TWENTY-ONE THINGS I'LL MISS ABOUT THE LOCKDOWNS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
TWENTY-ONE THINGS I’LL MISS ABOUT THE LOCKDOWNS.
BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
Okay, so is that it, then?
Two solid years of living in fear, wearing masks to cover our faces, sanitising
the top layers of skin off our hands and poking people with a two-metre stick
to make sure they didn’t breach our personal defences (or was that last bit
just me, lol?), and now suddenly it’s all over? Throw away your masks and
your hand sanitisers and safety signs, and roll around in a big ball of
humanity licking people all of a sudden?
Okay, fair enough, the global
coronavirus pandemic may be approaching end-game, but there are certain things
about the various lockdowns- here in Ireland, we had three main ones- that will
always make me feel nostalgic when I think about them.
Note, by the way, that I’m
not saying I’ll miss the pandemic that killed so many innocent people, every
single one of them someone’s son, daughter, friend, sibling, parent or neighbour.
It’s the lockdowns I’ll miss, and here are the main things I’ll miss
about them. You might experience a twinge of the old nostalgia for some of them
yourselves!
1.
That lovely initial feeling we had that
we were ‘all in this together.’ Sadly, it only really lasted until we realised
that, as usual, it was one law for the little people- ie, us- and another for
our esteemed politicians. We had this in common with our English neighbours.
Boris and his cheese and wine parties, snicker…!
2.
No school for several months. I’m not
going to lie. It takes a lot of work and persuasion to get a boy who’s nearly a
man, and a man who hates school to boot, out the door every morning with all the
stuff he needs. To be brutally honest, both he and I were glad of the break.
3.
Being able to use the global pandemic as
an iron-clad excuse not to meet up with certain people or to attend certain
appointments in person. Zoom, Zoom, Zoom all the way. To my shame, I’ve even
used it as an excuse to my kids. Fancy going somewhere different this weekend
for a change, Mum? Sorry, guys, the whole of Ireland’s closed for the moment…
4. Gathering around the news religiously every night at six o’clock to hear the latest update on the pandemic, and taking every word our Chief Medical Officer Tony O’Holohan said as gospel. Cheering when the numbers of people with COVID went down a bit, then booing when they’d go back up. It became an unbreakable ritual in the COVID times, and the faces of the chaps- and chapesses- in NPHET, our National Public Health Emergency Team, became as familiar to us as our own. We even became quite fond of some of them.
5. Every night was as quiet here as Christmas Eve. I live in the kind of area where young people and students party till late every night and leave pools of vomit and takeaway litter for local residents to pick their way through in the daytime. As all the pubs and nightclubs were closed for months and months, we local yokels got our streets back temporarily. Cue hillbilly laugh, lol. Hyeuk, hyeuk, hyeuk…!
6. Standing in shops for hours on end, talking about the news and the restrictions with the local shopkeepers and other customers and speculating if and when things would change. God, I miss those interminable, meandering chats! Re-hashing the same information over and over again and counting down the weeks to the lifting of various restrictions. Wondering where the anti-vaxxers got their crackpot information from. Oh, happy days! I especially loved it when people would get angry and start lambasting the government for doing things wrong or not doing enough. The excitement was indescribable.
7.
The phenomenon known to us now as ‘outdoor
dining.’ Sitting outside a restaurant in the freezing cold or even rain, in an
enclosed, smoky space with loads of people crowded on top of each other,
because the government deemed this safer somehow than sitting inside a ventilated room at spaced-out
tables. The amount of bitching we did about the government and their stupid (but necessary) restrictions was unreal.
8.
Getting attached to individual newsreaders
and news reporters because they were the only people we saw every day without fail and
who brought us our news fixes, and commenting on their outfits and hair and
whether they looked pissed-off or whatever. We’d notice if a particular
newsreader or reporter was missing and we’d say, oh, Richard must be having a
day off, or where’s Zara tonight? A few of the smarter ones have already published
books about those strange times. Good on ‘em, I say.
9. Booking myself onto a million free or cheap online courses which I still haven’t managed to complete yet, two years later. I did this back in the first lockdown when everyone else was baking banana bread and doing workouts with yer man Joe Wickes on YouTube. Good thing they were either free, or so cheap as to be nearly free. Either way, I’ll be stuck doing them till I die. I wonder if I can bequeath them to my children, or are they non-transferable?
10.
Glaring at anyone who dared to cough or
sneeze in your vicinity, then being bitten on the ass by karma and coming down
with a terrible coughing fit yourself the minute you walked in to a shop.
11.
Laughing at Donald Trump for thinking
that ingesting bleach might cure you of COVID.
12.
Laughing at Boris Johnson for, well, for
just being Boris Johnson.
13.
Laughing at Prince Andrew for- probably- thinking
that the pandemic would make everyone forget his disastrous Newsnight
interview.
14.
Uniting in condemnation of the death of George
Floyd at the hands of American police. Black Lives Matter!!!
15. Seeing the familiar yellow and black COVID safety signage everywhere you went. You didn’t have to really think for yourself when you were out and about, because the signs and arrows and stickers told you where you could stand and where you could queue up for things. I don’t know how the hell we’re supposed to shop now without the aid of those clear and direct instructions. It’ll be feckin’ chaos, I’m telling you.
16.
Our main broadcaster, RTE One, aired a
two-minute programme called IRELAND REMEMBERS every day before the six o’clock
news, at the height of the pandemic. It showed photos of lovely smiling, mostly
old people who’d died of COVID-19. I think they had to take it off the air
because it was too depressing for people sitting down to their dinner to watch,
but there was a part of the sombre theme music that went ridiculously shrill at
one point, and it always made us laugh despite the seriousness of the subject
matter.
17.
Thinking I was great for stockpiling
masks and hand sanitisers on the cheap when people were buying less and less of
them towards the end of the pandemic. Do you know of anyone I could sell these
to, now that the pandemic is practically over?
18.
Waiting in line at the AVIVA stadium with
hundreds of others to be vaccinated. Talking about my vaccination afterwards to anyone
who would listen, and comparing vaccination experiences with fellow vaccinated
persons. We all got great mileage out of our vaccinations.
19.
Watching the pub-and-restaurant owners
giving out stink in the media about how they thought the government was deliberately
targeting the hospitality industry whenever they brought in new closures and
restrictions, even though this was probably not the case, in fairness.
20.
Speculating about how the office people
who were all nice and cosy ‘working from home’ would never want to go back to
the office after the lockdown ended.
21. ONLINE SHOPPING!!! The unrivalled joy of ‘adding to cart’ and ‘proceeding to checkout.’ The excitement and then impatience as the days pass and you wait for your shit to come. Fighting on the phone with the delivery man when he can’t find your house, and then again when he leaves your package with a neighbour but doesn’t bloody well tell you which one. Enjoying your package for a few minutes, then ‘add to cart’ and ‘proceed to checkout’ again…
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, 'THIRTEEN
STOPS,' is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is
out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thirteen-Stops-Later-Book-ebook/dp/B091J75WNB/
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