February 2020. I just turned 28. I was suffering burnout in a job that I was hating. I was trying to make more of an effort with my relationship, having let my job burn up all my attention span. Good news was on the horizon though: I smashed an interview with a consultancy, that I genuinely thought would tell me to get stuffed and fuck off back to being a shite bartender.
Through hope and pain, I was seeing the news drift in of a pandemic, spreading from China, through to Italy, through to the UK.
Cases popped up in Newport. Hand Sanitizer appeared in abundance in my office. warnings about those returning from China appeared everywhere.
For the first time in my life, I can see an international news story burst apart in front of my life. In my ignorance I dismissed it as another Swine Flu. In hindsight, that was a fucking stupid thing to think.
Then the images of hospitals filled with suffocating patients came through. Then the numbers got bigger. The air was getting nervous, and the UK wasn’t doing anything. No restrictions, despites the cases growing.
March 15th, myself and my partner were in Tenby. It was our last trip anywhere for a long time. We were in an Italian restaurant, shoulder to shoulder with others. Card payments in the ice cream place were the only thing accepted. There was noticeable nervousness though, a sense of unease amongst it all.
Later that week, on the 18th March, myself and my friends were out in the local pub, sharing one last drink before the End of the World.
Then, the City of Cardiff fell dead silent. Empty, still and devoid of the life of people.
in its place, a virus we didn’t understand fully, and a national instruction that dictated a total restriction of life. Essential shopping only. Isolation. One hour exercise outside only.
This is not a criticism of said policy, but a reflection. To get to this point, pandemic protections and controls long established by the powers that be have failed. The US, long the world leading drivers of the WHO, were notably failing in their duty due to the rise of the populist demagogues that promise nothing but rage, while looting the system clean. Specifically, the WHO (And not the band).
life in lockdown was easy, physically. Hard, mentally. Work, if you were a desk jockey, was simple. Boot up Teams, have meetings over the internet. Lament your cat leaping out of the skylight mid conference call.
Somehow Zoom comes out of nowhere and dominates the VOIP game, despite there being a thousand fuckers doing this shit for years. Skype must have been losing their minds.
But time slips, into the cracks that violate any sense of reason. Days seem to stretch into eternity, yet weeks vanish by in the breeze. March, became April, became August. Boxsets and Netflix series become defining, life saving entities to prevent madness and boredom. Hobbies are picked up, sustained or otherwise.
Memes flow unbidden about the nature of man and the environment (accuracy irrelevant):
In the early period, people were bound by a sense of support for the NHS. Tiger King on Netflix was a bonding experience that defined the early pandemic for anyone in the Millenial range of ages. I distinctly recall a Cardiff comedian attempting to host a pub quiz in his living room via facebook. It worked…..OK? Maybe?
But that sense of community was there. There was no conspiracy, no rage against the vaccine, no 5G poisoning bullshit. Politics didnt divide shit. Masks were worn (incorrectly at times) but hey, we western folks haven’t had to deal with that compared to other nations.
Oh, how such memories linger in the mind compared to today.
Things got weird.
We opened up, slowly, from May onwards Eat out to Help Out became an unironic statement to help the newly re-opened economy in August. Vaccine development was underway.
The United States went absolutely fucking batshit, riots, anti maskers, the fat fucking idiot in the White House at the time somehow undermining his own authority to apparently score points with his base?
Thoughts for another day that.
But here, we had Durham Castle. You see, the UK still has a firmly entrenched class system, despite outside appearances, and the pandemic laid that on the table. The Special Advisor, responsible for Brexit and Boris Johnson’s personal bastard of choice, got caught with his family far away from home during the height of lockdown.
The entirety of the Tory Establishment defended it, rallied around it. He held a conference, and wanted to test his eyesight. An excuse so flimsy, so pathetic, it beggars belief.
The NHS were given the full respect and heroes treatment, much like the military. This translates into meaningless words and gestures, followed by a budget cut. The very people smacking their pots and pans at the alotted Thursday 8pm timeslot were the same people who read The Sun and panic voted Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson at the election in Dec 2019 in fear of a man with a maoist bike.
