I’m not entirely sure this says anything good about me as a person. But what upsets me the most about this is the sheer, untrammelled stupidity of almost everyone involved. Unlike Boris Johnson, a character I fear we cannot yet consign to history’s dustbin, I’m not a believer in the Great Man theory of history (and, yes, it is ALWAYS a man).

Let’s be clear: the confluence of tech wealth, post-truth, the clickbait economy and the oncoming climate apocalypse was always going to throw up one or more men whose main skill set is that of the old-school carnival barker. Tesla’s price/earnings ratio is currently around 200:1, compared to 7:1 for Stellantis, while sales are actually falling: It’s a valuation driven historically by rubes and lying tweets and now by assumptions about institutional corruption. Trump was so abysmal a businessman that he managed to bankrupt a casino and would have been considerably richer had he just invested the inheritance he acquired from his racist father in the S&P500.

But we are where we are, and the dynamic duo that someone described as a stupid person’s idea of a smart person and a poor person’s idea of a rich person are rampaging around breaking things. And, like it or not, they’ll have real impacts on all our lives. We have at least three easily identifiable bubbles threatening to pop (AI, weight loss drugs and crypto) and a freakshow of religious loons, 4chan fascists, “leopards won’t eat MY face” tokens and the kind of dumbass conservatives that appointed Hitler as Chancellor at the helm of the world’s largest economy when that happens.

Let’s just say nations rarely become more democratic or more functional during a massive economic downturn in a time of immense social change.

Like a lot of the tech overlords doing their damnedest to destroy the one planet we can currently live on, Musk is a big-picture thinker.

We live, as the apocryphal Chinese curse has it, in interesting times. Throughout human history, people have collectively gone nuts during times of stress, and a very large proportion of the developed west got sucked down sundry internet rabbit holes during lockdown and never really emerged. The invention of a set of machines that can, using just plagiarism, overpriced GPUs and planet-desiccating quantities of energy and water, lie fluently in a range of media has not helped this. (And, yes, there are other uses for AI, and, no, it’s not all bad, and, yes, like dot.com in 1999-2000, it remains a massive bubble.)

Donald Trump was not a billionaire until he played one on TV. He does not believe in climate change. He also does not believe in exercise, believing that a human being is born with a finite amount of energy that should be reserved for dining on charcoaled steaks or room temperature Big Macs. At least 26 women have accused him of sexual assault, including his first wife, while a New York judge went to some lengths to explain that a jury found him guilty of raping E. Jean Carroll, albeit with his fingers not his dick. He is profoundly and wilfully ignorant about everything from California water flows to basic economics.

Like Hitler (or, perhaps more relevantly, Berlusconi), Trump is as risible a figure to his adversaries—the hair! The orange! The white bits around the weirdly squinty eyes!—as he is a cult hero to his acolytes. And, yet, he’s capable of doing huge, huge damage to the entire planet at a critical stage in its history. He wants to open coal-fired power plants to feed the plagiarism machines. He wants to reset the clock to an era of colonial expansion, closed economies and unchallenged white male dominance, perhaps because this is the only period of history he remembers from school, and perhaps because it’s the only way to get the Trump name on the physical world map.

Musk is, also, in many ways, a laughable figure. A pathologically unfunny shitposter and internet troll, a man so bizarrely fragile that he takes time out of his busy day to steal the jokes of others, a man so high on his own supply that he’s been radicalised by the platform he owns, a self-proclaimed free speech warrior who’s currently suing advertisers who didn’t fancy their ads running alongside the CSAM, racism and crypto spam that now infests X-Twitter. (Side note: One of the more appealing elements of Donald Trump compared to Musk is how conspicuously Trump despises his core constituency, while Musk is quite embarrassingly thirsty for the approval of his own.)

Even more laughable, perhaps, is his Mars obsession. Like a lot of the tech overlords doing their damnedest to destroy the one planet we can currently live on, Musk is a big-picture thinker. He’d like to be a type of Hari Seldon figure, the ultimate great man of history, the visionary who got us off Earth and made us a multiplanetary species, thereby future-proofing humanity against supernovas, cosmic death rays, stray asteroids and sundry other existential risks. (I suspect, from his alleged freakish enthusiasm to donate his sperm to even the most passing acquaintances, that he’d also like to be one of those super-procreators who ends up in everyone’s DNA in a few centuries time, like Genghis Khan or Edward III.)

The corollaries of this elevated perspective are unfortunate, perhaps especially so when coupled with ketamine and the trollish sensibility that led him to deliver a Nazi salute at Trump’s coronation. Getting to Mars is step one in ensuring that trillions of future humans get to exist, so justifies any amount of suffering caused to any number of people in the present moment. The existential risks of death rays, supernovas, etc outweigh the current small-picture risk of the climate crisis, meaning he can continue to block high-speed rail, burn through tonnes of energy on his plagiarism machines, and ally with climate-change deniers such as Trump.

Obviously, not only because Musk is a shyster with an abysmal workplace safety record and a tolerance for risk that won’t really cut it on a hostile planet where a mission has to survive six months without external support, but because of fundamental issues such as there not yet being an energy source light enough to bring six months’ worth of food and material to Mars, he ain’t going to be putting people on Mars anytime soon. But he seems hellbent on destroying the only planet we currently have in pursuit of doing so.

Looking at the raging Dunning-Kruger cases who are currently leading the world’s largest economy, this feels, both tragically and comically, more and more plausible to me.

