We all know what I mean. It seems crazy now, looking back. Thinking about especially 2020 the world turned upside down. In my diary on 12/03/20 is said “Coronavirus now getting quite worrying. Wish I wasn’t going to see Ben Watt on Saturday. Just feel like staying in”. in fact I posted here to that effect which is an interesting discussion to reread. Actually the gig was cancelled but I don’t think I’d have gone if it hadn’t been.
Until now it had been like Bird Flu or other supposed disease disaster scenarios and I didn’t really think it would amount to much, until the footage from Italy started to to appear on the news, then there was a growing sense of dread as it crept across Europe, then it arrived here, ten a period when you didn’t know anyone who had had it…then fairly soon you did, then you hardly knew anyone who hadn’t. In fact I got it late, in 2021 and it was unpleasant but dying was less likely then.
In fact I enjoyed the first lockdown. The weather was lovely and we caught up on garden jobs and sat and enjoyed the peace and quiet. We didn’t realise then that we were screwing up an entire generation of children, or that the government would throw money at their mates and have disco parties in number 10. All of that was to come. Oh, and I got a full time job after years of freelancing (the freelance market collapsed almost immediately, and no furlough for us). So to start with it was OK.
By Christmas it was getting really depressing and wasn’t OK. We elected to ignore the rules and Mrs. T’s Dad stayed a couple of nights which was not allowed (by what logic is spending the day in a room with 6 other people ok but sleeping in the spare room on your own isn’t?).
I could go on – this stream of consciousness is me trying to figure out how to talk about it. Crazy wasn’t it!
I was a key worker during the first lockdown and remember driving along eerily empty roads at what had been rush hour. It was a beautiful spring, warm, sunny and very very quiet. Normally shy wildlife began frequenting streets and gardens and everywhere seemed filled with birdsong. I remember how people would cross the road to avoid passing too close, and how we all suddenly rediscovered the benefits of nature and being nice to each other. Predictably the last bit didn’t really last very long.
All the #BeKind stuff lasted a while, until people decided they needed to buy salad and bog roll – at that point, the hashtag went out of the window
Nothing much has changed for me. I was alone before the pandemic, I was alone during the pandemic and I’m alone now. I followed the rules to the letter. It was damn lonely. It still is. My thoughts were then and remain now with those that lost loved ones and I hope Johnson and his ilk rot in hell.
Same here, to all of that. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as lonely as I did then.
Work-wise I wasn’t too affected thankfully as I was already working from home, but the impact on friends and family was quite bad, especially for those who normally socialised a lot.
Knowing that both my parents were high-risk and could be endangered by me visiting them was very frightening.
We all followed the rules to the absolute letter, with not a single exception during that entire time. So discovering that Johnson and his ilk partied on while good people suffered and were punished for breaking the laws he laid down still fills me with absolute rage.
After seeing footage of people unable to attend funerals even as the Tories were bringing suitcases of booze into No 10, I wish Johnson was left so ashamed that he could never show his face in public again.
Yes exactly. Elderly ladies sitting on a bench in the park fined thousands while those tossers wheeled in suitcases of wine. They should never be forgiven, and even now Badenoch plays it down. Grrr.
The day before lockdown, I tooled up with what I could find that which i might need in the contamination containment shelter, some “ideal requirements” no longer being available in my circle of association. So instead, I bought a litre of whiskey, 2 lb jars of marmite, and a Morecombe and Wise DVD box set. Still haven’t watched the DVDs. I had a lovely few months sitting in the garden, and occasionally doing work online.
Apart from the first few weeks I didn’t work from home as generally I needed to be in the office working in a lab, so I was one of 2 or 3 who were allowed to work as “normal”, however there were restrictions like not using a common coffee machine and wearing masks etc. My daughter had long periods of “schooling from home” meaning she could stay more with me rather than all weekdays with her mother. This started a process where she ended up going to school where I live and living full time with me which is the case to this day.
Biggest issue for me was not being able to travel, was due to go to Disney in Florida the week after everything started to happen, the parks were closed the day before we were due to fly. I cancelled the flights and never received a refund. Also couldn’t go to the UK for about 18 months because of various restrictions. Bizarrely it was possible to fly to the US from Canada but not to drive over the border.
Had a few gigs cancelled. The Stones in Cleveland which I finally went to 4 years later. New Order/Pet Shop boys was supposed to be in Sept 2020, that was delayed a year initially, but that was also postponed and it finally took place 2 years later in 2022.
Saddest thing, my daughter’s grandmother passed away rather unexpectedly, there was no proper funeral which certainly didn’t help her grieving process and she hadn’t seen her for some time before that.
Never tested positive for Covid, may have had it last summer as I was sick when my brother was visiting and he tested positive on his return to the UK
Not that I wish Covid on anyone, but it has sort of been good for me.
I’m immunocompromised and I was sent home by my employer on the 9th as a precautionary measure. I’d long since avoided being in meetings where people coughed or sneezed – if they did, I just got up and left the room. It doesn’t matter over Teams.
I was given the equipment to work from home, and came back into the office on the evening of the 10th to ‘borrow’ my office chair (I still have it).
I’ve worked from home since, have avoided catching Covid (even though my Offsprings have both had it twice), I’m no longer asked to travel for work (instead of having to find an excuse), I don’t need to pop into the petrol station half way between home and work if my guts are playing up during the morning commute, and I can eat a hot lunch instead of microwaved packet rice.
I appreciate it hasn’t been great for everyone. My sister-in-law died quite early on when her dialysis was restricted, a colleague’s partner’s cancer treatment was put on hold meaning it went from stage 2 to 4 pretty quickly, and my mum’s post-spinal-surgery physio was cancelled meaning she now walks with a zimmer frame.
I find myself forgetting how long the state of crisis went on, albeit not in permanent lockdown.
