Don Paul, Cape Town media consultant, content producer and storyteller, made sense of the nationwide lockdown by producing poignant, perceptive blog posts from his 11th floor apartment in the Cape Town city centre. For 67 days, these Covid Chronicles helped Don to escape “the sticky grasp of gloom … and edged me away from the easy embrace of despair”. Here we hand-pick a selection written in the first 40 days of this surreal time in our lives.
Day One: Friday, 27 March 2020
The thin-line new moon skims the silhouetted trees striding up Signal Hill and drops off the horizon. The night is still. A raptor hangs in the sky, then dips and floats away. Cars move like Pokémon on the street grid, tail lights flashing, headlights bright, running from the midnight Covid-19 lockdown. And then it happens. The city goes silent as only silence in a working city can — a low, sustained, sub-surface bass roll urban hum. The smell lingers: sea air, piss, and pap snoek. The city lights glower. Traffic signals flick to an algorithm plugged in at some control centre, and the blind-sensitive traffic light beeps “walk” to empty sidewalks. I go to bed. In the early morning, a raging voice echoes up from the street. Below me, on an alley that runs between the Iziko Slave Museum and Houses of Parliament, a large man dressed in multiple layers of disparate garments, typical of those whose home is the street, stands defiant, facing Parliament, belly thrust forward, weight resting on his hips, and shouts, angry and incomprehensible. His fury is directed at a marble statue of Queen Victoria, standing in Parliament’s gardens. He pauses and walks in quick, erratic circles, before again planting himself in front of the Empress to resume his harangue. The Queen, true to life, remains unperturbed and not amused. A police car cruises up Wale Street. Three young men walk purposefully along the sidewalk. The birds hunker down in the Company’s Garden, vocal but invisible as if holidaying from the burden of humans. In the afternoon, two swallows swoop past my balcony, performing an air show. The moon appears and drops again. I go to bed.
Day Four: Monday, 30 March 2020
This morning’s morning observation from the 11th floor in Cape Town’s CBD was of a police car chasing a vehicle down Wale Street. No idea how that ended. Read that a favourite US singer-songwriter John Prine went into ICU diagnosed with Covid-19. Mentioned it to a fellow admirer and he said, “Get used to it there are going to be a lot of them.” He’s right. Get used to it. (But if Covid-19 takes out Keith Richards, then we best get used to the fact the whole world’s doomed.) Concocted numerous reasons to go out for supplies but stopped at the door. Listened, instead, to a video of the Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall on TV, beautifully filmed, with conductor Kirill Petrenko and pianist Daniel Barenboim performing Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C minor. You can find out more here: Then listened to a video of Sir Michael Caine, sitting on a park bench reading Kipling’s poem, If. He did it some years ago. And listened to a public service announcement by Siya Kolisi, the Springbok captain who lead the team to victory in the last Rugby World Cup. Ended the day listening to the President addressing the nation. His gravitas has won the hearts and minds of many South Africans, especially those who had been so dismissive of his capabilities as a leader. Add him to the voices you should listen to in these times.
Day Eighteen: Monday, 13 April 2020
Easter Monday. Try and treat the day like any other weekday, determine to do two circuits of the stairwell. Decide after the first this is a day of rest. Make coffee, thinking about the re-opening of the Ugandan Café. A friend in Switzerland sends me a message, asking, “What would you say is the most positive thing about lockdown and corona?” I make a second pot of coffee and prepare breakfast. She’s precious to me, so flippancy – default position – is out. Eventually, I write, “A number of things. Becoming reacquainted with the necessity of reflection, readjusting my priorities, reading more widely and hopefully more deeply, but mainly learning to laugh again, and how to live alone.” Throw the question back at her, and she has the best answer. She writes she now has “time to focus even more on the little things, I am sooo delighted by the birds whistling, the sun shining, the different shades of green and all the blooming flowers”. She ends by saying, “We can’t change the situation but we can change our minds, I guess?” My heart fills with this person.
