A vague year

It went like this.

In March of 2020 you have the sensible idea to document this strange and frightening time. You write two things in two weeks. After that you think about a lot of things and make notes and sleep a lot and then it is the last days of the year, and then the actual anniversary. But you have settled on a format for your summary, and figure that whatever you can skim off the top of your brain is going to have to do. You know that you can’t possibly put this year into words anyway cos it won’t fit and anyone who reads it will have to forgive you.

Whenever you’d thought about what awful things you might live through, you had always thought of disaster as something fast – collective panic, running and helicopters, chaos and screams. You never conceived of a slow, slumpy catastrophe where people stroll in the streets throughout like nothing. 

You had imagined a sudden upending of reality, not a banal months-long mass mortality event: some people living through it in the way they’ll eventually describe as Living Through It, some seemingly standing around tutting and shrugging as death rushes to and fro past their faces.

The piercing intensity of the spring, when everyone is obligated to stay at home for twenty-three hours a day and the weather is miraculously beautiful and the air is clear and still and the atmosphere is heavy with the hugeness of the situation, gives way to a sort of stressful undulating trudge. Everyone watches too much news, or somehow not enough, and has a lot of opinions. 

New terms, phrases and slogans come into use, the hastily composed common language of the pandemic. They range from the pithy to the apposite to the baffling to the twee to the infuriatingly obtuse, and most quickly lose their meaning. 

Different interlocking and shifting sets of rules governing what you can do with whom and where and when come into play, intensify, change, melt away, get ignored or misinterpreted. No one living person knows at any one time precisely what all the rules are, and not everyone cares. 

You figure that you are best off staying well inside what is allowed, as what is allowed feels like a vast baggy seatbelt flapping around you and everyone else.

The schools are closed, pubs and venues are closed, most shops are closed, holidays are banned, there’s no sport, casual sex is illegal. 

For a few weeks people go onto their doorsteps on a Thursday to applaud the staff of the NHS. This is great but then weird. People get weird about it. It becomes a thing, then a Thing. 

You are very grateful for your flat and are happy to stay in it. It has always reminded you of a den or a boat or a bunker. Now it is also a sort of space pod, trundling imperceptibly across the universe to a new world, exactly like the one you left, only shitter.

You watch a vixen raise her cubs in your garden. Your neighbours have spent money on stuff to keep them out, but you feel it’s a privilege that these wild creatures are showing you something of their brief lives at a time when human existence has taken a sickly downward lurch. 

Everyone gets really into a documentary series about a self-made criminal eccentric of the sort you only get in the USA.

The prime minister gets the virus, spends several days in intensive care. He survives. He does not appear to learn anything nor to grow as a person or leader. No one can estimate how many people will die as a consequence of him continuing to live. 

You are supposed to wash your hands all the time and you do. 

A very old man raises many millions for NHS charities by walking up and down his garden. He becomes a national hero and is knighted. The NHS is not supposed to be funded by very old men and sentiment, but it counts as inspiration. 

The prime minister’s galaxybrain goldenboy puppetmaster special adviser breaks the rules extravagantly, and lies about it extravagantly, but does not get fired nor resign, thus undermining the very notion of the rules entirely and becoming a totemic argument-ender for every prick who wants to do what they like.

The scientist who first proposed making everyone stay at home to starve the virus of hosts leaves his home to go and have sex, and admits it and resigns immediately, and you consider this fair enough really because he will have saved countless lives and he deserves some sex and was wrong to have it and right to resign. This will be the last occasion anyone resigns over anything to do with this for some time. 

You put almost a hundred percent of the blame on the government’s incompetence for as long as you can, because you figure you can’t appeal to the individual better angels of a whole population. But a percentage does go to the arseholes, who are still arseholes. 

You recognise that the actions of the arseholes would not land so hard and it would not be so important if the government had acted sooner. A lot of the actions of the arseholes would not even be arsehole actions at all, but the normal human actions of normal human times. 

You worry about death and sickness, about nothing. You worry about something happening to the cubs, you can’t stop imagining them being poisoned or crushed. One evening they don’t come out and you sit there until it gets dark, then you hear them rustling and chattering and one of them comes up to your leg and gives it a tiny experimental toothing and you are relieved. 

After a black man is brutally murdered by a police officer over nothing, the US erupts into huge protests and a new civil rights movement. The president attempts to quash it with tear gas and tweeting. This does not work. 

You start to see online ads for fashiony masks. 

The movement spreads across the world. 

The vixen trusts you enough to nurse her cubs a few feet away, though she never takes her eyes off you. The brown bundly cubs grow pointy and red and gangly enough that they can lie on their backs to feed, pummelling her until her back legs leave the ground and flail in the air. The cubs are nonchalant in your presence, but if you move a muscle they run. 

You both dither about whether you should wipe down all your shopping with antibacterial spray. After a couple of big shop operations where you do everything, you decide to limit it to just items that you will handle a lot again or put to your mouth. You spray all your cans of beer. Then you forget you did it and have a beer and get some on your mouth and your tongue and lips and throat are all wrong for two days. 

There are plague raves. 

The government is forced to start giving people money so they can live, although it is not enough money and then they mostly stop giving it, and they never gave it to everyone who needed it anyway because of things. 

In the richest country in the world which also has one of the worst death rates, they begrudgingly give one cheque for a few hundred dollars. They put a temporary stop to evictions. They do not stop shooting rubber bullets at protestors. 

A lot of people now discover working from home, and society more or less accommodates it. It is odd to see your way of life written about in a thousand articles as the new hot thing. The government sends people back to the office anyway so the sandwich shops can have customers.

People now gather online in mass video calls for work and play. You try one or two and your head explodes within seconds. 

There are underground hairdressers.

After some weeks of investigation it’s concluded that face masks do help to slow the spread of the virus. They protect people around you more than they protect yourself. People get upset about them. They become A Thing. 

The country enters its deepest recession for three hundred years. You await the return of illicit gin and giant skirts. 

The government fixes homelessness for a while. 

Some people sacrifice everything and others indicate that they would not move one single arse hair one solitary millimetre for the sake of anyone else ever.

It emerges that the virus can create lasting damage to the body and brain. People who were previously healthy now find they can hardly function. 

You’ve been thinking it is time to get a rescue dog again for years, and now you start to look for one just as everyone else has had the same idea. You decide to wait until next year, when there will inevitably be a glut of unwanted dogs. 

You decide to wait until next year to even think about a lot of things. 

The virus rampages around the body seeking out weakness, attacking every system. The symptoms list grows. 

You watch the numbers every day – cases, deaths, hospitalisations, transmission rate. They are horrifying, neutral, or ‘good’. It is like the shipping forecast, in that it sounds like it makes sense but you can only make partial sense of it. 

Sometimes the numbers are so bad it is obvious, but for some people no number is ever really that bad. 

There are stay-at-home sceptics, virus sceptics, mask sceptics. There are protests and clashes with police. 

The foxes scratch incessantly. They have fleas. You get flea bites. You don’t blame the foxes, or the fleas. You remember how it was the fleas that spread the Black Death but everyone still blames the rats, don’t they. There’s a lesson there you should internalise, you suppose. 

A US-based conspiracy theory that covers demented bollocks about everything from child abuse to vaccines takes root in the UK. People have t-shirts of it.

People are consumed by minutiae – what makes a Necessary Journey, what is an Essential Purchase. 

You are awed by the inability of human beings to perform reasonable risk assessments. You have to include your own hypervigilant arse in this. 

Across the world the virus is politicised, mismanaged, denied, downplayed. The poorest can’t afford to protect themselves, can’t even afford to worry about it. If your life is already desperate then this is just one more thing. 

The NHS experiences shortages of masks, PPE, beds, oxygen.

The news shows people everywhere in the world gasping to death on wards filled with milling faceless figures in uniform horror film hazmat white, doctors crying in twenty languages every night.  

You stay in your home for days, weeks.

It’s alright for you but you know there are so many people who are miserable and worse and there’s no real help. 

People snitch on their neighbours for having people over. Your neighbours have people over. You do not snitch but you hear the jolly socialising sounds and hiss about it. 

You instinctively flinch when you see people too close together on television, and then you remind yourself that they’re not people but cartoon horses from 2016. 

The numbers come down to what seems to be an agreeable number for the summer. 

The chancellor runs a scheme giving people discounts to go to restaurants, and does photo ops bringing noodles to tables. You gawp at this, but they all seem really happy and comfortable and it looks like normal life. 

There’s a whole thing about free school meals in the holidays and the government has to be shamed into feeding children by a young black footballer on two separate occasions. 

You watch an enormous amount of brilliant television and film and some comforting rubbish. You watch too much news and shout at it. 

You try various different masks, none of which are quite right but they are tolerable. Your glasses steam up. The fashiony ones are quite nice, there’s a bendy bit for your nose. 

