As a preface to this excerpt from a longer article that I’m writing , I should say that I have a background in mechanical engineering and so have placed an existential trust in science. Like many citizens, I suspect, I supposed that the science of something like Covid-19 would be relatively well-known, agreed, and so reasonably straight-forward to translate into policy and communicate to citizens as the pandemic took hold. After all, viruses such as those that cause colds and flu, and even coronaviruses themselves (e.g. SARS, MERS), were not new phenomena, and the threat of a pandemic had been long and widely appreciated (Mike Davis https://thenewpress.com/books/monster-our-door, https://theconversation.com/how-to-prepare-for-a-pandemic-137116 ...). As it turned out, however, the science was uncertain and shifting, and the policies of governments across the world varied widely. Meanwhile, how governments communicated with their citizens often appeared to depend not so much on the science but on the culture of the polity, especially the character of government and its relation with the citizenry.
During  the Covid 19 pandemic, I have followed a number of aspects of the science quite closely, specifically: the R number, hydroxychloroquine, vaccination, and masks. In all these instances, even when the science must surely be certain, there was political controversy. Basically, the R number is a measure of how many people one infected person transmits the virus to. One contested issue around R centred on UK government policy, specifically relying so heavily on a metric that could be misleading. Hydroxychloroquine is a malarial prophylactic that was considered as a treatment for coronavirus. While President Trump said that he was taking hydroxychloroquine and advocated giving it to Covid-19 patients before scientific studies were concluded, extraordinarily a paper in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet was withdrawn because its claim that the drug increased the risk of death in Covid-19 patients turned out not to be substantiated by the data. The prospect of a Covid-19 vaccine gave rise to postings on social media identifying fears about potential side-effects, mistrust in political leaders, scientific experts and, tellingly, the pharmaceutical industry.

Each of these instance is worthy of its own analysis, but here I’m going to concentrate on the example of wearing of masks in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic.  Even in that simple sentence, nothing is as straight-forward as it seems: there are different types of mask, different social situations in which they might be worn, various groups of people who might wear them, and different reasons for wearing them. There are masks designed for health workers, both N-95 respirator masks and surgical masks; there are industrial dust masks; bandanas in a variety of materials; all manner of homemade cloth masks; face masks and mouth masks. Californians, at least, have been sighted wearing scuba-diving and snorkelling masks. The different social situations in which masks might be worn can be summed up as: in healthcare, in confined spaces, outdoors, and according to proximity to other people. There are vulnerable people and less vulnerable people who might wear masks, and people might choose to do so to protect themselves and/or to protect others.

Up until early June, the World Health Organisation (WHO) strongly advised that a healthy person need only wear a mask (presumably a respirator or surgical mask) if they were taking care of someone infected with Covid-19 (https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masks). If a person had potential Covid-19 symptoms, coughing and sneezing, they too should wear a mask. Otherwise, the WHO stated in one of its online videos: “you do not have to wear masks because there is no evidence that they protect people who are not sick.” So, masks protect health workers but do not protect people who are not sick? Even from a single and should-be singularly authoritative source, the advice appeared instantly contradictory. One possibly hidden issue on the agenda at this point was the wish to reserve a limited global supply of respirator and surgical masks for health workers. In all cases, with all types of masks in all situations, the WHO advised that they would only be effective if used correctly and combined with thorough hand-cleansing, which was of paramount importance. 

On the 5th June 2020 the British Medical Association (BMA) reiterated its advice that the public should wear face masks in all areas where social distancing was not possible, including on public transport (https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-plans-for-mandatory-face-coverings-dont-go-far-enough-doctors-say-12000768). The UK government made wearing face coverings on public transport compulsory in England from 15th June. As Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, made that announcement, the safe social distance in the UK was prescribed as two metres, though the government was reportedly under pressure from some quarters, particularly business lobbies, to reduce this to 1.5 metres. The WHO says that a distance of 1 metre is safe. While UK government policy followed the BMA’s advice, the chief medical officer for Wales declined to recommend making wearing masks compulsory. Governments in Scotland and Northern Ireland also stuck to their policies on the voluntary use of face mask by the public[2].  Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s influential Today programme, renowned epidemiologist Professor John Edmunds said: “I don’t think mask wearing is particularly effective, but it might help a bit.” In line with the BMA, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US recommends the public wear cloth masks where social distancing (6 feet) is not possible, while N-95 respirator and surgical masks should be reserved for healthcare workers (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/diy-cloth-face-coverings.html). While the US government advises following the CDC’s recommendations, President Donald Trump has described masks as ‘a voluntary thing’ and declined to wear one himself. Culturally in the US, wearing face masks has been linked to appearing unmanly, cowardly, and ‘Asian’, reportedly sparking a backlash against wearing them (https://www.vox.com/2020/5/12/21252476/masks-for-coronavirus-trump-pence-honeywell-covid-19). Stating that it is uncertain whether they have any effect on virus transmission, The Danish Health Authority “does not encourage healthy individuals who go about their daily business to wear mouth or face masks” (https://www.sst.dk/da/corona-eng/faq).
 
As an aside, I’ll record that a variety of anti-mask laws exist in some US states, and in Denmark it is illegal to wear masks during public assemblies. The irony of potentially being arrested one day for wearing a mask and the next for not doing so was not lost on social media, particularly as Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the US and across the world, including  the UK and Denmark, in response to the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd. Despite quite widespread impressions to the contrary circulating on my social media, at least, and allegedly among the police themselves, the UK does not have an anti-mask law.

In defence of medical science, like any other sphere of knowledge it must learn and change over time. Indeed, on 5th June the WHO suddenly issued new guidance: people over sixty or with health issues should wear medical-grade masks when they are out of their homes and cannot socially distance, while other people should wear a fabric mask with three-layers. Although there may as yet be no direct evidence that cloth masks are effective in reducing transmission of the Covid-19, they do reduce contamination of air and surfaces that could be media for transmission (1). It may also be a factor in reducing transmission that masks stop you putting your fingers in your mouth or up your nose (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3050539/surgical-masks-protect-more-germs-fingers-viruses-air-experts-say-after). One study conducted on transmission of the SARS virus among healthcare staff in Hong Kong hospitals did conclude that: “Masks seem to be essential for protection” (https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2803%2913168-6). The most recent science available to me uses mathematical modelling and concludes that “facemask use by the public, when used in combination with physical distancing or periods of lock-down, may provide an acceptable way of managing the COVID-19 pandemic and re-opening economic activity” (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0376): an interesting choice of words managing the pandemic and reopening economic activity, not  saving lives and protecting each other. Finally, there is a moral argument for deploying the precautionary principle with respect to wearing face masks, not waiting for perfect evidence to make policy (2).

On the 10th of June a spokesperson for Statens Serum Institut, the official body that deals with infectious diseases in Denmark, commented on national radio (DR1) that the WHO was generalising policy for a world that they had to assume was crowded and highly infected with Covid-19. That, he concluded, with respect to wearing masks, was not the case in Denmark. Postings from across the world on social media questioned why measures against Covid-19 were not tailored more to regional and local situations, taking into account population density and infection rate, for instance. Boris Johnson’s government first responded to Covid-19 by deploying  the slogan that they would be “Guided by the science”, while numerous critics on social media and elsewhere over the course of the pandemic thought that rather they were ignoring the science (e.g. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-government-boris-johnson-science-advisors). As I write this at the beginning of the second week of June, policy on wearing masks in England is clearly based on the view as expressed by John Edmunds: it might help a bit. There was a row when the UK government decreed that all hospital staff, not only those on the Covid-19 “frontline”, should wear masks from 15th June: NHS Trusts had not been consulted. The chief executive of NHS Providers, Chris Hopson said that healthcare workers believed last-minute decisions are being made because of political rather than public health considerations (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/face-masks-we-were-not-consulted-nhs-trust-chiefs-complain). International media organisation CGTN studied the minutes of the UK’s New and Emerging Respiratory Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) and the Scientific Advisory Group England (SAGE) to ascertain what had determined the UK’s policy on masks. CGTN list “10 reasons given for not making general face masks/coverings compulsory”:

1. They might add to people's fear and anxiety
2. The evidence for mask use by anyone who is not infected "is near nil"
3. The general public might use face masks for too long, i.e. even if they became "soggy"
4. It could threaten supplies for healthcare workers who need them more
5.  It might lead to people abandoning social distancing and hand washing
6. It might lead to people who are self-isolating leaving their home if they wear a mask
7. Inequality concerns – some might not be able to afford or be physically able to buy face masks
8. People putting a mask on and off might touch their faces more
9. Policing implications if people are wearing face masks
10. Could lead to new crimes, such as thefts of face masks