Look at that smug prick, celebrating the NHS while clamouring for its demise at the hands of US insurance.
But everything was open again! We could see our friends, our family. Life could return to normal, only with planned seating and sign in sheets. The shitty NHS app that abso-fucking-lutely did not do its job, worth several billion to a Tory donor, but took about an hour’s worth of work by an app developer.
At this point in the pandemic, people are just glad to see each other. Covid wasn’t some boogeyman, some political point. It was a dice roll, factoring in your age and weight, and that roll either said you were either fucked today, long term fucked with terminal problems are losing the ability to taste garlic for a bit.
Who takes a chance with that?
Apparently, a whole raft of people tired of being locked down. An understandable position, because life was not meant to go this way.
I don’t know the exact dates, but I do know the idea seemed to flow over the internet, probably from the US’s strange descent into several conflicting realities. Mask wearing was now seen as something a bit weird, rather than a mechanism to protect others. 5G towers were blamed for the virus. Chinese and chinese looking people were getting harassed in the street by the kind of single digit IQ possessing fucktards that think The Fast and the Furious has Lore.
Key workers, a term used to inflate the smashed morale of frontline workers that could never work from home and faced both the virus, people and the total lack of any respectable pay in the face of it all. Meanwhile, their bosses reported record profits and growth.
And in the background, people deciding to politicise health measures, lockdowns, masks, vaccines that are being generated in state of the art labs.
In the background of the virus, a breakthrough in medicine occurred. Its almost shocking, the level of achievement, advancement, co-ordination and ingenuity that comes out of this time, and how it contrasts so heavily with the anti vaccination, anti health measure front that actively kills people.
It seemed to be imported from afar, this disdain for anything that might interrupt a good time. Karens on facebook happily sharing absolute bullshit about Covid, about masks, about the incoming vaccines that threatened to kill your kids and 5G up your veins for the NSA. It felt less like an organic fear response and more like information warfare. Maybe it was.
Another lockdown loomed for us. Wales had the Firebreak, a period of two weeks. But that didn’t really work too well, and the major winter lockdown kicked in regardless across the border.
I want to say, throughout all this, I tried to be routine. I kept writing, I kept exercising, and survived a 6 month lull in work as I waited for security clearance. Our house had damp problems. But we stuck through it all, and survived. We may even have had Covid early on.
My fitness group did Zoom sessions, every day. It was a hell of a thing, trying to hold a plank while a ginger cat constantly jumps over you and demands his daily bread (or ham in his case). It was a hell of a breather, and when everything opened up for a moment, I felt fit as a fiddle and on top of the world.
I mention this because the winter lockdown was brutal.
It is one thing to act in the interest in the common good, but when that act doesn’t yield a solution but a repeat, months later, it is a forlorn feeling, one that eats away at your sanity between short daylight hours and lack of any appreciable change of life.
Dec 2020 to April 2021 was a horrible, empty time.
The last time I felt the kind of bitterness and emptiness of that period was years back, 2015 ish. Before I yeeted myself to the Southern Hemisphere, and discovered I was actually a twat for most of my life.
I didn’t exercise, or shave, or look after myself. I felt myself getting weaker, losing energy, time, effort, love. My partner carried me in that time, much as she might otherwise disagree.
April onwards, the vaccine begins to roll out for my generation. I get mine, I faint (terrible history with needles, me) and manage through the day. We celebrate our anniversary, carefully, safely, in the west of Wales.
And yet, life is irrevocably changed, to its core.
I could talk about the politics of everything: the failure of the UK political system to produce solid leadership, the madness and misinformation propagating through the internet, the inability for people to wear the mask over the nose AND the mouth.
I could bring up the return of workers unionising against the megacorps of our era, the increasing power of said megacorporations, the frustration of so many in the face of absurdity.
I think I will settle for an observation. That is the name of this damn blog after all.
Covid has laid bare, the fundamental weaknesses that have been eating away at our world for a long time. Its exasperated them, kicked out the support systems that hold them in place, and given the impetus to many to no longer accept the conditions of it all.
