It’s a second wave then. The data is different but the seeping feeling is the same.
In March the virus was spreading its way quite evenly across the country; this time it’s more contained, more focused in the North for some reason. Liverpool’s on lockdown; Manchester, Bolton, Leeds, Burnley, Newcastle, the populous bit of Scotland, Birmingham, Leicester, and large areas of England are in Tier Two. There are, we’re told, currently more people in hospital with Covid than there were in the spring; it just so happens that they’re mostly up north. Which must be ever so worrying if you live there.
A lot of people I know are just bored of talking about it. The wave brings fear, anxiety, worry with it of course, and it might just be that to ride it out we have to do our best to adapt to this brave new world while it’s here. A stiff upper lip won us the war after all.
Others are keen to sound warning bells at the complacent. There was a video that did the rounds a couple of days ago in which a street in Peckham was packed with people who’d emerged from pubs after the 10pm curfew. Some were drunk, few were socially distancing, and there in the centre of the tightly packed crowd, were some young people playing street cricket. If we’re not going to talk about it, how do we prevent that kind of arresting stupidity?
I’m on the side of the talkers. This will get worse, and I think eventually, it will get worse here too, long before it gets better. It’s an unbearable mess: as though a tsunami has come flooding into our land and taken our homes, while our neighbours are still having street parties. ‘It didn’t take my house,’ they say. ‘I’m alright; it’s those poor people in Liverpool who’ve got it bad. Now stick the telly on.’
As grim as this second wave is though, there is also a place for living well and living through it. The war was life-changing for our grandparents and great grandparents: defining their entire worldview for generations - but many of them discovered a way to live it out, to be hopeful for the future, and resilient in the face of death, despite the cold-hearted enemy over the sea. What they clung to was something better, something distant - peace for all of us, whether they made it over the mountain or not. ‘There is a war on you know,’ they’d say to each other, reminding them of the stark reality of its hardship. But largely they all pulled together to win that war and create the world we all grew up in, like green shoots in the rubble of the bomb-damage. They didn’t let fear define them. Neither should we.
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