Alas That These Days Are Mine

It is almost a crying shame my nature survival skills are limited to collecting 1 000 wood and 500 meat in Age Of Empires III.

I can build a rudimentary shelter if I have enough villagers and a world map without invaders. But ask me to find some decent branches, some broad leaves, and to fashion a tent for the night’s rest after a day of camping and all you will hear are crickets.

Now, more than ever, I regret not knowing how to shoot, hunt, or skin something for food – maybe I should have practised with chickens when I was younger. I certainly think I should have paid more attention on all the camps I went to when I was in high school. All that jazz about tracking, looking for water and high ground, making fire from thin air and the sheer will to survive, or what plants are edible and which ones are not – man, I never thought that stuff would come in handy. No one did.

I figured, like most people at the time, the world was going to go out with bang, not a bloody sneeze or a damn cough.

Guess we were all wrong.

I should have watched more Bear Grylls programmes. I used to laugh at the man whenever he showed up on the Discovery Channel. I was a David Attenborough man, personally. Maybe I should have given him a chance. I mean, Attenborough was great, but what does he know about adapting, improvising, and thriving in the urban and natural wild? All he ever focused on were birds of paradise and penguins – not to eat them, just to lovingly talk about the former’s complex dance routines and the latter’s resilience in the Antarctic.

Thanks for nothing BBC Planet Earth 1 and 2.

Alas that these days should be mine.

Truly, as our so-called complex and advanced society is slowly undone by an 8KB virus, my biggest shame is that when the world ends I am going to die first with all the light-skinned blacks without beards in the first wave. If you do not know how shameful such a death is, I really do not have the time to explain right now. All you need to know is it is bad. Really bad.

I joke that this cannot and will not be the end. There is still, rightly so, too much left to achieve. I just started ‘The Witcher III’ – yes, late, but it is better than never so leave me alone. And I just invested in Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’, ‘Bring Up The Bodies’, and ‘The Mirror and the Light’ – tomes about Thomas Cromwell’s rise from absolute nobody to one of the most powerful courtiers in King Henry VIII’s court. Surely the world cannot end without me being allowed to boast about reading all of them.

Nee, man. Someone needs to find a vaccine for the coronavirus. This cannot be how I go out. My beard just started coming in.

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