Category: Retreat

It is now 34 days until Christmas; and 252 days since I first switched to working from home because of the pandemic.

Back in Spring, the government boldly promised everything would be back to normal in 12 weeks. A few people cynically referred to the WW1 claim that the conflict would be ‘over by Christmas’, saying this would drag on longer than expected. We’re now within 5 weeks of Christmas with the country on lockdown, and some very difficult decisions have to be made. Basically: how many people will the government allow to die so that Christmas can go ahead?

One of the reasons given for the current restrictions was so that families could meet on December 25th. There have already been triumphant headlines about “Boris” saving Christmas. But lifting restrictions in a pandemic and therefore encouraging people to mix around the country seems insane. Eid and Diwali have both been disrupted already; having an even larger festival go ahead is ridiculous. At the very least, a few days of looser restrictions will a longer period locked down afterwards.

All this adds to the gloomy apocalyptic mood. The government seems to have no strategy, and is instead distracted by internal squabbles and scandals. There is the promise of the vaccine, with the first roll-out just weeks away. But delivering supplies of this present another challenge, as does clearing up the economic damage (with Brexit on top of that). I’m not feeling optimistic.

My life in Lockdown 2 is, as for most people living alone, boring and a little lonely. Lots of people around me are ignoring the restrictions, and I can’t even bring myself to be annoyed or angry at this. The national response to this whole pandemic has been a disaster, and I don’t blame people for trying to get on with things. Me, I spend my days building software, and in the dark evenings I write, watch a little TV, but find it muster enough energy to do anything.

I’ve been planning Christmas on the assumption that the rule-of-six will be in place, and have invited a few local friends to join me for food. I’d hoped to visit family on the 26th or 27th, but they are (understandably) not enthusiastic about having Christmas outdoors or in the garage. Personally, I’d rather the Christmas Bank Holidays were rolled over to the summer, and just have them as normal working days. The holiday season feels spectacularly un-festive this year.

For me, the official end of this pandemic will be when I am dancing in a club to WAP. I don’t actually go to nightclubs all that often, so it will almost certainly whatever is the first post-pandemic night played by DJ Kate St Shields. WAP such a great song, and yet we’ve never been legally allowed to dance to it in a UK club.

When lockdown first started, I expected a clean ending to the pandemic. The government would get things under control, and there’d be a grand Reunion. This was not so unlikely, since several countries managed just this – including a few that were not islands. The Reunion was a big exciting thing to look forward to.

Instead, the UK pandemic has felt more ambiguous. I should be delighted about this week’s news about a potential vaccine – but it feels like all our eggs are in that one basket.

This government has a very poor record on logistics. I can’t imagine the screw-ups they might manage distributing a vaccine that must be stored at -80°C -70°C (EDIT – and apparently can be stored for a period in a regular fridge – see comments). And one that requires too doses two a week three weeks apart. And one that requires people to agree to be vaccinated when public trust in drug companies and governments is pretty low. I’d be amazed if restrictions are lifted before the July or August.

During summer, I turned down attending a couple of large events. They would have been distanced, but they weren’t quite in the spirit of the restrictions. Now I feel a sort of FOMO, as well as a feeling that I was overly pious. I’m not sure it would have mattered if I had gone or not.

I was chatting to Rosy the other day, and she said how much she was looking forward to going clubbing now the vaccine was here. I pointed out that even with a vaccine, this was a long way off. “That’s OK,” she said, “We’ll have time to pick out really good outfits”.

We’re now a few days into Lockdown 2. So far, Brighton has been very lucky with lockdown weather. Walking along the seafront Friday night, there was almost a summery mood. This afternoon, the undercliff path was packed.

It’s been a weird week personally, and it’s been a little hard to settle. I found myself ignoring emails, which I never normally do, to the point where I hit Inbox-320. Normally, 30 is the most I’ll allow things to rise to, before tidying up. I broke my news-fast to track the US election, waking at 4:30am on Wednesday. Gorging myself on live news didn’t feel particularly good. On top of that, I’ve had a few logistical irritations, which were solved by returning to the office.

Lockdown 2 has not affected my life much, as I was already distancing effectively, and haven’t needed to visit shops much. But the background to this lockdown is unsettling. It’s hard to see how a four-week lockdown is going to have an effect when things are less restricted than in the spring. The stats the government used to justify it were sloppy (not formatting them to display on TV was the icing on that cake); the “moonshot” programme is already a fiasco. The government saw off a rebellion on the measures, but the wheels are falling off a little. We still have no plan other than praying for a successful vaccine to arrive as soon as possible.

The results of the US election feel a little like the world getting back to normal. Things have felt intense since 2016: Brexit, Trump, the nuclear arms tension with North Korea, two UK elections, and then the pandemic. These have been unsettled times.

For me, the highlight of the last few days was a sea swim with Rosy. Yes, it was cold, but far less cold than I expected – and the feeling of invigoration has lingered. I want to go in again!

Personally, it’s been a strange week.

And, on Halloween night, the government rushed out an announcement about a second national lockdown. This has felt inevitable, but even as recently as two weeks ago, the Prime Minister was brushing aside Labour calls for one. Everything about this pandemic feels shambolic.

Now that the initial shock of the announcement has worn off, I can see that I’m not practically affected by what has been announced. I’ve not been socialising indoors much anyway, I’m working from home, and most of my shopping has moved online. I’m not going to be practically affected.

The main effect is on my morale. We seem so far away from solving this issue. Wuhan is mostly back to normal. Thailand, New Zealand and Taiwan have sustained low caseloads. Australia has managed a day without new caseloads. Meanwhile Britain blunders through different approaches and announcements, with numbers rising.

The Prime Minister claimed to be optimistic about the future, promising renewed, faster testing. Which sounds great, but everything the government has done related to tracking and tracing so far has been a disaster. Every target set has been missed. Mid-March: we’ll turn the tide in 12 weeks. In May, we were told we’d be near normality by July. September, it was back to normal by Christmas.

Mistakes are going to be made during a crisis of this scale. But there seems to be a failure of leadership, with blunders and cronyism at all levels. I’m tired and I am angry, and I can’t see when this is going to be solved. We can only hope that the Johnson government is handling Brexit rather better than they are managing Covid, otherwise January’s Covexit is going to be a disster.

In theory, the vaccine will be ready by the end of the year. It will go to the NHS workers first, then to vulnerable people, then to the wider population. It will take some time to get round to everyone but, by the start of summer 2021, everything is back to normal. House parties, gigs and festivals can all start again.

This is the vision that was laid out by the government at the briefing I watched last week. But this is a group that has been wrong about almost every prediction. They were wrong at the very start of 2020, when they said that coronavirus was a minor issue that did not merit closing airports or cancelling large events. They were wrong when they said they said that twelve weeks would get everything back to normal. They have made unnecessary errors at every stage, such as the care home scandal, failures with track and trace, and then they make ridiculous announcements about moonshots to distract from these errors.

The government’s vaccine vision certainly saves them from the hard work of setting up proper testing, tracing and quarantining. It’s also quite a fragile thing to be basing our entire future on. There are things that could go wrong with this, and then normality is pushed back another year.

When the pandemic started, I figured the lockdown could go on for maybe 10 weeks. I prepared myself for three months of this, just in case. In parts of the summer I felt becalmed, unsure what I was supposed to be doing.

I’m now settling into hibernation for the winter. I feel good about this, as I have things to work on and to practise. I’m happy enough for now, but I don’t want to make the same mistake I made this summer, of expecting things to get back to normal at a particular point. Which makes me think about 2021. What if this goes on throughout that year, and even into 2022? What does life look like under a prolonged pandemic? How do I keep my spirits up and my enthusiasms alive if this does go on for years?

It’s not that I think I can’t, or that this is likely to go on into 2022. But answering the question ‘What if this lasts forever’ makes it easier to deal with shorter periods of time. How should we enjoy life and thrive with these new limits?

225 days in, and it feels like we’re back to where we started.

