An Extract from "Year of the Plague: Notes on a Quiet Apocalypse"
5 years on from the pandemic, I wonder if we're any readier to revisit the events of that fateful period, and whether we ever will be.
It’s hard to believe it actually happened.
The Earth has circled the Sun five whole times since news began trickling in from Wuhan, since the infamous outbreak stretched its talons across the planet, and we all wound up scratching our heads, doing our best to adapt to a new life incarcerated in our own homes. Maddening to believe it’s been so long since the pandemic, since the days of Tiger King and banana bread, since Zoom quizzes and washing down the groceries, since a collective collapse in global mental health.
Such events (hopefully) crop up once in a generation, and as we venture into a world that is officially, determinedly post-Covid, my view is we’re yet to make peace with it. Interestingly, we barely discuss what happened to us all in 2020. Over the years that have tailed it, our reaction has mirrored a trauma response - we veer away from it, ignoring it completely, our memories wilfully forgetting certain facets of it until they materialise unannounced. (“Oh yeah, remember when Scotch eggs counted as a meal!?”)
It stands to reason. We are, to varying respects, still traumatised. As such, we’re actively pursuing the only route deemed available to us - pretending that this seismic occurrence didn’t happen at all.
To my mind, to forget it completely or attempt to forget, would be an error. Our ability to process an event like this is key to our understanding of it. To learn from it. Nobody seems keen to revisit anything remotely related to the Coronavirus pandemic and its litany of lockdowns, but what are we to learn from it if we don’t acknowledge it happened? What can we understand if we choose to opt out and ignore it, about our ways of living, our responses to crises, ourselves?
My attempt at understanding during that turbulent time was avid journalling. Supposedly anxiety hinders creativity, but creativity can do likewise with anxiety, ordering it back into its proverbial box. Supposedly, when we have a creative project to work on or a goal to pursue, it makes our worlds more manageable. Countless others did the same - whether it was learning languages, baking banana bread, following Joe Wick’s daily routines or bingeing a TV show - (“It’s finally time to watch The Wire in full!”) - goals and projects made some effort in getting us through it. Often this ranged into toxic productivity with some corners of the internet shaming others for not using this time for endless labour, but generally, the projects people were embarking on weren’t considered work but a way of processing what was going on.
The book of essays and short stories I wrote during that time became an anchor in the miasma of chaos. Isn’t that always the way with stories? Since time immemorial, we’ve told each other tales. Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling suggests the specific structure of a story gives humans hope - that the disarray of the world can be neatly arranged into a three-act structure and have a sense of order imposed upon it. Stories convince us that control exists. It’s why we’ve been drawn to the written or spoken word for millennia - and though it shifts from form to form - once predominantly poetry, then the novel, then the TV box set, now perhaps vertical video sketches - stories and humans have always gone hand in hand.
So here’s a sample of my attempt to impose a degree of control on a world that was spiralling unmercifully out of it. We all had our methods of getting through that time, and this is mine.
Genesis
Remember that golden era when we discussed other things? Time was, and I mean extremely recently, our conversations weren’t just made up of survival strategies – which type of mask to wear (multiple layers? Is a vent OK?) – but of other things which seem mind-blowingly banal now – which outfit we’d wear to work drinks on Friday, who’d got tickets to Glastonbury/Reading/insert music festival here, whether 1917 would win the Oscar or would it be Parasite? It’ll definitely be 1917, have you seen it, it’s so good. You have got to watch Line of Duty. It’s so good. Not as good as that new Netflix drama though, that just blew my mind. Have you tried that new ice cream place in Camden? I saw it on Instagram, it’s Thai, or Malaysian or something. I could buy this top from Primark but I don’t know if I want to support a company like that. Of course he’s trending on Twitter, he’s always offending someone, he thrives on that. I don’t have much time to read anymore, I do it on my commute mainly. I don’t know how much longer the murder-podcast fad will last, they’re becoming really samey. That movie came out twenty years ago? Ugh, I feel old.
This entire era now seems coated in a surreal fuzz, enshrined in a strange celluloid, the way we might feel looking back on old black-and-white footage of people celebrating D-Day – like it couldn’t really have happened because people aren’t in black and white. Same goes for the 2010s – did they really happen? Those naïve former versions of ourselves, blundering from one trite event to the next, no notion of just how different, how cinematic things were about to become. A time when the bulk of our concerns weren’t about surviving a literal plague but a cultural one, the onslaught of late 2010s populism being rammed down our collective throats by every notification and news alert going. A fitting message to any 2016 time travellers – if you were worried then, just wait. The spate of incompetents that people have a habit of electing will soon have to protect you from a very real threat, and whatever interview they gave on whatever news channel about whichever trivial issue won’t matter quite so much anymore.
Times change.
