‘Warm-ups’ by Abigail Ulman

In the first week of lockdown in Brisbane, my friend texted me three words: GET DISNEY PLUS. She has a 5-year-old. I have two little kids. GET DISNEY PLUS, she yelled at me again, even though I had not replied the first time. So I did. Then I bought Stan as well, to watch Normal People, certain that I’d remember to cancel my subscription as soon as I finished it. Or the next month, or the one after that, but here we are in November. Eventually, of course I will cancel my Stan subscription. In short: we’ve sat through a lot of telly this year. In her essay ‘Peonies’, Zadie Smith calls March 2020 the beginning of the ‘global humbling’.