A common cry of curs

Vaccinations won't save the world, but the iPhone might just.

Back from injection no. 4, and it’s still not any bigger: that’s good isn’t it, when your arm doesn’t swell up? At least I didn’t cry. No common cry for me.

The Covid injection centre has a bottleneck and it’s systemic, and it’s a good thing. How can a systemic bottleneck be a good thing? Because it occurs when you go to leave, not when you go to go. When you go, you’re only good to go after 15 minutes’ wait. The entrance is free from encumbrance bar a man in a tasteful Adidas sweatshirt (red – I loved it and said so) waving us all through to our destiny, like Eloi to the Morlocks. I was checked in in seconds, and the jab itself would have been over before I knew it if I hadn’t engaged with the doctor by asking, “How widespread is Covid these days?” (she didn’t know – go figure) and “Is it advisable to mask up when in the supermarket?” (she did know that: it’s always advisable to mask up in a supermarket, she said; a trend that has been popular ever since the Bende van Nijvel).

I complained to the pricker in exaggeratedly plaintive tones that I had not had sufficient time to mentally prepare for the ordeal and he replied, “It’s done now!” (indeed, it was over before I knew it) and I alluded to it being just like photographers that snap the shot on “2” instead of counting to “3”. I always say “Say ‘sex’,” and that gets people to laugh, and that’s a good shot; I sometimes wonder what kind of a shot you’d get if you said “Russian warship …” – probably the same as with sex, except in Russia, where you’d probably get 15 years.

Anyway, I got my shot, whatever I said, and then sat, not for 15 years but for 15 minutes, engaging in contemplative conversation with myself about the possibility of putting on two plays simultaneously on the stage of the hall we were in, which was about 25 metres wide – not quite the Sheffield Crucible, but maybe a modern and a costume version of the same play or plays that mirror each other, like Twelfth Night and El Anzuela de Fenisa, but creativity is on a low ebb as I feel not so much that I’ve been blackballed from Brussels theatre but more that there really aren’t any white balls at all in the ballot box.

Fifteen minutes is a long time to sit a metre apart from everyone in a hall. Last time, the metre was welcome, as protection from death. And now it’s used as a confidentiality barrier as everyone dives onto their devices. The bottleneck procured a crowd of about 30 or so people in the room, all but 5 of which (I counted) were busy with their numbed thumbs. A woman came and sat nearby to me and greeted the gentlemen to her left, and then the two of them continued on with thumbing their devices. They were there to preserve the continuity of our global community, and did so by communicating with the world and ignoring everyone no more than a metre away from them: their neighbours and, when they would be good to go, still their neighbours.

I looked back at the stage. A good lighting rig, about 300 seats maybe could fit in the audience, unimpeded visibility from all angles. It came to me: Coriolanus – Roman and as the Ukraine War. Lift the divider for really big-scale battle scenes, Rome v. Kyiv. I’ll be Cori. I still know a few of the lines from when I last did it. “You common cry of curs.”

You can even see me in action here:

The Brussels Shakespeare Society's Coriolanus. They've done it once. They're about to do The Tempest for the fourth time. Hmph.

This is me letting a common cry of curs know what I think of them. They didn’t look as if they were too pleased about it. Takes all sorts of curs to make a world.