Rage, Certainty and a Ginger Cat

I’m pretty good at opening doors with my elbows or car keys now.  I shower after hospital shifts rather than before, I carry sanitiser and hand cream around in my pocket, and I can do Microsoft Teams presentations while fending off a large attention-seeking ginger cat. All in addition to having developed near-perfect rituals of cleaning keyboards, donning and doffing PPE, and maintaining social distance in a subtly choreographed two-metre apart ballet with others.

 

These new skills have become familiar and almost comfortable against the profound shock at the loss of certainty during 2020. The number of score-outs in my paper diary bears witness to a year of cancelled family occasions, travel, courses, university terms, health appointments, football matches, concerts and festivities. The niggly fear that came with being in an age-related higher risk bracket and possibly ending up on a ventilator loomed over my anticipation of a healthy three score years and ten. The potential consequences of economic collapse, illness, unemployment, destruction of welfare state, civil disorder, even shortages of food and toilet roll all jostled regularly for headspace that sleep should have been occupying in the wee small hours.

 

Along with, and perhaps because of, the loss of certainty came the intolerant righteous rage of perceived selfishness and stupidity. Watching nonchalant young adults wander mask-less round supermarkets past elderly folk struggling to use a stick while fearfully adjusting their facemasks became the hypertensive equivalent of being tailgated on the motorway by a sales rep on a mobile phone. Listening to pandemic deniers recite Facebook anti-science with a partisan certainty and forcefulness normally confined only to evangelicals or football fans induced the temptation to share some inappropriately graphic stories from the frontline of destroyed lungs and lives cut brutally short.

 

I do however have 2020 to thank for bringing some ideas I like back in fashion. Inequality and environmental destruction make crises patently much worse and more likely. Science, tolerance and collaboration are clearly the past, present and future of Homo sapiens. Democracy as a political system is not about freedom to do what you want. It is rather taking responsibility for those around you and making decisions together that leave no one behind, especially the weak and marginalised. The NHS is a rallying flag because, at a touchingly emotional level of national consensus, people seem to love its inherent fairness and security. 

 

When things eventually start returning to normal thanks to the clever vaccines, just enough people not being selfish assholes to make the public health actions work, and the determination of a National Health Service not to let people who love it down, I wonder if I will miss my newly acquired skills. I will however probably have to take the cat with me to meetings for a while when they restart in person again. He definitely considers himself a key worker now having attended all the meetings over the last twelve months.