Hundred years, hundred more
Someday we may see a
Woman king, sword I hand
Swing at some evil and bleed.

— Iron & Wine, “Woman King”.

i. the days go by

Last Friday evening, the Irish government. (such as it is: a caretaker minority) held a press conference. The existing restrictions were insufficient to the cause: additional restrictions were required. All gatherings are forbidden. No visits. Exercise should take place within 2km of the household. Travel beyond 2km is only permitted for vital family reasons, access to medical care, and food, unless one is an essential worker. The list of essential businesses is revised downwards. These restrictions to last two weeks, minimum.

It’s necessary. It’s not quite house arrest, and it’s necessary. But it is brutally hard, and my mental and emotional equilibrium is suffering from not being able to go on the odd hard 30-40km cycle. Walking on the beach, karate kata, and pressing the weights that we have on hand just isn’t the same as pedalling until your leg muscles are the consistency of wet noodles.

And my mother is apparently not able to hold to the “no unnecessary visits” public health rules. She dropped around some soup she made, and needed to have a sit, and a chat, and a drink of water before she walked home. She’s trying. But it turns out that humans trying really hard to go low/no contact with other humans are still pretty bad at it.

ii. the patron saint of gamblers

St. Cajetan (Gaetano dei Conti di Thiene, of Vincenza in the Veneto region) is a saint whose patronage extends to gamblers and the unemployed. Before he became a priest in 1516, he was a doctor of civil and canon law, having studied in Padua. He graduated in 1504 and went on to work at the papal court of Julius II until that pope’s death in 1513. He died at the age of 67, in 1547. His biography was written by Paul H. Hallett in Catholic Reformer: A Life of St. Cajetan of Thiene, and published in 1959.

When we can go to libraries again, I might try to read it.

iii. do what we must because we can

In personal news, I’ve come to the uneasy conclusion that I need to defer some modules from the Higher Diploma I’ve been doing this year. My concentration is shot, and I haven’t managed to focus enough to settle to learning. So that is a paperwork that I need to do.

I mean, I can concentrate on videogames. Low stakes! But I can’t even focus to read.

I don’t currently believe I should indulge myself in the early-access Mount & Blade: Bannerlord. But I’d like to.

iv. tomorrow is another day.

Onwards. Tonight we shall eat chicken!

Seek perfection of character.

Be faithful and protect the way of truth.

Foster the spirit of effort.

Respect others and the rules of etiquette.

Refrain from violent or impetuous behaviour.

—Shotokan Karate Dojo Kun

i. in front.

In Ireland, the majority of us are under what is essentially a version of house arrest. It’s vitally necessary — this is the only way to prevent thousands of additional deaths from COVID-19, on top of the thousands we’re going to experience over the next couple of years — but there’s a reason that we generally consider confinement punitive.

I’m experiencing grief and depression. I think a lot of us are. Grief for the way of life that’s gone from us (for now, and for months to come) and anticipatory grief for the deaths to come: with a best-case mortality rate of 1% of identified cases so far, and a potential overwhelmed-hospitals death rate of up to 7%, this disease is likely to see all of us know someone who dies. On a global scale, the figures are overwhelming.

The depression comes from a sense of helplessness. (As well as the background depression that is chronic, and usually reasonably well-controlled.) I’ve signed up with the volunteering lists for Ireland’s COVID-19 response, and so far that’s about all I can do for the wider ongoing emergency. But the sense of helplessness in my own life (trapped, stuck, oh-god-the-plague) has led to staying up too late staring blankly at the nearest distraction, and lying abed of a day thinking grim thoughts about death, despairing of focus when I do get up and face a cluttered environment, full of unwashed dishes and litter boxes and all of my wife’s work from home as well as my own.

I’m not writing this in search of sympathy. Rather, because there are a handful of techniques I’m currently forcing myself to remember to use in order to maintain a minimal amount of focus.

ii. techniques of dubious value.

