What does the future hold for babies born in lockdown?

This week my mother turns 89 and my father 92. Last week my partner’s second grandchild, a boy, was born. The new baby emerged into a world transformed by pandemic; the news headlines on the morning of his birth spoke of lockdown, social distancing, infection rates and mortality statistics.

My parents, too, were born in troubled times, overshadowed by the global depression that followed the First World War, with a second conflict looming. By contrast, my partner and I were born at the end of the Baby Boom, in the era when the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, declared: “Most of our people have never had it so good.” So rare was my generation’s experience of national or global crisis that we came to think of such events as anomalous. But it turns out that we were the anomaly: for much of our nation’s history, crisis rather than stability has been the prevailing condition.

Everyone wants their children and grandchildren to have lives better than their own; if this new grandson were to live as long as my parents, what kind of world might he inhabit? It is the tendency of haruspication to be comically wrong, from the French cigarette cards produced for the 1900 World Exhibition that depicted rural postmen in the year 2000 whizzing about on gyrocopters, to the economics sage who predicted in 2011 that, by 2035, Britain would be “the key state in a reconfigured EU”. But the extraordinary circumstances into which this infant and his cohort were born invite both misgiving and hope.

Even before the pandemic, the hope might have been shadowed by innumerable anxieties, from climate change to more personal but equally pressing questions of what those humble monosyllables “home” and “work” might mean to our descendants. But, as with the post-war reforms that benefited my generation, one might descry in the cloudy mirror of future trends certain benefits emerging from the experience of pandemic: cleaner air, a stronger sense of the importance of kindness and community, a new valuing of the people who sustain what we think of as civilised life, such as medical professionals, carers, shop workers, refuse collectors and public transport staff.

Still, the term “social distance” strikes me as having a certain grim longevity. Our habit of congregating in shops, offices, universities and places of entertainment may be destined to change forever. The function of such places has always been to create wealth, but the nature of those riches was multifarious: emotional and intellectual gains thrived alongside the financial profits. My closest friendships were made in university bars and the offices where I worked.

It is true that generations Y, Z and Alpha were already conducting their relationships online, before the irksome virus made it obligatory. It is also true that working from home has brought unexpected benefits for many. But the revelation of lockdown has been the extent to which friendship, education, sport and the arts are impoverished when they take place in two dimensions rather than three.

I hope this new baby (whom we may soon meet in person) can grow up with the best of the new world and the old: the dazzling variety of the online realm, combined with the indispensable richness and subtlety of the physical world.

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