A vaccine is joyful news – but am I really ready to go back to the world?
Most of us can, at any one time, hold conflicting thoughts in our heads; it’s the basic condition of getting anything done. Faced with even the most trivial task, my first response is almost always I don’t want to do it, followed by I do very much want it to be done. To move from one state to the other requires the kind of internal workout – think how good it will feel to be on the other side of this bump; imagine what will happen if I simply stopped doing things; what kind of person can’t deal with the dishes etc – that kicked in particularly viciously last week, with news of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. Three oppositional thoughts flew to mind: the end of the pandemic is finally in sight; infection rates will, between now and then, continue to rise and many people will die; and, most confoundingly, I’m not sure I’m ready to go back to the world.
There is, almost certainly, a compound word in German for the anticipation of future nostalgia. One feels it keenly with children. I look at mine, now, hitting first milestones, and experience a spasm of what feels like loss: the certainty that, at some unspecified time in the future, this period will occupy enormous parts of my hard drive. I will feel sad for what has come and gone. The intensity of this period, so much of which flies by in the scramble just to hang on without falling, will, I know, look different at 10 or 20 years’ distance.
Such is the sensation brought on by looking forward to next year and the inevitable resumption of something like normal life. There are so many things to run towards gladly: being able to travel and see my family again; simple pleasures such as meeting friends for a drink without wondering if it’s an indulgence that will kill me; having my kids actually go to school; reading the news without keening at the death tolls and the image of people dying alone in Covid wards.
But then beneath all that, some
thing else that feels vaguely like dread. There are, perhaps, people who spring out of bed every morning and dive cheerfully and headlong into their day. There are also those – the majority, surely – for whom any engagement with a to-do list requires an enormous primary negotiation around one’s lassitude. During the pandemic, the siren song of cancelled meetings, zero travel, endless opportunities to avoid people you mildly dislike and a daily alibi for not having a shower has been terrible, disorienting, depression-inducing and inclined to cause panic. But let’s face it: some aspect of it has also been the enactment and indulgence of our wildest dreams.
“I want to be around people who don’t want me to speak,” a friend wrote to me the other day by text – we don’t talk on the phone; it requires too much effort – and I understood precisely what she meant. A couple of days later, I had a Zoom meeting for work, a horrific imposition that required me to dig deep and recover my perky game face, while still permitting me to show up, hair unwashed. The other person on the call was less than five miles away, in Brooklyn, and the fact I didn’t have to get on the subway to see her felt like a small gift from God.
An aspect of this conflict – I want to go back to my old life; I don’t want to go back to my old life – is simple desocialisation. I watch TV shows and movies these days with a reflex horror at crowded bar scenes where no one’s wearing a mask. Living for a year under pain of contracting a deadly disease has contributed to an overall sense of vulnerability that has nothing to do with the pandemic. The idea, now, of getting on a five-hour flight to meet an obligation 3,000 miles away from my kids is unthinkable. What if the plane goes down? (I’ve always thought what if the plane goes down, but prior to the pandemic could work around it). How can I take risks, when the very idea of danger – that which we spend so much of our time rationalising away – has been fully realised and proved to be real?
All of this will pass. In a year or so, if we are lucky, most of us will be fully back to business as usual. This period will appear outlandish, absurd, and for that reason alone subject to enormous nostalgia – not because what has happened was good, but because it was singular. This past year has been horrible in so many ways, and yet, knowing as we do that it will mark us in time, a small part of me doesn’t want it to end.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
area free. And, as I mentioned last week, many of you will be quite bored with taking lectures in personal responsibility from a man who doesn’t even take personal responsibility for an unspecified number of his own children.
For now: out of the frying pan, into the burns unit. Last month, before Johnson belatedly got around to announcing the national lockdown in a Halloween performance of quite terrifying ineptitude, over 50% of England was in tier 1. When the nation “emerges” four weeks later, it’ll be more like 1%. Boris Johnson has 99 problems, but the Isles of Scilly ain’t one.
Almost the entire country will now be in the toughest two tiers – which are themselves not the tiers you might have known and loved the first time round. There have been “modifications”. Furthermore, there is the situation of areas such as Kent, which went into this lockdown in tier 1 but which Johnson has deemed will come out of it into an even harsher version of tier 3. Like Taylor Swift’s, his tiers ricochet.
It is fair to say the reaction to yesterday’sannouncements is widespread WTF-ery. If you are able to follow all the news obsessively, these latest developments might not come as a shock. Since the beginning of our plague year, Johnson’s failure to grasp any of the nettles at any of the points they needed to be grasped has arguably long set us up for a bleak midwinter. And a bleak early winter, and a bleak late winter.
