Category: Life in Lockdown

“The crisis is a tough time to think through all the pieces that are necessary.” That was an intriguing point by Bill Gates in his recent interview with Ezra Klein. It is a point that is too significant to escape the nose of a sober philosopher or the minds of persons who may be concerned about mental health or how to think in such a tough time. To contextualise Bill Gates’ statement here we may shorten it as “[it] is a tough time to think…”

Our major question is ‘how can or should we think when it is a tough time to think?’

There are other questions we may need to consider before we could derive an answer to our major question. Such questions include:

1. Why is it a tough time to think?
2. How is it a tough time to think?

Bill Gates’ statement already answers the first question saying that there is a crisis that makes it tough to think. Almost everyone knows that something is wrong in the world at the moment. It is most likely that even babies in wombs could sense that a virus is currently wreaking severe havoc in the world that will soon host them. COVID-19 is making it a tough time to think.

Now that we know why it is a tough time to think we are left with the second question: How is it a tough time to think? This may not be straightforward to people who rightly think that the virus is not an infection of the brain or the nervous system, but rather an infection of the lungs. If it is not affecting the nervous system, so how does it affect thinking?

A recent article “Knowledge as the Working and Walking Narrative”, mentions that there are two basic processes of knowing which are called the Dual Carriageway of Knowing. On one way, the mind is working towards reality, the individual is directing herself (maybe by thinking) to acquire certain knowledge. On the other way, the reality is walking towards the mind, knowledge is entering the individual’s mind without the individual trying to acquire the knowledge. The individual is often in control of the former and the latter is often beyond the control of the individual. So how is this relevant?

During this challenging period, while we are trying to think about particular things and direct our minds to know somethings, our thoughts could be overwhelmed by the realities that flood our minds. It is almost impossible now for a day to go without news about Coronavirus. It is presently an overwhelming reality of everyday life and it creates a difficulty to concentrate on other things that we try to know. Social media and various outlets consistently flood our minds with the realities of COVID-19 even beyond what we would want to know. At the introductory phase of the virus, there were different descriptions from political leaders. For example, the President of China (Xi Jinping) calls the virus a “pneumonia epidemic”. The President of France (Emmanuel Macron) calls it “the invisible, elusive and advancing enemy”. The Prime Minister of Russia (Vladimir Putin) calls the virus a “common threat”. The (lucky) Prime Minister of the UK (Boris Johnson) calls it an “invisible killer” while the President of the US (Donald Trump) calls it “the Chinese virus”. These descriptions are followed by different statistics of deaths, of infections, disparities in infections and survival rates among other things. When these unavoidable torrents of information flood our minds, it is so difficult to concentrate on other aspects of life. It is indeed a tough time to think. Now, what can man do when it is tough to think?

It is not an option for a man to stop thinking because, as Michel Foucault puts it, “man is a thinking being”. Though it is tough to think, human beings must think. It is, however, important to be more thoughtful about thinking whenever it is tough to think because thinking often has a boomeranging effect. A religious personality once mentioned that “Man is a thinking being: what and how we think largely determines what we are and what we will become.” But our thinking will not only affect us as individuals; it also affects people around, specifically how we relate with them. So how can we be ‘thoughtful’ with our thinking when it is tough to think but we must think?

In 1637 the French philosopher René Descartes came up with Cogito ergo sum to argue for the attainment of certain knowledge. Cogito ergo sum means ‘I think therefore I am’. Bringing this Cartesian statement to context here, we may say that we can have a thoughtful approach to our thinking in tough times by starting the thinking with ourselves. We should make the ‘I’ come before the ‘think’. If we cannot avoid the influx of thoughts on Coronavirus, then we should personalise the thoughts. Let the thinking about Coronavirus starts with you:

What are the significances of the various thoughts on coronavirus for you as a person?

What are you identifying or knowing about yourself during the phase(s) of the virus?

Who do you think you are in the context of the coronavirus?

And what is the significance of who you are on others around you?

This is not a call for some irrational solipsism or untamed anthropocentrism. It is rather a call for a sincere self-examination. Despite all misgivings, the virus has presented humanity with a sober mirror to re-evaluate itself. Taking time before that mirror and painstakingly examining who we are individually is the best way to think now when it is difficult to think. Socrates rightly advised that “Man [and woman] know thyself. An unexamined life is not worth living.” Perhaps it is an advantage that the virus is offering us all the lockdown so we can pause and examine ourselves before we continue with the next phases of our lives. An example in this blog is the interesting article [https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/happ/2020/05/11/just-some-lockdown-thoughts/] by Rachel Thompson about how she recognised how less grateful she was for some benefits that she now realised that she is having. We should all take that bold stance to put up ourselves before the sober mirror of COVID-19 and check out who we really are, particularly in relations to others.

Many of us typically create a mental identity of being busy, we barely spend minutes with our families. We are now realising that we have only been using the workplace as an escape from the challenges at home. During the lockdown, we are now caught up with disagreements, misunderstandings and disputes that we have failed to address and have used our works as an excuse to avoid. Some of us believe that we are self-sufficient. We act, speak and think like we are the only ones existing in the world. We never believe we would need anyone in our lives but now we seek to communicate with people although virtually and we desire a reciprocal reaction from everyone. We are beginning to see that no one is an island, we are all social beings very much in need of ourselves. Some of us have enjoyed a lifestyle of discrimination, whether it is age, class, gender, language, race or what have you. We look down on certain people and implicitly or explicitly consider them as underprivileged. We think we are rich whereas health (not money) is the real wealth! We smile at peoples’ shabby dresses and feel satisfied that such people have already lost any competition with us for a good life. But who says life is a competition where the downfall of one is essential for the success of the other? Now the whole world is in a classroom, nature sombrely walked in as the teacher and slowly wrote the course title on the board: “COVID-19”. One of the learning outcomes is “That human beings will know that whether they are black, brown, yellow or white, they are all bloody humans. The only possible difference is that they can either be bad or good.”

Many of us are keen to have many things for ourselves notwithstanding if we need them or even to the detriment of those in dire need. Others consider us as greedy but it sounds derogatory and unacceptable to us. However, now we are learning that many of those things that we struggle to acquire are mere wants and not needs. Now that we can only pick three things per item at the stores and we still survive till another opportunity to leave the queue and enter the grocery stores; we are beginning to see that we have often used our wants to starve others of their needs. We now understand that what we really need in life is our health and the struggle to acquire more than needed is unhealthy. Now we agree with Immanuel Kant that, “we are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”

There are some of us in positions of ‘power’ to make decisions about the success or failure of some persons under us. We forget that we are not the first and we will not be the last persons to occupy such a position. We happily, though surreptitiously, victimise or oppress those under us, we believe that it is the way to command respect. That is the way to show we are the boss. We sometimes boast that the promotion or success of certain persons is over our dead body. That is, as long as we are alive, such persons cannot have a promotion or some benefits that they deserve. Fortunately, we are now learning that the same air that keeps the victim alive also keeps the victimizer alive. And that a change can happen by tiny challenges in the puff of air we take in or out. We are all at the mercy of something above and beyond every one of us.

While we have been busy looking at our differences, nature is seeing us as one. Life, at least on earth, is similar for everybody. It is simply a journey from the womb to the tomb or from birth to death. We are part of each other and the best we can be is not about the best we can achieve but the best we can give to ourselves. There is a commonness in the humanness of our humanity which evolution may never be able to explain. We hear about death rates and we feel sorry even though it may be unlikely for us to be directly affected. But the empathy we show is a tacit admittance of the reality that anyone that goes out of existence is part of humanity, part of ourselves. And it is a sign that we too will go someday even if we become another Methuselah.

The COVID-19 period is like humanity is crawling through a dark long tunnel and unfortunately, many persons will not see the end of the tunnel. But it is not just about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. It is about what you would look like when you get to the end of the tunnel. At the moment, humanity is acknowledging its frailty and there are many things that we cannot change. It is probably unhelpful to dwell much on what we cannot change at the expense of what we can and, even, ought to change. Take a bold step to assess yourself in the sober mirror and change what you ought to change while you still have the time. I will start to conclude with some apt lines by Shawn Carter (Jay-Z), in the song ‘Forever Young’: “So we live life like a video…when the [D]irector yells cut, I’ll be fine…” That you will be fine when the Director yells cut depends on you to now start thinking about yourself: Take a careful and reflective look at yourself in the mirror of life. Perhaps it is time to admit like Thomas Nashe (of blessed memory) that “Heaven is our heritage, Earth but a player’s stage” and agree with James Shirley that “Only the actions of the just, Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.”

Now that it is tough to think let the thinking starts with you!

