrink them to simple parables, to a few words shared when we meet a friend, a nod of the head. We crave the new normal, something we can understand. But I begin to wonder, what’s coming next? Changes that used to take decades to filter through the markets now happen in days and nation states have shown they can reshape and replace long-held values overnight. All it takes is enough people to ask.