My birthday falls in mid-March (this Sunday if you were thinking of sending fine wines and luxurious socks) and we cancelled a planned birthday break in 2020. We could still have gone as lockdown didn’t start till the following week, and did go to a couple of sparsely attended gigs the week before. There was no chance of an overseas holiday in March 2021, and in March 2022 we were still required to wear face coverings in lot of public places on a holiday in Edinburgh. By June that year it was only on the bus from the airport to Venice, and by our third trip in December 2022 no face coverings were needed anywhere.
I stayed in full time employment albeit wfh (I still am, a rare silver lining to the pandemic) and stayed well. To the best of my knowledge I still haven’t had Covid. As an introvert I didn’t mind ‘the new normal’, to use a phrase that was all the rage for a while. I don’t particularly care for socialising so what I really missed were travel and live shows. I found the most restrictive phases dull rather than traumatic, though my estimation of the then-government, which was never generous, took a hammering.
If we ever meet over a beer I shall tell you some of the stories my other half reported from her job on the frontline in a major NHS hospital. Maybe best get yourself a stiff brandy in addition to your usual beverage of choice.
My birthday is early March (same day as Twang’s) and I had a 50th party on Feb 29th. It was brill. Quite a few people didn’t turn up due to having heavy colds. In retrospect, thank goodness they didn’t.
as a funeral celebrant this was a very weird time for me … very busy sadly with 501 funerals conducted in two years but not a proper chance for the family to say goodbye with people having to select which members of the family to attend, i couldn’t get out to see a family to arrange things in person so all done over phone/zoom which meant you lost some of the personal touch of bonding with the family. strange driving around with so few cars on the road
Found it awful, pretty much from start to finish.
In the very early stages I remember trying to get to grips with the likelihood that people we knew and loved might die, and that my parents might not make it through. I remember standing in a supermarket of empty shelves and then heading back to the car and trying to make it seem normal so as not to alarm the kids, who were still little.
I know lots of people enjoyed staying at home for months on end, but I’ve never been able to identify with the bliss they seem to have experienced. The whole affair confirmed to me once and for all that I’m an extrovert through and through; I missed people, I missed moving around, I missed the physical act of being in a crowd.
I can only remember consciously breaking “the rules” once. The 92 year old who lived three doors down died (not of Covid). People loved him, he’d lived on the street for decades. There was a wake for him in the middle of the road; the neighbours all had a bit to drink and the social distancing thing slowly went out the window. Absolutely no regrets, it was the right thing to do.
My main recollection of the period is that work went out of control. Everyone being stuck at home meant there was nowhere else for anyone to be and everyone was reachable. The global nature of the business meant someone somewhere was always awake and trying to reach you. I worked to midnight and beyond for most of that year, trying to balance family life, and without the various things I usually do in order to manage a busy life and keep myself sane (long runs, cinema, lots of socialising). I remember working on something at 1am, getting a Teams message from someone on another matter and then receiving an unscheduled call from someone else, all in the same moment, as if it was just a regular afternoon. Grim.
At the end of the year, my company went through one of its semi-regular corporate bloodbaths and virtually everyone got laid off. I survived, as I always seem to, but it was galling to see people who had worked round the clock treated so poorly (albeit they were all very well paid to leave) as a reward for their efforts in such circumstances. C’est la vie, that’s the way of these jobs, but also: gross.
I remember getting the jab, waiting the required time and then on the first morning I was all clear dashing round to my parents’ house to give my Mum a hug. The second lockdown was far, far harsher than the first – in retrospect I think it was a mistake, and particularly the schools being closed. Deep into 2021 I remember home schooling my youngest until lunch time every day, and then starting my actual job knowing I would be working until the small hours as a consequence.
There’s one thing that will always stay with me from that whole period. I remember standing in my garden alone one afternoon, looking up at the moon and thinking that somewhere up there might be another planet, where a person just like me was also looking at the sky and thinking about other worlds, and where none of this was happening.
I think people had wildly different experiences of those months, depending on their circumstances. For everyone who ran out of things to watch on Netflix, baked banana bread, learned guitar and watched in wonder as the wildlife returned there’s probably someone else like me who hated every bloody minute of it (and I’m normally one to try to find the best in things). 0/10 would not do again, and I’ve still to this day never to my knowledge had Covid.
My experiences were much the same as eloquently expressed above. I do feel though that, post pandemic, society and the way people behave and interact with each other has changed. And not for the better.
I completely agree.
In which context I read today that the IFS reports a 25 % increase post pandemic in working age deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide. What they describe as “deaths of despair”.
Can’t say that entirely surprises me.
With half a decade’s worth of distance, it seems fairly clear that the cultural consequences of Covid and its associated lockdowns have been profound, both in terms of some of the feral, me-first behaviours we now see in everyday life (I suppose once a person has fought in the aisles over the last pack of toilet roll all bets are off) and the way most people seem to see the world and their place in it.
I’ve spent most of my adult life in an era of comparative optimism. Lives were improving, the Cold War ended, and opportunity seemed to abound. The past contained all the necessary lessons for us about what we needed to avoid, and the future was full of exciting new technology that would improve our lives. We genuinely believed the future was bright.
I think all of that stuff – that sense of the inevitability of progress – had probably been slowly eroding since the Financial Crisis, but Covid really gave it the final push over a cliff.
We learned in short order just how fragile our lives and the systems in which we operate really are. We were reminded of how chaotic nature is, and that for all our airs and graces we’ve still not really transcended its vicissitudes. We were provided final proof (although we’d long suspected it) that when push comes to shove there is no adult in the room, that the protections we’ve built are not in fact so fool-proof that they can survive contact with bona fide fools.
I sense a prevailing negativity since Covid, a sense of collective vulnerability, as if we’ve all been through a trauma together that we don’t really want to talk about. There’s an almost pornographic interest in any suggestion of another virus, or a ramping of climate change, or anything else where mother nature might shortly deliver us another spanking. We’ve become a bit of a cult of apocalypse, presumably because the collective whiplash has been so profound.
Obviously, the news doesn’t help, nor does the dawning realisation for many that the Tech Bros who were going to save the world would gladly burn it down for even the most fractional of advantages in whatever game they’re playing. But the prevailing mis-en-scene, that sense of a culture that’s too frazzled to deal and too fatalistic to get overly worked up about it – that’s new, and that’s not healthy.