It’s a hell of a premise for a sitcom. Two monstrous narcissists with unresolved daddy issues and a white supremacy fetish are sharing a White House. But one wants to take America back to the Gilded Age and the other wants to bump humanity into the twenty-fifth century. Who’ll win out?

Except it isn’t funny, because it’s happening now, it’s happening for real, and the many, many people around the world leading more-or-less blameless lives and trying to do the right thing by their loved ones, their communities and the planet are on the receiving end of it.

One explanation of the Fermi paradox is that the closer a species gets to becoming extra-planetary the more likely it is to extinguish itself through (to name but a few of the more currently obvious possibilities) climate change, rogue AI, bioweapons, chemical weapons or nuclear war. Looking at the raging Dunning-Kruger case studies who are currently leading the world’s largest economy, this feels, both tragically and comically, more and more plausible to me.

Happy February!

Image credit: Madhav fallusion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post On the Unbearable Dumbness of the Moment We’re In appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

So, what is new? Everything and nothing. Despite a couple of long stints back in the UK, I’m still based on Bali, still in the same house, in fact, demonic fishpond and all. Currently it’s the water pump that looms largest in the galaxy of broken things.

In fact, I’m very much based on Bali as I’m endeavouring to address my carbon footprint with the goal of living a sustainable life by 2030. That means I haven’t got on a plane since flying in from the UK via Istanbul in June and am aiming not to fly until I say goodbye to this particular base next year.

Overland travel in Indonesia beyond Bali is fun and doable but takes time, which seems to be in short supply at the moment. Still, I’m going overland to Jakarta twice at some point fairly soon to acquire a Polish passport, so stay tuned for some old-fashioned travel blogging.

Zach is still (just) at university, in his final year at Oxford. His current post-graduation plans are to earn some money in Australia and then take the GAP year of which Covid deprived him, with some time in Bali to see me and his mates. He’s happy, funny, great to look at, and seems generally well-adjusted, which is about all anyone can hope for. I expect that, like the rest of Generation Covid, he’ll figure out some career stuff in due course before getting replaced by an AI and having to figure out some new career stuff.

The main reason I’m busy, despite being an empty nester, is that I’m trying to combine earning money before the global banking system collapses again with a large creative project. I took a six-month writing course (online) with Curtis Brown Creative in the UK and am now in what I hope are the closing throes of finishing a novel, after which comes the real fun part of finding an agent (or not, of course). For an idea of how hellish this can be, I recommend the excellent Nerd’s Eye View (I also recommend her memoir, which did ultimately see the light of day).

I intend to write more about my attempts at sustainable travel and also share some thoughts on sustainable travel writing (and whether such a thing even exists), but my current plan is to move to Italy once the lease on this house expires next year. In theory, that will allow me to see family, travel and enjoy a fab life without the need to get on planes ever again.

Essentially, the pandemic made me, like many others, rethink a lot of things that I’d previously taken for granted, and post-pandemic, I’m still in a kind of stasis, albeit a thoughtful one. But I’m grateful that I and my loved ones have survived it unscathed—and looking forward to having more to write about than the plague.

*: The headline picture? That’s Balian. Pretty, isn’t it?

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The plague is rife in Indonesia and systematically under-reported. The health minister recently accused unspecified regions of reducing testing to acquire green zone status, while one citizen science project suggested deaths were at least three times higher than the official numbers, and a recent seroprevalence study found that, in September and November, Bali’s official case numbers were out by a factor of 53.

Cases among the foreign community on Bali rarely appear in the official figures, let alone get passed to tracing — I know, personally, of more than ten cases which never seemed to be recorded, and, ironically, the only case which tracers did follow up was a false positive. A good friend knew two foreigners who died of Covid: neither troubled the rosy official statistics. In fact, when the travelling Covid doc who’s working 16 hours a day testing foreigners at home endeavoured to report some of his weekly caseload (usually around 12 to 15 positives) to the authorities for follow-up, the powers-that-be weren’t interested.

All of which is to say that, after three close encounters with folk who tested positive soon after, and three weeks’ dutiful self-isolation, plus god knows how many encounters with folk who opted not to test, were asymptomatic or neglected to call me, not to mention quite a lot of social kissing and mask-off restaurant/bar socialising, I was feeling fairly bullish about dodging the plague. Then I started to feel tired.

My eleventh swab test of the pandemic and, as the fluid dropped onto the test strip, it lit up like a Christmas tree. “Yep,” he said. “It’s positive.”

Initially, I have to say, Covid felt like nothing. I was a little tired, so I had a nap— but I hadn’t slept brilliantly the night before. I had what felt like the beginnings of a sore throat, which I put down to napping with the air-conditioning on. And so I duly went ahead with the evening meet-up I was planning.

The next morning, I woke up feeling tired, and the sore throat was definitely A THING. Thinking it wise to test before heading off to yoga, and potentially infecting class and teacher and closing the studio in a one-woman super-spreader event, I messaged the Covid doctor. My eleventh swab test of the pandemic and, as the fluid dropped onto the test strip, it lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Yep,” he said. “It’s positive.”

