Just another sister on lockdown

Bread (not pictured) and roses, bread and roses

Just before this year's Significant Birthday, I did a little series of This Much I Know style musings on Facebook. I enjoyed it: the taking stock, the reflecting on things from the perspective of middle age. I like to think I don't feel that different to the way I did 30 years ago, when Young Joella was at her most glorious, but I must. I absolutely have to be a fully-fledged adult by now. I belong to the generation that's in charge here, terrifying as it sounds. 

But whatever any of us thought we knew has taken some punishment in the last 150 days, hey. And there's been no shortage of white middle class takes. Is there ever? But you know the drill: if you don't want mine, you really don't have to read it. Back buttons are available.

Schrodinger's Dad 
This was the big one. The big fella. Sometime in late April, it's a little blurry now, my actually quite beloved dad, my grumpy, stubborn, 20th century, pre-Israel Israeli, principled, heartbroken, sometimes inappropriate, reluctantly-but-in-the-face-of-incontrovertible-evidence evolving dad, was blue-lighted to hospital for the second time in a month. The first time, it was with a recurrence of the thing that keeps coming for him that no one has yet been able to identify. The second time, it was with the Covid-19 that he picked up the first time. I won't lie, I thought he was a goner, that it had finally come to, as he would say, Goodnight Vienna.

I know I am so far from the only person who went through this, and I know that the NHS were doing their absolute valiant best, unlike some people we could mention, but it was terrifying and awful. There were days and nights, long days and longer nights, where I just didn't know whether he was coming, going, or already gone. I couldn't go and see him, he wasn't well enough to call, there was a mega spendy phone number that went to his bedside, but they kept moving him around, so the number kept changing, and when it rang out I didn't know if he wasn't picking up, or someone else's dad wasn't picking up, or it was just ringing into the void. The ward asked for one person to call each day, morning and evening, so they weren't overwhelmed, and one day it was me and I rang in the morning and the person who answered said 'he's asleep'. 'How is he, do you think?' 'Well, he refused his breakfast'.

Two things I now know that I didn't know then: first, he'd lost his sense of smell, so food wasn't that interesting to him, but more importantly, he's vegetarian, and they kept bringing him meat. In those circumstances, refusing breakfast seems reasonable, but at the time, I thought, that's it, he's checking out. The one thing we could do was send messages online, and every morning I typed a little message into a web form, trying to say what I needed to say, and hoped that somehow it would get to him.

He survived, though is yet to fully recover, and I have since been to visit a few times. But there was some point in the 10 days or so he was out of reach where M observed that he was effectively shut in a box with a deadly virus, and until someone opened it we had no idea whether he was alive or dead. I grew that little shell around me that I remember from my mum's terminal illness. Not very much could reach me, but what could absolutely tore me apart.

He's back at Caffe Nero now, and sporting quite the beard. A couple of weeks ago, I was in his kitchen frying up some garlic for pasta puttanesca and he said 'wow, that smells great!'. I looked at him and grinned, and he said 'my god, I can smell!' He dodged the bullet that's now hit the larger part of a million people. May his luck continue to hold.

Reassessing the familiar 
I knew about the obvious key workers. My mum was a nurse. My dad worked in local government. My best friend is from a family of teachers. I have spent most of my own working life in the third sector, but many of the same values hold. It's not about you, it's about everyone. Nobody is ok till everybody is ok. Human rights apply to all humans. Pay your taxes. Vaccinate your children. Vote for progressive government. Check your privilege. Don't be evil.

But I did not fully recognise how reliant we are on the delivery drivers, the corner shops, the butchers, the bakers and the people who keep the lights on. Andy the fish man comes here on a Tuesday. He disappeared for three weeks because Fleetwood fish market closed for physical distancing adjustments. When he came back I nearly cried with happiness. In the deepest lockdown, the appearance of his van was one of the major events of the week. You can't outsource eating. We have to remember that. I can't even go there on the care worker front, I'm still too angry and sad. PAY ALL THESE PEOPLE PROPERLY. THIS IS THE REAL WORK. (Also: monkfish curry is the best).

