20 Lessons from Lockdown

 

20 Lessons from Lockdown

 

1. I quite enjoyed banging a spoon on the back of a saucepan to support the NHS for about 3 weeks and then the novelty wore off.
2. I didn’t mind wearing masks to go grocery shopping. It felt like the responsible thing to do.
3. I didn’t watch a single government briefing because Matt Hancock makes me squirm and Boris Johnson struck me as singularly incompetent.
4. The lockdown didn’t feel like a huge infringement of my civil rights.
5. There was what appeared to be quite a bit of scaremongering at points throughout the lockdown but perhaps there needed to be to get the herd to behave themselves.
6. If it was all a big con trick and a huge psychological experiment then congratulations to those who thought it up.
7. It’s quite obvious that we (the herd) can be controlled.
8. People will put up with so much and then they get bored and pissed off.
9. It was unfortunate for the Duke of Edinburgh that he died just as we were all leaving lockdown. It was comic timing plus raspberry from many to the collective scolding from the older Brexiteers.
10. People are generally seriously pissed off and seething and want to get back to the serious wastes of time and money like foreign holidays, non essential shopping and beer gardens.
11. Schools and Education could have had a complete overhaul during the lockdown but the powers that be decided that the head factories served a useful purpose and let them be.
12. We don’t really know what we want to do with our lives but we do know what we don’t want ie being cooped up in the same house with the same people for an extended period of time even though we may pretend or actually do love them.
13. Freedom to come and go as we please is something that we have taken for granted.
14. There will be now a cave mentality among a percentage of the population where lockdown suited their temperament and they will not come out and partake in the ‘real world’ again. They will remain in lockdown.
15. It has taken me to Number 15 to refer to the number who have died from Covid 19. For a long time the victims of a disease that should have been stopped in its tracks by closing the airports immediately and cancelling all air travel, were just numbers, statistics.  
16. Until somebody upstairs at broadcasting house said “We better start personalising this and turning these figures into real people or the viewers will think that we are cold and heartless like our employers, the Conservative Government.  
17. We then started to see the faces of the NHS workers who had sacrificed their lives for us and the Thursday clapping took on more of a relevance.
18. Care Homes were sitting ducks and it appeared from news footage that many were just left to their own devices to manage as best they could.
19. People have profited from this pandemic. Unfortunately in a society dominated by the profit motive somebody is always going to make a buck at the expense of the less fortunate, we just don’t expect them to be Cabinet ministers.
20. The whole experience has made me even more thoughtful about the fragility of the life/death conundrum and to try not to take things and people for granted in the future.