Saturday Journal A week of crazy Things, for sure

Right now the world seems l ike a dystopian fantasy writ large, real life from science fiction writers, or even the eerily prescient George Orwell. It should be an implausible B-movie you’d watch late at night.

But then truth is stranger than fiction.

I think back to my first time on a big broadsheet in a big city. I nervously took my place on Battlestar Galac tica, as our subediting desk was known, fearful of the wrath of the savage older subs for whom withering contempt was an art form.

One of the first stories I worked on was about a New York recluse, a man who hid from the world. His sister brought him supplies and regularly pleaded with him to step outside again. Then one day he did. And he got caught in the crossfire of a drug dealer gunfight. The old sub next to me gave me a jaundiced look. You’ ll learn, he said, that crazy things happen all the time.

But this is a new crazy. Imagine pitching Trump’s presidency as a movie, even 10 years ago? Would it have been declared too similar to all the other bad sci-fi? Or too out there – or too crude – to be credible?

But it’s real, or surreal. Against the backdrop of an unimaginable global pandemic there was President Trump this week, back from hospital for Covid-19 treatment and standing , infected and maskless on the White House Truman balcony, looking like he’d been glazed with an orange basting , implying he’d beaten a deadly virus in a matter of days.

By then some 34 White House staffers had tested positive for Covid-19. Who knows what that number is today, just in the small bubble of Trump’s own orbit. It ’ s bizarre, it ’ s incomprehensible and you could not make it up. It gets even better – or worse – when you think the vicep r e s ident ia l debate between Kamala Harris and Mi k e Pe n c e was actually upstaged by a fly. Yes, the fly that landed on Mr Pence’s crisp white head stole the show.

The flaring at the Mossmorran petrochemical plant this week would not be out of place in these scenes. Terrified residents called it ‘apocalyptic’, the massive flame could be seen from Fife, Edinburgh and Alloa, the rumbling like an earthquake . ExxonMobil put it down to a faulty compressor. A faulty compressor? When at one point the flare was burning ethane at a rate of 100 tonnes per hour? Where is the comfort in that?

A planned £140 million project to reduce the flaring has been postponed to April next year. Apparently we have ‘ the Covid’ to blame for that, too.

will pass W i th coronav irus infections surging again, and new safety restrictions on social interaction, it feels like a grim groundhog day. You wonder what will happen next, and you can understand the great significance of the seers, prophets of a sort, of the past . Nostradamus ’ prophecies endure over the centuries, and recently my attention was caught by the Brahan Seer, Scotland’s own predictor of the future from Uig (Lewis) who lived in the 17th Century.

He s aw the future through an Adder Stone

Testing times

– but apparently failed to see his own fate, burnt in a spiked tar barrel on the orders of a displeased Lady Seaforth, after his second sight had detected her husband carousing with women in Paris.

While some doubt the Brahan Seer lived at all, he lives on in folklore, and it’s claimed he foresaw the Battle of Culloden, the Highland Clearances, the discovery of North Sea oil, and even Margaret Thatcher. This time of Covid would have been more understandable to him, living as he did when plague and pestilence were

a dangerous and part of life.

I think of this when my walks take me away from the river and through the quiet streets of a waking morning and, sometimes, through graveyards where the gravestones bear testimony to the past perils of disease, of poverty – and of the sea. It makes me think of Dundee in the spring of 1645, when the great plague, already decimating Edinburgh and o ther burghs , was advancing from the south, and the Royalist insurgent Montrose and his army was laying waste to life and inevitable land to the north of Dundee. They arrived at the city walls on April 4 1645, laying siege to the city. It was a time of fear and suffering. But the port city coped with the plague pretty well. They closed the Tay crossing, barred all ships in the Tay estuary from entering the harbour and quarantined ‘all merchants, skippers and sailors’ for 40 days. So effect ive was the ir lockdown that the disease’s claim on Dundee was blunted.

It puts not being able to go to the pub in perspective. We know how the virus is t ra n s m i tt e d , we know figures show a higher rate o f transm iss ion in hospitality venues.

At the time of writing there are 35,787 cases in Scotland, there have been 2,538 deaths. Globally, the mortality figure is 1.06 million. While I’d rather consign dystopia to the imagination it makes sense to take precautions, no matter what President Trump says. And, if we follow the science and do what we can to ke e p ourselves and others safe, like the great plague of the 17th Century, this too must pass.

Clockwise, from left: President Trump during his impromptu Covid drivepast outside the Bethesda hospital where he was being treated; pubgoers contemplate a booze-less future; neighbours from hell – flaring in full flow at the Mossmorran plant.