With the stunning Christmas Eve resolution to four-plus years of agonising brinkmanship and European spite over Brexit, this year is suddenly ending on a bit of a crazed high. But for most of us, from March onwards, Brexit became a side show to the frightful main event of the year: Covid-19.
Indeed, just for a laugh – a bitter one, perhaps – I sometimes look back to something I wrote in February. It was about how little I was worried over the new coronavirus. The few people on public transport wearing masks seemed hysterical, I added.
I wouldn’t have been able to believe that, within months, I would be the owner of a suite of masks, and furiously staring at people either not wearing one or allowing theirs to slip under their nose.
Indeed, the urge to deny the oncoming catastrophe caused by Covid was so strong I boarded a flight to Australia on March 12, returning with a shocked and bewildered sense of defeat on the 23rd, the day lockdown in the UK began.
And now, with the New Year just days away, my thoughts have become reflective. So many of us have experienced suffering or deprivation in 2020. But I find myself admitting that while this year promised to be the most consistently terrible in memory, it has not, in fact, been all doom and gloom. There have been highs and lows, interesting discoveries of new tastes and abilities; weaknesses and fears. Here are a few of mine.
Highs
Sleeping well
It turns out, lockdowns are the perfect cure for my insomnia. My problems with sleep have plagued me since I was a child, though in the last 10 or so years have been more brutal, with periods of as long as six weeks with barely any REM snooze-time. It’s not always a particular worry that keeps me up; it’s usually more of a brain chemistry issue caused by general overstimulation. I had always suspected, but never had a chance to test, the theory that if my diary was neutralised – if I had nowhere to be, and most nobody else had anywhere to be either – that all my nervous energy would dissipate. Now I know. Lockdowns provide the only conditions in which I am able to simply give over and slumber.
The pleasures of parochialism
I discovered – as all jetsetters had to – that I can be happy for months going nowhere. Between March and July, I rarely ventured further than a 45 minute round trip walk from my house. Life was carved into wholesome domestic segments: exercise, coffee, working, reading, Zooming, TV. Repeat. Having planned months of far-flung travel for spring, I found that there was a kind of quiet, personal adventure in the unexpected reality of staying put.
Fishy fascination
As Brexit talks reached the endgame, I finally found I could no longer avoid questions of fish. Thanks to Brexit, and hotly contested rights to different types of British fish, I discovered the fascinating difference between demersal and pelagic species. A reminder: demersal fish live close to the bottom of the sea (or lake) and include turbot. Pelagic fish, the sexy things, live neither close to the bottom or near the shore, and include the likes of mackerel and whiting. We were willing to sacrifice our demersels – but it was hands off our pelagics. I can’t quite work out what the deal means for demersels and pelagics in future, but I feel I’m a better person for knowing the difference between them regardless.
Strangely enough… travel
It turns out, like sleep, travel is wonderful in a pandemic, if a bit nerve-racking at the start. By the end of July, I’d had it with the four walls of my living room, and tentatively cast a few first steps beyond with a trip to Yorkshire. It was scary – spring had left an indelible mark of unease. But once I’d done Yorkshire, my courage rose and I went to Scandinavia and then Italy. I chose Denmark because of the travel bridge and its safe, orderly reputation. I’d never have gone otherwise, and would have missed swimming in the crystalline Baltic and a chance meeting with the divine Sofie Gråbøl, star of The Killing, in a restaurant in Copenhagen. In Italy, finding myself almost alone in the Sistine Chapel was one of the highlights of my life, let alone the pandemic.
British women rule the science waves
Amid all the awful mismanagement and mess-ups, the fudges, false alarms and white elephants – not to mention the interminable droning on of our three horsemen of the apocalypse, Whitty, Vallance and Van Tam – it has been inspiring to see women in the most important positions when it comes to actually getting things done. Research on the Oxford jab was headed up by Professor Sarah Gilbert, a biochemist from Kettering. Venture capitalist Kate Bingham is head of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, responsible for investing taxpayer money in vaccine candidates (including those from Pfizer and Moderna). And June Raine is the chief executive of the MHRA, the UK’s regulatory body for new drugs, and the woman we have to thank for making the UK the first in the world to approve and begin using a Covid vaccine.
Lows
The manners deficit
I am constantly annoyed: in Waitrose, on the train, wherever I see anyone else in an enclosed public space with sloppy or non-existent mask usage. These people have clearly failed to keep up with the science and worse, they either don’t believe that the virus spreads easily or don’t care about spreading it themselves. Some of the worst offenders are celebrities, ranging from Rita Ora, the pop star who had a 30th birthday party while London was in Tier 2, to anti-masker Laurence Fox, and anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn. When Tom Cruise exploded at the cast of Mission Impossible for ignoring social distancing, I found myself – strangely – sympathising with him.
The deprivation of touch
Living alone is not particularly well suited to a pandemic, and I was one of those without a chair to sit on when the romantic music stopped. It was bad enough having to say goodbye to physical intimacy, but even more basic, though, was the withdrawal of all touch entirely. I began having fervent daydreams about massages and even security pat-downs. I would see couples or families out and about and marvel at how for them, skin-to-skin contact remained a normal part of life. Finally, in June, my friend Anna hugged me from behind to avoid faces clashing. I felt shivers over all my skin.
The imperilment of free speech
I had assumed, when the pandemic broke, that the world would have no bandwidth for the tiresome whining of the holy woke brigade and their obsession with censorship. I was wrong. The Black Lives Matter movement, emboldened by the death of George Floyd, soon became a giant umbrella under which the legitimisation of forced resignations and sackings, often grounded in nothing but feverish paranoia, became the norm. Speaking freely – even in a reasonable, lawful framework – has become dangerous. Just ask JK Rowling, who endured abuse for expressing her view that sex is biological – including, outrageously, from the actors propelled to fame by the Harry Potter films.
The horrors of video calls
In March, I fell upon Zoom like everyone else, seeing it as a brilliant cure-all to soul-sapping physical isolation. Several hours of video calls a day became normal, until I realised how desperate it was that all communication had become subject to a series of warps, delays and interruptions as creaking broadband lines struggled to cope. My brain has been in a perpetual fog since trying and failing, for hours a day, to make eye contact – impossible on video. When I’ve given Zoom lectures, I’ve been swamped by the alienation of not being able to see my audience. This is the brave new world? I hope not.
