Window on our Covid world one year later …

Today Britain was silent as the Queen lead a sad salute to the 126,172 of us who died from Covid. We have just marked the first anniversary of national lockdown. Boris Johnson also offered his condolences to families who lost loved ones to the virus

What a tragedy this has become for the world. But this is not a time for recriminations and blame and spouting of conspiracies and lies … it’s a time to reflect on something manufactured or natural which has almost certainly changed our lives forever.

But what can we do at the moment? Riot? Set police cars on fire? Anarchy over everything ‘mainstream’? Refuse to wear masks as a personal protest? Refuse vaccines? Like headless-chicken Europe turn a true crisis into a political Viking’s head to be booted while millions wait for a jab of hope?

No. None of those are the way forward at the moment. But the Great Debate over the Great Reset must begin soon.

We are teetering on the edge of that mythological state of dystopia … Dystopia ‘an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice’.

Dystopia is a society bereft of reason … and certainly, without conspiracies and Biblical prophecy, Covid is bereft of reason. But it is here in any form you imagine.

Let’s try for an instant to find something beautiful in our crumbling lives … we did last march when we published this pohtopgraph by Alexander Petrosyan, probably one of the best photographers working in Russia today.

He was born in the Ukraine in 1965 but has lived in St Petersburg for almost half a century. And it shows … he knows his city warts and all.

Lonely Planet said ‘the sheer grandeur and history of Russia’s imperial capital never fail to amaze, but this is also a city with a revolutionary spirit’.

And Alexander’s photographs capture not only the grandeur but the squalor and despair of this city of five million souls… he also captures the city’s pride and its  memories of revolution.

Alexander, who worked for his local newspaper for many years, has been published in the best publications across the world … and he agreed to us publishing his work… we will be returning often.