The Thirtieth Day: 21 April 2020 (129,044 confirmed infected, 17,337 died, in total)

"The Queen did not want any special measures to be taken to allow a gun salute to be held as she did not feel it was appropriate at the present time." – The Buckingham Palace

Today is the 94th birthday of the Queen. Each year on this day, there are gun salutes at Hyde Park, Tower of London and Windsor Great Park. But they are all cancelled this year due to the ongoing pandemic.

I bet most people outside the UK do not know that the Queen has “two birthdays”, one being 21 April as her “biological birthday”, the other being a Saturday in mid-June, when formal celebrations including “Trooping the Colour” are held. The mid-June ceremony this year has already been announced to be “held in another form” earlier.

Both traditional and trendy events are cancelled. Instead, as what I saw and heard, people staying at home are killing their time by doing more reading, watching TV or Internet contents, and playing video games.

As we come to reading, I have two funny things to share. One is several days ago, I was cleaning the floor of our balcony, when I happened to see through a gap of the planks that my neighbour downstairs just put down on the table her book with the title “And Then There Were None”. It is a thriller by Agatha Christie, but its title is really coinciding and thrilling under the current pandemic background.

The second is, it is reported that “Journal of the Plague Year”, a fiction written by Daniel Defoe reflecting the 1644 London plague, has risen in sales for 750% since the outbreak of the pandemic.

It is clear that what people read can reflect what they are thinking about. Well, come on, try not to be that pessimistic. We do not have a chain murderer who was determined to kill everyone including himself, neither shall we compare ourselves with those tragic 17th century residents of London. I would rather recommend Conan Doyle and Robinson Crusoe for every single person to find strength and hope from them, where evils are punished and heroes with strong mind survive.