He recommended rest, Vitamin C, Vitamin D and zinc. I retrieved my pulse oximeter from the last person in my circle who’d had Covid, who kindly donated a small can of oxygen and recommended a Chinese medicine, then stocked up on vitamins and paracetamol from the HaloDoc motorbike delivery pharmacy and ordered the Chinese meds on Tokopedia. And then I started the WhatsApp of shame, messaging everyone with whom I might have been in contact while infectious, plus cancelling all engagements for the next 10 days.

Another friend with whom I’d been on a very jolly day out that weekend had the same symptoms, enabling us to establish the likely source of the infection. And so… I waited.

This sorry state of affairs, replete with daytime naps and defined by an absolute inability to focus on anything, continued on and off for a full two weeks.

As places to get a mild dose of Covid goes, Bali has many advantages, at least for the privileged. A huge range of delicious food options are available on GoFood at a swipe; the HaloDoc pharmacy app delivers within the hour; and plenty of doctors do house calls.

By about day five, still with no symptoms but brain fog, a persistent sore throat and a need to sleep a lot, I was feeling quite bullish about my prospects. Despite a friend’s recommendation of rest, I was doggedly doing small quantities of exercise twice a day, and feeling good about that – not really noticing that 40 minutes’ gentle exercise and perhaps an hour or two tending emails and completing the little work I hadn’t deferred tended to be the sum total of my daily activity.

By about day eight, I was very tired of the sore throat, which woke me up in the night, and generally ready to get well again. On day ten, the plague doctor returned and confirmed me negative for Covid, and in celebration of my newfound freedom I had a reasonably active day. The next day, ignoring the fact that my legs, after walking 5,000 steps, ached as though I’d been hiking in the Himalayas, was positively action-packed: I did some work, took a taxi for lunch with a friend, and joined a family group chat.

On day 12, I struggled to get out of bed. Legs ached, throat ached, my brain was fogged, and I was absolutely knackered. This sorry state of affairs, replete with daytime naps and defined by an absolute inability to focus on anything, continued on and off for a full two weeks, although the sore throat did disappear on day 15.

I am sorry to report that, while roughly 80% of folk with Covid report reduced appetite, this very much did not apply to me. I did, however, find the consequences of drinking wine almost unbearable.

Is this long Covid, I hear you cry? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s not. It’s just a pretty standard case of mild Covid.

If there’s one recommendation I’d give anyone who has mild Covid – and I’m very grateful I only had mild Covid – it is to take it easy. My natural tendency is to power through things – and, given I’d successfully lost a lot of weight and gained a tonne of fitness, I didn’t want to neutralise those gains (although I did give the diet a rest).

To be honest, I only really recovered after a week of reduced physical activity and it’s only now, six full weeks after testing positive, that I am sleeping a sane amount and feel ready to attempt my old exercise schedule. (And, boy, has my fitness fallen back!)

Is this long Covid, I hear you cry? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s not. It’s just a pretty standard case of mild Covid. While some people I know who’ve had it have been back on their feet within a week, friends have reported not feeling back to themselves for “some weeks”; the NHS guidance says that “most people recover after a few days *or weeks*”; and the list of long Covid symptoms all seem rather more dramatic than “feel a bit feeble and can’t really exercise”.

But, despite being the sort of mild case I’d expect as someone of a healthy weight, under 50, with no relevant pre-existing conditions, Covid was unpleasant. Dealing with isolation and the subsequent social limits imposed by fatigue has been draining; I’m way behind on a personal project I’ve been working on; I’ve lost a stack of income through delaying projects and failing to chase new business; and, of course, there’s the magical possibility of longer-term health issues that can occur even with mild cases.

I’ll be getting vaxxed in a few days, and, while no vaccine is 100% effective, I’d firmly recommend others do likewise.

Image by torstensimon from Pixabay

The post Frankly, I Wouldn’t Recommend Getting Covid appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

First, the good news. More workable vaccines have been developed more quickly than pretty much anyone thought possible. This is a huge achievement and a great sign for the future.

Now, the less good news. We have no idea how long the immunity from these will last — or, in the case of the UK, what the consequences of altering the tried-and-tested vaccination schedule will be. We also don’t know whether all, some or any of these vaccines stop people being able to transmit the disease.

Most importantly, not all vaccines seem set to work well against all existing mutations, let alone future mutations, which will be under considerable evolutionary pressure to become resistant. (Novavax, for example, was almost 90% effective in the UK, where the British strain dominates, but barely 50% effective in South Africa, where the South African strain dominates.)

This is…. Not ideal.

***

The WHO recently asked Britain to pause its vaccination programme after covering the most vulnerable, and share its vaccine wealth with poorer countries. Beyond the ethical case (unlikely to speak to a Boris Johnson government), there’s a clearer point of self-interest here: if you let the virus spread more or less unchecked in poorer countries, more and more mutations are likely to develop and those that are vaccine-proof will prosper.

Bitter experience suggests, however, that rich countries won’t be donating vaccines to poor countries until they’ve vaccinated everyone, possibly even including pets. So we’ll likely see a bunch of more-or-less vaccine-proof mutations arriving, which will mean vaccines need to be reformulated.

Mutations, needless to say, will be an absolute gift to antivaxxers, Qanoners, Plandemicers and Covid-deniers of all shapes and forms. That — and I’m looking at you, America — may well impact some rich nations’ ability to achieve herd immunity.

Regardless, rich countries that are controlling their pandemic will increasingly tighten their borders against poorer countries that aren’t. And, let’s face it, every single country that has controlled its pandemic has severely limited international travel.