For the most part, I suggest, this list seems an informed and reasonable guide to policy-making. One factor the UK Groups failed to consider, however, was that masks could contribute to a surge in ocean pollution (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/08/more-masks-than-jellyfish-coronavirus-waste-ends-up-in-ocean). To conclude, Table 1 below shows some statistics comparing the records of the US, UK and Denmark on Covid 19. The table does not, I hasten to add, yield any insights into the policy on masks in the three countries. Rather, I think it reflects the US government doing too little and the UK doing too much, too late. (https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc7217796; https://www.forbes.com/sites/marleycoyne/2020/04/30/americans-trust-doctors-and-cdc-not-trump-on-covid-19-survey-reports/#3bde26f6cc6c; https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/14/white-evangelicals-among-groups-with-slipping-confidence-in-trumps-handling-of-covid-19/; https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-05/Confidence-falls-in-governmental-COVID-19-strategies-in-UK-by-18--R3mLgAVNSM/index.html; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/14/lancet-editor-attacks-uk-government-for-catastrophic-handling-of-covid-19-pandemic). By comparison, Denmark would appear to have taken timely and appropriate action Moreover, as I suggested previously, the current politics of Denmark is relatively equanimous, and the citizenry has a relatively high degree of trust in government, certainly vis-à-vis its handling of the pandemic.

Table 1: Infections and death due to Covid 19 
Country                       Cases per 1 million people                       Deaths per 1 million people
US                                      5,990                                                              338
UK                                     4,198                                                               596
Denmark                           2,059                                                              101

Source Worldometer 06 June 2020 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries 


[1] From Leonard Cohen’s song “I’m your man”

[2] N.B. Policy was subject to change on a daily basis.

​“This is the most studied period in recent Western history with tendrils of popular thought winding out into conspiracy theory. Strange that when it was truly aliens to blame, fringe folk wouldn’t believe it and blamed the government.”
Tade Thompson, Redemption
 