Science is quite rightly seen as systematic and based on logic and reason. Counter-intuitively, a core tool used by scientists is the opposite: randomness,

Cause and effect

In order to identify cause and effect, scientists rely on the simple idea of random selection. Imagine that 100 patients are involved in a study I am conducting to figure out if a particular drug works. I write the names of the 100 people on small bits of paper and put them all in a hat. I close my eyes and pluck out one of the names. I do this again and again until I have 50 names. I call this group of 50 ‘the treatment group’. I give them the new drug that I wish to test. The other 50 people, still in the hat, are my ‘control’ group. I don’t give them the new drug.

After a while I see how my 100 patients are doing. If those in my treatment group are healthier than those in my control group I conclude that my drug works.

It’s all a tad more complicated than this, and computers have overtaken hats. But the basic logic is that via the use of non-reason (random allocation) we can achieve systematic results.

Prevalence

A second, and distinct, use of randomness is to try and figure out how widespread something is in the entire population of the country. For instance, what proportion of the whole population supports Manchester United? Or are happy with the government? Or have a particular disease?

This time a much bigger hat is needed. The name of everyone in the country goes into it on separate bits of paper. You put aside a few hours of your time. You close your eyes and pluck out, one by one, a thousand names. This 1000 are the people you wish to examine, either asking them questions in a survey or conducting a test of some sort on them. By simple virtue of the fact that they were randomly picked, they are a miniature version of the entire population. What we find out about this thousand will be true of the entire population (give or take a few percentage points). So, if 40 percent of our 1000 rather misguidedly support Manchester United, we will know that somewhere between 37 and 43 percent of the entire county will support Manchester United.

This information does not give us a strong handle on causation, it mainly describes how widespread something is. And it enables us to describe variation in prevalence: support for Manchester United is greater in the Manchester region than elsewhere and greatest among young males.

Randomly escaping Covid-19

Our response to Covid-19 crucially relies on these twin powers of random selection: understanding cause and describing prevalence.

The world is focusing on identifying an effective drug that causes us not to get the disease. A potential vaccine will only be declared effective if it passes the test of a randomly controlled trial, if patients randomly assigned to the treatment group show better health outcomes than those in the control group. All else is speculation.

As we await the development of an effective vaccine, we need to make policy decisions on how to regulate our social and economic behaviour. To relax human contact rules we need to have an accurate picture of how widespread the disease is in the population. We can’t examine every single human and so we take the shortcut of examining a random selection of several thousand. From the information from the several thousand we can paint a portrait of the entire country. From this information we can calculate whether it is wise to ease lockdown rules and allow more human contact, or whether doing so is likely to increase virus transmission to a level that places unsustainable pressure on the health service. The information can also inform how we may vary policy in different regions given the information about how prevalence varies in different geographical areas.

Beautiful contradication

How humans escape from Covid-19 will be the story of the collaboration of random and reason. Scientists, in both the natural and social sciences, leverage the simple notion of chance to generate knowledge. As we quite rightly seek logical reasons for the next steps we take in addressing the pandemic we may reflect on the fact that the reasoning will, very reasonably, be based on the anithesis of reason: randomness.

When lockdown was announced there were many things that I, and others like me, worried about – how to get groceries and medications, if my family would be safe, and what this would mean for my field work. One thing I did not worry about was how to get online. But more so than ever, we rely on the internet for all kinds of access. We use it for Covid-19 news and guidance, food delivery services, communication with families and friends, work and school. But not everyone has such easy access to the internet or the equipment needed to access it like smartphones, laptops and tablets. Without these things, lockdown causes further isolation and disadvantages. 

This has become clear during my research with a women’s space that caters to asylum seekers and refugees here in Belfast. When lockdown began, I was impressed with the speed and agility with which the group adapted and moved online using Zoom. Not only have they continued to offer several regular classes, but they also expanded their offerings in response to the women’s requests and interests. Five days a week, women come together online to practice English, learn Chinese auto-massage, do yoga, or to cook together. And during these Zoom calls they also catch up and connect with one another. While these online activities could never fully replace in-person social activities, the women do feel they help them feel less alone and isolated. The problem is that while a core group of women do participate regularly, many more women do not have the technology or connectivity they need to participate.

Many women lack WiFi and the money to acquire it. That means they have limited opportunities to connect to the world outside their home. Before the lockdown, women would go to cafes, libraries and other public spaces with free WiFi for hours a day. That is no longer possible. And as a result, these women and their families are dramatically isolated from services, resources, friends and family. Children are home without access that would allow them to continue their education. Many also lack televisions, games, and other things we take for granted to keep ourselves entertained. Imagine being home with children for weeks on end, trying to keep them indoors but having nothing to keep them busy. On top of that, these women are separated from family members in other countries – unable to speak to husbands, children, mothers, etc. if they have no WiFi that makes regular calls affordable.

The problem of digital connectivity for marginalized populations is not new, but coronavirus has heightened the problem for the most vulnerable. Internet connectivity has become a necessity, especially during a prolonged lockdown.

Evening sunshine,

Empty street, I close my eyes,

Imbibing the warmth.

I’ve always been a walker. From being a well-exercised toddler with a mother who didn’t drive, I progressed to being teenager who furiously pounded the pavements before exams to handle the stress. My devotion to walking frequently saw me walking from my home in the South side of Dublin to my university on the North side, an ideal opportunity to listen to my favourite music (and save on bus fare).

I took a very cautious stance at the beginning of the lock-down, resolving to limit my exercise to my ancient treadmill. This didn’t last however, and before the first week had ended, I was back on the pavements, dashing out the door at the end of a day’s work after making the vital podcast/audiobook/music decision. In the intervening weeks, my evening walks have become increasingly important, allowing me to process my thoughts and stretch my legs after days that have become increasingly crowded, encompassing research, home-schooling and the sourcing of food and providing of frequent meals to a family and two pets with high standards.  

Walking outside also serves as a reminder that, despite my present narrow horizons, the outside world still exists. Encountering another walker often involves a complex little dance incorporating a rapid appraisal of distance and strategic eye contact in order to go on your way. Occasionally, you may catch the other walker’s eye and ruefully smile, attempting cheeriness despite the changed reality. 

This lockdown seems to pare everyday life down to its essentials – obtaining food takes more effort, there’s a new-found anxiety for the health of our loved ones and certainties about life, work, education and the future don’t seem so certain anymore. Sometimes old and simple pleasures help to remind us of who we are and where we came from in strange and unfriendly times.

My isolated experience thus far has given me a very inward focus on politics. Partially because my dissertation basis and degree program are inherently political, but also because of my emotional and personal desire to understand other people.

To be more in touch with the world, I have exposed myself to communities that I largely disagree with on civic duty, the role of government, collectivism, and what we consider to be fundamentally unnatural. These are all issues that have been latched onto while reconciling our current situation.

I’m really reaching here, but I think I can connect this to my dissertation using some philosophical acrobatics. For background, my thesis is focused on warlordism, and the role of ideological institutions in building military power. This has nothing to do with COVID-19 or what our daily challenges entail but I’m studying political science so let me have this. 

However, in many ways, going through a pandemic has made me think more harmoniously with warlord ideology. Do I prioritize survival or the common good? What is the line that separates these two? 

Life is predicated on unpredictability; we’ve known this since we were children. My primary deliberation now is how this present situation will affect us going forward. I feel that as a person who grew up with a comfortable life in a western country, this time is my ultimate confrontation with reality. The reality of death, contention, strife, and isolation. 

I think that this whole experience has made me more cognizant of the subjects of my studies. In a paradoxically sociopathic and empathetic way, I better understand what it means to be a warlord. To watch the world collapsing around you, and to appear unwavering. To engorge yourself with as many human comforts possible, and sleep through the inevitable suffering of others. 

Okay, full circle now, the point of my rum-fueled quasi-academic ramblings: I’m curious as to how this period of time will shape our future political ideology. Charles Tilly theorised that the development of our modern state system was artificially built through war, strife, and an intrinsic desire for domination, and now I wonder how we as a society will emerge from a day when the state very profoundly balances the scales of life and death. How will our society address an engrained polarization between inherent trust and obligatory defiance of what our leaders tell us to do? I know a lot of the latter is most vocally in America, trust me we’re not proud of it.

Thinking like a warlord, I am confronted with a societal afront that is nearly impossible to capitalize on. Any effort to gain power must be inadvertently humanitarian and done to alleviate harm. Perhaps we need a crisis to make those in power aware of what power entails. Some will argue that government impositions have made us “fascistic” to curb the liberties of individuals, others will say that stricter governments save more lives. 

In any case, I am excited for the political dialogue to follow. I do not know how we will reconcile endemic socioeconomic issues with our confrontation with partial extinction, but I believe that this crisis will produce incredible ideologs; many of them selfish and narcissistic. People my age will later campaign for political office hailing their pandemic ideals and what they accomplished during “the Dark Time” of 2020. 

There is a warlord in every person. My peers will scheme and conquer, some to support the state and others to bring it down. As a liberal arts major, I’m content to watch.

Death is our new currency. In the back of our minds there is voice that says, “I would kill to be free,” because freedom makes us powerful and dying is an inevitability. How do we teach ourselves about the common good, when goodness is a more nebulous concept than we have seen in out mortal lives?

These questions can’t be answered with science, political or otherwise, and none of us are qualified to give solutions. We will survive, in theory, perhaps in practice, because it is our nature rather than our duty to protect our fellow human beings. That is the warlord narrative that I would like to accept. A world without evil or vice would be fundamentally inhuman, and this crisis has provided me one of the most genuine human experiences that one could wish for.  

 “On days that you feel like the world is against you, you just have to push back harder… Life has a funny way of working things out…” 

Someone special had penned me these words in a card shortly after Christmastime, when I really did think the world was against me. Little did I know what life would bring in the months that followed. In fact, looking back on that time, those problems seem a million miles away from the world we are currently living in today.

It often seems selfish to be thinking of ourselves in times like these. I look at my own life; I live in the beautiful countryside, with a healthy, happy family, and am lucky to still be working and seeing faces each day. Yet still, despite all these privileges that we are so lucky to have, it can sometimes still feel like the world is against us- and that’s ok, that’s human. We all deal with things differently, no matter how big or small our problems, and that is perfectly normal; especially when we are in a pandemic, when life has been completely flipped upside down, when we barely even know what day of the week it is!

As the sun glares through the curtains of my little room in the mornings, I often wake up bursting with energy, with the feeling that I want to achieve something, to better myself, to make the most of this time I have with myself. And these days are great; they are filled with new opportunities to make me feel fantastic and to make lockdown seem not completely awful. Yet other mornings, I waken, feeling like the only solution is to lie in bed with a book and a cup of tea all day, tossing with the idea of maybe going for a walk, but eventually convincing myself that staying in bed is a better option (which in hindsight is never the case). And it always seems easier to be hard on yourself rather than forgiving yourself for having these ‘off’ days. Yet, over the last number of weeks, I have accepted that it is in fact perfectly normal to have chops and changes in my moods and attitudes during lockdown- and it is a perspective that I hope to keep with me even after lockdown. These ‘off’ days are normal, they are ok, and they don’t last forever.

And I know that they don’t last forever, because I look at the last eight weeks, and the bad days I’ve had, that are completely outnumbered by the good days, the great days! Like the evenings I have spent laughing with my sister over absolutely nothing, or the days I have spent bonding with my dad as we chopped logs for the winter, and treated ourselves to a cheap can of beer after, or even the sheer appreciation of hearing my granny’s voice over the phone, picturing our first cup of tea together once the lockdown is lifted. It really is the small things that keep us going during these crazy times. I understand that not everybody is on the same boat, but as that special card I mentioned stated, no matter what storm you are facing, you have to push back harder.

I feel like I have really learned a lot about myself during lockdown. I like poetry, I am a good runner, I like oat milk in my coffee; a compilation of tiny elements about myself that I had never discovered before. It has been this time I’ve had with myself that has really got me thinking about things- about what ‘normal’ will be like in the future, about what my own future will look like. But I suppose, what I have learned the most, is that it really is ok to be a little selfish during these uncertain times. We are living in a world that is millions of miles away from our usual comforts, and it is perfectly normal to be feeling uneasy or worried about things, even if they do seem small.

Almost five months after that card was sent, I feel like the words within it resonate with me now more than ever. These are uncertain times we live in, but it is important to look after one another and look after ourselves, mentally and physically.

Not everything is a part of your plan, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t part of the plan. Stay in, stay safe, and save lives.

Belfast in lockdown is loud at night. The sound of a helicopter stirs the darkness, its whirring drones on for what seems like hours outside my window looking west. I ask my friend, Google, why the helicopters are so frequent lately. She replies with an article from 2018:

“If you can’t sleep, too bad. Be thankful it’s not you who has a loved one missing.”

My new guitar arrived today, corralled by cardboard, suffocated in styrofoam. This isn’t how it was supposed to go, you know.

