The Isolation Blog

GS, I beat you to it on that one, but yes if you did make it up people wouldn't believe you

Chancer, watched the vid and thought you could be right, then checked the stats for the day it ain't going to be alright today, we lost 773 today

Merc thanks. It's a bit like living in Groundhog Day at the moment, every day the same

GS, Good morning to you, maybe the neighbours are washing the nets as the binoculars were having trouble seeing through them
Radio here as you'll know is more ads than anything else, I'll need to be really bored to tune in

GS, I've made the main concern getting plenty of wood for the log burner, the trees are all desperately trying to look fit healthy and at there best, as they know I'll be wandering around with the chainsaw later

Pat, do you have any stats on how much that ginger hair weighed surprised she could move her head

How far are you prepared to go to protect yourself, woman washing her supermarket shopping delivery in the bath

Think you may be low on toilet paper get your toilet paper calculator here

Luke,

Con't -

You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair.

You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.

Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce.

Many children will be conceived.

Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy.

Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die.

You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU.

You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps.

You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.

Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was.

At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too.

You will eat again.

We’re in Italy, and this is what we know about your future. But it’s just small-scale fortune-telling. We are very low-key seers.

If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same.

© Francesca Melandri 2020
Topics

Coronavirus outbreak

Italy
Europe
features

" President Trump told the press: "I just spoke with Andrew Cuomo, I just spoke with Rhonda Sanchez, we're thinking about certain things. "Some people would like to see New York quarantined because it's a hot spot."New York, New Jersey, maybe one or two other places."

I should point out that both PM's of Italy and Spain said similar things, people in the areas concerned scattered in panic and took the virus with them to other areas of the country.