Surviving insanity

I lived lockdowns at two levels.

First: the professional one, as a half-retired microbiologist.   Lockdowns were never part of pre-pandemic planning by Public Health England, for whom I worked from 1997-2018.  They never seemed likely to succeed against a respiratory virus that’d already spread extensively.  We’d have to sweat the pandemic, as our forebears did in the 1890s and 1918-19. Hiding and hoping made no sense.   Better for the fit and healthy to catch the virus, building immunity into the population.  So, I signed the Great Barrington Declaration, wrote for newspapers and went on air.    On vaccines I veered from pessimism to optimism to disillusion but I was consistent on lockdowns.  They did far more harm than good and we shall endure their sequelae for years to come.

Second: the personal level.  I gave the first lockdowns 3 weeks to ‘Prepare the NHS,’ as demanded.  Then, I decided they weren’t for me.  It wasn’t hard to slip onto a local bus or train, then melt into the empty Norfolk countryside.  I explored riverside paths, hunted Grebes, Fen Orchids and Swallowtail Butterflies. Just occasionally I’d find a blocked path and a ‘Stay home: Protect the NHS’ warning.  There was always a way around.   No one challenged me in Norfolk, nor on London to Norwich trains, though the police once came along the half-lit Liverpool St platform, peering through every window. I found a regular seat where, if I I put my bag in front of the security camera, my lack of a mask was hidden. 

Later, in the miserable, interminable lockdown of Winter/Spring 2021 I walked the Capital Ring and the London Loop, circling the city through parks and the Green Belt, respectively.    There was much of interest: the New River; Burton’s tomb; beautiful downland astonishingly close to Croydon; a massive proliferation of green parakeets in London’s southern hinterland…  I had my doubts about the virological safety of the Greenwich Foot Tunnel but walked through anyway, unmasked and unscathed.

So, 2020 and ’21 weren’t wasted.  I saw and learnt a lot.

And there was entertaining insanity.  I remember walkers jumped into a nettle patch to socially distance and those who’d don a mask as I approached, despite a bracing cross wind. I recall the girl at Golders Green who fished a tangle of masks from her handbag then debated with her friends as to whose was whose. And the woman who gave her mask to her lockdown puppy. I remember the abject terror of the man whose hand I tried to shake after an argument about masks. But I also remember another chap who, in that first lockdown, pumped my hand when I returned his over-friendly Labrador, which’d attached itself to me for 6 miles.  I remember too the Norfolk cottage with a stand selling eggs and a notice telling people they shouldn’t be outside.  How they could people buy eggs if they didn’t come outside?  

I vividly remember standing on a hummock, surrounded by waterlogged Barnet clay and a leaden sky, looking at the continuation of my path, five yards distant, through a hedge gate.   How to reach it?   By clinging to trees and a barb-wire fence, it turned out. Then just jumping.  Dirty and scratched, I clung to the gate and laughed at myself: Bloody Livermore, not quite beaten yet. 

All this belonged to a Theatre of the Absurd.   I rediscovered other theatre too – Gilbert & Sullivan operettas my grandfather loved.  I’d write playing Ruddigore at full tilt, relishing WS Gilbert’s subversive genius.   But, at a UK cost of £400bn for lockdown – £6000 per head – it was a pricey ticket.  Gilbert would have skewered that.

Some character traits and past experiences helped me: being a loner; having long experience of holding political views different to most colleagues; having spent schoolyears creatively evading compulsory sport; having read, at an impressionable age, Graham Greene’s subversive Travels with my Aunt.  All nurtured survival skills that served me well. 

Deep sadnesses came, nonetheless.  My last two aunts passed, both at great ages.  One died during the pandemic, though not from the virus; the other survived until last Christmas, but her mind went before lockdowns ended.   What good did shuttering their care homes do them?      

Tennyson’s lines (Ulysses) sum it up:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Our forebears understood life better than us, I think.  With the pubs closed I’d carry sandwiches, chocolate fruit and a couple of cans of cider in a WW2 messenger bag – less conspicuous than a rucksack for the bus journey.   I’d stop to eat and drink in a wayside churchyard. There was usually a seat in a sheltered corner.

At Fishley St Mary’s, near the church door, there’s a family row of big C19 gravestones,.  The parents lie beside five children who predeceased them; two died days apart.  That’s infection for sure. But the world didn’t stop.  Nor at Inver on the Dornoch Frith – reached whilst tramping the Aberdeen to Dornoch coast in the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ interregnum. 

At Inver there’s a plaque recording how the 1831-2 cholera epidemic killed half of a village of around 120 souls.  It put COVID-19 in perspective