In order to make it easier to read, the Wuhan Diary is now presented in reverse chronological order, so you only read the catch-up bits.
Day 92: Communication
In our household of five, it is extraordinary to see how communication with the outside world continues.
God knows how the broadband is holding out. At one point yesterday late afternoon, there were three ‘Zoom’ meetings going on in three different rooms, and an online teach-in in the fourth. A week ago, I didn’t even know what ‘Zoom’ was.
As our contribution to society, even more important as we clean forgot to applaud last night, we are three weeks into our Isolation Arms Pub Quiz series, which now has 110 followers. At its heart, it’s just an anarchic Saturday evening hour of cheering our own worlds up a bit. It is slightly ridiculous how good it makes us feel, though.
In a world of third party conversations held at two metres distance or more, you need all the closeness you can get.
Day 91: The next ‘new normal’
Thus we learn the next ‘new normal’,
All at home and nothing formal;
Learning this abrupt existence
Caused by keeping social distance;
Barred from pub or invitation,
Chained by family isolation.
Asking how each other feels,
Dreaming up unusual meals.
(Let this maxim be your motto:
‘Never curry your risotto).
Separate work, then lunch al fresco
Planning for the shop at Tesco,
Baking strange shaped breads to guzzle,
Cursing at the jigsaw puzzle.
Trying hard to cut down swearing.
Finding joy in simply staring;
Splitting out next season’s logs,
Endless walks for knackered dogs.
Calling up a long-lost friend,
Wondering, when it all might end.
The Fear
Then suddenly, on April Fool’s day, the job I had had for 33 years, albeit latterly part time, came to a temporary end, and I was ‘furloughed’. As a staff member, I was forbidden to work, but as a director, I had to, as, like almost everyone else, we faced a full-on battle for survival.
These were huge moments, when businesses who had been successful up to a couple of weeks ago, were facing bankruptcy. From major airlines to tiny airport taxi firms, from pub chains to franchises, no part of anyone’s business plan had included ‘British economy simply grinds to a halt’.
Down in the Sussex countryside, it was all deceptively easy. Up in East London, they were building an emergency hospital for 4000 expected patients: the biggest hospital in the world, and they were putting it together in little over a week. This was dominantly an urban crisis.
And all the time, the death rate spiralled: from 180 a day to 580 in just three days. Mentally, we all did the graphs for ourselves. We watched the nightly press briefings and wondered, from time to time, what was behind all the hostile questioning that followed. Probably just the price of living in a free society.
Above all, it was a time of hoping that the ‘grown-ups’ were right.
Day 90: Psalm 151 Percuniam Pro Hominibus
And on the ninetieth day, I walked out into the sand of the shadow of the Valley of Death, and I did wail, and God did hear me.
‘Hast thou come to see a reed shaken by the wind?’ he asked, but I replied that it had more to do with banks, and trying to borrow money off them to get though this virus thing. On saying the word ‘banks’, I smote my breast and other dramatic stuff like that.
‘Wherein lies the problem?’ asked God, who had something of a classical turn of phrase. ‘Why smitest thou thy breast in that dramatic way?’
‘They won’t lend me any,’ said I, who didn’t. ‘Without directors’ guarantees, which I can’t give. And endless paperwork, which I don’t have the time to do. And the patience of Job, who I don’t know. And the fact that the Chancellor has guaranteed 80% of it.’
And the Lord sighed, and said in his frustration: ‘Have you learned nothing? Who is thine bank?’ And I told him.
‘Have you any idea,’ the Lord said, suddenly becoming conversational. ‘What they have gone through in the last ten years?’ The wind shivered through the desert foliage and I admitted that I hadn’t.
‘Verily, even so far back as 2008, and that refinancing package of £3 billion from Qatar that stopped them having to be nationalised. And that painful court case.’
I pointed out unto the Lord that this wasn’t exactly my problem, but he went on. ‘And that £72 million fine for poor handling of financial risks back in 2015. How much gnashing of teeth did that cause?’
I demurred, until he told me that the question was purely rhetorical ‘And the 210 million euros for running illegal information chat rooms last year. And the £284 million pound fine, again in 2015, for manipulating Foreign exchanges’. I spake to the Lord and told him that he seemed to have a pretty good handle on financial stuff.
