COVID
The time of seclusion and loss
I think it’s only now, with the benefit of two years of processing, that I’m really able to think and write about covid and the lockdowns of March 2020 onwards. And it’s only now that I have started to feel like life has really resumed, that I’m able to just go out and do things: see art, go to talks, listen to live music. In the last few months, something has resumed. It’s not my old life, but it is something.
There was that amazingly strange moment in time when everyone was effectively housebound, confined in a way which no British population in history had been before. You couldn’t drive anywhere unless it was to get to essential work, or to shop – and if you did shop, only one person from a household was allowed to go unless there were extenuating circumstances. You could leave the house to exercise, for as long as you wanted, but only meeting the people within your household. Friends and strangers alike had to be kept at a distance. If someone was coming your way, you crossed the road to avoid them.
Before lockdown there was a period when everyone knew it was coming but everyone wanted to believe that washing your hands for 20 seconds was the solution. It hit us early. On the 13th March – naturally a Friday – one of our friends came from London for a visit. By Sunday, he was sick enough for us to have to drive him home, with rumours swirling that London would enter a lockdown which might see no one able to come in or out of it.
By Wednesday 18th March I was sick too. A minor cough, but what made me know it was covid was the exhaustion. It took me 30 minutes to write a five line email to my manager at work, telling her I thought I had covid, because I barely had the strength to type. Then Kim was sick. There were no tests available: the few PCR tests were going to hospitals. If you got sick, you just had to wait and hope it didn’t get bad enough for you to need an ambulance, breathing apparatus, intubation, critical care.
And the following Monday, 23rd March 2020, everyone was ordered to stay in their homes.
In lockdown, one weekend we walked from our home up on Tyler Hill in Canterbury down to one of the city centre parks because we had heard a rumour that there was a stall still selling takeaway coffee due to some kind of loophole in the regulations. A two mile walk to get a cappuccino. I almost cried – it was the first time in weeks that I had felt that somehow, perhaps, things might get better.
Lockdown has affected everything. I look at the fashions of the young people at university – kids who spent nearly two crucial years barely able to socialise with their friends except online – and they wear the kind of clothes that everyone adopts when they don’t have to leave the house: baggy sportswear, shapeless and comfortable, with none of the effort or styling which usually moulds your appearance at that age. It’s a bland conformity driven not by the surrounding culture but by a lack of surrounding culture. Humans are social animals: when that sociability turns into something which might kill them, they suffer.
And everyone I know has suffered in one way or another. Social bonds, prematurely loosened to the point of breakage. Friendships that took a hiatus during lockdown and have never returned. Mental health which means you struggle around strangers, or desperately seek the company of someone, anyone, while finding company strangely unrewarding.
No one feels like they did. And I don’t know anyone who feels they used the experience of lockdown and changed for the better. I know plenty of people for whom that was an intention: lockdown as a time to stop, a time to reinvent themselves, a time to study and take the time to read. But I don’t know anyone who came out of it more healthy or wise than they went into it.
I worry about kids. I know it’s possible to recover from badly disrupted schooling and from mental health issues in childhood (I went through it) but this is different. This was a mass trauma and I think we are, as always underestimating quite what an effect it will have both on individuals and our whole society. Children are more resilient than the mythologisers of childhood innocence would believe, but they are also more vulnerable than the stiff-upper-lip brigade fantasise about.
Covid isn’t over. While the rhetoric of “learning to live with covid” has been used as an ideological figleaf for a government policy of ignoring it and pretending it didn’t happen the truth is that we do have to learn to live with it. It’s not going away and the wise course of action would be to put as many mitigations in place to prevent future outbreaks as possible. Better ventilation in buildings, encouraging wearing masks (as the Japanese always have) when you feel even slightly under the weather, and of course a consistent public campaign of booster vaccination could all play a part in ensuring that we never have to go through a lockdown again.