***

Right now, it’s clear that nations which are progressing with vaccination — like those few that have the virus under control — are not opening their borders, but closing them. Wealthy European countries are restricting entry to protect their populations from new strains. And, while a handful of EU nations, signally Iceland, are opening their doors to other EU citizens with EU-approved jabs and yet-to-be-determined certificates, you can bet your bottom dollar that rich nations are not going to make it easy for residents to travel to countries that don’t have the virus under control and come home bearing new and exotic strains. (I also suspect that travel corridors with other rich nations rather than, say, Vietnam will be the priority.)

I don’t think we’ll see restrictions as harsh as Australia’s, with citizens having to apply for permission from central government to get on a plane and nationals stuck outside the country awaiting space on very limited flights. But strict vaccination, testing and quarantine requirements, plus the sorts of travel advisories that invalidate most insurance, will make journeys like the one I used to make so regularly (between the UK and Indonesia) complicated, fraught and hella expensive.

At the moment, international travel is very, very difficult, with flight cancellations, border closures, route closures, changes of visa rules, changes of testing or quarantine regulations, and even blanket bans on nationals who’ve spent time in infected countries being implemented at whiplash speed. Long-haul travel is particularly fraught: I’ve heard of people stuck for weeks in what was supposed to be a transit stop after the rules for their destination changed after they’d departed.

And between “rusty” pilots and struggling airlines skimping on maintenance, flying is going to be considerably less safe than it was. With an increasing number of airline bankruptcies plus route closures and reduced passenger numbers, it’s also going to be very much more expensive.

***

There has been a lot of talk about vaccine passports — an extension of the old yellow card which holds your yellow fever and other vaccination records. But, besides the not-insignificant issue of getting 200-ish governments to agree on a globally recognised format and build the digital framework in a sane timeframe, there are a range of other challenges.

Firstly, it’s already clear that not all vaccines are created equal: some simply don’t work as well as others, and others will work better against certain strains. Should Indonesia’s choice of vaccine, China’s Coronavac, which proved just over 50% effective in trials in Brazil (though over 90% effective in trials in Turkey), be treated as equivalent to a vaccine with 95% efficacy? What if said vaccine with 95% efficacy proves only 30% effective against a new strain?

Secondly: how do you protect against fraud? Indonesia has a thriving market in fake Covid tests and I’m absolutely certain vaccine passports will be available at a price in many, many countries.

And, thirdly, if a new strain that’s not been tested against existing vaccines emerges in a country or spreads to another and other nations shut down flights and close their borders, what difference will a vaccine passport make?

***

I am neither Einstein, an epidemiologist nor a public health expert, so I’m not sure what the best route forward is here. Letting the virus rip through the population won’t just kill and sicken many and drive new mutations, it will overload health services — and the idea that society and the economy can continue to function normally when soldiers are stationed outside hospitals to turn away the sick and dying is just plain delusional. Hoping that the virus will mutate to a less virulent form runs the risk of it becoming more virulent.

If world governments could agree to shut their borders (with limited, tested exclusions for trade and compassionate reasons) and pursue elimination strategies, and rich nations could help poor nations manage the cost, the virus could be wiped out. But the chances of that sort of cooperation seem about as high as the chances of global climate change coordination.

Many less wealthy nations are unlikely to finish vaccinating their populations until 2024, by which point one can assume their early vaccinations will be largely moot, either because the virus is less virulent or because mutations will have out-evolved the original vaccines. So, I think the days of gaily hopping on a plane to Bali, popping across to Vietnam, travelling overland around Cambodia, Laos and Thailand then hopping over to campervan around Oz, are gone for the foreseeable. Vaccines and (supervised) quarantines will remain part of life until the virus is either eliminated or becomes less virulent.

I’d like to say I have a brighter vision for inter-European travel. But I’m not at all sure that, after a reasonably relaxed 2020 summer culminated in a brutal winter wave, many EU countries are going to open their doors to fellow Europeans without quarantine this summer (this interview with a German virologist explains why).

For 2021 — and, quite likely, 2022 as well — I think it’s time to embrace the joys of slow, limited and local (perhaps extremely local!) travel. I will, of course, be delighted to be proved wrong.

Image by MasterTux from Pixabay.

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Which isn’t to say my 2020 has been bad, in the grand scheme of 2020. I still have (some) work. I’m in Bali, where there are (currently) a lot of freedoms. I’ve not lost any loved ones, contracted long Covid (or, indeed, any form of Covid) or been consigned to solo lockdown. The boy had a reasonably normal start to university — not imprisoned in halls of residence or confined to study from home. Hell, I even went to Italy.

But, on a personal note, it’s hard to navigate the major life change that is an only child flying the nest while Covid simultaneously limits options and creates wild uncertainty. And on an objective note, mutant Covid (both the British and the South African variants) has me worried. The fact that it made its debut just as vaccinations started to roll out and light appeared at the end of a tunnel feels like a very low blow. Seeing more and more countries slam the door shut on visitors from the UK makes me feel further and further from my family.

There’s an intensity of experience when a lockdown eases that I’ll continue to treasure — the sensory blast of a restaurant meal, the intense immersion of a movie on the big screen

There have, of course, been bonuses to this absolute binfire of a year. Discovering the quiet pleasures of walking, cooking, baking. Practising mindfulness, acceptance, yoga, meditation. Time to read and write — although, with all the doomscrolling, I find my concentration’s shot. Making time for family, albeit often remotely. The US election, and with it some faint hope of action on the climate.

