This is the day diary I am submitting to the Mass Observation (MO) 12 May 2020 day-diary project. I’m including this within a wider series of posts that I wrote about MO last year but never got around to finishing for reasons which are summed up below (but I do hope to finish this series off shortly with a final updating post). Here is my day diary:
I am 56 years old, a university academic and live in Aberystwyth with my partner ‘A’ (52), and one of our three children (14).
I got up in the morning and had breakfast alone as our son had gone to school and A was already conducting back-to-back interviews on teams for a job on her research project. Yesterday we had been in Cardiff because our son had a consultation following-up on his surgery in Cardiff at the end of January (see below) and the day before that had been my birthday, so I had been reflecting on the past year a lot late into Tuesday night rather than going to sleep. Therefore, I was a bit tired but also pleased because I had made a decision about how I was going to approach teaching next year and so I felt reasonably content too. I had a variety of chores to attend to alongside the usual demands of email. One advantage of working from home is that you can put the laundry on, unblock the bath with a plunger and transfer credit on to your son’s dinner card via the ‘parentpay’ app, in between emails.
Shortly after 12, I drove to Tesco to buy some bread, orange juice and printer cartridges. I was thinking while driving there that traffic through town is pretty much back to its pre-pandemic state now. The car park at the supermarket was pretty full but the shop wasn’t particularly packed. As I was walking out, I was thinking how much like a pre-pandemic brief trip to the supermarket this was. Apart from the fact that we were all wearing masks, this felt psychologically like ‘normal’ and not like those trips during the peak periods of the pandemic when everyone was scurrying around furtively as though from foxhole to foxhole in no man’s land. Part of this change is due to the vaccination rollout. That works down through the age ranges – I had my first AZ jab on Easter Saturday – but it is moving quickly in Wales; my 28 year-old daughter has the date for her first jab in early June.
I had lunch with A during a gap in her schedule and then had a supervision meeting with one of my PhD students at 2pm. I think the possibility of having these meetings on zoom, or whatever platform, is one of the good things to come out of the pandemic. Like many others, I have had weeks when I’ve spent too much time for comfort at my screen and in online meetings. But, also like many others, I’m hoping we can keep some of these meetings online after the pandemic is over. It’s much easier to get people together and cuts out a lot of wasted travel time, not to mention environmental costs. I realise there are many who are desperate for face-to-face contact and I’m also looking forward to that but there are so may advantages to having supervision and other types of meeting online. I vote for the hybrid future.
Later in the afternoon, I went for a walk along the seafront. The sun was out and it was a warm and pleasant walk in shirt and shorts. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that busy. I was out a bit before 5 and so maybe beat the rush. However, I have the feeling that less people are now going out for lockdown walks, which have been much more popular in the early months of this year than in the first weeks of the first lockdown in 2020 when the streets often felt deserted. I think people have moved on to other pursuits, such as shopping. I thought it was good that people were out walking earlier in the year because I don’t think it was healthy for those who didn’t go out at all in the first lockdown. On the other hand, there has been far more traffic throughout the lockdown this year than last year. In March and April 2020, people took to cycling along the middle of roads because there was no traffic and you saw birds (not just seagulls) hopping around in the road. None of this happened this year because the traffic continued throughout.
Back at home, we ate ready meals out of sync because A had already moved on from her interviews into a non-work meeting of a local group she is involved with. I put our rabbit and two guinea pigs into their respective pens in the garden and cleaned out their hutches. Then I sat on a bench in the sun and idly tried to reconstruct the article, ‘Without total change labour will die’, that Tony Blair has written for the New Statesman from what people were saying about it on twitter. This turned out to be depressing both because of the number of white forty-something men (‘centrist dads’ in leftwing twitter speak) who had approvingly retweeted it as though it was some major intellectual intervention and because the place where most of it was quoted turned out to be a Daily Mail article by Piers Morgan. Morgan described this as a ‘brilliant piece about the dangers of cancel culture’ in which Blair urges ‘liberal leaders to stand up to it and stop “being backed into electorally off-putting positions” on cultural issues like transgenderism’. Obviously, this is Morgan’s gloss rather than Blair’s marginally more coded message but it does do a wonderful job of expressing the subtext. Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times expressed this slightly differently as ‘Labour in England is a party of the big cities and college-educated middle-classes with an unhelpful set of progressive prejudices’. I think this is meant to be funny, but it is equally prejudiced and reactionary. I support all those ‘progressive prejudices’ and I’m especially proud that my own university has strong policy in support of trans rights for both students and staff. I’m going to buy a hard copy of the New Statesman so that I can analyse the article more thoroughly but my general position on this is that Blair is utterly wrong. He was never a convincing social liberal and I wish he’d keep out of contemporary politics. In fact, having seen a graphic of how different age cohorts have voted in UK General Elections, I’m coming round to the position that pretty much everybody over the age of 40 should keep out of contemporary politics.