We were certainly over-optimistic before, and we’re probably erring too much on the side of pessimism now. I think about some of the messages my kids are exposed to and I can’t really imagine hearing this stuff at their age – this sense that their future has been collectively pre-fucked for them. I doubt even medieval peasants chucked that sort of rhetoric at their young people.
Very well put @Bingo Little. Agree with every word.
All of which is especially problematic in the context of the UK, which becomes economically poorer each year in both relative and, arguably, absolute terms. At the same time half of all adults in parts of the country are economically inactive and expectations of what the state can and should do continue to grow. Meanwhile none of the political parties, svse perhaps the Greens, have any more idea as to what to do about this than they did in 2008, the last time the economy actually grew in real terms. And the Greens big idea is ultimately about actively seeking negative growth, which requires some real magic tricks if you simultaneously want a very active and generous state, and don’t want to limit immigration.
Unfortunately hoping magic happens isn’t a practical plan for the country.
It’s hard to be optimistic what with what’s going on in Ukraine and America.
On a financial note, I was talking to someone yesterday who is a little younger than me, early 50s maybe and she said that aged 21, working as a bank clerk, she was able to get a mortgage on a flat and run a car, presumably not living on Kwik Save baked beans either. My son and his GF have a decent combined income but should they want to buy somewhere, will need to borrow at least 5 times joint income over 30 years, which apparently is not uncommon, 6 times income being possible with the right deposit. Neither of them want a family fortunately, as the loss of income would be extremely difficult to accommodate.
Finally, anecdotally, I’ve met a few people who say they will never be able to retire, one at least through poor choices earlier in life but others through circumstances. Are the UK pensions so pitiful because of a reluctance to tax better off people or is that too simple an explanation?
We have the lowest taxes in Europe and the worse services. Do the math.
It would appear that we do indeed pay less tax than most of Europe but how much more would non basic rate tax payers have to pay to make a difference I wonder?
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/may/27/tax-britons-pay-europe-australia-us#:~:text=Germany,-Gross%20salary%20%C2%A3&text=Basic%20rates%20of%20tax%20are,and%201%25%20for%20care%20insurance.
Switzerland is much lower, but has a private health service
The main problem with UK pensions is that money has never been set aside to pay for them, so they have to be funded from year on year tax revenue. People had been living longer – although that has since worsened since the pandemic – and the number of economically active paying tax has declined. So pushing the state retirement age out (it will be 68 by 2044) and leaving it below a living wage seems unlikely to change.
I sometimes say half seriously that the anti smoking campaign was as disastrous as it was successful. Smoking used to lead to far more (pretty awful) earlier deaths, and now people are living longer as a result leading to more care costs particularly when Alzheimers and other forms of dementia kick in.
My Mum, a dedicated smoker, use to say this. She was right. She went into hospital with diverticulitis and they were unable to operate as she also had COPD due to smoking so they withdrew treatment. She made it to 86 though which is good going. She wouldn’t have had it any other way.
But less costs surely dealing with smoking related diseases
That first lockdown was great for us personally – had a big shed delivered and we built that and them the GLW persuaded me that I could repaint the entire outside of our house with our two sons who were still living at home at the time – we did. The weather was glorious!
During that time of course the deaths started to ramp up and I got genuinely scared, despite all the assurances that “most” people just got the milder symptoms. The relief when the vaccines were announced and then we got to stand (fully distanced, of course) in a queue to actually get a jab, was huge.
One of my wife’s friends lost her husband to it (pre-vaccine) but outside of that our personal exposure was fortunately low. I’ve had it three times, all post-vaccinations (which I will continue to take as many times as they are offered) and with diminishing severity even from a fairly mild first time.
My experience is that virtually no one seems to test any more when they get cold symptoms but I always do. No matter how mild it might be for the individual, you just never know who you might be exposing that might have reasons to avoid it, or elderly relatives who really don’t need to be getting it.
Our experience was made tolerable because we both continued going to work. I was working in a hospital and my wife in a Probation Approved Premise full of people being released from prison. Living in an ( albeit much quieter than previously) town center also helped, as there at least some people around.
The longer-term impacts that I see are all negative. I now work in a school and there is clear difference between the Year 11 and Year 10 pupils. The former are far more ‘needy’, an Assistant Head’s term, not mine. Elsewhere, service and performance levels seem to have crumbled in many sectors. My wife is now back in a Probation Office. Her latest Senior Probation Officer manager only deems it necessary to turn up in the office once a week. Meanwhile, newly qualified and staff in training are essentially left to fend for themselves.
My partner’s daughter is a teacher at a Manchester secondary. She was a NQT when kids were allowed back into schools. Her experience was that the kids who were already at secondary hadn’t gone as feral (my suggested word) as she had feared, but the ones entering secondary education now are very challenging having missed out on some very formative school time.
Yep. Tallies. I work in a School aldo in Manchester and the current Y6, and ones who have left in the last two years are markedly different to previous years. Not quite feral maybe but certainly unable to concentrate, listen or understand that word “no.”
Best of/worst of, to paraphrase Dickens. The first realisation it was all going to go tits up was when we were on holiday, in a B’n’b, in Bowness. I think lockdown was being talked about on the news, so Mrs Path was getting nervous about going in to pubs and restaurants, supermarkets and shops. I had then one normal week at work, remembering a sign going up in reception about anyone who had been to Wuhan should admit that fact. Then it was that day, with Boris telling us it was lockdown as from the Monday, necessitating an emergency planning meeting at the surgery on the Sunday,
I shaved off my beard, having read that would make any mask fit better and my wife bought up industrial amounts of gloves, masks, cleanser, aprons and surgical scrubs for me to wear: I was always weeks ahead the trickle down of official supplies. From 3 1/2 days a week, I stepped up to full-time, expecting it would be needed, being exempt from WFH restrictions. However, it became swiftly apparent that it was not necessary, given the situation. Much of my job was feasible to be done over the phone or zoom, or done differently. Indeed, the lesson learnt was that much of F2F attendance is purely customary rather than serving any great purpose. The problem was to know when F2F was required and thus when and how to arrange it. We had, compared to many other practices, a remarkably low threshold for conversion, which meant proportionately fewer mistakes were made through “missing” diagnoses, more happening through the fear of patients, who didn’t report them.
