Twelve Months On...

 

Well, we're now a twelve-month into our new, circumscribed lifestyle: a year since lockdown was first declared in the UK and a little under that since I started writing this blog. What have we learned in that time? The detail of that will depend of course on your perspective and the context in which you find yourself. As I've said before, we count ourselves lucky to live in an underpopulated and largely rural area, as well as having plenty of personal space to ourselves: this has gone a long way to temper the sting of restrictions to a large degree.

For those in the more urban areas in the northeast of Wales that I worked in during the first three months of lockdown, the story has been very different for the most part. It's relatively easy to cope if you are not confined to a small house with little if any garden, as were so many I visited in my old day-job: single mothers with young children, old people stuck at home alone, the vulnerable now more so. I think in those early days, there was a novelty to everything that helped in some way, but after this length of time that has long worn away and resentment is settling in alongside stoicism.

What I have taken away from this is basically how the vast majority of people have shown themselves to be thoroughly decent about it all and complied for the most part with the common-sense basics of self-protection and caring for others; our healthcare professionals, despite being treated so shabbily by successive governments, have been magnificent throughout and deserve a damn' good pay hike this year; the scientific community and the pharmaceutical industry have stepped up and performed the seemingly impossible on the vaccine front - something that no-one would have predicted just a year ago.

On the other hand, our government has been exposed as the shambolic and reactive mess that we all knew it would be, bouncing from one tactic to another, appeasing one focus group after the next; locking, unlocking and rewriting the rulebook almost randomly as the disease threw us curveball after curveball. About the only thing they've got right has been to apply essentially socialist monetary and fiscal policies to avoid the economy tanking completely: if a Labour government had applied such tactics there would have been howls of derision from the right and their media. They've finally shaken the branches of the magic money tree they insisted didn't exist, and conjured up the funds to get most, though not all of us through this with some lifestyle intact.

All in all it has been a trying time, this last year, and we ain't out of the woods yet - living in interesting times, indeed. Here's to all and our survival to see the other side of this.