Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Two Hundred Twenty Three

Politics is a dreary business at the best of times and we are certainly not in those. The Grand Old Empire is so full of shrieking clamour lately over its upcoming elections that it is hard to hear anything else. The politics of the Greater Dominions have always seemed smaller than those of our neighbour. We do not draw elections out over months and years and we do not hold our leaders in anything like the same esteem. Titles are not kept like birth rites after someone leaves office. It is a job that one holds so long as enough people think you are doing it well.

The matters of politics in the Dominions are smaller as well, in part I think because we hold it in so low an esteem. To listen to those in the Grand Old Empire one would believe the fate of the world rested upon their upcoming choice. Perhaps it does in its way, though the rest of the world will still have its say. We can have no such grand illusions here. But because so much of what our leaders do seems of such small consequence we have come to accept a lack of ambition as a virtue. They do enough to keep things running surely and ensure that things seem to be going well, but the arrival of the grippe reborn puts the lie to much of that.

Here in the Western Dominion we have been ruled by the same party for most of my life. They were shocked when they lost an election five years ago and returned to power last year like a lost prince reclaiming his throne. They believe ruling here is their right and that they may do as they please and promised a return to glory days when our great tar reserves made so many fortunes.

That time is past though, as government everywhere are forced to look to the future as never before. But our leaders here are blinkered, unseeing of so much of the change that is taking place across the globe, convinced of the rightness of their ideas, as all ideologues are, and unable to respond to change their approach to suit the moment. Instead of looking to 2023 when the dread lord will hopefully be in the past and shaping plans to try to lead us there, they are trying to restore the lost world of 2003. They will fail and so many of us here will lose so much as a result of that failure.

My love and I have talked since the dread lord arrived of moving from the west. There are many reasons for that, but the impetus has been the failure of leadership here. They failed to see the changes underway across the world, one that will turn us away from tar and coal and oil, and insisted that the old ways still held true. That change has only been accelerated by the arrival of the dread lord, but it was evident before he ever showed himself.

More importantly though, it is clear through their rhetoric and their policies, that the future our leaders see doesn’t have a place in it for people like my love and I.