He ignored the flattery. ‘And the £38 million fine in 2014 for failing to protect client’s custody assets. And the £11 billion to date that they have had to pay for mis-selling pension protection insurance. And the £21 million fine for currency rigging in 2019. And the £7.7 million fine in 2011 for investment advice failures’
‘And thou,’ he said returning to the classical, ‘thou chastiseth them for wanting a director’s guarantee for an humble loan of £250 thousand to keep your tiny business afloat. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
And I looked up and I saw the clouds part, and I knew that this was a God who was all-knowing, and all-loving.
And I knew in a flash of light that the endless men in suits saying: ‘I would if I could, but I’ll have to run it past the credit team’, and the ceaseless versions of ‘computer says no’ were all my fault, and that I had no right to expect salvation from that direction. And I thanked the Lord that this bank was still in business after all these terrible things had happened to them.
And thus I walked reflectively back into the desert, thinking of my own grievous sins, until I heard a powerful ‘Ahem’ from behind.
‘Yes, Lord?’ I asked, for I was sore afraid.
‘I was being sarcastic,’ he said.
How we spent our time
Each evening, Trevor and I played virtual ‘Howzat’ on FaceTime, a dice game for cricketing adolescents.
After five games, I was 3-2 up, by virtue of a last gasp victory in the fourth game (last wicket partnership of 60 between the Pope and Diane Abbot), and a crushing victory in the fifth (Kim Jong Un 94*; Buddha 55).
It was an anarchic 30 minute interlude in the days of two middle aged men whose own working lives and routines had been torpedoed.
And each evening, we wondered how many games the series would go on for.
‘Sixty,’ I reckon, said Trevor, and we both knew what that meant to us if he was right.
Day 86: The March of the White Vans
And while our shops emptied, and whilst our lives slowed,
A convoy of dirty white vans hit the road.
As from a safe distance, cautiously dropping,
An army of drivers chucked out our shopping.
Computers for home work, freezers for meals,
Toys, indoor games and new bicycle wheels;
Coffee for leisure and tools to strip weeds,
Massive great packets of vegetable seeds.
Books on the plague and cheap wine by the hour
And dozens of gluten free packets of flour.
‘If we can’t go out there to get it’, we said
‘We’ll find a white van to deliver instead.’
The First New Normal
Man became top animal, amongst other ways, through his adaptability.
And thus we started to adapt to the strange new normal, going out to do only the four things we had been told to go out for- essential work, essential shopping, exercise and looking after people who could not look after themselves. Having worried that we might run out of petrol, most of us found we hardly needed any at all. And having not really planned meals beyond today and tomorrow, the sight of empty supermarket shelves made us schedule them a week ahead.
Gradually, the internet started providing a few solutions for us. Long FaceTime calls that became virtual supper parties, for example, WhatsApp groups that became a channel for gossip, or for jokes that weren’t quite suitable for general consumption. Online classes in yoga, cookery, wellbeing, burgeoned, as experts took to the ether to keep an income stream going. Never had a box set been more welcome.
The biggest gainer of all appeared to be a video conferencing software company called Zoom. One week, only edgy corporates had heard of it; the next we had all installed it the better to bring groups of our friends together, and Zoom’s share price had doubled.
And, obviously, Jeff Bezos was rubbing his hands together. But then, he always seems to be.
Day 84: The War Cabinet goes sick
By Late in the month, with the prospects yet dimmer,
The news mainly bad and the outlook much grimmer;
We looked to our own boss for what he suggested,
And heard he himself had been positive tested.
‘I’m scarcely affected, but self-isolating;
The plan will continue, and no one is waiting’.
‘Oh yikes!’ we all said, ‘but at least we’ve got Matt,
The Health Minister’s fine and will keep up the chat.’
‘Ahem,’ said the Minister, looking quite blue,
I’ve just had the test and now I’ve got it too.’
‘God save us!’ we cried, as we begged for relief,
Then down went our scholarly medical chief.
The Loneliness
A list of 1.2 million ‘highly vulnerable’ people had been written to by the NHS, asking them to self-isolate for a period of twelve weeks. Vulnerable, in the sense that their own age or underlying medical conditions made it highly likely that they would end up in hospital, or dead, if they contracted the disease.
Thus people, many of whom by and large were already pretty isolated, started to get used to the four walls that surrounded them, and many prepared for a life of having to rely on the charity of others to help keep them provisioned and sane.
