Reaching for a book

Subject: Reaching for a book.

Sitting in my self isolated bubble here in Swansea I listen for a reawakening of traffic in the morning heralding people setting off for work. During the lock down it was eerily quiet, each day with the cars in the street parked up and not moving, no rumble, no swish when it rained, only silence as people stayed indoors. The houses are not large and one wondered how families with many kids managed to coexist, surely they didn't all turn to a book. I haven't heard of any cases of fratricide/filicide but I'm sure it came close as the pent up frustration mounted with 'boy meets girl' being carried on over the Internet. At least there was no chance of being 'stood up' waiting outside the cinema for the love of your life to arrive for an hour or so snogging on the back row, only to be dumped standing there in the cold as she found someone, or something more important. At least with an internet contrived fantasy connection you can have multiply affairs, one after the other all at the flick of a switch. 
So this morning, a Monday morning with the sun rising in the sky and the day beckoning the streets are still quiet, the cars still immobile, the silence still deafening. I suppose it all depends on how economically viable your area is, whether people can work from home or whether the business they used to go to has closed for good or at least downsized until some time in the future. 
The casualties of the pandemic are not only the poor people who struggle to breath in hospital but also the ones who struggle to see any employment in the immediate future. Living close to London the economy has hardly missed a beat except for those such as the hospitality sector who are still wondering how to redefine their business with social distancing. The building industry, electricians, plumbers, carpenters have been going into work across the piste as the building sites remained open. Missing their daily coffee they found a way to get on with what they do and probably thanked the pandemic for clearing the normal traffic off the road and they joked about the worries of the nanny state as it issued more and more, ever confusing directives ignoring the casualties on ventilators as just bad luck.
Swansea isn't London nor is Bradford or Coventry and in these cities and towns across the country the silence is still with us. People are still reluctant to come out and spend and therefore the shop girls and the fast food guys are pending. The manager has cut the staff by three quarters, the pubs are still uneconomic with reduced numbers and so people wait and wait for inspiration. Meanwhile the virus also waits, it lurks inside us even though we don't know and it's at it's most infectious in this lull before we show symptoms, just keen to get out and about as we are. When the results of the withdrawal of restrictions last week become apparent by a spike in infection, as shown in Leicester, causing them to once again quarantine the city and reintroduce this deathly silence, only then will we wish we hadn't been so frivolous. 
Perhaps unemployment will in the end be a blessing with many people having no job, nowhere to go and no money to spend, forced to stay at home and thus keep the virus to themselves perhaps an unintentional consequence which in the end will benefit us all  Maybe the silent, traffic free suburb   Is here to stay, until a vaccine is found, maybe the adage that 'silence is golden' will grow on us all, perhaps I'm not being so fanciful to think that more and more people will eventually reach for a book.