The 'New Normal' never left we just stopped noticing
FIVE summers ago Britain appeared to have side-stepped into a dystopian sci-fi novel.
Bus stops flashed warnings for walkers to keep two metres apart and people had to dowse their hands in Dettol before entering the pub.
It was a sobering reminder that almost every aspect of daily life can be upended by something we'd long assumed could no longer shake civilisation. Yet plagues and quarantine - the very stuff of 14th century folios - were among us once again.
From the earliest days of the pandemic, there was a desperate desire to know when things would be back to normal.
Tabloids would scream for an orderly timetable to take us away from the chaos, shrill as a child in the back of a car crying "are we nearly there yet?"
Press releases promising the reopening of bowling alleys or easing of rules around socialising often offered false hope, only for the virus and restrictions to rapidly return.
And then finally with jabs in our arms we were hurried on past the horror of more than 100,000 deaths to what we thought would be the old way of doing things.
And I suspect for a good many people, currently looking forward to music festivals and BBQs without a legal limit on guests, it feels like it did before Covid.
I have to admit that for me the uncomfortable new reality has never really gone away. The world feels as fucked-up and frightening as the days when we were disinfecting door knobs and being given a daily death toll in what was formerly The Pointless slot.
I'm not sure why perhaps the most dangerous nuclear stand-off since the Cuban Missile Crisis, an existential threat to our climate and the resurgence of a 1930s-style nationalism isn't scaring people the same way Covid did.
You may in part blame journalists who in an age in clickbait content lend the same urgency to an EastEnders actor being suspended as they do a US President threatening to annex Greenland... or Putin threatening to end it all.
And the sheer speed of social media means that events are shuffled off our timelines in no short order. We don't have the time to stop and consider the implications of what is unfolding. Indeed squeezing monumental events in between a Leo Di Caprio gif and a new "Now on Netflix" ad lends the impression world events are nothing more than another treadmill for our fingers. Perhaps when our screens go dark none of it really happened at all.
And perhaps it's easy to think that when the greatest threats are confined to foreign soil and days still ahead of us. It's not like Covid when the way the world had changed was driven home by the harsh reality that your local boozer was locked and you were suddenly working from a kitchen table. Today in Britain the world mostly feels like it's turning. A bit warmer in summer and more expensive in winter maybe but ostensibly the same. Cinemas open. Traffic hums. Kids bring doodles back from school.
Except all that takes me back to perhaps the most unsettling period of the pandemic; those days and weeks when we knew the virus was coming but we didn't quite believe it. Scenes of sealed streets in Wuhan and Northern Italy were sobering for sure, but it obviously couldn't happen here.
As a local journalist at the time, my near daily attendance at council meetings put me slightly ahead of the public as a whole in realising quite how bad things were.
Sat in the back of a public health briefing at the start of March, senior figures in the local NHS were already warning of a crisis that would continue to Christmas and beyond. It was a stark contrast to the online conspiracies and lies which were amplifying the idea this was at best an overreaction and, worse still, an outright hoax.
In the cafe next door, cutlery clattered and customers chatted almost entirely oblivious to what was on its way. Boris said we had the beating of it after all.
I feel we're in the same place now, trying to hold on to our ordinary day even as all the evidence suggests something has changed, fatally and perhaps forever. Not convinced? Consider the evidence.
A man who was once described by his own most senior general as "a fascist to his core" has regained control of the world's most powerful country and taken a sledgehammer to our global institutions.
Western leaders who have long preached "never again" have sat impotent while Israel has prosecuted a genocide in Gaza and all of us have been made to watch.
Climate change threatens the very viability of the planet and yet some statesmen are actually making "fucking up life on Earth for the sake of ExxonMobil's bottom line" a key plank of their policy.
When I was a teenager, still just about basking in the post-Cold War belief that peace and liberal democracy were now unassailable, these sort of scenarios were confined to in-vogue films like Children of Men, rather than a plausible running order for the Ten O'Clock News.
In one way I can understand the stubborn silence about just how much danger we're in. There are whole weeks where I can barely bring myself to read a single line of news, confining my attention to the BBC's tennis page and conservation newsletters. When you can't make the world make sense you can at least make it smaller, setting borders around a small part of the planet where you can just maybe make a difference.
But eventually I feel guilty, as if ignorance is acquiescence and I'll sometimes take seven days of bad headlines in one go - like an alcoholic falling off the wagon. I'll never feel better for the binge.
Instead I'll want to rage about the stupidity of it all on social media, conscious it probably makes me sound like an irrational nutter and I'm maybe only alarming friends and family in the way I alarm myself when I see words like "escalation", "tipping point" and "far-right".
But maybe some of that is seeking reassurance that I'm not the only one who thinks that at some non-descript point between Peter Capaldi becoming the Doctor and Andy Murray winning Wimbledon No 2 the world embarked on a nervous breakdown that has only got steadily worse.
