Fountains of yuletide-rain, rot the gums of Meneage street kennels. It's 10pm. I push up town on my bicycle. My dimming bike-light bounces off St Piran's tomb-like walls. No spingoed-drunks straggle the streets, these days. Gone are the hollering voices of; "Alright are 'ee?" "Yeah, you?" Pinching a poorly-rolled fag between chapped farmer lip, chubby hands swinging off bus-stop with a Kernow Kebab. Tragic Trelawney's night club grieves between the leftovers of empty charity shop fronts; no puke on the streets, no electronic music pounding the wet air, no roughed-up bouncers guarding the foggy club doors. No one throwing me and my friends out for being sweet sixteen with forged IDs. The town is an empty shrine to a time that was. The ancient thatched tavern of the Blue Anchor waits. Flaky-painted doors and windows battened, tight shut. For hundreds of years, this brewery has warmed cheeks and hearts of local drinkers, has hid the gratuitous goods of smugglers, has danced gaily with soul-redeeming folk music and compromised on Cornish looseness. Now pandemic signs flutter at the smugglers' saloon, like wanted posters in a wild western. And Wetherspoons, sits like a proud and pompous funeral home. It's taken the dead ones and powdered them pretty. Disenchanting 'spoons decorated with a vacuous veneer sheen. And the lights of a purring Helston taxi flickers outside. Pornography fixes the driver's attention; picking his nose. Waiting for no one. I pedal harder against the bitter hail pelting at my rosy cheeks. Up the hill, traffic lights change for the ghosts of horse carriages. Which once carried tin, copper, and passengers to the fanciful estate of Trelowarren. Now the arsenic tasting rain beats hard against the mirage of Meneage. And Christmas lights are hangmen floating like Day of the Dead; ominous rituals shaking on street lamps. A rusty white transit van splutters onwards through the downpour. One young man steals through the dark, stopping by the bank and gobbing a clump of phlegm on the filthy pavement outside HSBC. I pedal on. As the town mayor sleeps, as the town snores in a Valium-sedated stupor, in fear and in fury. A plastic bag catches in the wind and carries itself along the desolate road like a polythene angel. As I arrive in the neon lights of Texaco garage, a fresh-faced matlow fuels his Mercedes; he darts a look at this dishevelled woman alighting her carriage; a mud flecked bicycle. I pull of my bobble hat and enter. The air is cold tonight. As I cycle home with my over-priced tobacco pouch and bottle of gin, I see that Helston is assured of herself. Well and truly extinguished is the superfast modern-world. And the spirits of olde times spit with zeal. They scratch up through the sickly-slabs of cement, they stink of pilchards, spingo and smuggler's sweat but - they are clawing up gleefully to return.

The beauty of being home is too often colliding with the tragedy of what is happening to our little Cornish towns. And yet we forget how overwhelmingly 'before it's time' Cornwall was...

We revisit places we grew up. Those homelands where shops were once busting with locals jabbering on about their day to day lives. Picking up their bread and newspaper, sharing stories about their day and their families and who knows who and who knows what.  And now? The middle class division. Where people think that Cornwall is "cute" and "rustic" and order their food from Waitrose so that they can enjoy peace away from the commercial, corporate technological beast of the city. Where holiday-makers escape all the problems that existed in their modernised homeland yet systematically lick the melting ice-cream of neoliberalism.

Cornwall is reduced to a holiday destination. Which is nice, right? But is it really? Are we not just enabling this mentality of people continuing cut-throat, ostentatious livelihoods in cities where they don't know their neighbors and they don't know themselves so that they can come and return to Cornwall once a year to call it "cute" and "rustic."

After returning home to my family village after four years away at university, I have realised that, truly, underneath the skin, Cornwall is not cute and rustic, it is far more than that. Cornwall is a pure melting pot of profound flavours, of people with pain and beauty etched into their working hands, stories pour out of the serpentine pores. Hardy, wholesome villagers, who see the poetry of the eroding cliffs and the eroding past are now silenced behind the elaborate façade of exploitative commercialism.

