‘Anything can happen.

You know how Jupiter

Will mostly wait for clouds

to gather head

Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now

He galloped his thunder

cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky.

It shook the earth

And the clogged underearth,

the River Styx,

The winding streams,

the Atlantic shore itself.

Anything can happen,

the tallest towers

Be overturned,

those in high places daunted,

Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune

Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,

Setting it down

bleeding on the next.

Ground gives.

The heaven’s weight

Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.

Capstones shift,

nothing resettles right.

Telluric ash and

fire-spores boil away’

Seamus Heaney

JUPITER may be about to gallop his thunder cart across our clear blue sky, but after three weeks of lock down, no Gaelic football or hurling, little or no contact with other human beings, no work, no stout, and time stretching out ahead of us like never before, we are having to find new ways to occupy our minds and our bodies.

The St Brigid’s club footballers, for example, have decided that shaving all their hair off is a good idea and as is the way of young fellows nowadays, they think that shaving it all off on video, posting it online, then nominating another club member to do the same, is productive. Was it for this the men of 1916 died? Was it for this, the wild geese flapped a wing on every tide?

Starting on the March 31 meanwhile, John Griffin, a 53-year-old from Sussex, began climbing the stairs of his three storey house, having decided that he wanted to keep climbing them until he had ascended the equivalent of Mount Everest. The mountain is 8,850 vertical metres high, so he had to complete 1,363 ascents of his stairs to reach his goal. It took him four days, and after day three his knee swelled up and he taped a bag of frozen peas to it before carrying on.

When he completed the last climb, he lay on the ground, declared “I am absolutely shattered” and revealed that he had made a video of the entire four days of going up and down his stairs. This video is available online and will no doubt be of interest to those readers who enjoy watching Rory Gallagher’s teams play football.

The Financial Times reported on Saturday that although large parts of the global economy have been brought to a standstill, there is one business that is booming like never before.

I refer of course to the fantasy nurse costume trade, which has never been better. “A modern day gold rush” is how the CEO of Germany’s biggest producer described it, telling the FT that there has been “a 3,000 per cent increase (that’s three thousand per cent) in sales of fantasy nurse costumes compared to this time last year.” Perhaps realising that this sounded rather too triumphant in the midst of a worldwide plague, he added “Although we are doing incredibly well out of this crisis, I’m not exactly jumping for joy.” Which is something that cannot be said for his male customers..

Interestingly, unlike their Irish and UK counterparts, the German-made nurse costumes include PPE. On a similar note, a group of leading paediatricians in the UK have predicted a “coronavirus related baby boom” by Christmas. Who knows? Perhaps this pandemic will lead to a rebirth of romantic love around the globe.

Not everyone though, is having to get creative in the face of this curse. In Belarus, their dictator of 25 years’ standing, Alexander Lukashenko, who looks like a Bond villain and at 65 years of age could pass for a man in his early fifties, has simply ignored what is happening.

Belarus has continued entirely as normal, with the Belarussian Premier League going full tilt, and the Minsk Derby taking centre stage last weekend. Minsk Vitsebsk manager Syarhey Yasinski told the BBC “Nothing has changed for our players. We wash and rub our hands and try not to cough on one another.” They’ll be fine so.

Last week, Lushashenko described other countries’ lock-down measures as “a psychosis” and “a type of collective madness”. “Instead of panicking like those countries” he said, “one should have 40-50 grams of vodka daily, go to a banya (sauna) two to three times a week and work on a farm, as tough work and a tractor can cure anything.”

Which will be music to the ears for people from West Tyrone.

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