What are we gonna do now?
That picture is of a bridge near where we live. Someone’s scrawled a few of those messages around the neighbourhood – including one that just says ‘CLOSE THE BORD’, which is presumably as far as they got before being interrupted. Would it kill them to come back and finish it? Anyway, closing the bo(a)rders is something that’s never far from anyone’s mind at the moment.
Another day, another coronavirus project in work. Can't say much about it because of privacy but it's a strange thing to be living under a Covid-19 cloud all the time and then spend all day thinking about how to talk about in campaigns or online. In the middle of it all, I was working on an entirely different project for a luxury housing development, drawing little trees and parking spaces on a site map. That's a tonal shift that's hard to manage - from death and economic catastrophes to luxury homes with balcony views, and then back to the death again. The head spins.
It looks like the UK is going into some sort of lockdown scenario this evening. Boris Johnson, who is, apparently, shocked and dismayed about his citizens' slowness to embrace social distancing. After four weeks of his bluffing and prevarication on the matter, he thought everyone would jump in line with him on Friday. Needless to say, they didn't. In huge numbers. So now he's going to lock it down. They've had 335 deaths so far out of 6,500 tests which makes them similar to the Italians 3 weeks ago. And we all know how that went. Speaking of Italy, they've just recorded their second fatality drop in two days. Only 450 deaths or so. Can you believe that's how people are talking about it? And, by the way, that's after three weeks of lockdowns so the United Kingdom may have a long road of its own to travel now.
Not that we can talk. There's been a serious response to all that social distancing socialising that was going on at the weekend. Several shops have pulled the plug for now, and the restaurants that had pivoted to offering a takeaway service instead are starting to run out of steam too. Which is good. Well, it's bad, but you know what I mean. Still no sign of a lockdown. Hard to believe that it's almost a week since Leo Varadkar's speech last week and we're still mostly free to go wherever we want. Maybe they see something that the rest of us aren't. Another 201 new cases today, and two deaths. There were four deaths to date, and now there's been two deaths in 24 hours. Yeah, let's hope they know something we don't.
In the US, I've been enjoying (if that's the word) New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily briefings. He's got that 'tell it like it is' thing down to an art and, like Varadkar's speech he's telling people what they need to know, and not what they want to hear. It's brutal sometimes. Today he told them 'this is it - this is how it's going to be. You're not going to pick up the paper in a week and read that everything's going back to normal'. I mean that's frightening, but he's telling New Yorkers to embrace it. To take it on the chin and go with it. He also seems very accepting of the idea that he's extremely unpopular for what he's doing and unlikely to be re-elected. That's the price he'll pay for doing the right thing. Who knows if it's a stunt - for all I know he could be wildly corrupt and a terrible person, but it doesn't seem that way. Certainly makes a difference from the Trump/Johnson position to date.
We did a Joe Wicks work-out this morning. Twenty minutes of high-intensity training to start the day. We're conscious that this situation, while not quite a lockdown yet lends itself to inaction and over-snacking. Something I've never needed any encouragement to do. So, to counter it, we're going to try to do these work-outs in the morning. I mean, it's 20 minutes, it's not exactly eating up the day. So we'll see how that goes. It wasn't pretty but it felt like we did something. Which in the face of a whole load of nothing isn't a bad thing.
Almost time for Johnson's statement - here we go...