Nursing Homes had it the worst, as patients were dumped their way from hospitals desperately clearing their decks, without due testing. The virus ripped through their communities and I recall visiting funeral homes that were packed to the rafters with the dead: 3 to a fridge, and spare office rooms being cooled down by hastily hired air conditioners. Terrifying.
Colleagues with relatives working in hospital; conditions there were way worse. We were busy but risk was controlled and measurable. The horrors of local hospital staff who succumbed were reported widely, let alone the daily list of our own patients, unlucky enough to be admitted.
I enjoyed the quietness of the streets and roads and took full advantage for special NHS shopping hours: Early on Sunday mornings seemed to be one, I recall.
When restrictions were lifted/reduced the all too predictable hell broke back loose a little, and it was then just depressing to read and see how little attention to any subsequent instructions or advice was paid, it then becoming just a long haul onto the eventual acceptance it was not going to be held in check by restrictions, the hope being that sufficient immunity had been by then conferred. Frankly, those who were going to die had largely done so, and I apologise if that sounds harsh or banal.
Pray it be better next time.
Working for the NHS made it a pretty interesting time. I volunteered at one of the Wuhan resettlement sites, where 150 people had been flown back to the UK and were quarantining. It was a couple of fascinating days, there were some pretty high level NHS and government types co-ordinating and although I didn’t do much, I felt like I’d stepped up.
Although no one asked me to I dusted down my nursing skills and volunteered to help out with some of the local mental health teams, assuming that at some point I might be needed to plug a gap within a service. That didn’t happen until January 2021 when the coronavirus pretty much knocked out one of the community teams and I spent a month working for the mental health crisis team. I feel like I got a lot out of working back in secondary services (I normally work now as a therapist in a primary care talking therapies team) and I found it pretty funny that things hadn’t changed that much in the 20 years since I worked in those sort of teams (chronic lack of staff, facilities, being asked to stay late to cover gaps in staffing, suspicion from staff of anyone not from their team). I also volunteered to help with the vaccine role out (initially just flu, later C19). I was rather amazed how some of the organisation was second to none, and some of it was awful. The amount of times I turned up for an agreed shift, just to hear that I wasn’t expected or that they had no idea who I was. A lot of wasted time, usually when things were organised by the NHS trust I worked for.
I really enjoyed working from home with my usual job, and we all got used to using zoom and teams pretty quick (although I was still on site one day a week). It’s totally changed the way I work, and I’m still a WFH two days a week, not least because during the first lockdowns other ‘more important’ services nicked some of our office space and consulting rooms. Even if we all wanted to come into the office now there just wouldn’t be space for us all and some patients prefer a zoom call to having to get two buses to come to an appointment.
One of the things I reflected on at the time is that I was glad there wasn’t an equivalent lockdown when I was my daughter’s age. Mini Paws was only 8, but she seemed to manage not being around people as much. In the first lockdown she continued to school (I used to love walking her in on the sunny spring mornings), with there only being a few kids her age in a mixed class of 7-10 year olds. Most of her classes were outside and I got the sense that not much learning was done, but I think they enjoyed what they were doing.
Away from work and education we had to put up with some bad neighbours. The previous ones had moved out a little before lockdown and the people who moved in seemed to really enjoy the furlough scheme. Whilst we worked from home, they got up late, played loud music, had a cannabis factory in the loft and invited their mates over for hot tub parties. Going into the office was a good break from this. The most annoying thing was that every morning (at 11.30) when they got up they cranked up the volume and played UB40 really loud. Not the first two albums, mind, but all their well known and well loved hits. The neighbours eventually did a moonlight flit, around the same time the other neighbour reported the cannabis factory.
I have the utmost respect for anyone who worked in any respect in the NHS at the time. I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like.
As Twang says, we must NEVER forgive those at the top who failed to make decisions that seemed obvious even at the time or allowed the appalling abuses that started to come to light.
I bet the hot-tub was just cover for the humungous leccy bill for the grow-lights in the loft.
They would probably have rigged the electric meter as soon as they moved in. And they’d be packed ready to do a flit if necessary right from day one.
Working for the NHS (and other healthcare systems) before, during and after Covid, has always been a challenge.
Potted career history…graduated in engineering and worked through the financially successful but bumpy dotcom years in London in the nineties and the first half of the 2000s. Returned home to Northern Ireland and, wanting something more dependable, decided to retrain.
What does the world need? Love, obviously, but also healthcare and so nursing it was. If you so choose, you can never be out of work in nursing.
Since then, it’s been a career in A&E, urgent care, Hospital at Night, etc. and so I was frontline during Covid, both north and south of the border. Ireland went into lockdown before the 17th March with the UK shortly after. There was no connection between the NHS in Northern Ireland and the HSE in Ireland nor any common politics over the matter of the border, which didn’t help matters either.
EDs are generally chaotic at the best of times but short on equipment, staff, space and contraditory messaging from governments meant that it was even worse. The public also played its part in making things worse. Not only in large public events but in small scale stuff. Every viral symptom wasn’t Covid and not every Covid case needed hospitalisation but numbers in EDs didn’t change dramatically. What was noticeable was the number of presentations of MIs, CVAs, etc. dropped significantly, when those numbers are generally consistent no matter. The general feeling is that many people who could have been successfully treated in hospital probably died at home due to their fear of being out during Covid. Where I work now has a large Oncology unit and we are still seeing the effect of Covid on cancers not being detected in those years.