Inequality begins at home. 
If we're going to have more pandemics, and I imagine we probably are, we need homes we can bear to stay at home in. I'm Generation X, and, broadly speaking, we got a fair deal on the housing front. I hadn't properly realised how precarious this situation is for millennials and Gen Z, and how badly and insecurely so many people are housed. Which is to say, I knew housing was fucked, but I didn't know how fucked. I learnt back in the dying days of Thatcherism that this is a problem the 'market' will never, ever solve. You want to house your citizens decently, you have to invest public money in it. May we finally learn this lesson. May we finally vote accordingly.

Regression
Son of a gun, holy cow. Turns out we need to look after ourselves. There were the sourdough waves, the crafting waves, the Zooming all evening after Zooming all day waves, the allotted hour of exercise waves, but all that passed and we were still here, looking at the walls, wondering how to climb them. And like many people, I fell back on familiar comforts.

A lot of this was around food, and I think this was also linked to where it came from. We do have food available here in Ecoville, and the team who source it bust a gut to keep it coming in, but it is very much at the wholefoods end of things, and I found that I did not want it, even more than I usually find that I do not want it. What I wanted was pie. Fish fingers. Spaghetti hoops. Cheese and pickle toasties. Tuna mayo jacket potatoes. Ham, egg and chips. Instant noodles. There wasn't a supermarket delivery slot for love nor money, and I did not want to go into town.

So I developed a whole new opportunistic way of shopping, which was a mixture of watching the Abel & Cole website like a hawk (and huge props to them for bringing us what they could bring us every single week), and buying stuff in the local villages. I can now tell you what the Halton shop at the top has (Philadelphia! Cream! Koka noodles! Limes! Chillies!) vs the Caton Co-op (Prawns! Organic wine! Refried beans! Parmesan! Parsley!) vs the Bolton le Sands Spar (Locally made pies! Barmcakes! Linguine! Salted pistachios!).

As is the way in this house, I do the sourcing and M does the cooking. So I have been appearing through the door with all kinds of things, and he has dutifully been creating glorious dinners from them. Special mention to the miso ramens topped with fish fingers (aka cheat's tempura), the tuna steaks with chips and creative salad (aka whatever we have to shred), the many and varied frittatas and omelettes (thanks to my well-connected neighbour S, we have been well supplied with local eggs throughout), the (British*) corned beef hash - now just referred to as CBH - and the absolute standby sausage and sardine pastas (these are two pastas, not one, we're not monsters). We have eaten like kings, if the kings had been teenagers in the 80s. We're a bit fatter, but I think everyone is at this point, so that's fine. Who's even looking.

Transgression
Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in an old midnight choir, I have tried, in my way, to be eco. I have taken this a lot further than many people, to the extent that I could probably give you a list, but I won't, because then I'd sound smug, or defensive, or both, and that's not where I want to go with this. Where I want to go with this is that we all have our limits, in the places where we have a choice, and a whole myriad of factors affect those limits, as well as those choices.

When it all went tits with the Covid, a lot of those limits and those choices became really exposed, and I had a kind of dual experience of it. On the one hand there was the mainstream realisation that we are interdependent beings. Supply chains fail if even one of their links doesn't work. I had a higher than average awareness of this, partly because I'm quite old and I remember the days before you could think oh, I'd like x, and within minutes x appears in your life, as if by magic. And partly because I've spent a bit of time at the other end of those supply chains, on farms in developing countries, with small producers, with the people who don't get prioritised for anything, basically. We mostly don't know we're born, the water comes out of the taps, the lights stay on, and the shops have stuff in them. The difference between that happening and not happening is extremely finely balanced. The more of us who understand this, and make our choices accordingly, the better, and I have noticed the increasing awareness of this. Might we come out of this... better? (I'm not hugely hopeful, but there have been moments). The deep satisfaction that can come from scoring macaroni in a time of scarcity... I think, for a time there, we all appreciated that we should not take this for granted.

On the other, there was the choices that are supported here in Ecoville. I don't think we've had a good war. It's admittedly pretty challenging when you've deliberately designed a set up that relies on sharing facilities (washing machines, cars, bins, play spaces, stores, communal areas) and suddenly all of them are danger zones. There's been a lot of helping each other out, as you might expect. But as a collective, as a whole, we have not, in many instances, opened our minds to new possibilities, or extended each other generosity. In fact, we managed to weaponise the word 'generosity' a while back, which would be impressive if it weren't so depressing. 

