Today was my friend A's 50th birthday. There is no time in my life when I have not known A, our parents were friends, our big sisters were friends, we grew up on other sides of the same hill, we went to the same schools. We had decades of our lives when we didn't see each other, though he visited me and another school friend in London once, that was, when I think about it, literally half a life time ago. He took photos of us, I think with small plastic dinosaurs. Now he lives four blocks from me, down the same road. I painted a happy birthday banner on an old flowery sheet tacked the sheet to two poles., and did a cheesy kind of installation of the number "50" in battery fairy lights and surrounded by a wreath of plastic flowers. My friend KT has bought a 2nd hand piano accordion and is learning to play it so I enlisted her help. Our family and KT, a good 5 metres distant from us, serenaded locked down A. He was video chatting to other friends at the time and so they were part of it too. KT did an impressive version of happy birthday and we left a bunch of autumn flowers, the jar acting as a vase carefully disinfected if they choose to take it inside, then we walked briskly away, KT on the footpath opposite us waving a distant gooodbye. Effficient, covid-safe.
New Zealand's total of Coronavirus (including those recovered) is of today 647. It climbs but not exponentially. Ashley Bloomfield, the Director General of Health gives daily updates which are streamed live on RNZ. I watch them each day. He says he expects the numbers to rise for 10-14 days, and, if everyone sticks to the lockdown to start going down after that. I like the story that we are an island state and acted earlier than other countries and we could actually eliminate it here, and hunker down, hold out until there is a vaccine. I like that story better than the others. New Zealand has been under a state of emergency for seven days. It gives the government unprecedented powers, or perhaps it gives the special COVID committee unprecedented powers as Parliament is suspended. The state of emergency is I guess essentially undemocratic and is therefore reviewed every 7 days to ensure its still necessary. It was reviewed and extended today but that was misinterpreted by some, including some media, to mean our lockdown period (currently at 4 weeks) was extended by 7 days. Rumour spreads like fire on the internet. In New Zealand rumour spreads faster than Coronavirus. Someone asked on social media today about whether it was true you should wash your fruit in methylated spirits. I'm loving the re-visioning by some Māori of the lockdown as the rāhui. It's all over social media now. From maoridictionary.co.nz rāhui is "to put in place a temporary ritual prohibition, closed season, ban, reserve". I had only heard it before in relation to fishing or shellfish harvesting, stopping the harvest to give time for the babies to get bigger. People are talking about the layers of protection wrapped in the word's meaning. A collective decision to take time out to get things back in balance. The things we pause to allow us to pick up and continue later.
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