South African scientists recently announced that there is another variant. It is Delta B45634.78 and it’s six trillion times more contagious than Delta blah, blah, blah.
You can FUCK OFF with your new variants!
FUCK RIGHT OFF.
I don’t want to hear anything more about it.
This whole shitshow reminds me a bit of having a baby. No, no, just bear with me and you’ll see where I’m going with this. The husband and I went off to antenatal classes when I was expecting. No, I never did the “WE are expecting” malarkey, I knew whose vagina that baby would be coming out of.
The thing about these classes is that they concentrate on the BIRTH (I feel like there should be a drum-roll and BIRTH should be in shouty CAPS and in lights.) It’s everything to do with the birth; the waters breaking, the contractions, the various unpleasant things you have to endure until the sproglet has arrived.
Then it’s about getting your boob in that child’s mouth ASAP because those evil hospitals are trying to give your precious newborn a BOTTLE with FORMULA (pass the smelling salts.) But there’s this sense in the classes that your child, like a baby foal, will be a bit helpless for a week or two and then off they will skip – possibly to college – when they’re three months old because they’re just so super bright.
Nobody warns you that the birth is in fact JUST THE BEGINNING. That you will be deranged from lack of sleep, that your nipples will be hanging by a not very attractive thread because your child uses you as a dummy – because dummies are the work of Satan and are FORBIDDEN in your house, along with the evil formula and ANYTHING that might make your life a little bit easier.
So, yeah, you find out that actually the birth was a walk in the park, and we are talking about seventeen hours of agony here (it was 21 years ago, I have not forgotten – that’s another bit of bullshit, that you forget the pain. I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN THE PAIN), and that actually you are stuck with this tiny human that is completely helpless and you – with all your degrees and experience and many, many talents (FFS, you even tried stand-up comedy) – you will feel like the most stupid, useless person to ever hit the planet.
Aside: I wrote a musical and a book and a stand-up comedy routine about motherhood and went to therapy for four years, but as you can see, dear reader, I still haven’t quite worked through my issues concerning this topic. Another ten years of therapy and perhaps a limited drama series might do the trick.
Anyway, there was a point to all of this, if only I could remember it. Yes, the pandemic.
I thought once we had the vaccine, we would be jabbed and that would be it, we would sail off into the sunset enjoying the 21st century version of the roaring 20s. God only knows we’ve been put through the wringer for the last 18 months: the death, the sickness, the isolation, the economic wasteland, the banana bread, the pineapple beer, paying hideously inflated prices for our vino and our ciggies from our bootleggers, and so on.
But it is not over yet. No. That was just the beginning.
It’s like a child, you can’t stuff it back into your uterus with a “this item wasn’t quite what we were expecting” note and it’s same same with dear old Covid-19, we are stuck with the fucker and it keeps mutating. So, guess what? Much like with children, we are just going to have to learn to live with it.
We are going to have to make sure it doesn’t completely bankrupt us (like our kids) or drive us to the brink of insanity (like our kids) or kill us (erm…only if your kids are the Menendez brothers) and we are going to have to carry on.
Our lives will never be the same, and eventually we will not be able to remember what life was like before our dear Rona, but we will fashion a good existence for ourselves and then when eventually Rona is just another little virus along with the other little viruses, we will look wistfully at our discarded, hand-painted masks and think back fondly to the days when—
No. We won’t.
We really, really won’t.
There’s a reason so little was written about the 1918 Spanish flu.
When this shitshow is FINALLY over, we will have a big fat bonfire for our masks in the back garden and throw THE MOTHER of all parties.
Unlike when our kids leave the nest, THEN we will weep. I’ve got a year and a half to go, and I’ve already started drizzing.
Book recommendations: this week I read Christine by fave, Eva Mazza. What a joy! And as much as I loved all the local references – Love Books, Melville, Linden, the Joburg Country Club, I found the bits set in the Netherlands and Italy really fascinating. It’s a light, easy read that deals with the weighty issue of GBV – and is really about the protag, Christine discovering her independence and having some sexy adventures along the way. I gobbled it up.
TV recommendations: The Chair – perhaps it’s because I’ve worked at a couple of universities, but I LOVED this. It also depressed me slightly, because I thought a lot of these issues were specific to our universities here. Nope. It seems to be a universal theme. I also started watching Click Bait. What a fantastic idea…what a truly terrible script. The dialogue is awash with cliches. I know this because I have used many, many of said cliches in my own scripts. It also looks like it had a budget of two rand fifty and clearly no money for researchers. Shem. We’ve all been there.
I should say something encouraging at this point…um…let me go back to the baby analogy. Remember the first year when you thought your life was over (or was that just me?) Then suddenly the sproglet stopped hanging off your boob, your pelvic floor had recovered enough so that you didn’t pee (well, not that much) every time you sneezed, and you could actually have a bit of a life?
Ja, that will be us with Covid, we will eventually get a version of our lives back. Keep on keeping on and GO AND GET JABBED!! Love to you all and happy reading! xxx