It’s just another pandemic Monday

This is the perfect sludgy January opportunity for a column on getting through the pandemic with books, films, objects — anything but other people.

Although to be honest, I’m not. Getting through, I mean. What day is it? Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Sometimes I touch something solid and ordinary, a winter boot, just to check that all this is really happening.

The days extrude unattractively, like sausage meat through a mincer. Monday is like waiting a month for a bus. Tuesday is writing, unreal by definition. Wednesday, I touch the boot again. We’re in a river of news: the U.S. speed-collapsing; the U.K. as everyone’s sad, mad Uncle Noddy; the hottest years in recorded history; buildings and people in increasing disrepair. But we can’t take it all in.

My editor, Joe Howell, tells me that in “Waiting for Godot,” after Pozzo and Lucky depart, Vladimir and Estragon chat away.

Vladimir: That passed the time.

Estragon: It would have passed in any case.

Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly. This is good advice. One strategy is reading yourself out of it. Start with Linwood Barclay, the Canadian novelist whose thrillers are so whirlingly good that you don’t read them so much as enter them, like one of those high-walled copper Japanese soaking tubs.

You’re in there for the duration, blind to your surroundings, turning the pages saying, OMG, it’s him. Or is it? Don’t get in that elevator. Is that a police badge? Really? Don’t drink that. Don’t take that call. You’re dead. Are you not? Should you? Big mistake. Wow. I did not see that coming.

He wrote a trilogy about a dopey place called Promise Falls. I imagine Barclay stopped at three because there wasn’t anyone in town who hadn’t been stabbed, poisoned, re-stabbed, shot, drowned, garrotted, disembowelled, asphyxiated, burned alive, or marked for death. Every moment in Promise Falls is fraught, every decision a bad one, just like now.

But when you get out of Barclay’s soaker tub you’re still in the pandemic.

Pandemic literature is fascinating. New to rereading, I have now read Gary Shteyngart’s rural COVID novel “Our Country Friends” three times. Stella Gibbons’ “Cold Comfort Farm” is a great escape, as are memoirs of solitude (Olivia Laing’s “The Lonely City”) and obsessive cleaning (the Wellcome Collection’s “Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life”).

Another strategy: Find a new interest.

Yours could be the history of cereal or the Crimean War (the previous, not the one coming up). My new subject is clouds. I began to study them on nighttime walks, plucked black lumps in a cobalt sky, speeding streaks of slate, then white puffballs as the days grew lighter.

Spotify is teaching me opera. Clouds and opera marry well.

If this suits, you’ll need Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s “The Cloudspotter’s Guide” to bore your neighbours senseless with your well of fluffy sky knowledge.

Buy useful things. Posterjack.ca has been consistently wonderful, my Canadian source for beautiful blow-ups of the best of my hundreds of blah photos documenting pandemic “life.” I have inexpensive peel-and-sticks all over the house. Give them to friends. Go ahead, make yourself popular.

Best of all, buy nothing, they advise. This I could try. I am putting much study into buying nothing from China — where everything of course is made — with its violent, authoritarian government, its disregard of decency and planetary damage, its willingness to kidnap, to lie, to steal.

Buying nothing is like dieting. I don’t know how people with jobs and young families manage to diet — they perform essential services, and for that you need any gasoline you can find — but in a pandemic alone at home, it’s easier to go without.

Pandemic times are isolating and strange, leaving you hovering a floor above reality. Why am I even talking strategy? Just survive. Yes, try that.