Here’s how I spent New Year’s Eve 2019 – on the rooftop of my rented flat in Brixton. It was a smaller gathering than we’d had the year before – although had we known how much smaller our 2020 celebration would turn out, we might have aimed higher. As midnight struck, I watched and cheered from the rooftop among friends and neighbours as fireworks erupted from the London Eye, and waved a sparkler in the shape of the numbers 2020. I snapped a picture for an Instagram Story, adding an arrow to the sparkler, with accompanying text in chunky orange lettering: HOPE THIS DOESN’T SUCK!! (Oh wow, if only I’d known, because did it ever suck.) In January, I had lunch at a new place that had opened next to my work, went to see Jeanne Dielman, (all 3.5 hours of it) at the French Institute, attended a quiz night in Clapham and won a prize for knowing what a pine marten is. I worked on the BAFTAs from an office near Leicester Square, where we talked about topics of the day – Awkwafina, Parasite, and something called Coronavirus which was beginning to turn up in clandestine chats. Rebel Wilson’s BAFTA speech went viral. In February, I watched that Robert Pattinson movie The Lighthouse, and saw Armando Iannucci, Jess Phillips and Jan Ravens discussing satire and parody in contemporary politics at a renovated church in Islington. I went to the gym a few times, and to the opening of a new club called Lafayette to watch the band Grouplove, who told us in between songs how excited they were to be there on opening night, and predicted big things for the venue. (It would close in two weeks.) News of the Australian wildfires dominated social media, distressing images of charred koalas flooding everyone’s Facebook feeds as an area reportedly the size of Ireland blazed. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their decision to step back from their royal duties, which the media bizarrely dubbed “Megxit.” We were already staunchly convinced that these would be the biggest news stories of the year.
In early March, I spent a weekend away at a University reunion, where we revisited our old student halls and told a batch of Freshers (who didn’t care) that we were alumni. On the way back to London, a few reports trickled in of Coronavirus cases cropping up in Italy, worse than anticipated – “Six people have it!” The next week, I went to Bristol to give a talk on social media practice, and on my journey back, read messages from family members saying this thing was getting out of control and that some of them had started stockpiling, which felt excessive and a bit paranoid. It was at this point, in that first week of March, I felt the panic transform, from a semi-conscious concern of an overseas threat to an actual, creeping fear – that gradual dawning that something genuinely grave was closing in. Conversations saw a shift too, a sense of alarm rippled through every sentence. Life began shutting down around us while we washed our hands over and over, for twenty seconds minimum, singing the Happy Birthday song.
Just two and a half months into 2020, talk of Italy was everywhere. Then, after my weekend in Bristol, talk of London had taken over. Echoes of the swine flu pandemic ten years earlier had already come and gone, the hand sanitisers I remembered from my student halls in 2009 had already been installed, alongside placards explaining how to do it: “God, I never knew I’d been washing my hands wrong all these years!” was a favourite, frequent remark. Perhaps people were blasé at first because the similarity with the swine flu response was so blatant, and swine flu had turned out fine, so why worry? In a world where hysteria is the go-to reaction to virtually every event, we tend to become distrustful of it. A virus seemed on equal footing with everything that had come before it.
That first day back after Bristol was when the shift became most noticeable. My train journey to work was a thousand times more tense, and people were suddenly far less willing to share the confined space they’d been happy to pile into, shoulder to shoulder, armpit to armpit, for decades. A few commuters had begun wearing masks, and were attempting to keep their distance however possible, everyone casting wary glances at each other as if trying to spot the virus sitting there, nestled in a corner or on someone’s lap. No one gripped the poles, which we’d all known for years were riddled with every toxic bacteria known to man. One passenger coughed into her scarf and everyone craned away from her, their faces contorting in horror as if she’d vomited up a lung.
Work felt equally weird that day – why busy ourselves with such pointless activities with this sinister threat flaring up all about us? We sneezed into our elbows when it was 100% necessary, but any sneeze just got you a panicked glare from everyone around you. No one wants to be, or be near, Patient Zero.
At 4pm, someone turns on the telly. The Prime Minister, in his trademark haphazard fashion, is blustering through some semblance of a speech. His discomfort around having to give a speech where there’s no room for the comical is clear. I wonder if there’s a collective horror rippling across the nation that we put this guy in charge at the worst possible time. (Probably not, if his poll ratings are anything to go by.) When he delivers the line “many of you will lose loved ones before their time,” the office erupts with gasps.
In a muted daze, people start to gather their belongings. Lockers are cleared out; who knows when we’ll be back?
“This is so weird. It’s like being in a movie,” one of my co-workers says, shoving the contents of her locker into her bag. “And not a good movie. A bad one, with Dennis Quaid in it.”
It’s meant as a joke, but there’s a touch of melancholy about it. If this was a movie, we could shut it off. But the part we hate about real life is that happy endings aren’t a given. What are we about to experience?
Back home, we tune into BBC One and await another speech. Night descends, with an eerie stillness. The streets are emptying, and supermarket shelves are doing likewise. I’d made an attempt at stockpiling on the way home, though it hadn’t gone well – the supermarkets had been ransacked. Reports emerge of people bulk buying toilet paper, which seems such an odd item to have fixated on, since there was never any threat of it depleting. People do the dumbest things during the apocalypse; I’ll make a note of this before global warming worsens. I’d picked up the last few available scraps, bunged them into my basket and made for the checkout, including a masala sauce, obscurely the only one left on the shelf. It’s not until I get home that I realise it’s the extra spicy edition with five chillis on the label. Maybe stockpiling toilet paper wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.
The Prime Minister’s second speech begins. There’s an air of wartime to it, though it still feels absurd to see this man delivering this particular speech, with his tousled hair and jerky oratory so much more suited to the humorous, not the sincere. It’s like we’ve elected the ship’s cat to steer us past the icebergs. The level of how lost we are is coming to fruition, crucially because we’re about to live through something that has never occurred before. Wars, as tried and tested as they are, tend to come with a blueprint. Deadly pandemics do not. A worldwide experiment in pushing the OFF switch is about to commence, a world first. Anything could happen.
We tidy the flat, set up our new workstations, and prepare to become experts on big cats.
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To read more, buy a copy of Year of the Plague: Notes on a Quiet Apocalypse on Kindle and in paperback now.