23 March 2020…the day the UK entered its first Covid 19 Lockdown.
How on earth is that five years ago already?
It all seems surreal…
I remember sitting having a coffee in the office canteen with a friend three days before the announcement. We pondered if this virus would come to anything and if we were told that we had to work from home, how long would that last. Little did we realise…
Five years down the line and we’ve not sat together in the office canteen with a coffee since.
That first lockdown for me marks the start of the world changing forever. I appreciate that in my family’s case our lockdown suffered a dark cruel twist of fate when The Big Green Gummi Bear received a terminal cancer diagnosis in September 2020. In so many ways we lived in semi-lockdown conditions for three years.
In years to come, when our children’s children are in school, they’ll come home and ask us, “What did you do during the Covid 19 Lockdowns?” It’ll become one of those questions like “where were you when 9/11 happened?” and “where were you when Kennedy was shot?”
Will our grandchildren really believe that overnight all schools and offices and non-essential shops closed, that you were only allowed out for an hour a day, that the supermarket shelves were half empty and that you had to queue to be allowed into the store to follow a one-way system marked out on the floor? (I still recall being yelled at by a member of our local supermarket staff for going the wrong way down an aisle only to witness her cooing over a customer’s baby in a pram a few moments later and not obeying the 2m social distancing rule….) Will our grandchildren believe that folk were stockpiling toilet rolls and that you couldn’t get any in the shops for love nor money? Will they believe that for months on end people would stand on their doorsteps at 8pm on a Thursday to clap in support of the NHS workers? Will they be able to comprehend having to wear a mask in shops/schools/offices and on public transport? Will they even be able to comprehend not being able to see our loved ones for weeks on end and then when we could mix socially again you had to stay 2m apart and only meet up outdoors? Will they believe that everyone’s general knowledge dramatically improved as everyone was keeping morale up by doing quizzes on Zoom or Teams?
How do you explain the covid testing rituals we all went through to prove that you didn’t have the virus? Or how to describe the initial panic when the test was actually positive? Would “it” kill me?
I could go on, but you get the gist…. after all you lived through it and have your own memories of the challenges lockdown brought but does it really truly feel like it was five years ago?
It all seems surreal.
Coral McCallum 