I had a guitar lined up for my fieldwork. Had it lined up a year ago, a girly-pink Daisy Rock hanging on the wall of a friend’s studio. Not my colour, but the price was right. Instead, separated from the Daisy Rock by an ocean, I browsed a website. Disembodied. I realised how woefully unprepared I was for this task, with no one to guide me, no way to see the guitars in person. I nearly bought a left-handed model by accident – a close call. I somehow managed to bumble my way into a decent purchase; it has since been approved by my brother, the rock star.

I watched the UPS delivery tracker the same way I should have been watching the notifications for my flights: When will it get here? Will there be a delay?

If all had gone as planned, I would be flying to the US next week. Well, you know how that goes. I’m hardly the only person grounded by travel bans, answering questions about my fieldwork – my job – with a ‘delayed indefinitely’. It sucks though.

Fieldwork deferred, with no definite end date, feels like a bit of an identity crisis. I am, after all, an anthro-pologist. I do research with people. It’s one of the things I love about my job and my chosen career. While I fully believe in, and support, more social-distancing-friendly fieldwork – virtual research, online interviews – it is still deeply disappointing that my much-planned-for, in-person fieldwork, a project years in the making, has been put on hold. Ordering the guitar felt a bit like admitting defeat.

And so instead I am doing what everyone else is doing right now – learning online, alone, with an amp that plugs into a pair of headphones so as not to disturb my neighbours, or my long-suffering husband in the other room of our tiny apartment. Instead of being guided by a teacher, I am watching short videos of people I’ve never met – and never will meet – explaining string names and fret numbers to thousands of people they can’t see. Instead of rehearsing and performing with a band, I hum twenty-second pop song choruses under my breath to ensure my hand-washing is up to code. My chorus of choice is that to Queen’s ‘Save Me’ – a bit of black humour for days when humour is needed to get by.

This isn’t how it was supposed to go, but like everyone else right now, I am improvising.

I am not affected by COVID in a way that will cause me great trouble later in life. It’s been interesting to keep up with the science of it all and its not been too bad student-ing from home. However, something occurred to me recently as I was sitting in my family home having dinner with my parents. What did not occur to me was gratitude; an emotion that must be stalked and snagged, and forced into the centre of one’s mind. Gratitude is only achieved through painful activities, the likes of which, annoyingly, I ought also to be grateful for like meditation and prayer. What occurred to me was how much time I had lost with my friends in Belfast, and how this, the summer after my final year was time I would never get back.

So here are the mitigating factors: this is where I am wrong and stupid. Allow me to lay it out, to bear my sins before the group and be judged accordingly:

· I’m ungrateful for the family and the home that I have.

· I’m secure and I will nor starve or freeze, or probably (due to my age and lack of cardiovascular problems and age) die of COVID or any other infectious disease.

· I am not newly exposed to danger in a low wage, low status job like people in Tesco or Asda (or whichever supermarket is pertinent to you, oh reader, I’m not leaving you out in sentiment just because I left you out words).

· I’m not even grateful that I’m not sick, I take it for granted that I will be healthy throughout this.

· If I do get sick, I know there will be people to care for me, family and NHS.

· I am not at huge risk of high viral load and therefore a more complex illness like heath workers and teachers.

· I have no dependents, no fat coocoo has landed on me, beak open, demanding to be housed and fed…guilty as charged.

· I am not a significant other to someone pregnant nor am I pregnant myself.

· I have not been put into any financial hardship.

· I am not a business owner forced to put others into financial hardship.

· More good news! My submissions were pushed two weeks later than they otherwise would have been…

· one was reduced in length

· All the emails I get are about the understanding of the difficulty of these, and I hate to repeat this ubiquitous phrase, “unprecedented times”.

There! I said it! I’m an ingrate! I even bought a new smartphone this week, this is the lap of luxury…yet seen as the thought flashed across my brain, from whence it came or to whence it went no one knows, I allowed this nymphic spark to be a cantankerous and unreasonable one.

‘This blows, and I hate it and I want there to be a responsible person in front of me so that I might kick them in the shins with big steel-toe boots’.

I am a child having a tantrum even as I recognise I am a grown up watching that child. I was planning a huge party with all the friends I’ve made over three years of work at this uni. I was even planning on being quite happy about my achievement of not dropping out, despite weekly threats to the contrary. At Uni learned to cook, I learned to plan my days, I learned how to fight for myself. I wanted to have a right roaring ol’ pat on the back, and I had reasonable hopes of getting just that. Even what I wanted now sounds disgustingly self-gratifying.

In the ignorant fog of youth, I wasn’t full of all this icky introspection and self-critique; I’ve developed that, I’ve learned how to think, and follow up the thought with why I’m thinking like that. I’m almost a civilised person in a room now, and believe it or not sometimes I have a conversation with people that I can look back on and be proud of. Thank God. Listen, there is much to be grateful for in this, there are new friends to make and new adventures to pursue. I know it, I spend time and take pictures of flowers and hug my family… but, would it be okay to allow myself, for these next months are so significant to me perhaps, to be upset? If you can get on with reading and research then good for you, and post on the forum about how interesting this all is then good on you, great attitude and congratulations on your well-formed character. Really (I know tone is hard in text), but I do mean good for you, I read and am glad to know you are inspired by this new world as you have been in the old one to explore all that good academic stuff. This is not how I feel about **LOCKDOWN** most of the time, and I have a tenancy to decide to handle something one way, and then decide that I’m weak and morally compromised for doing it another way. In spite of all the good things I have, I feel alone, I feel grief for time I won’t spend with my friends and I feel sure that my degree, my last stage of adolescence will be marked by nothing.

These are the least of the concerns of our society at large, and it chose the right priorities. Now is not the time to hold a vigil for the students who are still basically fine. These are not, however, the least of my concerns, and seen as communities do sometimes take note of the discomfort of the individual, I thought I might see myself as a member of my own community and remember that mercy isn’t just for others. I remember the student, the person newly formed and ready to take their place in society who now, by the great and terrible Mother of Nature, is forced to cower in the rooms of their father’s house. I don’t know what to think when I remember that the student is me, but maybe that is an exercise for a different day.

These are all the thoughts I have to share right now.

Thursday evening. Sitting at the desk in the small upstairs office which has been my workplace since Queen’s University was locked down, I see my north Belfast neighbours coming out of their houses to participate in the weekly applause for the NHS. I open the window and join in the applause. Many of the houses in the street have been decorated with bunting for this year’s VE Day commemoration, which has been widely publicised in the neighbourhood: two minutes silence at 11.00am; Churchill’s speech on TV at 3.00pm, “socially distant” family celebrations in front gardens at 4.00pm. 

The thought of VE day turned my attention to an old cardboard box which has sat untouched on a shelf in the wee back room for at least ten years. I know it contains photographs of my mother’s wartime service as well as other family memories: I had meant to go through them any create albums, but had never found the time. I opened the box. It contained a jumble of photos and documents going back over a century. The first thing I pulled out, however, was my own military enlistment papers, dated August 1975. My mother must have kept them: I didn’t. A brochure for the Royal Anglian Regiment promises “good pay, excitement, comradeship, promotion and the opportunity to travel, drive, signal, learn other skills and further your education.” Looking back now, the army delivered on every one of those promises, but ironically, the same cannot be said for the society it was defending. I did indeed further my education, eventually going on to achieve a PhD, but in real terms, I was paid more as an eighteen year old infantry recruit in 1975 than I am now paid as a contracted university lecturer with 13 years of experience. I dug deeper into the box.

The oldest thing I found had immediate resonances with our current situation. It is a preserved newspaper clipping dated November 1867. It announces the retirement of my great-great-grandfather, William Hunt, from the Metropolitan Police, in which he served as the Inspector of Common Lodging Houses. Although he died long before I was born, I still have his truncheon and whistle, and the desk on which I am writing, a little battered now, but still beautiful, belonged to him.

The clipping says that “Mr. Hunt was mainly instrumental in the suppression of the evil of subletting single rooms, the more especially amongst the lower class of Irish; and in his troublesome and often dangerous duties – having frequently to visit places infected with fever and other contagious diseases – he invariably displayed the greatest patience and kindness.” 

I am glad that my great-great-grandfather was kind. I wonder what he would have thought had he known his great-granddaughter, my mother, would marry one of the “lower class of Irish”? That was far in the future, but such class controversies entered the family in the next generation. In the cardboard box, I found a paper bag full of photographs and letters belonging to John Hunt, son of William Hunt, who had been the founder and Captain of a North London Fire Brigade. 