But while all the talk was of ventilators, the biggest issue was, as ever in healthcare, the availability of staff. You volunteered to work but plenty of bank/agency staff didn’t want to take the risk and so didn’t pick up shifts in those years. This is completely understandable given that healthcare staff were as suspectible as anyone else when it came to surviving Covid but with the added risk of working in environments where Covid was rife.
By some stroke of luck, I went through all those years without so much as a sniffle and without ever being a close contact when I wasn’t wearing a mask so I worked all the way through Covid. I worked an average – and I mean an average so the peaks were higher – of 58 hours a week for two years with little annual leave and little time off. All of that was in hospital and in-clinic. If there was any plus to that time, it was that the coffers did open to allow us to get staff. The issue was often finding staff who were not unwell themselves and who were not in isolation.
Still…as a ward sister I worked for once used to say, “This shift will end”, so too did the worst of Covid. I had no time for the clapping on the streets – sorry to any of you who did so but I’d rather have had a payrise – and the general praising of healthcare staff has dissipated and gone back to the routine abuse that was present pre-Covid. Only now, healthcare organisations are looking to balance their accounts for those years so staffing is, relative to the demands on the systems, worse than it’s ever been.
And it’s not only the NHS. The HSE is the same and, in Ireland, where there is a mix of private and public healthcare, the private providers are also significantly reducing their costs while increasing the services, working hours, etc. You’ll detect that staffing is something of a common theme in this long post but it’s always been the staff that make any healthcare system work and they are, unfortunately, some of the worst treated in any type of organisation anywhere, healthcare or not. Abuse of healthcare staff remains commonplace and, in too many cases, there is little to no support. And for little financial reward and sometimes very little recognition.
Too late to go back to telecoms though…
The clapping crap infuriated my other half.
The best thing about the lock-down period was the sight of horizon to horizon blue skies with no vapour trails visible. The hexagram of the heavens was blank. Earth breathed while we died.
It took four years before we caught the bug ourselves, thanks to a packed gig in Bristol. Poleaxed us both, despite the jabs. Luckily it was easy to buy fresh LF tests online, and once we knew the cause we could avoid passing it on to anyone.
Trouble is, it’s only a matter of time.
As someone who had worked at home on their own for ages and enjoyed their own company, lockdown meant I suddenly had to share a house 24 hours a day, which was very hard indeed and, I think, ultimately the thing that led me to decide that married life wasn’t really for me. On the plus side, I loved the empty streets and the empty skies, and the home-made soups and the soda bread. I even kind of enjoyed being in charge of home schooling.
The point about sudden enforced company is a good one. This week I’ve been wfh as usual and The Light has been using up leave doing stuff around the house. It’s been … challenging, and I really don’t know how we could have coped if we were cooped up as so many were during lockdowns. At the time they were going on we didn’t live together.
2020 Started with a wave of confidence and punning on the 2020 Vision idea – indeed The Professionals release a song of that title in January, and Stiff Little Fingers titled their tour that way. I had tickets for both in late March – unsurprisingly it never happened.
Lockdown proper (“you must say at home”) happened on the day of my step-daughters birthday. It was my grand-daughters first birthday 3 days later, my 15th Wedding Anniversary the next month, and my 50th in July (quite pleased we were locked down then, as I didn’t have to deal with the enforced happiness and full-house of a surprise 50th party).
Working from home: After the first week of IT issues (the VPN work used couldn’t handle the amount of users, Teams wasn’t working properly, and access to everything else was hit and miss), and wifi at home not being able to handle 3 people using it any one time (this was fixed by VirginMedia kindly upgrading all customers to the next level of connection), actually enjoyed working from home (apart from the “I’ll just do one more thing” syndrome which extended working days quite often.
Actually quite enjoyed lockdown – frustrating, but pretty relaxed in general – I think Mrs D and I only had one major row in the whole time (10th June, I think it was).
And neither of us got (or have had) the Covid – at least not knowingly anyway.
As things started opening up, I admit to being concerned about crowds, gigs, football … basically anything outside my house. But 5 years on, I’m happy (and sometimes surprised) how we have got back to being busy, communing in public, and generally carrying on as before (OK, with some small tweaks here and there).
I think the moment I knew the world was open again was when the Harvester near me stopped doing the app and table service.
Other notable lockdown anniversaries:
Eldest Daughter was 25
Youngest Daughter spent her 21st alone in a house in Portsmouth (she wanted to stay there to finish University and keep going to the end of her lease)
Went to the last football match on March 7th.
I say ‘last’ as everything about felt like the end of the season and, in bright Cornish sunshine, I saw a great 2-2 draw. The players touched elbows instead of shaking hands before the match (funny what you remember), and the crowd, about 150, moved around awkwardly, knowing that something wasn’t quite right and nervous about how to behave.
No one in that ground, positioned in one of the safer areas of the country, thought for a minute that they’d be going to a game the following Saturday, let alone the one scheduled for Tuesday 10th. They were right, they weren’t.
Pity the government weren’t as astute… at exactly the same time, Fat Boy J. and his Home Crew, with sage and unbiased advice from the honourable gambling industry, were sanctioning the continuation of that week’s Cheltenham Festival.
Like all schoolteachers, it was a stark reminder than we got into the job for the connections with people. It was like teaching with all the good parts taken out. Currently, we’re managing behaviours in 17 and 18 years old that were previously the domain of 14 year olds. Things seem to be settling but, when dealing with individual or group behaviours and dynamics, it’s become second nature to count backwards to 2020 and work out when Covid hit ’em.
I’ve recently decided to get off the booze, about 3 weeks ago. When I was trying to answer a friend who asked how long I’d been drinking noticeably more, my wife, without hesitation, said ‘Since Covid’. I hadn’t really realised how much that period rewired my drinking brain: perceptions of ‘reward’, more time on our hands, not having to physically go anywhere the next day, general laissez-faire attitude toward booze. I hadn’t really re-adjusted.