There is nothing "cute" about the labour of men who have worked in near death conditions down tin mines to buy a loaf of bread, or the women who have worked tirelessly in fishing and farming to bring up families with little financial reward. And yet, when I write these cliches, isn't that an old fashioned view, isn't it time that we embraced the new, that we moved on?

Yes, transformation is an important part of life, evolving out of the old ways and welcoming in new ways of thinking, of being. Mining is no longer part of Cornish culture anyway and we should be grateful for tourism as it sustains the majority of our industries. But it seems that tangential to this evolution, the spirit of Kernow is being crushed and consumed.

​When tourists go to Spain they are embraced by the vivacious, exuberant colours and sing-song of Latin cultures that once shaped the land. But the culture is an act, displayed for the entertainment of the British ex-pats who pay the money to see the expected rhythm of the siesta and 'Benidorm fiesta'.

Unfortunately, the organic, traditional customs of rural lands are dying out. In my village of the Lizard, tourists arrive and are met by pasties, cream teas and postcard pictures of a village that was. Yet deep below there is a sigh, for when they have packed up their suitcases and left, the pubs, the villages, the shops are empty. The buses are expensive and empty. The old stories are only heard nostalgically, coincidentally, ironically perhaps.

We are more than that, we are a culture to be preserved, maintained, lived. We are not a Kynance get-away from London, so that instagrammers can take a quick pic and fly back up the country saying that they have visited Cornwall. We are not a get-away in a cottage in St Ives. We are a people, a living, breathing network of communities.

It is not a lifestyle down here, it is a livelihood, a solid solidarity, a way of being. In these beautiful cavernous Crofts, Coves and Carns, we should rebuild our identity.

During lockdown, the quietness and togetherness of communities has given many Cornish folk a small reminder of how it once was. Listening to these stories at the local pub and shop has inspired me to channel this feeling of community and culture through writing a play about our heritage and long-lost magic. 
​
I value the spirit that has governed this uncertain period in time where communities have pulled together in a time of desolation, isolation, desperation. As the tourists (or "emmets") start to fill up the village of The Lizard again, I am really keen to utilise my passion for script-writing and story telling and merge the culture of "what was" with "what is" before it is somehow lost to the loudness of globalisation again.

Therefore, I am putting out a call for anyone who has a passion for acting and story-telling to get in touch. We can socially distance rehearse in a way which is suitable for you. 

But I would like to use the stories I have gathered to compose nights where we perform a tale about the village and surrounding areas, the local families, the analogies that kept fisherman going to sea, the poetry that connected people, the superstitions and magic that supported a whole other way of life.

In this way, we can celebrate what it means to be Cornish, what it means to be connected to these years and years of rich and meaningful heritage. As my Great Uncle J.C Trewin wrote:

"The Lizard means to me the harsh scent of camomile in Pistol Meadow, the thymy tang of grass jungled above Housel Bay in a dry September, the acrid smell of seaweed from Polpeor, the warm geranium-and-musk in Church cove, the clove and peach of the Goonhilly furze, the hot spicy tingle of saffron cakes in the ovens of Kynance Bay..." But he went on to say when looking at an old map of Cornwall, he noticed  how poetically we used to see the land "the treasures" of " acrobatic sea-monsters - one in a rich lime-green, with mouth of flaming red, 

But everyone has a different vision of this land, this kingdom, 

Although, we are living in a very technological time now, the magic, the spirit of the place is still here, just waiting for us.

Today I pulled open a 2007 copy of the National Geographic which my mum picked up once in a bundle from the car-boot. Funnily, or eerily enough,  I opened it on a special segment discussing pandemics called "Deadly contact: How animals and humans exchange disease“ by travel writer David Quammen. Lo and behold, as if by some uncanny coincidence my eyes instantly fell upon the word 'bats' towards the bottom of the page, it read “At this point you’re entitled to ask: Damn what is it about Bats?“ It then went on to explain how bats are an ideal candidate to host a variety of dangerous viruses because they roost in huge colonies, snuggle together intimately, give birth to only a few young and therefore nurture those young dotingly, and they have long life spans especially for small mammals. 