Future imperative
There is no post-pandemic. They were wrong about that. They were wrong about most things. Self-isolation, it’s how we all live now, those of us who still live. Some are wholly alone, others in tried and tested groups – or rather tried and trusted as there is no longer any such thing as testing. Most survivors occupy isolated properties in rural areas, desperately growing what food they can. Readily defended houses at the coast are much sought after and contested, oftentimes with bloodshed. There are small towns and villages which try to maintain cordons, but smaller isolated groups probably constitute the bulk of the population, at least here in the places that I know. Obviously, many groups are families. As time wears on and the pandemic’s virulence shows no sign of diminishing, incest has become a social norm.
I much prefer my own company.
Some couplings are negotiated, of course: young people leaving their group to meet with a lover in no-one’s space, either breeding and then forming a new group, or killing each other softly with a strain of the virus one carried and the other had no resistance to. Either that or one romantic party was faking it and the spouse-to-be ends up as Sunday lunch for the trickster’s family. It happens. Food is in extremely short supply and meat is almost unheard of since we passed the virus back to the animals, extinguishing countless species. Pathogens are no respecters of species boundaries.
At least there are no longer factory farms…
First there was the unrelenting economic recession, generating a second great depression, much deeper than the original, and then came the final erosion and fracturing of societies. The virus overwhelmed us on all fronts, and it gathered allies. After a long while, peoples’ frustration turned to anger and the authorities couldn’t maintain their lock-downs and so-called social isolation. No access to hairdressers was a particular source of tension. Across the world there were riots, looting, people gunned down by the police… Governments stopped dedicating resources to mitigate other crises, especially environmental crises, most especially climate change. These days there is only one weather forecast: we say “blowing hot and cold”. I don’t know where that comes from, but we shout it to each other across open ground when wary travellers meet, when we encounter each other and do not instantly start shooting, firing poison arrows or throwing stones. So, when some place isn’t parched by drought and aflame, it’s under water. As I record this message for you the meteorological curse on this particular area is a chill which has bitten unheralded into a spring-like period of warm rain showers. The over-riding curse, the plague, is everywhere. But it came too late to staunch the mortal wounds we had already inflicted on Mother Earth. Seasons are a thing of the past. This deep frost has literally nipped any emerging plant life in the bud.
Trying to grow any sort of crop is an arduous and heart-breaking endeavour. When I can scavenge nothing tinned to eat from abandoned shops and houses, and that resource is almost exhausted it seems, I survive on grass and by digging up a bitter root that I do not know the name of. These ingredients I boil on a campfire together with wild garlic, which makes the dish considerably more palatable. This diet does, however, cause my stomach to cramp suddenly and agonisingly so that I am forced to cry out, risking detection. But I live with the cramps alongside the other afflictions of our age: wasted muscles, a scurvy rash, hair loss, wounds that refuse to heal…
My lips are chapped and bleeding, the blood an iron reminder on my tongue: get this done.
I read once that: “The past is one, but the futures are many.” It’s from an old novel, possibly from your own time. The paper copy that I gathered, browned, blown and scattered in what was once a high street bookshop, did not have a cover or the page with the publication date. I still don’t know the title of the book. Anyway, it’s not true that the past is one, but the futures are many. Deconstruct only that quote and it is plain that the past in agglomeration of many times that were formerly futures: the past is multiple, as uncertain and as unstable as any future for it was built on shifting sands. And it is remembered for us, though not on our behalf. The case was always that we made so-called rational decisions based on random data, gathered piecemeal and arbitrarily analysed. Once the algorithms took over the gathering and analysis, thus removing the space for human free will, idiosyncrasy and hence error, we were doomed. Only chance could have saved us: more of us, that is; more of what “we had created with our hands and our minds for the beauty of the world we lived in”. I once heard a small choir sing those words on the street and they have stuck with me. It was about another form of apocalypse, nuclear war, which extraordinarily remains a threat. I hope I remember the lyrics correctly... No time for rambling! My point is, rather than compounding irrational rationality, what we needed was “a happy accident”. Fat chance of that now.
But that’s why I’m writing to you: you do have a chance; you, back then. Of course, I cannot tell you what that chance is. It will stem from one happy accident among many, many fatal errors. What I can tell you is that if you don’t take that chance – all those chances, and make all those terrible choices, then this is your future: my future; this nightmare. If you survive, that is. If you are among that mysterious number who survive; that inaccurate, unknowable percentage…
Must move, I can sense them.
I leave my faint and ancient path and plunge into the forest, flitting through the shadows, keeping my head down. Once step ahead: one small step for me, one giant leap… I must apologise for speaking in quotes and clichés but I have little opportunity for dialogue and so for developing my own verbal habits. Reading must suffice. And I am voracious. So, what else do you need to know? What must I tell you? What will help you? In the very early days, someone wrote of the pandemic: “Nothing can be worse than a return to normality.” That too was wrong. I mean it was one hundred percent correct when spoken by that prescient person in that particular present. But that present was always already the product of many diseased and crippled pasts, misremembered. Speaking from such a time, the words were bound to be fuelled by mental deficiency. Nothing personal, but you are all demented, even your prophets - most of all your prophets because they are the ones who are making the most seeming sense of absolute bunkum! Better to gabble and drool, “fall wanking to the floor.” But just imagine what your historic dementia makes me: me, the product of morons coupling! Love in the time of cholera, so to speak: another title I found in that ruined bookshop, though I only found the cover and so never read the book. Was it good?
The cover is a gorgeous sepia photograph of a beautiful woman, I have it folded still.
Love in the time of Corona, the Covid 19 virus… Well, actually, only one of a cloud of corona viruses that just kept – keep – coming, year after year, season upon season, then month by month. Myself, I have survived the attack of at least two of these viruses – or, who can tell, two attacks by one of them. Not so my partner. Nor, with the second bout, our child. I do not want to talk about this; can’t think about it. Not at this time. You should know, must have worked it out for yourself by now, that there is can be no authority. For authority is legitimised by knowledge and no-one knows a fucking thing! Here, now, everywhere and whenever, authority is based only on the knowledge of itself: it is certain only of itself. And it is so deadly certain of itself. It cannot be trusted.
The sharp crack of a twig snapping beneath a clumsy boot, shattering the dusk: go!
Once I met a couple on “the road less travelled”, my term - purloined from a book, of course - for all the routes that are officially closed. Like me, this couple were on the road into the city where the mass of the infected are contained. The infected smear themselves over every surface and fill the air with viruses, sneezing into each other’s faces  for fun, for the hell of it – and it is hellish - then collapsing, first in hysterical laughter and then coughing fits. Some call them “The Hosts” and they were one of the wholly unexpected outcomes of the pandemic: the perennially sick; a fate worse than death? To my own flawed knowledge, The Hosts are a totally urban phenomenon. As a mortal threat, in any open ground, they are generally easy to evade. Having little lung capacity they usually give up the chase quickly, wheezing to a standstill or even expiring on the spot. They are no crazier than the rest of us, of course, no more wrong, they have just created a culture of their own with wildly different values. For them, infection if a system of belief. Their creed is hedonistic: don’t worry, be happy! If you can live with infection, what’s left to fear? Survival is tantamount to resurrection and infecting others is their duty, their holy order. And if you die when they infect you? Well, that was the will of the virus. They effectively worship microbes.
Bat-shit crazy.
But I am near exhaustion now, deep in the forest, and I digress. Back to the couple. Obviously, they were a couple, lovers, clinging tightly together when we stumbled across each other. Heterosexual, it appeared: an older white woman and younger man, dark skinned; ivory and ebony. Now, where did that quaint little phrase come from? We exchanged hesitant, suspicious greetings: “Are you well?” has become both a greeting and a survivalist enquiry. Having reassured each other by word of mouth as well as via our apparent relatively good health – the woman was so weak from malnutrition that her partner was obliged to half carry her - they told me their story. I do not recall either of their names, if I ever knew them. They were risking an incursion into “the seething city”, the woman’s term, in search of her runaway daughter. Although I was myself intent upon a similar incursion, I felt I had to advise them of the foolhardiness of their intended course of action. Particularly given the woman’s weakened state, they would likely be infected by the hosts and die or live terrible lives, permanently ill: sweating and coughing with a splitting headache to end all headaches. At least we’ll be together, she said, and I bit my tongue so as not to disabuse her. Although the man was evidently the heathier, no-one could predict who might survive the viruses: old, young; weak, strong; woman, man; white, black...
That was just one more thing that they got very wrong.
Then the young man spoke up. It would be alright, he said, the authorities had assured them that the city was safe, as long as they took adequate precautions. They had masks and gloves, he told me, alcohol to clean their skin and the surfaces that they contacted. And they had spray that would repel The Hosts. “The authorities” had given them a “city kit” when they passed through a boundary checkpoint. The kits were newly arrived and they were giving them to everyone and anyone who asked. This less travelled road was patently open to human traffic, at least in one direction. We lemmings are so easy to cull. Myself, I chose to steal around such checkpoints. It wasn’t so hard: the police, soldiers, security guards or vigilantes who were stationed there generally didn’t stray far from their encampments. When the earnest young man had finished telling me his story, I did try to warn him that “the authorities” he trusted so intently were the very same authorities that had assured us the pandemic would pass, that this virus and then the next one would die off in cold weather, that masks worked in all circumstances against transmission, that the economy would recover, that releasing people from prisons and detention centres was a good idea, and that the infection always either passed or resulted in death after just a few days. And now we have The Hosts, I concluded.
The couple were not to be swayed, however, so all I could do was wish them well and leave them to wend their way. It was surely a good thing that they hadn’t interrogated my own intentions. At least they had a good flesh and blood reason for their lunatic expedition, albeit that the daughter must be dead or infected: there would be no going back for her, and surely not for her mother and her heroic young lover either. Myself, I was willing to risk disease and, more likely death, just to – as I quipped to myself – “renew my library book”. I had to have fresh reading matter: books, books, books… I couldn’t live without them - but probably won’t live with them. What I found on that very adventure into the seething city was much more than the literature I bargained for, though, believe you me.
Rabbit, run! At least headlong flight staves off the numbing cold… I think of the collected Rabbit novels I read and, distracted, hit my head on the branch of a tree, almost knock myself out: up again, and flee for dear life! Yours as much as my own.
Had I been born into another age, rather than this lifetime of “toil and blood”, I might have been a historian. And I say that knowing full well that history is a lie, that all histories are worm-riddled falsehoods, fashioned to control. Toil and blood, by the way, comes from an old song that the authorities deemed suitable for community singing back in the day when they were strategically seeking to foster community spirit. People sang along as, on their screens, a beaming young man played popular songs on a grand piano topped every day with a vase of fresh flowers. He looked like a fervent religious convert, brimming with joy. His eyebrows had an ecstatic life all of their own. Maybe the authorities thought it was kinder if we felt more connected as we died in droves, trying desperately sing in tune or harmonise. They themselves, of course, knew what to do to survive. I say “they themselves” but I mean “it”. For although there is some heredity and inheritance to its administration, authority is a phenomenon in its own right, a misanthropic force, rallying to its service the obedient, the expedient and, inevitably, the fanatic. And you were expecting little green humanoids in flying saucers?
I must move faster, I can smell them, tainting the petrichor and pine aroma of the forest: closing in.
Before I tell you what I inadvertently unearthed on my incursion into the seething city, I should tell you just how you might grasp at your chance for survival. This I also got from a book. Please, for all our sakes, pay attention. Next time you hear or see something, some information, anything at all, take a deep breath and consider before processing it: think very carefully about what it means before you fit it into your story of the world. A trick I use is to pinch myself hard, inflict pain to pause the otherwise automatic representation of perception. You can make the space within yourself to remake history. It’s easier to comprehend if I give you an example, a pertinent one. Say you watch on a news channel a political leader declaring martial law in order to stop the spread of a deadly virus. You perceive the leader’s earnestness, their reluctance and yet their resolve; you see concern etched on their face, hear them talk of the greater good, the lack of alternatives… Normally, you will choose a representation of your perception in an instant. What that representation is depends on who, where and when you are. You may decide the leader and their regime is acting in your best interest and accept the extreme curtailing of your freedoms of movement and association. Or you might decide the leader is lying and so determine to ignore or actively resist their edict. The thing is you have a choice. But the only way to change reality is to make a choice that you cannot even recognise! Not obey, not resist, not ignore: not for nor against nor careless of. Once again, I can’t tell you how such a choice might look: I’m sorry. I am truly sorry.
There is snow in the air, drifting to earth between the trees. If I can’t find shelter tonight, I will probably freeze to death even before they find me. 
You surely feel that I’ve let you down, but honestly it would – and could – make no sense for me to try to express the sort choice that only you, there and then, can contemplate. I don’t know you, your space nor time; not the truth of it. All I can say is that, in my example, whether you choose compliance or resistance will make absolutely no difference. Either way you compound authority. Look, if it helps at all, I chose books, okay. Of course, my informational inputs, my perception and my choice of representations was quite different from your own. Different but equal, not opposite. Maybe music will work for you, maybe meditation, making, or mayhem? Maybe you need to choose together with others, change the perception-representation process as a group, a multitude. Who can say? Just don’t “go along” with anyone.
What I found was a time machine.
It’s not what you’re thinking, surely not what you imagine: there is no physics, no physical rupture of space-time continuum, no wormholes… No wires nor sparks nor whizz-bangs. Even the author of the book I gleaned the time machine from did not fully comprehend what she was conceptualising. For me, though, it came together like the dawn of a blinding summer sun. It works much as perception and representation work: I can create a pause between future and past; that is my breakthrough, joining the dots between two ideas, making the connection. I can’t send material objects back in time, human bodies no more so. But what I can transport is an idea: the idea of changing the way you choose to re-represent your perceptions and so remake the world: a post-pandemic world, mayhap a sufficient world, a world of freedom and responsibility, of caring and communal jurisdiction, a politics of all beings... Or a world where there are no beings left at all. “You pays your money and you takes your choice”. But it’s surely worth a shout?
A shout!
They’re close now, deadly close, almost upon me.
The thing is, I have no idea how you will encounter this, my little idea. Almost certainly, it won’t come to you as I imagine I send it. It may hit you like a breaking wave, literally. Or it may come to you in fragments inadvertently or consciously gathered over a lifetime. It could be via an image, a song, a sensation – stroking a cat, scenting orange blossom, tasting rain on another’s skin... More likely it will begin to manifest as you take action, reject authority, debate and decide with others, realise that you have always been blinkered, that you can change your mind. And be true to a version of yourself you have never known but yearn to be: meet your own stranger, love your alien. Reconfigure resistance. Very soon I will send this simple idea back to you. When you read it, see it, feel it, piece it together and maybe, just maybe, make it happen, it will seem like it has always been there: a cliché. You may mock it, shrug it off, reject it… Forget it. In the words of one of the greatest authors I have read from your time, sometime: so it goes. Uncertain, I can only make the offer. And you’re welcome. First, though, before transmission, the pause: I must choose how I represent my perception of being hunted down; I must create my own reality before I can offer a perception to you. Of course I must.
Pinch yourselves.  Repeatedly.
My partner was called Alice, our child’s name was Jade.
They accepted: they died.
Shout loudly.
Pause, think about what I have said before you process it.
Don’t you trust me?
 
