Good art borrows, great art steals. So here goes …
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
Dickens was right. We are now living a tale of two cities, of two parts of the country.
One place where COVID is closing in, while the rest of the country cautiously pushes open its doors.
Did you ever have that feeling as a child of being left behind while everyone else went away? Summer holidays, long weekends?
For me, it was at supermarket closing time: the clanging of the bell to sound 10 minutes to the end of trade always filled me with the terror that I'd be locked in and left behind.
It only took 40-odd years, but now it's finally happening.
Records don't matter anymore
Dear readers and friends, it feels rather frightening to be here in Melbourne.
The red line on the graph goes up and up — 270 new infections one day, then 238, then 317, and then yesterday 428 Victorians newly infected with a virus that has taken control of so much of our lives that other experiences seem like an alternate reality.
When I saw that 30,000 people were going to gather in Perth on Sunday to watch a football match, it felt as if I was reading about a gladiatorial contest from ancient Roman history.
Records don't matter anymore. Each day is a new record figure — I don't notice.
But I can't shake the stories of people who have now been told that for reasons of infection control they cannot visit their dying mother in palliative care until she is unconscious and has only 24 hours to live.
And I can't unhear the anxious voices and teary inquiries of listeners who don't know if they have the mental stamina to survive six more weeks away from those they love.
It's lonely here. The streets are silent again, and while the nation buzzed last time around with chat of craft projects, binge-watching and iso-cooking to make the shared time indoors fun, no-one's talking about bloody sourdough now.
Shoulders are hunched against the cold and collars are turned against the reality that lives will be lost and that spring will come to our fellow Australians, but it may be without us.
If you don't live in Melbourne, I do not write this to make you feel bad, and I am sorry to be writing again about COVID, but I know that many of us struggling here crave your fellow-feeling, your empathy, but most of all we want your understanding that this too could happen to you.
We are your Cassandra — warning against what may be in the wind. The Prime Minister was wrong: we are not all Victorians now.
Let me tell you plain: do all that you have to do right now not to become us.
We grab the moments of grace that get us through
This weekend let me take you away from all this for a while: back to 1975 and the constitutional crisis that casts its shadow to today, and then to the hottest legal seat in town — the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell: will she spill all? God, I hope so!
Have a safe and happy weekend. Here, we grab the little moments of grace and charm that get us through.
When my old ABC colleague Ryan Sheales tweeted that he'd just discovered the most brilliant three-ingredient recipe ever — tin of creamed corn, flour, salt — voila, cornbread — it kicked off a hilarious weeklong competition on air to unearth the best and briefest three-ingredient recipes around.
You can find some here — damn the sourdough, give me chocolate ripple cake.
And because I miss live music so much, and the smell and sway of hundreds of leaping live bodies all around me, please enjoy a bit of time I got to spend with Mr James Reyne, who will always be a beautiful, blonde Mornington Peninsula lad to me.
He's never stopped writing and performing; his voice is utterly unchanged and his new music just as perfect.
This is the self-titled single from his new album Toon Town Lullaby and this is the aching and lovely Australian Crawl song that most makes sense to us here right now.
"It seems all wrong back here at home
There's no end in sight..."
There's no end in sight..."
Take care, won't you? Go well.
Virginia Trioli is presenter on Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne and the former co-host of ABC News Breakfast.
No comments:
Post a Comment