There’s an intensity of experience when a lockdown eases that I’ll continue to treasure — the sensory blast of a restaurant meal, the intense immersion of a movie on the big screen, the all-round wonderment of wandering a beautiful city such as Rome.

But coming into the New Year, I feel in limbo, no longer really an agent of my own destiny, no clear goal or destination, with all the plans I’d made for this life stage unmade and, as yet, nothing obvious to replace them. It’s an almost oxymoronic feeling: simultaneously trapped and unsure.

And I’m terrified by the state of the plague: British hospitals already maxing out their ICU capacity with a month to go before we see the impact of the Christmas mingling, California rationing care, even countries that had controlled the epidemic starting to lose their grip. It’s likely we haven’t seen the last of the mutations and it’s still unclear how long vaccine immunity will last.

The virus was lab-created by Bill Gates to force us all to take a fake vaccine which will both include tracking microchips and render the populace sterile

Conspiracy theories have always flourished at times of intense social change and, even prior to the pandemic, we were living in fast-moving times, as social media replaced old media as the primary news source. But it’s frightening to see how far the conspiracy theories around the pandemic have spread.

Some versions are mild: there is a medical conspiracy to exaggerate the number of cases to raise money somehow or there is a political conspiracy to exaggerate the number of cases to enhance social control. People aren’t really dying of Covid, but other conditions, or those who are dying lived lives that were not worth saving anyway. Other versions are full-blown batshit: the virus was lab-created by Bill Gates to force us all to take a fake vaccine which will both include tracking microchips and render the populace sterile.

But they’re all quite frightening. Not, perhaps, as frightening as Qanon, where a cabal of high-profile paedophiles, including Tom Hanks of all people, are sacrificing children to feast on a substance produced in their blood. But frightening because the old world where most agreed on the basics has been replaced by a world where people fight from their siloes — and, as the economic pain continues to bite, this will only get worse.

The climate crisis, from the melting Arctic to burning Australia, is becoming harder and harder to ignore

Ah, yes, the economy… I’m worried for my son, who is, like all the Covid generation, going to be educationally disadvantaged compared to those who came immediately before and immediately afterwards, and is likely to graduate college into one of the worst economies the world has ever known. I’m worried for myself, having failed to make provision during the good times.

And I’m worried for the world. We haven’t had a banking crisis yet in this catastrophe, but one can’t be far off. People not only on Bali but in the wealthy UK are turning to food banks and to charity. It can’t be long, surely, before desperation fuels crime and riots?

Meanwhile, the climate crisis, from the melting Arctic to burning Australia, is becoming harder and harder to ignore. It already looks as though expectations of temperature rise and sea level rise may have been optimistic, rather than the reverse. Mitigation is going to reshape the world in unknown ways, but I’m fairly confident a nomadic life, like the one I lived for four whole years, is likely to be impossible.

One broadly optimistic analysis predicts that life won’t really pick up until 2024. I can only hope he’s right.

The post Happy New Year: The Worst Is Yet to Come appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Grateful as I am for the flat – which my aunt rented as a base for whoever was looking after my brother when he was in the depths of Stage 4 cancer – the pandemic still sucks. I had a raft of plans for the next five years: a long lease in Bali to provide Zach the home base he wanted while at uni and me the chance to travel the world by home exchanging (and sit out the recession we were overdue). The bulk of my income for the last five years or so has come from writing about travel and bars, both sectors on the sharp end of coronavirus, as indeed is publishing in general.

Put crudely, my entire life for over a decade has centred on the ability to skip between countries and continents with no obstacles more significant than the odd hellish bus journey or visa hassle. Covid has kicked all that hard up the arse. And here in the UK, as the idiot at the wheel of the clown car demonstrates our English exceptionalism by releasing lockdown and hollering to the public to spend, spend, spend, it’s hard to see a way back, or indeed forward.

By Chinese New Year, when Xi Jinping locked down Wuhan and slammed the brakes on the economy, it was obvious that something very nasty was on its way.

Thanks to friends in China, Covid appeared on our horizons in early January. By Chinese New Year, when Xi Jinping locked down Wuhan and slammed the brakes on the economy, it was obvious that something very nasty was on its way; by early February it was clear that we were looking at a full-blown pandemic. As I travelled, that month, from Zermatt to Zurich and Zurich to Innsbruck and Innsbruck to Salzburg and Salzburg to Vienna and Vienna to Dubrovnik, I scrolled the news obsessively, and, as borders started to close, my world narrowed until I broke my rule against short-haul flying and bailed for Blighty.

But I don’t think I’d envisaged what would come next. I think I imagined something brutal but short: carnage like Wuhan, followed by a fairly rapid return to business as usual. In the UK, we escaped the collapse of healthcare systems seen both in Wuhan and in parts of Italy by callously and (I assume) deliberately sacrificing care home residents, allowing them to choke to death one after another with no prospect of a hospital admission and no guarantee of drugs to ease their passing.

I didn’t envisage the economic insanity: currently, around 10 million workers are furloughed at the government’s expense, awaiting the moment when the economy magically restarts, or October, when the furlough ends and their jobs evanesce, just in time for the winter second wave.

And I still can’t see what comes next. Is this the start of societal collapse? Will the banking system hold up? Or will a vaccine magically appear and life, at least for those who have kept their lives and their health and their jobs and their homes, go back to normal? How will the pandemic and climate change interact?