Maybe being a former reporter makes me more alert to it, particularly having seen how little the people behind the curtain really understand what they're dealing with. Having witnessed some backbench MP trying to pretend police funding cuts aren't actually why the local police station is closing goes a little way to explaining heads of state trying to cling to the notion that Netanyahu's murderous government is near as damn it the Lib Dems of the Middle East.
I suspect not having a partner, a kid or a mortage also compounds my concerns - you have more time to indulge this stuff when you don't have real responsibilities. But in a way maybe I'm lucky, I don't have to fret on my child's behalf or worry about my assets being sucked dry by a financial meltdown.
And I suppose ultimately I have to hope that the current madness is in itself a passing phase - that it might peak and finally fall like a graph on one of Chris Whitty's famous slides. We have, after all, faced down authoritarians, injustices and ecological crises in the past, although the stakes are undeniably higher than ever they were.
I also take comfort in my abiding belief that most people most everywhere are decent. It is only unfortunate that a disproportionate number of the villains have control of the oil wells and ICBMs.
Nonetheless it is important to call them out, to acknowledge that the new normal is not in fact normal, it's raising the spectre of things that until fairly recently we thought we'd got the better of.
Yet now on the heels of plague, the other horsemen trot forth. Famine for the Palestinian children. War once again within European borders. Death of entire ecosystems that we need ourselves to survive. Not to mention the former reality TV star in the red baseball cap who is somehow all of them at once (slashing foreign aid, empowering anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, perhaps toying with a button the same shade as his stupid hat).
And we would be fools to think our nation can escape notice, anymore than it could avoid Covid. It is not only small island states that should fear rising sea levels, nor the people of California the whims of far-right fantasists. Even if Trump's assaults on the world economy and global security by some miracle stopped short of the English Channel, there is not an insignificant chance his toad-faced tribute act takes the reins of power.
Against this backdrop, despair cannot be a strategy. There has to be hope that in the end the decent majority who have had enough of killing and shudder at authoritarianism and believe in science and honest debate comes through.
But that is the work of a great many people and today each of must settle for how we can keep our own worlds' normal. In some respects it's a return to Winston Smith's old manta of "Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is four". Acknowledging how wrong all this is feels important, if not always easy.
Or to quote another Smith, that'd be Matt Smith, the Eleventh Doctor, there is also the fact that "the good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't always spoil the good things and make them unimportant."
On that basis the things we enjoy matter. My chilli plant in the greenhouse matters. The parakeets in the treetops matter. The gratuitous quotes from my favourite science fiction series - one which has never had much truck with dystopias - matter. They aren't just distractions from the horror, they're what we want to protect in the midst of it all. They're our own small corner of the planet which gives us the impetus, the imperative, to say "hands off".
Bus stops flashed warnings for walkers to keep two metres apart and people had to dowse their hands in Dettol before entering the pub.
It was a sobering reminder that almost every aspect of daily life can be upended by something we'd long assumed could no longer shake civilisation. Yet plagues and quarantine - the very stuff of 14th century folios - were among us once again.
From the earliest days of the pandemic, there was a desperate desire to know when things would be back to normal.
Tabloids would scream for an orderly timetable to take us away from the chaos, shrill as a child in the back of a car crying "are we nearly there yet?"
Press releases promising the reopening of bowling alleys or easing of rules around socialising often offered false hope, only for the virus and restrictions to rapidly return.
And then finally with jabs in our arms we were hurried on past the horror of more than 100,000 deaths to what we thought would be the old way of doing things.
And I suspect for a good many people, currently looking forward to music festivals and BBQs without a legal limit on guests, it feels like it did before Covid.
I have to admit that for me the uncomfortable new reality has never really gone away. The world feels as fucked-up and frightening as the days when we were disinfecting door knobs and being given a daily death toll in what was formerly The Pointless slot.
I'm not sure why perhaps the most dangerous nuclear stand-off since the Cuban Missile Crisis, an existential threat to our climate and the resurgence of a 1930s-style nationalism isn't scaring people the same way Covid did.
You may in part blame journalists who in an age in clickbait content lend the same urgency to an EastEnders actor being suspended as they do a US President threatening to annex Greenland... or Putin threatening to end it all.
And the sheer speed of social media means that events are shuffled off our timelines in no short order. We don't have the time to stop and consider the implications of what is unfolding. Indeed squeezing monumental events in between a Leo Di Caprio gif and a new "Now on Netflix" ad lends the impression world events are nothing more than another treadmill for our fingers. Perhaps when our screens go dark none of it really happened at all.
And perhaps it's easy to think that when the greatest threats are confined to foreign soil and days still ahead of us. It's not like Covid when the way the world had changed was driven home by the harsh reality that your local boozer was locked and you were suddenly working from a kitchen table. Today in Britain the world mostly feels like it's turning. A bit warmer in summer and more expensive in winter maybe but ostensibly the same. Cinemas open. Traffic hums. Kids bring doodles back from school.
Except all that takes me back to perhaps the most unsettling period of the pandemic; those days and weeks when we knew the virus was coming but we didn't quite believe it. Scenes of sealed streets in Wuhan and Northern Italy were sobering for sure, but it obviously couldn't happen here.
