Diana Wichtel: children play, freedom fighters protest and headless chookery

Freedom and Rights Coalition protesters at Parliament, Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Get up. Figure out what freaking day of the benighted Covid week it is. Have coffee, shout at newspaper, emails, work. Walk up to the little French cafe and line up - masked, scanned and sanitised - for a cappuccino and maybe an iced custard choux thing so delicious it can only be the work of Satan. Merci. A demain et demain et demain....

Every day the same, yet compared to life as hitherto known, so surreal. Thanks to the vagaries of big-box store click & collect, we had what these days counts as an excursion to rival a minibreak to Sydney to pick up a toddler grandchild's birthday present. A sit-on sand digger, since you asked. He loves diggers. "Digger, digger, digger!" We drove to West Auckland, sent a code by text and lurked, masked and sanitised, in the carpark until someone came out, furtively dropped a parcel and ran away. It felt like an illicit drug deal.

Two grandchildren came for a socially distanced, outside visit. We walked to the village. It's hard to choose a treat by peering past a Perspex barrier into an empty Two Dollar Shop. We got icecream. As I write, we can shop again. Two steps back, one step forward.

What to do back home for a couple of hours during which they are unable to raid the snack drawer or beg screen time? They found the bucket and pulley arrangement used to haul up supplies to the old tree house and proceeded to rig up an elaborate arrangement to transport teddies between the deck and the garden below. There are apparently endless ingenious things to do with an old school game of Monkeys in a Barrel, including a sort of art installation involving many monkeys making light work of a pair of sweaty sneakers. Even the adults have dusted off the Scrabble.

Lockdown has been hard on children but maybe such disruption to their normal busy, structured, slightly dystopian 21st century schedules has left more space for that most human attribute, imagination. I haven't seen them all play together like that, engrossed, in harmony, for years.

Meanwhile, in the adult world, chaos. Everything changes fast and with change comes anxiety, fear, a lot of headless chookery. I put my hand up for that and have the therapy bills to prove it. So the PM gets hammered for easing restrictions and hammered for having restrictions, often in the same interview.

An inability to deal with this volatile world has taken some people to the streets demanding the democratic right to let pandemics kill people unimpeded. They see themselves as radicals, freedom fighters. In fact the message is deeply conservative. Anything for a "normal" life.

It can't be a virus causing all this disruption. It must be … Jacinda. Stuff's Henry Cooke spoke to a group claiming the Prime Minister was arrested at the White House two years ago and wears an ankle bracelet. Apparently that explains a lot. "She's involved in child trafficking. You fellows need to do your homework," advised a protester. Cooke tweeted the threats: "…lot of people up in our face saying we will get what's coming to us, etc."

The other day, out walking, we saw some friends looking at us strangely. I realised I was marching along the street, masked, sanitised and ranting. I'd been reading comments on a protest group's website. Many "freedom" fighters are unable to process the reality of what happens where there are high Covid death rates. Schools don't stay open. People don't want to die. They don't want those they care for to die. People die in cars waiting for medical help. People go on ventilators begging for the vaccine they refused. Precious little freedom. For God's sake, pick up a newspaper. It would do no good.

"Would you rather live somewhere else in the world with a high death rate?" asked someone on a protest group thread. "Yes," was the reply. People willing to believe with all their hearts that Jacinda was arrested by Trump and wears an ankle bracelet turn out to have no imagination at all.

Next week: Steve Braunias