      “We got her, Sir, but…”
      “She’d already sent.”
      “Sorry, Sir.”
      “No matter, no one will listen.”
      “Sir!”
      “And if a few do, they’ll be called mad, fringe, cranks....”
      “Or be taken-out should anyone begin to take them seriously.”
      “Indeed.... What’s your name, soldier?”
      “That, sir, I have yet to choose.”
 
With xenospheric thanks to Tade Thompson for the inspiration and the quotes from Redemption. And to Arundhati Roy for writing “Nothing can be worse than a return to normality.” (Financial Times, 3 April 2020 https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca)

‘The way we get through this is together: the rise of mutual aid under coronavirus. Rebecca Solnit
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/mutual-aid-coronavirus-pandemic-rebecca-solnit
 
The pandemic is a portal. Arundhati Roy
https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
 
Coronavirus shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let's start with education. George Monbiot.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/12/coronavirus-education-pandemic-natural-world-ecology?fbclid=IwAR0Ga7nMF8-uyPMusdM6BEVRvgooZJBGz9u6mwvymPF15LsI9NfTk_VKzUk
 
Screen New Deal (How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic). Naomi Kline
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/
Aternatively
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic
 
Surveillance Capitalism in the time of Covid-19: the possible costs of technological liberation from lockdown. Mark Whitehead
https://abi554974301.wordpress.com/2020/05/11/surveillance-capitalism-in-the-time-of-covid-19-the-possible-costs-of-technological-liberation-from-lockdown/?fbclid=IwAR0SkraHfP_X7ftvEAAEDXI4ji3gL2syl0l61nvZILfpJCwO_TIqXe9Hrek
 
Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible? Panagiotis Sotiris
https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/14/against-agamben-is-a-democratic-biopolitics-possible/?fbclid=IwAR37oFUB-neNbwRGjTbdJO85wgX4Mt5OtQ7XrgLeJV2mWTETH9Ab5yKYwTA
 
Will coronavirus lead to fairer societies? Thomas Piketty explores the prospect. Laura Spinney
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/12/will-coronavirus-lead-to-fairer-societies-thomas-piketty-explores-the-prospect?fbclid=IwAR3MvsC-zOdtYEqSX8ko4nu1xNSnIs47-PBoBOL62Qffd1nAmoqhAw8MG6k
 
Why coronavirus might just create a more equal society in Britain. Richard Wilson & Kate Picket
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/04/coronavirus-equal-society-britain-wellbeing-economic-growth?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR1ie2Xr1puqlQzvbIrpv9YNMh3r-yiNW0cD_TlslhWSaYf-k-FNsdHOF0k
 
Ten articles about the current crisis that every UK activist should read. Peace News
https://peacenews.info/node/9620/ten-articles-about-current-crisis-every-uk-activist-should-read?fbclid=IwAR1z_mokvq8qxyKUbWHgoV6VckO_ueQo7t-mkjWX6ISCbOZyPxVXwRTtHf8 

“This is the most studied period in recent Western history with tendrils of popular thought winding out into conspiracy theory. Strange that when it was truly aliens to blame, fringe folk wouldn’t believe it and blamed the government.”
Tade Thompson, Redemption
 
