So the covid anniversaries are under way: a national day last Tuesday marking a year since the first UK lockdown and 127,000 plus more intimate memorials to come. Aries friends are anticipating a second consecutive birthday in lockdown and 2000 years after Christ, BC and AD have had a rebrand.
I can remember with unusual clarity my last party, BC (Before Covid) - a school friend's 50th, my last work event - a conference in Docklands, last meal with my family in a restaurant - dinner, Mediterraneo, Nottinghill. There’s a point of reference in all our minds and history that is the third week of March 2020 before which life was.... different: before words like ‘lockdown’ and ‘quarantine’ became part of everyday language, before support bubbles and face-masks, before we were straightjacketed by fear of risking our lives if we went for a pint of milk or of killing our parents by breathing near them...before we’d lived through a global pandemic, people!!
For the first time in a long time there is optimism, albeit of a cautious kind. Over half of UK adults have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, not all of the news agenda is taken up now with covid stories (other bad news is beginning to get a look in) and we are able and daring to imagine life, AD (After Disease) - sorting pub dates, booking restaurants, planning holidays... and getting hair cuts.
But as we begin slowly to shed our shackles and stumble blinking towards liberty and the light - what if anything has changed?
For all that in its early days the pandemic was presented as a great leveller, it has of course been anything but. A great, all-encompassing backdrop yes - the only thing that any of us has been able to point to and talk about for a year so omnipresent has it been in all our lives, but no leveller.
There are some who’ll come through this pandemic relatively unscathed - those who have not lost loved ones, their livelihoods, homes or good health. Some will even be flush - those in whichever blessed niche industries and businesses to have thrived, those who have worked throughout and saved a small fortune during a year weirdly absent of commuting, socialising and any other cost-incurring activities that happen outside of one’s home.
Others have been completely derailed - financially, emotionally, and mentally. How different the experience of lockdown will have been for a comfortably off family living in a spacious home with garden access to that of one living in a cramped high-rise flat with no outdoor space whose windows barely open. How different the home-learning experience for children with parental support, dedicated space and their own digital device to those lacking one or all of those things. For all that lockdowns have been intense, claustrophobic and monotonous for most of us - imagine spending those months living with illness, with grief, an abuser.
The fabulous Sheila Hancock said on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour last week that the only conclusion she’d reached at the end of this long year is that we need a revolution. For her the pandemic has simply reaffirmed how undervalued the people ‘who’ve got us through this mess’ really are and that the long existing and gross divisions in our society need urgently to be repaired.
No-one could dispute that the covid pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in our society and hit those least able to cope, hardest. I will forever be indebted to the army of frontline workers who have kept the wheels from coming off in the last year, from hospital staff and teachers to supermarket workers and bus drivers - the people we were invited to our doorsteps to bang pots for and applaud, whilst government echoed our appreciation for some of them with a 1% pay rise.
Given the death toll that sits behind us, and all the suffering that continues to be endured, I can’t help as we emerge from lockdown and into Spring but feel something akin to survivor’s guilt. That, and a growing suspicion that Sheila Hancock could well be right. Not just because I think she’s fabulous, but because when an 88 year-old says it’s time for a revolution - it’s probably worth listening.
Image by Janosch Diggelman
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