LONDON, U.K. -- I have on my desk a half-eaten dark chocolate Easter Bunny, a nearly-empty box of salted, caramel-filled Office Bunnies, a package of Divine Chocolate speckled eggs, a jar of salted peanuts and walnuts mixed, a package of anti-bacterial wipes, and a small plastic bottle of made-in-Canada foaming alcohol hand rub.
Notice the abundance of food, though I suppose chocolate really isn’t food food.
Easter was more than two tedious Pandemic weeks ago. Why does it take so long to polish off a hollow chocolate bunny? Anybody else ever notice that?
It’s 10 a.m. Time for a little hunk of chocolate ear to go with my Twitter scrolling. The New York Times, now that demands a smooth-filled speckled egg. Before you know it, it’s 10:15 already.
It’s what one does when trapped inside one’s house in a never-ending lockdown loop. Think of a poor gerbil going round and round on its treadmill.
Which brings us to Tuesday, the beginning of week six, under London’s version of feng cheng.
The 11 million people of Wuhan, China had never really heard the term feng cheng, until they were told their city was being sealed off, and they couldn’t leave their homes for 76 days.
I want to thank Don Weinland, Beijing correspondent of the Financial Times, for passing on that little mandarin expression. He recently spent 10 days in Wuhan after it opened up. Safer than London.
On that point, did you know this is like the umpteenth plague to sweep across London in the last 700 years? Remember the Black Death?
She: “Well, I’ll be! Isn’t that fascinating.”
He: “And it’s not the first lockdown either.”
She: “Another surprise. Aren’t you just full of them!”
The most famous plague expert is probably Samuel Pepys, who wrote everything down in his legendary diaries.
“Great fears of the Sickenesse here in the City,” he wrote, on April 30, 1665. “God preserve us all.” Today, he would have tweeted.
Plague houses were marked with red crosses on the doors. Parish clerks published “Bills of Mortality,” announcing the weekly count of burials.
Alas, nobody kept track of the poor people who died. Just as today, many elderly victims of coronavirus are not being counted.
Pepys followed and documented the number of dead closely, noting 6,978 in one week: “A most dreadfull Number.”
As Donald Trump dangerously mused about injecting disinfectant into human veins, Pepys turned to tobacco, which was said to purify the air and reduce bad smells.
Oh, and he gave up wearing a wig.
So tell us, already.
Well, because he bought it in a part of London that was a plague hotspot and might have come from the head of a victim.
Disgusting.
However, none of that disgust and fear and paranoia stopped Pepys from seeking the pleasure of his mistress, even as he noted: “On every side is the plague.”
He also noted this about London:
“But Lord! How sad a sight to see the streets empty of people.”
Much as it looks during the Great Pandemic of 2020.
