Lock down the over-50s? Get out of here…
As the Government gets cold feet over its latest quarantine plan, our writers remind us why midlifers are the nation’s backbone
John Simpson
I’m 75, but as a broadcaster I’m allowed to go to work. It’s amazing how many of the younger people I see on the train or in the streets seem to feel that the Covid crisis has gone away.
Lots of them don’t wear masks, and they group together as though social distancing is something that doesn’t apply. Last weekend, someone sneezed volcanically over me, my wife and son in Covent Garden as we sat outside sipping our drinks. And each evening people crowd around on the pavements outside pubs, knocking back the pints and shouting as though it’s still 2019.
OK, I know I sound like a Victor Meldrew/ebenezer Scrooge combo, but it seems to me that the under-50s are behaving a lot less sensibly than we oldies. Maybe it’s because so few of us have any idea what the Government is asking us to do.
Boris Johnson and his ministers seem to want two entirely incompatible things: they hope Covid will die away, of course, but they also want us to beef up the economy by going back to shops, pubs and restaurants. And they can’t decide which of the two they should plump for.
So this weekend they floated the idea that people like me should stay at home and not show our aged faces in public.
Fine – but in my experience it’s the over-50s who tend to behave sensibly. And yet we’re the ones the Government seems keen to drive off the streets. The vigilantes will be out hunting down anyone with grey hair and wrinkles, next.
John Simpson is the BBC’S world affairs editor
Hannah Betts
At 49, I am obviously nowhere near the age of 50, which is where I am planning on remaining – not least if my 50th birthday present is a letter from the Government confining me to home for my own safety.
The notion of a 50+ lockdown – mooted in Cabinet last week – is pure
Logan’s Run, a cultural reference you have to be 50 to understand.
I’ve just got back from Venice, and we’ve been wondering which deserted tourist spot should be our next mission. Even those less inclined to globetrot will still insist on racing around, working, partying, running marathons, sleeping with people they shouldn’t – and all the other things fiftysomethings are wont to be doing.
I should include running the country here, given that a 50+ lockdown would take out most of the Cabinet.
Robert Jenrick, the 38-year-old Housing Secretary, has now declared that “we don’t have any plans” for such a policy – which is Downing Streetspeak for “It’s happening on Tuesday.”
Will he be given the keys to the country while the rest of the Cabinet is penned up watching Homes Under the
Hammer?
But, as ever, it’s young Carrie Symonds I will feel sorriest for – with a new baby and a housebound 56-yearold partner to take care of…
Judith Woods
Pardon my French, but what the actual? It’s rare for me to be rendered speechless, but the suggestion that middle-aged mothers, the nation’s unflinching backbone throughout this pandemic, could be locked up verges on the criminally insane.
I don’t know of any woman my age who hasn’t put in a double shift most days – and nights – since March. We have taken on the extra burdens of home education, caring for the elderly, keeping our children and spouse fed three times a day – all the while working from home.
One friend, a fiftysomething mother of three, gets up at 5am to get three hours of paid work done before her stint as canteen lady-cum-entertainment convener begins. After supper, she clears up and spends her evenings at her day job, while her husband clocks off and watches telly.
Or what about another furloughed friend who tirelessly delivers food and medication not just to her elderly neighbours but other people’s elderly neighbours, too? I’ve also seen her walk their dogs and take out their recycling. Who’s going to do that if she’s made to lock down because of her age?
Before Covid, women over 50, caught between the often contradictory needs of the young and the old, were dubbed the sandwich generation. Now we’re the full picnic.
We have kept Britain going. Take it from me: if this Government so much as attempts to push through this punitive proposal, it will have the Mother of all Battles on its hands.
Richard Madeley
Arbitrary (adj). Capricious, whimsical, random, illogical, groundless, unjustified…
I could stop there, courtesy of my Oxford Thesaurus. But I’m much too cross about the newly proposed “shielding” of we over-50s. Shielding? Perhaps we should call it “oppressing”…
Those definitions of “arbitrary” now almost wholly encompass every single Government response to the coronavirus. Decision after decision drips with inherent contradiction and illogicality – and, now, rank condescension for anyone born before 1970. It’s part of an increasingly welldefined pattern of loopy logic. Bits of Spain show a spike (NOT a second wave…) in Covid-19. Blanket quarantine! No matter that the Balearics, Canaries and vast swathes of mainland Iberia have lower infection rates than the UK, and that you’re safer in Ibiza than Islington. Everyone into lockdown!
Now, they’ve mooted another arbitrary action plan if we get a second wave: board up the most level-headed section of the community. We don’t go clubbing in hot, sweaty basements or mass together at illegal, densely packed raves. We socially distance. We wash our hands. Generation Safe, that’s us.
Oh, and as Michael Gove’s wife pointed out on social media at the weekend, we’re pretty much Generation Backbone, too: pay most in taxes, run companies, look after the elderly and the young. Maybe we know how to look after ourselves, too.
Shall we give it a go? Or would that be, you know, a bit arbitrary?
Debora Robertson
I am quite the goody-two-shoes. As a child, I never stole sweets for a dare and my teenage rebellion consisted of three layers of mascara, rather than two. I am almost pathologically well behaved to the point where I am inclined to write you a thank-you note if you bump into me in the street. I also enjoy any form of plucky public-spiritedness. I can barely glimpse a church spire without wanting to save it.
From the beginning of lockdown, I took everything very seriously and barely left the house for three months other than to walk my dogs. Though we never received the shielding letter, my husband has various medical conditions, which made us take every precaution. Obsessively washing everything from my hands, to the groceries and my doorstep filled the gap where my social life used to be.
So I was crestfallen at rumours that we – the fat over-50s – may expect this autumn a tailored letter from our GPS telling us to lock down once again. After so much seclusion, the thought of giving up the small freedoms we have begun to enjoy once again feels particularly brutal.
This is one missive I won’t be responding to warmly with a cheerful thank you note. When it comes to the Covid Hokey Cokey, it is an invitation that, with regret, I decline.