I sit here on a balmy July evening, distracted by the din of seagulls and the draw of the Olympics on the television. Liverpool has felt like a literal melting pot over the past weeks, as has much of the UK I imagine, but here is where I live and where I see it. Lockdown made it so difficult to make sense of the world in so many ways. Lockdown One was filled with the kind of paranoia and tension you only expect in a Margaret Atwood novel. The slow strangulation of the streets until the only things that moved were desperate beggars and the ever-present gulls. The city centre was from the pages of Mike Carey, only I am hardly the girl with all the gifts! Lockdown Two seemed to melt into Lockdown Three like the increasingly turgid Terminator franchise, and even fewer people seemed to be taking the reality very seriously. Now we have people actively telling you off for wearing a mask in a bar and hundreds of young people turning the waterfront into Rhyl Sun-centre. A perfect storm they describe it as, but it feels more like the slow erosion of sense and normality. There is even a petition doing the rounds to prevent lying in the Houses of Parliament—I mean, what has the world come to when we expect people that we already know to be barefaced liars to start telling the truth all of a sudden?
I passed a man on the street today; he was carrying what looked like an old-style TV aerial, he kept looking to the sky anxiously. Apparently, the falcon he uses to scare the seagulls has abandoned him in search of pigeons. Maybe they taste better? This sort of thing only reinforces how crazy and disingenuous things have become, when even our falcons are unfriending us.
I’m drawn back to the telly, only to find that Russia have risen to fourth in the medal table, and they’re not even at the Olympics! I think it’d be best if I just closed the doors and wait out the rest of this pandemic. Or maybe I’ll take up falconry.
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