Distances and No Salon This Week (Patreon)

Hallo lovely Patreonites.

I’m writing this in the early morning of a sleepless night spent waiting for someone on the other side of the world to die. It’s a uniquely modern version of an age old sadness. A very helpless feeling, being kept up to date with life and death by messages, at such a vast distance. Though as ever with the approach of death, whatever your proximity, you’re always helpless.

It’s one of those invisible covid deaths. An illness that needed treatment and attention that the hospital system was too under load to give. How much of a difference more attention earlier would have made is always unknowable.

We hadn’t talked for a long time, headed off on different paths in life, though our last conversation was kind. I’d assumed we’d bump into one another at some point later down the track of work or life, and now we won’t. From now on, all the conversations that we’ll ever have had are in the past. Unchangeable.

The thing to do in a cosmic sense is probably to reach out to your loved ones and friends. On my behalf, please do that with the hour you’d have spent on the salon this week. I’m going to take this Tuesday off.

Lots of love

See you next week

A