Some kind of meditation helps. I’m revisiting the karate practice I fell out of doing years ago, both in its meditation and physical aspects. (The meditation is just kneeling and reciting the dojo kun, and visualising specific moves.) The physical aspect involves trying to focus as closely as possible on my body while moving.

Exerting control over your immediate environment, that helps too. Reduce clutter to a level you’re comfortable with. (Even if it’s shoving everything in a box and throwing a blanket over the top.) Keep up with minor chores. Establish a space and or time where you can be comfortably alone, if you share living space with someone you’re now seeing all the time where you had space to yourself before.

Reorganise your furniture or your kitchen cupboards, if you have the energy and it feels right. Move things around on your shelves. Throw out that pile of crap you’ve been meaning to get rid of forever. Make your bed when you get up, or shut your bedroom door on it.

Eat appropriately. Exercise. (Bodyweight sets, if nothing else.) Go for a walk, if you’re in a situation where you can.

Remember that it takes time to adjust to new routines and develop new coping methods.

Talk to your friends. Acknowledge what you’re experiencing. Don’t downplay it.

iii. acknowledgements.

These techniques aren’t keeping me mentally well. I’m not always able to use them, and even when I do, they’re only keeping me swimming instead of drowning, rather than dry on shore. But they’re keeping me swimming.

iv. above.

“Flying At Night”

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,

some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,

snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn

back into the little system of his care.

All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,

tug with bright streets at lonely lights like

his.

—Ted Kooser

In the first days of summer the Lacedaemonians and their allies, with two-thirds of their forces as before, invaded Attica, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of Lacedaemon, and sat down and laid waste the country. Not many days after their arrival in Attica the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighborhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered. Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better.

—Thucydides, Peleponnesian War, 2.47

i. prologue

I’m dragging out all my plague quotes, because what better time? Lean in to the gallows humour: it’s how I cope. Have a cat picture:

ii. argumentum ad

If you’re looking for new music to listen to, let me recommend the folk-rock-metal band Pagan Fury. I’ve been playing “Stormbringer” on repeat:

And “Broken Heroes”:

…and noting that a lot of their tracks make for a nicely meaty playlist.

iii. meat and drink

The stress-baking continues apace. There’s a cake backlog. Today I made cocoa walnut date muffins with just-out-of-date Greek yoghurt.

This was the base recipe, though I left out the chocolate chips and cut down the sugar. (And, obviously, added chopped dates and whole walnuts.)

Fortunately, the weather’s fair enough to go for bike rides and I have a small home weights set-up, because if I keep baking like this, I’ll need new trousers. Again.

iv. living with the new normal

Ireland has ramped up testing for COVID-19: several GAA grounds, including Croke Park, have become testing centres. Our confirmed case numbers continue to rise. The government has not yet confirmed that they will extend restrictions on movement and gatherings beyond March 29, but it looks inevitable.

The current situation has schools, creches, universities, pubs and leisure facilities closed, sports events cancelled, restrictions on gatherings, many hotels, restaurants, and shops shut, and a strongly worded message from the government that everyone who can possibly work from home absolutely should. (Most people are working from home with less-than-ideal setups, and many have small children underfoot.) Emergency legislation is in the pipe to provide some relief for the 140,000 and rising job losses, as well as to make provision for enforcement of public health orders in the ongoing situation.

I feel confident that we’ll be living under some form of restrictions until we see a vaccine in production. As testing helps the authorities get a handle on (and reduce) community transmission, I expect we’ll see a limited amount of retail trade and an economy that will begin to adjust from the first appalling shock. (It won’t recover quickly. But it’ll begin to adjust, at least locally, especially if the EU and the govt. gets its shit together enough to throw money at individual citizens. Solution to this kind of economic problem? THROW MONEY AT INDIVIDUALS, EN MASSE. That is, I believe, what a lot of the post-2008/9 analysis agreed on.)

