The Corona Chronicles
When it became apparent that the covid-19 outbreak was not going to be a mere blip on the newsflow so much as a major global upheaval, I decided to keep a journal of events so that once we emerged from the other side of the maelstrom I could read through my notes and make sense of what had happened.
A friend of mine told me she was blogging about her view of the situation as an American living in Italy, and I mentioned that I was writing about it too, but just for myself.
“You should turn your journal into a blog,” she said.
I told her that I had thought about it but that I had decided against it because I might end up blithely admitting to doing or thinking things that with hindsight would come across as naive, foolish or horrifically dangerous.
I told my mother about the conversation, and she reckoned I should do the blog – not a neatly curated one, released months after the fact, suitably sanitised of incriminating admissions, but a real-time one, because it’s what people are interested in at the moment – in fact, it’s ALL people are interested in at the moment – and because “it’s commentary. It’s just commentary!”
So here it is. I initially intended it to be a sober record of the spread of the epidemic, how governments reacted, key events and other notable historic information, but within a few paragraphs it had swerved, as my journals tend to do, into stories about people, so it’s not quite what it might have been but it is what it is.
Make of it what you will.
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The Corona Chronicles 