To each experience, a new vocabulary.
Up in our bedroom we look at each other in strange ways during that first early morning cough. After all, a cough, these days, is an event.
And just as we find new comfort in the suits that fade into, and out of, our TV screens, so we come to grips with the new words they bring. In a world that has inadvertently forced so many of its older people to self-isolate for years, we now brandish the term like an Arthurian sword, proud of the implied virtue. Suddenly, we know the difference between terms we never normally use, like pandemic and epidemic, or respirator and ventilator. Epidemiology is a thing, and ‘exponentially’ is the scary ever-upwards curve we need to describe the way it works. We ‘flatten the curve’ to buy time, and to acquire a ‘herd immunity’, and something called WHO teaches us about ‘social distancing’.
Sometimes we long to make a joke, and yet we know deep down that it is beyond one, for the moment at least. Sometimes we would like to talk about our own anxieties, but choose not to. We see mainly young people hurrying home from incomplete adventures, and we watch ourselves homing in on rarely-used taps to wash our hands again and again. All of this stuff is outside my experience, and the only things that I know for certain are that I have come to love the men and women in suits who are trying to keep us all as well as we can be and, after a lifetime of growling at authority, that I have decided to do just about whatever my reasonable government would like me to. I know no better, and I don’t see any suspicious agenda. I watch the Prime Minister and understand that, although this is not the job he changed the course of history to get hold of, he seems to be giving it his best shot.
Early on, I thought I wanted to get the disease as soon as I could, so that if anything went wrong, I would find space in an NHS that hadn’t been stretched out of shape and hope. Now, I just don’t particularly want to get it: It does not seem to be a gentle illness for sixty year olds.
With some bitterness, I see it complicating the world my children have to make their way in, and threatening my mother-in-law and godmother, seemingly, more than it is threatening the rest of us.
And then, when the plates stop spinning in maybe about a year’s time, there is that intriguing question of how much will it have changed us. You know, really changed us. Because I get the feeling we need to allow it to, beyond the way that the Chinese allow their ‘wet’ markets to start these things in the first place.
Maybe we will once again find a measure for the cost of travel, and see it as a privilege and not a right. And think about the things we buy, and where they come from. And the price that someone might have paid to get it to us.
Maybe we will afford our old people, a category into whose folds I feel I am gradually being shepherded, a level above that of general inconvenience. Maybe we will even come to value them.
We could end up asking ourselves, I suppose, why the Germans have four times the number of critical care beds per capita than we do, and why more than four times less of them are dying than we are; whether we have thought this health thing through, you know, beyond it being a political football. Whether, for all the fine words, we don’t really value it at all until we have to.
Possibly we will notice some of the hidden costs of the gig economy, that brave go-it-alone avenue down which mainly young people hurl themselves in the good times.
We might, I suppose, start to reflect on the nature of our island, and how vulnerable we want it to be, or not. How much food we want to rely on others for, and how much we want to produce ourselves.
And it might just be that we were ashamed enough of the ‘48 rolls of loo paper gang’ to remember who they were, and how we felt let down and appalled by them.
Above all, we might think about how our 24 hour, interconnected world has made us feel vulnerable and that, when it came down to it, feeling vulnerable was the one thing that we really didn’t enjoy.
In a time of great scariness and uncertainty, the biggest residual question might be the most awkward: how our liberal, non-authoritarian society will have to let more of us die in the end, because we have spent two hundred years fighting for that weird, unattractive privilege.
That’s the complicated, annoying bit I wouldn’t change.
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