Skipping over all the scary images of pandemics (too much for my brain at the moment!) I  swiftly skim-read the article. The main message which struck me was the fact that in this changing world, where species are transported across the globe for zoos, for food, for fun, viruses will be on the increase - and this is because viruses are pretty bad-ass. Viruses evolve quickly, they are versatile, elusive and unaffected by antibiotics. Travelling more, importing and exporting food all enables the contact-spread of pathogens,  which spreads diseases and viruses. Basically, what is happening now is not some random event that couldn’t have been predicted. Quammen predicted it and so did hundreds of other biologists.

Whilst this all seems rather daunting, and it even stirs up a gut-wrenching anxiety in me now, I am reminded that, if pandemics like SARS, Ebola, Measles... have stuck before and will inevitably strike again, this experience shouldn’t be compared to a one-off event like the Blitz. The Blitz was a human-made war which happened under human-made circumstances. We reacted to it in a human way - rationing food, blacking out homes, hiding/confusing/deterring the problem. This pandemic is a pathogen spread virus, we cannot hide, confuse or deter pathogens. Thus, this situation is a hard-hitting but important lesson - as a species we must holistically adapt. We cannot change the phenomena of organisms, we can only change our ways to protect ourselves and other species. With the global impact of this virus, we must see ourselves more as a species inter-connected to other species, rather than as separate entities. In opening up to a greater empathy for all living things on Earth, we can begin to understand how our trans-national, neoliberal lives, founded on exploitation and destruction, have lead to this. 

By looking at the science from a past perspective - and not reading into the many alarming political theories circling around currently - it has helped me to realise that this situation is tragic but it is also a massive opportunity for adapting and re-connecting to our local communities and environments. This problem will not go away because the planet hasn't gone away and the transmission of viruses is a natural phenomena. Our consumer habits and lifestyles are neither natural or nurturing. We need strong communities and localised nurturing collectives, sharing of knowledge and food sources between neighbours. It is time to turn the slogan 'stay home' into 'stay homely.'

Like rats, humans tend to be opportunists, we fan out quickly, arrive in new places and reproduce fast, some of us are more conservative like tortoises, which remain within their preferred habitat and reproduce slowly. Like gorillas - who were able to carry and spread ebola - we are intellectual and social creatures. Like fruit bats, we are also nurturing creatures who; live in big communities, spend a lot of time bringing up our young and have pretty long life spans. Our safety, our health is not the only issue. The disease can go both ways, from humans to other species as well as from them to us. Therefore, it is in some ways the great species leveller. It is not the great class, race or cultural leveller. Yet as a collective of humans, it does kick us off the top rung of the ladder and land us on the same level as every other living species on Earth. 

Is that reassuring? I think so. For me, it is quite grounding, we are not as invincible as Capitalism would have us believe. We are reminded that, even though domesticated pets seem to be the only animals many humans care about, when it comes to a virus, the cat and dog are just as dangerous as wild animals, as we come into contact with them everyday. There is therefore no hierarchy between the dog or the cow, the man or the bat. We are all on the same level.

‘Pandemic’ might now seem like the buzz word which sends us reeling into fear, but all it means is the spread of a microorganism; the spread of a living part coming into contact with another living part within the living world. Our world is a world within worlds, if it wasn't alive it wouldn't be so complex, ugly, weird and beautiful. 

The sheer abundance of Earth, its living parts, is something we as a species have exploited. For thousands of years we’ve chopped down the trees from the ancient forests, we have sucked up the waters from the great lakes, we have drilled into her ice sheets and spilt oil into her seas. And now we are learning that this way of spreading ourselves out across every inch of the bio-diverse planet, has meant that the bio-diverse world has bitten back. You can't take the honey and not expect the bee to sting once in a while. Unfortunately, through mass exploitation, poor treatment of eco-spheres, eating animals ruthlessly and relentless travelling, we have been letting out the hive.

