WE have now reached the start of all of our Coronavirus anniversaries. A year ago today, I was in Edinburgh for a day out at the end of a week of days out. A couple of days earlier I had driven the family up to Dundee for a trip to the V&A, ever so slightly antsy that news that the first case of coronavirus in Scotland had just been confirmed on Tayside.
A year ago next Monday I went to my last live gig, David Baddiel at the Glasgow Pavilion. I met Ken Smith, the Herald’s former diarist there. I decided not to shake his hand. Baddiel made a joke about how we were all enjoying our last night out for a while. It would be another 15 days before the Prime Minister – dithering as usual – announced a lockdown.
Indeed, on March 3, 2020, Johnson was boasting about going into hospitals and shaking hands with everybody. (You should hear the language I use in my head about that man. Actually, best not.)
A year ago, and, yes, it feels longer. A year of living quietly. A year of living through various shades of frustration, fear and low-grade misery, with the odd day out in the middle of it last summer when, on reflection, I wish I had done more.
This third lockdown through the winter has been the hardest. A real grind as everything shut down and we were stuck in our heads through short days and long nights. Time passed numbly. Yet how much worse would it have been without the promise of the vaccines?
And all through this year that ticking knowledge that we’ve been the lucky ones. That while Covid has touched us, it has done no more. So many families can’t say that.
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What has changed? I’m speaking to my family more but seeing them less. Life has closed in – closed down – to box sets and football on the radio. And I’ve realised I’m not quite the homebird I always thought I was. I’m desperate to get out now.
To be human is to live in a state of constant change, of course. We often just don’t notice it, too busy living to take on board how our lives are changing. That’s been impossible with Covid. It’s been a very visible rupture to normality.
Yet, a couple of centuries from now, historians studying the late 20th century and early 21st century will most likely be describing this time in terms of technological change, the emergence of social media, our digital interconnectedness and, if we are lucky, the beginning of a concerted effort to combat global warming (hopefully not too late for our great-great-great grandchildren).
As we live through this it’s difficult to know if Covid will be a future footnote (the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919 disappeared from public discourse for decades after all) or a defining moment in mankind’s story. Or maybe even a harbinger of something worse.
And yet right now it’s impossible to see past it. We’ve had a year of living with this. Some anniversaries are not worth celebrating.
It’s later. Between the last paragraph and this one I’ve been a walk. Up the hill above the Forth and Clyde Canal to a stretch of the Antonine Wall which offers a view across the Forth Valley. The sky is grey and low today, so for once I can’t see the Trossachs. But the Ochils are in view, the boundary line of my personal geography.
In fact, they are lit up by a break in the clouds. Dumyat is shining out like a promise of better days. Another promise. We’ve had a lot of promises these past 12 months. Maybe one day soon one of them will be delivered.
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