Another Angle

Lockdown is enabling me to see the world from a different perspective. 

Last week I viewed my kitchen from an unusual angle – lying on the cold slate floor with my legs propped up on a chair. Due to daughter having contracted Covid19 at her lab we were all being tested for antibodies. The nurse didn’t take much blood but clearly more than I could spare, hence my dying fly. 

I’m not the only one in the family to adopt unfamiliar postures. Daughter and prospective son-in-law are regressing into primate state, largely due to spending hours hunched over a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a horse and cart.

“I was sure that one went there.”

“Part of the horses leg? In the tree?”

“There’s just so much brown…”

Though frustrating for puzzlers, minimal variation in colour is brilliant when looking at images of the presence of nitrogen compounds in the atmosphere over the world’s cities before and after lockdown. Wuhan, for instance has gone from deep purple (lots of pollution) to a pale yellow (fairly clean air).

Of course, this clean, breathable air comes at a price. Since we’re not flying or using our cars and our industries are in lockdown, economies worldwide are freefalling according to the experts. But I can’t help thinking the recognized perspective on the economy is, to put it bluntly, a bit crazy. Without a planet and people, the state of the economy is irrelevant. How did we come to organize such a daft system? 

I expect you’re dying to know the results of our antibody tests, eh? Negative. Which could mean that we have strong immune systems or that daughter’s Covid19 blood count was pretty low or that we kept her locked in her bedroom until she finished the jigsaw puzzle.