Editor’s Note
Things are getting a bit desperate. The novelty of staying at home to learn how to home school while giving up booze and cigarettes has worn off — and I’m not even a smoker. Winston Churchill said: “Destroy the free market and you create a black market: you overwhelm the people with laws and regulations, and you induce a general disrespect of law.” You’ve presumably seen that Churchill meme going around this week. You’ve probably also seen the shady characters leaning surreptitiously into car windows or exchanging on street corners with suburban housewives, small packages for notes — smokes for hard currency. Some suburbanites are better at doing the deal than others, a driveby exchange at the robot. Others shout from across the road, “Hey, you in the overcoat! You selling smokes?” This one may never have scored weed in her youth. We also all now know a bootlegger; reliability and realistic prices not guaranteed.
Most covert Covid stuff is a downer, but there have been some positives to come out of these particularly South African regulations. The zol song for example, a brain worm that’s in my head all day: “And also, when people zol they put saliva on the paper ...” is destined to be a post-lockdown club classic.
So, it seems, we’re living in a Netflix miniseries. It’s a comedy/horror filled with the absurd. Just this morning, during our daily conversation, my dad said he was out walking between the appointed hours when a disembodied young voice (he guesses about eight) came over a home intercom into the street. “Hey grandad, where’s your mask,” the obstreperous voice wanted to know. My dad wasted no time in telling him where to get off. And just now, this appeared on our family WhatsApp group: “I’m going out to catch the ‘rats with wings’. Your uncle says he’ll chop their head off for pigeon pie.”
Bootlegging, swearing grandads, chopping heads off, forager pie — it really is the apocalypse. What’s clear, though, if you read the stories from around the world in our main feature this week, is that people, no matter where they are living, are in this Netflix series with us. And surely we can all take some comfort from that.