A brief dalliance with white bread knocked me out of my stride earlier in the week. I can’t eat it. I shouldn’t eat it, yet I do have the occasional craving for it and I also sometimes indulge. When that happens, I usually end up feeling flat for a couple of days. I’m a Byronist in these matters in that my gut is intimately linked to my brain, so if one is off then so is the other. I know white bread is my main food intolerance, though I often want to deny it and blame other things.
I also very rarely eat the stuff. I forget where I heard that cutting white bread out of my diet would make me feel better (I think it might have been Bill Maher on his HBO show) but it’s certainly a real thing. A lot of modern bread is made using the Chorleywood Bread Process which speeds up production, produces bread that lasts in storage, but results in loaves that aren’t particularly good for you. Certainly isn’t good for me.
Because I felt zonked for a couple of days, I’m not sure where I am with the blog or if anybody actually reads it. I certainly don’t know if people bother with these small personal updates but I’ll carry them on. They help me put my broad thoughts about the word into a structured form.
Today is Thursday, the day after people started to emerge from the lockdown and, by my calculation, about ten days before many of those people start displaying the first signs of the virus. I still think we’re going about it the wrong way. Governments seem to be falling into two camps: those that believe there will be a vaccine and are willing to wait; those that don’t believe there’ll be a vaccine and are going for the mitigation approach. That means, turning restrictive measures on and off for the next few years so the system just has enough capacity to cope with the continued waves of the infected.
Myself, I believe there will be a vaccine. I believe that we the science to match the political will, which, for the moment, is being expressed in the form of hard cash. Where science fails or struggles is usually when it’s no longer in people’s focus. I just can’t see that happening around COVID-19. From what I’ve read, this isn’t going to disappear on its own.
The problem with my side of the argument is the economic damage that’s done in the time we wait for a vaccine but I’m not entirely convinced we can do a great deal about that. I think it was Rick Wilson who pointed out on his podcast that free market conservatives don’t seem to understand that, if the economic does unlock, it’s still going to be government by free market forces. People are not going to be flooding back into cinemas and restaurants until they think it’s safe.
That’s a good argument but as much as I think he’s right, I also realise that the market will ultimately make these decisions. It seems to me that people are bored of the lockdown, of social distancing, of washing their hands, and crave for “real life”. If there are enough of them – and it seems like there might – then there will be people eager to cater to that market. The rest is in the lap of Darwinism.