The prevailing maths probably encouraged them to take this seriously from the earliest point: there were 1.2 million of them, and just 6600 critical care beds in the country. Granted, the latter figure would grow, and grow quickly, but not in a way that would allow them any room for comfort.
Whatever happened, we all got the feeling that the way that we dealt with our old and vulnerable was under the spotlight as never before, not just pale faces through the protection of a window, but the people we would all become ourselves, sooner or later.
One way or another, we were mortgaging our children’s futures to protect them.
In the vast majority of cases, good citizenship dominated.
Day 83: America reels under the virus. A hero emerges.
But west, in America, things had gone dire,
With the incidents up and the growth rate much higher.
And with all the citizens wondering whether
They had a true leader to bring them together.
‘Who could it be?’ They all asked in their fear,
‘Could it be that strange man with the flyaway hair?
Could it be the old bloke with the perma-glow skin,
And the questionable cap and the vacuous grin?’
Yes, it could, with his air of offended defiance,
His versions of truth and contempt for the science.’
But the leader just sat as they started to shake,
And implied half of it was just news that was fake.
‘You’ll find you can look at our actions in pride,
When the history is written, and so few have died’
The Applause
Then one Thursday night at exactly 8 p.m, we went out into the roads and streets that we lived on, and we applauded our health workers until our hands hurt. From busy cities to lonely hilltop farms we clapped them to the echo, every last one of them, and we hoped that they would feel the love. Because this time we meant it.
In a country that tends to confuse the love it professes for its National Health Service with the reality of just wanting it to be there for us when we need it, this was genuine, and it was heartfelt. We had read of, even perhaps known personally, of the little sacrifices and enormous bravery that all these people showed at the start of each shift when they went back in to the furnace.
And, not before time, we wanted them to know that we understood and appreciated what they were doing for us.
Day 78: Stuck in the wrong place
Here I am, in Machu Picchu
Where the Incas came to be;
Where the Emperor Pachacuti
Built the ruins we now see.
Here I am, in countless selfies
Smiling for the folks back home
By the Urubamba River
Underneath an Incan dome.
Took six months of graft to get here,
Had four months to travel on,
Till the text arrived from Lima
Saying that the trip was done.
Can’t stay here, but can’t move onwards.
When the Music Stopped
It’s all very well telling people to lock-down and self-isolate in their own homes, but the nature of modern living is to be somewhere else, often very far away.
Many of these were young people on the adventure of a lifetime, some of whom were suddenly getting more adventure than they ever bargained for, but most of whom just made their orderly way back in a slow, disappointed reverse diaspora. Others, perhaps older, were making long-planned visits to the other side of the world, only to be quarantined, or told to go home, as soon as they had touched down.
In places like India and Peru, where the movement rules were far stricter than elsewhere, people found themselves stuck in places that, only weeks before, they had dreamed of just going to.
Tellingly, most British people stuck in India were relying on Lufthansa to get them home. The Germans, in virtually every way, seemed to be having a better crisis than the rest of us.
Day 76: We meet yet another new word.
Thus down went the shutters and off went the light
As we did as he’d asked as we sought to do right.
We closed down our restaurants, cafes and shops,
The bars and that place with collapsible mops;
And, true to his word, the new Chancellor ran
To the lectern and told us his bold rescue plan.
‘We’ll close Britain down to prepare for the stress
Of a horrible spike in our loved N.H.S.
But you can be ‘furloughed’ and not lose your pay,
As we’ll pick up the tab till the thing goes away.’
And off we all went, every boss and assistant
To spaces we hoped would be socially distant.
But deep in our hearts we were wondering why
It was coming to us; and how many would die.
The Sunshine
As so often in times of national crisis, the miserable weather of the winter suddenly gave way to ten days of unbroken Spring sunshine. August 1914 and September 1939 had been exactly the same, as if the weather gods somehow understood, and wanted to mitigate, what was coming our way.
Walking the dogs, or exercising alone, which were two of the few things that we could now leave the house for, took on a new preciousness with the extraordinary brightness and greenness of the waking natural world around us.
You only had to look at a boldly coloured cock pheasant strutting his stuff in the margins of the paddock to envy the simplicity of his life.
He might get shot, but at least it wouldn’t be till after October 1st.