“Virologist Eric Leroy’s research points towards fruit bats as an ebola reservoir.” This statement is written in the 2007 National Geographic magazine I found today. Beside it, is an image of a family in the Republic of the Congo. The man who stands in the middle of fourteen children has such pain in his eyes it is unimaginable. His name is Balo Karesh, he was spared from ebola but his wife’s family died so he cares for their children as well as his own. This happened during the ebola outbreak, this article is form 13 years ago and did we change? No, we allowed capitalism to prevail, we kept sucking the honey out of Earth, we didn’t heed the warning signs.

The next chapter in the magazine is about the space age. It talks about the space race between Soviet Russia and the US and how it all began with Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth in 1957. Sitting here, with all this going on, the space race article seems so futile. A few men fighting over sending a few of our species out in a rocket to plant a flag on another piece of floating rock? A rock un-inhabitable to us?

Yet, science can provide us with the answers in this time of uncertainty. But one wonders how much of the space race is about creating phallic instruments and shooting them out to penetrate the world we haven’t yet exploited ("I came first!") As Francis Bacon believed, the art of science should always be about creating a greater philosophy around our connection and symbiosis to our living planet. After all we exist because of it, and we need to co-exist with of all of the other species on it. Space is bewildering but so is home and this is our only home. We are and will always be in lockdown on this planet. And that is a good thing. Its verdant green spaces are not only our parks but our source of food. The Arctic is our lockdown fridge and no plumber will arrive from Pluto if it switches off. Our conscious, complex minds are in this planet, we can seek meaning outwards, but we also have to find meaning within it.

For many people, like me, this pandemic has stirred up a huge amount of fear, feelings of needing to escape but no where to run to, mainly because we’ve never been told that we couldn’t. I never thought something like this would ever happen in my lifetime. Sometimes, I think I’ll wake up and it will be just a pretty imaginative dream! Even the Track and Trace App sounds like some kind of weird-ass Charlie Brooker episode of a dystopian nightmare... But today this magazine fell into my lap and after seeing that this was not only predicted but will happen again shows us that we must address the impact of our consumer habits and our neoliberal lifestyles. Now more than ever, it is not a time to live like rats and spread ourselves thinly, we need to nurture our home, our localised town, villages, cities. We are social living organisms and that is the beauty of being human, but we are as much to blame in this crisis as the bat, the bee, the bird, if not more to blame because we had a choice to make, the signs were there and the people in power ignored them. As a species, we need to use this moment in time, to utilise our creative intelligence, honour our role as care-givers of the planet and stop destructively penetrating other habitats.

Well on that note, remind yourself that just as there is the tragedy of death, there is life, because the Earth is alive. She is full of pathogens, particles and strange and phenomenal organisms. The living planet gives us death and decay, but it also gives us the beauty of growth and recovery. Thence the man and the bat are both of the same. But what we should know is that we are not any better than the bat. The bat is utterly brilliant and unknown, they are ancient in terms of evolution, they find ways to sustain themselves on nearly every land apart from Antarctica, and unfortunately owing to the diverse range of species, bats carry a huge amount of unknown diseases. But the brilliance of the bat is that it didn't ask to be on the streets of Wuhan, we exploited the bat, we put it there. We penetrated the landscapes of millions of wild animals and the pathogens have spread with cataclysmic consequences. So, it is time for us to stay at home, not just for lockdown but like the tortoise, learn how to live smaller, softer, gentler on this planet.

"It's not about wildlife health, or about human health," William Karesh said. "There's really just one health - the health and the balance of ecosystems throughout the planet." 

​She reads Plath and taps ash
Into the clam shell,
Which a young feminist housemate gave her
As a gift
Look at it, she had said
It’s the vagina,
Don’t ever be afraid to look at it.
Mice scurry along the rafters
She had ice cream for dinner
And for afters -
She chews the marshmallows
Off of the Easter egg.
Too much saccharine
Too many sulphurous dreams,
Not enough sleep.
Bathroom air vent whirrs
Trainers discarded in a running position
Are ready to leave
Always ready to run.
The cruise ship moon dips into clouds
As the crew shout; help
From quarantine.

