Will share with you all what has been passed on to me by a friend:

"SUDDENLY

Suddenly we slept in one world and woke up in another.
Suddenly Disney has no more magic and Paris is no more romantic.
Suddenly, in NewYork no one sleeps and The Great Wall Of China is no longer a fortress.
Suddenly hugs and kisses become weapons and holding hands and walking the parks becomes outlawed.
Suddenly not visiting aging parents and grandparents becomes "an act of love".
Suddenly our bombs and machine guns, our tanks and artillieries begin to gather dust.
Suddenly we realise that money has no value when it cannot even buy you toilet paper.
Suddenly we realise that power is with God alone.
Suddenly we have been put back in our place by the hands of the Universe.
Suddenly we have been made aware how vulnerably "human' we truly are when faced with a microbe so powerfully inhumane


Dirk

Dirk, it sounds a bit as coming from the US Bible Belt...

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/real-boundaries-bible-belt/1617/



or perhaps from the Netherlands' Bible Belt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Belt_(Netherlands)



No, Dirk, in my humble opinion, it is a kind of a war, not as usual between countries, but a global war of countries with one goal: to tackle the disaster...

And there is a lot of cooperation:
Turkey withdrawing with busses the migrants inland from the Greek landborder...
Germany, perhaps because it has up to now controled best the pandemy, will receive now some 131 patients, if I recall it well from France and Italy...
Some VUB (Free University Brussels) engineers have started a kind of assembly line for "ventilators" (to ventilate air to patients. In Dutch "beademingstoestellen") with wiper motors from trucks
and both Volvo trucks will deliver next week hundreds as Daf trucks...
https://www.vub.be/fablabvoorzuurstof
https://www.tijd.be/dossiers/coronavirus/vub-ingenieurs-maken-in-enkele-dagen-prototype-van-beademingstoestel/10215810.html

OOPS and I forgot Putin, who, perhaps for local policy reasons, offer help to the US...and perhaps for electoral reasons Trump will accept...?

No, the virus will not last and let us hope that the world community will have learnt some lessons for the next pandemy...

Paul.

Dirk posted what some other gobshite wrote:

Suddenly we slept in one world and woke up in another.
Suddenly Disney has no more magic and Paris is no more romantic.
Suddenly, in NewYork no one sleeps and The Great Wall Of China is no longer a fortress.
Suddenly hugs and kisses become weapons and holding hands and walking the parks becomes outlawed.
Suddenly not visiting aging parents and grandparents becomes "an act of love".
Suddenly our bombs and machine guns, our tanks and artillieries begin to gather dust.
Suddenly we realise that money has no value when it cannot even buy you toilet paper.
Suddenly we realise that power is with God alone.
Suddenly we have been put back in our place by the hands of the Universe.
Suddenly we have been made aware how vulnerably "human' we truly are when faced with a microbe so powerfully inhumane

But I fixed it up a bit:


Suddenly about a fifth of the population of the world have woken up in the world that the other four fifths live in every day.

Suddenly Disney have shown their true colours by trying to kill an estimated 700,000 people that they packed into their playgrounds for three weeks even after we all knew about the contagion rates of a potentially fatal global disease (and made them pay for the privilege) - and Paris, devoid of traffic, rude waiters and noxious air pollution, is way more romantic than a fortnight ago.

Suddenly, in New York no one sleeps around much for a little while, and The Great Wall Of China - just as in the last half millennium - is still no longer a fortress.

Suddenly hugs and kisses become even more potentially lethal as disease transmission vectors than they always have been anyway, and holding hands and walking in parks becomes outlawed, so now everyone gets to feel like how it is to be gay in Iran, Iraq, Honduras, Uganda, Russia, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, etc ....

Suddenly not visiting aging parents and grandparents becomes "an act of love", which - as many parents and grandparents might gratefully agree - is how they would have always wanted it.

Suddenly our bombs and machine guns, our tanks and artillieries [sic] begin to gather dust, except where they don't, which is just about everywhere, and also of course when they will be polished off and used against rioting first-world populations in a few months' time

Suddenly we realise that money has no value when it cannot even buy you toilet paper, and that ironically it will have tremendous value even in small amounts for the 99.1% of the world population that won't be allowed access to it by the 0.9%

Suddenly we realise that power, as some say, is with God alone, and that this power is apparently in the hands of a genocidal psychopath.

Suddenly those who lack the imagination to accommodate a sense of true proportion have been given a hint of their actual place in the universe (a synonym for all of reality, which does not need to be capitalised and certainly doesn't have "hands")

Suddenly we have been made aware how vulnerable humans are when faced with a microbe that is neither humane nor inhumane but simply seeks the assistance of suitable host cells in order to replicate RNA proteins

Ah, could these virtual entries be listed as based on Chinese Sweet and Sour Takeaways?

Don't know, but only one of them shows evidence of using one's noodle.

As in the Chow Mean one - is is it Wonton?

I didn't think Dirk's entry was all that mean and only Wonton a little intelligence. You might even say it was on the Dim Sum side.

Whereas mine was Peri, Peri good.