Day 74: In which we meet some more new words
By Monday we knew that we’d split into two:
The many who cared, and the couldn’t-care few.
The talk late that night from our tousled blond hero
Was ‘flattening curves’ and ‘defeat the sombrero’.
‘We need you to stay where you are in your houses
With just your immediate family and spouses;
As only that way can we stop the thing flying
From person to person, and pushing the dying.
So, as from this evening, we’re closing each place,
Where the public might gather and breathe face to face’.
So down went the shutters on cafes and pubs,
And bang went the doors of the restaurants and clubs;
And off went the engines of taxi and plane,
Not knowing when they’d see the daylight again.
The Silence
We awoke, almost the next day, to an eerie silence. Roads that had been strangled with traffic only a few short hours before, suddenly had no cars. Bars, clubs, restaurants, cafes and pubs presented their shuttered windows to the streets, who offered back only quietness. Every closed door represented someone’s dream that was at best on hold, and at worst over. As one of the most social species on our planet, we were suddenly having to get used to a world on our own.
And any idea that we could lay back on the sofa and watch hour after hour of elite sport evaporated in the cancellation of everything. The Cheltenham Festival lucked out by being allowed to go ahead but after that, every ground, pitch, track and arena was closed.
These were the early days, the quiet days. We were an indoor people fed on silence and disciplined by the knowledge of the death rattle of a fibrous lung.
That was definitively not what we wanted for ourselves.
Day 69: In which we forget our manners
And suddenly those who weren’t older or wiser
Sought masks and loo rolls and some hand sanitiser.
And flour, and spaghetti and oil and eclairs,
But bought them in twenties, instead of in pairs.
They cleared all the shelves, and they hid them indoors,
And filled up their cupboards and loaded their floors.
So then, when the N.H.S. workers went shopping,
After twelve hours of shifts, and near physically dropping,
The stores had been cleared, there was nothing to buy,
Only acres of emptiness, floor up to sky.
‘The only things left,’ cried the nurse as she fled,
Is the food I don’t want, and some out of date bread.’
‘But we are OK,’ grinned the man and his spouse
As they shoehorned and hid stuff all over their house.’
Citizens and Idiots
At the end of the Second World war, the myth emerged that everyone had pulled through the dark years together. Actually, they hadn’t, but it just suited the national temperament to pretend they had. In fact, crime went up by just about every measure, and the profiteers, the black marketers and the dealers in misery were doing fine throughout.
Their pale inheritors didn’t take long to come out of the woodwork this time, either. The strippers of supermarket shelves for whom society was less of a social concept than an opportunity for personal gain were first. Then the profiteers: the shopkeepers who decided that what had last week been £2.99 could now be a tenner more, simply because they had some, and everyone else was desperate. Then the scammers, in a virtual storm of fake emails purporting to be from a concerned government offering money.
Many people were concerned that this had already mutated into a rich man’s disease, then inflicted disproportionately on the poor. Cheerful skiers in Austria, or delegates at energy conferences in Singapore, or trade shows in Paris, unconsciously brought back the misery in their throats and their oversized hand baggage, from where it started to migrate, seamlessly, into the nursing homes and crowded suburbs of our country.
To people, in other words, who had no cause to know where Ischgl was if it jumped up and bit them.
Day 67: In which we learn a new life skill…
By now it was clear that it wouldn’t just miss us,
Arrive at the Channel and swiftly dismiss us;
The thoughts that entwined in our unrelaxed slumbers
Had steepening curves and unthinkable numbers.
So on to our screens, with a pallid complexion
Explaining how we could slow down the infection,
Came a man who declared that the government’s plans
Required us to re-learn the washing of hands.
‘It’s not just a dab, like the average Joe reckons,
But a detailed technique lasting twenty full seconds;
‘It’s simple,’ he said, ‘and to every extent,
It slows the spread down by some fifty percent.
‘Wow! Fifty percent?’, and we started to hasten
Around our abodes to locate a new basin.
Reminders
From their different departure points, aeroplanes and coughs suddenly became ‘events’ in their own right.
Aeroplanes because each day brought fewer and fewer of them, and fewer contrails across normally crowded skies. And coughs because, well, because everyone was aware that a cough could be the start of it. Instinctively, we would find ourselves backing away from the sound of any illness.
A roll of loo paper would soon become an event, too, but that was a whole different story.
