I'm not exactly sure what the point of this post is and have written, re- written and deleted parts of it several times and almost scrapped the entire thing but in the end I thought I should mark it. Five years ago this week Covid's arrival in the UK brought about the first lockdown and life changed dramatically for everyone.
The Friday of this week in March, five years ago today, schools were closed and everyone was sent home. At that point I was an Assistant Head at the school I work at. I made the announcement in the assembly to our Year 11s that this was their last assembly and that they wouldn't be sitting their exams that summer (you might reasonably ask why the Headteacher didn't do that and therein lies a whole other story which is not for here or now). School was difficult all week with increasing numbers of staff and students off ill, the rest of the staff very stretched as absences left gaps and tensions were running high. Coughing became a classroom issue. Year 11 and 13 were particularly emotional as their school experience was came to an abrupt and unexpected stop.
I started to write a post about our experience of lockdown, a reminiscence- lockdown nostalgia is a genuine thing (not for everyone I know)- but I didn't like the post and binned it. The impact of Covid has been huge and apart from a few pieces here and there in the media this week, for many people Covid is done, gone, over, to be forgotten, consigned to a weird period four to five years ago that they want to forget about and move on from. There was a lot of talk at the time about the new normal, about things being different when 'all this is over'. I don't see much of that.
Our son Isaac died of Covid in November 2021, just as the world was opening up again. He was 23. He is one of 232, 112 people in the UK who died from Covid. His name is on the Covid memorial wall in London. It still staggers me sometimes that he is not just our personal loss and grief but that he's one small part of a national and global catastrophe. The memorial wall was on the news recently and there he is, one name among many. The news in January and February looked bad, cities in China in complete lockdown, Italian hospitals overrun and in chaos. We watched all of that and then all the fallout in this country with the nonsense and chaos of the Johnson government- and then Isaac died of that disease eighteen months after we went into lockdown.
There are probably millions of people connected to the 232, 112 who died, millions of personal tragedies. There are also an estimated 1.9 million people with some form of long Covid, just under 3% of the UK's population. Many schools are still reeling form the fallout of lockdowns and the lost months, not just of learning but of socialisation and social skills and behaviour. It'll take another ten years for those young people to move through the education system. They've lost out in many ways and for those in already deprived communities the impact on their education and well- being will likely follow them long into adulthood.
I'm not sure what we've learned from Covid. The Tories moved on as quickly as they could and the Labour government seem to want to treat the disabled as benefit scroungers and force them back to work. I don't see a new world being built from our experience of Covid and lockdown. Lockdowns built some bridges between people, community spirit in many places was stronger than before- street WhatsApp groups buzzed constantly- but they created differences and disagreement as well as people became judgemental of others who weren't following the rules correctly or of those deemed to be following them too closely. Into the void of human contact, division and conspiracy theories grew. Vaccination scepticism spread and undoubtedly caused deaths. When Isaac was on the Covid ward that he died on, the nurses told us almost everyone else on the ward was unvaccinated and that many would die due to their decision- and they, the nursing teams, had to deal with that daily.
In some ways it feels five years ago, all of that. In some ways it feels very recent, very present. It's not something all of us can move on from.
Lockdown saw the arrival of a few albums that arrived in the post, packages wiped down and isoalted for 24 hours before being opened, that sound tracked the evenings of those days in March in April when we all adjusted to living in lockdown. One of them was Four Tet's Sixteen Oceans, a record that if I reach for now instantly drops me back into the spring of 2020 and that sense of the unknown that the early weeks of the first lockdown brought. Four Tet's music on this album is so warm and enveloping, an aural balm, real mood enhancing music. This one closes the album in fine style.
5 comments:
It feels simultaneously more recent and longer ago than that. The shadow cast by Covid is long and permanent.
A very thought-provoking and brilliantly written piece.
My own overriding memory of that time was that my own long-planned early retirement ended up happening a few days earlier but that the farewell party was postponed....with the latter pissing me off, as you might imagine.
Within a couple of weeks, I learned of the death from COVID of an elderly person whose impact on my career had been significant. Not long after, a cousin died. All the while, I was trying to adjust to the changes in my daily routine, while coping with a wholly new routine. Looking back, it would be foolish to claim that I was, mentally, in a good place.
It doesn't seem like five years...especially when I meet up with old colleagues who can't believe I've been away for so long....but as I remind them, for about two years it felt as if everyone was away from the office environment.
But, more than anything else, whenever I hear the word COVID, my thoughts turn to you and your family and how hard you all worked to keep Isaac safe. The fact that all around you there were fuckers who were denying COVID was a 'thing' and there were politicians/officials whose behaviour was abhorrent, makes me sad and angry in equal measures.
I find it a real concern that the world actually seems less well-prepared to cope should something similar happen again, particularly over the next four years given who is 'in charge' across in America.
In the same way that my generation find it hard to comprehend what people who lived through either World War must have gone through, in many years to come there will be a generation who have no idea what living through Covid and the immediate post-Covid years was like. Even now, I struggle to know what to make off it all, there's so much to take on board.
*of (damn stupid keyboard skills)....
JC- the lack of preparedness for a future pandemic is horrifying.
Jase- the comparison with the aftermath of the wars is interesting, especially the First World War where war was followed by Spanish flu which killed 50 million worldwide. I don't know what people's response to that was and how they dealt with it. I suspect many people tried to 'move on'. Not long after the Wall Street Crash sent the world into a further crisis...
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