As a local journalist at the time, my near daily attendance at council meetings put me slightly ahead of the public as a whole in realising quite how bad things were.
Sat in the back of a public health briefing at the start of March, senior figures in the local NHS were already warning of a crisis that would continue to Christmas and beyond. It was a stark contrast to the online conspiracies and lies which were amplifying the idea this was at best an overreaction and, worse still, an outright hoax.
In the cafe next door, cutlery clattered and customers chatted almost entirely oblivious to what was on its way. Boris said we had the beating of it after all.
I feel we're in the same place now, trying to hold on to our ordinary day even as all the evidence suggests something has changed, fatally and perhaps forever. Not convinced? Consider the evidence.
A man who was once described by his own most senior general as "a fascist to his core" has regained control of the world's most powerful country and taken a sledgehammer to our global institutions.
Western leaders who have long preached "never again" have sat impotent while Israel has prosecuted a genocide in Gaza and all of us have been made to watch.
Climate change threatens the very viability of the planet and yet some statesmen are actually making "fucking up life on Earth for the sake of ExxonMobil's bottom line" a key plank of their policy.
When I was a teenager, still just about basking in the post-Cold War belief that peace and liberal democracy were now unassailable, these sort of scenarios were confined to in-vogue films like Children of Men, rather than a plausible running order for the Ten O'Clock News.
In one way I can understand the stubborn silence about just how much danger we're in. There are whole weeks where I can barely bring myself to read a single line of news, confining my attention to the BBC's tennis page and conservation newsletters. When you can't make the world make sense you can at least make it smaller, setting borders around a small part of the planet where you can just maybe make a difference.
But eventually I feel guilty, as if ignorance is acquiescence and I'll sometimes take seven days of bad headlines in one go - like an alcoholic falling off the wagon. I'll never feel better for the binge.
Instead I'll want to rage about the stupidity of it all on social media, conscious it probably makes me sound like an irrational nutter and I'm maybe only alarming friends and family in the way I alarm myself when I see words like "escalation", "tipping point" and "far-right".
But maybe some of that is seeking reassurance that I'm not the only one who thinks that at some non-descript point between Peter Capaldi becoming the Doctor and Andy Murray winning Wimbledon No 2 the world embarked on a nervous breakdown that has only got steadily worse.
Maybe being a former reporter makes me more alert to it, particularly having seen how little the people behind the curtain really understand what they're dealing with. Having witnessed some backbench MP trying to pretend police funding cuts aren't actually why the local police station is closing goes a little way to explaining heads of state trying to cling to the notion that Netanyahu's murderous government is near as damn it the Lib Dems of the Middle East.
I suspect not having a partner, a kid or a mortage also compounds my concerns - you have more time to indulge this stuff when you don't have real responsibilities. But in a way maybe I'm lucky, I don't have to fret on my child's behalf or worry about my assets being sucked dry by a financial meltdown.
And I suppose ultimately I have to hope that the current madness is in itself a passing phase - that it might peak and finally fall like a graph on one of Chris Whitty's famous slides. We have, after all, faced down authoritarians, injustices and ecological crises in the past, although the stakes are undeniably higher than ever they were.
I also take comfort in my abiding belief that most people most everywhere are decent. It is only unfortunate that a disproportionate number of the villains have control of the oil wells and ICBMs.
Nonetheless it is important to call them out, to acknowledge that the new normal is not in fact normal, it's raising the spectre of things that until fairly recently we thought we'd got the better of.
Yet now on the heels of plague, the other horsemen trot forth. Famine for the Palestinian children. War once again within European borders. Death of entire ecosystems that we need ourselves to survive. Not to mention the former reality TV star in the red baseball cap who is somehow all of them at once (slashing foreign aid, empowering anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, perhaps toying with a button the same shade as his stupid hat).
And we would be fools to think our nation can escape notice, anymore than it could avoid Covid. It is not only small island states that should fear rising sea levels, nor the people of California the whims of far-right fantasists. Even if Trump's assaults on the world economy and global security by some miracle stopped short of the English Channel, there is not an insignificant chance his toad-faced tribute act takes the reins of power.
Against this backdrop, despair cannot be a strategy. There has to be hope that in the end the decent majority who have had enough of killing and shudder at authoritarianism and believe in science and honest debate comes through.
But that is the work of a great many people and today each of must settle for how we can keep our own worlds' normal. In some respects it's a return to Winston Smith's old manta of "Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is four". Acknowledging how wrong all this is feels important, if not always easy.
Or to quote another Smith, that'd be Matt Smith, the Eleventh Doctor, there is also the fact that "the good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't always spoil the good things and make them unimportant."
On that basis the things we enjoy matter. My chilli plant in the greenhouse matters. The parakeets in the treetops matter. The gratuitous quotes from my favourite science fiction series - one which has never had much truck with dystopias - matter. They aren't just distractions from the horror, they're what we want to protect in the midst of it all. They're our own small corner of the planet which gives us the impetus, the imperative, to say "hands off".
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