There have been huge bushfires raging across the state of Victoria for a couple of weeks now. So bad are the fires that when I woke today, the weather wasn’t overcast (as it seemed at first) but instead the sky was completely blotted out by a huge smoke cloud. The sun seemed like a torch seen through a newspaper and it wasn’t just asthmatics that had trouble breathing.
On my lunch hour I took a stroll through the park near my office to try and conjure up some sort of focus as the impending holidays have made me very distracted. In between splutters and coughs I noticed that, rather than clearing, the smoke had only gotten thicker. Everyone was going about their day as per normal but to me it felt like we’d fallen into a Wellsian plot - the kind often copied by science fiction writers. The typical scenario is: a huge ‘event’ occurs; the populace, at first, are confused and mesmerised by the ‘event’; common opinion is that it is benign and everyone gets on with their life, adapting to the ‘event’; until the true, malicious nature is revealed and the very existence of the human race is under threat because of the ‘event’.
I’m not scared that triffids or Martians or Specials are on the verge of ripping the world in half but is says something about humans (and the observational skills of sci-fi authors) when a huge atmospheric change is very quickly absorbed into the background and simply seen as being another sort of weather.
Note – We have been married for one year as of today. Being married, put simply, is the "Best. Experience. Ever."
I love you Roo.
No comments:
Post a Comment