We’re not allowed out of our houses unless it’s for food essentials, medicine, or daily exercise. All shops are closed, other than grocery stores and pharmacies. We must not visit friends, family, loved ones, or anybody, for the next three weeks, and gatherings, all gatherings of more than two people, are now officially banned by the government of the United Kingdom.
“It is the right decision,” said Rich, looking away from his screen for a moment. And it is. It’s just a horrid one. This virus can infect up to 3 other people once hosted - meaning just ten leaps of infectious contact and one person, just one, will have infected around 59,000 other people.
What’s more, thousands of us won’t have a clue that we’ve even got it. So when you see a weekend where people flock to the park, the beach, the river, to make the most of the sunshine ... it makes absolute sense to enforce a complete lockdown. People will die if we don’t do this.
So here we are. Forced into endless hours of mind-numbing confinement, the ever-loopy TV, and our inseparable smartphones and iPads. We’ll be square-eyed, drained and pale when we finally blink into the sunlight half asleep. And there I was thinking this wouldn’t look like a zombie apocalypse!
A crisis like this brings so many tensions into sharp focus. The selfish spirit of stockpiling and socialising comes into relief when the world reminds us that that behaviour is literally endangering the lives of other people. It is currently irresponsible to live like that - though generations of us have never really known any different; we've never really had to give up anything before.
But there are older generations who know exactly what that means. They weren’t hunted by an invisible killer; they were bombed by a real one, who burned their towns and cities to smouldering ash. They fought for, and won our freedoms at a great and terrible cost. They had ration books and night terrors, they had hardship and hard work, they had fire and fury. They gave everything for us. And now they, and the children who grew in the shadow of that war, need protecting, but we don’t seem to know how to do it. We can’t even bring ourselves to stay at home in front of the TV!
If there is one thing then that emerges ‘blinking into the sunlight’, I hope it’s a new sense of responsibility. I hope we all finally get it - that our actions have consequences, that somebody, somewhere always cleans up when we make a mess. I hope that we see a kind of an end to that ‘I’m young and healthy/why shouldn’t I stockpile/it’s my right’ attitude.
Anyway, we’re locked down, at home for the foreseeable future. The world belongs to the birds for a while, and as I realised the other morning, that really is quite a beautiful, hopeful sound to sing across the empty streets.
There will be a day when we’re back. And it’s my hope that it will be a different kind of day altogether.
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