by Guy de la Bédoyère
Before we can undo Lockdown Land we must try to understand why it has proved so appealing to so many people.
I’ve done a number of jobs over the last 40 years, but by far and away the most full-on was retraining as a secondary school teacher at the age of 49. In some ways it was a superb experience, but in other ways it was a nightmare. The job was never done – there was always something else. Whatever one did it was never quite good enough. Targets were replaced by new targets. In short, it was like trying to climb up a glass cliff with melted butter in my hands.
In the event I lasted nine years, but for much of that time I was acutely conscious that had anything happened – like an accident – to take me out of work for several weeks or months, I’d almost certainly never be able to climb back on the travellator and resume my duties.
That was a job in education, but it could be matched by so many other jobs where the sheer momentum is what keeps it going: from the commuting, right down to worrying at the weekends, the relentless and merciless pressure of performance management and the status that becomes tied up one with one’s persona. The ceaseless frenzy becomes an end in itself and people become lost within it.
Many years before, I worked at the BBC. I was only 26 when I witnessed a decisive moment. A manager whom everyone feared and who ruled the place retired. We were all invited to pop in one morning for a drink and snacks to say goodbye. Her office had one large desk and three smaller ones for her underlings. She went at lunchtime. That afternoon I went back for some admin reason. Her desk had gone and the other three had been rearranged in such a way it was impossible to see how there had ever been room for hers. Her irrelevance had been instantaneous. I was transfixed by this and decided then that I would never seek or bother with promotion in the workplace. I have, I am happy to say, been very successful in that endeavour.
As it happens, I left teaching of my own accord in 2016 to resume freelance writing and lecturing on a part-time basis to lead into retirement. It was a fascinating experience to walk out that midsummer morning. All the responsibility and even relevance evaporated in a trice.
And that’s pretty much what happened to most of Britain in late March 2020. In a development no-one in SAGE or the government anticipated, large numbers of Britons were led into a delusional world of premature retirement. The spell was broken. The bubble burst. Status at work dissipated. No more clean shirts on Sunday night. People have discovered that the roof didn’t fall in when they were no longer at work, thrashing themselves to be indispensable.
Every dynamic of the workplaces was changed. The sheer force of habit was disrupted and everyone was led inadvertently through a door into what Fate decreed would be an unnaturally early summer that has seemed like one from childhood. A headteacher friend of mine says it has already become clear that some of his staff have enjoyed the lockdown so much they will undoubtedly struggle to go back to work in any capacity, let alone having to adapt all their working practices to the so-called “new normal”.
This is easy to understand when it involves people who have flogged through years or decades of work, but the other day I heard from one of my ex-students. She bust a gut through school and university to become a lawyer. She’s about 23 now, and like so many other people she’s been working at home in her job in corporate law. The experience has galled her. Stripped bare of what she called the glamour of working in a team and going to a busy office she has seen her job for what it is: a Dickensian drudge of Jarndyce and Jarndyce paperwork. This girl is a grafter and a person of real determination, but she has already come to the conclusion this is not something she can possibly do for the rest of her life. She might well have come to that conclusion anyway, but it has come a whole lot faster.
While I am on students, let’s not forget that, for children, school is their working world. It’s stressful for them too, just as much as it is for the teachers and indeed probably for some a great deal worse. I came to realise as a teacher myself that plenty of teenagers – especially – find the deadlines, the noise, the pressure, and the relentless preoccupation with the barbarities of social media to be a seriously debilitating experience, emotionally and mentally. For hundreds of thousands of them I’ll bet the last few weeks have included a profound sense of relief to be away from school. For some, even the journey to school by bus or the walk down the road to or from the school is traumatic.
The parents no longer have to struggle with turfing them out of bed, sorting out breakfast, making sure they have everything they need – and all with an eye on the clock. The same parents no longer have to experience the onslaught of exhausted and hungry offspring piling back in the late afternoon. And there are plenty of parents who hate the effect school has on their children.
Therefore, I’m not one tiny bit surprised that so many people think that Lockdown Land is a nicer place to be. For a start it never rains. Well, hardly ever. There are no heaving commutes to work on nightmare trains. For the victims of Southern Rail the last few weeks must feel like Paradise Lost has become Paradise Regained. No more getting up at the crack of dawn, the last few hours of sleep a fevered agitation in advance of hurling oneself out of bed.
For those lucky enough to have a decent house and garden, their loved ones mostly in residence as well as being furloughed, the Land of Might-Have-Been has turned out, at least for the moment, to be the Land That Actually Is and “far more mercifully planned” than the one they know.1 “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” said T.S. Eliot, and he was right. It’s why Lockdown Land has proved so dangerously beguiling.2
Even better, in a remarkable and unexpected nod to Ancient Rome, the Annona has been revived. The Annona was the Corn Dole. Not every citizen of Rome was entitled to it but a very large number were, and the effect was that about half the huge city’s population depended on it. What this meant was that all you had to do was loaf around in Rome and occasionally go and get your handout of free food. And if the Roman government failed to deliver then there was hell to pay, even if it wasn’t the government’s fault that storms or pirates had compromised the shipments: riots erupted when the crowd got hungry. The emperor Claudius was confronted by an enraged mob when only a few days’ supplies were left. His solution was to “ramp up” the administrative and harbour arrangements to ensure an improved supply. It was politically impossible to run the scheme down – another ominous portent that goes alongside the rent and mortgage holidays.
And now, having done all that, our beastly government is trying to get people back to work. It’s an absolute swiz but luckily it comes with a trump card, and everyone has one. Since the government reliably assured the population of Britain that to step out of the front door would either mean dying oneself, or causing someone else to die, or both, then there’s a spectacularly good reason to continue to stay at home.
Of course there is also a terrible side to all this. The Ruin of Britain is staring us in the face. The money will run out soon. Not only that, but also Winter is Coming. It’s easy to forget that we are less than a month from the summer solstice. Then it’s all downhill to the dark cold months when not having a job, or any income, or any security, will sit uncomfortably alongside all the normal physical ailments of the northern hemisphere. Hundreds of thousands of people and their families will be confronted by genuine destitution, deprived of the ability to earn their modest livings in zero-hours contracts or with their vulnerable businesses. Right now, many of them cannot afford food. In five months’ time they’ll be struggling to pay fuel bills, too.
None of this was thought about by the government or its advisers – or if it was, they reacted like Scarlett O’Hara who always said she’d “think about that tomorrow”. No-one ever considered the possibility that, by throwing a switch, so much could change in a population’s psyche, and so quickly. We are of course stuck between a rock and a hard place. The virus is a fact of life now, but so and always was our need to earn our living. The Earth owes us nothing.
What matters in life is not what goes well, but what goes wrong and how we deal with it. So far we have not dealt with this particularly effectively. We have replaced one problem with another and a far bigger one at that, like burning a house down to deal with a water leak. If we are to solve this new self-inflicted problem then the government’s responsibility now – and it is all our responsibility – is to move as fast as possible to rid this country of its new-normal mindset that hiding behind the front door is the path to our salvation. We are living in an entirely false state at the moment, like inhabiting the basket beneath a hot air balloon with the fuel about to run out but obliviously continuing to enjoy the ride.
Not long before the virus crisis took hold my three-year-old granddaughter was supposed to be going out for a walk. “I’m not ready,” she said. It soon transpired that this was not a statement about not having her coat or shoes on but a more metaphysical observation of her state of mind. “I’m not ready” meant she was not disposed to going out at all. Ever. She would therefore never be ready.
I am reminded of that every time I hear someone saying “I’m not going back to work until I feel safe”, or “I’m not sending my child back to school until it is safe to do so”. Such sentiments are conveniently couched in rational terms, but in reality they cloak an emotional reluctance ever to return. Right now they represent this country’s biggest obstacle to recovery. The world has changed and we can never go back to where we were, but whatever we do we have to face up to the realities to which Lockdown Land has closed so many people’s eyes and not hide beneath the bedclothes where we might suffocate instead.
There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck.
E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey (1907).
We are none of us safe.
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Brilliant article, and great analogy about the hot air balloon.
Which reminds me of a thought which crossed my mind a while back, after happening upon this column by Freeland in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/17/political-imagination-end-lockdown-mass-testing-contact-tracing
…in which he used the quite inappropriate (though superficially plausible) analogy of the public being a family hiding in a cabin whilst a wild bear prowled outside, and needing to make a decision on when it was safe to come out (ie. when the bear had gone away).
For starters, I found this troubling because if the bear just stayed outside indefinitely the family would eventually starve.
But the point is, the analogy was wrong. Under lockdown, we are not sitting in a cabin which is safe and stable for the foreseeable future. Instead we are taking huge risks with the entire functioning of society.
The better analogy which then crossed my mind was we are all in a submarine. The virus was some unknown fault which sounded an alarm in the engine room. Under those circumstances it might be sensible to temporarily shut down the engines whilst the fault was investigated.
However what has happened with lockdown is the engines have just been left switched off and the powers that be are saying “let’s stay here until we can be perfectly sure they are safe to start up again. After all, we are all still breathing and everything is perfectly comfortable, isn’t it?”
Whilst all the time the ship sinks nearer to the bottom, the hull pressure increases and the remaining air decreases. We can only hope someone shouts the order to surface before the entire ship implodes.
Yes, the “bear” scenario really annoys me. Most people – apparently including almost all politicians and other “decision makers” – have no idea at all what viruses are, how small they are, or how ubiquitous they are.
The world is thought to contain about 10 to the power 33 viruses – more than stars in the universe, more than grains of sand in the world. Much of our human DNA consists of old viral genes from invaders that burst in, were assimilated, and joined the host genome. (Karin Moelling, a leading virologist, states that the human immune system was created by viruses trying to defend the cells they had conquered from other viruses).
Every human body is full of viruses, bacteria, fungi, archaea, amoebae and other microorganisms – a total of 2-3 kilos for an average adult. Only about 10% of our cells are human; the other 90% belong to our tiny symbiotes.
Thus, as Moelling explains, our immune system is not so much “at war” with viruses as “playing ping pong with them”. Health consists of keeping the balance between all the myriad elements of the human body.
To say that someone has “been infected” with Covid-19 is misleading. I am sure we all have a few billion of the little buggers somewhere in our bodies. It’s only when the number of billions ramps up sharply that we start to feel off-colour – and only then that tests can detect the virus. (Both the PCR and the antibody tests are extremely unreliable, giving both false positives and false negatives – not least because trying to confine a virus or keep it out is like, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “shovelling flies across a room”).
The virus does not really exist, in active form, anywhere except in human cells. It may lie around dormant on surfaces for a while, but eventually it degrades. And it probably gets into the body only through the nose, mouth and eyes. It gets the upper hand whenever the body is weakened – the immune system is inadequate, or there is some powerful stress. (Such as being locked down). Both stress and immune deficiency can be caused by a bad diet, such as Western governments have been recommending for the past 50 years, by vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and by lack of sunlight and fresh air (the best disinfectants).
So locking yourself in your house until the virus “goes away” is as ludicrous as the frantic attempts of a horror film victim to barricade the doors and windows – only to find the monster is already in the house. As Pogo said, “we have met the enemy and it is us”.
The virus will never go away. The best we can hope for is that, in time, almost everyone’s immune system will have encountered it and created sufficient defences to hold the balance – to maintain the ping-pong rally indefinitely. That is how human beings have been coping with viruses for the few million years humans have existed, and there is nothing else. Clever drugs and vaccines do no more than clumsily try to provoke the immune system into premature action – which may not end well even when it appears to succeed.
This is brilliant. This is what I have been trying to explain, but Tom Welsh has it well and truly nailed. Thank you!
What i find strange in this analogy you mention is what Roy Aitken, former Celtic FC and Scotland defender / midfielder would be doing outside a cabin terrorising a family.
