I've been thinking about swine flu. There's a media stereotype in Britain that the newspapers and television go ga-ga about the slightest things that happen in London, but ignore the rest of the country, because the media is predominantly based in London and media people very rarely leave the city. From the point of view of someone living in London, there's no point going to e.g. Warminster when Heathrow airport and thus the rest of the world is just a short journey away on the London Underground. As a consequence of this insularity, the national media tends to have a London-centric viewpoint. Thus whenever there is a tube strike this is national news, but when for example the Chicago Rock Café in Salisbury had to close for a couple of days because the cookers broke, this was not reported on BBC News 24 at all, or on Radio 4. I was very angry about this and sent in a complaint to the BBC, but all they sent me back was a piece of paper with "now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho" written on it.

I get the impression that, up until now, swine flu has been seen as a novelty in the media. It happens to foreigners and there was that case in Scotland. The hysteria has been mock hysteria, the kind of hysteria that people do not really take seriously, like the scare every so often whereby a NASA report is skewed and twisted so as to give the impression that a meteor is going to pulverise the Earth in 2080. Mock hysteria is very different from the kind of hysteria that takes hold when one is subjected to the daily sight of bodies being burned, when one is unable to escape the smell of charred flesh, when the police routinely break into people's homes to look for infected people to take out and burn with flamethrowers. Now that people in London have started to die, I believe there is real fear in the media.

Londoners can relate to the deaths of other Londoners, because all Londoners are brothers. They share a common bond, which is to say that they live in London, although some of them live just outside London - it is called Essex, but it is London really. Newsreaders, who are Londoners themselves, will eventually put two and two together, and come to the conclusion that they themselves are not immune. I have a mental vision of Mary Nightgale's body erupting tentacles live on air, and bursting open, like in The Thing. Peter Sissons' head splitting open down the middle to reveal a second, smaller head, that says "daddy". Natasha Kaplinsky, but she has no nose. I sense a real edge of desperation in the newspapers because they can see the end times. Soon there will be a flood of articles on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" website written by rich media types who do not live in London; the thrust of these articles will be that Tories are rich and do not live in London and that through some twisted logic this is tantamount to genocide.

Living as I do in the countryside I am unsure what to think about swine flu. Wiltshire is traditionally a dairy / corn farming area rather than a pig farming area, and thus I probably do not have a natural immunity on account of the fact that I have never touched a pig in my entire life, and I cannot say with certainly that I have breathed the same air as a pig. I surmise that the M25 acts as a kind of sterile barrier around the edge of London - the traffic fumes kill germs stone dead - but on the other hand Salisbury is a popular tourist destination for foreign people, some of whom might have swine flu, or whatever they call it abroad, e.g. "the English disease". Pigs probably do not have a name for it. I call her "Salotine MacClacky".

They say that it is no longer possible to contain it, and that we will all be infected eventually. A part of me wonders if this is the beginning of the next stage of human evolution. Just like in The Day of the Triffids, we will notice nothing and first, and then we will wake up blind; or we will start to mutate into pigs; or we will become unable to talk. At first we will resist, but then we will come to accept that this is how things were meant to be. It will be the next step in our journey. Perhaps it is the case that pigs are actually the next stage in human evolution, and that when we eat a sausage we are in fact consuming our superiors. Perhaps the pigs willingly give up their flesh so as to advance us to their level. Pigs are not limited by moral constraints; but what have they created? Perhaps we cannot appreciate their art.