Our current government, which made a policy platform out of ignoring the consequences of Brexit are of course uniquely unsuited to doing any of this. They are born chancers, riding gamblers’ luck with our futures and our lives. They would rather believe something will come along to make covid go away entirely – or that they can do nothing and it will be someone else’s problem if and when it returns in strength.
I said earlier that only now has my old life resumed, but that does not mean I am unchanged. I’m in worse physical shape than I was pre-lockdown (and I wasn’t in great shape then). Perhaps connected to having had two bouts of covid, I came out of it with significantly higher blood pressure than I went in, and weighing a fair chunk more. Lack of mobility when I work from home means that, unless I deliberately exercise, my average steps per day hovers down at the 4,000 level rather than over 10,000, which was where it was “in the before times”.
My mental health suffered too, in ways which it’s hard to put my finger on. I am more anxious (and I was no stranger to anxiety). But I have also become more aware of my own needs in terms of people. Far from being the one who didn’t need a lot of people around him to, it turns out that I do, that I love being around people and function best when I am. Who would have predicted that I am, in fact, a thoroughly social animal – a perfect exemplar of how most of my fellow humans are?
It also radicalised me. Covid, and the government’s response to it, exposed the middle ground of politics for what it always was: a comforting lie, something that I wanted to believe was true because I always like to believe everyone has people’s best interests at heart. During lockdown, the capitalists and their cronies came out of the woodwork in droves to dip their snouts in the trough of government money, with chancers (or “entrepreneurs”, in Toryspeak) appearing to sell us billions of pounds of useless PPE, growing fat on margins. Profiteering shits of the kind which appear in any disaster, but which our “third way” centralist politics pretended had gone away.
Health workers who were clapped in the streets, then denied a decent wage once it was “all over”. Bus and train staff who were lauded as “key workers” in the pandemic and made to risk their lives so that people could continue to do vital work, only to be told they were greedy when they dared to ask for their salaries to rise in line with inflation.
The old histories always made out that great men make the times. But that’s nonsense. The times make us, and they also show us a little bit of what we really are. We have to live through whatever life throws at us, and the events around us shape us to a far greater degree than we like to admit. Covid, those two years of seclusion and loss, are going to be with us for a very long time. The only thing we can do to make it all more tolerable is to tell our stories, and hope for change.
Weeknotes: Sunday 30th August 2020
There are a hundred little ways which the pandemic has changed our lives, often without us noticing. For example: despite being at home, work now dominates my life in a way which isn’t conventionally true. Although I’ve been pretty-religious about keeping to an eight hour schedule at regular times outside of these times, for quite a long period, there wasn’t much else to do, to get engaged with. The only rhythm left was the work.
The past two weeks of holiday have really hammered this home to me. I’ve always been someone who spends the first few days of holiday fretting about work: there is always something which has been forgotten or which I didn’t have time to finish, always some kind of loose end, and I spend those early days thinking about it and worrying. It’s ridiculous and unhealthy, but after a couple of days I’m fine.
Not this time – it took basically the whole first week – and I’m convinced it’s because the pandemic has made things worse.
We actually went out to a pub to meet people on Thursday, which meant I got drunk on two pints and very drunk on four. That was psychologically weird. Part of me didn’t want to go, and I have no idea why. Fear of the unknown.
In other COVID-related news, I was tested to see if I could donate convalescent plasma. And it turns out that my antibody levels were too low to be of any use. The actual result is just negative or positive: if it’s negative, it doesn’t mean you haven’t had COVID, it just means it’s below a set number, so it could be zero or it could be “quite a lot but not enough”. As five months have elapsed since I had the bug (I think – there were no tests available then) it was always likely that my antibody levels would have declined.
There’s also a 30% chance of a false negative. The parameters are set pretty high because taking plasma is a complex and expensive process so it’s better, as my dad would have said, to be safe than sorry.
I’m slightly glad that I now don’t have to have my own blood taken from me, filtered, and put back in – but on the other hand, I wish that I had been of some use.
Stuff I’ve been reading
There’s an interesting concept of your present-self and future-self at work in this post. It’s worth reading.
