Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

I do feel like the early overconfident public health messaging of "don't want COVID? just wash your hands!", prior to all of the experts discovering it was airborne, lead to the weirdest deep-cleaning obsession in history, which really became COVID theatre when it was realized fomite spread contributes little to nothing to the overall spread and that most of the 'deep-cleaning' methods employed were probably no better than like...using those alcohol wipes.

when my mom got it last month, she was still wiping down everything in hyper-sanitize mode like it was March 2020, and I finally said "mom, if I get it, it's from breathing air you sneezed in, not you touching a counter".

no kidding, the whole thing was so surreal. I'd really thought this was just another bird/swine flu thing (not that those weren't serious!) and the fact that only conservatives seemed to be freaking out was a sign that it was probably no big deal. and then entire countries started to shut down. I remember during my team meeting at work on Monday being like "uhhh folks what are we doing about this?" and my manager saying "I have no idea yet". then one or two days later I told her "hey I think I'm going to work from home tomorrow if that's okay, things are getting too weird", and that night as I was putting my kids to sleep I find out that Tom Hanks has it, and then the NBA shut down an hour later, and then an hour after that we all get an email and a text saying not to come into work tomorrow. one of the weirdest days of my life.
― frogbs, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 4:09 PM (six days ago)

I was at rehearsal for a Fringe Festival play that night. Things were already looking ugly when I left to drive there. We had only just entertained for the first time at rehearsal the "non-zero possibility" that the entire festival would be cancelled, but nobody put it at more than like a 25% chance. right as we were being dismissed, the news that Trump had banned travel from Asia hit, and that Tom and Rita Hanks had gotten it.

I got to my car, and saw the news about the Jazz game (which had been cancelled an hour prior, but I hadn't seen it). I spent about 30-40 minutes in my car reading news and not leaving to go home and during that time the NBA suspended its season. by the time I got to my house I knew I was going to be seeing a lot of it and nothing else for a while.

To this day using wipes -- I SEE this every day -- is way easier for many people than masking. It requires no sacrifice.

And I gotta say if people washed their hands more, this is no bad thing.

well no argument there.

I remember the horrifying speed with which things changed. On 29 Feb I went to a football match along with thousands of people and the world was basically normal. Three or four days later I was at a committee meeting for my cycling club and we were making plans for the various spring and summer events and COVID wasn't even mentioned, didn't even enter our thoughts. Two or three days after that I remember having conversations about what was happening in Italy and thinking 'it's coming here next' but still feeling like we had a month or two to get ready. Then everything just collapsed. No toilet roll, then no pasta/rice/cans of soup, then no fresh food at all at the supermarket. More and more colleagues and students who I was supposed to be teaching off sick or staying at home in fear. My daughter's school having to send whole year groups home because of a severe lack of staff. The news from Italy getting grimmer and grimmer. Boris Johnson announcing that many will die before their time and then just fucking off and vanishing for several days leaving everyone to panic in a vacuum. Doom scrolling Twitter about just how bad it could get and either not being able to get to sleep or waking up at 4am full of fear. Monday 16 March about a third of my students were missing and all anyone wanted to talk about was the pandemic situation. The next day two thirds were missing. Wednesday 18 March I had just 1 student left. Everyone knew we were going to be closed down and couldn't understand why we were being forced to carry on going to work. I went to Sainsbury's in the evening and there was literally *no food* left at all. When the lockdown was eventually called, at least a week, probably two weeks later than it should have been, I just felt massive relief.

"The news from Italy getting grimmer and grimmer"

that was horrifying at the time. I had two members of my family with cancer and my partner with MS and dementia. I felt like there would be nobody left in my life after it hit the UK.

When dad had his gallbladder out and I was staying with the folks to help with recovery, I was so worried about getting it and giving it to Dad that I wore my "mask" (a balaclava that me sweat) indoors for 14 hours a day.

Mostly because I made a lot of trips to the store then out of necessity

echo all of that NBS, thats very close to what i remember , and how i remember it hitting me

Sometime in mid-to-late February 2020 I read a story about it spreading in China and they couldn't stop it. I somehow just knew if it got to the US we were so open and dysfunctional we wouldn't be able to either. That weekend I went to the store and bought $300 of shelf stable food: pasta, rice, beans, cans of tomato, etc. I should have bought toilet paper instead. Oh well.

The night the NBA stopped playing games I called my boss and told him I was working from home indefinitely. I had worked with them for 19 years and they needed me so I was lucky I could do this. I went into work very early the next day, grabbed a small box of things I would need and split. The next week everything shut down including my company.

When my kids had to start doing remote learning from home it was tough, but they finished at noon and then... what? And like an angel sent from above it became apparent that a loose group of ping pong players in the neighbourhood were playing every day, in the Olympic Park, a 10 minute walk from my house. And my two boys became obsessed with ping pong. A Whatsapp group was started. We all got to know each other. So every day the boys would finish their schoolwork, we'd give them sandwiches in a bag and they'd race to the park with their paddles and a big bottle of water. The weather was sensational. Eventually some of the guys there (it was 90% guys)started bringing a chess board, because there were only two tables and maybe a dozen people who wanted to play. So those who weren't on the tables played chess. This literally happened every week day. For months. So when people talk about the mental health problems that lockdown caused kids, we really dodged a bullet. It was one of the greatest little spontaneous displays of community togetherness I've ever witnessed.

Tracer that's great (as tbh your posts on ILX of experiencing COVID at the time haunt me to this day).

I took this photo Jan 26 2020 at Bank tube station, in pouring rain:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49461142038_3c78ce7e14_c.jpg

After that there were weeks of... birthdays, trips to L'pool and Amsterdam, galleries and days out, gigs, bowling... no masking anywhere, just half-hearted attempts at social distancing, hand-washing stations in the office. Then, Mar 12 - "WFH for two weeks, it's experimental". I've been back to the office maybe 15 times in four years.

I recall the neighbours hired someone to spray 2m chevrons on our lane in late April, and we got this instead :)

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49834655143_c301788756_c.jpg

That bank station picture is incredible, Michael. Real Vertigo Comics panel energy.

we pulled our kid out of school a week before LAUSD officially closed its doors. we pretended he was sick. but really, it was a bad idea to slow-walk the closures so we kept him home, and explained to him why. one other family we talked to did the same. LAUSD actually dealt with the pandemic *exceptionally* well after they shut down. the superintendent at the time was someone who folks regarded with a bit of side-eye in the wake of the teacher's strike a year or so previous, but he did a very very good job.

i remember going to half a dozen grocery stores the day the big panic-buying started and i wound up getting the scraps of what remained. so many pierogis. and andouille sausages. in the end, we went to Ikea to go grocery shopping and they were stocked up, so we got a ton of swedish meatballs and gravlox.

my mom was visiting at this time, she flew in on March 7 for a visit. I suggested she might want to postpone and she thought it would be ok. flying maskless on a crowded plane to L.A. on that date was, in retrospect, taking a gamble. but she was fine. of course, 17 days later, when i dropped her off at LAX (a much bigger gamble but she had masks by then), there were fewer people traveling. anyone familiar with LAX knows this photo is not usual --

https://i.imgur.com/3JYgGuf.png

Los Angeles was dead for quite awhile. I could stand in the middle of the street with the kid and play catch for an hour and see two cars. and at the time, it felt risky because we weren't wearing the masks outside! we kinda knew we'd be okay, but we didn't *know*.

Hollywood was dead on a Friday night, even.

https://i.imgur.com/RRzpbCq.png

https://i.imgur.com/nFFaoTA.png

we remained fully locked down for i'm sure at least a year, and our kid didn't attend school in person until fall of 2021. we remained more locked down than most due to my wife needing to visit her dad, who was isolated and living alone. she visited her mom to, but her mom was in a group home and they could only wheel her to the sliding glass door in the backyard so she could see her from outside. her mom couldn't see and wouldn't recognize her if she could, so it was even more of a one-way thing. like visiting a zoo. it was so hard on her. her parents both died the same week, Thanksgiving week 2021, her dad in failing health after a fall, probably indirectly related to being locked down and less mobile. he fell and was found shortly after by his in-home caregiver (part-time, we couldn't afford more) and just never recovered. what a guy he was -- a gentle soul. and her mom...a journalist turned teacher, gone too soon, so immediately kind to me it was like finding a second mom.

my career evaporated during the pandemic, it's still tough times. i don't feel old but according to others i got old and honestly it's probably for the best. i still don't really know what i'll do next for longer-term prospects vs what i've pieced together. but i can't complain too much. i guess i had a decent run.

our friendships changed -- we stopped hanging out with some people, not as a political statement but due to our own general caution, and many just kept on being social with their "pod" being very large. many of them caught covid multiple times.

