When you ride everywhere in the world you wish, whenever you wish, on the magic carpet of the Internet (thank you Mr Philips, maker of my beloved desktop!) there can be a strange internationalism about these grounded times.
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So for example following online the Pandemic Journals of dozens of locked-down contributors to the online New York Review of Books I'm able to visit and tune in to the Covid experiences of contributors in New York, Havana, Bangalore, Edinburgh, Zagreb, Bogota, Chattanooga, Windhoek and a galaxy of other far away places with strange sounding names.
A strange, vague "we're all in this together" international camaraderie sort of emerges from this. And yet (because everyone's locked-down experience is different and because all of the NYR contributors are thinking, articulate individuals) sort of doesn't, really.
Looking for a common thread linking, say, Ian in Canberra, Jeet in Bangalore and Carina in Manhattan, I think I see that we are all unhappy, frightened and irritable. But of course while all happy people are the same, every unhappy, frightened and irritable person is uniquely unhappy, frightened and irritable in his or her own way.
If asked to contribute to the Journal I know I would be making a big thing of the news of the popping-up of a pop-up coronavrius emergency hospital on my suburb's oval, just at the bottom of my street.
This welcoming popping-up stokes a range of feelings in me. Perhaps most importantly this popping up makes something material, something actual of a coronavirus phenomenon that by its nature is almost all about the invisible. I appreciate that.
The luckiest, most leafy-streeted of Canberra lives (mine is one of them) carry on strangely unaltered by the crisis. It is quite possible in Canberra to at times forget that the horror exists. But the powerful pop-up (I see it every day, marvelling at the shape-shifting speed of its erection) shirtfronts our smugness.
It says "Here I am, like an ancient city's fortification against the bound-to-happen-one-day attack of the Visigoths. Like me, Canberrans, brace yourself for the coronavirus worst, for the Second Wave which may be yet to come."
For a little light, but historically relevant reading during this lockdown I've been reading online the actual sheet of The Diseases and Casualties This Week from London's Bill Of Mortality edition for the week of September 19-26, 1665. It was the week of the highest death toll from London's terrible plague.
The grim week's statistics are fascinatingly chilling and show of course that the 7165 deaths from Plague vastly outnumber the deaths from all other causes at a time when the state of things was "parishes cleared of the Plague - 4, parishes infected - 126".
Among the miscellaneous other diseases carrying souls away one finds some unfamiliar-sounding ones including "Rising of the Lights" (whisking away 11 souls, it was any respiratory disease of the lungs) and "Kingsevil" (taking one victim, it was a tubercular swelling of the lymph glands which was thought to be curable by the touch of a member of the royal family if only one could get one to make a house call to one's hovel.
Everyone everywhere is reporting heightened, Covid-jangled emotional states. It may be that tissues for wiping away tears are almost as much in demand as the famously scarce lavatory paper.
And sure enough Sunday morning's news on the wireless of the death of Little Richard seemed to hit me with a ribcage-rattling wallop and sent me out into the garden with a box of Kleenex where only the birds and garden gnomes would catch me crying.
We keep special places in our affections for pop music that was an accompaniment to memorable times in our lives. For some of us of a certain age Little Richard was a big part of the soundtrack of our puberty-haunted years.
I am fond of saying that my ears prick up at certain sounds but it may be that the first and only time this ever literally happened was a 1950s day when suddenly from the wireless came a maniacal a-capella shout of "A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" then followed by Little Richard singing and piano-hammering his wild, untamed hit Tutti Frutti.
If you weren't there, then (in the music-listening world, in the 1950s) you can have no idea how revolutionary and liberating Little Richard's musick and his performing of it was. Pop music till then was bland, chaste and Anglican. Pre-Richard pop was a kind of dull, giant cork keeping everything joyfully primitive about us that music ought to liberate, bottled up.
With Little Richard's "A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" and then the videos of him being somehow polished and maniacal at the same time, music's tyrannical cork came out with a liberating "Pop!" Pop music began to dance and at last we young things had a licence to effervesce.
So Ian in Canberra spent some of Sunday morning enraptured (bless you YouTube!) with Little Richard videos.
The sheer joy of it temporarily vaccinated me against all thoughts of accursed Covid-19.
"A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!"
What Shakespeare would have given to have written something so visceral, so immortal!
