Escape from lockdown!

Well, for some weird reason this morning I got the itch to do some web tinkering and blogging so I’m back baby! Amazingly, the domain marksibly.com was also up for grabs so grab it I did.

As I write this, New Zealand is coming out of a 3 month corona virus lockdown, which seems to have been very effective (so far). We have had ‘only’ 22 deaths out of 1100+ cases, although there have recently been a few newly imported cases and I guess there will be for quite a while yet.

The lockdown experience was pretty surreal. Going to the supermarket involved queing for a while (not for very long where I live but there were reports of huge queues in other areas) and going to the dairy meant following a one-in, one-out protocol. Going to buy booze did, however, involve some serious queuing, especially in my part of town where you can’t buy booze in supermarkets. Plus, since buying was a hassle, you tended to buy more than you normally would…

But everyone I encountered navigating this strange new world dealt with it all in a super relaxed way. No one threw a wobbly or muttered ‘hurry up’ to themselves or anything potentially aggravating like that. The were a few super-kitted-out survivalist types around, which looked super surreal. Especially when they were checking out half the freakin’ supermarket’s stock of baked beans through a checkout aisle staffed by a teenage checkout girl with virtually no protective clothing at all.

At worse it was all a minor inconvenience, and well worth how many ever lives were saved. And we’ll never know how many that is whether it was 10 or 10000. Of course, there was a certain contigent of people freaking out about The Economy the whole time, but we were lucky enough to have a ‘slightly left-of-center’ govt in at the time vs the ‘slightly right-of-center’ version we have the rest of the time.

But despite these minor inconveniences, I think I mostly enjoyed lockdown TBH. The streets were incredibly quiet which was a little spooky but also very peaceful and even weirdly beautiful. In a way, it felt like a brief glimpse into a much quieter alternate reality that could be happening on a far more chilled out earth, far far away.

Anyway, that’s enough to get me started.

Bye!
Mark