we survived psychologically, at least in terms of the pandemic stuff. my kid thrived somehow and remained his relentlessly cheery self.

i think in the end, we were happy to be where we were in L.A. since everyone was on board with being careful and respecting others, and politically it was the best place to be i suppose. for me the pandemic took a turn earlier when Trump lost in 2020, walking thru the hood w/everyone celebrating and listening to "FDT" by YG at a corner gas station, most people wearing masks, me turning to someone standing next to me and saying "This is fucking incredible!" and she replied, "SOOO incredible!" and i realized it was A1ia $hawkat. haha if we only knew we couldn't kill what was already dead! FDT and F covid too.

January: I quit a horrible job that I hated and that was hurting my well-being. Good timing, because it was in a school and things were about to go completely impossible for schools and my work environment was already toxic as hell. Later in January we made a point of going to Chinese restaurants which were being hit by anti-Asian xenophobia/racism and fears of disease from the stories coming from China, a brief period perhaps when dining out but there were no lines at Nan Xiang.

February: While aimlessly wandering around a picturesque historic park one day, I felt the return of something that had been out of reach for so long I didn't even recognize it--which after some introspection I decided was probably happiness. I wasn't kidding about the job, it was killing me.

March: I woke up in Brooklyn and looked at the way the morning light brightened my bedroom walls and decided that if this was the end of normal life, I was going to act decisively. I packed a lot of bags and called my partner to come get me, and effectively moved to the country. I only had this option because he moved out of NYC a couple of years prior, which is turns out was ALSO great timing.

Spent the next 3 years living my cottage-core gardening dreams.

this thread is hard to read but someday i hope to write some sort of more measured reminiscence of how things were and what happened.

the pandemic was like a bomb that went off in my life. i still don't understand the extent of the trauma but everything is different now. some things are better, for sure, and then there are other nagging things (like a loss of trust in "people" in general, knowing that 100M+ people in the U.S. alone are horrible people who do not care at all about anything except themselves, heavily confirmed by the 2016 election and then extra heavy no doubt confirmed by the pandemic) that i'm not sure what to do with. i expect a lot of other people feel the same, but we can't even get it together to designate a shitty national day off of work for the 1.1M who died in the u.s., because absolutely no one wants to talk about or remember it. (this makes me pessimistic about the next pandemic). so i really doubt there will be some sort of "national conversation" about coming to terms with collective trauma. the collective trauma is already under the rug, down there with vietnam and shit.

i fondly remember getting on a crappy video chat iphone app called marco polo and making/watching/sharing all sorts of really weird video messages with a close group of friends for several months straight. i'd wake up and watch 10 minutes of marco polo every morning before work, just catching up with my friends' routines and dilemmas. it was nice, and i miss it in some ways, as the status quo of the occasional text message / funny meme has replaced the daily chatting and bonding that was there in april/may 2020

I know what you mean - 4 people I knew died from it and it didn't feel like anyone got to really process the losses at all. there were funerals but not like what you had pre-COVID. just people going "whoa, that's crazy" in the groupchats. even now it's like these people are barely even remembered. just people who existed in some sort of "before time"

i've often had the (incredibly depressing) idle thought that i wish there could be a day where everyone who knew someone who died from covid just walked outside and stood on the sidewalk for about 10 minutes. just to look up and down the street and see who else is standing there. no words, no signs, no bloodcurdling screams threatening revenge against trump (that rule is for me) - just standing there for a second and seeing who else is there

(i feel like a prequel to 1984 could explain that just before fascism took over, there was a pandemic, a shocking and relentless display of inhumanity from half of humanity, the end of the pandemic, followed by the first implementation of 2-minutes-hate, which initially was two large groups shouting about the other but eventually merged into one)

lol, sorry! just read what i typed over the last few minutes, and yeah, i shouldn't be on this thread. the cool part about believing hundreds of millions of people are straight up evil is that i really do believe that the other hundreds of millions of people fucking kick ass and do care about other people.

"The news from Italy getting grimmer and grimmer"

I'm certain I've said this already but a Guardian article headlined something like "Letter from Italy" had a massive influence on me - I recall stuff about care homes being abandoned (with the residents still in there), relationships failing under the trauma of stuff, queues outside of shops (and friends making sure they were in the same queues, so at least they saw each other).

I keep getting bogged down, trying to post here. Like, my brain wants to do this precise timeline and no, that's awful. So:
I started 2020 with one cat and now I have 7. I went from flying 50k+ miles per year to zero. I went from working 80+ hours/week to retired to consulting on 2 24/7 projects to working an incredible job I fully enjoy. I suffered the worst depression/anxiety/insomnia I've ever dealt with, got help, got lucky with meds, got lucky with therapy. Lost 4 people I was close to in the course of 2 weeks mid-2020. My grandson was born healthy and hale in July 2020 and I was able to meet him in person right before his 1st birthday. Moved house twice. Got over my intense needle phobia. Lots of bad stuff relatively balanced by good stuff.

I remember telling my son, in maybe late March 2020: “Don’t worry. This will be over by May.” He’s never let me hear the end of that.

I went to a local shop that first weekend and it was decimated, ransacked even. That afternoon, I drove to a farm shop (not quite as posho as it sounds, but not far off) and there was this apocalyptic atmosphere: huge queues, the stink of slurry in the air, everyone wild-eyed and frantic. At one point, a white van pulled up, driving aggressively close to the queue; three huge blokes got out and pushed their way to the front. I remember thinking 'fuuuck, this could escalate quickly'.

― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Tuesday, March 12, 2024 1:57 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Whoa.

xp - Well, to be fair, there was A LOT of messaging that we just needed to "flatten the curve" for a few weeks and it'd all blow over!

Also none of us alive right now had a very valid frame of reference for a global pandemic!

I think I’ve erased a lot of the worst of the pandemic in my mind, or muted it. A response to trauma maybe. But there was a big, rough stretch of 2020 (pre-election) of just gaping, desperate fear and sadness and wondering if life would ever return to normal. I worked from home long before COVID (and do now) and when work would end for the day I would push the laptop way and reach for my phone and doomscroll, in a daze, until suddenly it was time to get a shower and go to bed. I just couldn’t believe that we were in the worst situation and led by the absolute worst person possible in that moments. It was crushing:

(I do recall, vaguely, some very surreal supermarket low-stock situations, and the randomness of what I could get. How awful I’d feel wearing a mask for what seemed like forever, until I started to get used to it. A stepsister buying everyone masks; getting into the mask-making business and selling them to family for cheap.)

... and then finding out that only N95s really worked worth a damn :(

I remember a friend of mine went with the "face shield" option, he still has long COVID

I messaged a hoos one day in desperation: "WHAT CAN I DO? What are we doing? Where is the organizing in this moment?" and he was like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and then a mutual aid group in a nearby town asked for more online administrative support, and I volunteered. And I'm still doing it! Actually it got me a part-time job for about a year and has completely changed my life. I finally understand what I want to do (build self-reliant community networks) and found so many people to learn from.

It was a weird summer though, cognitively. There were deffo times I sat down at the computer and read something 5 times and felt a wave of panic that it didn't make sense. That may also have been menopause though, xp to the "There Will Not Be Blood" thread. Hard to tell in 2020.

we had one friend die during the pandemic, a bit over a year after it started. don't know how he got covid, but he was feeling under the weather and apparently said he'd go to the hospital the next day, went to bed, and died in his room overnight.

a friend's aunt died in the worst way possible.. alone in a hospital, facing the floor in a ventilator (to drain the lungs)... a lot of people went like that, we forget what an awful ending it was for so many

I've heard about a possible (U.S.) national covid memorial in the works, not sure where they're at in the planning stages

i think they're in the "planning to plan until it's not a political issue" stage, so given how long it has taken for the GOP to acknowledge climate change, 20-30 more years minimum, and only kicking and screaming for some of them, even then

I dont think I know of anyone who died from covid but one aunt died during lockdowns (she was old and ill anyway) and they had to do a mostly-absentee funeral.

I do know multiple people who have been quite crippled by long covid. One has developed really bad heart problems for example.

One of my wife's law partners who she worked with for 18 years died in the first weeks. His wife never saw him in person alive after he went into the hospital that first week. That certainly framed our early covid experience.

I do not know anyone personally who died, but def friends/relatives of friends. I know one person with long COVID as noted above. My early experiences were nowhere near as harsh as many that are described here, I was relieved to work from home and it was actually feasible. I do remember days before the mid-March shutdown giving a customer a ride from work to a UPS place maybe half a mile away, we disinfected everything but of course did not open the windows of the truck.

The weekend of March 5 we went to the funeral of a local activist found dead in his room after two days; in November 2020 we learned it might've been COVID. He was the only person I know infected between March 2020 and March 2021. My friends and relatives started falling like trees in the post-omicron period in 2022. I got an asymptomatic case in September 2022, so I still don't know what symptoms are like.

Whatever wave it was in early 2022 had a big negative impact locally: bodies were stacking up because so many licensed crematory operators were out sick. It took until September for the backlog to be cleared at the largest crematory in the state, running 24/7.

that was one thing that pissed me off when fighting with the "Plandemic" crowd. people saying things like "if this was really what public officials said, you'd see an overflow of bodies with nowhere to put them" and it was like THAT'S LITERALLY HAPPENING, YOU FUCKING IDIOT, they are using refrigerated trucks as makeshift morgues right now

I have to credit my genius friend from high school and my partner who was following what was happening in Asia for mentally preparing me for the pandemic. Honestly they both got a huge jump on most of the country, if not more.

My partner was frantically looking for N95 masks, which apparently were cleaned out around our area. We were told it was primarily the Asian residents of Flushing, with many of them far more concerned about a potential pandemic since it obviously was already having a huge impact in Asia. I reached out to my family in the Midwest as they were far from the city, and their local Home Depot had plenty of N95 masks so we got some that way (as well as some for my family, which they were soon glad to have). I took it as a "just in case," and moved on with my life, but over the course of a 6 or 7 weeks, the country was getting more worried. Then the day before lockdown happened, my friend was texting me, and I STILL have those texts:

You really shouldn’t be going into work. How is it possible that what is happening in Italy won’t happen here? In 2 weeks most businesses will be shut down and travel around the country restricted. And lots of ppl will die.

As I read these, I looked out my window and it was just so fucking surreal - like life still LOOKED normal and I actually just got back from the bank to have something notarized. (In an awkward moment, I just sat there nodding to the nice guy who helped me, and I think he was expecting a handshake because of my body language and verbal thank you, but I was too paranoid to touch anyone at that moment.)

He sent these as he was packing his family into his minivan to drive off to his wife's family's rural home in Virginia or West Virginia, where they'd have plenty of space and isolation, and inside the minivan was three months worth of emergency packs that he bought a month earlier when they were still readily available through Amazon.

An hour later, we found out someone who called in sick was now coming down with flu-like symptoms, so we all were sent home. We never came back to the office.

That weekend, my partner then gave me an academic periodical (forgot which) that was published like a month ago - it was about COVID and every epidemiologist was matter-of-factly agreeing that it was only a matter of time before COVID reached the U.S. It wasn't a guess, it was a sure bet given how the disease was spreading, something that was par for the course for viruses like it even if the actual effect on anyone infected by it was new territory. Anyway, in retrospect, it just seemed like a lot could and should have been done to prepare people, but most people were in denial and of course we had an ignorant and morally bankrupt asshat running the country.

Quick correction, those texts were issued on March 12, so the co-worker getting sick happened a few days later

I was in a pretty bad place emotionally/mentally in the late twenty-teens, so when covid came along I thought "nice, I don't have the guts to kill myself, so maybe this'll do the job for me." I would say as much and pass it off as a joke -- "if god wants me, he/she/it can have me, lol" -- but I wasn't really joking. Still, I masked up and behaved myself because I didn't want to risk anyone else's life, just my own. I'd worked from home since late 2001 and had always done the shopping, so no changes there.

Some friends who had put plans in motion in December 2019 to open a restaurant/bar kept plowing ahead even with covid. They had been at the parties where I'd tended bar over the previous three years, thought I knew my stuff, and offered me the job to tend bar, build its cocktail program, order booze, be de facto bar manager, etc. I jumped at the chance -- my freelance dayjob wasn't keeping me busy enough and I was spending weeks at a time in my own head, stewing over my grievances at my family and at the world. Here was a chance to get out of the house, make drinks and hone a new craft, and maybe catch the rona and die, or at least see if the world cared if I got sick. Yes yes, hugely self-pitying.