There’s a reason the Office for Budget Responsibility places the UK on the naughty step of charts comparing not just European death tolls but also economic damage, despite the country having had to endure some of the most stringent restrictions in the continent. And it’s not because it’s “just one of those things”. Johnson’s government has fallen between every stool. Worse, they were so hell bent on not having to learn from the first wave via any sort of inquiry, that many of the mistakes have since been repeated in the second wave. If there is a third wave, expect yet another runout for all your favourites.
As I say, lots of hyperengaged people may already feel they knew what “the end of lockdown” would look like. If, however, your main preoccupation has been with keeping your head/ business/life above water, you might have taken a very different signal from the government over the past few weeks, when you’ve had a second to pay attention. You might have assumed that the thing which followed the lockdown would be – how to put this? – less lockdowny. You might have assumed, what with all the deceptive performative fussing over Christmas and so on, that we would return on 2 December to something better than we left on 4 November. You might even remember successive promises of Johnson’s to “turn the tide” in 12 weeks (March), and a “return to normality by Christmas” (July).
Alas, all of these little white lies are a function of Johnson’s character. From the very start of this pandemic, the prime minister has confirmed he is temperamentally unsuited to delivering bad news. Instead, he has opted to deliver bad news hopelessly belatedly, and good news self-defeatingly prematurely. The effect is to make people feel constantly cheated, even when the news is better than might have been expected had their expectations been managed more fairly or reasonably. Hence why, up and down the country today, people feel led up the garden path. If they watched Thursday’s Downing Street press conference, they will know to expect more of the same as we move forward. No sooner had Johnson explained how your tier wasn’t your destiny, than chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, explained that even the new tier 2 would only hold infections level. Tier 1 would result in a rise.
Naturally, there is a certain irony in seeing Tory MPs who voted for Johnson now outraged to discover that he won’t tell them the truth. Had you given a look to camera this morning every time an MP said something like “the prime minister needs to be straight with people”, you’d have had whiplash before breakfast.
Much worse are the ones still quietly making excuses for his character failings, like he’s some special case. Even at his lectern, Johnson seems to cast himself as the chorus to events, as opposed to the guy who decrees them. All the sighs and the winces and the “I wishes” – we are for ever being encouraged to see things as happening to the prime minister, as opposed to at his behest. He lacks the leadership qualities required to own his response.
No doubt his last defenders would claim that Johnson is simply giving people hope. If so, then he is demonstrably going the wrong way about it. Johnson has become a specialist in dashing hopes falsely raised ( by him). Yet hope is hugely important, now more than at any time this past year, and a better leader – even an adequate one – should be able to inspire without misleading.
Alas, Johnson continues to confuse giving people hope with placating them with fibs, only to let them down later, like he was always going to have to anyway. The pattern is not unfamiliar. There are women in several London postcodes to whom the prime minister once gave hope, only to later turn out to have been making false promises. Hang on to your lunch, but perhaps we’re all those women now. We expect him to do this; we expect him to do that. So we became hopeful, after a fashion. When the time comes, of course, Boris Johnson doesn’t think he can be reasonably expected to do the things he suggested he could – indeed, he protests that he never really suggested them anyway.
So yes, this is the way he has always been. At the time of the leadership election, there were all sort of open-minded Tories who voted for Johnson, apparently convinced the personal was not political. That was a misapprehension. Your tier might not be your destiny – but in his job, your character always is.
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
• Join Marina Hyde and Guardian parliamentary sketch writer John Crace as they look back at a political year like no other. Thursday 10 December, 7pm GMT, 8pm CET, 2pm EST Book tickets here
ers like Derek Chauvin and remain opposed to any efforts to reform policing or address longstanding issues of systemic racism in policing are the spiritual and political descendants of
Dan White and SFPD officers who supported him.
As the Black Lives Matter movement continues, it is important to make these connections and recognize this history. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, Stephon Clark and too many others are part of the long and brutal history of killings of African Americans by security forces in the US that probably predates the founding of the country.
George Moscone and Harvey Milk were white politicians, whose deaths are usually associated with the LGBTQ + civil rights movements, but they are also part of the sad story of police violence in America.
Lincoln Mitchell teaches in the political science department at Columbia University. His most recent book, San
Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock and a Third-Place Baseball Team, was published by Rutgers University Press in October 2019. Follow Lincoln on Twitter @LincolnMitchell