No tiers for people’s fears
I’ VE been chatting to my postie, as I often do now I am no longer required to hurtle out of the door at 7.30am to get into an office. Posties are, to my mind, among the great unsung heroes of these crazy times. They are familiar, friendly faces we see each day, usually ready with a wave and a word even as they deliver the dreaded brown envelopes through the nation’s letter boxes.
For some they represent vital human contact – perhaps the only one they get that day. They are also the eyes and ears of a street, noticing when curtains aren‘t drawn back or when the milk’s left on the step.
It is they who know first about a new addition to the road – all those cards! – as well as the losses in a neighbourhood and are a bit like barometers. If you asked them they’d know the temperature of a community, their fingers on its pulse as well as its mail.
So when Postie told me about how frightened the people he came across on his rounds were, how fearful for the future, I had to listen. Indeed, we should all listen.
This is information not from official surveys or polls. There is no fancy-dan data behind this or graphs to study and interpret.
Just honest, informed opinion straight from the coalface.
There are people on his rounds living in utter terror.
I don’t just mean the elderly or infirm – although there are plenty of those – but others. People across the age spectrum who are rigid with anxiety about Covid and what it can (and can’t) do.
One person is so nervous they won’t hang their washing in the backyard, convinced it may be contaminated by the virus and then brought indoors. Another lady leaves her shopping for 48 hours piled in another room before she touches it. A third refuses to open the door to him without wearing a mask.
Now, you and I might think some of these actions are a bit extreme but who are we to judge?
The fact is this there are many, many ordinary people in this country who don’t give a fig for the parade of scientific advisers on the telly or the politicians telling us all about the new three tier system.
All they want is clear, concise information delivered by people they can trust. And it just isn’t there. Earlier on in this crazy year, as bad as March and April were, it felt like we were all (Dominic Cummings aside) in it together.
Lockdown was bleak but everyone was largely in the same boat, muddling through as best we could. The whole world was being tossed around on the same stormy sea. Now I have the sense that huge swathes of the population feel abandoned, left to their own devices to pick their way through the mountain of confusing and often contradictory information and advice. There is a vacuum where facts and reassurance and, to my mind, any kind of exit strategy ought to be.
Is it any wonder folk fearfully fill in the gaps themselves?
It’s not just fear of the unknown we all face – inevitable in times of national crisis – but the fear that those leading the charge against the virus haven’t got a grip.
It feels as if this Government is making it up on the hoof, flip-flopping from one policy to the next, unsure, uncertain, and under-prepared. What is needed is clear, trustworthy governance and leadership – a road map we can rely on.
We need a plan. We all might not agree with it but at least there would be one. A plan, after all, offers hope. Only then will people be able to live less anxiously and be better equipped to face what may be to come.
And the woman on Postie’s round will feel able to hang her washing outside again.