November 16th, 2020Kyle’s Rant

After all, life is a series of lessons. You are born with a few instincts like where your mum’s boob is located and how to get attention, and the rest is learnt. Mannerisms and the way you handle stuff is nature or nurture but the big life lessons come about by practical learning.
Mum always said don’t eat anything bigger than your head but I had to go out and give it a go, in the same way (so I am told) that Adam was told that he can eat freely of all the trees in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But he had to give it a red-hot crack and now here we are paying for his produce cravings.

So, what have we learned from the panic buying other than there is little difference in the brands of canned tomatoes and a huge difference in the quality of toilet paper brands? I suggest not much.
And what have we learnt about relationships, hopefully a lot, with family being separated by rings of steel and border closures. I also feel the friends’ cards have been shuffled, with a few not making the grade. The kind of friends that you keep around to stack numbers at the post-pandemic party but are no longer the ones that come half an hour before the party starts so as guests don’t feel they are walking into an empty room and your party sucks big time.
But what have we learnt about patience? Once again I fear it is a fleeting education with things returning to a new normal fairly soon. Business will go on and customers’ expectations will be higher than Keith Richards at an all-you-can-eat hash cookie buffet. And the foodie reviews will once again start rating our good restaurants low stars because the coffee wasn’t served at precisely 100 degrees from a coffee bean that has passed through a marsupial’s bottom – back to first world problems.
I do hope we take something tangible out of this whole débâcle but looking at the drivel on the community Facebook sites, I fear we won’t. The problem is that humans are a unique animal, highly adaptive and highly forgetful. How quickly did we learn to live with lockdown restrictions, supermarket buying restrictions and that awful homemade sourdough bread? It is quite likely we will simply resume head-first into our consumerism society, looking for the next shiny thing to draw our attention away from our interconnected universe.
Dark Rant over… (Ed’s note: I only made that sourdough once…)