For these past two days I've headed south out of my front door, and a lot has seemed suitable. Some shops are open now, as you know. I went to Forbidden Planet. You have to enter through the rear door, where the people behind the desk explain happily and quietly the new one way system, and how you're not supposed to touch anything that you don't want to buy, and as I moved through the shop I looked at these vinyl wotnots with new eyes and realised I was now in the mindset of a visitor to a regional toy museum, and that felt like an improvement. When I exited, everything else seemed improved upon: Shaftesbury Avenue seemed suitably free of traffic, with a suitable number of people in masks keeping a suitable distance even as far as Oxford Street. And the evening seemed suitably warm. And by suitably I mean perfectly. I mean just right, which it strikes me is something London hardly ever seems, which is fair enough. I've known the city deserted, sure, but not simply uncrowded. With one possible exception: the Summer of 2012, when the Olympics saw a lot of Londoners leave because they thought it was going to be unbearable, and then it turned out to be more bearable than we'd known in years. However, according to my daily Covid reporting-on-myself app the number of new cases has risen twenty five percent to two-thousand a day, so perhaps this feeling is madness, but it feels like the opposite, that's the point, and I thought that worth recording. Look at it. Thank you, like the banners say, and hashtag stay safe.
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