Related: Obsessions with self improvement aren't always healthy. Sometimes it's just good to let yourself be:
The urges are not based on anything meaningful. They come from reading a magazine, or someone’s blog, and thinking, “Oh, that would be cool!” I read lists of things I should do someday, places I should go, achievements others have done … and the idea pops into my head that I should do them. Hey cool, let’s suddenly pursue a new goal! But this new fantasy in my head isn’t based on anything that matters, just a cool image that I have in my head about how awesome my life will be once I achieve this goal.
BRB moving to Switzerland
Lunchtime is sacred time in Switzerland. When I was on maternity leave, my husband came home for lunch to help me care for our daughter. This strengthened our marriage. Many families still reunite during weekdays over the lunch hour.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8974435/switzerland-work-life-balance
The planet is fucked, redux
The madness of airline elite status:
The costliest manifestations of GS-MAD are unnecessary year-end trips, called “mileage runs” in the frequent-flier community, which are cousins to the flights Walter Kirn’s protagonist in “Up in the Air” takes to meet his goal of a million lifetime miles. I asked around to find the highest amount anyone had heard of being spent on mileage runs: the winner was fifteen thousand dollars, by a friend of a friend, in a month.
I know someone who constantly berated those of us who bought a car because we didn’t live in an urban centre with adequate public transport while flying enough air miles every year to maintain the highest tier of frequent flier class on his chosen airline. One of the flights they take has enough carbon emissions attached to run a family car for a year.
Everyone has their blindspots about the environment, and this is just one example. There’s the concerned parent that complains about air quality around their school while driving their child there in an SUV, just the two of them. There’s pretty much anyone who understands the impact of meat and dairy farming on global warming but doesn’t become vegan.
But those who travel the globe to speak and attend conferences, flying long haul more than once a year? Yeah. Those ones annoy me more than most.
Ambitions
When I left school in 1983 my ambitions boiled down to owning a van and being in a band. The two things were not unconnected: I was a terrible keyboard player (punk, yo) but if I owned a van the band would still need me to cart the equipment around from gig to gig, free festival to free festival.
I never bought a van – in fact, I never learned to drive – but neither did I replace that ambition with another. Leaving school at the age of 16, with four CSEs at the height of Thatcher’s era of mass unemployment basically meant I had no expectation of ever even working. And if I did, it would be a shitty job, probably in a shitty shop. When a local Wickes store opened, I applied and didn’t even get a reply, let alone an interview.
The trajectory of my escape from that world is long and complex and deserves its own piece of writing, but the important point is this: I had no ambitions. Ambitions were something that other people had, but not working class kids from Derby. I had dreams, sure. But there was no possible path from here to there.
Since then, though, ambitions have become the playground of the young, and there’s been an expectation actually rooted in reality that a young person’s ambitions can be fulfilled. You could travel and work in Europe. You could go to university. You could get a job, buy a house, something that so so few of your parents were able to do. Some of these simple things moved from ambitious dreams to expectations.
The past ten years have chipped away at this. A house has become something no one can afford unless they can rely on the bank of mum and dad, while the media bombards you with messages about how it’s your own fault you can’t save a hundred thousand pounds. Jobs which offer long-term careers and progression have been eroded, to the point of destruction. There is no such thing as job security if you are young.
Brexit and COVID, though, have been the twin hammer blows which have destroyed the opportunities of the young. Brexit’s retreat to cosy little Englander fantasies of an idealised 1950s Britain mean putting up borders and robbing the young of a core part of their identity, while reducing the ability of the poorest to up sticks and work wherever they can across the continent. Looking abroad for work was one of the few routes out of Thatcher’s newly-impoverished Britain when I left school, and that option just won’t exist the young poor in a few months time.
