The current lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic has, I am sure, led many people to re-assess their circumstances, projects and aspirations. The first thing to say in this very personal and hence circumscribed re-appraisal is that I am exceptionally fortunate in my starting point. I am only too aware that a confinement between walls that is somewhere between voluntary and compulsory (but erring towards the latter) is a severe sentence indeed for a family inhabiting a small flat with insufficient resources, social and cultural as well as material, to pay the rent and feed, school and entertain the kids. And then there are those, mostly women, who find themselves ‘imprisoned’ with abusers with nowhere to escape to. So my first and overwhelming sensation of one of guilt. I have been arguing for many years for a more just ‘socialist’ society; but just as Jean-Paul Sartre (whom I have been re-reading) realised only belatedly, there is much that is ‘bourgeois’ in the setting and context in which I am commending socialist philosophy, theory and practice.
To guilt I must add impotence. I am in my 70s and have type 2 diabetes, so we have ‘elected’ (yes, we have agency) to self-isolate and are now in our fifth week of near-confinement. This means that we are not in a position to offer much support locally to those who need it. We have not to date needed much ourselves, although a friend and neighbour has done occasional shopping for us. Otherwise, with the help of our daughter Rebecca, we have managed regular deliveries of food and other essentials (even plants). But the instinct and desire to be an active member of the local village support network, of which more later, is thwarted.
This is all quite negative so far: guilt and impotence! A third observation is more hopeful. It denotes a deceleration in the pace of living. This might seem an odd thing for someone in retirement to claim. After all, for most people retirement itself is a form of deceleration. It has partly to do with the diminution of daily structures, which is a common lockdown experience. Structures not only provide psychological scaffolding, they can also introduce set-piece variety. Cafes, and to a lesser extent bars, punctuated my week prior to our confinement. Moreover, I wrote different books, chapters or papers in different places (without ever really deciding to do so). Now I write more slowly and less systematically in my study; and I’ve slowed down. The generally supportive structure, ritual, variety and buzz have gone and I must make myself get down to it in my study. My solitariness is no longer tempered by others’ bustling around me, which I have always found particularly – and possibly bizarrely – conducive to concentration.
One function of this deceleration has been a preparedness to stand and stare. I have found myself stopping to look around me, and here having a half-cultivated hillside to garden and enjoy is delight. And of course the lockdown has corresponded to the advent of Spring, so new growth, infant and tenderly green, is all around. Linked to this is an urge to pen poetry, which has entirely taken me by surprise. I have no ideas what the few poems I’ve written amount to, though friends on Facebook were encouraging when I posted one or two. What I have noticed is that whenever I tried my hand at poetry in the past the results always seemed forced. Now they flow more readily, about which I have three observations: first, I am perhaps more confident writing now (the more so since retiring and banishing my CV to the past); second, the trick, it now occurs to me, is ‘to have something to say’; and third, the content doesn’t have to represent some sort of statement, but rather has to strike a cord with the reader. Poems offer a counterbalance to sociological and philosophical exposition and analysis: they speak in a different voice!
It is doubtless a residue of my day-to-day life pre-lockdown that, like most people I’m sure, I feel a degree of restlessness. I am fortunate in my home base and there are positives to the slowdown forced on me. Nevertheless I find I am often hovering between this and that, be it watering the garden, catching up with the news (invariably on social media these days), setting off on a walk, getting dinner, reading and writing, or whatever. Even standing and staring can be a facet of such hovering. There is, in other words, a slow-burning edginess to my restlessness.
Like many others I ponder the future. I am possibly fortunate in that there are outlets for my thoughts. I can and do blog, and I am at the moment preparing a manuscript on COVID-19 and the UK for an Australian journal. This is not the occasion for rehearsing my thesis (which I have in any case blogged about). All I will say here is that this pandemic is a possible turning point. Although a return to something akin to the status quo ante – albeit in modified form – is conceivable, there could be a transformative shift, either regressively to the right or progressively to the left. A shift leftwards, hoeever, would require a state legitimation crisis and has been rendered unlikely by the Labour Party’s overthrow of Corbyn and companion neutering of Momentum.
A final point is about the resurrection of a feel of community. Very quickly after the lockdown was announced two villagers established on WhatsApp a network through which anybody self-isolating and in need of any kind of support might receive it. Annette and I have not needed it, but many others have and several of the younger, less vulnerable people in the village have rallied to the cause, notably for supermarket shopping and collecting prescriptions. This is altruism, or charity, in its acceptable sense (not Attlee’s cold, souless thing). Interestingly, and allowing for the fact that I inhabit a mid-Surrey, middle-class enclave, it has cut across class, ethnicity and gender (without of course dissolving them as structures). People who hitherto ‘didn’t get on’ have buried differences and come together. The village choir has its own WhatsApp network, on which numerous musical and comedic pieces are shared well into the early hours.
As I write the landlord of my local pub, the King Willie, has suggested cooking and distributing fish and chips to us this Friday evening.
Innovative communal forms are being accomplished, as I’m sure they are all over the country. This bears study in its own right and a local anthropology graduate and I are considering how it might best be done. The probability is that these communal forms will dissipate rapidly when the lockdown ends, but then again, the future is uncertain.