There is no post-pandemic. They were wrong about that. They were wrong about most things. Self-isolation, it’s how we all live now, those of us who still live. Some are wholly alone, others in tried and tested groups – or rather tried and trusted as there is no longer any such thing as testing. Most survivors occupy isolated properties in rural areas, desperately growing what food they can. Readily defended houses at the coast are much sought after and contested, oftentimes with bloodshed. There are small towns and villages which try to maintain cordons, but smaller isolated groups probably constitute the bulk of the population, at least here in the places that I know. Obviously, many groups are families. As time wears on and the pandemic’s virulence shows no sign of diminishing, incest has become a social norm.
I much prefer my own company.
Some couplings are negotiated, of course: young people leaving their group to meet with a lover in no-one’s space, either breeding and then forming a new group, or killing each other softly with a strain of the virus one carried and the other had no resistance to. Either that or one romantic party was faking it and the spouse-to-be ends up as Sunday lunch for the trickster’s family. It happens. Food is in extremely short supply and meat is almost unheard of since we passed the virus back to the animals, extinguishing countless species. Pathogens are no respecters of species boundaries.
At least there are no longer factory farms…
First there was the unrelenting economic recession, generating a second great depression, much deeper than the original, and then came the final erosion and fracturing of societies. The virus overwhelmed us on all fronts, and it gathered allies. After a long while, peoples’ frustration turned to anger and the authorities couldn’t maintain their lock-downs and so-called social isolation. No access to hairdressers was a particular source of tension. Across the world there were riots, looting, people gunned down by the police… Governments stopped dedicating resources to mitigate other crises, especially environmental crises, most especially climate change. These days there is only one weather forecast: we say “blowing hot and cold”. I don’t know where that comes from, but we shout it to each other across open ground when wary travellers meet, when we encounter each other and do not instantly start shooting, firing poison arrows or throwing stones. So, when some place isn’t parched by drought and aflame, it’s under water. As I record this message for you the meteorological curse on this particular area is a chill which has bitten unheralded into a spring-like period of warm rain showers. The over-riding curse, the plague, is everywhere. But it came too late to staunch the mortal wounds we had already inflicted on Mother Earth. Seasons are a thing of the past. This deep frost has literally nipped any emerging plant life in the bud.
Trying to grow any sort of crop is an arduous and heart-breaking endeavour. When I can scavenge nothing tinned to eat from abandoned shops and houses, and that resource is almost exhausted it seems, I survive on grass and by digging up a bitter root that I do not know the name of. These ingredients I boil on a campfire together with wild garlic, which makes the dish considerably more palatable. This diet does, however, cause my stomach to cramp suddenly and agonisingly so that I am forced to cry out, risking detection. But I live with the cramps alongside the other afflictions of our age: wasted muscles, a scurvy rash, hair loss, wounds that refuse to heal…
My lips are chapped and bleeding, the blood an iron reminder on my tongue: get this done.
I read once that: “The past is one, but the futures are many.” It’s from an old novel, possibly from your own time. The paper copy that I gathered, browned, blown and scattered in what was once a high street bookshop, did not have a cover or the page with the publication date. I still don’t know the title of the book. Anyway, it’s not true that the past is one, but the futures are many. Deconstruct only that quote and it is plain that the past in agglomeration of many times that were formerly futures: the past is multiple, as uncertain and as unstable as any future for it was built on shifting sands. And it is remembered for us, though not on our behalf. The case was always that we made so-called rational decisions based on random data, gathered piecemeal and arbitrarily analysed. Once the algorithms took over the gathering and analysis, thus removing the space for human free will, idiosyncrasy and hence error, we were doomed. Only chance could have saved us: more of us, that is; more of what “we had created with our hands and our minds for the beauty of the world we lived in”. I once heard a small choir sing those words on the street and they have stuck with me. It was about another form of apocalypse, nuclear war, which extraordinarily remains a threat. I hope I remember the lyrics correctly... No time for rambling! My point is, rather than compounding irrational rationality, what we needed was “a happy accident”. Fat chance of that now.
But that’s why I’m writing to you: you do have a chance; you, back then. Of course, I cannot tell you what that chance is. It will stem from one happy accident among many, many fatal errors. What I can tell you is that if you don’t take that chance – all those chances, and make all those terrible choices, then this is your future: my future; this nightmare. If you survive, that is. If you are among that mysterious number who survive; that inaccurate, unknowable percentage…
Must move, I can sense them.
I leave my faint and ancient path and plunge into the forest, flitting through the shadows, keeping my head down. Once step ahead: one small step for me, one giant leap… I must apologise for speaking in quotes and clichés but I have little opportunity for dialogue and so for developing my own verbal habits. Reading must suffice. And I am voracious. So, what else do you need to know? What must I tell you? What will help you? In the very early days, someone wrote of the pandemic: “Nothing can be worse than a return to normality.” That too was wrong. I mean it was one hundred percent correct when spoken by that prescient person in that particular present. But that present was always already the product of many diseased and crippled pasts, misremembered. Speaking from such a time, the words were bound to be fuelled by mental deficiency. Nothing personal, but you are all demented, even your prophets - most of all your prophets because they are the ones who are making the most seeming sense of absolute bunkum! Better to gabble and drool, “fall wanking to the floor.” But just imagine what your historic dementia makes me: me, the product of morons coupling! Love in the time of cholera, so to speak: another title I found in that ruined bookshop, though I only found the cover and so never read the book. Was it good?
The cover is a gorgeous sepia photograph of a beautiful woman, I have it folded still.
Love in the time of Corona, the Covid 19 virus… Well, actually, only one of a cloud of corona viruses that just kept – keep – coming, year after year, season upon season, then month by month. Myself, I have survived the attack of at least two of these viruses – or, who can tell, two attacks by one of them. Not so my partner. Nor, with the second bout, our child. I do not want to talk about this; can’t think about it. Not at this time. You should know, must have worked it out for yourself by now, that there is can be no authority. For authority is legitimised by knowledge and no-one knows a fucking thing! Here, now, everywhere and whenever, authority is based only on the knowledge of itself: it is certain only of itself. And it is so deadly certain of itself. It cannot be trusted.
The sharp crack of a twig snapping beneath a clumsy boot, shattering the dusk: go!
Once I met a couple on “the road less travelled”, my term - purloined from a book, of course - for all the routes that are officially closed. Like me, this couple were on the road into the city where the mass of the infected are contained. The infected smear themselves over every surface and fill the air with viruses, sneezing into each other’s faces  for fun, for the hell of it – and it is hellish - then collapsing, first in hysterical laughter and then coughing fits. Some call them “The Hosts” and they were one of the wholly unexpected outcomes of the pandemic: the perennially sick; a fate worse than death? To my own flawed knowledge, The Hosts are a totally urban phenomenon. As a mortal threat, in any open ground, they are generally easy to evade. Having little lung capacity they usually give up the chase quickly, wheezing to a standstill or even expiring on the spot. They are no crazier than the rest of us, of course, no more wrong, they have just created a culture of their own with wildly different values. For them, infection if a system of belief. Their creed is hedonistic: don’t worry, be happy! If you can live with infection, what’s left to fear? Survival is tantamount to resurrection and infecting others is their duty, their holy order. And if you die when they infect you? Well, that was the will of the virus. They effectively worship microbes.
Bat-shit crazy.
But I am near exhaustion now, deep in the forest, and I digress. Back to the couple. Obviously, they were a couple, lovers, clinging tightly together when we stumbled across each other. Heterosexual, it appeared: an older white woman and younger man, dark skinned; ivory and ebony. Now, where did that quaint little phrase come from? We exchanged hesitant, suspicious greetings: “Are you well?” has become both a greeting and a survivalist enquiry. Having reassured each other by word of mouth as well as via our apparent relatively good health – the woman was so weak from malnutrition that her partner was obliged to half carry her - they told me their story. I do not recall either of their names, if I ever knew them. They were risking an incursion into “the seething city”, the woman’s term, in search of her runaway daughter. Although I was myself intent upon a similar incursion, I felt I had to advise them of the foolhardiness of their intended course of action. Particularly given the woman’s weakened state, they would likely be infected by the hosts and die or live terrible lives, permanently ill: sweating and coughing with a splitting headache to end all headaches. At least we’ll be together, she said, and I bit my tongue so as not to disabuse her. Although the man was evidently the heathier, no-one could predict who might survive the viruses: old, young; weak, strong; woman, man; white, black...
That was just one more thing that they got very wrong.
Then the young man spoke up. It would be alright, he said, the authorities had assured them that the city was safe, as long as they took adequate precautions. They had masks and gloves, he told me, alcohol to clean their skin and the surfaces that they contacted. And they had spray that would repel The Hosts. “The authorities” had given them a “city kit” when they passed through a boundary checkpoint. The kits were newly arrived and they were giving them to everyone and anyone who asked. This less travelled road was patently open to human traffic, at least in one direction. We lemmings are so easy to cull. Myself, I chose to steal around such checkpoints. It wasn’t so hard: the police, soldiers, security guards or vigilantes who were stationed there generally didn’t stray far from their encampments. When the earnest young man had finished telling me his story, I did try to warn him that “the authorities” he trusted so intently were the very same authorities that had assured us the pandemic would pass, that this virus and then the next one would die off in cold weather, that masks worked in all circumstances against transmission, that the economy would recover, that releasing people from prisons and detention centres was a good idea, and that the infection always either passed or resulted in death after just a few days. And now we have The Hosts, I concluded.
The couple were not to be swayed, however, so all I could do was wish them well and leave them to wend their way. It was surely a good thing that they hadn’t interrogated my own intentions. At least they had a good flesh and blood reason for their lunatic expedition, albeit that the daughter must be dead or infected: there would be no going back for her, and surely not for her mother and her heroic young lover either. Myself, I was willing to risk disease and, more likely death, just to – as I quipped to myself – “renew my library book”. I had to have fresh reading matter: books, books, books… I couldn’t live without them - but probably won’t live with them. What I found on that very adventure into the seething city was much more than the literature I bargained for, though, believe you me.
Rabbit, run! At least headlong flight staves off the numbing cold… I think of the collected Rabbit novels I read and, distracted, hit my head on the branch of a tree, almost knock myself out: up again, and flee for dear life! Yours as much as my own.
Had I been born into another age, rather than this lifetime of “toil and blood”, I might have been a historian. And I say that knowing full well that history is a lie, that all histories are worm-riddled falsehoods, fashioned to control. Toil and blood, by the way, comes from an old song that the authorities deemed suitable for community singing back in the day when they were strategically seeking to foster community spirit. People sang along as, on their screens, a beaming young man played popular songs on a grand piano topped every day with a vase of fresh flowers. He looked like a fervent religious convert, brimming with joy. His eyebrows had an ecstatic life all of their own. Maybe the authorities thought it was kinder if we felt more connected as we died in droves, trying desperately sing in tune or harmonise. They themselves, of course, knew what to do to survive. I say “they themselves” but I mean “it”. For although there is some heredity and inheritance to its administration, authority is a phenomenon in its own right, a misanthropic force, rallying to its service the obedient, the expedient and, inevitably, the fanatic. And you were expecting little green humanoids in flying saucers?
I must move faster, I can smell them, tainting the petrichor and pine aroma of the forest: closing in.
Before I tell you what I inadvertently unearthed on my incursion into the seething city, I should tell you just how you might grasp at your chance for survival. This I also got from a book. Please, for all our sakes, pay attention. Next time you hear or see something, some information, anything at all, take a deep breath and consider before processing it: think very carefully about what it means before you fit it into your story of the world. A trick I use is to pinch myself hard, inflict pain to pause the otherwise automatic representation of perception. You can make the space within yourself to remake history. It’s easier to comprehend if I give you an example, a pertinent one. Say you watch on a news channel a political leader declaring martial law in order to stop the spread of a deadly virus. You perceive the leader’s earnestness, their reluctance and yet their resolve; you see concern etched on their face, hear them talk of the greater good, the lack of alternatives… Normally, you will choose a representation of your perception in an instant. What that representation is depends on who, where and when you are. You may decide the leader and their regime is acting in your best interest and accept the extreme curtailing of your freedoms of movement and association. Or you might decide the leader is lying and so determine to ignore or actively resist their edict. The thing is you have a choice. But the only way to change reality is to make a choice that you cannot even recognise! Not obey, not resist, not ignore: not for nor against nor careless of. Once again, I can’t tell you how such a choice might look: I’m sorry. I am truly sorry.
There is snow in the air, drifting to earth between the trees. If I can’t find shelter tonight, I will probably freeze to death even before they find me. 
You surely feel that I’ve let you down, but honestly it would – and could – make no sense for me to try to express the sort choice that only you, there and then, can contemplate. I don’t know you, your space nor time; not the truth of it. All I can say is that, in my example, whether you choose compliance or resistance will make absolutely no difference. Either way you compound authority. Look, if it helps at all, I chose books, okay. Of course, my informational inputs, my perception and my choice of representations was quite different from your own. Different but equal, not opposite. Maybe music will work for you, maybe meditation, making, or mayhem? Maybe you need to choose together with others, change the perception-representation process as a group, a multitude. Who can say? Just don’t “go along” with anyone.
What I found was a time machine.
It’s not what you’re thinking, surely not what you imagine: there is no physics, no physical rupture of space-time continuum, no wormholes… No wires nor sparks nor whizz-bangs. Even the author of the book I gleaned the time machine from did not fully comprehend what she was conceptualising. For me, though, it came together like the dawn of a blinding summer sun. It works much as perception and representation work: I can create a pause between future and past; that is my breakthrough, joining the dots between two ideas, making the connection. I can’t send material objects back in time, human bodies no more so. But what I can transport is an idea: the idea of changing the way you choose to re-represent your perceptions and so remake the world: a post-pandemic world, mayhap a sufficient world, a world of freedom and responsibility, of caring and communal jurisdiction, a politics of all beings... Or a world where there are no beings left at all. “You pays your money and you takes your choice”. But it’s surely worth a shout?
A shout!
They’re close now, deadly close, almost upon me.
The thing is, I have no idea how you will encounter this, my little idea. Almost certainly, it won’t come to you as I imagine I send it. It may hit you like a breaking wave, literally. Or it may come to you in fragments inadvertently or consciously gathered over a lifetime. It could be via an image, a song, a sensation – stroking a cat, scenting orange blossom, tasting rain on another’s skin... More likely it will begin to manifest as you take action, reject authority, debate and decide with others, realise that you have always been blinkered, that you can change your mind. And be true to a version of yourself you have never known but yearn to be: meet your own stranger, love your alien. Reconfigure resistance. Very soon I will send this simple idea back to you. When you read it, see it, feel it, piece it together and maybe, just maybe, make it happen, it will seem like it has always been there: a cliché. You may mock it, shrug it off, reject it… Forget it. In the words of one of the greatest authors I have read from your time, sometime: so it goes. Uncertain, I can only make the offer. And you’re welcome. First, though, before transmission, the pause: I must choose how I represent my perception of being hunted down; I must create my own reality before I can offer a perception to you. Of course I must.
Pinch yourselves.  Repeatedly.
My partner was called Alice, our child’s name was Jade.
They accepted: they died.
Shout loudly.
Pause, think about what I have said before you process it.
Don’t you trust me?
 