But it is probably COVID which will have a longer term impact, and which will break the back of ambition, particularly for those reaching maturity now. In a long and brilliant Twitter thread, David Hayward wrote that “a pandemic is a killer of the dreams of the young” and nothing could be closer to the truth. I have been lucky to live for 53 years in a bubble of safety, with the freedom to roam and to dream. Until we find a vaccine, that freedom is basically gone. Who can have ambitions, who can have dreams, when the next person you meet might be the one that passes on a deadly virus rather than the person who changes your life for the better?
31 May 2020 Weeknote
Habits, as I’ve learned over the past few months, are a good thing. They’re also something I resisted like the plague in the past owing to a misplaced idea that creativity and all things good came out of spontaneity not repetition.
I’m not sure I even believed that myself at the time, so it’s good to get it out there and over with.
One habit that I’ve been meaning to get into for about fifteen years is the habit of blogging regularly, something that I really haven’t done for a good ten years, possibly more. Prompted by the appearance in my feeds of this post from the redoubtable Ben Hammersley (were you twiddling with your feeds, Ben?) I’ve decided that a regular weeknote of my own will be in order.
Unlike many weeknotes, there won’t be much about work in these. There’s a couple of reasons for that: first, much of what I do these days is connected to people management, or in some way sensitive to the business. I can’t really write much about that, although I might write more generally about digital publishing every now and then (I have, as you can guess, opinions.)
So the focus is going to be a bit more personal. I hope that’s OK.
Covid exhaustion
In common with a surprisingly small percentage of the population I’ve had the coronavirus in my system. For me the symptoms at the time I got it were minor: a raised temperature for a whole day, a very intermittent cough for a couple of days, a couple of other things. The biggest impact was tiredness, which was like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. I felt ill first thing in the morning, so I started writing an email to my manager – and something which should have taken me five minutes to compose took nearly half an hour. I couldn’t concentrate, and my eyes just started closing.
I promptly slept from 9am till 9pm, when I woke up and soon enough fell asleep again.
Since then tiredness has been an ever-present factor in my life, and I’ve learned to manage it so I get the most important things done in the morning. This week, that feeling has been back with a vengeance. I don’t know if this is the start of some kind of post-illness fatigue syndrome or what, but at one point in the early evening I was lying on the small sofa and was so tired that I literally felt my arms slump to my side as I passed out.
I’m hoping this will pass, but if not, I’ll embrace it and just get up earlier. You can only do what you can do.
Big-picture productivity
A few weeks ago I signed up to Pater Akkies’ “Big Picture Productivity” course, and I’ve just completed the second module. I discovered Peter through YouTube – where I discover 90% of people these days – where he’s put a series of really nice videos on setting up Things, OmniFocus and some other tools.
The course is really good, and I’d recommend it to most people. The modules released so far have been on the basic productivity strategies of thinking about your values and roles then working through what your goals are. Once you’ve done that it’s time to work out what the actionable projects are which lead to your goals.
I like Peter’s avoidance of the SMARTER framework which everyone uses for goals. One thing that I’ve come to understand is that some goals don’t have an end: for example, a goal of reducing your carbon emissions isn’t ever going to end, but it’s still a goal. The projects you put together to achieve that should have something closer to a smarter framework, but the goal itself can be ongoing.
Peter has also finallygot me using Notion, which I’ve resisted for a long time. A notes app that is really a database sounds too much like the kind of thing that I would spend about a year tinkering with to get it just so while never actually using. But Peter’s course shows you how you can use it to track goals and projects in a way that I really like. I’ll still use my Bullet Journal for my day-to-day note taking, but when I need something more serious I can see how Notion fits in.
Tot
The other big discovery of the week is Tot, which I’ve written about extensively already so I won’t dwell on it too much. However, it’s a great example of an application which uses a limitation as a fundamental feature to nudge someone towards a better behaviour. We need more of that.
Music
For some reason I ended up listening to “I’m a tree” by Imani Coppola AKA the single that almost sank her career. After having a big hit with her first song, top 20 worldwide and all that kind of thing, this one was released and promptly charted… absolutely nowhere. Well, it scraped the top 200 in Australia.
