There we were, two years ago, fretting about the onset of what was already described as a pandemic but which had yet to take a grip. By and large, things were not that bad at all. The racing fraternity had gathered en masse at Cheltenham for the great National Hunt annual meeting, mostly oblivious to the public health calamity that was about to ensue.
That event was subsequently seen as a great seeder of Covid, as was Liverpool’s Champions League match with Atlético Madrid around the same time. Back then we called them “super-spreader” episodes because it stood to reason that thousands of people milling together must pass on easily transmissible illnesses.
But while that is demonstrably true, the pandemic would have happened even if Cheltenham had been cancelled. The virus was already here, brought in by visitors and skiers returning from the Alpine slopes.
Two years ago today we were still a week away from a total lockdown, a delay for which Boris Johnson continues to be lambasted, even though all the evidence shows it made no difference.
Britain’s excess fatalities for the period are no worse than most similar countries and yet at the time we were encouraged to believe this was a uniquely British disaster. We were “Plague Island” and yet it turns out that UK the death toll was below average for western Europe.
This propensity for doing ourselves down has grown over time. When I was young, the narrative of national exceptionalism was strong. Empire, victory in war and epic tales of great adventurers were celebrated not condemned. Patriotism was a virtue not a sin.
Men were men and women were women and no one had any difficulty telling which was which. Over the decades, as prosperity has grown, life spans have been extended and we have become used to comfort and plenty, another disease has eaten into the body politic, that of declinism.
In Britain, this led to our joining the Common Market in a belief that, without pooling sovereignty with our continental neighbours, we were doomed to perpetual weakness. The establishment was obsessed with the idea of joining this club, even if it meant cutting our close ties with countries with which we had more in common, both culturally and emotionally, such as Australia and Canada.
The point is that there is always something to cause anguish and collective heartache, but what is important is to react in a proportionate way. We are currently in an extended bout of dread-filled angst that began with the financial crash of 2008 when it looked like the entire global banking system would fall over.
I thought we would be pushing our belongings around some dystopian world in a shopping trolley like the father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It didn’t happen, although we came close.
Then came Brexit, which half the country was convinced would lead to economic collapse, a run on the pound, the diminution of the UK as an influential world power and a permanent severing of our links with Europe. None of these happened either, nor were they ever likely to, but exaggeration is another character trait we find hard to avoid.
No sooner was Brexit “done”, than news came through from China of a novel coronavirus with the potential to spread rapidly from person to person. Not that the Chinese admitted as much at the time, any more than they were upfront about its provenance, which is increasingly believed to have been a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Then, as the pandemic abated and restrictions were finally removed – with February 20 dubbed “Freedom Day” here in England – that ominous noise we could hear from a far-off land was of Vladimir Putin’s tanks rumbling towards Ukraine. Just when it seemed like life was getting back on an even keel, Covid is beginning to look like a walk in the park.
Now the worry that keeps us awake at night is not just the plight of the poor Ukrainians or the wider economic consequences of the war, but the renewed threat of Armageddon. The shadow of the nuclear bomb, under which we lived during the Cold War, has returned to cast a pall over all of our lives.
A friend said to me the other day that he had never felt so depressed about events, which made me think that, in reality, we had lived through a golden age. Our parents had been bombed in the war and grown up when diseases like polio and diphtheria were still rife. Their fathers had been conscripted to fight in the “war to end all wars’’ which it turned out not to be. If they were shot or otherwise wounded, they had to endure the risk of infection long before the discovery of penicillin.
There has hardly been any time in history that has offered as benign an existence as that enjoyed by those of us born in the late 1950s and 1960s into a stable, democratic country like ours. We were not even called up to do National Service, let alone required to fight in a war. This applies not just to Baby Boomers who subsequent generations think got all the breaks. Those born since have had a few, too.
Most of us who have grown up since the Second World War have come to expect a steady state of prosperity, stability and contentment beyond the imagination of previous generations. We have lost a sense of historical perspective by overreacting to events precisely because life has, by and large, been good for most people most of the time.
The Hobbesian reality is that, for the greater part of man’s existence, wars, famines, pestilence and disaster were the norm just as they still are in some parts of the world. Across Europe and Asia, people happily minding their own business have for centuries suddenly had their worlds snuffed out by Romans or Saxons or Vikings or Normans or Mongols or a succession of Continental armies.
In most of Europe it was commonplace to feel that your life was about to be torn apart, your entire savings lost and that a new reality would emerge to take the place of the old. This misery is now being visited upon Ukraine, whose citizens just three weeks ago were looking forward to the arrival of spring.
