Mall withdrawal

So... it's June already and I've only blogged once this year, way back in Feb, before Covid (BC), at least before the globalisation of this worst pandemic since anyone living can remember, even my mother, who is 96 . Admittedly, she doesn't remember much (except for my loooooooooong list of crimes, of course).

Apologies to anyone out there who might have missed me, I have been neglecting you a long time now and cannot blame any virus for that. So I would not blame you in the least if you have long since given up on me and moved on. Indeed we have all 'moved on' since those deceptively innocent times in Feb, some, tragically, not of their own volition. And so no one can blame anyone - well except HIM (and him, and...) for anything.

As I write, the Covid death toll has topped 400,000 and the number of cases this morning reached a staggering 7 million across more than 200 countries, which is most of them, though a handful of countries are now - for now - Covid free, including NZ almost (we have 1 active case), numbers that just a short time ago no one would have imagined possible, except of course for the many experts who predicted the very thing and told us to STOP LIVE ANIMAL MARKETS and various other precautions in an attempt to prevent such an outbreak, but we did not listen. Instead, we went shopping, in our various live animal markets...

Until we didn't.

And you know something has changed at the heart of the capitalist world when the malls are closed for business for whole weeks and months, as they were here for 2 months and are still elsewhere closed, a totally unprecedented occurrence. Oddly, though we thought we couldn't live without malls, it turned out that we (the lucky ones at least) could and did - everywhere except Sweden that is - and survived, with a little or a lot more cash in our pockets and fresh air in our lungs.

They reopened their many doors here on May 15 but we only capitulated to their bright-lights lure last weekend to get emergency shoes for two of our crew of three, one a birthday present (one pair not one shoe. We're not that cheap). And the small, mid-range shop we ended up favouring, according to its manager had done more than $2,000 in sales that day, and it was only mid-afternoon, which she informed us was a lot! A lot of work! It wasn't our fault, we didn't spend that much, we only bought two pairs and the second was half price!

But never mind shoes. The queue for the makeup shop shamed all the other shops, even the shoes, and suggested its customers might have been suffering a degree of mall withdrawal during lock-down. Suffer no more, the mighty mall is back, with its many lovely lures. Just beware those live animals, they are not all as lovely as they (we) may seem and look, with or without makeup -- and heels.