Culture
Grayson’s Art Club is of course fantastic. There’s a long-running battle in our house over which of is Grayson and which is Philippa. I’m also really enthused by the amount of talks that museums and art galleries are making available virtually while we’re all stuck at home, plus the new range of plays and ballets available on YouTube. At least, the internet is enabling democratic culture.
As well, of course, as resurgent nationalism, but we will talk no more of that.
COVID 19 is tailor made for our culture
I should start with this: I’m not an expert. You should listen to those that are.
COVID is an almost perfect virus. It rarely kills its host. Unlike its distant relative MERS, which makes people ill fast and kills them before they get chance to infect many others, it creeps up on you.
In fact, for the majority of sufferers, they will remain ambulatory. They may have outward signs, like a cough, but they may not - and our culture has trained us to keep going if we feel under the weather, to ignore symptoms.
It hits us when economically we're weak to it. Zero hours contracts mean there is a pool of people who have no choice but to keep working, and a set of businesses that are built around the idea that you don't have to keep people on staff. If you're under 50, you've never really experienced a dangerous infectious disease that spreads like this. Yes, there was HIV, but that could mostly be avoided. COVID can't.
But it also hits us when we’re mentally unprepared.
I'm 53, and as a child I was vaccinated against two things: smallpox (one of the last wave of children to get the smallpox vaccine); and polio. I got my immunity (such as it is) to measles, mumps, scarlet fever and German measles the hard way, by contracting the disease. And I remember the steps my parents had to take to keep me isolated (no playing outside, stuck in my bedroom, no friends visiting, EXTRA COMICS) because some of those diseases could kill other children. And, of course, could have killed me, although their undoubted worry didn’t register at the time.
If you’re younger than me, you’ve grown up in a world where most of the major childhood infectious diseases didn’t exist: you’re used to infection being something that either you didn’t have to worry about (colds, seasonal flu) or affected someone else, somewhere else.
And if you’re older than me (OK, boomer)... well, you should know better.
The generations currently alive are probably the first in history not to have anyone who remembers the last global pandemic in them. The influenza of 1918 was a distant memory to my grandmother, born in 1910, but for anyone of my mother’s age or younger – everyone currently alive – the danger of pandemic has faded from the collective memory.
Having lost the folk memory, all we have to keep us cautious and keep us alive is the knowledge of experts, and yet we also live at a time when major Western countries have turned away from an understanding of the important of expertise. Brexit, the pride in ignorance that characterises Trumpism, all show us that the respect for expertise which built post-war prosperity has vanished. Even amongst my generation, the notion of the “wisdom of crowds” tell us that while everyone can’t be an Einstein, if we all click our heels and wish three times, a hundred of us can add up to one.
No one is going to crowdsource a new treatment for COVID. Wikipedia isn’t going to discover a vaccine.
Social media allows accurate information to pass faster than before, which would be a ray of hope were it not for the fact that rumour, speculation and outright lies spread faster. The old, early internet idea that “good information drives out bad” is probably still being touted by the Digerati somewhere, but it’s really now pretty laughable.
And of course the news that your local supermarket is running out of bread can spread faster than ever, letting the well-off drive down in their cars and buy up the last remaining stocks to put in their chest freezers, while the poorer wait for a bus and find shelves empty. We have even forgotten that “panic buying” doesn’t mean everyone gets a fair share, it means that the poorest and weakest will go hungry.
Never has a culture been less prepared for a pandemic, and never has a virus had a better chance to become endemic in a population. COVID almost seems tailor made to capitalise on every single weakness in our culture, from expert denial and anti-vaccine madness to our lack of experience of pandemic to the way our economy is structured. I said earlier it was almost perfect. I was underplaying it. I think it actually is the perfect virus for our times.
But it’s not hopeless, and life will go on. These are obstacles, and it is down to each of us as individuals to use them as ways to improve ourselves, to do what we can for others, to make ourselves better people for the experience. “Amor Fati”, as the Stoics said.