Moog from home

Social distancing is a bit of a busman’s holiday for Downtime, but just to be safe, we’ve alienated everyone we know.

We haven’t really known what to do with ourselves since being advised to stay inside. Our parents have found our incessant phone calls – where we project onto them our intense, 24/7, insurmountable fear for their lives – quite off-putting, and it’s led to them taking out a restraining order against us. Good. Our oldest friend has cut off all contact after we called 111 on them for going for a morning swim. Fine by us. Our housemates have told us to stay out of their way after we glued Henry’s vacuum hose to the front of the communal television. Our pleasure, but we don’t see them building any ventilators.

We began to wonder if the world’s foremost satirical technology blog had any role to play during a global pandemic whatsoever – but then, something wonderful happened. The synthesiser apps were made into free downloads, and with sudden access to the Minimoog Model D, we plugged our phone into our speakers, flung open our bedroom window, and brought the Italian quarantine disco scene to the UK.

Ooh, we were like Giorgio Moroder. In that moment, everyone was free. It all felt like a dream. And then we woke up and realised it all was a dream. Apart from the free synthesiser apps part. And the global pandemic part.