      “We got her, Sir, but…”
      “She’d already sent.”
      “Sorry, Sir.”
      “No matter, no one will listen.”
      “Sir!”
      “And if a few do, they’ll be called mad, fringe, cranks....”
      “Or be taken-out should anyone begin to take them seriously.”
      “Indeed.... What’s your name, soldier?”
      “That, sir, I have yet to choose.”
 
With xenospheric thanks to Tade Thompson for the inspiration and the quotes from Redemption. And to Arundhati Roy for writing “Nothing can be worse than a return to normality.” (Financial Times, 3 April 2020)

​“This is the most studied period in recent Western history with tendrils of popular thought winding out into conspiracy theory. Strange that when it was truly aliens to blame, fringe folk wouldn’t believe it and blamed the government.”
Tade Thompson, Redemption
 
Future imperative
There is no post-pandemic. They were wrong about that. They were wrong about most things. Self-isolation, it’s how we all live now, those of us who still live. Some are wholly alone, others in tried and tested groups – or rather tried and trusted as there is no longer any testing. Most survivors occupy isolated properties in rural areas, desperately growing what food they can. Readily defended houses at the coast are much sought after and contested, sometimes with bloodshed. There are small towns and villages which try to maintain cordons, but smaller isolated groups probably constitute the bulk of the population, at least here in the places I know. Obviously, many groups are families. And thus the latest of myriad crises to assail our species is incest. Or rather the product of incest: The Dribblers. Some couplings are negotiated, of course: young people leaving their group to meet with a lover in no-one’s space, either breeding and then forming a new group, or killing each other softly with a strain of the virus one carried and the other had no resistance to. Either that or one romantic party was faking it and the spouse-to-be ends up as Sunday lunch for the trickster’s family.
It happens. Food is in extremely short supply and meat is almost unheard of since we passed the virus back to the animals, extinguishing countless species.
First there was the unrelenting economic recession, generating a second great depression, much deeper than the original, and then came the final erosion and fracturing of societies. The virus overwhelmed us on all fronts, and it gathered allies. After a long while, peoples’ frustration turned to anger and the authorities couldn’t maintain their lock-downs. There were riots, looting, people gunned down by the police… Governments stopped dedicating resources to mitigate other crises, especially environmental crises, most especially climate change. These days there is only one weather forecast: we say “blowing hot and cold”. I don’t know where that comes from, but we shout it to each other across open ground when wary travellers meet, when we encounter each other and do not instantly start shooting, firing poison arrows or throwing stones. These days when a place isn’t parched by drought and aflame, it’s under water. As I write the meteorological curse on this particular place is a chill which has bitten unheralded into a spring like period. The over-riding curse, the plague is everywhere. But it came too late to staunch the mortal wounds we had already inflicted on Mother Earth. There are no longer seasons. This deep frost has literally nipped any emerging plant life in the bud. Trying to grow any sort of crop is an arduous and heart-breaking endeavour. When I can scavenge nothing tinned to eat from abandoned shops and houses, and that resource is almost exhausted it seems, I survive on grass and by digging up a bitter root that I do not know the name of. These ingredients I boil on a campfire together with wild garlic, which makes the dish considerably more palatable. This diet does, however, cause my stomach to cramp suddenly and agonisingly so that I am forced to cry out, risking detection. But I live with the cramps alongside the other afflictions of our age: wasted muscles, a scurvy rash, hair loss, wounds that refuse to heal…
I read once that: “The past is one, but the futures are many.” It’s from an old novel, possibly from your own time. The paper copy that I gathered, browned, scattered and blown in what was once a high street bookshop, did not have a cover or the page with the publication date. I still don’t know the title of the book. Anyway, it’s not true that the past is one, but the futures are many. Deconstruct only that quote and it is plain that the past in agglomeration of many times that were formerly futures: the past is as uncertain and as unstable as any future for it was built on shifting sands. The case was always that we made so-called rational decisions based on random data, gathered piecemeal and arbitrarily analysed. Once the algorithms took over the gathering and analysis, thus removing the space for human free will, idiosyncrasy and hence error, we were doomed. I believe that only chance could have saved us: more of us, that is; more of what “we had created with our hands and our minds for the beauty of the world we lived in”. I once hear a small choir sing those words on a street corner, and they have always stuck with me. I hope I remember the lyrics correctly. Anyway, rather than compounding irrational rationality, what we needed was “a happy accident”. No chance of that now.
But that’s why I’m writing to you: you do have a chance; you, back then. Of course, I cannot tell you what that chance is. It will stem from one happy accident among many, many fatal ones. What I can tell you is that if you don’t take that chance – all those chances, and make all those terrible choices, then this is your future: my future; this nightmare. If you survive, that is. If you are among that mysterious number who survive; that inaccurate, unknowable percentage…
I must move, I can sense them.
Once step ahead: one small step for me, one giant leap… Remember that? I apologise for speaking in quotes and clichés but I have little opportunity for dialogue and so for developing my own verbal habits. Reading must suffice. And I am voracious. So, what else do you need to know? What must I tell you? What will help you? In the very early days, someone wrote of the pandemic: “Nothing can be worse than a return to normality.” That too was wrong. I mean it was one hundred percent correct when spoken by that prescient person in that particular present. But that present was always already the product of many diseased and crippled pasts. Speaking from such a time, the words were bound to be fuelled by mental deficiency. Nothing personal, but you are all demented, even your prophets - most of all your prophets because they are the ones who are making the most seeming sense of absolute bunkum! Better to gabble and drool, “fall wanking to the floor.” But just imagine what your historic dementia makes me: me, the product of morons coupling! Love in the time of cholera, so to speak: another title I found in that ruined bookshop, though with that one I only found the cover and so never read the book. Was it good?
The cover is a gorgeous sepia photograph of a beautiful woman, I have it still.
Love in the time of Covid 19, the corona virus… Well, actually, only one of a cloud of corona viruses that just kept – keep – coming. I don’t know when they stopped counting. Covid n+1 perhaps. Myself, I have survived the attack of at least two of these viruses – or, who can tell, two attacks by one of them. Not so my partner. Nor, with the second bout, our child. I do not want to talk about this; can’t think about it. Not at this time. You should know, must have worked it out for yourself by now, that there is can be no authority. For authority is legitimised by knowledge and no-one knows a fucking thing! Here, now, everywhere and whenever, authority is based only on the knowledge of itself: it is certain only of itself. And it is so deadly certain of itself.
The crack of a dry twig snapping beneath a clumsy boot: move!
Once I met a couple on “the road less travelled”, my term, taken from a book of course, for all the routes that are officially closed. Like me, this couple were on the road into the city where the mass of the infected are contained. The infected smear themselves over every surface and fill the air with viruses, sneezing into each other’s faces  for fun, for the hell of it – and it is hellish - then collapsing, first in hysterical laughter and then coughing fits. Some call them “The Hosts” and they were one of the wholly unexpected outcomes of the pandemic: the perennially sick; a fate worse than death? To my own flawed knowledge, The Hosts are a totally urban phenomenon. As a mortal threat, in any open ground, they are generally easy to evade. Having little lung capacity they usually give up the chase quickly, wheezing to a standstill or even expiring on the spot. They are no crazier than the rest of us, of course, no more wrong, they have just created a culture of their own with wildly different values. For them, infection if a system of belief. Their creed is hedonistic: don’t worry, be happy! If you can live with infection, what’s left to fear? Survival is tantamount to resurrection and infecting others is their duty, their holy order. And if you die when they infect you? Well, that was the will of the virus. They effectively worship microbes.
Bat-shit crazy.
