Holed Up in Hungary: Lockdown Bulletin No. 1

Well, despite what they’ve been trying to make us believe, this new COVID virus thingy has taught us the truth: sixty is not the new forty, after all. In fact, sixty is the new ninety-seven, for sixty is now the age beyond which you don’t get treated in hospitals - at least not if they are besieged by patients suffering from the effects of the latest iteration of coronavirus. Which they soon will be, everywhere in the Western world.

Thank you, Mr Xi, thank you WHO, run by a notable alumnus of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Good to have international health in the hands of an adherent of a Marxist Leninist organisation.

This pandemic couldn’t be some kind of a deliberate plot, could it?

We will never know. But never mind - as Psalm 39 says:

“Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.”

In Hungary, we’re in shutdown, or lockdown or self-isolation or whatever the new term is. As long as I don’t remember why I rarely go out, I don’t mind, as it’s extremely nice in our flat, but what if it wasn’t? How is it for people cooped up in places they don’t much like?

These are the things I’ve been doing while “social distancing” (so modern - I've always hated modern, except in dentistry):

1. Reading the book I’ve been reading since October, about the English Civil War:

I bought it because at school I was taught nothing about this period in English history and I wanted to understand it. I have by no means finished it but I already think I understand why they don’t teach it much to schoolchildren - the war itself was scrappy and confusing and for long periods inconclusive and the causes of the war were strange religious obsessions and the very poor leadership of King Charles I, who appears to have been pretty imperceptive and indecisive. Furthermore, when he did actually make a decision, he almost invariably made the wrong one. At least that’s my impression so far.

2. Sewing: I hated China’s regime long before this latest proof of what a horror show it is came along. Therefore, I have been making my own clothes for years to avoid supporting the Chinese regime's economy. I haven’t yet succeeded in making my own iPhone, mind you, but I have resisted replacing my super battered one with a shiny new version:

Now I think about it though, (lot of time for thinking these days), I’d be willing to bet that most of the materials I’m using to make my own clothes were woven in China, so I’m probably achieving nothing, other than having unique (slightly peculiar) garments (at least currently [forever?] seen by none).

3. trying to learn Hungarian (I can almost understand a newspaper headline now, sometimes)

4. obsessively checking Twitter, hoping against hope that it will be flooded with joyous Tweets linking to announcements that the whole virus  problem has suddenly been solved and entirely swept away.

On Twitter, (and off), I’ve been reading poetry. Today I came across this one from Cavafy (I chuck down his name here as if I have any real knowledge of who he was - Egyptian? Very actively gay? Enormously romantic view of young male beauty? Above all perceptive):

Finished

Deep in fear and in suspicion,
with flustered minds and terrified eyes,
we wear ourselves out figuring how
We might avoid the certain
danger that threatens us so terribly.
And yet we’re mistaken, that’s not it ahead:
the news was wrong
(or we didn’t hear it; or didn’t get it right).
But a disaster that we never imagined
suddenly, shatteringly, breaks upon us,
and unprepared - no time left now - we are swept away

A poem for our times or what?

I also read this story on Twitter. If laughter is the best medicine, I prescribe a read of it, as it made me laugh quite a lot: