BA / BEEM, GETTY IMAGES
back to the theatre to experience the
soul-stirring effervescence of seeing actual
people performing in front of my actual
eyes, remembering how it felt to live a full
life again, when cruddy August weather was
the only real drag on summer exuberance.
I’ve taken every opportunity I can to
grasp normality this past year, snatching
hungrily at new freedoms, pushing myself
on to planes and into nightclubs. It’s all so
much better than it was, but somehow the
ambient anxiety has never quite left me:
I still google new case numbers each
afternoon just as instinctively as I take my
extra vitamin D in the morning, fulfilling
the dull new routines of plague life.
How will we look back on these peculiar
habits and this peculiar era? The general
view is that most of us will try to forget,
to erase this pandemic as soon as possible,
as described in Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider,
an excellent but notably rare account ofthe Spanish flu of 1918, published three
years before our own pandemic. After all,
who wants to remember a virus? Barring
the odd tattered mask or vaccine certificate,
there are few physical artefacts with which
to commemorate this time, little to put in
a Covid museum.There have been Covid heroes of course,
the medical workers and frontline staff
who have kept us all going. But a key
distinction between a pandemic and, say,
a war or revolution is just how difficult it
is to memorialise a pandemic.
“The problem we have is that there’s
no moral in all this,” says the political
philosopher Ivan Krastev, who wrote Is It
Tomorrow Yet?, a book about the pandemic.
“In war you can construct a narrative that
you are dying and fighting for some higher
purpose. But not here. How can you tell
your children about the heroism of staying
home and watching Netflix?” Perhaps
this is one reason why some antivax
conspiracists are so determined to cast
themselves as valiantly resisting diabolic
government oppression. At least it’s a story.
Yet even as our daily experience of the
pandemic fades from memory, I do think
this moment will represent a collective
turning point.
In the early days we spoke often of
“getting back to normal”. Now we have
come to the blunt realisation that there is no
going back, only forwards, into a different
future. For better and worse, things will
never be quite the same again. It will take
decades to assess the full import of what’s
happening to us now, but this pandemic may
be viewed as the moment when a new age
dawned, when the real 21st century began.
“The beginning of a century should be
a collective experience,” Krastev says.
“And this is nothing if not a global
collective experience. We’ll go back to
normal eventually, but normal will not be
where we were before. Already we don’t
fully remember exactly how life was
before the pandemic.”
When I started writing this piece I
thought it would be mostly retrospective,
as we entered what Jonathan Van-Tam (see
our interview on page 6) used to call “extra
time” of the pandemic. But as I type, the
Omicron variant is tearing through the
country and new “plan B” restrictions have
arrived. So are we at the beginning of the
end? Or the end of the beginning? Or just
smack bang in the middle of a messy
shitshow that could yet go on for years?
One thing we all should have learnt
during this pandemic is that the virus will
make fools of any who are reckless enough
to predict its behaviour with confidence. All
we can really do, as Winston Churchill
would put it, is “keep buggering on”. In the
meantime it helps to ensure that, whenever
possible, life is filled with the kinds of
experiences that our brains consider
worth remembering, so this long stretch
of time doesn’t just become a grey
medicalised blur. Today, like many others
I imagine, I hope I’ll be watching the
football, eating leftover stuffing straight
from the bowl and raiding my parents’ wine
cupboard. No matter the ominous news
bulletins, that’s a memory worth keeping nRight: emotional reunions at JFK airport in
New York last month as the UK travel ban is
lifted. Below: antivax protests in London“IN WAR THERE’S A NARRATIVE
THAT YOU ARE FIGHTING FOR
SOME HIGHER PURPOSE, BUT
WHERE’S THE HEROISM IN
WATCHING NETFLIX AT HOME?”
The Sunday Times Magazine • 51