However fake, forced or false, I’ll always try to be positive. Or at least see a funnier side; could I have envisaged a Lockdown2 birthday when the all too inevitable myth of a COVID-19 pandemic became real to the U.K. back in the onset of our initial lockdown in March 2020?
The answer is of course “no” to those of us lapping up our delusional notion (well me at least) that this was likely to be some over exaggerated media frenzy – which my cynicism vindicated – that’d soon become a tiring subject to talk about. As exhausting as it may indeed now be, let’s not pretend that there is anything at all hyperbolic or fantastical to acknowledge that we have witnessed a feat that has succeeded in devastated numerous lives; if not life’s. Apportioning blame for something almost akin to a natural disaster in terms of being unprecedented, seems redundant in terms of acting more as a self-affirming mechanism. Launching hatred into others must only detract from finding the healthiest outcome for everybody. Focusing on the losers has to be the most advanced way forward.
The past molds our present and the future is all that we can have to work on… I may already be on to what is something of a colloquial trope, but what we all must do has to be to work through this protecting the most vulnerable.
It was almost depressing, that as I watched some documentary (that I think was on Channel 5, but nothing definitive on that, let alone when it was on) touching on London’s infamous Plague of 1665. These incredibly different situations seemed to share far more in common in terms of isolation policies used to limit infection, than you may at first think, as the acclaimed novelist Daniel Defoe and diarist Samuel Pepys document. Both of these men represent something of an anomaly for men of their social position, as they actually stayed put observing the city centre throughout. The vast majority of people with the means made sure to evacuate themselves to more sedentary rural retreats. When you think of the general affluence of the people able to remotely and the life station of their servants i.e. supermarket workers, deliveroo couriers, etc. etc. questions concerning how much has actually changed concerning social inequalities has must arise to anybody with a conscience. People are people and anybody deluded enough to believe that people are ever capable of fundamentally changing or that they themselves are any better or worse than anybody else must just have some need to do a bit of maturing.
Although slightly different from anything that I may have imagined my 32nd – it being an insignificant and non-descript age was an added bonus – birthday, it definitely did feel like a positive milestone to cross during the pandemic. Given the unknowns in terminating the threat of COVID-19 from being substantial, it is more than fair to say reflect upon there having been nothing at all exclusive in my experiencing a lockdown birthday; the number of big days that I now feel myself to have witnessed only exacerbates this. The old notion of it not being how long your life is, but what you do with it feels less than helpful amidst our current environment. Something personally significant about me progressing is something that I can only regard as confirmation that we are progressing through this global crisis.
Doing my best not to tempt fate, I’ll just end on the fact that we’re hopefully getting to the other side of this blight on humanity. The tests on the Oxford Vaccine – amongst others – give an optimistic feel that we getting a grip on how to get a handle on CORONA. As far from over as it may be, it at least feels as though we’re more set on the road to make this ordeal to be one for the grandkids as much as anything else. A most staggering given inescapable outcome of this pandemic is that the rich will still be rich and the poor will still be poor whatever happens and this must be at the forefront of what any civilization must work to change.