2020 has been like a dream.

To call it a year does not do justice to the depths of its strangeness. It has at times seemed like a prolonged season of solitude, twisting so much of the familiar out of shape and making the surreal appear mundane. We have pitched and tossed across its treacherous currents and navigated its warped contours. We have no maps. We have never been here or anywhere like it before.

Remembering is a blunt instrument and if not handled gently, it can pierce the placenta of the dream it is trying to recall, the dream turns to water, slips beyond our reach and is forgotten. So, I will try to recall these fragments as carefully as I can.

In February, Brazilian students in the language school where I teach on Abbey Street started to tell me that their hours were being inexplicably cut. They work mostly in hospitality or as pre-dawn cleaners in the city’s office blocks. They were also the first to tell me that Patrick’s Day might be cancelled. They were like canaries down Dublin’s mine shaft and sensed an ominous shift in the air weeks before the rest of us did. Restaurant bookings being cancelled, hotel rooms not being filled, weddings postponed. The ground was shifting beneath their already fragile circumstances.

Across the road in Muse Café, on the top floor of Eason’s, Sky News flashed headlines about clusters of Covid in Lombardy and Veneto, scientists in white lab coats were interviewed, graphs and charts displayed. A vast warehouse full of empty beds appeared like an image too disturbing to be the cover of a Pink Floyd album, this was real. It all still seemed far away though. Something on the news. Something over there. But each day it insinuated its way deeper into the front pages and into our conversations. One afternoon in the café an old woman turned me while poking her crumble and custard and said:

“Oh, you wouldn’t know what’s comin’ or goin’ these days. I mean, it’s not like in the past when we had our own diseases like TB, they were simpler times.”

It was making its presence felt before it arrived.

In the middle of the month I went to Madrid for five days. I had lived there for three years long ago and wanted to settle a few scores with my past. By the time I arrived the city had already collided with the Covid, but had no idea yet of the extent of the devastation. In the few days I was there thousands of cases were flooding the city’s nursing homes, but life went on as normal on the upper decks. On my last day there, I went to The Prado to see Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”. I got there early in the morning and had the room almost to myself. My eyes gorged on its depictions of The Garden of Eden, the fall from Grace, vast opulent copulations, sacred orgies, swarms of birds and nightmarish creatures devouring and excreting human forms, a city being licked by flames and damnation. I was exhilarated and terrified by it. When I turned around to leave, there was a large group of Asian tourists all wearing masks semi circled around me like a flock of eyes. I was caught somewhere between the third day of Creation and a vision of what was to become all too familiar soon enough back home.

February was studded with uncanny moments like those scenes early on in horror films when a window suddenly shuts or the ethereal youngest child is seen through a kitchen window playing outside on a tyre swing rope, chilling preludes of the terror that is about to unfold.

When I got back from Madrid there was no other talk around town except for Covid. A fog of anxiety was sweeping through the city. One day, while waiting for the bus home on Dame Street, a man approached me to ask me for a cigarette and said, “How’re ye finding things?” I knew exactly what things he meant. The foreboding and the dread. Dublin had entered a sense of collective experience like I had never felt before. We were all singing from the same trembling hymn sheet. We had woken up in season two of a dystopian Netflix drama. It was all the stranger because the script seemed so eerily familiar. Reality was catching up with our collective nightmares. We were living our lives in the frame of a Black Mirror and I wondered how our once beautifully drab lives had gotten woven into a tapestry of sci-fi cliché.

There was panic buying in Fallon and Byrne like it was the Organic Apocalypse. For the many it was queuing in Lidl on Moore Street for pasta and toilet paper; for others it would be a West Clare Lobster Lockdown. A Tale of Two Dublins!

In mid-March I met Donal Smith the owner of Grogan’s pub on South William St. He said he was going to close that afternoon, speculating that he would be reopening again within a few weeks. The echo of those words now sounds like the dashed hopes of troops to return home from the trenches of Verdun by Christmas.

The unravelling had begun.

I remembered the immortal words, whispered to me at a party, with stoned Pentecostal intensity by a beautifully deranged Dubliner.

“Are ye feelin’ any negativity around the periphery of the buzz?”

His sense of the geography of being wasted was sublime.

Lockdown was a word I had until now associated with American policing in the wake of an atrocity. The Boston Marathon Bombings. A word to conjure fear. The sound of cackled voices on walkie-talkies. Chaos. Our first lockdown was a time of poignant paradoxes. Being alone together. Being proactive by being inactive. Showing solidarity in solitude. Clapping in our gardens to invisible front-line workers.

If the 1930’s saw the rural electrification of Ireland, then Lockdown 2020 saw us make the transition to fully inhabiting our online alter egos. Our avatars paid their final visit to the virtual tailors to be fully fitted out for a world that had changed from physical analogue to detached digital the space of a few months. Schools, offices, pubs, cafés were all drained and muted. Our veins hummed with electricity like never before.