But I fully expect we’ll see restrictions on large gatherings and sports events to continue until a vaccine is deployed, along with strong encouragement to work from home. I think it’s probable, though not certain, that schools and pubs will remain closed until we start seeing no new cases of community transmission.

There’s no point being breathlessly afraid or excited about this, regardless of the tone of the news coverage. (There is urgency about hospital equipment and staffing, and the provision of a safety net for people unexpectedly out of work, but parts of the news coverage are working breathlessly overtime on the panic mill.)

I’m looking at the current restrictions and planning as though they were going to remain in place for the next 18 months. That means making sure that the patterns and routines I’m transitioning into are sustainable over the next year, and working to minimise both the risk of being a transmission vector and of experiencing ongoing adverse mental/physical health impacts. Act as though this shit is going to last a while, because it’ll be easier to adjust back from that than live with a constantly disappointed “it’ll blow over in a month” hope.

And yes, I’m lucky. My wife’s job isn’t likely to be affected in the medium term, and the Irish government is taking swift reasonable and responsible action to mitigate the impact of the pandemic (though I think they could do more on the economic side).

But we’re all in this lifeboat together.

v. until soon

Stay safe, friends.

“We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since.”

– Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year.

i. preamble

Hello, friends. What strange times we live in!

I’ve been meaning to set up this newsletter for months, you know. It’s strange that I should finally launch it in a week where our Irish government has confirmed we may expect our anti-pandemic measures to last for months, and the shape of life to come feels nebulously fragile and uncertain. The cats, at least, are delighted that both my wife and I are working from home…

…although the constant chair-snatching could get a bit old fast.

ii. apologia

I recently read Alastair Reynolds’ Shadow Captain and Bone Silence, sequels to Revenger. It astounds me that anyone considers them YA (I have heard that argument advanced): apart from the age of their protagonists, they share little in common with the general output of YA imprints. They’re intensely personal space opera novels, taking place in a universe with a sweeping scope and a millennia-deep sense of time. Eerie and atmospheric, at times veering into claustrophobia (imagine the claustrophobic intensity of The Hunt for the Red October in space), at the heart of this trilogy is the relationship between two sisters — torn apart, pulled together, neither able to trust the other — and the secrets that underpin their society.

And intrigue, and piracy, and action. They’re books well-worth reading.

iii. the bread and butter of our days

Do you know how easy it is to make bread? As part of our “limit supermarket trips” new life, I’ve found myself called upon to make bread at home. All you need is plain flour, yeast, water, salt, and an oven — though some oil might also be called for. I tend to use the BBC’s “easy white bread” recipe, and while the rise, in the end, isn’t brilliant, it is quite tasty.

Kneading the dough is also a) a good workout and b) useful for pounding out one’s frustrations.

iv. until tomorrow

Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade.

All things to end are made.

– Thomas Nashe, A Litany in Time of Plague.

Thomas Nashe (1567-1601, dates approx) was a bit of a dick. All playwrights and poets of the Elizabethan period seem to share this trait, but Nashe was also a pampleteer, and, as the son of a curate, a staunch supporter of the Anglican church — though he also wrote the erotic manuscript The Choice of Valentines. Also known as Nash’s Dildo, on account of some… climactic (heh) … lines:

My little dilldo shall suply their kinde:

A knaue, that moues as light as leaues by winde;

That bendeth not, nor fouldeth anie deale,

But stands as stiff as he were made of steele;

And playes at peacock twixt my leggs right blythe,

And doeth my tickling swage with manie a sighe.

For, by saint Runnion! he’le° refresh me well;

And neuer make my tender bellie swell.

Poore Priapus! whose triumph now must falle,

Except thou thrust this weakeling to the walle.

Behould! how he usurps, in bed and bowre

And undermines thy kingdom euerie howre.

v. fare thee well a while

Next time, I’ll talk more about books. Promise.

Stay safe, friends, as you can.