OF course he should have resigned. Goes without saying. But really, anyone who expected an amoral, lying charlatan whose main interest is self-interest to show any respect for the rest of us (never mind self-respect) has probably not been paying attention.
Still, Boris Johnson has tapped a deep well of anger this week and I’m not sure it’s going to go away. Not because anger can’t burn off but because of what lies beneath it.
That anger is the petrol on the surface of a deep grief, I suspect. Over the last two years Covid has played a role in the deaths of 150,000 (and counting). What was really striking this week on social media and on radio phone-ins was how often it was not the anger that resonated but the sorrow, the first-hand accounts of loss compounded by the iniquities of this virus.
Inevitably it has made me think of the last days of my late wife. She died in a hospice in October 2019. In her final days she was surrounded by those who loved her, and I was able to hold her hand until the end.
The question I’ve been asking myself all week is, what if she had lived a few more months? How would I have coped if, like so many families, I wasn’t able to say goodbye properly?
And so many people were robbed of that small comfort and consolation. They couldn’t be with their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, grandparents or friends in their last hours, had to keep their distance from friends and families during funerals (if they were able to go at all).
Read More: Boris Johnson has been lying again
To be honest, I’m not sure we’ve really begun to come to terms with what we’ve all gone through in the last couple of years. I don’t know about anyone else but, perversely, this strange half-life I’ve been living – that we’ve all been living –for most of the since early 2020 has acted like a stopper in the bottle of my own grief. It has swirled around and around and gone nowhere.
Of course, not everyone has lost a loved one. And that’s something to be thankful for. But the truth is we all have lost something over these last couple of years. We’ve lost not only freedoms, but also our certainties. People have lost their livelihoods, many have found themselves isolated, or have had to struggle on in fear and pain with conditions that Covid has pushed to the side.
Yet some have treated these last two years as a mere inconvenience. Is that really what we have been living through? An inconvenience? The truth is surely that we have all, in our own ways, been grieving the lives we lost prior to 2020.
How will we remember this tear in the fabric of our lives when it ends? Some will, no doubt, be able to draw a veil over it and move on. But for many their lives are not as they were. They are grieving, or maybe living with Long Covid. And for them, the difference between a work event and a party will be, I’m sure, of little consequence at all.
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