Creative minded journalist, handling print, video and radio.
People who flooded along the streets, packed as close to one another that you could count the eyelashes of each of their neighbours. The viral decimator does not exist to them in their minds. Threats don’t matter when they want to celebrate the end of a war the overwhelming majority of them never knew.
There is a party on my street celebrating VE-Day that I’m deliberately avoiding by sitting on a deckchair, here in my back garden, with a cool Corona beside me. I can hear the polite cacophony of middle-class jubilation well enough from here. Laughter, the occasional calls for ‘cheers!’, and an endless loop of music from generations before mine. Vera Lynn has sung The White Cliffs of Dover around nine times during this afternoon, and doubtless many more times elsewhere.
Superstitions aren’t my forte usually. Assuming that little unrelated events are not only connected, but potentially foretell even greater things to come is the kind of thinking that strikes me as desperately trying to grab hold of something in life that’s missing from our everyday society. As if we are bored with the mad chaos of the universe, with the lack of barriers that prevent us from doing what we want, so we must make our own strings to dangle from, and subject ourselves to an invisible and omnipotent Nature-of-Things. When we do that, suddenly things are not only more manageable for our heads, but also more interesting, since there’s rhyme and reason to everything wherever we go now.
Jack W. Nicholls 