In The City. Finally.

Life Hello, how are you? Keeping safe? I know it's been a while, but, you know, stuff and things.  We're all double or fully vaccinated now, which happened relatively smoothly, apart from Dad ending up in hospital overnight after his first jab, although it wasn't until much later we realised that it wasn't the side effects which caused him to repeatedly pass out as fluids were emerging from all over his body, it was the large bag of black liquorice he'd eaten that afternoon which is a no-no if you suffer from high blood pressure.  He had liquorice poisoning.  

After over twelve months of thinking about it, I visited the city centre this morning for the first time in twelve months.  Having been vaccinated and with the proffered statistics on cases and deaths in the local area, I'm a bit more relaxed about going out into the world, albeit still with a mask on throughout and to the point its caused a rash on the back of my ears.  For all that, bus travel is still a psychological step too far, what with some people being incapable of keeping their mask on for the whole journey.

The city centre felt strange.  Even for a Monday morning it was relatively quiet   Much of the visit amounted to me noting what's closed (the Sainsburys at the top of Bold Street, the WH Smiths in Central Station), what's newly opened (B&M in the old Virgin Megastore space in Clayton Square) and what's miraculously still open (the cheap DVD and CD place in St Johns Precinct!).  But having become so delivery sufficient across those twelve months utilitarian reasons for visiting the city centre have diminished considerably.

Not least because we've also updated our broadband connection.  Twenty years ago when visiting the Millennium Dome, I watched the Wierd Al parody of The Phantom Menace on a T1 internet connection which seemed like magic to someone accustomed to dial-up.  Ten years ago, this blog was still being written across a phone line.  Today, it's via a 1.1Gbps fibre connection, which is ridiculous and faster than some universities.  It was a 700mps leap for just a pound extra a month, albeit added to an already relatively expensive charge.

Of course, at these margins, using the web hasn't become that much faster.  Download speeds are only as fast as the servers from which they're being delivered and while pointless saving tracks to offline mode in Spotify is now instantaneous on Windows, grabbing material from the Internet Archive still has some inertia.  But streaming apps are miraculously fast to open now and installing one of the Alien related games the other night, all 13GB of it, took just four minutes.

So despite having been vaccinated enough that it feels safer to go places and do things, at least for now, there aren't that many places I'd want to go and with this broadband connection no need to.  But museums and cinemas will be opening soon and I'll finally be able to look at a painting in the paint and canvas rather than on a computer screen.  Though geographically useful, virtual exhibitions simply aren't a substitute for a thrill of visiting a space and smelling the varnished floors.