It’s a strange, helpless feeling, not to know where we are or where we’re going. The knowledge that we’re led by an idiot narcissist who literally shook hands with people in a hospital full of coronavirus cases only makes that loss of agency sting harder.

Unless and until there’s an effective vaccine and reliable cure, the nomadic way of living – crisscrossing borders with merry abandon – is over.

In Indonesia, the picture is no rosier. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on as testing levels are low and numbers are being massaged at the micro and the macro level. Even with limited testing, however, numbers continue to rise and some experts think they may not peak until November. And, although Bali has set a goal of opening to tourists on the auspicious date of 11 September, word is that the Covid referral hospitals are already full.

The desire to reopen is understandable. Tourism is the main driver of Bali’s economy and most guides, hotel staff and the like haven’t worked since March and are reliant on charity or family farms for food; lawyers, web developers, estate agents and their ilk are finding invoices unpaid and the work tap running dry. But it’s hard to see which countries are going to accept inbound flights from Indonesia, let alone add the nation to the safe list that lets travellers get insurance.

One of the few elements that is clear is that the pandemic will reshape the way we travel. Unless and until there’s an effective vaccine and reliable cure, the nomadic way of living – crisscrossing borders with merry abandon – is over. (It’s likely that many borders will remain tight even if this current pandemic is resolved.) Expatriate lives, always predicated on the idea that, if trouble or illness strikes, you can head home, look markedly less appealing now that working overseas might mean missing a parent’s funeral. Flights are going to be more expensive, more complicated, more risky and less pleasant than ever before.

And, from my perspective, the more lockdown opens up, the more obvious it becomes that I’m in limbo. I remember thinking, back in March, that I’d cycle the EV6, from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, once the pandemic was over. But I have no idea how long that will be: one year? Two years? Three or more? Are we basically in August 1914, believing it will all be over by Christmas? Will the economic collapse start to resolve in two years? Ten? Never? I don’t have a straight answer when I’m asked when I’m going back to Bali; I don’t have a straight answer when I’m asked how long I’ll be here.

The economy is shedding jobs like dandruff even with the government paying the wages of over a quarter of the workforce.

It’s the uncertainty that makes this new phase of the pandemic so challenging. During the hard lockdown, which for less vulnerable people in the UK meant leaving the house only for essential shopping, essential work and one round of exercise a day, the only thing to worry about was maintaining a routine and hanging onto sanity.

It felt like a challenge, to make this quality time count, to demonstrate one’s Blitz spirit, to keep calm and carry on. I didn’t bake any bread, but Zach baked cakes; I invested in a tapestry kit (currently approximately 80% completed); I started plotting out a novel (tbc); we created routines and, generally, made the most of an exceptional situation. It felt, in an odd way, like a bonus, to have time with a young man who’d otherwise be off doing his own thing.

Facing down the new normal, however, it becomes more obvious what we’ve lost. Lockdown was a few weeks. This could last many months, or even years.

My personal economic anxiety is intense – my income’s fallen off a cliff and the Bali lease I’d considered an asset now feels more like a liability, as two families now rely on it for income. Commercial writing is one of the first things businesses cut in any economic downturn and this unprecedented downturn is accelerating a range of longer-term trends, from telemedicine to the death of newspapers.

More generally, it feels as though we’re looking down the barrel of another Great Depression, with Britain particularly in the firing line. The economy is shedding jobs like dandruff even with the government paying the wages of over a quarter of the workforce; our idiot leaders are ploughing full steam ahead towards a no-deal Brexit at the end of the year, quite possibly during a second wave of Covid; the stock market is acting like it’s on crack; and the world’s largest economy is in the hands of a man who finds identifying a picture of an elephant a meaningful intellectual challenge.

I’m anxious about the second Covid wave hitting here in winter: during Spanish flu, it was the second wave that was most lethal. I’m anxious about being stuck here for winter, but I’m also anxious about being stranded thousands of miles away from my son (and my parents) during a once-in-a-century plague. I’m anxious about Zach’s future. And, perhaps most immediately, I really don’t like the new normal.

The new normal combines uncertainty over events you’d prefer to be set in stone with the need to prebook and militarily organize activities you’d rather do on impulse.

Now, I don’t want to come on like one of those fine American fillies throwing tantrums in the dentists or the grocery aisle, but I do find wearing a mask puts a damper on proceedings. Obviously, it’s the only socially conscious thing to do and a public health necessity. But one’s own recycled breath is never the sweetest; it’s depressing donning a reminder of the plague whenever you leave the house; and a mask is not particularly comfortable on a hot day.

Further, I’ve never been a fan of queuing and queuing for the supermarket is just plain depressing. There seems little point in shopping for clothes when you can’t try them on. I could really do with seeing a dentist but teeth cleaning and fillings are not on offer due to a lack of PPE. Gyms and yoga studios, replete as they are with people breathing heavily in a confined space, seem like a recipe for infection and, while I’m pleased that bars and restaurants are opening up, I need to watch both my pennies and the plague.

While I appreciate my privilege, compared to people with chronic health conditions, folk going hungry, folk without a job, folk who have lost loved ones, I deeply miss the ability to live in a freeform, fluid way. The new normal combines uncertainty over events you’d prefer to be set in stone (will my parents’ golden wedding in Italy be a go? Will Zach start university as planned?) with the need to prebook and militarily organize activities you’d rather do on impulse.

