I’ve had a Web master redesign my main website, matthewkudelka.ca. You can now enter this blog through a portal there.
The pandemic
A Friday night in March my wife and I went out for our anniversary dinner. Talk was of a coming pandemic and possible lockdown. We chose not to think about it yet, or imagine what it would mean to us, and had a wonderful candle-lit time together. Saturday morning, we went grocery shopping as always at a chain grocery and – who could possibly have imagined this? – it was being panic-mobbed – this was new – with people racing three-cart trains around the aisles, sweeping the shelves empty with their arms and forcing their way through cart traffic jams. At 9 a.m., the shelves were mostly empty. All I could find to get from my shopping list was a can of Unico tomato paste. I wondered how long it would last us. On my way home through downtown, I stopped at the city’s main pedestrian mall hoping to buy chocolates from a specialty shop (as noted, it was our anniversary weekend). All the hundreds of shops were closed, and of shoppers there were none, but the entrances to the three-level concourse itself were were still open, and the city’s homeless had quickly figured that out and they had all moved into it from what was a bitterly cold day. It was a mob scene again, but these shopping carts were … well, you know the kind. Hundreds of yards of aisles were lined with most of the downtown’s broken and poor and their scavenged and hoarded belongings. I walked from one end to the other (a few hundred yards) and saw a security guard at the exit I had chosen. “This is something out of Blade Runner,” I told him. “It’s more like the zombie apocalypse,” he replied. I got home to handle my accounts (Saturday mornings have always been my hour for paperwork) and wondered what impact the pandemic would have on my business.
As it turned out, it would have none, though I wouldn’t realize it for a few weeks and worried for a while that the opposite would be true. Truth, the next two years were the most lucrative of my career – I added clients, and none of my existing ones slowed down. I had always worked at home – paid to self-isolate – and the MEs now followed suit. It didn’t change my relations with them in any way, or how I filled my workdays. Besides which, a lot of authors used the lockdown to focus on their mscripts-in-progress. I had never taken in-house meetings, so there were none to cancel. Because of the glacial lead times for getting mscripts into production, there was basically no impact on flow. So the pandemic had no impact on my business except to strengthen it. It seems that freelance editors are likely to outlast anything that can happen. Just us and the cockroaches.
SIDEBAR
Somewhere between a brief fascination with earth movers and a slightly longer one with dinosaurs, I learned to pronounce “antidisestablishmentarianism” without stumbling. Did that happen in your schoolyard? The stuff kids get up to, before they quickly move on from them. We used to chant it together, we used to see who could say it quickest and argue about what the word meant. I’m saying I was hardly the only one in my schoolyard at the time who was fascinated by it, briefly, and presumably because it was supposed to be the longest word in the English language. I remember some of us asking our grade three teacher what it meant. It’s hard for a word like that to not get stuck in you head. Back of my mind since then. Sixty years go by, thirty-five of them as an academic editor, three quarters of my way into editing a Victorian history mscript, and there it was, looming farther down the page. I read: “Having abandoned the Wesleyans, he was now an ardent antidisestablishmentarian.” After all this time … and without irony, no less. The perfectly correct word for its place, spelled correctly. I’d just seen the elephant. So I tweaked the sentence: “[…] he grew ardently committed to antidisestablishmentarianism.” Then I went out and bought a lottery ticket. Then I checked my bank’s website to see how my retirement savings were doing. There just didn’t seem anything left for me to see at this job.