OK, so this is a big one. I want to talk about the lockdowns. Right now, there are ‘oaf-icial’ inquiries going on into the behaviour of our leaders and lead scientists who flagrantly ignored the lockdown rules they were giving out at the time to the public and into the infighting going on between the medical experts, scientists, Sir-whatever and Professor-this-or-that, and the government. At the time, we were all scared. We behaved in ways that we would never have understood before the lockdowns: going outside and clapping the NHS into the evening sky on Thursdays, hoping they would not be overwhelmed; acknowledging our neighbours who we could only see through each other’s windows and never speak to apart from when we all went outside to do this and shouting cheery messages to one another across the street; feeling guilty and risking a fine if we went out for any reason other than shopping or for walking our dogs; going around in face masks to supermarkets where teenagers who were still expected to keep working on a minimum wage were becoming our heroes (in masks and tee-shirts proclaiming their newly-elevated status, but still on a minimum wage); making lessons online for children and having meetings with them online lying on our beds while talking to them.
Wow, that was a long sentence!
I was listening to the radio today and they were talking about the memory loss that we are all suffering from because of these lockdowns. And the reason for this is that our familiar reference points simply just disappeared. We don’t have the memory of the normal Christmas, Glastonbury festival that year and so on. So when we try to recall things, we tend to underestimate how many years ago that was because to a certain extent those lockdown years have been wiped from our memories. Our normal reference points are missing.
Michael Rosen’s Lockdown Diary (linked)
I wrote lockdown diaries throughout the period because there were no travel blogs to be had. We couldn’t even leave the house unless for very prescribed and specific purposes. There was a rota to go into school to look after and teach the children of ‘keyworkers’, which was flagrantly abused by some of the parents who could not hack their children being at home during the week and in some cases inconveniencing their drug-dealing or dodgy eBay store activities: “I’m a key worker because I work down the corner shop on Sundays so my child has to be at school all week.”
I, like many others, felt that it could be me or anyone close to me next and my older brother came very, very close. I would not have been allowed to attend his funeral if it had gone down that route. Three of my former schoolmasters were picked off by Covid19, probably because they were thumbing a tooth at the pandemic (in a Shakespearian way – an obscene gesture in Elizabethan times) and got picked off as a result. Sure, there were tragic deaths at our school back in the day. A master lost his wife. A student got kicked in the head on a rugby field and there was a cup and a plaque named after him. Cracknell his name was, I think. But we were never expected to show emotion about this just like people could not find closure and attend the funerals of loved ones they lost during lockdown. The only way you could show that was taking it all out on the rugby field. It was the 1970s. That’s what we did and were expected to do. But looking back at my lockdown diaries I wanted to republish here with the benefit of hindsight and to try to make sense of it all.
We all thought that we could be the next one down so did unusual things. We put up our glamping awning for the V-dub in the garden and lived out there during the summer lockdown. It has a wood burner in it so worked in the cold too. I got my younger daughter to record me singing a song I liked at the time on her phone… just in case… It’s not very good, but I was thinking… just in case I need to leave something of it behind.
The school encouraged us to record bedtime stories for the children. There was an issue with copyright, and I had to contact the daughter of the (deceased) author, who had the rights to the story, to get consent to put it out as a video. But if you ever need a bedtime story for your littl’uns, then this is a great one.
And, very sadly, we lost a much-beloved colleague at school during the lockdowns and they asked me to record this story. Jerimiah’s Journey is a Plymouth-based charity that supports children who have lost close family members or loved ones and gave us permission to record it. I hope you never need it. I still grieve for my Dad and whenever I am overly-sad, or overly-happy, I take out my hip flask and raise a ‘glass’ of his favourite tipple (a good malt whisky) to the picture of him wearing nothing but swimming briefs and a towel, at the seaside with his dad, my grandfather, who sports a 3 piece suit, wry smile and a tie on the shingle beach, both sat in deckchairs, back in the 1950s, on the wall of my man cave, always on my own, and toast the old buggers. It looks like my young dad had just gone for a swim and my grandad was smiling at the youthful exuberance of his son who had just gone and thrown himself amongst the cold waves – the stupid boy. In this way, their spirits are always with me, just like in the Jerimiah’s Journey story. I worked that one out for myself. I still think about my dad pretty much every day. And every day he walks beside me. Maybe those lockdowns taught us to walk hand in hand with those that are no longer by our side.
It really was berserk, lost time. My younger daughter was at home trying her very best to follow online secondary school lessons in a way that made me feel very proud of her. My older daughter was in Canada and I told her she needed to fly home while she still could, but she said that she was fine: the food shops and the weed shops were still open. She’s not a smoker but said this just to let me know that people in Canada were fine and dandy… and stoned if that was their thing. My son was on his cruise ship in his singing job and was happily confined moored up in some port or other in the Mediterranean and enjoying use of the facilities normally offered only to passengers. My wife was at home making lessons for her school and I was doing the same. What the f*** was all that all about? No wonder people lost that time and think that six years ago was only four years ago. We must all have some worm hole, some period of time wiped from our normality over this. But I do remember that those plastic Covid test gizmos were the perfect spacers for laying decking out in the garden. See what I mean? Berserk. When would we ever have had the time to do that? Dig out the sloping soil by hand, level the ground, lay the decking and build a roofed gazebo over it with the aid of a potential-death test.
And then I looked back at my lockdown diaries published previously on this site. And there are the clues. Some good things did happen during the lockdowns. Things were done that we never would have thought we had time to do. Lives were reassessed and we found some of the gallows humour that sees us through situations like this. And when I read them back, I think I can start to make sense of it all, how it affected us, and how it changed and grew us. But nevertheless, it’s certainly still like a hole in our histories. It is as if there were a period of our lives in which we were zapped into some sort of parallel reality, completely separate from our normal lives before and afterwards. Maybe that is what it was like for people who lived through the terrible world wars of the twentieth century.
My son and my daughters will remember this when they are old. And just like the younger generations blame us boomers (who dried their washing on clothes lines outside, dried the washing up with a tea towel rather than in a washing up machine, returned our glass bottles for a deposit, wore hand-me-down clothes and used a fraction of the electricity that we use today because we played outside rather than on electrical devices – I could go on…) for the current climate crisis, their children will ask them what they were doing during the lockdowns and why their leaders were partying, arguing and abusing the very rules they themselves were setting… and blame them for it. They will tell them: “That was ___ years ago,” but will probably be out by a couple of years because of that hole in their history. In some cases, like my younger daughter’s, it may be a rite of passage – the transition from primary to secondary school and the events surrounding this, that were lost. Forever. There has to be some learning from all this.
So here are the lockdown diaries I wrote at the time and the thought journeys they took me on. None of them are very long, so please take the time to read and think about them. I guess everyone has their own unique story from the lockdowns. Here are a fraction of mine:
Related Post/Further Reading:
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