The Coronavirus Pandemic - 5 Years Later

[huxley]

My mother`s dementia worsened early on into the lock down and she had to go into residential care as she required specialist care.
The thing that really sucked was the limited visitation and contact we had with her towards the end.
The week she died Boris was in the papers having a piss up with his mates in the garden at Downing street. So **** him very much!

The cleaner air was much nicer, less traffic.

Worked from home the whole time, only go to the office twice a week now (if I feel like it) Employer has stopped insisting on attendance as less people go in after each time its brought up. They seem to understand they will get better performance going softly softly on office use.

I was meant to see Front 242 in London a week after the first lockdown, that was cancelled for two years and when I did get to see them I got Covid. Going to see them next month, so fingers crossed.

[Hirst]

It's all a blur to be honest, I spent quite a lot of it feeling like I was on the edge of a mental breakdown and I suspect if it wasn't for my missus I'd have completely gone off the edge (not literally). I barely remember much of it, just a big long dull anxious blur.

My work is office-based and never stopped, but I had to threaten work to let me work from home as I felt my office (open plan, non-opening windows) was a disease factory already. They relented when I said if I can't do it, I'm just going to walk out.

Early on, I remember loads of people thinking you couldn't go to a supermarket that was further away than your nearest one and you'd see huge queues outside Morrisons. I felt this sounded like an easy way of catching the virus, so instead I would go in the car further afield to places I knew would be completely empty, like otherwise closed shopping centres. Huge hauls of food from M&S reduced by 90% as nobody was going in. Or I'd just go to Eastern European and Turkish supermarkets. I do remember me and the missus going through a shopping centre that was closed except for Superdrug and Sainsburys but otherwise opened-up, so we just wandered around like it was Dawn of the Dead or something, staring at the shops (but being unable to loot them). Felt very post-apocalyptic.

I remember there being outrage locally with the tier system when we went into some worse tier, as London remained in a lower tier despite higher figures at the time, but as nobody was sharing any methodology it just sounded unfair and like they were gaming the figures for the sake of London (never knew if it was). This prompted a lot of non-compliance and people just left the area if they wanted to do something, but I think the second lockdown started shortly after anyway.

Probably more to do with my personality, but I found the blitz spirit stuff absolutely infuriating and I didn't accomplish anything throughout other than probably age myself about 10 years with anxiety thinking I'd never get to leave the country again, seeing other countries still basically working but this place being plague island and banned from entering anywhere else. Didn't even manage to work through a boxset.

The only thing I'm glad of is that my most elderly relatives didn't have to live through it, because the effects on the old lady next door was awful. She went into self-isolation to protect herself and never came out because she saw people on TV early on fighting over toilet roll, spun that out into thinking society had collapsed and if she went outside she'd be attacked by roaming mobs. Nobody could ever persuade her otherwise and she died late last year having only left the house since very early 2020 for injections, a single accompanied trip to the cashpoint (ran out of money to pay the window cleaner) and then being found in the street because she'd lost her capacity for thought and didn't know what she was doing, went into a care home and passed soon after. Really sad, because until then she was always out every day. Whilst pretty obvious why keeping vulnerable people inside made sense, I have to wonder how many turned into shut-ins.