And so NSW is officially in lock down state wide. It’s been weird watching the pandemic remotely and just as the world appears to be getting back to some sort of normality, where I live suddenly bucks the trend with bigger numbers that we’ve had throughout the entire crisis.
Schools are closed, 10:45am triggers a game of ‘guess the numbers’ and people’s mental health is deteriorating by the day. I consume lots of media from ‘back home’ and I’ve lived the pandemic vicariously through podcasts and news sites from my homeland. And now it’s happening here and I feel absolutely like I want to do an online quiz or, God forbid, even do some exercise. Except an Australian Joe Wicks sounds fucking horrendous.
That said, it’s odd to watch 100,000+ fanatical Dutch fans on TV at Zandvoort and then go to the local Woolworths where I have to mask up, keep my distance, sign in with an app and sanitise my hands to the point of my skin peeling off. It feels like, as a nation, we’ve done this arse about face.
And that brings me onto my next point, my gorgeous little human has been ‘assessed’ as having autism. She has ‘meltdowns’ (or, as we have discussed with her and decided to call – ‘Big Feelings’) and can be oppositional to the most basic ask. It’s tiring and negotiation and unconditional support is difficult when you have your own big feelings of a different nature.
And so adding working from home and schooling from home to a general sense of ‘How fucking long will this thing go on for?’ I think it’s fair to say that everyone is feeling it just a smidge.
And so what better time to bring back a place to throw words at a wall and try to make sense of things than here. It’s nice to come back to.