Going nowhere: Trump’s gone, but his fans are increasingly articulating their frustrations in protests, such as this one with members of the far-right Proud Boys. Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images/AFP
Thursday.
It’s still dark, but I’ve been busy for a while.
The second Covid-19 case in our home in as many months means I’ve already prepared lamb chops, mashed potatoes, roast vegetables and a side dish of garlic spinach for the newest patient’s lunch. Breakfast — a ginger, strawberry and banana smoothie, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs — was ready a while ago, sorted while the first coffee of the day was brewing.
Dinner — smoked turkey and sugar bean casserole, thick with onion, garlic, ginger and paprika —is still being prepped. It also needs to be ready before the day’s work starts, or my patient awakes, so either way there’s not much time to mess around.
Fair enough.
I’ll cook 24/7 if it means nobody has gotten sick enough to need to go to hospital. All day, every day. Cook, clean, care, wash, work. Bring it. Anything, whatever it takes to get us through this.
The food’s also not bad.
Baba Mhlongo from the then department of manpower’s Natal Training Centre taught me to cook, about 35 years ago. I was trying to stay out of jail, and I ended up there. R12 a week for transport and a plate of phutu and curry for lunch every day. It’s a long story, but in the process, I learned to play the pots pretty well.
Cooking’s therapeutic, a good way to take the mind off living with the virus in the house. Lurking.
Covid-19 has infected two of us so far, despite months of staying at pozi, masking, sanitising, keeping our distance.
It’s only a matter of time the inevitable happens and it pulls off the treble, gets me as well, given the slow pace at which those who lead us are moving in terms of getting a Covid-19 vaccine into the arms of those of us who want it.
It’s unavoidable, really, with the rate of spread of infection; the apparent inability of the government to deliver the vaccine, nearly a year after the pandemic reached South Africa.
Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps fear and being locked inside since Monday is making me think like an old wit ou.
Perhaps.
Perhaps our leaders will surprise us all and deliver a vaccine before it’s too late and we’ve been totally decimated by the pandemic. Perhaps the lack of detail about when it’s coming, where it’s coming from and how we’re gonna pay for it aren’t an indication that there’s no plan.
No money.
No vaccine.
Perhaps.
Until then, the cooking helps with the fear. So does the cannabis oil. Treble doses, smashed along with the Covid-19 immune booster packs.
There’s not much else that can be done, for now, apart from sleeping in the lounge, masking indoors and non-stop handwashing. Thus far, there’s no real symptoms, beyond the sweats and a headache that won’t go away. Then again, it’s Durban, in January, so we’re all sweating, and the headache is probably a result of dehydration from way too much cannabis.
There’ll be an opportunity to test on Friday.
Until then, I’m going nowhere.
Unlike me, Donald Trump has, finally, gone.
Left the White House. Said his goodbyes to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with one last empty, petulant yelp and trundled off, too arrogant to stick around for his successor’s inauguration, too cheap to pay for an Uber home for him and his spawn.
Then again, Trump couldn’t really stick around for Biden’s inauguration.
That would have meant accepting reality.
Publicly.
It would have meant accepting that his final con, that he had actually won the election, was just that, a pack of lies, one last scam, and that the muppets who stormed the Capitol in response to his call to arms were the latest patsies in a career — a life, really — that has consisted of little more than one con after the other.
The ultimate flim-flam man is gone.
For a while, it looked like it might all end with a double suicide in a bunker. That it didn’t, that Amerikkka’s homegrown Fuhrer turned out to be ersatz, a bundle of noise, is almost disappointing.
Almost.
Trump is gone.
The millions of Amerikkkans who voted for Trump — twice — aren’t. Neither is the racist mob he incited, empowered for the duration of his term in office, egged on to trash the seat of government. Now they’re all popped up for a cancelled party.
Like millions of people around the world, I’m wondering which country Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, will invade first, now that the normal order of things in the United States has been restored. Which country will be the first to be bombed. Whose government will be the first to be overthrown.
Perhaps dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic and the mess Trump has left behind will keep Biden busy for a while; delay the inevitable.
Perhaps.