John had clearly been held in respect by his fire brigade comrades, but when he entered business after leaving the fire service, things went downhill. According to my mother, he not only lost all his own money, but married a rich heiress and lost all her money too. Nevertheless, he retained Diadora Lodge, the large family home with its extensive grounds in suburban North London, and he clearly retained his pride and class consciousness, for when his daughter, Ada, my grandmother, fell in love with Walter Larkin, a lowly carpenter, he refused to allow the marriage. When Walter was conscripted into the Royal Engineers during the Great War and posted to a searchlight unit in northern England, John hoped the romance was over. But the couple wrote to each other throughout the separation, and thirteen years after they first met, John finally relented and allowed the marriage. A postcard I found in the box reflected Walter’s wartime role.

My mother, Margaret, was born in 1917 and eventually, Ada and Walter inherited Diadora Lodge. I found photos of the house in the box too. Ada had to learn that shopping on a carpenter’s wage could not include ordering deliveries from Harrods, and Walter converted the large gardens, once a bourgeois playground, into extensive vegetable plots. I remember shelling peas and gathering walnuts there when I was a child, as well as playing in the wilder corners that remained uncultivated. I found a photo in the box, showing my grandad in his leather armchair with my sister on his lap, me in the arms of my grandmother, and my parents standing behind.

Now I came to the material that had first drawn me to the box. My mother, Margaret, had joined the RAF in 1941, largely to escape her over-protective mother. She had already lived through the Blitz, and was posted first to Wales, and then overseas to Egypt. A small autograph book I found in the box contained good wishes from her RAF friends, including this poem, dated June 1946, by her close friend, Marjorie:

There is sunshine here in Cairo,

Such as England rarely sees,

Though its fierce full heat is tempered

By the balmy winter breeze.

In the gardens at Gezira

Rose and antirhinnum smile

And the gleaming white fellucas 

Sweep superbly down the Nile.

But I’d gladly give the river,

And the flowers and the sun,

For of shower of sleet,

In a London street,

Where the old red buses run.

My mother was demobbed from the RAF later that year, but she did not return to London for long, rather accompanying her closest airforce friend, Margaret Ramsey, back to her home in Ireland, where she met and married her best friend’s brother, my father, Bob Ramsey. My father had left school at fourteen and begun a seven year apprenticeship as a steam locomotive fitter. During the war, he moved to Short Brothers in Belfast, the city his mother was originally from. At Short’s, he maintained and repaired the aircraft which fought the Battle of the Atlantic. During the Belfast Blitz of 1941, nine members of his mother’s family were killed when a bomb struck the communal air-raid shelter in which they had taken shelter. When my father went to the house to check on them in the morning, he found the house intact and the dog, which was not allowed in the air-raid shelter, safe and sound, but the family gone. The box contained a photo of my father, with his workmates, their attention focused on something ahead of them. A union meeting? He was a committed member of the TGWU. A religious service? He was a Presbyterian but not an overly observant one. Or a football match? He played when he was young and always followed the game. It is one of the few photos I have of him without a cigarette hanging nonchalantly from the side of his mouth. Eventually, a combination of the cigarettes and locomotive boiler soot destroyed his lungs, and he died at the age of 63 – the same age I am now.

At the bottom of the box, I found a pamphlet which brought me back to VE Day. It was the order of service for a religious ceremony marking my mother’s departure from the RAF. The front cover, which showed two quotes from Churchill’s 1940 speeches, was headed, “Your Finest Hour”. 

The back cover conveyed a message with a very different tone, including a cartoon, showing a soldier attempting to hand in his kit at the Demob Centre. The kitbags he carried are labeled, “Fighting Spirit”, “Service”, “Teamwork”, “Courage”, and “Sacrifice”. “Don’t hand them in this time, Son”, the storeman says to him: “We’ll need ‘em all in civvy street”. 

Below the cartoon is another quote, this time from Field Marshall Wavell: “Think what a world we could make if we put into our peace endeavours the same self-sacrifice, the same energy, and the same cooperation as we use in the wastefulness of war”. 

These were the word which accompanied every servicewoman and man when they returned to “civvy street”, and they are a reminder that my parents’ generation were not just the generation that defeated fascism: they were also determined to build a better, fairer and more humane society than the one which had led to the growth of fascism in the first place. Right at the centre of the society they built in the post-war years was the institution on which we all depend today: the National Health Service. Just like my parents’ generation in World War Two, NHS staff never wanted to be heroes. But this is their Finest Hour. And as we applaud them, we must remember that our task is not just to beat COVID-19, but to build a better society than the one which allowed us to become vulnerable to it in the first place. That is what true Victory means.