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What I’ve learnt from the Great Pause
Allison Pearson introduces our A New Dawn special
As restrictions start to ease and we begin to emerge from the long, dark tunnel of lockdown, the only certainty is that life will never be quite the same again. So what will the new normal look like? In this 20-page special, four writers provide us with their lessons in starting over. Columnist Allison Pearson shares the silver linings she has discovered, A&E doctor Stephen Fabes predicts what the future holds for the NHS, fashion director Lisa Armstrong examines the reinvention of retail and special correspondent Harry de Quetteville looks at current scientific thinking and paints a portrait of what an average day will look like a year from now
As the end of lockdown seems less of a distant dream, Allison Pearson looks at what w e gained, from birdsong and clearer skies to acts of great kindness, a sense of community, and a new love for the people who really matter
In a dark time, the eye begins to see. The words of the American poet Theodore Roethke felt especially resonant during the long weeks of the Great Pause. The wellordered, predictable life we had come to take utterly for granted was rudely overturned like a bar after a brawl. No one was untouched. Businesses have been lost, loved ones separated. Two members of my family had a nasty, persistent illness which we assumed was coronavirus. My son, stranded in London as the lockdown began, was unable to join us in the house of plague. Even worse was not being able to see elderly relatives who were frightened and alone. That’s the cruellest thing about Covid. They said, ‘We’re all in this together,’ but, too often, we have all been in this apart.
And yet, as the empty streets start to stir with life again, as shops lift their shutters and we emerge blinking from our musty lockdown lairs, there is a keen sense that the darkness glimmered with silver linings. In the rush to return to normal, we are able to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to. The world may never be quite the same again and, if we make wise choices, that could be a good thing. An economic system that bought in so greedily to globalisation and cheap labour in far-flung places must now reflect on the wisdom of relying on India for paracetamol and on China for personal protective equipment (PPE).
How many of us had any idea that we were so heavily dependent on drugs from India, or that Indian pharmaceutical companies source 70 per cent of their ingredients from Chinese factories? I certainly didn’t. Clearly, it was utter madness not to be making our own because, if the worst ever happened, we’d be desperately scrabbling around to get our hands on vital supplies.
Well, the worst did happen. And the UK was at the mercy of long-distance supply chains whose links blew apart when Wuhan, a city we’d never even heard of, unleashed a pandemic on the world. As a direct consequence, because we were in a competition to obtain PPE from Asia, there were valiant British medics in ICUS and dedicated drivers on buses and staff in care homes who got terribly sick, and even died. It was a brutal wake-up call. Turns out there was a high price to be paid for becoming dependent on cheap foreign stuff. Who knew?
The conventional wisdom that the
United Kingdom, her once proud manufacturing base sadly eroded, could survive on services alone was left looking unforgivably foolish. During lockdown, we learnt to make things again. There was the most remarkable renaissance in native ingenuity, whether it was my friend Caroline, who started baking bread for her whole Essex village, or the Mercedes Formula 1 team fast-tracking a breathing device for corona patients. Brilliant researchers at Oxford University beat the rest of Europe to start trials on volunteers of a Covid-19 vaccine. Everywhere you looked, Britons were doing it for themselves.
In the years AC (after corona), this country will see a glorious revival in manufacturing. We will make our own drugs and vaccines (and toilet paper, hopefully, to avoid unseemly panic buying. After six weeks, some poor people were down to their last 73 packets). Globalisation won’t stop – you can’t uninvent the internet – but the UK will become more selfsufficient and be much better prepared if we ever face a global meltdown again. Buy British may cost more than Made in China, but people will be more inclined to pay for it now we truly understand the value of home-grown. Our whole attitude to consumerism has changed. Psychologists reckon it takes 21 days to create a new habit. Well, lockdown afforded us that time. Unable to ‘just pop to the supermarket’ or to secure the self-isolation Holy Grail – an online shopping delivery – we learnt how to shop less often. Millions began to use local greengrocers and butchers. I came to rely on a nearby farm shop and my family competed to turn their fresh, locally sourced ingredients into delicious meals. (At long last, we had time to look inside those recipe books we’ve been giving each other every Christmas for 20 years!) Weaned off ready meals and posh
nibbles, we discovered it was possible to eat better than before and for a third of my weekly Waitrose spend. With so many small businesses facing ruin, there was a real sense of satisfaction (as well as a patriotic duty) in buying cheese from a farmer with a name and a family rather than a faceless brand. Plenty of us have broken the habit; we are never going back to the old, heedless, pile-thetrolley-high way of shopping.