I agree with the analysis. I think there is also a compounding problem of the “safe space” culture that has been propogated in the last 30 years. The BBC and the Guardian are guilty here but so is most of the rest of the press and now our politicians have succumbed. The Andrew Marr interview with Michael Gove last week is a prime example. The idea one can negate all risk is absurd. Gove rightly asserted one cannot avoid all risk but it is unfortunately a brave politician in this time of panic who actually speaks sense. And it pains me to write this as someone on the left who feels his world is crumbling before his eyes both figuratively, legally and economically.
“A courageous decision, Minister…”
Hmm, this psychological aspect is perhaps even scarier than the state to which governments have brought their economies. We have finally been allowed to go on the beach, but I keep wondering if we are actually about to go ‘On The Beach’ (a la Neville Shute).
That book has been on my mind a lot over the past few weeks.
Don’t think it’s just individuals, institutions are finding it hard as well. A week after the lockdown was eased here all the park car parks are still locked up, I think the local authorities are finding it easier not having to deal with the public
But how will they manage without the income? Not to mention deferring two months of council tax…
They won’t understand that bit until it’s much too late (and then they’ll blame the government anyway).
Taxpayers are no longer needed. We print money now.
Brilliant.
(When there’s a Guy article to read, I always pause, set myself up with a coffee, and then settle down for a real treat).
Hear, hear! It’s quite unusual to find opinion that is so well written, well argued, and well researched.
I think you mean E.M. Forster, not C.S.
Please don’t get the little things wrong, because it’ll give the malicious the chance to claim that all the big things are wrong too.
Excellent piece. I have another analogy – that blissful moment when road runner is off the cliff and in mid air, still running. Or the whale in Douglas Adam’s story becoming conscious for a few seconds as it plummets to earth. This situation is as darkly comical and as tragic.
A common theme in the comments of this website is the notion is that people enjoy being on forlough as furlough is a dream situation is that you are paid not to work. They get only get 80% of their wage but this is compensated by no travel costs.
The lockdown is going to have a major economic impact and one cause is large sections of the population not working even if this is only temporary. Let’s say a company is unable to operate during the lockdown and the workers are all off. If no one is working, things like toilet paper, soap, stationary etc are not needed which will have a knock on effect on suppliers. There is a convenience store near the company which receives a lot of trade from the workers eg buying coffee for breaks, newspapers. The convenience store looses this trade when the workers are not there. A fair number of workers travel by bus and bus companies loose this trade when the workers are away. Many of the workers are worried if they will have jobs to go back to and are reluctant to spend money.
When my younger son was at collège, as the French say, he went through a bad patch. I’ve never been able to find out precisely what happened, but I think his so-called friends stopped speaking to him. One evening he even cried. Then he learned to cope. He hung about with a new boy, observed the others, joined in the conversation when he could, was gradually re-accepted by the group. The whole experience was unpleasant, but made him more resilient. It occurred to me that if covid19 had happened when he was thirteen he would have liked nothing better than to be allowed – forced – to stay at home where his family was nice to him and he didn’t have to meet these nasty friends. He would probably have dreaded going back to school. His character would have developed in a different way. It is not good to be too safe at an impressionable age.
Tom Welsh is spot on. The worst thing to do for one’s health is to stay at home, out of the sun. This is especially so at mid to high lattigudes. The lunatic advice to stay at home, enforced by police state behaviour, has taken the last remaining elements of self-sufficiency from most people. I am also seeing a nastiness develop in formerly decent people who gave been in isolated lockdown. Having no face to face contact with colleagues for a few months is causing personality shifts towards dictatorial and repressive behaviour, or maybe exacerbating these traits.
Reminds me of
Klaatu, Everybody Took a Holiday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_O0ltzBlLs
Great article. But I keep asking the reasons for many of the measures in the emergency act and how was it drafted and agreed so smoothly and quickly. I’ve used https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/coronavirus-act
as a decent summary and believe that the sections on death certification, post mortems and inquests and the removal of liability for indemnity from health services probably make the primary statistics of death wholly suspect. Most of the Act has a shelf life of two years, but not this last section. Our health services may be exempt from liability for some time.
One question remains. I’ve heard talk of health workers being subject to the Official Secrets Act. Is this true and where are the references?
We are being scammed.