CoVID-19 Diary – week 15

Time is a tyrant. If it’s alive it ages, if it’s dead it decays, if it’s inanimate it weathers. If it doesn’t weather it still gathers dust and even if it’s sealed it gets preserved in the past while time marches on in all its tyranical certainty. Time demands you stay with the program. It’s a moving train — you get 30 seconds to board or unboard and you are either on the train or you are history.

As monstrous as the CoVID-19 crisis has been it’s a pussy cat when stood against time. It will (eventually) be consigned to history and even now it’s no longer a monolith. The easing of the lockdown is fragmenting our thoughts, actions and even our fears. Smaller secondary and tertiary outbreaks are creating new concerns and questioning our initial ideas about the virus. For governments like the UK and USA the initial strategies have been so unhinged, haphazard and almost non-existent that any new strategy has no real point of reference and that is, in itself, unsettling.

None (or very few) of us want constant supervision and instruction but we almost universally want some lines drawn or rules laid down as starting blocks and boundaries set (not to be hemmed in by them but to be there as markers). This is why we took to the lockdown so with so little resistance. Even in the USA, with its new frontier mindset, compliance has been high. The threat was taken seriously (more by the people than the governments) and while the measures were draconian they made a great deal of sense. Many of us would have wished for even more restrictions as they would not only have set clear boundaries for those who don’t take well to being told but it would have meant a shorter and more effective lockdown (who would choose solitary confinement in a luxury apartment for a month over being locked in their bathroom for a day).

The virus being invisible (as viruses are) it means you need visible and solid representations of the threat in order to establish your routine. We’ve always known that you catch the thing from close proximity to other people and what they’ve immediately touched (the latter less so). So when you are out and the only other people you can see are few and in a different space, you feel reasonably assured of your safety. When you are behind a locked door and strangers are semi-permanently barred you feel in control. While we are gregarious beings, security is our primary concern so while social isolation has its own mental health issues, so long as you have a valid reason to isolate yourself and the threat overweighs the advantages of socialising it’s really not that bad a place to be in.

I don’t know if its an introvert thing but I’ve enjoyed not having to deal with people face to face, be more in control of my time and have less time-based commitments, and I’m not over excited about going back to how it was. Apart from the self isolation it was good to have boundaries that everyone understood and complied with even if they did that for different reasons. I would have liked a more comprehensive lockdown, not only to isolate the outbreaks but to set a common baseline. For all its menace and indiscriminate killing CoVID-19 has no axe to grind. It has no agenda and doesn’t bow to any political ideology and in this sense its a particularly useful foil. As a nation we can fight this enemy without a sense of nationalism. Its lack of ideology means we can collaborate with others regardless of their ideology.

It has been said “Don’t waste a crisis” and our government have really taken this on board using every excuse to enrich their mates rather than meet real needs but its looking more and more that the government and wider society will have been extremely wasteful and missed massive opportunties this crisis has afforded (if that’s not insensitive). In no way is the 60k+ excess deaths an opportunity or positive on any level and people losing their jobs and houses benefits no one. But we did see an improvement in the environment, we’ve seen an explosion of creativity and inginuity, the crisis has highlighted how valuable our essential workers are yet how poorly paid. The Black Lives Matter movement exploded within a perfect storm. We’ve seen the money tree myth hacked apart and consumerism has had its copybook well and truly blotted. But its pretty clear that all the gains that could at least have given us some consolation could consign this period to being an ill wind that blew no one any good.

As with any crisis, when you lie about your part (whether it was contributary or incidental) you exclude opportunities for yourself or others. When faced with a critical issue a responsible company will employ troubleshooters and give them access to all areas. It wouldn’t use the crisis as a cloak to introduce measures it couldn’t do in plain site. The luxury we had during the pseudo total lockdown was that both voluntary and compulsary limitations on providers and recipients were up for little debate. We now have a free for all where there will undoubtedly be clashes between physical, emotional, economic and various personal needs and wants. Any thought of embedding some of the benefits we’ve experienced will be out of the window as the nation clamours for normality and be in no doubt, none of this will go to waste on a government that is hell bent on asset stripping what’s left of our country.

Time is not our friend and don’t they know it. That’s why they’re so keen on enquries rather than inquests. Everyone wants to see the back of coronavirus but not everyone is so excited in ending the lockdown (not immediately anyway). There are very good reasons for wanting the lifting of restrictions to be more measured, staggered and more fully understood but there are also less logical reasons. Most of us kind of knew where we were with lockdown and it got us exploring new ways of working, living and being. So in some ways we could have done with a couple of more months to work out how the future could look. But that’s not how it works.

Lockdown, we are missing you already but each new season brings new opportunities, challenges and heartaches. Holding on to time is like cupping water in your hands. Unless you put it to use immediately it simply runs through your fingers. The past gives us context, the future gives us hope and the present gives us opportunity. Time cannot be tamed but it can be used to our advantage if we take up the challenge.