How to survive Swine Flu

When you are 23, as i was when Chernobyl exploded, you don’t remember things that happened 23 years earlier. Thirty one years later you do, and sometimes it feels like yesterday. And three decades ago the world seemed a simpler place, though already a lot more complicated than it had been two decades before that.

John Updike in his novel, “The Journey to the Dead” put it like this – “…. Those Fifties and early Sixties when you moved toward your life with an unstressed freedom no one could understand, now, who had not been young then. There was less outside to that world – less money, fewer cars and people and buildings – and more inside, more blood and hopefulness. Nothing, really, had cost much, relative to now, and nothing, not love or politics, was half so hyped as now.”

And somewhere during this time the world became easier to panic and now it feels as if someone actively tries to keep us in a state of constant fear.

A few years back Asian Flu was going to kill everyone, cats were not to be allowed out lest they ate a contaminated bird, people stockpiled flu vaccines, my mayor visited every house in the commune to ensure all chickens and geese were confined to closed accommodation and yet today no one seems to consider the threat a threat.

Death by international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction predated this Chicken Paranoia which in turn was replaced by impending ecological disaster which gave way to the financial meltdown of society which now rolls aside for Swine Flu and the intervals between these disasters are decreasing in reverse proportion to our ability to deal with them.

One of the worst things of ageing is the inability to know if you are old enough and thus wise enough to say, it’s ok, I’ve seen this panic before and we will survive to witness the next.

However age brings a deepening suspicion that there is more to the pandemic destruction we are assured than meets the eye.

So what is there to do about Swine Flu?

1. Well I would avoid Pork for a while.
2. I would probably become vegetarian again.
3. I’ll holiday elsewhere than Mexico, though it’s probably the safest place to be right now
4. And I won’t read the newspaper for a few days too.