Expenditure for the whole lockdown period reads something like this: New clothes: 0; Eating out: 0; Personal maintenance: 0; Leisure and entertainment:
0. Food: £27,249.
I exaggerate, of course, and my roots and I miss my hairdresser more than I can say, but there’s nothing like a pandemic to teach you what’s truly important (and what isn’t). Food, shelter and love are pretty much all we need. Then comes music, singing, sewing, crayonning, crafting, cooking, painting rainbows, imagining, volunteering, pets, power-washing, neighbourliness, exercise, games and gardening.
All the subjects that are most undervalued by our education system turned out to be precisely the things that nourished us during a bleak time. There’s a lesson there for schools ministers if they’re smart enough to learn it.
Lockdown also caused an upending of traditional social hierarchies. Celebrities have never appeared more vacuous or irrelevant. Kate Winslet undoubtedly meant well but attracted widespread derision when she gave advice after pointing out she played an epidemiologist in the film
Contagion. It was real scientists, including that gentle, lofty brainbox, chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty, who were our stars now as well as the remarkable, chart-topping figure of Colonel Tom Moore. A youth-obsessed society rediscovered old people; not just as sad casualties of corona but as individuals of spirit and resourcefulness who could bring almost a century of perspective to our present problems.
In the years before corona, PPE meant philosophy, politics and economics, the subject that the elite read at Oxford before going on to run the country. Now, PPE means something entirely different. It’s the safety attire of the people we soon came to see as the most important members of our society. It wasn’t the political or professional elite who were on the frontline doing 13-hour shifts in masks that cut savagely into their faces. It was nurses, care assistants and paramedics who are poorly rewarded for work of inestimable value. Cicero, one of the Prime Minister’s favourite philosophers, observed: ‘In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men.’ Never have we felt the truth of that so profoundly as during the Covid pandemic when exhausted medics joined the immortals and, every Thursday night, all the streets in all the land were filled with a great thunder of clapping for our shattered heroes.
When this is over will we return to worshipping at the tawdry altar of Fame or will the appreciation of human beings of genuine merit survive reentry to Planet Normal? It feels, at least for now, as if the specific gravity of the carers and the healers will continue to carry great weight. Public gratitude will reshape politics for a generation. Boris Johnson himself survived an attack by the ‘invisible mugger’, and paid tribute to the two nurses, Jenny Mcgee and Luis Pitarma, who monitored his vital signs for three anxious days and nights. Bursaries for nurses’ training were scrapped by Theresa May’s gov
Public gratitude will reshape politics for a generation
ernment, an act of wanton vandalism. Looking forward, you can be sure that a Johnson administration will reward the NHS that saved his life (while reforming its hopeless procurement arm) and deliver the 50,000 extra nurses we so desperately need.
Yes, Covid-19 put the NHS under horrendous pressure, but the virulent new disease also forced medics to adapt and learn at great speed. ‘Best practice is rolled out in a matter of days when normally it would take months or years,’ one consultant marvelled. Amazing what can be achieved when there’s no time for paperwork, protocols or layers of useless management.
It wasn’t just doctors who were learning on the job. Companies that stayed open had to rapidly develop new ways of operating. Staff meetings were held on Zoom or Microsoft Teams. For years, people like me who campaigned for better work-life balance were told that the old command-and-control model of major corporations would never accept mums and dads working from home in any numbers. The culture of ‘presenteeism’ was stubbornly immovable. Well, Covid-19 smashed through the roadblock. During lockdown, WFH (working from home) instantly became the norm, with husbands and wives divvying up the chores. Gender equality acquired rocket boosters. No longer would men be able to claim that the world would end if they had to do their share of their childcare. Acknowledging the huge cultural shift, Jes Staley, the chief executive of Barclays, said that having thousands of workers in one building ‘may be a thing of the past’. Instead of 7,000 employees travelling to the bank’s Canary Wharf headquarters, just a handful went to the office while the rest worked from home. Another CEO told me that her staff, who hadn’t had to pay for travel or lunch for weeks, ‘feel like they’ve had a pay rise and don’t want to go back to how things were’. An exodus of jobs and people from London looks likely in the next year.
