Back on

On the 'doing things again now they're allowed' bingo card I have accrued many red Xs. I've been to the beach twice. I went and looked at a house for sale (on my relatives' behalf, not on my own). I have had a haircut, eaten in a cafe and in a restaurant, been to the gym, visited, seen a film in a cinema, and oh my goodness I have been to some places: the distant alien lands of Ballarat and Sunbury to the west, and to the southeast, the proximate alien lands of various suburbs where people aren't ashamed to vote for the Liberal Party. Emails are coming thick and fast about going back to the workplace. I drove past the workplace last night and it looked unfamiliar and strange in the glimpses I caught of it because while I have looked at images of it on every working day since last being there in June, last night it was shaded and half-obscured by trees and I saw it from a road which has substantially changed in layout due to the progress of the Metro Station and tunnelling works going on at that location.

Everyone still talks incessantly about the virus. If you listen in to those conversations (and I do, my street is noisy and populous so snatches of chatter float up to me all day long) they are becoming rote now and their content isn't apprehensiveness and fear, it's what a drag it is to remember a mask when you go out and whether we will be allowed to go north for Christmas. It's been fifteen days since a new infection was detected in Victoria. I pity the fool who breaks that run. How would you be? As it if  wouldn't be enough of a misfortune getting sick, you also have to be the person who causes everybody in Australia to pull some sort of disgusted face. 

I wonder what's going to happen now? Seems kind of possible that everything is going to resume just how it was, in a way. I looked out my living room window yesterday morning and I could see welding sparks cascading down off a crane being assembled in the pit on the other side of the half-finished mega development next door. So that appears to be starting up again. Gambling, recreational shopping, binge-drinking, public cooking of animal flesh, traffic jams, punishing the unemployed, horse racing and the fast fashion industry all appear to be resuming with renewed ferocity. I have some absolutely ridiculous 'is that all there is' type feelings about how the pandemic has not put paid to a long list of terrible social practices we did really fine without. Ideally someone would explain all of this to me. Aside from you, Katharine Murphy is the finest explainer of Australian public life but she is in Canberra and cannot help us here in Melbourne.

Photos now: