4 minute read
BARTLEBY
T H E BR ISTOL M A G A Z I N E
Uncharted waters
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Like everyone else on the planet, I’ve been rearranging my life to make room for our new friend Covid-19. Actually it’s mostly other people who’ve been rearranging it for me, by cancelling things left, right and centre. And then there are the trips to the supermarket in search of paracetamol and toilet paper – items now only rarely sighted. By the time you read this, such treasures will probably be available only via a black market presided over by characters like Private Walker from Dad’s Army. I feel I should really be doing something exciting and dramatic so that one day, when my grandchildren ask ‘What did you do during Corona 2020?’, I can tell them about the charity bungee-jump off the Suspension Bridge or my work volunteering for the South Bristol Loo Paper Weavers. I ought to be writing a witty novel about life during a-bit-like-wartime or at the very least maintaining an insightful blog into the behaviour of modern Bristolians during this (we hope) oncein-a-generation crisis.
Instead I’m trying to keep things ticking over while avoiding the news as much as possible. To my mind, most of us are less likely to suffer because of the bug itself than we are from its social and psychological effects. Isolation. Fear of contact. Constant worry. I’ve always thought one of the routes to good mental health is to avoid TV news altogether and to limit the intake of current affairs reporting from other sources. When the United States elected its latest president we passed a resolution to switch off the radio whenever his voice was broadcast, and that has saved us no end of anguish. The problem with news at a time like this is that it consists largely of speculation, with all kinds of dire predictions about worst-case scenarios.
On the other hand I’ve found chatting with friends and family about our current predicament helpful, stimulating and often reassuring. Neighbours too, and strangers: dogwalkers, shoppers, the woman who delivers parcels for Hermes. People I might normally pass with a nod and a hello. Remember how we all used to live in our separate bubbles, divided by political views, music tastes, interests, etc? Now we all have something in common. We’re all concerned about what’s going to happen next. We all have elderly relatives to worry about. And many of us face a degree of economic uncertainty. Talking about elderly relatives, I’ve been pondering how best to help my mother, who lives on her own and is nearly 80. In Lidl I found myself discussing this with a chap on the checkout. I’ve said hello to him a hundred times but on this occasion we somehow got talking about old people and the virus. His father, I learned, was in lockdown in Italy and enjoyed grumbling about his predicament via Skype. My mother, meanwhile, is entirely uninterested in the whole subject and can’t see why we keep telling her to wash her hands. We agreed (the Lidl employee and I) that there’s little point constantly worrying about people who are not worried themselves.
I know, though, that the situation is very difficult for people who are in some way vulnerable or – in a different way – for those who have responsibility for the welfare of people beyond their immediate family. We have a neighbour who has a management position at a secondary school and when I asked him about it he said wryly that there had been quite a number of meetings. His tone suggested that the meetings were of the back-covering variety (to put it politely), because in the end nobody was sure what would happen next – what instructions might suddenly be delivered from on high. His parting words stayed with me: “This virus thing is like the snow,” he said. “When it comes, you just get on with it.” ■
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