It was supposed to be very different to this, and could have been. A recent article described life in Taiwan: prompt action meant that cases were quickly brought under control and life there is mostly normal. Here in England, the government seems to have some very poor decisions and we’re entering winter with cases rising

Last weekend I went on holiday to Shropshire. It was relaxing and also provided a circuit-breaker from my constant watching of the news. Since coming back I’ve continued avoiding the news and I feel less anxious. And, since I’m distancing, there’s little that the news could change about my behaviour.

I’ve stopped travelling into work for the time being, and I’m avoiding socialising indoors. While the odds are good for me being OK if I catch covid, they are even better if I delay catching this, since treatment and outcomes improve all the time (research into long covid has barely begun, so that risk is hard to quantify). And, you know, if I’m going to get it then best to get it when the hospitals are quiet.

The ‘whack-a-mole’ lockdowns continue with no exit strategy. I watched a daily briefing last week (watching it directly doesn’t quite count as news) and it sounds as if we are holding out for the vaccine. This seems quite a gamble, as a successful vaccine is neither inevitable, nor an instant solution – unlike, say, testing, tracing and effective quarantine. This virus is going to be with Britain for a long time – and we still have the spectre of Brexit to deal with. One commentator referred to this as ‘covexit’, the two crises finally becoming the same thing.

I can’t do anything to change the tides and storms that are coming. All I can do is make sure that my little boat is seaworthy. I am walking 10,000 steps each day, even when I don’t feel like it. My diet has been a little poor recently, so I have restocked the cupboards this weekend. I’m working on focussing more on single tasks, reading more consciously, and thinking about new exercise routines.

I’m still finding sleep difficult, as I have since the start of the pandemic. I’m feeling worn-out and fatigued most days, even after a decent sleep. I wake about 6am, pick up coffee from small batch, take a stroll. Start work about 8:30am, finishing about 5, and spend the evening writing or watching TV. And repeat. It’s not a bad life, and one I can manage for some time. It’s going to be a long winter though.

One of the most interesting things about algorithms is the strange mistakes they make, which can be sometimes spooky. Like the time when Facebook made jaunty videos about people’s years, which blithely incorporated funerals and house fires among the celebrations. Or the strange writing collected on the AI Weirdness Blog.

Google photos draws up all the photographs taken on my phone in order to learn how to market web advertising more successfully. Sometimes google suggests new services or goods, such as unlimited storage space. Or an automatically generated photo book.

Google offered me a book of my best photos from Spring 2020. This was a time when I travelled less than any time in my entire life. Lockdown confined me to just a few miles from my house. It seemed a weird time to memorialise. The photos are mundane and strange and I had to buy a copy as a souvenir.

I sometimes wonder how I will remember this period. Already, the frustrations are fading and the summer is about walks and being outdoors. I remember the sunrises better than the insomnia.

A Whatsapp message from Kate, just after three yesterday afternoon, linked to a tweet from the local council. The city’s covid alert level had gone from yellow to amber, the last stage before the government “will declare the city an area of national concern“.

Along with the cutesy picture of a knitted coronavirus, the council informs us that “We all now need to make extra efforts”. What efforts? I’m genuinely not sure what else we should be doing.

My reaction to this news is not fear at getting the virus; despite the awful effect it’s had on friends of mine. My reaction is not determination to ride this out.

My main reaction is anger. Throughout the summer, the government has made foolish errors and failed to prepare for any rise in cases. Tracking and tracing is a joke, an expensive and confused bureaucracy that is unable to count cases, or tell us the number of people being tested. Local lockdowns are not working. Enforcement of the existing rules, particularly around the 10pm curfew is a mess. Nobody can keep track of the current rules people should follow, including government ministers. Messaging has been incompetent, with exemptions to the rules for grouse hunting, or certain government advisors. And just this week, the Prime Minister was telling us to go out more and support our local cinemas.

Part of my resentment is selfish, at the threat to my own plans. But a lot of the anger comes of being six months into this crisis with no clear exit strategy and no real plan from the government. My job is stable, and I can’t imagine the fear and uncertainty for those working in local hospitality businesses (most of the cinemas in the town didn’t survive the news of the new Bond film being postponed).