I’d agree about the kids. Current y12 seem pretty sorted. Current y13 can’t do anything. They’re the ones for whom it broke in y9, and so that all-important y10 year, where they do so much of their becoming, was a shitshow. And then they had to do the exams at the end of it all anyway, having had the weirdest teens: all the shit, none of the good stuff. I think that cohort, and the current y5-6 lot, are the ones for whom the really important years got trashed. The babies’ earliest years were spent at home, being not-parented. The teens were locked in their rooms being neither parented nor properly, meaningfully befriended.
The bleakest realisation for me is how many people have been revealed as fundamentally uninterested in their own children. Schools, in far too many cases, turned out to be the only place kids learned manners, sociability, and “no”. And loads of those kids had 2 of their most formative years getting none of that. They’re fucked.
Meanwhile, the adults all went quite quickly insane on the internet, and our social contract began to fray alarmingly. I think it’ll come back – I actually think we’re due a sort of Butlerian Jihad and a concomitant return to more traditional ways of living and thinking – but COVID always seems to me to be the nadir of the individualism which people claim to be the child of Thatcher but is actually the child of the 60s. I hope it dies, soon.
(Addendum: I actually had a pretty blissful first lockdown. Lost about 5 stone, got properly seriously fit. I was on the run-out groove of my previous job, getting ready to start a new one in Sept, and so I had no reason to do anything much at all. What I learned in the process is that I am basically incapable of boredom and if (WHEN) my Euromillions ship comes in, I will be the best rich person ever to have lived. There’s so much to see and do and read! I’d do that shit properly. But yeah: after August 2020 there was fuck all good about any of it. Hellish.)
My daughter’s school history since lockdown
2020 Grade 8, school year abandoned after March break, this was her final year of middle school, there was no graduation ceremony, she never saw some of her fellow pupils again
2020-21 Grade 9 high school half of year mixture of schooling from home and attending then moves to another high school in another city because she hates it, she also switched to a new learning language (English instead of French)
2021-22 Grade 10 leaves that high school because of various problems and moves to another one that specialises in schooling for students who struggle
2023-24 Doesn’t graduate in grade 12 (normal year for such)
2024-25 Now in “grade 13”, slight possibility of graduating and going to university but unlikely
She has other issues, but the timing of Covid was really really bad for her
We did OK.
I was a little between jobs as we were about 7 months from moving out to Alice Springs. So I did some part time consulting work, walked the dog, got used to my new insulin pump, and exercised.
For a while, Sharon was home as well. For once the Federal government was excellent – people with high risk family, as I was deemed, stayed home. She eventually got some work to do, but not a lot. Turned out we will be able to retire together, because we got through that OK.
Moved to Australia, separately. Two weeks of quarantine in the Radisson in Sydney. I won’t lie, it was great.
Got to Alice, at a time when Australia had pretty strict interstate travel guidelines. The NT, by and large, remained pandemic free. It was also a great time to travel, as people from Victoria were locked down.
We both eventually contracted it, in 2023 after Sharon came back from a trip to NZ. We’d both been vaxed, and boosted, so that, plus Paxlovid, meant my encounter was relatively low key. The first day was miserable, but after that, no issues. Others we know…much worse experience.
I did two weeks of quarantine at Rydges in Brisbane, also great – I even had a balcony overlooking the river. The leftover airline meals left at the door weren’t great though. Fortunately the missus (who hadn’t come to England with me that time, fortunately) brought care packages, and Woolies and Dan Murphy delivered.
Lockdown in England wasn’t great though. I was due to fly back to Oz, but the flight got cancelled. I’m also high risk, and it was a nervous time until the government and the supermarkets got their act together. I’ve kept a jar of Homepride Cook-in-Sauce from my Boris box as a souvenir. Once I knew I wasn’t going to starve I settled down to eating and drinking – both to excess. I occasionally went out for lonely walks when the weather wasn’t terrible, studiously giving everybody else a wide berth, but overall I was pretty depressed.
Can’t remember how long it was before Emirates suddenly announced my flight was back on – seems like months but probably wasn’t. I was nervous about the flight for obvious reasons, but I’d spent a large chunk of my life savings on biz class, and the flight was practically empty anyway. It was a surreal experience being herded on to buses at Brisbane Airport by armed cops. I asked the one on the bus if he was enjoying the duty. Rather be out catching crims mate, he said.
I’ve caught COVID three times since I got back without any obvious long-term effects. So I’m lucky. It all seems like a strange dream now.
NSW cops were brilliant, as were Immigration folks.
I’d never been to Oz before, let alone on an Official Passport, so I was a bit nervous. The Sergeant was nothing but pleasant, informative and courteous. Immigration’s “Welcome to Country” was so pleasant after a torrid month and having been used to American CBP that I got a bit choked up.
I had scheduled retirement on my 60th birthday in May2020. The building I was working in closed its doors (possibly February) and so the last couple of months of my 30 year stint with them was working from home. During that time the world around us changed forever.
My mother in law had the misfortune to fall and break her leg and so went into hospital where she picked up Covid. She was released from hospital clearly ill but we were assured she had been tested and didn’t have it. My wife (a recently retired health professional) took her in to care for her. You won’t be surprised to hear that she did have Covid and in fact passed away from it within about a fortnight.By then she had passed it on to all three of us at home. Myself and daughter recovered reasonably quickly within a couple of weeks. My wife however was blue lighted into hospital to the same building where her mum was lying below in the hospital morgue. Five years on, and her life has totally changed. Still breathless and with other associated problems, long covid is debilitating her with no cure or resolution in sight.
So my 60th birthday came and went marked not by the big surprise party that had been secretly arranged for me, but by the small gathering of the permitted 6 family members in the garden.
My retirement plan was to go out as an entertainer in care homes and the like. It was about 18 months before I was able to do that.
So in short long Covid continues to spoil our retirement plans, and all because of an old lady falling and breaking her leg at the worst possible time in post war history.
