somewhat confused
I don’t know if you’ve been following the news but Freedom Day has come to England. It’s an interesting kind of freedom in that it does not actually resemble anything like freedom. We seem to have collectively agreed to believe in magical thinking. If we just think we’re free from Covid, then it must not exist to cause us problems anymore. Yay!
Except of course that’s not what’s actually happening. Everything has opened up again but, of course, Covid is still here, being all contagious and inconvenient. And so we’re told we can go places without masks but that we actually should wear masks, which is the kind of clear messaging we should expect from a Prime Minister who once hid in a fridge.
This is excellent as a British person because it is the ultimate excuse to bring out the trifecta of passive-aggressive judgment of strangers:
- One perfectly raised eyebrow
- Tutting
- Loudly whispering your opinion under your breath in case the person you’re judging can hear you, whilst safe in the knowledge that they probably won’t
Both sides can go wild. And I’ve heard it. If you wear a mask, you’re a sheep. If you don’t wear a mask, you’re killing people. The stubborn part of me wants to either shred all my masks in protest or strap 100 masks to my body every time I step out of the door. Not sure which side I’m going to land on yet.
My conspiracy-theory leaflet-dropper continues to post tracts through our door about Prince Charles thinning out the population via deadly vaccinations (I’m genuinely not joking), although the leaflets he includes about protesting lockdown are now kind of redundant. He keeps posting them anyway, I guess because he’s got them lying around.
The media like to make up buzzwords so now we have Pingdemic. Which, annoyingly, I’ve started saying. My kids have been ‘pinged’. We’ve isolated so many times that I can’t actually remember the last day we were all allowed out of the house at once.
I mean, the temptation of freedom is there. I could go and get my hair cut (and I did yesterday, because I looked like a ginger Hermione Granger from films 1–2. My hair doesn’t grow down. It expands sideways like a sponge). I could go to the pub. I could go to the cinema. But is it worth it really? One day of fun for 10 days of staring at my OWN FOUR WALLS?
Do you know how many cracks and fingerprints and cobwebs are on my walls? Because the answer is a lot.
Anyway, this confusion and flux is a good reflection of my brain. Sometimes I feel very excited at the thought of the future and other times I really don’t. Today I watched the opening of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, got to the inevitable ‘this year is not going to be how we imagined’ montage, and burst into astonishingly sudden tears. It just hit me all of a sudden. The cost. What we’ve lost in terms of our relationships and emotional health, as well as the obvious human loss.
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about today. Am I happy? I don’t know. I think I imagined this moment to be a bit smoother than it actually is. A gradual readjustment to normal life rather than a sudden, confusing, and stressful bump back to reality, only with more Covid-related nonsense words than we had before.
That’s a little update for you. I wish you a summer of no Covid and no horrible phone calls of doom from Test and Trace ❤
(Oh also, now we’re allowed to not wear masks, I’ve had to adjust my smile. I was smiling extra-wide to overcompensate so I can show people I am a friendly person, so now I have more wrinkles and I’ve forgotten how to smile in a way that isn’t intense and creepy which is problematic given my general awkwardness. It’s a work in progress though.)