Whenever there is stress you remind others or yourself that There’s A Pandemic On, until the phrase like the numbers loses its meaning, but there is, and it underlies and overlies everything all of the time, pressing on us from above and below, threatening our breath. 

Pandemic scepticism in the US maps perfectly on top of the built-in death-cult drive for personal freedom at all costs. Your right to refuse to wear a mask becomes almost equivalent to your right to own a firearm. People do excruciating livestreams of themselves getting thrown out of supermarkets by weary cashiers. 

Overall mask take-up is still higher there than in the UK.

A bus driver in France is beaten to death in an argument over mask-wearing.

The government sets up a track and trace system meant to map infection. It does not work. Billions go to a company that uses an outdated version of Excel to manage the data. 

You can’t see how the numbers go anywhere but up after the first successful attempt to bring them down. You don’t want to contribute. You stay in the house. 

When this is over you want to be able to say that the most irresponsible thing you did was snoffle a friend’s dog who was intent on snoffles and would not be denied. You will render yourself impossible for guilty politicians to throw under the bus. You need to answer to yourself. 

Also you really do not want to get the thing, you are afraid of it, and the idea of giving it to anyone else is unbearable. 

It is not hard. In some ways it is a relief. You miss your friends, but the weight of social obligation is gone.

You are mostly contented, you think, with bouts of frustration and despair and quiet terror and long streaks of slump. You are safe and entertained and loved and you don’t need much at all, and if sometimes your privilege weighs on you, you figure you are at least deploying it to the fullest to keep others safe, keeping your body out of general circulation.

People wear masks on their chins, or just over their mouths with their noses peeping over the top. Some discard the disposable ones in the street when they’re finished with them, or they fall out of pockets. A dog eats one and dies. 

‘Social distancing’ is the worst of the new phrases. It refers to the two metres people are meant to leave between each other where possible. This greatly lessens the risk of transmission. But it is a contract between you and every stranger and if they break it then so do you. It is impossible to stay two metres from a person who isn’t arsed about staying two metres from you. It’s like shit chess, with pathogens. 

There is a profound disconnect between behaviour and consequence. The concept of asymptomatic transmission is just too chaos theory for most people. Someone breathes near you in a shop over here, and then a month later someone else dies in a hospital fifty miles away? The reality of it just does not plug in, especially when you just want things to be normal and no one you know has died. 

People crave normality so much that they manifest it regardless. 

Patients need three times the usual amount of intensive care, for twice as long. 

The chancellor’s restaurant scheme turns out to have probably killed a few people.

Puppy prices soar and dog-related crime with them. One day you see three separate Facebook posts from desperate people whose dogs were either snatched on a walk, whisked away into a car, or taken from their garden. There is a heartbreaking photo of a glossy black cocker spaniel puppy with ears like a Georgian wig. 

Around this time various very famous people decide to set about destroying their own legacies through active or passive bigotry. Some columnists and personalities and people with big Twitter followings set about killing people through airy contrived cynicism and dismissal.

You had these notions about how this would bring humanity together.

You tentatively make a hair appointment for a date a few weeks away and start worrying about it. 

There is generally a fatal lag in governmental decision-making, followed by eventual emergency action. Eid is cancelled with a few hours’ notice.

The thing surges through society like a pressure hose and flushes all our sludge to the surface: healthcare, class, work, poverty, domestic violence, pollution, every ism, every phobia, every sort of shitness humans can visit upon each other and the world.

The president continually refers to ‘the China virus’. Hate crimes against Asian Americans go up. 

The rules change again so your hair appointment is moved. You end up cancelling it anyway because you can’t yet imagine sitting in a steamy room for an hour, and your hair seems to have stopped growing anyway. 

In late summer you go and see friends in their garden across the city. It is lovely. You get the tube and a train and then a cab back. It is tense but manageable. 

‘Socially distanced!’ caption people online as they are pictured stacked nine high in the pub. 

Things happen according to economic schedules rather than the one the virus sets. The government claims to care about mental health now. 

‘One in one out system!’ sings the shop sign, pointing the way to a shop full of ins you will not join. You stand two metres back and wait for an out, who is replaced by someone one and a half metres away who did not see you there.

You go to the pub once in September. You sit in a perspex booth in the garden. You have to fill in a form. You sort of enjoy your one drink.

In the pub garden you see two men hug and your brain makes a robot noise. You guess if they live together or not, probably not, that was an it’s-been-ages hug, they have probably done the Wrong Thing, but it’s the most natural thing, but you mustn’t.