Later in the evening, after 9 but before it was completely dark, our humane mousetrap clicked and caught another small rodent, which I carried some way off up the road before releasing. That’s the seventh or eighth we have caught since easter. It seems an odd time of year for an infestation and there also don’t seem to be quite enough mice to amount to an infestation either. Anyway, I shall continue to trap them and move them on until there are no more left.
I didn’t do much else of note during the rest of the evening. It was a quiet day on the whole.
In MO’s call for day diaries this year it says that ‘Diaries can record 12th May and reflect back over the past year and look forward to the future and life beyond this year.’ Looking at last year’s day diary for #12May20, I didn’t feel good when I woke up and generally was in the midst of a period of sleeping badly, feeling not quite right, and finding it difficult to concentrate on some tasks. I thought I was suffering from anxiety at the situation. No doubt this was part of the problem but subsequently, months later in October, I was diagnosed as suffering from post-viral syndrome, involving fatigue and extended bouts of post-exertional malaise. At that point, things were so bad that I was off work for three months before making a phased return in January this year. Since then I have negotiated a flexible working agreement and a reduction of my hours, so that I can still cope with my job despite this condition. To be clear, the condition is improving – I’m a lot better than I was in January, let alone last October, but I still have to pace myself carefully to manage fatigue. There are also secondary effects in that this condition has affected my mental state and confidence. On the whole, I have tried to maintain a positive front but there were times, especially last autumn, when I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to return to anything like ‘normal’.
Furthermore, in January our youngest son developed an infection in his ankle, which required hospitalisation in Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth and then an emergency operation in Cardiff before returning again to the hospital in Aberystwyth. All in all, he was in hospital for 18 days during the peak of the Covid wave, which also meant that due to pandemic restrictions only one of us could be with him at any one time and that we were only allowed to swap over periodically. I was concerned that I would struggle with my post-viral fatigue but in fact I managed to cope with the tension and anxiety and sleeping consecutive nights in a chair. We also managed to deal with the culture shock of going from socially-distanced low-covid-rate Aberystwyth to the huge hospital in Cardiff, which was seemingly full of people throughout the entire site. After we finally got him back home – an hour before his online parents’ evening and the final chance to seek advice on which GCSE options to choose – the pandemic seemed different. I’d finally exhausted all my emotional energy on the topic. Whereas, until that point, I had been diligently following developments in the pandemic on a daily rate, I gave up on that as I seemed to have run out of emotional energy. I also stopped feeling angry all the time. I know there are many people who have had a much worse time than me because they’ve been hospitalised with Covid or bereaved. In fact, I don’t even know for sure that I have had Covid as at the time I was unwell in March 2020 I didn’t have all the symptoms; I wasn’t even that ill and it was impossible to get tested at that time. Nevertheless, by mid-February this year I had reached my limit and just fell back into a routine of getting by on a daily basis. I felt I’d had enough, and I just wanted it to end, so that we could all move on.
I suspect a lot of people feel like this by now and this is one reason why the UK Government will get away with their plan to ensure that the public inquiry into Covid doesn’t report until after the next General Election. However, I’m talking about conscious weariness with the pandemic as a result of its traumatic impact; I do think there is also an unconscious response to the pandemic and that will boil over at some point in the coming years. No doubt the UK Government will try and deflect that suppressed rage at migrants or remainers or ‘woke’ culture or one of the other groups they are working relentlessly to demonise as ‘others’, but I’m not sure they will succeed. The Queen’s Speech this week has set out a list of legislative targets that display a clear intent to fight a ‘culture war’ but I don’t think the ideas behind it are part of a coherent world view; it looks much more like a ragtag assortment of half-baked ideas from think tanks and opinion columnists. I don’t think, as Conservatives were briefing at the weekend, that Johnson is in a position to change the political identity of Britain (at least, not in the way he wants to) and rule for more than a decade, but a lot of damage will be done to marginalised and vulnerable people in the name of achieving those goals. I expect that the exact shape of the future is going to remain unclear for some years as we work through the legacy of the pandemic.
While it is by no means assured that the pandemic is now under control – there may be a resurgence of a new variant – I am reasonably confident that the vaccines will continue to protect us. However, there may be different pandemics and other consequences of climate change will surely have an impact over the next decade. The next few years are also going to be socially volatile and I’m still working out how I am going to approach life during this time. In the meantime, I just think it is going to be – as the cliché goes – one step at a time at a personal level. I’m returning to my campus next week for the first time in 14 months. Then, in June, we’re all going to see my parents. We did see them in their garden for a couple of hours last July but this will be the first proper visit since Christmas 2019. So, there’s things to look forward to…
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Social Humanities 