But I am near exhaustion and I digress. Back to the couple. Obviously, they were a couple, lovers, clinging tightly together when we stumbled across each other. Heterosexual, it seemed: an older white woman and younger man, dark skinned; ivory and ebony. Now, where did that little phrase come from? We exchanged hesitant, suspicious greetings: “Are you well?” has become both a greeting and a survivalist enquiry. Having reassured each other by word of mouth as well as via our apparent relatively good health – the woman was so weak that her partner was obliged to half carry her - they told me their story. I do not recall either of their names, if I ever knew them. The woman did most of the talking, while the man kept his eyes and ears open, like me scenting the air often. They were risking an incursion into “the seething city”, the woman’s term, in search of her runaway daughter. Although I was myself intent upon a similar incursion – on a quest for more books – I felt I had to advise them of the foolhardiness of their intended course of action. Particularly given the woman’s weakened state, they would likely be infected by the hosts and die or live short and terrible lives, permanently ill: sweating and coughing with a splitting headache to end all headaches. At least we’ll be together, she said, and I bit my tongue so as not to disabuse her. Although the man was evidently the heathier, no-one could predict who might survive the viruses: old, young; weak, strong; man, woman...
That was just one more thing that they got very wrong.
Then the young man spoke up. It would be alright, he said, the authorities had assured them that the city was safe, as long as they took adequate precautions. They had masks and gloves, he told me, alcohol to clean their skin and the surfaces that they contacted. And they had spray that would repel The Hosts. “The authorities” had given them a “city kit” when they passed through a boundary checkpoint (this less travelled road was patently open to human traffic, at least in one direction). The kits were newly arrived and they were giving them to everyone and anyone who asked. Myself, I chose to steal around such checkpoints. It wasn’t so hard: the police, soldiers, security guards or vigilantes who were stationed there generally didn’t stray far from their encampments. When the earnest young man had finished telling me his story, I did try to warn him that “the authorities” he trusted so intently were the very same authorities that had assured us the pandemic would pass, that this virus and then the next one would die off in cold weather, that masks worked in all situations, that the economy would recover, that releasing people from prisons and detention centres was a good idea, and that the infection always either passed or resulted in death after just a few days. And now we have The Hosts, I concluded.
The couple were not to be swayed, however, so all I could do was wish them well and leave them to it. I daresay it was a good job that they hadn’t interrogated my own intentions. At least they had a good flesh and blood reason for their lunatic expedition, albeit that the daughter must be dead or infected: there would be no going back for her, and surely not for her mother and her heroic young lover either. Myself, I was willing to risk disease and, more likely death, just to – as I quipped to myself – “renew my library book”. I had to have fresh reading matter. Books, books, books… I couldn’t live without them - but probably won’t live with them. What I found on that very adventure into the seething city was, though, much more than the literature I bargained for, believe you me.
Run, rabbit, run! At least it staves off the cold
Had I been born into another age, rather than this lifetime of “toil and blood”, I might have been a historian. And I say that knowing full well that history is a lie, that all histories are worm-riddled falsehoods. Toil and blood, by the way, comes from an old song that the authorities deemed suitable for community singing back in the day when they were seeking to foster community spirit. People sang along as, on their screens, a beaming young man played classic pop and folk songs on a grand piano topped every day with a vase of fresh flowers. He looked like a fervent religious convert, brimming with joy. His eyebrows had an ecstatic life of their own. Maybe the authorities thought it was kinder if we felt more connected as we died in droves. They themselves, of course, knew what to do to survive. I say “they” and “themselves” but I mean “it”. For although there is some heredity and inheritance to its administration, authority is a social actor in its own right, a persistent part of human cultures, rallying to its service the obedient, the expedient and, inevitably, the fanatic.
I must move faster, I can smell them.
Closing in.
Before I tell you what I inadvertently unearthed on my incursion into the seething city, I should tell you how you might grasp your chance for survival. This I also got from a book. Please, for all our sakes, pay attention. Next time you hear or see something, some information, anything, take a deep breath and consider before processing it: think very carefully about what it means before you fit it into your story of the world. A trick I use is to pinch myself hard, inflict pain to pause the otherwise almost instant representation of perception. You have the space within you to remake history. It’s easier to comprehend if I give you an example, I think, a pertinent one. Say you see on a news programme a political leader declaring martial law in order to stop the spread of a virus. You perceive the leader’s earnestness, their reluctance and yet their resolve; you see concern etched on the leader’s face, hear them talk of the greater good, the lack of alternatives… Normally, you will choose a representation of your perception in an instant. What that representation is depends on who, where and when you are. You may decide the leader and their regime is acting in your best interest and accept the extreme curtailing of your freedoms of movement and association. Or you might decide the leader is lying and so determine to resist the edict by any means possible. The thing is you have a choice. But the only way to change reality is to make a choice that you cannot even recognise! Once again, I can’t tell you how such a choice might look.
I’m sorry.
There is snow in the air. If I can’t find shelter tonight, I will probably freeze to death before they find me. 
I know you feel I’ve let you down, but honestly it would – and could – make no sense for me to try to express the sort choice that only you, there and then can contemplate. I don’t know you. All I can say is that, in my example, whether you choose compliance or resistance will make absolutely no difference. Either way you compound authority. Look, if it helps at all, I chose books, okay. Of course, my informational inputs, my perception and my choice of representations was quite different to your own. Different but equal, not opposite. Maybe music will work for you, maybe meditation, making, or mayhem? Maybe you need to make your choices together with others, change the perception-representation process together. Who can say? Just don’t “go along” with anyone.
What I found was a time machine.
It’s not what you’re thinking, surely not what you imagine: there is no physics, no physical rupture of space-time, no wormholes… No wires nor sparks nor whizz-bangs. Even the author of the book I gleaned the time machine from did not fully comprehend what she was conceptualising. For me, though, it came together like the dawning of a blinding summer sun. It works much as perception and representation work: I can create a pause between future and past; that is my breakthrough, joining the dots between ideas, making the connection. I can’t send material objects back in time, human bodies no more so. But what I can transport is an idea: the idea of changing the way you choose to re-represent your perceptions and so remake the world: a post-pandemic world, mayhap a sufficient world, a world of caring and community, of communal authority, a politics of all beings... Or a world where there are no beings left at all. “You pays your money and you takes your choice”. But it’s surely worth a shout?
They’re close, deadly close.
The thing is, I have no idea how you will encounter this, my little idea. Almost certainly, it will not come to you as I will send it. It may hit you like a breaking wave, literally. Or it may come to you in fragments inadvertently or consciously gathered over a lifetime. It could be via an image, a song, a sensation – stroking a cat, scenting orange blossom, tasting rain... More likely, I think, it will begin to manifest as you take action, reject authority, debate and decide with others, realise that you have always been blinkered, that you can change your mind. And be true to a version of yourself you have never know but yearn to be. Very soon I will send this simple idea back to you. When you read it, see it, feel it, piece it together and make it happen, it will seem like it has always been there: a cliché. You may mock it, shrug it off, reject it… In the words of one of the greatest authors I have read: so it goes. Uncertain, I can only make the offer: you’re welcome. First, though, before transmission, the pause, I must choose how I represent my perception of being hunted down: I must create my own reality before I can offer a perception to you. Of course I must.
Pinch yourselves.  Repeatedly.
My partner was called Alice, our child’s name was Jade.
They accepted: they died.
Shout loudly.
Pause, think about what I have said before you create your reality.
Don’t you trust me?
 
      “We got her, Sir, but…”
      “She’d already sent.”
      “Sorry, Sir.”
      “No matter, no one will listen.”
      “Sir!”
      “And if a few do, they’ll be called mad, fringe, cranks....”
      “Or be taken out should anyone begin to take them seriously.”
      “Indeed.... What’s your name, soldier?”
      “That, sir, I have yet to choose.”
 
With xenospheric thanks to Tade Thompson for the inspiration and the quotes from Redemption. And to Arundhati Roy for writing “Nothing can be worse than a return to normality.” (Financial Times, 3 April 2020 

Every school should have a copy of A Nuclear Refrain, according to a wonderful review of the book by Caroline Lucas, the UK's most radical and best loved MP, Caroline Lucas. A Nuclear Refrain was launched at City Books in Brighton and at Housemans in London on 5th and 6th March respectively.