I have instead sensed something of a hardening. The lines that have hardened are not a great surprise, maybe - I'm going to avoid the gory details, but we've had the Tinned Fish Wars, the Don't Tell Us What To Do Wars, and the Trampoline Wars. I mean, we're all a bit broken. Who can say they're at their best in "these times"? And I do, honestly, try and access my empathy (as I imagine others do too, at least those who've done even the tiniest bit of therapy) but then I boing up against its limits and ping off in the other direction. I guess you could say this is a counterpose, if the pandemic were a yoga class, which it in no way is, but we can try. 

The first sign was the washing up. I hate washing up, and we do have a dishwasher, but three meals a day at home, every day, there's stuff that needs dealing with. We ran out of washing up liquid. What's supposed to happen is you take your bottle down the street and refill it from a giant vat of Ecover. This can take a while, it's pretty viscous, but I have been dutifully doing it. And I thought no. Fuck this. I want proper washing up liquid. And I went out and bought a bottle of Fairy Eucalyptus Anti-Bacterial. Oh, the joy those bubbles brought me. I blew the little ones round the kitchen, and made giant ones with my hands. I poured it into running hot water like a cocktail waiter with a bottle of Galliano. 

I was a bit unstoppable after that. Dettol wipes. Tesco Click and Collect, feat. hash browns. Air freighted roses from Sainsbury's (see above. Fairtrade, of course, I'm not a monster). Giant bars of Cadbury's Dairy Milk. Even (and I do feel bad about this, just not bad enough) a strimmer, a whole strimmer, just for my allotment, because the communal strimmer battery went missing and I could. not. be. arsed. waiting for it to be found. So I bought a strimmer. Off Amazon.

I know these decisions are taking me in the wrong direction. We need to be doing less of this, and I have been doing more. I'm still trying to fathom why, as I'm fairly sure it's a slippery slope between this kind of thing and refusing to wear a mask because yada yada freedom. (I am not refusing to wear a mask, of course. I'm not a monster). I suspect it might be actually quite linked to the regression thing. I try and make principled choices, but actually I don't always find that easy. You have to work at it, all of the time. And when you take a kicking for not being principled *enough* (I'm not expecting medals, just not "feedback"), and then there's a *pandemic*, I think what happens is a little switch flips. I have, these last few months, rediscovered the deeeeep pleasure of driving fast, on my own, windows open, loud music playing. I thought those days were long behind me. Turns out not. Quite tempted to make a roll up at the traffic lights singing along to I Am The Resurrection, go full 90s.

Anger. 
If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. I started a 21 day Deepak Chopra abundance meditation thing that one of my lovely Australian half-aunts was hosting, because I thought it might do me some good. But I dropped out from fury on day... 4? Not now, Deepak, I thought. People are dying fully preventable deaths. I could say more about the anger (I could always say more about the anger) but actually, I read this on the LRB blog a long three months ago now and I can't top it. It's really very good.

And now what? 
I work with futurists, and the futurists are busy as hell. This has been like a fracture in time, a deep but sharp shifting of the tectonic plates. We have none of us any certainty about what comes next, and if we do, we're deluding ourselves. So much possibility has been revealed, as has so much vulnerability. Many of us have had the opportunity to think deeply about what really matters, and some of us have taken it. The bare brick of the structural inequalities in our world has been exposed in a way that I have never experienced before - at least, not in the country I live in. 

We could adapt -- we've had a sense of how fast things can change when the political will is there. But I am not sure that we will. We present as a democracy, and heaven knows it could be worse, but our electoral system is so unfit for its 21st century purpose that we have somehow ended up being led by amoral narcissists advised by monsters, and we might quite possibly be fucked. I watch the signals that my colleagues produce that indicate which trajectory we may be on... zero sum game competition for limited resources? trading privacy for access to goods and services? a radically different, regenerative future? something else? Who will decide? 

It's been an interesting time for those of us who straddle various divides, or, to use the new parlance, inhabit several bubbles. Not sure I'd wish these times on anyone, but they aren't boring. There is possibility, for those who are able (and allowed) to lift their heads up high enough to see it. There is a lot of bleakness for those who aren't or can't. I don't know where to put myself really. But imma stashing some tins of sardines, just in case.

joella

*This isn't a Brexity thing, it's a rainforest thing