The “Great Resignation” is a sign of the times, and the sign of power changing. Heavy Goods Vehicles drivers in the UK are finally able to fight back against the fucked up bosses that have taken advantage of the EU in the worst way, now that Brexit AND the pandemic has totally shown how fucked everything is.
Oh yeah, I forgot Brexit officially “happened” at the start of the year.
….
Look.
It’s been a long two years. I feel like its simultaneously been two weeks and two millenia since that March, since that last weekend.
I can feel it in my bones, that life is just…not what it was. Not what it will ever be.
Maybe that’s for the best? A shake up, of everything we know? But my cynical mind leans towards the Bo Burnham interpretation: 20,000 years of this, only 7 left to go.
I have a horrible, deep feeling in my bones, that we’re in the endgame now for this period of human history.
I grew up never knowing an empty supermarket (Post Brexit, this has happened and fuck anyone who says otherwise). I saw the internet grow into permanent distraction and convenience. I could conjure up a fact in a millisecond, bounced around satellites and relays via a pocket computer more powerful than the Saturn IV.
Yet, I grow up with no power. My vote has never won in an election. My generation has never been represented, nor will it ever be in a meaningful timeframe. I’ve witnessed governments win elections off of empty resentment, and the pandemic has highlighted just how shortsighted and selfish quite a few people are around us.
But it has also highlighted that the world is powered by those that continue to push that fucking wheel. People that keep turning up to hospital in expired PPE, and face down an antivaxxer spitting fury on their deathbeds, dying of a new novel disease they refuse to believe exists as it ravages their body.
People that have decided that they’re done being fucked over by a suited prick in a c-suite position, someone pushing drug laws through their donations to the Tory party while railing a line off a stripper’s tits.
The pandemic is an eye opening exercise in the raw hypocrisy of the powers that be, versus the absolute will and strength of the people who we rely on day and night for the core things that power the world.
The logistics folks, the health folks, the scientists, the artists, the writers, the doctors, the nurses, the teachers, the factory workers, the farmers, the builders, the shop attendants, the cleaners. The individuals labelled as key, being broken every day, and robbed by an economic system that is buckling under its own inertia.
I mentioned the Bo Burnham intepretation above, but there’s another brewing. I’ll call it the Marina Interpretation.
This one comes from another angle: one of anger. Frustration, born from generations of absolute injustice. Energy that says “Fuck this god forsaken bullshit, why the fuck isn’t anyone doing anything?”
Mother nature’s dying, all right. So what are we doing? We can’t even save our god damn selves from a pandemic.
“Do nothing” seems increasingly trite.
Maybe we’re too complacent, because right now, the angry people doing shit seem to all be singing a song that’s out of tune and directed at anyone with more than two working braincells. The same angry people that won’t wear a mask and record themselves shouting at children in some twisted sense of self entitled justice.
….
Or maybe, this is the end?
Maybe that anger is one, last, desperate shout, by the forgotten and the bitter, by the self aware and the self righteous, against a world that inceasingly feels like a last gasp. A last moment of triumph by the powers that be, to claim that last ounce of wealth that they can manage before they flee for their high castles (or in Jeff Bezo’s case, his cock shaped spaceship).
I’m just an overgrown kid, approaching 30 rapidly, afraid of the tidal wave (possibly literally) of climate change, and watching us fail to deal with masks and handwashing. We’re politicising science, making each other hate one another over a health issue. Making each other divided over every. single. Point.
I want to be hopeful, after all this time. I have to be, because to think anything else is to write off anything we can do to mitigate it. We’re past prevention, I think. The world’s climate is going to shift, and the pandemic will continue unabated, and the escalation of the political divides of Brexit, of rich vs poor, and young vs old, are going to continue.
I hope, in the midst of all this, we recall those early days of the pandemic. That community, comaraderie, as we fumbled Zoom calls and attempted to stay close amidst the uncertainty of it all.
Good luck 2022. You’re going to need it.
Observations from afar 