Van Badham: Even More Postcards from Coronavirus: May 14, 2020
It’s been explained by psychologists that strange dreams are accompanying many people through the uncommon stress of coronavirus lockdown.
Even by these standards, the one I had last night where Pierce Brosnan turned up and claimed he was my dad was a doozy.
He looks great for his age, by the way.
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My diet is slightly improving from a coronavirus peak of half-a-block of Cadbury’s Black Forest a day. This morning, I decided to go luxe with bananas for my yoghurt.
Drop a tablespoon of butter into a frypan. When it’s liquid, add a teaspoon of cinnamon and a tablespoon of honey. Stir. When it’s mixed, add two sliced bananas to your pan. Fry and flip until the banana is coated in caramel and the house smells like the atmosphere of a particularly wholesome American TV commercial.
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I ran into one of my neighbours at the supermarket the other day. We’ve been close the past couple of years and, when coronavirus started, we were still hanging out online for a bit – having Zoom meeting cups of tea. But then she had to cancel, I had to cancel, and we just stopped doing it.
Running into her at the supermarket was like running into an ex from a breakup you still don’t really understand. I totally got all Barbra Streisand at the end of The Way We Were and when I got home, I burst into tears.
Anyway, she and her husband are going to come over for dinner when it’s allowed. Which is a much better ending than running into Robert Redford in the street and walking away pretending like it’s no big deal.
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Our dishwasher has broken down. Ben and I have been staring at it, squat and immobile under a growing pile of dirty dishes, as if it’s an unpleasant family pet that’s suddenly become catatonic. Do we spend hundreds at the vet to revive it? Or do we quietly bury it in the backyard?
It’s clearly not a pet, or the vet would already be several hundred dollars richer. We also have not buried it in the backyard because, if we’re powerfully unmotivated to scrub a plate, we’re hardly likely to pick up a shovel and dig.
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The Pierce-Brosnan-is-my-dad dream didn’t end with his spectacular claim on my parentage. It turns out that he was deviously enlisting my help to lure flying-jetski troopers out beyond the protective forcefield that domes the city, so giant alien insects could mount an invasion from the hills.
Anyone who has any insight as to what is going on in my psyche, please address your correspondence to my management.
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Coronavirus seems to be breeding an odd selection in my earworm playlist. I sort of understand why I’ve been repetitively humming the Darth Vader Death March from The Empire Strikes Back while trying to do work, but why I’ve felt obliged for the past six weeks to mouth the half-remembered words of the “Yes, We Can” song from the Obama ’08 campaign is beyond me.
Tonight, the internal soundtrack gave me a break from will.i.am. And switched to Tom Lehrer’s Oedipus Rex song.
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Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States for eight years. But as of April 24, 2020, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee’s most popular tweet is “I can’t believe I have to say this, but please don’t drink bleach.”
It has received 1.5 million likes and 323,000 retweets.
In case anyone willed themselves into a K-hole rather than remember these statements were in response to an official briefing given on coronavirus by the current US President, Donald Trump, here is the transcript of what Trump said:
“So I asked Bill a question some of you are thinking of if you’re into that world, which I find to be pretty interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn’t been checked but you’re gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you’re gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’d be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me, so we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it goes in one minute, that’s pretty powerful.”
Trump has since claimed he was “being sarcastic”.
In the weekend following Trump’s remarks, medical and poison control hotlines were swamped with calls regarding the ingestion of cleaning products. In Kansas, a man was hospitalised for doing it “based on advice he had received.”