September 2020

Yes, I know it’s still August. But this piece needs writing because September is looming large. It is not just the start of the school term – an event already suffused with major ‘hal-eh-fucking-lujah’ for parents on any given year – but in 2020, September recommences planet earth’s existence; it is the gateway to the future; life as we know it will end - and then start again in September. We will turn this wretched year on and off again and hope that it blinks into life…

I have a crap memory and a busy brain of to-do lists. I can barely tell you what I did yesterday without some considerable contemplation and a scroll through my camera gallery. But one date is crystal: Monday the 23nd March, when the fishmonger who plays our Prime Minister spoke down the lens like an Am Dram actor more used to begging councillors to keep his theatre open, intoned that we “must stay home.”

I was sat in the lounge with the kids, wondering what the hell this all meant as they shot me through with questions, “Can we go swimming?” “Can we go to the park?” “Can we see nanna?” and knowing that I must answer nonchalantly, playing down the sense of impending doom and imminent death while admitting that no, we could not do any of those things…. “But wow! Think of the fun we’ll have!!!!!!”

And now it’s almost September…and how do we feel?

For me, it’s a draining combination of relief, excitement and a type of unfamiliar rage that wakes me at 3am as I drown in an impotence against The State that I thought only happened to home-birthers in Hungary; American black men at the hand of racist cops and Tom Cruise in dystopian landscapes.

Over the last five months the space between public and private; the governing and the individual; those who make the rules and those who obey (or resist) has never been smaller. The collision of these entities has been so loud that all I can hear at 3am is the pounding of authoritarian fists on my door demanding that I wash my hands; keep 2m apart; see nobody; see only one friend; see more friends, but only see them outdoors; have a barbecue, but don’t pass the ketchup; please wear a mask; lose weight because covid kills fat people, but look! There’s Rishi Sunak with a burger in each hand telling you to go out and eat 2000 calorie meals at half the price; don’t go to the gym; don’t swim; ok swim but in that lane only; get fit to save the NHS but please go to the pub and get shit-faced so that publicans can claim back half your booze by pretending it’s food; wear a mask; walk that way in the shop but don’t get in that lift; download our app, nah, we download it for you; eat out, eat out, eat out but order your food on an app as waiters can’t come near you, stupid; WEAR a mask or you’ll be fined. WEAR a frickin mask or that man in the queue behind might punch you and the tea-lady on Virgin trains will call the police and you’ll be fined. HA! NOW you’ll step into line….

And I look for a life-raft of facts to cling onto while I pull off the mask and breathe. A sea of statistics swirling amongst the flotsam and jetsam of subjectivity and inaccuracy; numbers massaged with political oil scented with Clarry SAGE – ahh, that’s cases, not deaths; ahh, that’s death certificates with covid as present, not the cause; ahh, that’s Italy where multi-generational families live together (and they kiss each other A LOT) and ahh, that’s China where they locked down immediately (and probably created it in a lab to make money from a vaccine anyway right?); and ahh, Russia already HAVE a vaccine so we’re all doomed because Putin will blackmail Mr Johnson the journalist and he’ll cave because ‘Kings of The World!” save people and then he’ll be forgiven all this because at least we will be alive…

But there is the question that won’t go away, the question that lives in the parallel universe where kids got educated and supermarket delivery slots didn’t hold cache: wouldn’t we have been alive anyway? Without crashing the economy and saddening a generation, without landfills of masks and the criminal ceasing of cancer treatments, without the heart attacks untreated at home and the strokes missed? Wouldn’t the vast majority of people have been ok anyway?? Just asking for a friend. Don’t arrest me.

The average age of those who had covid on their death certificate is 80 with 90% having at least one medical condition already. Covid killed in care-homes and on hospital wards where guests are as vulnerable as it is possible to be. And staff exposed to huge amounts of viral particles were insufficiently protected by PPE.

But aha! You idiot - we can thank lockdown for the fact that we aren’t dead. Really? …God damn Sweden with its steely-spined leaders and it’s official epidemiologist who shrugs that they didn’t need to lockdown because they had excellent a-political scientists who could talk of ‘herd immunity’ without the nation recoiling in horror that the Politicians wanted half of them dead. The ‘Nasty Party’ tried that here and spent five months back-peddling and reinventing the kid’s entertainer in No. 10 as an avuncular advocate of tough love , not the sort of clown who suddenly whips a machete from his square-wheeled car to massacre his herd.

The Swedish super-brains shrug that masks encourage people to stand should-to-shoulder sorting through the apples in the supermarket and thus cause more harm than good. Without enforcing masks, social distancing and isolating the sick remain most effective in stopping Swedes from breathing each other’s air. But don’t think about that now – when you can buy masks in such pretty colours!

I’ve seen families more divided by Covid than Brexit. Perception of risk is entirely individual. Even members of the same family can disagree on what qualifies as ‘risky’ behaviour: be that sky-diving, drug-taking or how best to give birth. CoronaV has distilled risk in a petrie dish of fear. And when the subtext of all conversations is “but you want mum and dad to die..?” it’s impossible to find any common ground based on fact, rather than emotion. One woman I know arranged to visit her parents on their wedding anniversary for a socially distanced, outdoor visit. Her brother disagreed on the safety of this. Then the rules were changed, making this event ‘legal.’ “Ahh, but you arranged to do this before the rules changed, so sorry no,” said the brother – ordinarily, a sane human being.

And suddenly it’s September…Two people died of Covid 19 yesterday. (Don’t ask how many died from cancer, cars or suicide – that’s not relevant – they are nowhere near as inspiring for Headline writers and while we marinade in the ‘pandemic’ we won’t ask tough questions of the government). And shaky mothers still call radio shows to say that they won’t send their children back to school until there is a vaccine. Obese grandads sit in pub gardens smoking a cigarette and shaking their heads about their life not being safe until there is a vaccine. Healthy 45 year-olds dart nervously through shops with anxious children in each hand, snapping at them for touching things and begging them to understand that there isn’t a vaccine.

The SAGE guys who got in the PM’s ear in March told him, “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently threatened…The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”

Well done. It worked. When you vote a columnist into no. 10, you get a government who prizes the Feels over the Facts.

And although September still feels uncertain and a precipice upon which we will teeter, one fact is now clear: your child is more likely to be killed by lightning than by Covid-19. And yet some batshit Head teachers are insisting that children wear masks in the classroom like girls in Afghanistan forced to cover up in the name of religion. In leadership vacuums, bullies with emotional issues will always weaponise illogical theories to control women and children.

And as Mr Johnson sleeps in his yurt (escaping from a new mum and baby who can be annoyingly disruptive in the night?) we STILL don’t know what the hell we the country is doing:  saving the NHS? Limiting infections? Or limiting deaths?

Tell us that and everything else will fit into place. We must still protect and respect the elderly and unwell – while healthy 0 to 100 year olds were locked up at home this message has been entirely blurred.

And so…as we awake from this nightmare, fuzzy-headed and scared, livers pickled from daytime drinking, finances, jobs and mortgage payments uncertain, it is September and so the usual battle is to buy school shoes that fit and rucksacks that will be spotted across a busy playground. Name tags will be sewn into new uniforms. Water bottles will be marked with Sharpies and hair will (finally!) be cut.

Mums like me who have had five whole months of non-stop parenting are coiled springs desperate to work, create, or even simply clean without a child under our feet.

But there’s a knot in my stomach that tightens when I think of the illogicality and unpredictability of the loons in charge. Anything can happen. And we’ll be powerless to respond.