My half-term plans have changed four times...
Well, that’s half-term up the proverbial Swanee, then. Hands. Face. Please make space because Mummy’s crying into them.
As of midnight tonight, we’ll be in tier-two lockdown along with the rest of London. Stop all the clocks. Silence the pianos. Cancel everything on the socially distanced calendar.
Do I feel empathy with the rest of the UK’S virus hotspots? Including my native Northern Ireland, now subject to a four-week “circuit breaker” that will see schools close for a fortnight (dear God, NO!), rather than a week?
I’d love to claim I share their pain. And I do, sort of, but mostly I’m selfishly fed up for me. I had plans. I know, right? The height of hubris. Or maybe just the depth of my feeling that life must somehow go on.
I am, by disposition, an optimist. Partly to counterbalance my rather more pessimistic husband, who is a socialist and a Scotsman and married to me, so it’s really not his fault.
I like to face forward. Know where I’m going. Visualise the future. Regular readers will know how much I like my trips away, so much so one wrote to inquire “are the problems at home-home?” and point out “it sounds like you are trying to escape yourself ”.
The answer to both is a resounding yes! The problem is that home has become a holding pen, rather than a haven, and when I do manage to escape, I leave my true self at home and bring my far more charming doppelganger. Half-terms are really important to me – and, yes, I realise that, in the midst of a pandemic, this hitherto banal observation has morphed into a decadent disclosure that makes me sound like a tone-deaf Marie Antoinette.
Nonetheless, in October we usually take cheap flights to a fascinating city because it’s infinitely nicer trailing round Rome or Marrakesh offseason, when the crowds are thinner and the weather cooler.
No chance of a jaunt to Berlin this year. The alternative plan for friends from Edinburgh to come and stay has been jettisoned due to their lockdown. The plan for us to travel up and see family went the same way.
Virtually every last cottage in Booked-up Britain has already been rented out. As of this weekend, kids’ sleepovers are banned for us tier-twoers. And as it’s a toss-up whether the nation’s mothers rely more on wine or sleepovers to maintain their sanity, that’s a bitter blow indeed.
The truth is that living in limbo doesn’t really feel like living, and when nothing is certain, everything is uncertain, exhausting and debilitating.
As far as our wildly vacillating PM is concerned, lately he has put me in mind of another unforgettable blonde: Vicky “yeah but no but yeah but” Pollard. I see our leader frowning a lot more, which is weirdly reassuring as those circumflexed brows must mean he has some clue about the national mood. But I, for one, am sceptical when it comes to his statesmanlike pronouncements, because many of them – “Go back to the office!” “Use public transport!” – have a shorter half-life than a bag of Walkers’ Cheese & Onion.
On Monday, Boris stood firm, brought us all to tiers and rejected scientific advice to impose a harsher national lockdown on the grounds it would be “disastrous” for the economy. So at least we knew where we were.
By Wednesday, Merseyside was the first to enter tier three. By Thursday, it was announced that London, Essex, Elmbridge, Barrow-in-furness, York, north-east Derbyshire, Chesterfield and Erewash would move to tier two. So we knew where we weren’t.
Meanwhile, last time I looked, Greater Manchester was still arguing the toss about being upgraded (which is to say miserably relegated) to tier three. So we knew where they didn’t want to be. Wales currently has 17 lockdown areas, and has banned English visitors travelling from Covid-y regions. But with no way of knowing where they’d been. Scotland, which has already imposed restrictions, is taking the High Road and threatening to upstage everyone with a fancy-schmancy four-tiered lockdown. We know exactly where First Minister Nicola Sturgeon wants
The problem is that home has become a holding pen, rather than a haven
to go, and with a poll this week now revealing a majority in favour of independence, she may well get there.
The overall picture is one of barely contained chaos at a time when all regions and nations should be sharing a coherent strategy. I don’t subscribe to the lazy dismissal of all politicians as “useless”, but I do believe they could be a lot more useful if they pulled together, rather than apart.
I hope you will forgive me, Boris, for saying – more in sorrow than anger – that this is the crappiest game of Whack-a-mole ever. I fear the bat will break long before we hear the definitive crack of fossorial mammal against willow. Or maybe our spirits will crumble first.
Either way, it is starting to look as though we are doomed to go in and out of lockdown like those folksy Alpine weather house figures, until the roof falls off and the walls collapse.
To paraphrase: I know this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But is it, perhaps, the end of the beginning? I fear that despite his unique access to scientists and economists, epidemiologists, medics and statisticians, Churchill’s biographer has no more clue than the rest of us. But he is the Prime Minister. It is his job to drill down into the detail until his head hurts, weigh up the evidence, come up with a consistent strategy and follow the damn thing through. Anything less is a dereliction of duty.