The government permits us to take exercise for up to an hour outside the home, as long as we maintain a distance of at least two metres from other people.
Not long ago, mere weeks, had I written an opening sentence like that, it might have been the start of a short story about a coup, or martial law, set in a dystopian future, or in another, troubled country.
Not any more. It’s sensible advice from the Public Health authorities. Or is it? None of us knows. And so I venture out for my daily walk, sunglasses perched on top of my face mask, hand sanitiser tucked in my pocket, to walk through streets of the worried, and the wary, and the not very well.
The daily walk is both essential, and troubling. The weather, this holiday weekend, is glorious, taunting the locked-down with clear skies and Spring warmth. But where can one go?
The churchyard is now a busy thoroughfare. To maintain one’s prescribed distance from the slow amblers with sticks, the baby buggy families, and the walkers of multiple dogs, necessitates the hasty improvisation of paths between graves not visited in a century or more. In this way, one stumbles across surprises; shopkeepers too canny to let a gravestone go to waste, proclaiming the name of the family ironmongers; or the former Labour MP for Wednesbury (1945-1956). Why, I wondered, did Stanley Evans, stand down? His support for Eden over Suez, seems to be the answer. Above all, for there are 40 Commonwealth War Graves in the cemetery, there are clusters of little white headstones recording the deaths of young men, usually in 1918-1919. One cannot help but wonder? The Spanish Flu pandemic?
Walking the streets is no less a game of strategic jay-walking. It is necessary to cross, and re-cross, roads continually, to avoid the sweaty joggers intent on the straight line down the middle of the narrow pavement, or the teens lounging on a garden wall eating ice lollies. The streets of big houses, the vast Edgbaston mansions, some now nursing homes, but most still private residences, provide the best walking terrain. There are fewer people on the wide streets, just the occasional elderly Sikh, or an Ocado driver pulling a delivery box from the back of his van.
The normal suburban streets are now transformed by handmade posters from the people’s Ministry of Information. An array of rainbows, some scribbled, some patiently meticulous, adorn windows, complete with the slogans of these times, ‘Support the NHS!’, ‘Thank You to all the Key Workers!’, ‘Thanks Posties and Delivery Drivers!’ It’s hard to know how to read these signs. Which came first, the people’s Thursday night applause, or the government’s exhortations to ‘Save the NHS’? Who, is leading whom? Does it matter?
Shopping is the most transformed of daily necessities. The initial spell of panic buying seems to have subsided. The nation, it seems, can have too much toilet paper. But in place of ransacked shelves, though some remain sparsely stocked, we have queues to enter stores, and staff enforcing ‘social distancing’ in the aisles, and cashiers seated behind perspex screens. Do not, in any circumstances, offer cash in payment.
The return home is no longer a matter of closing the front door, shrugging off a coat in the hall, and stepping out of outdoor shoes. It’s a ritual. The hand washing - we all know how to wash our hands now, as our raw red knuckles can testify - the washing or surgical spirit cleansing of our groceries before they can be shelved or refrigerated, the obsessive attention to the cleanliness of door handles and light switches. These are plague anxieties. The rituals may be no more more effective than lighting a candle at a shrine, or bending a head or a knee in prayer, but we rely on their repetition for a sense that some of all this is under our control.
Lockdown is a novel experience for those of us in prosperous, peaceful societies. We are in the early weeks of what may be a long and testing period. None of us can guess what happens next week, next month, next year. But we are adjusting, and we will change and be changed by the experience.
We just don’t know how.
Yasmin Ali is a writer of non-fiction and short stories.