Empty shop windows reflect the need for us all to stick together
CYCLING through my hometown on Sunday, I got the strangest deja vu feeling. The town was just as it always is on Sunday, sleepy, quiet, with shops closed and dogs and cats wandering around.
Being an early riser I was out at a time when mass goers would normally be converging on the parish church. There were no church bells chiming. Not a hint of activity as I cycled around and around my hometown.
I say hometown knowing that for New Ross natives I’ll probably never be counted in such distinguished company. The fact is I’m a blow in and will probably ever remain thus. There is no family lineage to turn to in conversation, no shop with our name over the door. No, that is a different kind of home, one I miss, but know I’ll see again in the coming months if we all stay the course and continue to act responsibly.
The town I cycled through was patently familiar and yet not. In the windows of some shops – shops I walked passed every week day when I was
working from the office and not from my living/kids’ toy room – there were signs of Easter, a yellow bunny, a sign.
In clothes shop windows, displays which had been meticulously arranged for Spring, were no more having been taken down.
On the outskirts of the town, by the wall where traders and travellers passed into the once busy port town centuries ago, I passed a poster for a musical, Ghost, which was performed in early March.
It seemed like years ago. A stasis has descended on our towns, villages and cities. This eerie, ghostly silence, broken occasionally by the odd sound of human voices, makes you feel like you’re in an apocalyptic horror movie.
You see the shop fronts, the restaurants, the pubs and can’t help but think of the owners, many of whom are used to working seven days a week. How are they coping? You see people lining up for food, for pharmacies. It’s the new normal, as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says, but nothing feels normal.
How can it? People are still dying, the Government and HSE are still trying to get testing under control. Politicians are still digging into their reserves of spin. And yes ladies and gentlemen, the world is still spinning wondrously in its orbit.
The town I have grown to love is not the same but I have faith that it will come back stronger and better, its people battered but toughened by the experience of too many days, weeks and months apart.
On Sunday I drove to the coast to do a story and everywhere was the same, empty. Hook Lighthouse, where normally hundreds of people gather on sunny May bank holiday weekends, was empty save for one car. Duncannon Beach the same.
I returned and turned on Normal People, which has turned on some and turned off others, as reflected in Liveline, which provided some golden radio moments last week. Sex is a big hang up for many people and I found the TV show very responsible in its treatment of consent and teenage sexual and interpersonal relations. We have a roadmap now. There is no normal, but some things never change.