Some Day this War’s Gonna End
By Rob Doyle.
What we’re all supposed to be taking from this, I hear, is how interconnected we are and how dependent on one another. I get that, I really do, but if I’m honest what I’m really taking from it is how much better off I am without the lot of you — how pleased it makes me when you all back off, clear out, keep away, keep your distance, at least two metres but preferably two hundred miles. What I mean is, I’ve never felt more harmonious in my social relations, never felt so content, never felt so much love as I do in these strange days of quarantine, of staying home all day like I’ve always done, with the crucial difference that now I’m unable to interrupt that staying at home — by going out, for instance, or doing things in general. I mean, of course I’m dependent on you all; I need your goods and services, your emotional support, your expertise, your love, but what I’ve been finding is that all that stuff really does work better from a distance. So much of what I assumed to be necessary turns out to have been optional, not a luxury so much as an exhausting and self-imposed obligation: travelling, for instance, or meeting my fellow human beings in person, IRL, in the flesh, face to face. Whatever it is, we have apps for it now and they work very well indeed. As long as the internet stays running and the supermarkets are stocked, then I’m fine down here. And where is that, exactly? Well, I’m living on a half-empty estate in the port town of Rosslare Harbour, County Wexford. Even before Covid19 came in over the Irish Sea this place was not just sleepy, it was comatose, so in a sense it hasn’t changed much at all. If they made one of those drone’s-eye videos of Rosslare Harbour in the midst of the pandemic it would look exactly as it did beforehand. There’s a beach here, a long and sandy beach where I go walking every day after I’ve got some writing done. I’m tempted to include in this post the video I shot out there in the Saturday evening sun, drinking my first and well-earned beer of the week. But I’ve seen French writers taking flak in the media for revealing to the world that they’re quarantining on the bourgeois coast, rather than crammed virtuously inside some tiny Paris flat with three screaming babies smearing their shit on the walls. I don’t want to be mistaken for a guillotine-deserving harbour aristocrat, rather than a writer who moved out here because it’s what I can afford, when to rent in Dublin I’d require some kind of IMF bailout. Hang on, screw it, I am going to include the beach video. It’s just a beach, a banal and pretty beach video, that’s all it is, now leave me alone — but stay there, at a distance.
@RobDoyle1
