FOUR YEARS ON FROM THE FIRST COVID LOCKDOWN, THERE’S ASENSE THAT LIFE HAS RETURNED TO SOME SEMBLANCE OF NORMALITY – WHATEVER THAT MIGHT MEAN. BUT ARE WE ACTUALLY ALL DISASTER SURVIVORS? EVA WISEMAN REPORTS
THERE WAS A PERIOD IN DEEPEST LOCK-down all those light-years ago when we would regularly ask each other if we were all right. Texts would ping in the mornings. ‘How are you doing?’ ‘How are you coping with this upturned reality, these home-schooled, banana-breaded one-walk days?’
‘Are we OK?’
We were not. Of course we were not OK. We were quite mad and grief-y, actually, with our hands cracked from sanitiser, hearts longing for our unseen parents and relationships spread thin as Marmite. But time passed. We all moved on. Everything went back to normal. Didn’t it?
The imminent fourth anniversary of our national lockdown has seen some of us looking around at a country on strike, down at our ‘burned out’ bodies, and asking the question again: ‘Are we… OK?’ For me, it was the first morning of the school holidays in July when I had this feeling. This bad, unplaceable feeling, like panic and doom, or having eaten something rotten at the weekend. It wasn’t until another parent described a similar dread that we were able to locate it in the bit of us that had not forgotten lockdown – the prospect of no school for weeks had pressed on a bruise.
I had to sit down. The first lockdown had started the week I went on maternity leave, with my daughter’s school closing the following day. I gave birth to my son on a hot April morning in bright panic – Britain felt as if it was vibrating with dread, alive with death. The baby’s first year was spent watching our attempts at ‘home learning’ in an airless house. Bemused, we shuffled angrily from room to room looking for escape routes. We used him as a clock, as proof time was passing.
Mine was far from the worst experience of childbirth in a pandemic, but even in my privilege, my mental health was paper-thin. The charity Pregnant Then Screwed marked the second anniversary of lockdown in 2022 with a film warning that the rise in postnatal depression would be huge; a mental-health epidemic yet to come. On the third anniversary in 2023 there was no such marker – the feeling by then was that we must look forward, not back. That we mustn’t dwell.
When the Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope, Britain’s leading disaster expert, was published just days after the UK’s final Covid restrictions were lifted in 2022. For two years, she claims, we lived in a state of terror. People’s parents died on ventilators, alone. Loneliness spread like weather fronts. Politicians decided where we could be for Christmas, and police fined neighbours for picnicking.
‘We are all disaster survivors now,’ Easthope wrote. ‘That’s the line I get the most reaction to,’ she says. ‘People originally foug