Hugging is now bad and alarming and immoral and unsafe. You boggle at this and the boggling does not stop. Fucking hugging. 

There is a window of a couple of months where you could go out and meet people but you don’t. You almost get on a bus to see some friends in a park, but you fear the bus and you have to apologise. Then you get this cold for a month anyway. 

People don’t believe in it, people are fed up to the back teeth, people don’t want to be told what to do thank you very much. A cantankerous old lady is famous for eighteen hours after she spits “I don’t give a sod” on the news. As you edit this into the thing you’ve written a few months later you wonder if she is dead now. 

Time is weird, the weeks and the year are weird. 

Elective surgeries and other treatments are delayed, waiting lists lengthen, cancer grows undetected. 

You wait until you are sure the foxes have left and get some men to destroy the ruined asbestos shed they were sheltering under and take it away.

The president of the USA gets the virus. You are convinced he’s going to die, but they fill him full of the finest steroids known to man and he lives. He waves it off as no big deal for such a strong man and such a great country. Many people continue to die there. 

People fail and performatively contrive to fail to grasp basic things. They continue to insist that it’s about personal choice, personal responsibility, personal risk. The laser lines of interconnectedness are still faint. It’s just a bit of flu.

You’re stubbornly under-well somehow. You do the thing you’ve always done with your familiar human body, which is to call on it to heal itself, only now it just goes, huh. 

You try to forgive people for just fucking about as normal. You are partly successful.

People say it’s their choice, or God’s will. Other people, or sometimes the same people a few weeks later, die alone and their funerals have to be held online. 

You pretend you might one day dare to ask someone to pull their mask up over their nose. You see an advert for novelty cattle prods to enforce distancing. These are for true masochists and people who are too squeamish to pull out that loose tooth on their own.

You are very tired. You’ve been tired in this way and that for ages of course but it has to be said that you are now very tired.

You make hesitant plans, talk about them, talk about cancelling them, cancel them.

People proclaim loudly their absolute lack of trust in the prime minister – what an arsehole! – as they trustingly do stuff he has assured them it is safe to do. 

People get a positive test result and just pop to the shops before going home to isolate. 

The death toll in the UK overtakes that of the blitz, then it’s every civilian lost in every war in the last century.

In the US it goes Vietnam, World War II, then it’s 9/11 every two days, then every day.

The president loses the election. The country erupts into hysterical partying.

You see two other friends in your garden on the last day it’s allowed and then that is it for the year. The only other people you see are neighbours or people who have come to fix things urgently or bring you things, necessarily or frivolously. 

The US embraces outdoor dining. When it gets colder they put a roof. When it gets colder still they put walls.

Multiple vaccines are developed and approved by December, an incredible feat.

People think the vaccines put microchips in you. They have t-shirts about it. 

With hundreds still dying every day the shops are reopened because it is now Christmas shopping time.

Schools try to close a few days early before Christmas and are sued for it. 

There are endless arguments at every level about who is most at risk, what to do about it, who can be allowed to die and what is actually important. 

The self-centredness of people, the sheer unstoppable forces of obliviousness and individualism and exploitation, the murderous ineptitude of your leaders all make you weak. You point at the news and rant and wave your arms about until you are sick of listening to yourself.

The president persistently denies losing the election, claiming massive electoral fraud. 

People do not use everything they’ve learned about the virus, but the virus uses everything it learns about us. New variants emerge that are more infectious. The UK has incubated at least one, which we export to Europe and the rest of the world. 

The numbers are horrifying and yet Christmas is important. There will be five days where you can celebrate with up to two other households in your house or theirs. This is a huge deal. 

People make plans and buy train tickets, because the rules still allow you to. You compose and discard a load of helpless blather begging your friends not to do things they’ll regret for the sake of a lost £50 and some fucking Quality Street and some parental passive-aggression. 

Eventually you don’t have to bleat anything at anyone because the new variant means they finally clang the rules down again. Now it’s just one day and two sets of people allowed, which is also going to kill people but everyone agrees that’s a fair compromise. 

Lots of people leave London at the last minute, cramming into Kings Cross, creating shocking scenes. Some of them have good reason, some don’t, but you realise again this is essentially crowd control on a massive scale and you are watching the fatal failures of authority in real time. 

You feel the immense weight of responsibility that is lifted when your government does the right thing to protect you from a national problem rather than leaving it to the individual to somehow decide their own fate and the fate of everyone else.

