Thrilled to get the bug again

When news broke of Covid cases in a Christchurch suburb, I immediately dashed off to the library to take out a whole stack of books. That is after I’d swung by the garden centre to buy more seedlings, and the supermarket to stock up on T sauce and toilet paper, the latter running dangerously low in stocks.

So when we didn’t go into lockdown, I had to plough through them, didn’t I? The books I mean, not the loo paper.

There’s nothing like a spot of panic buying to try and take control over a lockdown period where you can grow your own and escape from the constant narrative of the plague and a dying planet by reading and entering alternate realities.

It’s a way of coping and hoping for the best, while preparing for the worst. Fortunately, there was no spread of Delta in the highly vaccinated community, and a lockdown was unnecessary.

The happy by-product of putting pressure on myself to read the stack of books has me back in the swing of it, and now it’s like the good old days when I devoured a couple of books a week.

Falling out of the habit of reading leaves me feeling guilty, and as dumb as a sock. One tends to go through phases of attempting to read a perfectly decent book but without committing to it. It’s like putting a needle on a record only to find you can’t settle it into the groove.

I grew up in a family where a good book ran through us like a contagion. Siblings would hover over you and berate you for not being quick enough to get to the finish line of a novel rumoured to be a little ripper.

You had to put your skates on and polish it off, rather than savour it, sink into the embrace of an armchair and indulge in the slowing down of those last few precious chapters before bidding a fond farewell to all the characters you’d met along the way.

An impatient queue was breathing down your neck. Their unsubtle subtext? Don’t bogart that book, my friend, pass it over to me.

That’s how I felt about that stack of library books and the beauties I’d discovered. There was a hard-wired haste, a contagion raging in me to get them read and returned through the library slot so someone else could get their minds and mitts on them for their great escape. Giving the reading of them the hurry-up was the right and proper community-spirited thing to do.

For weeks I had been trying to come up with a collective noun for anti-vaxxers, till I saw Tuesday’s protest and the family C-word came back to me. What I was witnessing was a contagion of anti-vaxxers, QAnon-nonentities etc, storming the capital.

This crazy cultural salad of ill-matched groups had come together like a bad blind date, not knowing the back-stories or what each faction stood for.

A bunch of angry extras had been let out from a film lot, a director had yelled ‘‘Action!’’ on a B-grade political thriller, and uneasy riders on motorbikes had supplied the smoke and noise for the special effects.

If the protesters were books, a library shelf would struggle to give them house room. Defying the Dewey Decimal System, these disparate desperadoes would be too far-fetched even for the fiction section.

Impossible to catalogue, we have to wait for the historians to write them a quick history before removing them to the remaindered section.