The experience that spurred us to write A Nuclear Refrain was participation in a Trident Ploughshares campaign against nuclear weapons. In 2016, Kye Askins and I organised an academic seminar to be held at AWE Burghfield – the place where the UK’s nuclear warheads are built and maintained. On the theme “no war, no warming, our call for contributions spurred participants to explore the connections between “conflict, particularly nuclear conflict and its requisite institutions, development and infrastructures, and a range of impacts on environments, nature and society”. There is clearly a relation that cuts both ways: environmental impacts, pertinently the effects of climate change, can foment armed conflict; while armed conflict inevitably has negative environmental impacts – in the most extreme case a nuclear winter.
 
Our seminar was to be held as a direct action, a blockade of one of the gates of AWE. Such blockades in the past have featured lawyers putting nuclear weapons on trial, symphony orchestras playing music invested with non-violent values… Bricklayers might build a wall across the gate to a military base. You get the concept: people enact their working lives as democratic protest. In the event, we only had five participants: the police chased off one academic, sending her home because her vehicle tax had run out; a scant few other academics sent their apologies. On the day, Kye, Phil and I roped in Lotte who was there mainly to participate in a singing blockade, and an artist who was painting at the ad hoc peace camp near AWE. We even tried to include the community policeman who had been assigned to keep watch on us! Nevertheless, we weren’t much of a blockade.
 
But we did have an extremely moving, thought-provoking and action inspiring seminar.
 
I won’t try to summarise all that we said, heard and experienced, but a couple of episodes will, I think, give a flavour of why A Nuclear Refrain is what is, as one reviewer apologetically stated it: “an uncomfortable hybrid between academia and fiction”. He need not have apologised because an uncomfortable – unsettling – hybrid was exactly what we were after! More on that in due course. First, the seminar was a very emotional experience. Even being there and, for instance, hearing birdsong so near to a place that contained the potential to end all birdsong forever made the ambience – the vibe - very intense. Kye had brought along “a people paper chain”, four-inch high red cut-out figures, to make present at the seminar all those who weren’t there for whatever reason: from the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through the academics who were too busy elsewhere to participate, to our real and imagined grandchildren, humans whom a nuclear conflict might prevent being born, might kill, or might compel to exist in the hell on Earth of nuclear winter… However, when we wove these little paper figures into the wire fence of AWE, the heavily armed MoD police inside threatened to arrest us. By turns and according to our individual personalities we were flabbergasted, outraged, dismayed and amused. For the authorities to allow our paper figures to remain for just a few minutes, we were obliged to enter into serious negotiations. The experience was at once deadly earnest, ludicrous, terrifying and – finally, after we’d negotiated our concession with the police – exhilarating. Throughout that intense day we ran the gamut of emotions, and I think we learned a lot.
 
So to the book.

A Nuclear Refrain couldn’t be a dry academic analysis. If we were going to write anything at all, our experience demanded we paid attention to:

• the human and environmental tragedy of nuclear weapons, the emotional horrors that even the prospect of using them raised;
• the terrifying absurdities of the securitised nuclear state;
• alternatives to nuclear deterrence and the socio-political relations it dictates, alternatives that reflected the resolve of democratic protesters, people who must – we suggest - be prepared take political responsibility.

 
We were also committed to continuing our direct action in anything that we wrote. And that had to include making that action widely accessible, welcoming and emotionally vital, as our seminar had been. But how? It was at that point that Dickens – channelled by the ever-creative Kye Askins - came to our aid: Let’s emulate Dickens, she said, combine social commentary with fiction. Making such a connection, creating political literature or art, is sometimes dubbed “cultural activism”. With it theme of ghosts past, present and future, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol seemed the perfect template for us (though, I’ll admit, I was dubious until persuaded by an irrepressible Kye, who you’ll realise by now, is the innovative, exuberant and inspiring elephant in this room, though I doubt she’d excuse that metaphor).
 
An excerpt, then: Our Scrooge, the Right Honourable Roger C. Bezeeneos, a pro Trident MP, finds himself transported by our version of the Ghost of Christmas Present, the hesitantly heroic Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. Roger finds himself in a TV studio where he is the focus of an edition of a live current affairs programme Just Answer Me That! It is hosted by the adroit Jeremy Dimble.
 
A studio technician wearing a headset and porting a microphone on a boom hurriedly moved to a woman sitting in the midst of the audience. Roger recognised her immediately as that irritating MP from that little party that refused to completely disappear. Her constituency was that ridiculous South-coast bubble. This was the woman whom, very recently, the PM had shot down for a lack of patriotism. Though he remembered it all too well, Roger never deigned to acknowledge the MP by name.
     “How is it essential for the UK’s survival,” she demanded now, “when there are over one hundred and eighty countries without nuclear weapons? Does that mean those countries are not safe? By the logic of nuclear weapons ensuring security, should every country obtain nuclear weapons in order to be safe?”
     “Oh come on, no.” Roger smiled, feeling superior but very conscious of not wanting to come across as patronising. These days that simply wouldn’t do. “I mean, we’re not starting from a blank slate here, we are where we are. Britain is in a position of global power, and it is up to the global powers to work together to fulfil pledges to the non-proliferation treaty, while being realistic about the serious national security threats that we face. The fine people of the British military are quite certain about that.”
     “Well,” Jeremy Dimble said with a smile on his face, “it’s interesting you should mention that, Roger, because we are joined in the front row by Major General Patrick Cordingley, who led British forces in the first Gulf War, and Field Marshal Lord Bramall, former head of the armed forces.”
     As the technician moved to bring the microphone to them, Roger gave the uniformed, stately looking men the once over. They were very plainly of good stock, he decided, made of the right stuff. He smiled at them, waiting to lap up the authoritative support for Trident and its replacement that they would surely lend.
     “So, Trident is necessary for keeping us safe, Field Marshall?” Dimble asked.
     “Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face, or are likely to face, particularly international terrorism.”[1]
     Roger gasped. The Field Marshall looked extremely serious and sober, yet he must surely have had one too many single malts in the Victoria Services Club?
     “And Major General,” Dimble prompted, “your thoughts?”
     “Strategic nuclear weapons have no military use. It would seem the government wishes to replace Trident simply to remain a nuclear power alongside the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council.”[2]
     Roger was stunned, this wasn’t how this debate was supposed to go. These two looked like thoroughly decent, reliable chaps, former top brass, pillars indeed of the establishment. How was it that he hadn’t heard their views before?
 
Fast forward to the end of a very testing evening for Roger:
 
     “So,” Dimble said, turning to Roger, “would you push the button?”
     Roger froze, like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights. Scrolling in his mind’s eye was a covert nuclear history: Clement Attlee, the Mutual Defence Agreement, the secret memorandum of 1979, the cover-ups, the crashes, the radioactive leaks, the near misses, the half-truths, and the down-right lies. He recognised no democracy in this litany. Did it really boil down to Britain’s place in the world being defined by the potential for instantaneous mass murder? Now this had crystallised for him as the key question, he sat transfixed as he heard Dimble’s repeat the question, his voice seeming to come from a long way off.
     “Would you push the button?”
     Roger’s vision blurred, the studio lights of Just Answer Me That dimmed, and the audience melted away. Through a thickening fog, he heard the question once again:
“Would you push the button, Roger?”
     “Let me be clear….” Roger mumbled into the darkness. Feeling sweat roll down his temple, he reached for the monogrammed handkerchief in his breast pocket but all he plucked was duvet! He was back in bed, in his pyjamas with Marjorie sleeping soundly next to him!


[1] This is a direct quote from a letter to the Times written by Field Marshall Lord Bramall, See Helen Pidd, “Trident Nuclear Missiles Are £20bn Waste of Money, Say Generals,” The Guardian, January 16, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jan/16/trident-is-20bn-waste-say-generals.

[2] Major General Patrick Cordingley, quoted in Kate Hudson, “Trident’s an Outdated Waste. Even the Military Say So,”  New Statesman, June 24, 2015,  https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/06/tridents-outdated-waste-even-military-say-so.

A Nuclear Refrain: emotion. empire and the democratic potential of protest will be launched at  City Books in Brighton and Hove on Thursday 5th March 2020. Do come along for a night of fiction, theory and song! It's great the launch will be first in Brighton where we held the MAD Cabaret in 2018 to raise money for the project. The MAD Cabaret was supported by Caroline Lucas and starred Attila the Stockbroker, Michael James Parker, my co-author Phil Johnstone, Lotte Reimer and comrades from Red Leicester street choir. The London launch of  A Nuclear Refrain is the following evening at Housemans: spread the word to friends, comrades and colleagues. And do come along, it'll be emotional