I remember a few comments at the time comparing Covid to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, pointing out that afterwards there seemed almost an agreement to forget it, devastating though it had been. Novels, films and so on of the twenties almost never refer to it. I think to some extent that has been true of Covid. For me, as I was lucky enough not to be infected, all I remember is a lack of event, and a mild tedium. I work near Covent Garden and must have been able to go into work in 2021. I took some pictures of the empty piazza, knowing how hard it would be to remember or imagine later. By contrast, I know someone who is a nurse who was on Covid wards working on research and said even though she had been on wards for thirty years, this was the worst she had ever seen.
Everyone’s experience is interesting, but it will be useful to have more analytical approaches. One of these is Imperial College’s React project which is looking into the long-term effects of the virus. I am one of the people who has been asked to answer their surveys. They contact people who haven’t had it as well as people who did so they can make comparisons, and suggest any necessary actions.
I started a part time job in 2017 as a wedding registrar as I was due to get my state pension in December 2020 I planned to give it up in the September have a few holidays and finally retire, then of course best laid plans etc.
The Friday before the lockdown I was registraring a wedding, the venue had three rooms small, medium and large. Of course it was in the small room with a full complement of guests crammed in it, in hindsight we should have insisted in it being moved to a larger room.
I was paid throughout lockdown and as I was supposed to do my brother in law’s civil partnership (which delay after delay never happened). We started back in August doing weddings etc but we could only do them at our premises, with bride and groom, two witnesses and two registrars, (one of us had to stay in the other room and listen to the vows) and they were only allowed one photograph. I’d did it once decided I didn’t feel safe and so handed in my notice. I have an old schoolfriend who’s a priest and he had different rules for people present if he had a congregation, a wedding or a funeral with different numbers of people allowed for each.
Finally got my vaccinations in February 2021 as I was ‘at risk’ (I’ve had nine in total). 2022 we caught Covid, I’d had to take my wife to the hospital one Friday, the next day we were out and in the evening she felt a tad unwell, and tested positive. She had to go back to the hospital on the Monday so rang up and explained she had Covid and was told to just come in and they’d keep us in a separate room which felt very odd. I of course went down with it after. Luckily there were no lasting effects.
In a way it just helped myself to ease into retirement, I enjoyed sitting out in the sun having breakfast, still went down to the allotment, listened to the birdsong etc.
For me, 2020 is inextricably bound up with the death of my other half – it’s hard for me to get a clear-eyed view of it all…
Jeez sorry to hear that Fitz.
Shuttered our micro business supplying and operating conference hardware and went delivering for Amazon for a few months until I got sick of it. First job back would be 18 months later, although some people did very well out of on line meetings during lockdown.
I remember being very twitchy, always needing to be doing something for quite a long time. I cycled a fair bit, made things and cooked a lot but it was also a chance to get off the work treadmill and re evaluate everything.
After Amazon, I was a postman for a bit but I was worried that I’d get sucked into that so packed that in too, plus it’s really hard work and my feet suffered quite a bit. My wife did care work for a while, which while rewarding, is physically hard sometimes. All these jobs are also not very well paid for the effort required.
We were fortunate in that we were furloughed, got a flat grant towards warehouse costs and the business had money in the bank so it survived. We also retained our major clients when the work came back.
Both my children’s education was disrupted. My daughter coped better than my son, who probably would have found it easier and done better had he not had to come back from university.
Mother in law was in a care home by then and by the time visits were resumed, the dementia had really got a hold. Physically she was ok and survived into 2024 but mentally, she’d gone.
I’d rather not have lived through it all but we were quite fortunate really.
The initial lockdown in Cornwall was almost idyllic. The weather was fantastic and I spent most of that summer sitting on the rocks by the sea, drinking the occasional Proper Job, and reading old Uncut/Mojo Specials.
There were people in the village who had never looked so happy, residing, as they were at that time, in a charming place with absolutely no tourists and barely any traffic!
The lack of sport was my biggest problem, but cricket came back first (Fat Boy. J.: “You’ll be able to go back to the tea urn at your local ground”… you what? Not a f***** clue!!!!) and most Saturdays were spent there.
My overwhelming feeling about the whole thing is that, after years and years and years of people banging on and on about immigration, no one seemed to recognise the serious threat posed in the early days by people winging into the country and being allowed to go here, there and everywhere from the airport. NOW is the time to get busy about people coming into the country, Fromage!!! Not a dicky bird. Amazing.
At the time, Sarah lived near Bedford and I lived near Manchester. She used to come up on alternate weekends. That one, she was staying a bit longer as her Easter holiday had started. When BJ said ‘no travelling after tonight’ I asked my son if he was okay with us moving down to Sarah’s ‘for a couple of weeks’. He was fine, so we packed and drove through the night – we were still there in August.
It had been Sarah’s mum’s birthday a couple of weeks earlier – she’d booked for us all to see the Wizard of Oz at a local theatre. She had decided not to go due to COVID – I can’t remember why Sarah and her son didn’t drive up, but just me and my lad went in the end. The theatre was half empty and the atmosphere was strangely tense before the performance. Sue, Sarah’s mum, cancelled the Mother’s Day buffet she was planning for us all the following week – just in case.
At Sarah’s we settled in – Joe Wicks on YouTube, learning from home, reading, jigsaws, music and art. We were lucky that our salaries were unaffected – it was like being retired but on full pay. We took lovely long walks (longer than the allowed hour) in the sunshine. We got told off by a Tesco manager for not looking scared enough when queuing for bread and milk.
I drew a picture of us all being okay and sent it in a letter to Sarah’s mum. Sadly, she died a day or two after getting it. It was open on a table when we were allowed to go in and clear her apartment. As was a handwritten list of information – legal stuff, what to do with the cat, cash for expenses in case – well, she obviously knew it was coming. It was only April 2nd when she passed.
The drive to the funeral was strange – eerily deserted motorways, half lit service stations, bin liners taped over two out of three urinals. I kept thinking of 28 Days Later.
The funeral was unreal – six of us standing in a car park watching a coffin being carried into the crematorium. Sue would have been 86 today.
An all too typical story, well told.
This is a very valuable thread, I hope it survives any electronic apocalypses that might be on the horizon.
