Part 31
Another week and words on the Internet are not the only things that are going viral!
There’s not much to add to what has already been said in the public media. There’s quite enough doom and gloom, with just little glimmers of hope here and there. Then the conspiracy guys on Facebook and YouTube pose a completely different scenario. This ranges from the idea that when vaccines arrive they will be infected with the virus and spread it even further, to the deliberate planning of the pandemic designed to destroy the global economy and establish control by a tiny elite, with the rest of Mankind in a state of virtual slavery.
Which is more frightening? The reality of the rapid growth of the coronavirus or the thought of what life will be like when it goes away?
How does the average person cope? The feeling of utter helplessness grows as the bad news permeates every facet of our lives. Whether it be deliberate or simply another episode of Earth’s unfolding story, who knows?
My personal view is that it is sensible to follow the instructions of the more intelligent medical advisors – frequent washing of hands, keeping two metres apart, trying not to touch things with your hands when shopping and restricting one’s movement to essential actions.
However, just as important is the need to remain upbeat and hopeful for the future. Going into apathy is a recipe for disaster both physically and mentally. It takes me back again to my childhood during WWII in England. Of course, I was scared some of the time but in the main I was buoyed by the fiercely positive attitude of the adults around me. Despite massive odds, they had certainty that we would prevail.
There were rough days, too. One day, we had no less than fifteen air raid warnings. Our house in St. Georges Hills Weybridge had no air raid shelter and the nearest one was miles away. Although we lived in an affluent area surrounded by lush countryside, we were also only about four miles from the Vickers Armstrong aircraft factory producing Wellington Bombers. Our house was directly on the flight path for the Luftwaffe’s raiders.
All kinds of debris fell into our garden, ranging from unexploded anti-aircraft shells to bits of airplanes limping back to Germany. I was up in a tree one morning exploring, as little boys do. I was so used to hearing planes overhead that I barely bothered to look up until I heard a plane with a slightly different engine sound to the ones I was so used to hearing. I looked up then and, to my horror, saw a German Junkers 88 directly overhead. Although I’m sure it had no intention of bombing a little boy in a tree, I was out of there in record time, raced to the house and sprawled under the kitchen table, which was the next best thing to an air raid shelter for our household.
You know what? That’s more than enough doom and gloom. Yesterday was a glorious early spring day in England. Wall to wall sunshine. Reasonably warm in the sun but still cold in the shade. The magnolias, daffodils and countless other blossoms were coloring the countryside and, despite any stray viruses floating around, the spirits soared as my wife and I visited the grounds of a grand old manor house, where we were welcome to stroll around in the sun.
I was seized by a sudden photo mania, wanting to record every glorious corner of the estate. I’m not too excited by using my phone as a camera, but it’s all I had. The transition period from the stark but spectacular branching forms of huge trees, to the “darling buds of May” in late March provided a glorious backdrop to a lake complete with swans and ducks, with the manor sitting majestically on a hill.
It was a wonderful release from the confines of our apartment and, as I walked around, I had some pleasant flashbacks to other moments of rare beauty I have experienced around the planet. As a sample, the world famous Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens at the back of Cape Town’s Table Mountain, hosting a huge variety of plants and flowers as part of the world’s most diverse floral kingdom to be found in South Africa’s Cape Province.
In complete contrast, the towering cliffs of California’s Yosemite National Park and the breathtaking silence of the incredible Grand Canyon in the early morning, with the Colorado River a thin winding ribbon far below the jagged edges of the cliffs that fall away to its impossible depths.
How about the little village of Bevers some ten miles from St. Moritz in Switzerland’s Engedine Valley, inhabited by exactly 124 people when my parents and I arrived to stay for six months in 1946? Surrounded by an endless line of stunning snow-capped mountain peaks with lush green valleys and the River Inn flowing its icy waters towards Germany’s Rhine.
Britain’s Lake District, haven of poets and writers, the mountains and valleys of Wales, the lochs of Scotland teeming with trout and salmon, France’s Loire Valley, lakes Como, Maggiore, Lugano in Northern Italy, the rolling dunes of Namibia. Need I go on?
We live on an incredibly beautiful planet but somehow most of us manage to huddle together under the polluted airs of great cities. Once this traumatic and life-changing period of isolation is over, we should perhaps think how the future will change and how, more importantly, we can make our wonderful world a better place, where we can run free through tall grasses and hear the birds sing again and not shrink into our homes to outthink a virus.
What is wonderful is that we all have the power to begin again. Along with a new start, it would make great sense to have a novel and exciting technical development to help us readjust to a cleaner, safer, better world – the product of a remarkable mind, the creator of ExoBrain.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.