Day 40: Welcome to the United Kingdom
Via a thousand incubators,
Each one walking off their plane,
Covid made its way to London
In the February rain.
Driving back from Alpine chalets,
Flying in from Singapore,
In the mouths of super-spreaders
Walking through each sliding door.
Dotting maps to chart its progress
Each case noted two weeks late;
House by house, a leaving present
Handed over at the gate.
The Great Divide
There was a point when the majority of us probably decided, in the absence of any specialist scientific knowledge of our own, simply to do what the government and its advisors asked us to do. No one alive had the experience to tell their children how it was going to be, so we didn’t even try.
But social media is a cruel mistress, flattering, amusing and misinforming by turns, and it was largely on social media that the ‘debate’ broke out between the ‘it’s only bloody flu, for God’s sake’ hardliners, and the ‘we’re all going to die, probably tomorrow and certainly painfully’ doom-mongers. To be honest, the efforts of both came as cold comfort. All we looked for was moderation. And honesty.
All at once, everyone seemed to have a brother-in-law whose cousin had a golf partner who once worked for the Ministry of Health and who happened to know that we were going to be locked down for ever. So, equally suddenly, most of us came to love the un-flamboyant, suited men and women who did the 5.00pm press briefings each evening.
Because they had suits. And they were calm. And, as much as anyone could, they really did know.
Day 29: Death in Venice
Out among the old palazzos,
On the squares where tourists queue,
Up the campanile stairways
Quiet, the new arrival flew.
Packed within a thousand cases,
Silent, spreading day by day,
In the old Venetian factories,
Elegant, it slid its way.
With each tiny, unseen droplet,
In each grandmother’s embrace,
Under Georgione’s frescoes
Elegantly, gathering pace.
Avenues of Lombard poplars
Shade each gently coughing breast,
Travelling out to see relations,
Always beautifully dressed.
Closing In
On 29th January, Italy detected its first two cases of the virus, two Chinese tourists.
The following day, having just declared a state of emergency, Prime Minister Conte assured his people that he had the situation ‘under control’. 50 short days later, his country was losing people at the rate of 1000 a day, and had well overtaken China in both deaths and infections. Challenged by its ageing population, and, bizarrely, by the fact that in Italy people still actually talk to and widely socialise with old people, the control turned out to be more hopeful than real
But in early February, no one really expected Italy to become an exact template for the rest of us. The truth is that the two Chinese who tested positive at the end of January were probably a month after the first, mainly asymptomatic, cases had arrived in the country, and that being ‘under control’ had not been an option from the start.
We stared open-mouthed at what was going on. Italy, for all the stereotypes, had a great health service, great doctors and the same technology as us. It was one thing in a city that we had never heard of 6000 miles away, but quite another in locked-down Verona.
Cartoonists had a field day, mainly with masked up classical statues.
Day 28: The Cruise of a Lifetime gets more than it expected.
The news drifted in from the coast of Japan
That the virus had somehow infected a man
On a boat. Only then it turned out he had been
In Hong Kong just before, and had felt a bit green.
The Diamond Princess, with its cheap entertainers,
Its crowded bistros and its stewards in trainers,
Turned out to be just what a virus most needed,
To copy itself in each throat where it seeded.
And moving around like all things we ignore will,
It ran round the ship like a fire in a sawmill.
‘Quick! Quarantine everyone!’ shouted each state,
And they did, and they hoped, but it all came too late.
At Sea
Between 20-25 January, an 80 year old man from Hong Kong, who was later found to have the virus, enjoyed a cruise from Yokahama to Hong Kong. By the time the authorities had been notified of his diagnosis, the Diamond Princess was back in Yokahama and about to embark on its next cruise with 2666 passengers on board, and 1045 crew to look after them.
The ship was quarantined just offshore, and the nightly news bulletins started to lead with the deprivations of the (mainly elderly) passengers, and the growing list of those ‘testing positive’.
Around 700 cases were eventually found on the ship (around 20% of its complement), and, although not widely reported, around 50% of them were asymptomatic. What was widely reported was that the bio security on the boat was shockingly amateur.
By the time the last passenger was taken off on March 1, one thing was abundantly clear. The new Corona virus had definitely not stayed in China.
Day 15: … and the rest of the world yawns.
In Europe, they greeted the medical news
With the air of a bunch who had too much too lose.