They finally sign a Brexit deal but it’s only the fourth thing down on the news. You take some small satisfaction from this.

The new variant leads other countries to close their borders to the UK. Thousands of lorries get marooned in Dover without food or facilities, something you’d expected for a couple of years but for completely different reasons. 

You have a perfectly lovely non-household-mixed Christmas and the shittest, soberest New Year’s Eve ever. The daily death toll is close to a thousand by then, on the same day the third vaccine is approved.

After a rousing speech by the outgoing president his supporters storm the Capitol building. Several people die. 

The schools outside the south east open for a single day then close for six weeks.

Supermarkets finally make masks mandatory. 

People make much of reports that only a small percentage of the under-60 deaths had no underlying conditions. Given that the list of underlying conditions is as long as the On The Road scroll, this is not the smackdown they think it is. 

You are startled to find you seem to have four of these conditions, without even trying. 

Doctors treat patients in the back of ambulances because there are no more beds. People on Twitter go hmm that there’s silence from doctors, who are busy. 

The doctors tweet lengthy accounts of how bad it is and how the worst is yet to come. People on Twitter say how suspicious that all these doctors are suddenly posting such similar things.

A ninety-year-old woman is the very first to be vaccinated. This is not your cue to go and lick any faces.

The very old man gets the virus and dies. There is a clap for him. Not many people clap. 

Some guy in a tracksuit gives an elderly woman a fake jab for £160.

The UK starts to require hotel quarantine and negative tests for anyone coming into the country, a year after the first cases. The UK is very serious about controlling its borders, it’s like our thing, everyone knows that. 

An airline runs television ads with the tagline ‘JAB AND GO!’ until they are told to stop it. 

Brazil is described as an ‘open laboratory’. 

It turns out it was harder after all for the prime minister to say sorry you can’t Christmas than to say sorry lots of people died because I let them Christmas. But everyone’s tired and nothing can be done anyway, nothing now. 

You have to go to the doctor which means the bus. You note every person who gets on it and how much of their faces you can see. There’s a recorded announcement about how you must wear face coverings to ride the bus but the driver lets anyone on. The bus is small. A woman pulls her mask down to talk to someone she knows. Fuck the bus.  

People still don’t believe the president lost, people still don’t believe other people really count as people.

Workers in care homes, which have been devastated by the virus, are among the first to be offered the vaccine. Some refuse it because of things they’ve been told that are not true. 

You still do not know who has the virus, who has it and doesn’t know, who has it and knows but doesn’t care if they give it to you.

Neighbours and friends are blithe or reckless or incredibly unlucky.

Your tired is a familiar tired but also a new one, and it seems to extract energy from your bones and use it to make you stupid.

The government changes the vaccine schedule. More people will get it faster but with less protection, a longer wait for the second dose. It seems like a gamble. 

You mean to call people and you don’t, and you are sorry. You mean to message.

Entire industries teeter, businesses go under, pubs shut forever. You don’t know which places you’ve already been to for the last time. 

The health minister turns out to have given a load of contracts to his mates which is extremely illegal but everyone is tired and wants to move on. 

It is confirmed that the prime minister really didn’t take this seriously at all in the crucial early days to a criminal degree, but nobody has anything in the tank at all. 

The government’s vaccine gamble apparently pays off. They are jammy bastards who have got almost everything else wrong. 

Thirty percent of respondents to a survey say they probably won’t follow the rules after they get vaccinated.

The EU bungles its vaccine rollout somehow which makes people think Brexit was right after all even though it has killed the fishing industry dead in about ten days.

The president is finally banned from Twitter. He puts out tweet-style press releases. 

Things start to be suggested that you might want to go to. You book to attend a wedding in September. You are surprised at how this cheers you up, from which you deduce that you are in some ways a lot sadder than you thought. 

You can’t fucking abide the #feelinghopeful people and you find the ‘well now we’re fucked’ people just fucking impossible.

You have to lightly slap yourself down when you start to think you’re good for staying in. You stay in mostly to save your own arse, and because you’re too tired to go out. 

The president is impeached for a second time, for incitement of insurrection, but acquitted on a technicality facilitated by his party. He remains popular among his party, and at a conference says he might run again. 

Stories about the need to ‘learn to live with the virus’ are published, which contain truth but also irony. There are one or two countries where they do not have to learn to live with the virus because they decided at the start it would be unacceptable.

Someone comes back from Brazil with a new variant and doesn’t register properly and vanishes into British society. They turn up after a week-long manhunt. This is ridiculous. 

