This is my first blog post since something very strange happened to the website, and despite the loss of all my hard work and all the new hair-pulling – ahem – moments I’ve been experiencing, I’m strangely grateful because I have no idea how I’d be coping in isolation if it wasn’t for the odd and ever-changing world of WordPress. But I’m not going to talk about the obvious, because everyone else is. Instead, I’m going to focus on afterwards, when it’s all resolved.

So the first thing that everyone is going to get back to, I hope, is socialising. We’re animals, beneath everything else, and we’ve come this far as a vast collection of animals because we’re a collective, and because we’re great at working together. Only God worked alone.

And once we’ve become accustomed to not buying 16 bags of 8-pack toilet rolls every time we visit the supermarket, along with 14 litres of milk and enough bread to feed the five thousand, what, if anything, have we learned?

I’ve heard and seen a lot of people proclaiming the lessons we must take from the clean waters of Venice and the reduced air pollution in Wuhan. And as lovely as that idea is, it’s vastly unrealistic. We’re a global world becoming closer and closer by the day, and as it becomes quicker and easier to traverse this wonderful planet of ours, tourism and travel is only going to increase. However there are ways to travel sustainably, and some countries have had limits in place for a while (Dubrovnik being the most famous).

In the same way, I expect the vegetarian and vegan movement to gain even greater traction once the dust has settled, considering the origins of this latest version of the coronavrius…damnit I wasn’t supposed to mention it. Anyway, what is important to mention is that we, as a world, have a habit of jumping on bandwagons, which makes whatever we choose quickly unsustainable. Avocados, coconuts, almonds and quinoa have seen stratospheric rises in popularity, such that Mexican agriculture is losing considerable verstaility, the world is losing a huge variety of coconuts as more farmers strive to grow the most productive kinds for their milk, and Peruvians can no longer afford to eat quinoa due to its popularity in the Northern hemisphere.

I’ve been using the time to get back to basics, re-focus a little more on a healthy routine of morning exercise, healthy eating, work and photography, interspersed with the occasional glass of wine or choccy biscuit. In conclusion, if we’ve learned anything from this ongoing isolation from reality, I hope it’s the importance of moderation, something we have certainly abandoned in recent years.

Thank you Covid-19.