Lockdown recoveries under way in holy lands

OWING to an odd alignment of the planets and a number of work commitments, I have spent the past three weeks zigzagging between Jerusalem, Cairns and Hobart. I know what you’re thinking: these are all places of equal spiritual importance. And that is true.

But they also have another thing in common – foreigners. And by golly, how I’ve missed them.

By both nature and vocation I am a sedentary suburban middle-class man. While I largely opposed lockdowns and lockouts on an ideological level, in practice it made little or no difference to my life.

It was workers being deprived of their pay cheques, kids being deprived of school and teenagers being deprived of their first kiss that I really thought was unfair.

But now that such miseries have been endured – and notwithstanding those unfortunate souls who will never recover – it is a sheer delight to simply see people out and about again.

In the holiest place on Earth this presence was most pronounced by its absence. A group of us wandered about the Old City of Jerusalem – a sacred site for three global religions – surrounded by little more than birds and skip bins.

Our guide told us we beat the crowds but no crowds could have been beaten back in normal times – if such times can still be remembered.

The truth is that even in mid2022, in the famously vaccine-charged state of Israel, tourism still hadn’t recovered to a fraction of its former levels. Even the great pull of pilgrimage for billions wasn’t enough to pull a crowd.

In Cairns, the apex of Australia’s offering to tourists wishing to experience the majesty of the Great Barrier Reef – one of the natural wonders of the world, no less – the streets and beachside boardwalks were also lightly populated.

There was also a mild but clearly detectable anxiety in Covid-cordoned Queensland about wearing masks in airports and on planes – where of course we still must. Not much, but just enough to notice.

Meanwhile in Tasmania, where I just went for a walk through the holy city of Hobart, I noticed a few earnest hippies even wearing masks in the open streets and frosty night air. Perhaps it was merely for warmth – God bless them.

But in all three places there was still a distinctive soundtrack of strange accents and foreign languages. People who had come from far away to experience and enjoy something new.

It made me very happy, and for a number of reasons.

For one thing, I felt that if we could put aside whatever ethnic or cultural or nationalistic backgrounds that divide us and focus instead on the children’s memorial waterpark, then maybe we could find a way forward to global peace.

For another, I felt that if we could just agree that all religions were harmful and destructive – except Roman Catholicism – we could at last resolve our differences.

But most importantly I felt that if I could just order a ham and cheese sandwich with chips instead of a plant-based soybean polenta with locally sourced organic lamb marrow, then maybe I wouldn’t be so goddamned angry all the time.