My pride in the human race has reached fever pitch

Looking back, it seems the height of irony that I once called the years between 2010 and 2020 “The Troubled Teens”. With Trump, Brexit, the culture wars, and the ceaseless malevolent backbeat of Islamist terrorism across the world, it seemed apt. It was an Age of Fractiousness, epitomised by the ceaseless sulking of thwarted Remainers. And then suddenly in 2020, we really had something to cry about. The year that promised perfect vision had a pleasingly sci-fi sound to it, but swiftly descended into a parade of virus variations, one after another, each named after a nation (India, Brazil, South Africa), like some monstrous beauty pageant.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the smug bourgeoise who find the “positives” to a pandemic that has killed more than three million people, and led to untold numbers spiralling into illness, insanity and unemployment. Simpering on about how the “silver lining” is the “healing of nature” might impress a handful of well-connected halfwits, but to real people struggling to keep mind, body and mortgage together it’s insensitive to the nth degree.

My own lockdown was pleasant: working from home with a view of the sea, my life-long chronic carousing habit curtailed, I got more writing done in the past year than in the previous decade. But I’m not going to prance around saying how lovely it is that I can hear the birds singing, because I can see with my own eyes that every month that goes by, the lives of my fellow citizens are being burned to the ground. (And those birds are mainly threatening other birds away from their territory, anyway – toxic masculinity.)

During the first lockdown, Hollywood celebrities tried to tell us that we were living through a common experience. But that was never true. As one social media wit put it: “There was never any lockdown – there were just middleclass people hiding, while workingclass people brought them things.” Risk from the virus was hugely dependent on age – and, to a lesser degree, sex and ethnicity.

But, to me, the most poignant disparity was between those of us who have had their fun (and by fun I mean career, love and money as well as the obvious) and those waiting for their lives to begin. We punks snarled petulantly of having “No Future” in 1977, but most of my spitting cohort went on to have gorgeous careers in music and media. These days, it’s the kids I feel sorry for. As a child I sat in my room, impatient for my life to begin, but knowing at least I could escape at 16. Not so for Generation Grounded.

Unlike the Smuggies, I’ve come out of this with less love of nature than I had before. But I’ve always been a people fan, and now I’m even keener. I’ll never forget a couple of years ago in the German town of Bensheim, rescue workers and firemen spending hours freeing an overweight sewer rat from a manhole cover. Imagine a rat returning the favour!

Joining the long, laughing queue on Brighton seafront yesterday to get my second jab, I was overcome with a love for humanity in all its messy glory. I remembered seeing Brian Wilson play at the very same Brighton Centre – now a vaccination hub – and being packed in with four thousand strangers, all of us united in sheer glee over what humans can do. The survival of such talent felt like a victory for the human race, not just the man himself, over all the pain and sorrow he had suffered since childhood.

Of course the future is uncertain. But it always was. We survived the Blitz and the Bomb, and more plagues than you could shake a hypodermic needle at, if our poor, primitive selves had only had them. And of course, we don’t know how many more Covid variations are on their way. But two things are certain: that our human lives are brief and should be enjoyed in their entirety; and that the human spirit will never die.

Thanks to these fantastic vaccines, a testament to human skill, ingenuity and team work, there is light at the e end of this long, dark tunnel. And one day soon, when these miserable travel restrictions have been lifted, we’ll look at a map of the world again and see it not as a threat, but as a promise.