Not another coronavirus piece

And yet, the only thing on everyone’s lips (not literally, I hope) is Covid-19. Would it be sinking to the most lurid depths of bad taste to make light of the pandemic? Or, in fact, is that precisely how I should be treating it in this article: laughing in the face of the virus to help us all to hold onto our sanity? Should I adopt a more serious tone to reflect its impact? Resolute, but grimly determined, bidding us to take as our slogan ‘Keep Calm and Corona On’? Instead I could use this piece to ring all the alarm bells, shocking you out of any complacency you might still have by rolling out all the facts and figures about how fast the contagion is spreading and the deadly effects it has. Or, I could proceed as though the coronavirus had never even happened, indulging in a bit a mindless escapism to remove all thoughts of this horror from your minds, albeit temporarily. But would that be such an obviously transparent attempt at wishing it all away – and thus only succeed in making you fixate on it even more?

You’ve probably already read reams of copy, online and elsewhere, about the pandemic. Is yet another coronavirus article really what you want right now? The dilemma here is that this column is supposed to offer something more off-the-wall and alternative to everything else that’s going on, and yet it would also seem wrong to ignore the main topic of the day; and it would certainly not do to simply treat it as a big joke, nor would it be right to lose our sense of humour about it completely. So I think the only way is to somehow mix and match all the approaches to this topic that I outlined above (except ignoring the virus). So if anyone feels I’ve settled on the wrong tone, I apologise in advance.

One of the strangest things about preparing for publication in the midst of a pandemic is not so much working in an almost empty office, nor the fact I can’t go out for lunch, but that I have to put the finishing touches on texts written or begun before the lockdown (which as I write was just over a week ago). Why? Because they now seem like windows into a dimly remembered past, when conferences, business lunches and cocktail mixers could still be held, and when abnormal hadn’t yet become the new normal. In some of these articles, experts and market players offer us their predictions for the future. Apart from a few Cassandra voices warning of a new virus emerging in China (and the risk of it turning a slight slowdown into a full-blown recession, stock market meltdown and collapse of the real estate market), the tone of many of these people was chirpily optimistic: “If there is a downturn, it will only be mild one and over soon – and it won’t affect real estate or Poland and the CEE region as much as elsewhere” – would seem to sum up their general attitude. It might be the job of those in the business to always look on the bright side, but given how much of a shock to us all the onslaught of the disease and the emergency measures that have been imposed have since been, they could be forgiven just this once for spin that now looks wildly off the mark. The temptation, as an editor of this august periodical, might have been to tweak these opinions, to make them appear less insanely optimistic about the market’s prospects than originally expressed. However, that would have involved falsely conveying the sense of what they had said and the tone of how they said it. They genuinely did feel they had reasons to be cheerful – or at least intended to give the impression that they did. So it would have amounted to distorting their actual intention to put a less positive gloss on their utterances. Much as we would like to spare them their blushes, as journalists with a degree of integrity it would go against our code of ethics (honestly, we have these) to record their words inaccurately. And as I said before, they do give us a tantalising glimpse back through the mists of time into that seemingly far away golden age when people actually could be optimistic.

And now, how to end this Endpiece? Well, maybe by expressing the hope that by the time you’re reading it everything will have sort of got back to normal again and this column will also seem like a window into an eerie past. But in the strange days we are still in as I write this, this still seems like an agonisingly distant prospect.