Uncertain times

WELL, WHO’D A THOUGHT IT would come this way, some goddam little bug that no one can see, sneaking in and laying waste the party? I thought the end would be apocalyptic, the skies falling, the inexorable flooding of low lying lands, a slow incremental gridlock and descent into torpor. That, for a season or two, we might smugly congratulate ourselves growing grapes in Southland before the land dries and cracks there too. I thought, too, there would be some celestial sign of the heavens falling, not some lightning fast vector hiding in a hug or a handshake, dismantling globalisation at the speed of a trans-Atlantic flight.

I am writing some weeks before