I found this text recently, stumbled across it. Thought I might share it.
I was asked a while ago (October 2021 as it happens) to record some audio for a piece on COVID and Lockdowns and madness and mayhem. I wrote this. We were just coming out of the second lockdown I think, and things were opening up a little more.
I think there is a collective trauma in this last few years that we’re all doing a job of keeping under wraps and I’m not entirely sure it’s healthy. Talk.
Look after one another x
The recording by Max Richardson is here.
Lockdown, Coronavirus, COVID19, what can you really say.
The lunacy of 2020 was surpassed by 2021 and fake news channels are talking about fake news, people are taking horse deworming pills and some of us think 5g is being pumped into our arms and some crazy conspiracy exists to control us all.
We pay 30 quid a month to be connected and contracted and contactable and all we can find on the internet are Jewish super lasers, Trumpers, fake vaccine cards, Freedom finders, doolally Truck drivers, COVID deniers and conspiracy theorists.
There’s barely any sense to be seen.
I’m still secretly hoping it’s there someplace or this is some crazy group dream and we’ll all wake up soon and watch the Netflix docudrama about the great faint we’ve all shared.
We started like everyone else, I think we were lucky in that I had just got a job where I worked from home and my wife could work from home all the time.
The kids became great friends while we struggled with being great teachers.
We watched pretty helplessly as friends got ill, we watched them bury parents, and some even buried kids. Words don’t fix that kind of stuff, that kind of pain and anguish need more, hugs help and everyone is still a little afraid of hugs.
Heartbreaking stuff.
Both our families are in different countries so bubbles were odd and a little unfamiliar, families are just out of reach, and relationships survived on dodgy connections and overloaded servers.
We held on to sane voices and ignored the fascists and fanatics, people like Jon Snow on Channel Four and Emily Maitless led the way, and the rest were discarded like old right-wing politicians and failed actors.
Loons closer to home were unfollowed and defriended, hidden from view like the holy statues your parents leave on your mantle.
We got sick of Mystery Park very quickly, bored of avoiding crowds in Sefton and dog shit in Calderstones so we took the middle-class way out and joined the National Trust.
We spent a lot of time exploring new places and eating ice cream.
Pre-booked and within the zone, obviously.
We spent a lot of time just being the four of us, which feels entirely guilty in some ways but it was wonderful to have that time getting to know each other in relative peace.
It was going as well as it could have until October 2020 when a medical issue came up and I had to battle through a quagmire of new NHS rules and a system under enormous pressure.
There was a cancer scare, the actual illness that caused all the bother and surgery that left me totally deaf for four months, a thing made much worse by PVC screens, masks and distance.
That made it all a little tricky.
My wife is a biomedical engineer and researcher, and working on COVID projects means that we are a little closer to the truth of it than I sometimes like to be, sometimes it’s best not to ask.
The truth is actually scarier than fiction, or fascists and fanatics
But we’re getting there, we’ll all get there, the nerves will dissipate, the energy will return, and we might not get Sunlit Uplands just yet but with a bit of luck it won’t all be doom and gloom.
We’re getting back to life, back to reality, gigs, restaurants, days in town.
I met a dear friend I hadn’t seen in over two years in Manchester last week for lunch. I help her when she plays gigs and festivals, and when she goes on the road, I take some pictures, tinker on the edges, and help with to-do lists.
She’s making a TV show and they’ve been locked down properly for months, there was a little hesitation that I might walk COVID onto a very expensive TV set. In the end, our lunch tool took ten hours and involved three different cafes and a hug or two.
It was amazing. And followed by negative tests all around.
We’re getting there, we all just need to take a deep breath and a step back out into the wild.
We’re getting there, with a bit of luck…
Words & pictures 