Month: April 2020

I’m pleased at getting an ABBA song into the title, but just to warn you it’ll be downhill from here.

In common with the legendary Scandinavian pop-sensations, I am feeling ambivalent. Or plain confused, maybe. That is to say, I find myself unsure what I should be feeling, and how I should be reacting.

Is it OK to say, for example, I’m pleased to hear the Prime Minister is out of ICU and recovering (even though it’s clearly going to be a longer haul than we were initially led to believe)? Or should I not allow his illness to detract from holding him to account over the ongoing issues around insufficient supplies to the NHS, and inadequate levels of testing?

Am I allowed to be reassured by the fact that the vast majority of us have, as instructed, shut ourselves away, going out only if necessary, and then only sparingly? Or should I be angry that these restrictions aren’t being enforced more strictly, or weren’t introduced more quickly?

Bringing it right to the heart of the matter: should I have spent yesterday afternoon gardening, which left me with an incredibly short lawn and an unappealingly smug sense of a job well done; or should I have been in some kind of mourning for the 980 people listed as having died that day? And again today, am I wrong to have been innocently occupied in mopping the kitchen and singing along to Pick of the Pops, when another 917 people have died?

It’s knowing what I should be feeling, to be frank, which is troubling me, or confusing me (or ambivalenting me, if you insist) because I’m fortunate enough (at time of writing, natch) not to have been personally affected by this.

Well, obviously that’s not quite true, nobody is leading an entirely unaltered lifestyle. But if the worst that happens to me is that I have to work from home, and can only go shopping once a week, then… frankly, it’s very hard to put any kind of negative spin on that at all.

So in terms of real impact, I’ve not (at time of writing) been affected. I’m a bit like a man who’s just fallen off a twelve-storey building, and is currently dropping past the eighth floor. Clearly I’m in the middle of a bad situation and it may not end well – but at the moment if anybody should stick their head out the window to ask how I am, I’d have to say so far so good.

For the hospital workers, and for the families of the nigh-on ten thousand victims so far (I’m also troubled by how glibly I’ve typed out that staggering figure, and how ‘easily’ we have reached it) their feeling towards the situation is clearly determined by the ill-fortune which has forced them to confront it head on.

But for the rest of us that hasn’t happened (at time of writing) and rightly or wrongly that gives us licence, indeed in a sense it absolutely requires us, to carry on. Not carry on exactly as normal of course, but carry on carrying on with our daily, run-of-the-mill lives, gardening and mopping and, yes, and singing along to the radio.

Still I feel… I feel I should feel something, when I’m mowing the lawn, or machete-ing through brambles, against a backdrop of almost a thousand deaths per day. Of course it’s shocking, but in the same way as the Hillsborough or the Herald of Free Enterprise tragedies were shocking, or even the Twin Tower attacks – it’s a response to the event as a whole, not grief over any individual.

I’m comforted at least by the fact that the few people I’ve seen (at a distance) and spoken to (at volume) this week have been similarly composed, enjoying the weather, gardening or otherwise occupying themselves reading a book, watching TV, or whatever. Nobody dressed in black, or speaking in hushed tones, or wailing.  So, at least I’m not alone.

I suppose, given the implications of the alternative, there are worse fates than to remain ambivalent.

So far, so good. (At time of writing.)