Meanwhile, my mother, who had always been fiercely independent and proud about being able to take care of herself, had finally moved to an assisted living facility in early 2019 after an accumulation of health problems. She was furious at her body's breakdown -- it was no consolation to her that it happens to everyone. Covid was the last straw. She still had her car and could come and go as she pleased, and she found a lot of errands to run and never seemed to be able to remember to take a mask with her. She finally managed to chase down and catch covid in August 2020, passing away after six days. She went to the local ER on day 2 of symptoms and I stayed with her while she saw the doctor. Sometime during the week I caught it, probably from my mother during that ER visit. Roughly 9-day case, very mild, symptoms arriving the day of her funeral.

When it didn't kill me, I quit joking about it. I quit masking fall 2020. I'm mostly, not 100%, in a better headspace now. Mom was the linchpin of the family, and I haven't seen much of my brother or sister in the last couple of years since we sold Mom's house. They just fought all the time with me in the middle, so that's fine.

That’s heavy stuff, WmC. Glad you are doing somewhat better now.

My mom had gone to an assisted living facility in December '19, but it quickly became obvious to everyone that she needed to be in the memory care wing. They moved her to MC the weekend in March that everything shut down, and we could only talk to her through her window for a few months. She was somewhat cognizant of the fact that there was a virus going around and that that was the reason we couldn't come inside. After a few months we were allowed to sit 6' apart from her at a table at an outside patio, then when the weather turned in Fall '20 they set up a vacant room inside of MC as a visitation room, still maintaining 6' distance. We didn't get back into her room until April '21. I had some issues with the facility management but they did a fantastic job keeping everyone safe through COVID; no COVID fatalities in either AL or MC.

My son came home for Spring break around March 5th; was supposed to go back on the 14th but by that time it was apparent things were not going to reopen. We drove from Cleveland to St. Louis to move him out of his dorm room and drove back the next day. I remember stopping at a Chipotle near Columbus, the three of us walking into the restaurant, and getting yelled at by the doorkeeper for standing too close to each other. . .

The night of the 15th I turned on a Liga MX match, knowing it was the last live sports I would see on TV for awhile. IIRC they had closed the game to fans and it was very weird to see a stadium (especially the Azteca) empty of fans while a match was going on. Turns out that would be a common sight soon.

Both gyms I belonged to closed and I remember a lot of long walks in the Metroparks that spring/summer trying to stay in shape -- didn't work, I had gained about 15 pounds by fall '20.

I was very fortunate not to lose any close relatives or friends. What I remember most during the first months was. . .I wouldn't say confusion, but just a feeling of not knowing how things were going to unfold. My work was pharma/life sciences-adjacent, and I knew that every day, we would get a bit more information about what was happening, and that there were lots of smart people working on understanding the problem and finding ways to slow the transmission and mitigate the damage.

a year before covid, my partner had an accident that affected their mobility and left them housebound for several months for physical reasons. While they stayed at home recovering, I worked 5 days a week, out the house from 7am til 7pm. Their mental health suffered as a result of the isolation - we had visitors but not many, and he didn't work or get to do the things that brought him joy, like gigs and clubs. So by the time lockdown arrived, they had been "socially distanced" for a year already, or near enough.

In Feb 2020 we travelled from Glasgow to Manchester with two pals for a Carly Rae Jepsen concert and a night on Canal St. It was a disaster - he did well with the travel and the concert, but the night of clubbing was disastrous and he committed an act of serious self-harm that let us know he just wasn't ready for this kind of activity.

We got back to Glasgow and I was ill. At first I thought it was a hangover, then it got insanely difficult. Fever and sweats, and a constant cough I couldn't get rid of. I took a week off work. People were joking that I had covid because in February it was still a mysterious disease on the other side of the world, but with hindsight I think I might have had it then. I went back to work but was already using a bottle of hand sanitiser a week because I had to touch stock, and also customers due to the nature of what my shop sold. I remember joking with a customer that I hadn't heard of covid because I had been on a boat trip to Italy and missed the news, and us all laughing because we had no idea how serious or real it was going to be, which feels grotesque now.

March arrived and it became increasingly real. I went to a Tove Lo concert on the Monday, and I remember a lad chatting/flirting with me at the sinks as we washed our hands for twenty seconds while singing a So Solid Crew verse (?!?). Work was utterly pointless - our shop took £2000 a day normally and that week we couldn't even put £100 in the till in a day. On the Wednesday we got told by Head Office to prepare a sale and be ready to launch it on the Thursday. I remember moaning to a colleague how irresponsible it was to attempt to drive footfall to the high street at a time that we were being discouraged from going out. It was moot: by Thursday the shop was closed for lockdown, a day earlier than the rest of the country. I went in to do things like turn off the fridge and throw out any food, and put dust covers down, and the person I went in with and I joked about how good a three week holiday would be. It turned into five months.

