THE QUARATINE INTERVIEWS:13

24 April 2020

Hillary is celebrating, isolation style 

 

What’s one item you’ve found essential during isolation?

 

Those dinky little one-serve bottles of prosecco are handy. A six-pack is about right to get me from breakfast through to pre-dinner – you don’t want your bubbles going flat between sittings.

 

And with dinner?

 

Tequila. Goes with anything frozen.

 

Celebrating something?

 

Well, it is my birthday.

 

Oh, commiserations on not being able to properly celebrate that. How’s that been?

 

Pretty fun. My friends organised a drive-by earlier. They came past honking their horns like an upbeat conga line of bog lapping bogans. Then they each delivered a gift via a bucket attached to a broom stick out their passenger windows, stopping for the briefest of chats. It was kind of like a back-to-front drive through. Nobody brought chips, sadly.

 

What a nice surprise!

 

Well, it was meant to be a surprise, but they included me in the WhatsApp group they set up to organise logistics, so… awkward. Just one of many pandemic technology fails that prove we’re really built for face to face contact. Luckily the heads up meant I was ready with my pants on. I even wore a bra.

 

Any useful gifts?

 

Jigsaws – enough to keep me going until around October. A few hand-made masks fashioned out of hankies and hair ties. And someone gave me a 2020 planner, which I’m pretty sure was second hand – there were some telltale rubbings out in February, but April onwards is all clear. I expect it’ll stay that way.

 

How will you spend the rest of the day?

 

I’ll spend some time watching my micro greens grow. Nature is so incredible.

 

Yeah, for a while. What else?

 

I think I’ll turn that 2020 planner into a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. I’ll don one of those masks as a blindfold and stick a pin in some random dates, then make a bet with myself about which date is closest to the one when somebody finally coughs on Donald Trump.

 

What’s your best guess?

 

I think May Day has a nice synergy to it, but I’ll see what turns up on the board. You’ve got to leave these things to karma. I mean, fate.