One thing that I think about often is that, for a period, the entire world was going through the same experience – to a greater or lesser extent obviously. Not even World War 2 did that.
Similar to my post above… those who banged on most about the war (although they didn’t fight in it) were, during Covid, the ones who were the most likely to not give a stuff.
That was my experience. They were also the ones who voted to leave Europe…. hey-ho.
Thanks chaps.
The good news? A significant number are now pushing up the daisies.
Once again, thanks chaps. I miss those war heroes.
Interesting edition of More Or Less on Radio 4 this morning, on the impact of Lockdown on youngsters.
It tallies with the experiences of my Offspring, both of whom had access to laptops, wi-fi, etc, but were affected by the lack of lessons, socialising, exams (one didn’t take A-levels, the other didn’t take GCSEs).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00291y1
Coincidentally I spent the first weeks of 2020 on a cycle tour of COVID ground zero, Yunnan, visiting caves that had bats (but were promoted for their being the origin of bird’s nest soup). I visited wet markets selling mostly pigs and geese and wondered at the time why these had not been shut down following the disastrous SARS outbreak twenty years earlier.
I left China in mid January completely oblivious of any impending respiratory infection pandemic, but my last night was spent in a hostel dorm in which a fellow resident coughed all night. I wonder … Back in Australia I heard from my Chinese friends that they were locking down fast and hard, and asking why we weren’t doing the same for such a serious disease. Our prime minister was instead saying there was no reason why we still shouldn’t go to the football or go on a cruise ship. It took until March for our head-in-the-sand leaders to impose a patchy form of quarantine restrictions, which failed to contain the spread of the highly infectious airborne virus (which they claimed wasn’t airborne and we should wash our hands).
But already by April my Chinese friends were happy to report their lockdown had been successful and they were able to lift restrictions, while we continued to blunder through a year of confused and on/off lockdown conditions that failed to stop the virus spreading. Sadly two of my friends were infected. One died within days, the other developed complications including kidney failure that ultimately took his life later in the year. Both were in their early sixties and not particularly unhealthy.
I was fortunate in being able to work from home, but the pandemic transformed our company into dull remote working. The best part of my job had involved attending medical conferences, but these now switched to virtual online meeting s which were tedious and unrewarding. We never went fully back to ‘in person’ meetings, and five years on I have just resigned in search of more ‘real world’ work.
Last year I went back to China for the first time since the pandemic and met up with old friends whose pandemic experiences seemed much less disruptive than mine. They didn’t mind the draconian but brief lockdowns because they worked, and local communities all looked out for each other. Restriction and access systems based on apps worked efficiently and they had a sense that everyone was in it together.
I asked one friend who is a hospital administrator what it had been like at the height of the pandemic, and she said it had just been a few weeks of quarantine for most people, and they hadn’t experienced many excess illnesses or deaths before they were able to get vaccinated. Over time COVID-19 mutated into Omicron and they never had the deadly waves that we saw in Australia and the UK. They were baffled when I had to explain that as well as losing two good friends to COVID I also lost several colleagues and acquaintances to COVID conspiracy cooker syndrome. If there is another pandemic and I’m in China again, I’ll stay put and not move anywhere where health services are run by charlatans and antivaxxers.
What is cooker syndrome?
An Oz FB page Batshit Crazy Cookers describes itself thus…”The Chronicles of Australia’s Conspiracy Fearists, Sov Shitizens, Grifters, Anti Vaxxers & Freedumb movement…Also known Down Under as “Cookers”.
COVID is a hoax, vaccines are mind control (expanded lately to all vaccines, not just the COVID ones), chemtrails, fluoride in water, 5G, urine drinking is good for you, cure cancer via diet…and that’s just for starters.
Cheers for that. I. never joined facebook, and hearing about this is yet another confirmation I did the right thing.
I take it you mean the caves were the origin of birds nest soup and not the bats.
Interesting reading your account.
I was coming up to my second year of redundancy and running out of money when a temp agency offered me six weeks’ work at one of these new-fangled drive-through testing stations the army were setting up. It turned out to be a life-changing experience, having been thrown into a melting pot which was part Big Brother, part I’m a Celebrity, part Love Island. I learned more about the human condition in two years than I had in the previous fifty. I was changed.
I had a small WhatsApp support group, so many of my daily reflections are still preserved in digital form, from encounters with panicky parents, entitled twats in expensive cars, terrible admin, being told where I could stick my vaccine (“I don’t think he was a real doctor”), Captain Tom in real time, seeing just how much money was siphoned off by various agencies (the portaloos earned more per week than I did), and Matt Hancock’s “Ever Yours” letter to all us essential workers.
Luckily we’d got a dog about a year previously, so I had an excuse to get out and get some exercise in between shifts, carefully skirting the families in the country park organising barbecues in the car park and navigating by phone since they’d clearly never been anywhere near the place previously. I skipped out a couple of months before the entire workforce found out they were going to be made redundant via a press conference.
Somewhere, I imagine, there are still two thousand retro-fitted Renault vans with badly-functioning microwaves to be decommissioned.
Our son turned two the week of lockdown. It could have been a lot better for us, but I’m also aware it could have been a lot worse – he was too young to ask questions, no home schooling for us to cover, and both my wife and I have jobs that we could do from home; in fact I haven’t set foot in an office since. We had to juggle childcare between us so there was no opportunity to take up breadmaking or however people filled their time, but fortunately we both had employers who were willing to be flexible when we really required it. I actually ended up saving a chunk of money as suddenly there were no travel expenses, and no cafe / pub trips.
It was bloody hard having the in-laws half an hour up the road and no opportunity to see them, I’m sure our son wondered why he didn’t see his grandparents for 3 months when previously we’d seen them twice a week. My own parents live further away, and I didn’t see them for 10 months, which was hard as they’re pretty old now. I also remember the eerie feeling of cycling around an empty city, on roads I wouldn’t usually ride on because it would be too dangerous.
My fear is that several public health experts believe it’s only a matter of time before another pandemic, and we don’t seem to have learnt any lessons from the first.