Janine Ashbless: Lockdown post

Tuesday, 24 March 2020

Lockdown post

Last weekend I should have been in the 19th century.

We were supposed to be running a LARP weekend for 40 people. We'd spent over a year (and numerous crew meetings) writing and honing the plot, making props, sewing and buying costume. It was so full-on I almost totally neglected my writing. It was to centre round a Victorian mummy-upwrapping, something Mr Ashbless and I have been trying to bring off for years.

(Yes, we do have a mummy. I wrapped it myself!)

The last thing we could have imagined was that we'd have it all trashed by a worldwide pandemic. In a matter of days it went from "There's a virus on the horizon" to "People are officially requested not to gather in large numbers" to "All schools are closed." We called everything off, but luckily we arranged with the site to bump our event into 2021.

Now here's the awkward bit. I'm in a risk group because I have asthma that can go from 0 to 100 when I get any respiratory infection. I've no particular fear of death* and wasn't worried about the Coronavirus anymore than I worry about getting flu every winter ("It'd be fairly likely to kill me. No point worrying."). I figure I've had an excellent life and not really left anything undone that I wanted to do.

Now, goddamnit, I have to survive this plague. The Show Must Go On!

Pah.

I'm in the best possible position, to be fair. We'd stocked up for Brexit and I'd just done the food shop for our Victorian weekend (which means there's a hell of a lot of carrot soup in my near future). My SOs are both here and normally work from home anyway. We're watching Altered Carbon and playing SO MUCH Gloomhaven, a game so long and complex it could have been invented for siege conditions:

So like Prince Prospero during the Red Death we are partying on. (It ended so well for him, heh? 😛)

It's weird finding ourselves apparently living in a SF novel, or a horror movie. We truly live in Interesting Times and it's all a salutary reminder how thin the ice of our comfortable civilisation truly is. And how much we rely on the tolerance, help and benevolence of those around us. My foreword to Lust in the Dust is looking too bloody prescient.