What do you normally do on New Year’s Eve? I ask because people tend to have traditions for these sorts of things – and, safe (as can be…) in the knowledge that no new restrictions will dispatch the wrecking ball through Friday night’s plans, there’s no reason we can’t all party like it’s 2019. But will we? Government restrictions are one thing, but then there are the self-imposed ones: hosts cancelling for fear of sparking a superspreader event, friends who will only attend if there’s a one-way system round the nibbles table, caps on guests and the windows wide open; others whose concerns over getting pinged mean most social engagements are no longer worthwhile. For those who have dodged enough of the above to still be celebrating as though the last two years never happened, Friday may be the closest approximation to normal possible for some time.
The old normal, that is. The one that has been unpicked, piece by piece, and will not return. Work, home, socialising, shopping, exercise – too much has changed to go back to what came before, and any notion of waiting things out in the hope this blip might pass is to waste yet more of what is left.
There are many, many people for whom the virus poses a real threat, requiring their lives to be put on pause. There are many others who aren’t in that situation though, but who – because aspects of their life remain in the emergency mode created at the pandemic’s start – have yet to feel secure in releasing their foot from the brake. Offices are still closed, signs and screens are everywhere, health documentation is required at events; life remains replete with modifications, and that is not set to change anytime soon. Why would it?
Many businesses have been handsomely rewarded – or even made it their business – to cash in on fear, like those who have pivoted to become ‘healthcare companies’ (in spite of having done nothing of the sort prior). Then there are those who can gladly employ fewer staff now that apps, in lieu of waiters, take orders; the financial boon of no longer running complimentary breakfast buffets, or the still-taped off free coffee machines at Waitrose. There are the calls to shops or services you’ve ordered from who, mid-variant surge or otherwise, will pass off any error that’s crept in as being ‘because of Covid’ – even if, when pressed, there is no explanation as to what difference it could have made.
From mindsets to material things, the virus is now the core around which the rest of life is bent to fit. There is nothing wrong with reconfiguring the status quo when it no longer meets our needs. But it is our duty to challenge what those ‘needs’ are – particularly when they now so often seem to involve once-enjoyable parts of life being diminished with little reason.
Early on in the pandemic, comparisons were naturally drawn between Covid and Spanish Flu, the 1918 pandemic lasting a year or two before wiping itself – and the 50-100 million it killed – out. It is a seismic event devoid of monuments in London or most other major worldwide cities, for that matter; a subject largely untouched by the writers of the age too, in spite of the disease having infected one in three people on the planet.
The idea of this virus similarly exiting our lives with the gusto it arrived now looks either unlikely or impossible. Just as 9/11 changed airport security forever, the Covid imprint has spread too far, to too many things, to turn each of them back – and the scant bits that remain unchanged only serve to highlight the altered state we’re still in. This new normal has created a divide between us: between those willing to muddle through the added layers of complications heaped on previously simple things in an attempt to simulate the old normal, and those who prefer to cut such elements out entirely. Is this really the post-pandemic ‘recovery’ we were promised?
Perhaps the clue to the issue here is in the name – recovery – the idea we can bring back what has been lost. But we are past that point: surely the way forward now is to forge a strategy that recognises how far removed things have become, and attempts to carve out what a good, virus-adjacent life can feasibly look like. Let’s at least plan for the world we live in, rather than one that used to exist, and won’t again.