‘It won’t get to London; it won’t close our bars;
It just a Bird Flu, or it’s MERS or it’s SARs.
And there’s all the bad stuff that’s causing us toil,
Like the Syrian war, and the price of our oil.
We don’t have the headspace to think of ‘invasion’
That’s foreign, and odd, and spectacularly Asian.
We could close our borders, and set up a freeze
But it’s only a way to offend the Chinese.’
So we sat, and we watched as it shocked the recorders
And slowly and surely flew out from the borders.
The Understanding
Two weeks later, the new-Corona virus had made its way onto the front pages. The more thoughtful papers talked of preparation for a possible epidemic, whilst the tabloids shouted about repatriations. We might have been thinking about it, but certainly not hard enough to trouble the global stock markets who were reaching, as it seemed, higher and higher peaks each week.
The general consensus on the outbreak, if there was one, was that something had to be done to persuade the Chinese to close down the ‘wet’ markets for ever. An authoritarian society, they had proved by the remarkable effectiveness of their Wuhan lock-down, and by building a hospital in tend days from nothing, that they could do as they liked.
No one really thought that it was going to change our lives. All of our lives. Maybe for ever.
The problem, by that stage, was that the genie was well and truly out of the bottle
Day 10: The Chinese Government finally reacts…
A week or so later, a doctor declared
That the illness was new, and we ought to be scared.
He said that he had it, and felt pretty ill,
But they told him ‘be quiet, look away and be still.’
It took a few days, and a lot of persuasion
For them to wake up and explain the equation;
And then at a speed that was almost frenetic,
But late, they passed on the code of genetics.
And grimly, they spoke in their phrases robotic:
‘It’s path is quite fast, and its process zoonotic’.
‘Dear W.H.O.’ they explained at the knocker,
‘We’ve got a new virus and think it’s a shocker.’
The ‘R’ Word
The Chinese leaders are a sensitive group, and they did not appreciate being reminded by the rest of the world, and particularly by Donald Trump, that the virus was a home-grown product.
The W.H.O., who sent teams bravely into Wuhan and beyond to learn everything they could, unsurprisingly chose to mention and praise the speed with which China had released the genetic coding for the disease, which was genuinely important and helpful, rather than the fact that they had started it, and sat on it, for vital days.
The Chinese retaliated by saying it was probably brought in by some American servicemen at a sports event in Wuhan.
vent in Wuhan.
But then there’s nothing like a pandemic for bolstering racial stereotypes.
Day 5: The Chinese Government looks away
And back in Beijing, at the desk of the man
At the top, came reports of a ‘thing’ in Wuhan.
‘We cannot be sure what it is’, said the letter,
‘But people are coughing, and not getting better.
And all the tests show it’s a new one on us,
But we’d like to avoid any trace of a fuss’
So at Party HQ for some critical days,
They sat on their hats, and averted their gaze.
And back in Wuhan, from that pangolin sneeze
The virus took wings with a frightening ease.
The Shadow 2
A few days later, the new-Corona virus, as we still called it then, had made its insidious way onto a few front pages. In the news, we saw Wuhan citizens being sprayed and forced back into their own flats, and we saw streets being disinfected.
To be honest, the papers on January 12th looked to be more interested in Nicole Kidman looking effortlessly elegant, and Pope Francis defending clerical celibacy.
But if there were to be a shiver of disquiet, it was in the coming days that it probably started off on its long trip up the national spine.
Day 1: The Start of it
One late Autumn day on some green Chinese privet,
A pangolin sneezed in the face of a civet;
The civet then asymptomatically spat
In the fur of a dog, and the mouth of a bat.
But that bat was regrettably soon to be due
To be part of a takeaway meal for two;
At the end of which feast, the guy turned to his wife
And said that his throat had been scraped by a knife
And every medical potion he tried
Just didn’t come off, and he suddenly died.
The Shadow 1
It wasn’t really even a shadow, so much as an item of news in a new year weekend supplement that mentioned some new virus in Central China.
Most of us hadn’t even heard of Wuhan, far less did we know where it was. Most of us tended to forget from one zoonotic infection to the next everything about them, apart from that many seemed to arise in China’s ‘wet’ markets, where live animals mixed freely with dead ones, just as humans mixed with the potential consequences.
We folded the paper away and got on with what turned out to be the metaphorical crossword.
Comments