Apocalypse Now: Coronavirus isolation – continued

Guess the next two riddles, thought up yours truly:

First:

What is as hard as bones but soft at its fingertips,

grows and moves but always stays in one place,

has wrinkly skin but stays eternally young in its core?

Second:

What has legs and arms but cannot move on its own,

acts as second skin, can be hard or soft as you please and could be any colour of the rainbow?

The answer of the riddle is at the end, so you will just have to read on – no scrolling down, that is just cheating! 😀

The above riddles we made up on our walk today, the second walk of the week at the end of our third week in isolation. We are taking the isolation seriously and are therefore limiting the outings to the bare minimum.

The world outside of our apartment is still spiraling into madness and I just finished listening to a documentary on the Spanish flu which broke out at the time of the First world war. It is mind boggling how many things are similar to the current outbreak of the Coronavirus, but thankfully the governments in most of the world´s countries have started to take this outbreak much more seriously sooner than was the case with the Spanish flu and for now the measures are effective. Well all except the US government with its trump card Trump at the top, which seems to be a bad episode of a sitcom.

However, as a lawyer I am more and more concerned about the measures of even our government that are impeding or aim to limit the democratic rights and using state budgetary funds with little or no supervision. It is completely understandable that the state needs to help many different groups of its subjects that have been effected by the pandemic, however I have a bad feeling that we will be arguing about who got how much money for decades to come. Hopefully though this situation does not permanently encroach our civil rights, otherwise we have failed as a nation and as species. Our historic track record on these questions is not good and the current situation is just showing us that we have not learned from our past mistakes.

On this note I have also noticed that people are sometimes understandably sometimes exaggeratedly tense and ill-disposed against each other, from averting eye contact on the street to arguing in queues for shops or online when disagreeing with opinions of others. There are conspiracy theories floating around and opinions of self-proclaimed experts or just people who are more aggressive in their opinions without having the first-clue what they are talking about on one hand and people who can´t stand those kind of people and are willing to show how much they disagree with their opinions on the other. There is fear in the air, there are cautious people and there is complete indifference towards the situation. There are individuals proclaiming their willingness of taking the risk to their health in order to save their companies and the economy and individuals that are trying to show them the selfishness of that way of thinking because they are not just endangering themselves. There are friendships and family ties put to the test, some due to the isolation requirements and others due to stark differences in opinions. And that is only after three weeks of extraordinary circumstances and emergency measures. Imagine what mayhem is in store for us if this thing draws out through the whole summer or maybe for the next year.

Still, not all things are bad. The nature is having a break from the humankind. We are having fun staying at home, the home-schooling is going well, my expert article not so much (having rewritten it too many times) but I am still fiddling with cooking and with photography quite a lot and that gives me some sense of creativeness and productivity.

My wife has been going on early morning walks and taking photos of local birds with increasing success. The following photos are quite impressive if you consider that she made them with a slow ass Nikon P520 which offers an incredible 42X zoom but is really hard to get a fast focus or good light on the distant, small and fast moving subjects as birds.

I have no smart concluding thoughts or words of wisdom, but I do have a a video of us doing cartwheels, which is the best thing I the situation we are in:

https://hertourage.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Kolesa-1.mp4

Oh yeah, the answers to the riddles are:

First:

a tree

Second:

Clothes