The dastardly bastardly weather man
Keeps telling us that the sun shone today
And it will shine again, tomorrow,
And even when there’s rain,
Is there any really? 
If we can’t feel it
Can’t taste it,
Slipping down our noses
Dousing our tongues
With pain
And beauty
And all of the things that rain 
on a spring day brings.
I’m beginning to think the weather man 
Is a hologram
Or a comedian
Telling us things we don’t need to know
But want to hear.
And the prime minister
Is probably dead.

​

​The best part of self-isolation is the idea that we can reconnect to the home and the ol’ family values again. The worst part is that the home has already been isolating many people from their family, community or friends for long enough. I don’t like to dwell on bad news but it would be harmful to ignore the fact that domestic violence rates have risen since we were instructed to ‘stay the f*ck at home.’ It’s fair to say, it aint all plain-sailing.

The home. Such a funny concept. The walls from which we pay our tenancy, our division and our duty. The walls which cave our desires and fears. Those walls upon which we engrave our handprints and growing pains. Material items boxed and shelved, strewn, folded and suspended. Layers of dulux paint coating the thumb-prints of parties, blu-tack and capricious memories. Fridges that whirr full of brands and expiry dates. Cupboards that hold contingent tins full of beans and soups that imitate home-cooked homeliness. Grave-yard ovens where every over-cooked scent of frazzled and charred dinner wafts through the fan like a spectre. Microwaves that worry us by whisper of brain tumours but seduce us by their hyper-modern efficiency.

As we sit now, prisoners in our homes, do we see it as a jail? Are we living in solitary confinement cut off from the outside world? No not really. On some ultra-modern hover-craft we are catching the VR train each night; meeting our friends and family in CyberVille. Having house parties on smart phone apps. Swigging vino with mates at the insta LIVE pub. Waving at Nan on Messenger and holding fully-staffed work conferences come Monday on Zoom.

Can we ever really feel isolated in this ultra-connected online world? Or do we feel more isolated by the very fact that we are connected this way?

Many have compared the Coronavirus Pandemic to The Blitz, but who is the real enemy here? The virus? Our neighbours? Or the world we perhaps no longer feel accepted in?

As another 'lockdown' day yawns across the white squares of the calendar into grey chunks of housing blocks, some people continue to drive along the regulated black lines, nostalgic for the adrenaline-pumped fear of being late for the 8am online conference check-in. Others find themselves bankrupt and bed-ridden and are confused by their contented complacency about it because at least, thanks to Corona they don't have to carry on anymore. It is out of their ungloved hands. Others peer through masks out of shutter blinds, their mind, fizzling like Fukoshima. 

No bombs fall here, no spitfires can be heard overhead. Only the tap-tapping of keyboards, muttering of discerning old folks and the occasional car winding in a paranoid haze down the once bustling streets.

Today, the Coronavirus pandemnic reminds me of a poem W. H. Auden penned during the start of the Second World War in 1939,  September 1st; the date of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Auden, the great cynic of the Empire, originally wrote the last line as ‘We must love one another or die’ but said in an interview that he thought to himself; ‘that’s a damned lie! We must die anyway!’ So he changed it to ‘We must love one another and die’.  In the end he said he hated the whole poem and tried to bury it, but it didn’t die. Snapped up and slapped all over newspapers during the 9/11 attacks, many people have coined it ‘the right poem at the wrong time,’ alas, there is something wise and relevant about it’s nuanced, bored, lonely tone of  inner revolution:

… All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority 
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such things as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Today, comforting ourselves in the cosy furniture of imperialism, Many of us can relate to Auden’s solitary figure observing a terrifying world outside, a world of industry and ego, climate change and mental illness. Others are too busy living. Are we the children who are ‘afraid of the night’?

… Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

…

What resonates with me in this poem is the ideology that above all, we must love, even if Arden said, quite rightly, that as mere mortals we are all to die anyway. And during this pandemic, when people recall the "Blitz spirit" they refer to a sense of stoic British compassion, enduring kindness for the communities shattered and buried under the debris of war. The "Blitz spirit" has always been a myth, academics now say, contrived by the Government to stop us slipping into psychosomatic illness and civilian chaos. But the sense that we need to love one another, give out public displays of affection for our NHS to escape/overcome this enemy is prevalent.
​
So, if there are no bombs raining down on us, why do we feel like we are under attack? Perhaps, we are just afraid of the other - Germs or Germans. Isolation then, is the very psychological form of the word. It is a noun as much as it is an adjective. It is not a thing to be in, as in to be in ‘isolation’ it is a thing to describe how someone feels; ‘I am feeling isolation’.