But not pertinent to a Chinese takeaway observation. This may be put into your scotch bonnet if you are feeling the chill - or not.
 Dear God the things one finds to do to fill the empty hours between lunch and dinner. 

In Persian/Urdu  a Peri is a fairy. Just saying.

Next time you are in China visit Macau. Resist ordering any bat or pangolin and instead ask for the local dish. You'll be Peri, Peri supplies, I think.

I would be even more surprised to find myself in Macau for any reason whatsoever. It would great to be rich enough to be addicted to Poker. Alas I have only free Microsoft Solitaire for that and on level 20 of most of their games. Thus does time hang heavy and the mind seeks small comfort. 
At least you have your poetry...….. er… don't give up your day job.

The night job I'm holding on to as well, just in case.

I wasn't aware I had any poetry at all. Or maybe that was one of your little jokes? In which case I can only quote the late great WB (not Warner Brothers) whose prescience, as we all know, was as world renowned as his antipathy to the Saxon stock, and probably best exemplified by this lesser known ditty from his anthology "Maud, She's Gonne!":

There once was a lady in Kent
Whose humour, mis-shapen and bent
She tried to employ
As a form of decoy
To distract from the fact it was spent

Oh that poor lady of Kent. Don't know anything about Kent. It used to be a brand of cigs,,, or so I think. Possibly not.  Spent humour is so very good, you know. perhaps I am in overdraft? An interest free loan would be appreciated - unless you are a bit short, yourself....mmm?

Not poetry then  - blank verse - very blank. 

Hurrah dinner is served! If they would just loosen the ropes a little.

Love the hat. She looks like the Kaiser in drag.

I rather thought that the Kaiser was always in drag, along with half the British Army:



And now for a musical interlude while we all loosen our stays, or was it ropes? prior to dinner, here's the 'Temperance Seven' playing 'Kaiser Drag':



Sorry, for being a bit "melig" this evening (ask Paul R what it means) but I did my fortnightly shopping today and along with pasta and toilet rolls they had gin on special offer at just 5 euros the bottle, woo hoo!

That's cheered me up, MM - thank you!

By Jingo, you can't beat British Rubbish! Eat your heart out, nordmann   !

Siegfried I would say, dear Temperance...





Somber stuff (I see now that our "somber" is also your "somber")...

I never liked that music of Wagner, nor the man: that proto-nazist...
Prefer by long the Italian opera...any day...

Kind regards from Paul.

Cheap gin kills all known germs - and a few unknown ones too!

My quarantine is nearly over - yippee! I can go marauding through M&S Food Hall on Monday (Aged Persons' Hour). Can't wait. Freezer bags at the ready.

Imagine Friday night karaoke down the Wine Lodge with that Maud and this one...

Temperance wrote:

Cheap gin kills all known germs - and a few unknown ones too!

That was going to be my excuse when I was stopped today by the gendarmes demanding to see my papers and proof that my journey and purchases were essential. I could probably have got away with the cheap gin excuse, however the five sacks of cheap garden compost might have been more difficult. But as it was the policemen were all smiles (behind their face masks) and very pleasant, and the younger one was dead cute and very, very good looking. So rather than spreading me over the car bonnet, doing a full body search for hidden weapons, and then banging me up  ... unfortunately he just let me go about my business.

Unfortunately, this chap (who surely knew) does not reveal the transvestite propensities (if any) of Wilhelm II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GIT_-JqhEU

And so, children. the mad carnival wound its way through the shadowed streets already locked down for the night. Where did they go? These weird people who come together in the gloaming? Some say they are forever lost in the dark labyrinths of their  very odd minds.

The Queen of Desserts wrote:

Don't know anything about Kent. It used to be a brand of cigs ...

I whipped out the oiuja apparatus and asked WB what the hell he'd been thinking of and got the following reply (a snippet from his follow-up anthology "Gonne, Gonne, My Muse Is Still Gonne" or "How I tediously constructed an entire literary oeuvre based on lusting after another man's wife" ):

To rhyme with an apposite suffix
While keeping a semblance of syntax
In limericks is tough
So I soon had enough
And moved her to Kent out of Essex

.

The ghost of WB brings another shade to mind ...

As small children my grandmother had the dubious pleasure on occasion of escorting us little mites to the beach in a neighbouring hamlet. This plaque stood (and still stands) on the wall of a cottage along our route, past which we could never go without the venerable ancestor who, as a much younger woman and in service, knew the subject when he had been a frequent and not entirely welcome "self-invited guest" at her employer's residence, angrily mumbling "they spelled f*cking 'scrounged' wrong!".

nordmann,

a bit embarrassed  (embarrassé) by the fact, although I heard the name before, to have to admit that I had to look on Google, who that guy in fine was...
 ...of course I know all the Dutch and French poets...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats

Kind regards, Paul.

My grandmother would have been among the legions of people envious of your ignorance, Paul.

Embarrassed at having awarded WB their Literature Prize in 1923, the Nobel Committee made amends by awarding the IRA combatant son of WB's lust target and reluctant muse their Peace Prize in 1974.


Now there's a guy you don't want to meet up a dark Oslo alley on the way to the ceremony ...

Suddenly, the name of a Frank Sinatra film from the 50s. Good film:

nord, 

Paul.