I guess the only thing to do is prepare to withdraw once more, and check those around me are OK. But I am so tired of this mess.

Flash forwards are a powerful story-telling technique, which work particularly well in TV or comics. A character is given prophetic glimpses of their future, a scene that doesn’t fully make sense at the time. The best example I’ve seen of this was in Babylon 5. Viewers were shown the death of two characters was in the first episode. The question became how events would lead to this moment, and what the context would be.

I’ve been thinking about flash-forwards in terms of the pandemic. Walking down the street now, I sometimes pass people in masks without thinking about how easily the world has switched. Other times I have a sort of jamais-vu where the strangeness of it all becomes apparent. The posters and other background details remind me of the subtle set-dressing in the film Children of Men. These items work in the film to defamiliarise us, to show us the different effects of the catastrophe (which, in that film, was universal infertility).

I had a moment of this jamais-vu in the office on Friday, when I realised how strange the scene in front of me was. I wondered how I would have interpreted this moment if I’d seen it as a flash-forward a year ago.

Our office is huge, and dominated by a large atrium. Of the four floors, two are in darkness, even though it is daylight outside. The main communal space has been roped off. The office is mostly empty, many of the chairs covered in plastic, out of use for now. Only a few people are in view. All of them are wearing facemasks.

The scene would make no sense to my 2019 self. Where is everyone? Why is a large corporate office empty? We have fallen into a new world.

On Tuesday lunchtime, my second day back in the office, the Prime Minister announced a new set of measures against coronavirus. This included saying that anyone who can work from home should. Without a command to close offices or restrict public transport, it’s left to companies and employees to decide what to do – particularly in those offices that have been made safe to work in.

It was actually good to go back to the office. It felt strange, and a little dangerous, but I liked being somewhere different, and I liked taking the first steps towards normality.

Way back, on March 19th, when the Prime Minister announced “we can turn the tide within the next 12 weeks and I’m absolutely confident that we can send coronavirus packing in this country”. The latest restrictions are said to be set for six months. Given the government’s failure to hit the targets it sets for itself, we are likely in for a long haul.

This lockdown feels a lot more sour than the first one. It is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that we wasted the time gained through the initial lockdowns and restrictions. We face the same problems six months later, but from a more precarious position. Winter will bring dark days and bad weather; and the economy is reeling from the shock of the pandemic, with the potential problems of Brexit yet to come.

There was some sense of consensus for the first lockdown, a feeling that we were ‘all in it together’. That very phrase was used by chancellor Rishi Sunak, echoing George Osbourne’s description of austerity. Despite Sunak’s assurances, the pandemic is affecting different people in different ways. Some people are suffering greatly, already living in cramped or undesirable housing. Meanwhile, there have been profiteers. Tiny companies were paid vast sums for PPE that was not delivered. Accenture received £850,000 for ten week’s work on the government’s failed contract-tracing app. Dido Harding has been promoted despite failing to establish decent contact tracing (James O’Brien has compared her to those same ‘unelected bureaucrats’ that the Brexiters were trying to remove).

At a time when consensus is important, it’s easy to perceive a sense of rules being applied unfairly. Despite NHS’s 111 line told sick parents to maintain quaratine, while MPs defended Cummings’ trip to Durham as what any decent parent should have done. Tory MP Bob Seely attended a barbecue held by Richard Tice (Brexit party chairman) when the mixing of households was banned – no action was taken. And then there is the exemption for grouse-hunting to restrictions for groups meeting – so important that the Covid-19 Operations sub committee scheduled a special meeting for this.

The new restrictions announced for England this week still allow households to mix, something that is banned elsewhere in the UK. I expect that further measures will be announced soon – in a recent article, Tim Harford quoted a statisticians view that “Every week before lockdown cost us five to eight weeks at the back end of the lockdown.” These are hard decisions for a government to make, and I certainly don’t envy the people involved. But it’s hard not to feel like the government is floundering, and there seems to be no way out of rolling restrictions.