Five months at home with my partner and their mental health struggles. Did lockdown exacerbate them? Perhaps. But I doubt they would have been going out otherwise. They don't go out now without me, a pal or their mother. I was there to talk to them, comfort them, entertain them, watch nonsense on Netflix and Youtube with them. When they picked up the scissors or the knives I was there to take them back out their hands. It wasn't easy, but it was better than what might have happened when I wasn't there. They started having seizures during this time. The first time was terrifying. I called NHS 24 but of course the lines were so busy and the resources so limited that I was basically told, if he doesn't die then good luck to you. Those seizures have become a part of life for us now - at least one a day - but it was months before we could get the necessary MRI scans and blood tests to confirm they weren't part of something scarier like a brain tumour.

I also had a very creative five months. I had bought a DJ controller but was scared to set it up and practice because I had a fear I would find it so difficult and hard to use that it would turn out to be a waste of money. I got better with it, and now a few years later I'm at a point where I'm playing out in public. I also recorded my own music and put it online and made a not-insignificant (to me, at least) amount of money from it. I haven't made any new original music in a while, and in the four years since lockdown ended I've made as many minutes of music as I did during lockdown itself, if not less.

I realised I was going to get heavy during lockdown. I don't enjoy exercise and I never do it, and for all the yoga videos and Joe Wicks content we saw it just wasn't for me. All I did was run up and down stairs at work all day, which was enough to keep my waistline under 36" it seems. I wear elastic waistbands now and I'm probably never going to lose the weight. Pre-lockdown my diet was terrible: nuggets, wedges, dippers and bites. I decided to learn to cook better foods, figuring that if I was going to get fat then I was going to do it in style. I made fancy decadent dinners. 18 months later I got a kidney stone and was told to avoid foods like beetroot, chickpeas, lentils and rhubarb - all the food I had become confident in using and had been making nice meals with.

My first niece was born in the first week of lockdown. We met her for the first time in the garden from 10 ft away, months later. My brother and his family live 15 miles away so we were never going to be close due to simple geography and the fact neither of us drive, but I wonder if lockdown has exacerbated that. My brother and his partner doubt they'll have another child, because they don't think it would be fair that they got to spend so much time with their kid and they wouldn't be able to do it again.

I remember being close to telling people to just fuck off in the supermarket. The first trip to ASDA was gruelling. We had to queue for nearly an hour to get in, but once we got in people seemed to just give up on social distancing. I also remember queueing to get into the corner shop and having to hear some homophobic "banter" from a lad behind me. My tolerance for other people's nonsense dried up very quickly. When I saw people having street parties for Royal Family nonsense while I thought of people dying alone in hospitals I felt - feel - so sick and angry and I find it hard to believe this country was ever able to recover from what felt like such an obvious schism in attitudes.

While on furlough I was on 80% of my wage, and I wasn't exactly earning good money before that. I worried about costs. But it turns out, being at home meant not spending money. Pre-lockdown I would cheer myself daily with a trip to Greggs, once weekly to McDonalds or similar, and I would walk past other shops and drop money if the sales were on. It changed my spending habits substantially.

When the time to go back to work came, I realised I would be responsible for the safety of my team. I would be the person who would have to get into arguments about why we couldn't let ten people into the store, why they had to wear masks, why they would have to be taking hand sanitiser before they came in. I'm not naturally a confrontational or confident person in many ways, but I was going to have to be to ensure my personal safety and that of my staff. So I spent a weekend practicing saying in the mirror "I need you to do this" until it sounded natural, confident, forceful and expected. I didn't have too many difficult encounters but I was prepared in a way I wouldn't have been before, and going forward I now practice and learn scripts for difficult situations I can predict, and feel much more able to say "no" in a way I wouldn't have in 2019.

tl;dr - lockdown was a land of many contrasts

when it was safe to go clubbing again, a group of us bought tickets for a weekend at a place in Glasgow where local heroes Melting Pot and Optimo were playing. The Saturday was the day for Melting Pot who play around the theme of disco, and it was a little disappointing - they usually play quite eclectic and interesting but the vibe was very School Disco and I heard "I'm Every Woman" three times in the space of four hours. But they also played this, which I had previously enjoyed but never really felt was top tier - but on a sunkissed balcony after months of staying in, sounded absolutely glorious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syPi_HXY1e0