Perhaps it goes back to the Marxist sense of alienation, to feel estranged from our Gattungswesen - our ‘human essence’ as many of us feel estranged from the top tiers of society. Those capitalist stars above, whom we peek at in paranoid curiosity, not through the ‘black mirror’ (our smart phone) but through the glass sky of industry. We feel deeply isolated in our ‘otherness’ to a super-fast world that still perplexes our deeper homely original self.

Or maybe it is simpler than that; isolation a sense of being cut off from an entire town/village/world which doesn't understand us anymore? Doesn't know the real person whom steps out the front door each day and leaps over the chasm of social expectations, smiling and charming their way into a corporate world, where an emotion is an emoji (happy face)?

That very real person, who sits at home and picks their spots in the mirror and worries about their crooked, stained teeth and the stretch marks on their arse. Those whom live with some off-shoot of Modern Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, hopping cautiously over the blemishes on every slab of the pavement to work.

Certainly, many of us don’t feel as if we are good enough to be even a mere commodity to the commercial realm that exists outside our front door. Yet, we are supposed to feel as though we are an asset to this transnational business which is thriving away, all very seriously and judiciously. Whilst this virus shuts down the world we knew, are many of us clamouring to change the way it once was? 

“We are in a square, where nothing really matters apart from our anecdotal lives, all these stories we told one another until this point don’t matter,” said a musician friend of mine in Brighton. “This quarantine has had an unprecedented positive impact upon people who normally live isolated lives, who now become more connected by truth of them sharing an online experience which did not exist previously. Some people may have suddenly realised that they have lived a very lonely experience up until now, saying to themselves ‘what really changed?” 

So here we sit, some who have always felt alone, others who feel impacted by the sudden confinement of the walls, here we are on our computers; waiting for the next big thing to guide us into a sense of seemingly God-given meaning. Dying to feel the present but yet dying to escape from it. 

“In our age of individualism, we see computers as ways through which we can express our individuality. But the truth is that the computers are really good at spotting the very opposite. The computers can see how similar we are, and they then have the ability to agglomerate us together into groups that have the same behaviours.”

Adam Curtis.

And in our echo-chambers, here rings the concept of ‘ubuntu’ - or “I am, because you are” - the idea that we all are all connected and that one can only grow and progress through the growth and progression of others. This ideology could intercept, if not demolish, our modern day lives of self-individualisation, re-building a better world beyond neo-liberal warfare and narcissim - if we allowed it to hold space beyond the computer. 

Yet, we are terrified of what lies in between, what could we possibly be without the framework of a digital society to tell us who we are? And what should we be, as seemingly self-determined people, without the goading of others and moreover Parliament to tell us what we should do with our lives? 

How about if our ‘online’ society guided us into greatness, a common good? Like the decent Police officer who tells us to stop having a BBQ on the beach because we should respect the lockdown rules. A gentle nudge in the right direction rather than a water canister sprayed in our eyes. But can we still be good citizens without our essential free-will? One of the great philosophical questions is turned on its head as antagonising algorithms re-code the Bible into HTMLS of hysteria about Muslims, Single Mothers, A 'Chinese Virus'. Technology and bureaucracy become the chief symbols of superiority and we all sit at the shrine of the TV screen as it is preached to us.

Should any of us have a moral superiority? We are told to respect one another by way of keeping distance to not infect our vulnerable, by the means of ‘social distancing’ as it is now known. But, if it was not made law, and we didn't respect that idea, are we still inherently good people, going about our daily lives resuming ‘business as usual’? We may respect this government instruction and take a wide berth around asthmatic Barbara at Waitrose, but do we do so merely in anticipation of how it will reflect upon our own lives? As in, “if my neighbour sees me violating the two meter rule will she hate me?” And when Covid-19 is over, do we go back to resuming our social mores, avoiding one another in a transparent haze?

