ISOLATION DIARIES PART 35: PYRAMIDS

So my role's not at risk. I'm not sure that makes things any easier though, as there'll be quite a few people out there whose are.

The big question left on everyone's mind is whether this will be it. Will there be another round of this? And let's be honest, nobody knows. They've told us they've done what they can to make it (what the Americans call) a "One and Done", but truthfully? No-one's making promises.

It's quite remarkable how quickly we've all got here - just 63 days after isolation began. It's a flimsy world sometimes, the business world. That was all it took for sales to slow down and for our reserves to fail to the point where we're axing our most valuable resource: 63 days. Our pyramid is built on sand.

I do wonder sometimes whether the world went haywire trying to make as much money as possible. Something's happened to us since the Industrial Revolution - a kind of long, slow descent into high-speed inequality, where the very few pharaohs get grapes and fans and statues - and the rest of us get sun-baked, while plucking and crushing and sculpting.

I'm not proposing any sort of thesis on socialism versus capitalism (though I appreciate it might sound like it): I'm just wondering whether we've been given this hiatus for a reason, and whether the shining ones at the top of the pyramids will allow us to change things, or whether we're an expendable resource, so long as they get to stay there.

Don't let me grow cynical though. Hard hearts go that way, and I am genuinely thankful for what I have - including the opportunity to grow, make more of my time, help the world be a nicer place, and loan any strength I have to others.  

I checked my calendar for 63 days' time and made a note of it. I hope it really is a 'one and done' - not just because I don't like this awkward anxiety, but also because it's a pretty horrible thing for all of us to have to go through. It's horrid for those forced into making that decision. It's horrid for those halfway up to have to cascade it down. It's horrid for those of us facing a possible lean time. It's horrid for those who have to go through it regardless of whether they keep their jobs or not, and it's horrid for those of us left too, who have a little more toil to do, a residual sense of survivors' guilt, and the anxious thought that there might be a next time.

But in me at least, the brook still babbles and the beck still bubbles. "There is a river whose streams make a city glad," as it says in Psalm 46. So even if the system is pyramids and palms and we can't change it, I guess we can bring peace into the bit of Egypt where our own feet have landed.