I used to listen to phone-in radio religiously at the time, and there started to be stories about a virus in China. Not surprisingly, it was all anyone wanted to talk about. I was doing a few outdoor events that February, and there was definitely the sense of “Is it over here yet?” It sounds stupid now, but I shook hands with a bloke and wondered if I should have.
I worked in a supermarket at the time, and we soon got people rushing in to clear the shelves. It was extraordinary. I was in the warehouse with my workmate, and I turned to him and said “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” It wasn’t a suspicious feeling, just one of dread.
Most of my workmates weren’t worried at all by the news, however. And the funny thing is, I didn’t hear one conspiracy theory off of them. The best way I can describe it is they just weren’t bothered. There was a jovial atmosphere. We were initially told the virus was mostly on surfaces, and I made my friends laugh by singing “Happy Birthday” as I washed my hands. Memes were going round with Uncle Albert from Only Fools & Horses saying “During the Coronavirus…”
I remember videos of people communicating by shouting at each other across balconies in Italy, and a police truck pulling up to perform songs for them in Spain. Then, Boris Johnson appeared on a national broadcast solemnly urging us to stay at home. So seriously he seemed to take it, you wouldn’t have thought he was having parties, would you?
But the first lockdown was a lovely time, in a way. I decided to learn all the local footpaths and walk as far from home as possible. It was a brilliant way to really learn the local environment like the back of my hand. They were good, innocent times. It was a little bit scary, like how a wolf or bear is scary, but it wasn’t sinister at that point.
People were leaving little trinkets and messages of love in the woods, and there was a televised concert where pop stars literally performed from their houses. Almost everyone really was indoors. I dropped some shopping round to a friend’s house, and didn’t see a single other person out. It was surreal. I’m sure most of them meant well, but I feel like people’s good nature was taken advantage of.
Captain Tom kept walking around his garden, and people clapped and banged pots & pans for the NHS. It seemed to the layperson that NHS workers were extremely brave, coming face-to-face with a deadly virus. Apparently though, many of them were embarrassed at being hero-worshipped. I can see why now.
Then there was that weird afternoon where Dominic Cummings sat in the rose garden explaining why he’d been to Barnard Castle. We were led to believe that there was something so dangerous, it wasn’t even safe to be outside in the fresh air. There was an incident where police used drones to film people being out for a walk in the Peak District. Others were fined for exercising or sitting on a bench. It was outrageous.
Personally, I started to stray further afield. One day I decided to visit a huge Oak tree that we have on a local village green. To my surprise, a police car pulled up and stared at me! I went out for a great many walks at that time and often had Apache helicopters follow me.
And yet, I never actually knew anyone who came down with anything like what was described initially. My neighbour - a good man - died from cancer that he’d had for a while, and the doctors told his family he’d died from Covid. I continued to go for walks, and saw people had stuck stickers onto sign boards saying “The media is the virus”. That’s another thing that I didn’t understand at the time, but I do now.
If it sounds like I didn’t believe a coronavirus was circulating, that’s not the case. It’s just that things didn’t add up, and there was a lot of Government overreach. Personally, I thought Social Distancing made sense at the time, and I always respected other people’s space. Whether there was a particular need for it, more than any other year, is a matter for debate.
My beliefs changed during Covid, but I had three principles that never changed. One - the Government should never have the power to keep you in your house. Two - they can’t tell you who you can have in your home. And three - they can definitely, never EVER make you have an injection.
I’m happy to talk about the more sinister 2021, if anyone wants, but I suspect it wouldn’t be very welcome. Those are my thoughts about the early part of 2020, anyway. It has taught me a lot and re-shaped my view of the world. I would like to go back to having a more innocent mindset, in a way, but hey, you learn what you learn.
More than anything, it showed me that there are levers of power way above the people we might have thought were in control. The people we think of as “presidents” and “prime ministers” may have slight differences, but they are all controlled by the same strings on certain issues.
Fear was deliberately induced in the population to make people not think straight. Because of mass hysteria, many defended things that really weren’t acceptable. A little bit of adrenaline is good in an acute situation, but chronic fear will just mess with your mind. So to me, that is one of the biggest lessons of the whole sorry saga - to never make decisions based on fear.
We will probably never know the whole truth about which pathogens may or may not have been circulating during Covid, but I hope we have all learnt to be a bit more sceptical and questioning. In a way, Uncle Albert was right - we will look back on it as a war, but a different kind of war to the one we thought.