Maybe most of us are deeply good. Let’s not slip into pedantic pessimism. After all, half a million of us signed up to be NHS Volunteers which is more people than those who signed up in response to Lord Kitchener's chubby finger 'YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU.' (Although, we do have internet now and through the digital spread of information it is much easier to round up the troops, not to mention we have a much larger population.)

If we, the civilians of Britain, have a good altruistic soul, it has been trapped under the St Patrick-flag-blanket of that great lie, the British tight upper lip. Generations of compassionate crusaders have wagged their tongue, ready to sing a language of our unifying values, our aspirations, our humanity. Hundreds of thousands of young people sing to that chorus today. "I am because you are" - the concept has been integral in breaking down the rotten apple of apartheid in post-colonial African countries. Could it pull open the Iron-shutters of the neoliberal Western world now?

Fundamentally, up until now we have gone about our daily business, shopping in Aldi or perhaps Waitrose, purchasing the goods which we feel will sustain our household, our tribe, but where has tribalism turned to? Fighting over loo rolls? And what kind of people are we now, tribes of people, who return to their virtual reality when the outside world has sustained them enough to get by? 

“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.

Well, to end my meandering thoughts, if this life is a great old mess, some play where the stage crew have gone awol, why not just enjoy the spectacular theatre of it? In doing so, we might have time to stop and stare and appreciate the beauty of her. Turn off the TiK-ToK app a second to hear the tick-tocking of a world which slowly rotates around the sun, unassumingly, mysteriously and miraculously plodding on. Our singular lives may currently be as atomised as she is - but there are many worlds in this world and just as microscopic life-forms collide; the atoms and fractals also dance a synchronised dance. We are the alchemical soup of something bigger, we are the sum of our parts. Ubuntu.

Margaret Cavendish (c.1653)
17th Century Philosopher and Poet 

Of Many Worlds in This World
Just like as in a nest of boxes round,
Degrees of sizes in each box are found.
So, in this world, may many others be
Thinner and less, and less still by degree:
Although they are not subject to our sense,
A world may be no bigger than two-pence.
Nature is curious, and such works may shape,
Which our dull senses easily escape:
For creatures, small as atoms, may be there,
If every one a creature's figure bear.
If atoms four, a world can make, then see
What several worlds might in an ear-ring be:
For millions of those atoms may be in
The head of one small, little, single pin.
And if thus small, then ladies may well wear
A world of worlds, as pendants in each ear.

W. H. DAVIES

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

​

Old Man sits by the side of the street in Brighton town,
He catches his breath now,
And we breathe 
and we see what we’ve done.
Young girl sits by the bus stop with an asthma inhaler,
If only, it was her boyfriend who took her breath away
And not the grey, grey smoke of another day in the City.

What have you done to me? Says the Woman.
Where were you, when I needed your help? Says the Old Man.

These are the lungs of the next generation, for sure
And yet the young ones can’t breathe round 'ere no more.

It’s awful quiet in the City now, 
Apart from people wearing masks
And in their eyes, they're scared to die,
but only for a few weeks,
This only lasts a few weeks, they say.

And the old man coughs and coughs his lot
Buried in a graveyard 
Rest in Peace
Rest in Shmog
Like the dogs in Wuhan
And there’s no reason
To kick the bucket 
Just becasue we fucked it 
up too soon.

I broke my mask
And sang for freedom
I sneezed in the breeze
But another Arab Spring was coming
And I had Western hay-fever,
And cabin fever,
And I heard the mutters 
Of the diseased splutters 
Of the deceased still holding the throats
Of Parliament
Still careered 'round the trachea
Of the future.
So quickly, I put my mask back on
And carried on along the sidewalk. 

Coronavirus kills, 
Smoking Kills
Foreign Policy kills babies
So stop blowing smoke on them.

The New Old Man sits by the side of the street in Brighton town
The year is 2080, he is sure he remembers a time before he needed a mask
To breathe
And what were trees, anyway?
But the sunset slips down the polythene grip
Of the silicone sky.
And no one has fear in their eyes now,
Just the reflection of concrete.