I’ve lived with this toxic combination of uncertainty about the future and restrictions on the present since February and I only wish I had a crystal ball to confirm when it will end. With Hong Kong going through a third wave, American hospitals beginning to overflow, parts of Catalonia in lockdown and global infection numbers continuing to accelerate, it feels that we are closer to the beginning than the end.

***

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The post Easing Lockdown Is the Hardest Part of This Pandemic appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Naturally, flying came up. When you write about travel, you see, you don’t just tend to fly a lot. You tend to encourage others to take flights. Often, many, many flights. And the performative greenness of composting, shunning air-conditioning, reducing meat consumption, school striking etc pales into comparison if your work involves writing copy and articles that sell travel by plane.

You probably know the maths. We all do. One return flight, even a short-haul flight, generates more carbon dioxide than the average citizen of some countries produces in a year. And, in England at least, 1% of fliers take almost 20% of international flights, while the top 10% of fliers take more than half of all flights.

The more I thought about it, the more the role of “writing about travel” fell into the category of something I’d rather not explain to any future grandchildren as they confronted a climate-ravaged wasteland besieged by refugees from the uninhabitable tropics. Organised tours with day trips by plane – often when perfectly good trains are available? Weekends away with a flight at either end? Stories for inflights, constructed with the specific goal of selling yet more flights? All this with almost every nation in the world set to miss its (already inadequate) 2030 climate goals?

Travel writing seemed almost as hard to justify as writing for the fossil fuel industries (something I have also done). I concluded that I’d give up short-haul flying and work towards a lifestyle that excluded long-haul, give up copywriting for egregiously flight-heavy travel, start to gradually move towards doing more environmental writing, and start to talk about this particular elephant in the room on this blog….

Then Covid happened. International borders shut down and airports became dead zones. The skies magically cleared. Nobody was going anywhere (or hiring anyone to write copy or journalism!), so smug blog posts on the joys of train travel within Europe felt as redundant as booking a cruise aboard a plague ship.

But slowly, flights are starting up again. Even as we face down a climate crisis that could lead to as much as 8° C (12.5º F) warming and will most likely lead to almost half of that, according to David Wallace-Wells’ excellent The Uninhabitable Earth, airlines are pleading for, and often receiving, government bailouts.

It’s difficult to emphasise how utterly batshit this is. Aviation was a rapidly growing sector, both in terms of passenger numbers and in terms of emissions. Currently, insane subsidies mean that it’s often, in the developed West, cheaper to travel by plane than by train. In any sensible world, trains would be subsidised and flying heavily taxed (perhaps, as the Greens suggest, with a tiered levy that hits frequent flyers hard and leaves the annual holiday or trip of a lifetime largely untaxed). Social distancing, which seems set to be the new normal for some time at least, is easier and more climate-friendly on trains than on planes.

Now is the perfect time to let the aviation sector go the way it needs to go in climate terms – and not just by refusing government bailouts to tax exile billionaires. If there’s one thing working from home should have taught us, it’s that a lot of business travel is a waste of time and carbon. Flying is even less pleasant than it was, with bare bones and often socially distanced service followed, in many countries, by compulsory two-week quarantine, with or without Covid testing.

I can’t, yet, entirely give up flying: Like lots of people around the world I have family in one country and a home in another (Covid depending, of course). But I’m working towards it and I am flying less. Because if you’re campaigning on the streets for climate action but taking 20 flights a year, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

A lot of us talk, now, about a green recovery from Covid, and a Green New Deal. People who can afford to fly already use much, much more than their share of the planet’s resources – even more so in the developed west. Few of us are comfortable engaging with the behaviour changes we’ll need to make, whether that’s wearing layers in winter and switching off AC in summer, reducing meat consumption, mending clothes, cutting out flying, reducing our internet use, buying less, or accepting slower delivery times. (And, no, reducing plastic use doesn’t count: it’s great for the oceans but in many cases “sustainable” alternatives use more energy and resources than a single-use plastic bag.)

Flying will likely need to revert to where it was in the 1980s, when most of the rich world flew once a year for their summer hols, if that, and the majority of the world’s population never flew at all. There will need to be heavy investment in trains and ferries (including making ferries greener), at national and transnational levels. And, just as across other industries rendered obsolete, this will entail job losses, business failures, pivoting, adjusting and retraining.

Even without trying to rectify global climate injustice, this isn’t going to be easy. It seems unlikely that an increasingly fragmented, nationalist world will manage the necessary concerted action. And feedback loops will make matters worse. Last time Zach visited Australia, his inter-city trains were cancelled because bushfires had warped the rails, and the self-same bushfires made the roads too dangerous for rail replacement services to run. No prizes for guessing what caused the bushfires, and his short-haul flight will only have made things worse.

But there are things all of us can do. Plan our travel in long blocks, rather than as weekends, and make shorter trips by land or ocean transport only; pay the extra to travel by train (or book well in advance while tickets are still cheap); go overland wherever feasible; and query whether that face-to-face work meeting is really necessary or can be done by Zoom. Because if we’re going to exit Covid in the right direction — rather than ramping up fossil fuel use in the face of climate doom — we can’t go back to the way we were. We need to travel, and to live, a very different way.

