Coronavirus Lockdown in Paris : Day Two
Wednesday 18th March
8h01 : Don’t know what’s happening but I woke up an hour before my alarm ready to get up. This never happens in real life.
8h05 : Draw the curtains and spot the rotting chicken in a bag outside. We stare at each other for a long moment. The chicken is accusatory, I’m confused and then ashamed. I have to take it down to the bins today. I know that if I fail I will be a truly revolting human being. I also won’t be able to read on the balcony and the sun’s due out, so.
8h15 : Toast one of the multipack of sweet brioche rolls that I’m pretty sure wouldn’t go mouldy for the entire 15 days of lockdown (or a nuclear winter) because there’s nothing in them except imaginary, made-up ingredients. Somehow weirdly soft cake-bread is conjured from air and e-numbers. I bloody love ‘em. Make a cup of tea with Smug Milk.
8h20 : The internet is down I repeat : the internet is down. I stay calm. Ever so still and calm. Perhaps a little too still and calm. I take a breath and make my phone into a personal hotspot. It’s fine. This is fine. My laptop connects. I load the news. I do not think about the internet and how it’s not working or what that could mean. I do not scream.
8h21 : Unconsciously stop chewing and roll my eyes upon reading that “Mr Trump also said on Tuesday of the outbreak: ‘I've felt that it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.’” Of course you did, you extraordinary asshat.
8h30 : Since I’m up early, I’m allowed to watch at least half an hour of Flight of the Conchords clips. While watching I plait my hair, which is about one day away from being a single solid mass.
9h31 : I try the Real Internet again. It works. It works. Consider that the internet might be the fine-spun thread on which my sanity hangs. Must start a book today as a safety net. Or dig out the crochet hooks. Learn transcendental meditation. Take up Arabic.
10h : Tupperware up the two-bean stew. Seems alright. Slung a can of chickpeas in at the last minute last night because these are crazy times so why not. Are chickpeas beans? Don’t answer that I got there. So the recipe for the Two Bean One Pea Stew might follow when I’ve taste-tested it. Might be godawful. Sometimes think I don’t really know how to make anything that isn’t some form of chilli. What do people even cook when there’s not a tin of tomatoes involved.
10h09 : Sarah texts saying her stepdad in the south of France just got stopped by the police while out searching for milk! Evidently he did not get the last two-pinter from his local Franprix.
10h24 : Have coffee while writing out a permission slip for being out of class my flat so I can take the rotting chicken out without getting reprimanded / arrested / shot. Might go for a walk around the block which suddenly seems full of daring. You can go out for exercise as long as you’re alone, and you have to stay in your own neighbourhood. So not that daring really. I wonder if the inability to exercise will transform me into someone who actually wants to exercise. Nothing else ever has, so I highly doubt it.
11h : Do ten push-ups because Sarah texted us to say she was sending a daily fitness challenge to “keep us fit” and I said “what do you mean ‘keep’” and she said “hahaha good point” which it was. Anyway there’s only so much fitness you can do in one square-metre of empty space - I can’t swing my arms in here let alone a cat. Anyway I gamely do my 10 push-ups and am reminded to add “Hoover the carpet” to my to-do list.
12h07 : I AM GOING OUTSIDE. The chicken is coming with me. I’m also taking a few books which I thought might be picked up by people in need of free books. One of them is Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee though so I feel like I should leave a note saying For heaven’s sake don’t read this if you’re already thinking humans have a fathomless capacity for being absolute trash. I only read half of it then had to stop because I felt like my soul was leaking out. So that’s really going to make someone’s quarantine. Sorry neighbour.
13h45 : There are bloody LOADS of people out! What the hell! Everything’s closed, but people are just milling about. MILLING. In masks! (Where on earth did they get them?) I had not expected there to be milling. In the supermarket they’ve put up ruddy gurt sheets of plastic to shield the staff from the great unwashed (me and my hair). The good news is I now have 1.5 bottles of wine, a courgette, some Coke Zero, an onion, no eggs, and some Penne (the Farfalles are still there, poor things. Almost bought them out of pity but then remembered I don’t like them either).
13h09 : Can of Coke Zero on the balcony. Never been more grateful for a balcony than I am at the minute. Except maybe that time I crawled onto it at 3am in the middle of August because the ambient temperature in my flat was Surface-of-the-Sun°C. I have this magic balcony chair that’s in two pieces and it slots together. I bought it off some woman for €30 last year and it’s really about to come into its own. Started The Girl on the Landing by Paul Torday as part of my disaster prevention scheme should the internet abandon me.
14h59 : Ate leftover pasta with Two Bean One Pea Stew. Had a cup of tea. Said outloud to no one at all I’m so glad the weather’s going to be nice, because it is, and I am.
16h05 : Finally crack and try to download a newer Operating System onto my Mac, which I think was a prototype built by Steve Jobs in his garage in 1979. Pop-up messages from most websites I visit inform me snottily that they will “Soon stop supporting this browser.” The download’s supposed to take 23 minutes. Fat chance.
16h45 : 16 minutes.
16h53 : 20 minutes.
16h58 : 14 minutes I am definitely having wine tonight.
17h23 : It’s been stuck at 8 minutes for 19 minutes.
17h47 : Oh holy mother I’ve killed my laptop. My laptop is dead. Everything has gone blank. It’s asking if I want to restore from a previous backup. I do not have a previous backup. Writing this on my phone. Oh. My. God.
18h01 : Ok the laptop is back. I don’t know how I did it. Maybe my panic tore a hole in the space-time continuum and I just got back to before I killed my laptop but whatever it’s back and I’LL NEVER SAY ANYTHING BAD ABOUT IT AGAIN.
19h44 : Just finished navigating all the mind-boggling nonsense necessary for any willing folk to sign-up for an email when there’s a new post on the blog. Massive thank you to Polly-in-Berlin who helped me achieve this on her (youthful) laptop, while I recovered from the above meltdown with a massive glass of wine. Hopefully it works. If it does, feel free to sign up using the form that should hopefully be floating around here somewhere. The more the merrier! You won’t hear that again for a while.
21h10 : Just spent another 1.5 hours in mortal combat with technology saying What the hell does that even mean? outloud to various online forums that closed in 2018.
21h14 : Collapsed into other half of flat. Going to watch ice-skating medal winning routines to wind down. Nothing like a bit of triple Lutz triple toe double axel action to bring a little perspective to your day.
