What an extraordinary state we find ourselves in: obliged to stay at home, avoid others (even family members we don't live with), cancel all social engagements and visits. The places we may like to go out to, moreover, are closed until further notice. Most of us are "working remotely" (or not remotely working) while at the same time juggling childcare because the schools and nurseries are closed (I am awkwardly typing this, for example, with my one-year old son asleep in my arms) . This sounds like something of a "nightmare situation" for many ie. those who become easily bored by sitting at home, who enjoy socialising and going out to the pub, gym or shopping-centre, even those who prefer the banter and busyness of the work-place to time spent indoors.Yet for most writers "self-isolating" is a necessary way of life and for some, even, a kind of prolonged spiritual discipline (Beckett wrote of art as "the apotheosis of solitude"). As for social distancing, I feel like my life-long instinctive unsociableness and avoidance of company may at last be interpreted as something other than the weird, rude behaviour of a boring loner. It may be one of the effects of aging and is almost certainly also to do with having a young family at home and moving from London to a quiet Home Counties town, but in recent years I have felt less and less temptation to go out anyway - giving up drinking this year (at least thus far) seems like letting go of one of the last few incentives to heading out to pubs or attending social events. So this governmental edict seems to ratify the direction I was veering towards anyway, and will hopefully also permit me to recover a healthier balance between writing/study time and family time than that toad work squatting on my life usually allows.
But before I become too self-congratulatory, I should remember we are facing an unprecedented public health crisis and this should not be regarded as a holiday of any kind. Many more lives will certainly be lost and of course we should all be taking the strategies of isolation and distancing seriously. The shortage of food and basic amenities like toilet-roll in our supermarkets precipitated by selfish panic-buying is also a growing concern. When I went into town the other morning at about 8am, the shelves of the two main supermarkets were already mostly bare and I came back with a few random items (eg. poppadoms and croissants) rather than the essentials on our list, feeling like I'd been on one of those scavenging missions the characters in The Walking Dead used to go on when the series was still watchable. Because I'd left the house in a rush without showering I likened myself to scuzzy old Darryl coming home with his crossbow over one shoulder and a dirty hessian bag containing a few tins of indeterminate food-stuffs over the other. (Fortunately I didn't encounter any zombies on the high-street, although maybe these were the shambling, unthinking hordes who had already stripped the shelves.)
From a political viewpoint, this sudden sense of blind panic and Dad's Army unpreparedness seems to reflect the nation's dawning realisation that this is a monumental crisis for a societal infrastructure which, after ten year's of swingeing austerity-cuts and siphoning of public resources into the hedge funds of affluent Tory-donors, was already to a large extent at crisis-point; chiefly of course the NHS and social care but also in the deregulated bear garden of the gig economy. We were told that the "flexible" freelance job-market was the way forward but for all those hundreds of thousands of workers living a more or less hand-to-mouth existence each month (many poets, writers, musicians and other artists among them) and whose income has just evaporated overnight, its hard to see how the government is going to be able to underwrite or recompense all their lost earnings.
But if this period of lockdown forces us to revaluate the fragility of our current social and economic conditions, as well as making us understand the value of living on less, being less greedy and choice-driven in what we buy and sharing with our neighbours when we can (especially the more vulnerable and less fortunate members of our communities), we may look back on it as a turning-point, an opportunity to move beyond the abysmal state of anguished schism and discord which the debate over Brexit landed us in. Brexit is now relegated to the ridiculous waste of energy and rhetorical bickering it always was, and rightly so: we have more fundamental issues to confront now, like working together to ensure our own and each other's safety at this precarious time.
"Almost all our unhappiness comes from from not knowing how to sit alone in our rooms", Pascal suggested (and I love that qualifying "almost" at the beginning). Thrown back on our own resources and own company by forces outside our control, shouldn't we now mine the positives of this situation and use this time to our best advantage by catching up on all the long-put-off writing-projects, the fat novels we started reading but abandoned, the classic movies and "must see" series we never got round to? The internet is suddenly bristling with suggestions and offers of creative activities which can help us use our downtime wisely and productively. Once we have got through this dreadful situation, let's hope we can look back on this as a time of opportunity and endeavour rather than a privation.
