OH & S

In the 1930s, not far from our place in Budapest an insurance company set up business. Spurning anything as tawdry as mere billboards, they decided to carve their advertisements in stone on their facade. They covered everything from alcoholism to getting tangled up in telephone wires, war and revolution to getting bits of yourself mangled by various bits of machinery, having heavy things dropped on you, something happening to you in a pottery studio, the bony hand of death grabbing you while you are disporting yourself in a gay baths (at least I assume that is what’s going on in image no.4). The only one I’m completely baffled by is the one involving pig carcasses.

There is one situation that they didn’t predict though, and that is going mad from being tangled up in contradictory pandemic regulations for too long. While the Hungarian government has managed things with a much lighter hand than most, the Europe wide panic seems to be increasing, rather than receding, and it is this that I find alarming (in fact, if I’m not very careful, I can be found teetering on the very edge of the conspiracy rabbit hole [peering in, I can just make out something about a great reset, Davos, someone called Schwab].) 

When one considers that we now understand that the new virus that we are all being constrained because of only presents extreme danger to some people and that doctors have now worked out quite a few ways to make many of them better, it is hard not to feel faintly suspicious, given how genuinely damaging the measures we are being forced to accept are in so many ways. 

It all is so worrying and baffling that, although I have many blog posts I would like to write (not to mention a project I am actually supposed to be working on), the only way I can take my mind off things is to leave my desk and go outside and walk and walk and walk.

I admit I haven’t picked the ideal season, but one can wrap up well.

Is it just me? Is anyone else beginning to wonder if responsibility for our own decisions is ever going to be restored? Is anyone else beginning to worry that, even if our freedom is restored, our economies will be so ruined that the Chinese Communist Party will explain politely (at first, if we are lucky), that as we are now entirely financially dependent on them we need to understand that we must also accept their total rule.

Yes, the gloom is here again, I admit it - time for another walk.