Day Twenty-seven: Wednesday, 22 April 2020
Eerie silence from the Company’s Garden this morning. Have all the geese been eaten? Watch a squirrel venture out of the park and make its way down Parliament Street: dart, stop, kowtow, dart, dart, stop, kowtow – takes all day. It’s looking for a fix – the humans have left the park and the squirrels, deprived of fast-food scraps and Pick n Pay nuts, are going cold turkey, and looking for more, “dragging themselves through the … streets at dawn looking for an angry fix”. Negotiating lockdown entails ritual. Wake. Listen. Get up. Exercise. Run the stairwell. Shower. Then visit one of the cafés – Uganda – and go onto the balcony. Doves fly past. Watch people on the street. Go back inside. And drop my coffee cup. It shatters. This is not part of the ritual. I am not superstitious. Is this an omen? The barista at the Uganda Café is not amused. At midday, multiple car alarms go off somewhere nearby. The news is full of mutterings about Covid-19 having been spawned in a bioweapons factory. Reminds me of the claims in the ‘80s that AIDS was cooked up in a laboratory. As Gore Vidal said, such paranoia serves a useful purpose for some. Another thing about lockdown is all the renewed magazine subscriptions. Wired publishes a great letter of hope, placing faith in science and scientists, not “because scientists are perfect, or even smarter on average than other humans, but because science is one of the best ways humans have come up with to reliably understand how the world works and how to fix it when it’s broken”. The writer ends by pointing to the “single, vivid insight” of Charles Fritz, a sociologist: “People in crisis help each other. Elites panic about riots and looting, but most of us just try to help the people nearest us. And then we help the ones a little farther out, and then farther again. The centre holds; the gyre widens.” Discover that a koesister goes well with a chilled glass of white (sauvignon blanc/chardonnay). Stay safe and hold the line.
Day Thirty-five: Thursday, 30 April 2020
The stairs are brutal this morning. On the balcony with a coffee it’s still dark outside and the lights are off in the apartment block to the east, except for a solitary red glow in a small window low down in the building. It’s always on, a sluggish, dim light, and from this distance it looks like one of this ’70s lava lamps, except the lava has solidified. A MyCiTi bus trundles slowly down Wale passing the empty bus stop. One of the security guards on duty in the lobby says they only allow 30 people on board in order to maintain social distancing. He has a monthly season ticket for the trains but they’re not running and he had to buy a new season ticket for the bus. It’s all digital — why could they not make it possible for him to use the train card on the bus? If that can’t happen now, then the Fourth Industrial Revolution [4IR] is still on a bicycle some ways back down the road. Willie Nelson turned 87, and the editor of the Texas Monthly ran a feature rating — and reviewing — all 143 albums the man has released. The number one — according to the magazine — is Phases & Stages released in 1974 after Willie broke up with his first wife. Whether it’s a fair winner will be debated for as many years as there are Willie Nelson fans. It’s not a song cycle to listen to in lockdown late at night, but it does contain what the reviewer termed “what may be the saddest country song ever written”. It’s possible in these matters we have only the voices in our hearts. It was Rilke who knew the geography of love and desire, that place “without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart”. Perhaps we have no measure for the weight of the real things in our lives; they sit within us with all the massive granite solidity of clouds burnished by a setting sun. Around midday a group of women come strolling through the Company’s Garden, taking selfies, and laughing — tourists, certainly not locals from the voices and clothing? It’s weird and incongruous and yet naturally what one should do, except this is a city in lockdown. They disappear up Wale Street.
Day Thirty-nine: Monday, 04 May 2020
Wake to a city emerging from sleep. The harsh incessant thrumming of rubber on tarmac, the smell of petrol and diesel fumes, of food being cooked on long-abandoned grills, of people shouting. Grateful for the break in routine — no more stairwell running — go and get a flask of coffee from the Uganda Café, load it into the backpack with a tracksuit top and set off for the promenade. The sun is rising. The roads are still empty of cars, but more people are running, walking, cycling, skateboarding. Dogs bark and fight and run crazy circles around their walkers. The morning is glorious. On my way back, I stop and sit on a bench to drink my coffee and watch the sun light up the container boats in the harbour. A woman stops opposite me and I think she’s about to give me a lecture about not wearing my facemask, but then it turns out I know her. I put down my cup, adjust my face mask and we chat. It’s one of those circular conversations where neither wants to talk about lockdown but lockdown is all we have to talk about, even if you’re side-tracked into something such as the fine difference between introspection and reflection. The former may lead into a spiral, an echo chamber where you only hear your voice, whereas reflection bounces you against another or others, and the return shot never always goes where you want it, and so you have to stay on your toes, think on your feet, prepare for the volley, baseline, net. It’s a tougher game, mainly because it’s voluntary. Introspection often joins the game uninvited. I finish my coffee and cycle home. I come to the top entrance of the Company’s Garden. Two military men step forward smoothly and stop me. They’re young, hard, steady-eyed. Their uniforms are crisp, their boots polished. We exchange greetings. They don’t smile. They’re not impolite. They tell me bicycles are not allowed in the Gardens. I shrug, thank them, and turn and cycle on. At home, on the balcony, a car goes up Wale Street, the snatches of saxophone music coming from its open windows. I hear children laughing, playing on skateboards outside the park entrance. The city stretches, rubs its eyes, and sits up.
- Don Paul’s other blog posts can be read at https://donpaul-story.com/covid-19-chronicle/
IMAGES: Don Paul