I flew back from a holiday in Prague to Bournemouth on 10 February 2020, and there were signs at the airport about the outbreak of novel coronavirus in the Far East. I assumed it would go the way of avian flu or the heatwaves in France, e.g. it would kill 20,000 people who were already poorly, but otherwise life would go on. On 14 March 2020 I went to see Lawrence of Arabia at the BFI Southbank, and I remember thinking "is this a good idea". They closed the cinemas seven days later:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/17/cinemas-across-the-uk-to-shut-in-response-to-coronavirus-odeon-cineworld

The roads were really quiet for a short while, so in May I spent a small fortune on a Brompton, thus contributing to the great bicycle boom of 2020:
https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/the-great-bicycle-boom-of-2020.html

I lived near a town that was at the time popular with tourists from the Far East, and pre-COVID they often wore facemasks, which was disconcerting, because pre-COVID facemasks came across as an overreaction. Admittedly my home town has a distinctive odour, but for the most part it's not unsanitary. However those tourists obviously knew their onions, because China's official death toll was something like 80,000 for the entire COVID wave (roughly the same as Japan, slightly more than the Philippines and Malaysia), so they must have known what they were doing. I was also struck with the depressing thought that COVID wasn't going to be like a war, with a definite end. It was just going to chunter on, and then slowly fade away, but never vanish entirely, like the ending of The Birds.

I visited Hong Kong in October 2019, because I was briefly flush with cash. It was £450 to fly from London to Hong Kong and back. I remember thinking "this can't last" and "what kind of world do we live in where a flight half-way across the globe is £450" and "it's a good job I'm a documentarian and traveller, not a tourist, otherwise people might blame me for climate change". It feels like a completely different world now.

Back in 2020 the whole travel blogger "van life" thing was just becoming established (Itchy Boots, the motorcyclist, ended up being stuck in Peru) and I remember laughing heartily to myself at the thought of these well-scrubbed yuppies suddenly having to pay for accommodation instead of demanding free rooms etc, but also not laughing because they started off richer than me and would presumably continue to be richer than me. I imagine it also affected people for whom international travel is a power signifier, such as Timothy Garton Ash and Thomas Friedman etc.

The big tragedy is that after getting thumping majorities and pretty much vanquishing the lefties in 2016 and 2019 it seemed as if we had finally won, and had been given a guaranteed lock on the subsequent elections. COVID was a golden opportunity to humanise the right wing and show empathy with ordinary people. But the Tories and the Republicans shot themselves in the foot... feet... foots and essentially wrecked their own chances of election victory against weak opposition. If Donald Trump had simply gone into hibernation throughout the pandemic - if he had gorged himself on cheeseburgers and gone to sleep in a cave - he would have won the 2020 election by a landslide, and now he would be at the end of his second term, with no chance of ever being President again. It would all be over.

And if Boris Johnson had used his brush with COVID as a learning experience he would still be Prime Minister and would presumably have called a general election last year, which he would have won handily. Instead we have this mess. This mess.

Wildlife who were dependent on humanity’s leavings - I’m thinking of restaurant dumpsters and such - had a tough time during the early pandemic. My neighborhood had, suddenly, mouse and rat problems.

One of my enduring memories of this time was discovering a squirrel on top of my plastic garbage bin, gnawing a hole through the lid. We were separated by a few feet, and I gawped at the squirrel doing this, wherein the squirrel glared back and then took another bite of the lid, as if to say, “What? What? You got something to say? You gonna step to me?”

Clearing out my drafts and found this shopping list from March 16, 2020

List for hanging out at home

potatoes
fried shallots
Spring onions
Minced beef extra
bread
Chicken carcass
white pepper
anise seeds, cardamon, cloves, cinammon
coconut milk
Pasta
sausages
Toilet paper and kitchen roll
Garlic
eggs
Sanitising products
Wipes/dettol
Chocolate
More instant ramen
Chips
Pancake mix
Candles?
Razor
Shower wash
Alcohol

Came into the San Francisco office today, on a lark. I've been in for a couple meetings and lunches, but this is the first time in four years that I've done the morning commute, on the BART train. It's kind of surreal - a trip I've made literally thousands of times, so it's very familiar, but it's also like something from a dream.. the alleys I used to walk, the sandwich shops.. it all seems so weird and distant, like from a different life