3 or 4 days left, of Oblique Strategies, not sure how well its gone, and not 100% sure that it works with words or my words, so for maybe the time before the penultimate time, I bow down to the genius of Eno and Schmidt and ponder;

Is It Finished?

Is what finished? My folks seem to think that the vaccine will be knocking on their door anytime soon; Christmas with their grandchildren a certainty, or at least possible, but I wonder how much they know and then I wonder how little I might know. They don’t have access to the knowledge of how to access the internet despite paying for super fast broadband with BT which is not super fast but because Mum can’t hear and Dad can’t really speak very well they lack the ability to hold a technical conversation with a telephonic engineer down their crackly phone line. I can never get anywhere with the company because its always the weekend when i visit (last time months ago, and only in the garden anyway) and so they are scuppered destined to crumble down underneath the downward pressure of tech, leaving them behind. Their fidelity to paying for tech does not mean they understand it or are even able to use it, but by having it, somehow their position in Octogenarian luncheon circles is cemented, they’ve all got it, but no one knows how to use it or what “it” actually is, and to be fair i’ve been to one of those lunches and the preoccupation of the state of the country and the bloody immigrants, not to mention the unheard ramblings as another glass of house red is ordered, somehow nothing really matters anymore. And this is where my folks sit; the future as they see it, anything past July 1981 when Charles and Diana married, is irrelevent as long as junk mail catalogues drop through the letter box, and time saving devices like pairs of oven gloves rather than the monoglove exist then all is well with the world.

As if to ascertain that we will triumph over the plague, the government has apparently agreed to stick a union jack on each vial of the vaccine as a monumental two fingers up to the other countries vaccine manufacturers. Playing to the xenophobia of a certain type of person who will see that it was us, The British, that will destroy the grip of the virus over our people, despite fumbling around in the dark for the last 10 months, slipping over the blood which pools at the feet of our politicians as it drips from their hands. The Wretched Watchmen, who played the game without really understanding, the moral compass corrupted by the magnets of capitalism, not understanding or daring to care, governance as brownian motion, random, massively random. Save their skins and fuck the rest of us. 

So the Brexiteers and Nationalists will claim victory over the virus as the union jack festooned vials find their way into the bottle banks of Britain and then onto the tarmac around the bottle banks as they overflow, kicked into hedgerows and down drains, a legacy of how we won the war.

I hope the vaccine does come to my folks, but I also worry how, due to their lack of tech knowledge and isolation from what is going on apart from what they read in the Daily Mail and Telegraph, will they be able to be quick enough to get to the centres or will they know where the centres are? Only time will tell, and my efforts to contact their doctor have thus far drawn a blank despite holding on the phone for 15 minutes yesterday and no reply.

So is it finished? It might be sometime, but by that time something else will have come along. It’s never finished, there’s always more.