About Town.

 ‘About Town’.

Cycling around town during the Corona ‘semi-lockdown’ is like a dream. 

A lot of the Cafés are doing their best to accommodate people with ‘take away’ coffee, snacks, and such, but there remains a problem when it comes to the bladder -as the Cafes cannot offer toilet facilities, and Belgium isn’t really well known for its public toilets, but I must admit living in Antwerp gives the extra advantage of being able (as a man) to legally pee against the wall of the Cathedral in one of those enclosed by a wall, ‘old-school’, pee gutters that used to be all over town (in the old days' Women never used to pee I imagine).

Cycling over the main pedestrian shopping street you see people collecting ordered items from shops (the minority) but also people just staring at closed shops like consumer junkies in ‘Cold Turkey’- or pigeons expecting to be fed, listening to the regional accents many come from out of town just to walk through the closed shopping area which seems a strange pass-time. 

It makes me think of disaster films, where you see people walking around in a daze after some aliens have been defeated by Tom Cruise. 

A daze, that is the right word, we are in a new sort of reality and haven’t had enough time yet to adapt fully to the situation. We need to get out of the house now and again to stay sane, but don’t always have the inspiration as to what to do or where to go. Antwerp- luckily- has lots of parks, yet still, we (or some of us) feel the ‘pull’ toward the center of town, only to realize that a town center has become just a place where you can ‘consume’ ‘eat drink and have some retail therapy’, take the essence of that away and it turns into a ‘concrete theme park’ of how life used to be. 

A town with no ‘hustle and bustle’ is sad, like turning up to a party only to find there is no music, dancing or alcohol. 

There is a feeling of ‘what are we supposed to do?’. For many people, weekend entertainment has become ‘going shopping’ (mostly stuff we don’t really need). So I cycled, all over town, the same thing, except in areas where the small vegetable stores are still open offering at least some form of normality. 

The Coronavirus is forcing us to ‘reset’ to think about how we fill our free time. The bicycle lanes are pretty full with all the different forms of two-wheel transport there are nowadays, not just bicycles (electric or leg-power) but also Scooters the ones you see with people on them imitating meerkats-using not one muscle and probably going fastest. Young people earning extra cash delivering food in the huge bags strapped to them, some of the bags are ‘United Nations’ blue and make me instantly think of aid workers delivering food to people stuck in their war-torn bunkers. 

Pedestrians, lots of people out ‘for a walk’, walking briskly through town getting the kilometers on the clock to stay fit, people taking photos for posterity in case we ever forget 2020. 

Then there was me, on my bicycle cycling around trying to work out some new routine in case we comedians ever get back on stage. I stopped for a coffee at my favorite Irish bar ‘An-Sibhin’, had a ‘take-away’ coffee and a short socially distanced chat with the landlord, it helped. 

The virus comes and goes, governments and ‘self-important’ politicians tell us what to do and how to do it, we comply, but the only thing that can really get us through this is human contact, despite everything we Humans, we Sapiens are ‘survivalists’ we will find a way to defeat the virus and we will adjust, shake ourselves down and ‘get on with it’.  

But we do need public toilets.