With everyone at home, the lockdown saw a tragic spike in domestic violence although, more generally, there was a happy strengthening of the family unit. Empty nesters like me welcomed older offspring back to the house and their company was such a pleasure it almost made up for the fridge being ransacked every half hour. Parents actually got to spend time with their children. Not the snatched, shouty time that makes up so much of stressed-out, double-shift family life, but acres of relaxed interaction. It was like Christmas without the stress of presents. You know something major has changed when teenagers start agreeing to go for a walk. While furloughed parents were definitely anxious to resume work, they were in no hurry to get back to the hamster-wheel of office life. WFH is here to stay as we build an economy and a society that is more responsive to human needs.
The enforced respite from busyness had other benefits. What was that unfamiliar noise our ears strained to hear? It was the sound of silence. In the deep hush of a car-less world, we could actually enjoy the piercing sweetness of birdsong. No longer permanently distracted, it was almost as if we were experiencing the changing seasons for the first time. The weather gods mocked Covid by blessing us with the sunniest April since records began. This was spring as it was experienced by our great-grandparents, insanely beautiful
Being forced to keep our distance has brought us closer together
in its green awakening. The blossom had never been blossomier. No one could remember the sky being that perfectly blue. With aircraft grounded there was no frenzied scribble of white contrails to spoil it.
As normal activity shut down, wildlife was emboldened. Welsh goats came down from the mountains to Llandudno to crop hedges in the town centre. Dolphins dared to swim in Istanbul’s Bosphorus Strait. The levels of nitrogen dioxide over cities dropped sharply, allowing children with asthma to breathe more easily. My daughter complained that her hay fever was actually worse. ‘There’s no pollution to block the pollen, Mum.’
Having enjoyed the peace and the fresh fresh air, will we become better custodians of the Earth? In the short term, it’s more likely that urgent economic considerations will drive us back to our noisy, filthy ways. And yet there will be a heightened awareness of the natural world that will make us more reluctant to treat this blessed plot as a rubbish dump. We liked hearing the birds sing.
Of all the silver linings in this surreal, scary period, what will shine brightest in the memory is the expansion of human kindness. On 29 March, they had to pause recruitment to the NHS volunteer army just to process the initial 750,000 applications. An increasingly atomised society, in which people could barely tell you their neighbour’s name, began pulling together in the most extraordinary way. Social distancing spawned a passionate hunger for connection. Abrupt text messages gave way to long phone calls as we checked in on old friends and family. A million bridges were built over the generation gap, with one study finding that young people had contacted the old more during the past six weeks than they would in an average year. Grandchildren helped grandparents conquer their fear of Zoom and Whatsapp. Some 61 per cent of elderly people said they ‘felt more loved and cared for by their relatives since lockdown began’.
Were we ashamed that we had been too busy to pay attention? Yes, undoubtedly shame was part of it, but that was in the before time. Now, the prospect of loss, the remorseless roll call of death on the
evening news, lent an urgency to making things right. Covid-19 could kill the weakest and most vulnerable among us, but we would fight back with all the humanity we could muster. During lockdown, 90 per cent of rough sleepers in England were offered accommodation. Homelessness, it seemed, could be fixed if only people cared enough. By his hundredth birthday on 30 April, Colonel Tom had raised nearly £33 million for NHS Charities Together. When the apocalypse came calling, we answered with altruism.
Many years from now, when we look back on the Great Pause, we may recall how being forced to keep our distance brought us closer together. I think of a small child being held up to kiss her grandmother through the glass of her care-home window. I think of a husband hiring a forklift truck to deliver 50thanniversary flowers to his dying wife on the top floor of a hospital. The poet was right. Covid came and went. What survived of us was love.