The vaccination programme goes astonishingly well. The government takes most of the credit. You feel just as blank at the positive numbers as you do at the negative ones by now, but when friends share that they’ve had the jab you beam. 

It is found that after all this only just over half of people with symptoms know to get a test.

It turns out that there’s barely any risk of transmission from surfaces after all, but a lot of energy continues to go into deep cleaning of places because you can’t be too careful and also it looks like you’re doing a thing. 

You watch livestreams of gigs. They are good but sad. You book tickets for things for next year. You’ve had tickets for a festival for the last year and it’s been postponed four or five times. 

This is a different world but everything looks just the same for now, except for a few signs and people wearing masks and adverts being weird. It is quieter. 

Because it doesn’t seem different unless you’re attuned to it, people can aggressively pretend it’s the same as it was. You don’t know how they do it. You envy them. 

You had this idea that maybe this could be the thing that reboots us, forces a profound shift, but now you think it won’t – although surely there will be some bullshit for which people will no longer stand. 

The Brazilian president, presiding over the second worst death toll in the world, demands of his people when all this crying and whining will stop. 

None of your Underlying Conditions are bad enough to get you a vaccine yet but you are fine to stay in your home, yes. 

You’ve put on a small amount of weight and who gives a shit, each extra clump of fat cells is more of you that is not in the morgue. 

The money raised by the very old man buys tea and snacks and sofas for exhausted nurses. They also get a one percent pay rise, which causes outrage but the government says there just isn’t any more money. 

Since you are now assured that transmission doesn’t happen so easily outdoors you sort of wish for all the energy back you spent being afraid and being cross at footage of crowds, and all the times you stepped into the road to avoid people and held your breath going past them like a dick. But then you never truly regret any excess caution, any surplus distrust of government, any extra helpings of primal life-preserving hyperawareness.

Mass shootings resume in the US.

Brazil is described as a ‘biological Fukushima’. 

Your brain maxes out frequently, like your internet.

You find you don’t mind wearing a mask after all as it keeps your face warm and makes you feel at least somewhat safer, and it is a signal to strangers that you mean no harm. 

You feel mostly normal, or do you.

Some people cope, some disintegrate, some seem impervious.

You realise you now have to add a year on to most things you say about the past. 

People still believe the prime minister is doing his best under difficult circumstances, a fire blanket of a phrase that will forgive all things.  

You’re really mostly fine but never far from rage or sadness, usually about other things, often about tiny things, sometimes about the thing itself but the thing is too large to look at, like a looming adjacent planet that has moved itself into the sky. 

It seems easy and obvious to describe and yet you can’t. You work on this thing for ages and hope the fragmentation of it evokes the experience somehow in a way that might look like you meant to do it. 

Vaccinations are paused in Europe over blood clot fears. There’s some argument between the UK and Europe about vaccine supply which your brain brusquely decides it does not have space for so you can’t really summarise it. 

‘Peak Dog’ has been reached, says one of the papers, but you reckon they’ve jumped the gun. 

‘Vaccine passports’ are a Thing about which people have many feelings. You don’t know what your feelings are other than you do not trust the government nor a lot of the public. 

Some people march in London against everything to do with combatting the virus, some wearing yellow stars to indicate that they think being asked to stay at home or show they’ve had a vaccine is comparable to being exterminated by Nazis. 

You sort of think you’ll just get NHS appointments when it quietens down, but the waiting lists now stretch on forever. You get a referral to nowhere. 

People protest male violence and police violence, rage in the streets against the suppression of the right to protest. There are no protests against government incompetence and corruption, none about the unfathomable and unnecessary loss of life, and people on social media smugly say it’s apathy but you think it is immense exhaustion and the fact that everyone is still staring upwards at the side of the planet or just doing things in its shadow. 

It is spring again and you get the sense that time has crumpled, a year collapsed into itself.

The cop who murdered the black man over nothing gets convicted and goes to prison.

You book your vaccine appointments.

A ‘double mutation’ variant from India reaches the UK. We had sent them our own variant and now send medical supplies. In Delhi one person is dying every four minutes, some on pavements outside hospitals. There’s a black market for oxygen. 

Things are going to be the same as they were only they aren’t, but there’s no thinking about that.

You look at the rubbly patch where the shed used to be. You wonder if the cubs survived, if any have had their own litters, if you might see them again. 

It turned out the spaniel puppy that disappeared from the garden was just hiding in a cupboard.