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Bruges is crazy beautiful. Every bit as pretty as you’d expect a Hanseatic canal city to be, and even more opulent too. Particularly in January, it’s easy to wander cobbled streets and arcing bridges, soak up stepped gables, medieval squares and Brabantine Gothic belltowers, and pause occasionally for Belgian beer, chocolate or modern Flemish fine dining.

But what bewildered me about Bruges was the city’s wealth. During medieval times, it was a centre of the decorative arts, from painters like Jan Van Eyck to the unsung women who created gorgeous tapestries under men’s brand names and phantasmagorically delicate lace under, occasionally, their own.

Next door to the Gruuthusemuseum which holds these kinds of treasures, the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk church houses a jaw-dropping Michelangelo Madonna – surrounded by a streaky marble baroque confection that’s close to criminal.

And it also holds the tombs of a father and daughter, Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy. “Bold” is a bit of a euphemism for Charles. When he inherited Bruges, as Duke of Burgundy, his lands covered great swathes of what is now the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, and looked set to form the kernel of a European nation that could have rivalled and perhaps ultimately absorbed France.

Bruges, an important port, home to the court of a great lord, one of Europe’s earliest stock exchanges, and a wealth of gorgeous art and architecture, could have grown to the size of Paris and changed the shape of history.

But there was a problem. Charles may have been gay, and he certainly only produced one legitimate heir, Mary, who barely counted, being a girl. And, while still possessed of this solitary, female heir, he was unwise (or bold) enough to invade Switzerland, a nation famed for two things: towering Alps and enormous, cheese-fed mercenaries.

This did not go well for him. Charles’s body was found in a stream after the Battle of Nancy, so badly disfigured by halberds, lances and wild animals that only his personal physician could identify it. Mary, a power player, negotiated a successful marriage to a Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, only to die in her 20s after a hunting accident – having produced two surviving children.

And so Bruges fell into decline. The Habsburgs moved their base away, created the empires of Spain and Austria-Hungary, and intermarried so vigorously that they spawned the Habsburg jaw.

And poor little Bruges withered on the vine until Leopold II, the Belgian king best known for the gothic atrocities he oversaw in the Congo, decided it could rival Nuremberg for charm and gave it a lift and dust.

In normal times, this tiny city, with a population just into six figures, hosts over eight million visitors a year. If you visit, come far out of season, take the train and stay a few days.

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But if you travel beyond the main building’s 2,000-odd rooms and past the suitably gargantuan water features, you can find a gentler, more tranquil scale. It is, of course, the Hameau (or hamlet), where the much-maligned (if far from beautiful) Marie-Antoinette is supposed to have played at milkmaids with her ladies.

Creation of Marie-Antoinette’s favourite architect, Richard Mique, a landscape designer so dedicated that he was guillotined for trying to help her escape imprisonment, the Hameau formed part of a trend for France’s elite to rediscover a simpler kind of life in the manner of Rousseau. While the rustic look didn’t extend to the interiors, which were duly lavish, Marie-Antoinette could escape some of the weight of ceremonial life and hang with friends and family in a way that must have felt relaxed for this daughter of the formidable Empress Maria Theresa.

Rather sweetly, the model farm, complete with lavender gardens, wasn’t just for show: it seems Marie-Antoinette wanted her children to learn where their food came from. Whether you consider the place an early example of kitsch, a classic of the picturesque landscape genre, or a metaphor so damn heavy-handed Robespierre could have written it himself, it’s a beautiful spot. And, as it’s off most guided tour routes, you’ll likely have much of it to yourself even when Versailles reopens.

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Zermatt, a painstakingly gorgeous Swiss valley town, where medieval hay barns preserved complete with hay do battle with watch stores, designer ski wear outlets and pounding aprés-ski for the village’s soul, is one of Switzerland’s adventure capitals. The climbers’ graveyard, by the tranquil church above the river, pays tribute to some of the 500-or-so alpinists who died attempting—or returning from—the Matterhorn, which towers proud, high above the town.

A jagged triangular shard thrusting skywards above glaciers and valleys like a shattered antler, frosted with snow even in the midsummer heat, the Matterhorn is the most alpine of Alps, the most mountainous of mountains. Which isn’t to say it’s especially tall. At just 4,478 metres, or under 15,000 feet, it’s only the sixth highest peak in the Alps and doesn’t break Europe’s top ten. But what it lacks in height it makes up for in looks—and lethality.

We looked out at the mountain every morning and every evening from our beautiful chalet apartment, watching the clouds roll around it, the snowstorms blow in, the alpenglow chase the setting sun. We sipped hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows by an igloo looking up at the Matterhorn, and we skied in its shadow, including one of Europe’s best intermediate ski routes.

For, thanks to the genius of Swiss engineering, you can ride a series of gondolas and cable cars up from Zermatt to the Little Matterhorn, home of a ski and play area branded Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, at 3,883 metres (12,739 feet). From there, when the glacier crossing is open, follow the Reine Blanche (White Queen) ski route almost 20 kilometers (12 miles), descending 2,300 metres (7,545 feet), across the invisible border into the softer, rolling valleys of Italy’s Cervinia, skis hissing on groomed piste and mountain landscapes opening below you.

Paired with a lunch of ragu, polenta and homemade pasta in the spring sun at the Foyer des Guides restaurant beside the piste, it’s hard to think of a more magical way to spend the day. And I’m still amazed that, only two months ago, this was so easy. It feels, now, like an artefact from a vanished time.

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