By Toh Hsien Min

CNA reports that the interdiction on social contact outside one's household is for six months.  I am upset, because I live alone, and six months of solitary confinement is brutal.  It is out of all proportion to the two to four incubation cycles that a lockdown might need.  No doubt this is why the law is – correctly – being called out as draconian.  Having stayed home even before the announcement just to be safe to visit my family on the weekend, I struggle with my response.  There is a psychological disconnect when one cannot see who one is making sacrifices for.		When Singapore concedes a defeat of sorts and declares a lockdown (let's not euphemise with circuit breaker, which in electrical engineering opens a circuit, whereas this one closes us in), news agencies around the world take note, and start to dissect the lessons to be learnt.  One of my WhatsApp chats talks about hubris: no longer gold standard.  I point to evidence that the government were anxious that the good press of early March would breed complacency among the people.  But one can note that and also acknowledge that mistakes were made, such as in not isolating arrivals from the West early enough.
I have heard wearing a mask described as being like living at altitude.  It is hard to draw breath while walking masked, but I disagree with the analogy.  In Cusco, I felt light-headed because of the thin air, but acclimatised enough to climb Montaña Machu Picchu.  With a mask, breathing feels heavy.  Worse, my reusable mask triggers my allergic rhinitis; after taking off the mask at home, I run through about a dozen facial tissues.  As the new rules on wearing masks are issued, I wonder whether discomfort is part of the government's strategy to encourage people to stay home.		On 14 April, the government issues yet another new rule: one may not leave one's home without wearing a mask.  I have lost count of the consecutive days of new rule-making.  First wet markets, then public transport, then food service staff, then supermarkets, convenience stores and malls, then finally everywhere unless you're exercising.  How does one keep on top of what one is supposed to do or not do?  Worse, it makes me think the ministers are losing the plot.  Oh, we forgot another situation, let's put up a new rule.  It's all too Dolores Jane Umbridge.
I head to Tekka market, wearing my mask.  At Chia's, I ask V. – at arm's length – how his supply chain is holding up.  He says his Malaysian supply is fine, but Thailand and Indonesia have seen disruptions.  There are complications with freight, and his freight costs have been increasing.  He admits some items will have to be priced higher.  I pick up potatoes, arugula, okra, and cherry tomatoes.  M. punches the register.  "Nine dollars dear," she says.  I pay, and start to head off but spot roselles.  "Steal one," I call out.  She smiles.  They feel like my only society.		Watching Andrew Cuomo give his daily briefings on the coronavirus situation in New York State, I am impressed.  He describes his brother catching Covid-19 in such emotive and human narration that you only just catch the engineered appeal to everyone to stay home, and forgive him for it anyway.  He strikes a stark contrast with our multi-ministry Covid-19 task force, who trade in facts and figures.  I think about a WFH phone call in which I sought to bring a colleague round to the view that facts and figures are seldom the way to convince anyone, and I am sad.
In engineering coping mechanisms for six months without human contact, my thoughts keep circling around Finland.  In 2013, I spent some weeks on a writing residency in rural Finland, with the freedom of a large house to myself.  It may have been the most isolated I have been, in a country renowned for introversion and whose language I do not speak, but I hardly felt lonely and wrote loads.  It seems an extreme introvert can dig deep into even more extreme introversion.  April is now through, and I have completed more poems this month than in 2011 and 2012 combined.		To be fair, there are no easy answers.  I have been studying the public data, at first for work – there is occasionally some use in a professional specialisation in predictive analytics, and I can attest that the data were signalling disaster very early – and then, after the fact of a viral cataclysm has become incontestable, because it is impossible to look anywhere else.  The data currently tells me the earliest the world can get Covid-19 under control is July, if policy responses are flawless from now on.  But looking at what we've seen so far globally, don't hold your breath.

Were it not for Covid-19, this editorial would probably have been making more of the unusualness of this issue.  It is not simply that there is a distinct weighting of material towards the pandemic; my highlight is a pair of sonnets from Pierre Vinclair, who used to contribute to the literary scene when he was living in Singapore a couple of years ago and who unfortunately contracted Covid-19 in London, but the virus also shows up in Short Stories, Essays and Extra Media.  Rather, this issue is notable for the being the first one I can remember in which the articles from what I think of as the "non-creative" sections have outnumbered the creative pieces.  This is powered by a surge in the number of critical reviews, as a direct result of the vigorous discussion I had alluded to in the past issue on the state of criticism in Singapore literature.  In that discussion, two stalwarts of the literary scene had taken it upon themselves to run an experiment, for which QLRS is a happy third-party beneficiary, and I think we can read from the outcomes that we have neither too little critical talent nor too few worthy books to sustain a critical arena.  But – in common with our responses to the coronavirus – where do we go from here?

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