MY second blue envelope arrived on Tuesday. Four days from now I’ll be double-vaxxed and as protected as I can be (give or take a couple of weeks). Perfect timing for the easing of lockdown, especially as I’m living in a level two area.
I’m already planning a trip, once travel restrictions ease, to visit my mum in Northern Ireland. I’ve seen her once in the last year, for a couple of hours in September and that was for an interment, so not the happiest of reasons.
This weekend I might even go to the movies. And there’s a Jock McFadyen exhibition opening in a few weeks at the Dovecot that sounds great.
At the same time, though, I was bemused, to put it mildly, to see all those people cramming onto the first flights out to Portugal so avidly covered by the media (so much so you could be forgiven for thinking everyone flying was a journalist). Is that really a good idea, I thought?
We will all have our own notion of what’s safe and unsafe, as we go ahead. There are good reasons for caution. The virus, to paraphrase Gerry Adams, hasn’t gone away, you know. We still aren’t clear on how problematic the B.1.617.2 variant is going to be.
Read More: A year of living with Covid
But then, part of me also feels I was too cautious last summer when cases were low. We are all of us torn between caution and desire, aren’t we? And there is no correct behaviour (although not wearing a mask, not taking the vaccine and moaning about conspiracies is definitely incorrect).
What does feel important to remember is that we have lived through – are still living through – something seismic. There is no reason to believe that things just snap back to how they were before. They shouldn’t, should they? That would suggest we have learnt nothing from the last year. What that learning should be, though, may take time to work out.
What also has to be remembered is that there are people whose lives have been transformed by this virus. They have lost family members, or they may be suffering from Long Covid. And who knows what mental health issues may have been stored up by this last year’s privations?
For myself it’s now been 18 months since my wife died. So often this last year grief has felt like a house guest, something that has fed off lockdown and insularity. Unwelcome mostly, but now and then a comfort. Grief can be perverse like that.
I don’t know how I would feel now if this last year had been normal. Maybe things would be different, maybe not. Grief is tidal, after all. It ebbs away only to roar back when you don’t expect it.
Read More: Grief in a time of pandemic
We all have been living with different forms of grief this last year; for other people, for ways of life. And that needs to be acknowledged.
So, going forward, we have to give each other some leeway. We all will move into this potentially post-viral world at different speeds and it’s not a crime if not everyone is accelerating up to the speed limit straight away. Taking the B-road out of this is OK too.
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