Hi,
Going back to the outside world is going to be really weird. Part of me thinks life will return to normal as quickly and as dramatically as it ended, but it’s dawning upon me that my old life is probably out of reach for a lot longer than I had originally anticipated.
It’s not just the physical shops and cafes and familiar commercial faces that had featured on the landscape of our lives that might be gone forever, wiped out by the pandemic. It’s the actual way we were.
How do you undo weeks and weeks of lockdown wiring? I can’t even handle petty cash without a several stage ablution process afterwards. Before the pandemic, I prided myself on my robustness. I grew up in Sudan. Half the time there was no electricity, no running water. We ate with our hands and rinsed them often with no soap. When it was too hot to sleep indoors, we dragged beds outside and slept in the yard, first fighting off mosquitos, then the chill of the dawn as it crept into our bones, then the sudden bright heat of the sun. When I moved to the UK, I scoffed at antibac and wipes. But when coronavirus happened my own robustness and immunity no longer mattered; it became about protecting family and acquaintances from the disease if I caught it. Nothing quite sharpens the mind like fear for those you love. It supersedes fear for your own self.
And it’s this fear that I now take with me into a world where every risk is a threat to ageing or vulnerable relatives. How are we going to navigate a world of door handles and public transport and cutlery and all the other head-spinning possibilities for infection, when before we couldn’t accept a food delivery without going through an elaborate disinfection exercise?
We don’t know when it will be completely safe, or if it ever will be. Until there’s a vaccine, we might have to factor in the ever-present risk of catching or carrying the virus for an unspecified period of time. I don’t know what that means for the final shape of our lives, but it’s certain that in the immediate future, for many of us who are close to vulnerable family members or live with them, we’re sentenced to anxiety.
Yet, as I wrote in last week’s newsletter, it’s a privilege to be able to continue social distancing even when it’s not compulsory. To those for whom lockdown won’t end because they need to continue to shield due to age or ill health, or because of proximity to those who are elderly or susceptible, this may seem like a cruel fate when the whole world is going back to normal. But not everyone has the ability to make those life-saving choices. Like so much that’s come out of this pandemic, what appears to be a curse is actually a blessing. We just need to be able to adjust our perspective.
Before I go
At The Correspondent, we like to look beyond the calamitous headlines and keep a cool head. To keep bypassing the anxiety loop of the media, we need your help.
If you’re a member, please take a minute to renew your membership today; you enable us to tell the stories the world needs more than ever.
And if you’ve already done this – thank you. We hope to be worthy of your support. Onwards!
Would you like this newsletter straight in your inbox?
Subscribe to my newsletter and stay up to date with the Better Politics beat.