Welcome back to Rising East, the Spring Season. Over the next twelve weeks our editorial team will do its best under COVID to engage with the strangest spring we may ever know. We usually associate the season with growth and moving forward – whereas this spring it’s all about uncertainty.
Ok so things are progressing fast with the vaccine, and we all hope that the story of this pandemic is approaching its denouement. Hard times may be ending soon, but until they do, it all still feels mysterious and uncanny.
Important cathartic gatherings – like weddings and funerals – can’t happen. So instead we pour our emotions into tiny events such as finally managing to get that delivery slot with Asda. Where Saturday night once meant a night out with mates and creeping back home at 5 am, now I’m at home 24/7, doing anything I can to pass the time while waiting for something to change. Last night for example I was forced to play at bowling with a baseball and ten beer bottles. It’s that new phenomenon Spring Intertia – as if the world has been turned upside down.
Forced to press the pause button on our lives, we press play on our TVs instead. And the news on it so often looks like fiction. Trump supporters wearing spray paint and buffalo horns storming the Capitol building. Our own PM breaking his own rules on his bike. And at a time when humans communication is all but forbidden, scientists working out how to give plants the power to send emails.
Another story that recently caught my eye was the the one about the Ryanair Jab and Go TV ad urging the public to plan ahead for their vaccine by booking to fly out straight afterwards. The film showed groups of millennials jumping into a pool and sitting in a restaurant with no social distancing on the menu. Meanwhile people were (and are) still dying of COVID – and so there were so many complaints that the ad was banned.
It seems everything is up in the air except foreign flights. And those that are don’t always know where they are going. A passenger on a regular flight from the UK to Europe recently told a journalist that that scenery they could see from the porthole wasn’t the same as usual. It wasn’t till the plane was flying over Edinburgh that the pilot was alerted to the fact that he was heading in the wrong direction, of which he seemed completely unaware.
So as we head into the unknown with no pilot, Rising East promises to keep you posted – in the hope that we can all eventually find our way back together.
