Forgetting quarantine

[Corpsey]

Happened across this thread from 2020

Stray thoughts under partial quarantine

- I was walking in the park yesterday, from which you can see the shard and various other skyscrapers on the horizon. And I thought to myself how they look so distant now. Not just geographically, but temporally. That central London is now just a memory. You know that it's not functioning as it...

www.dissensus.com

It was so weird living through that, and now what's weird is we're (ostensibly) back to 'normal'.

Yes more people work from home now, the economy is fucked, etc. It's had a huge effect on how we live but... I wonder if anyone else finds that they've more or less forgotten about the experience of quarantine now?

 

[sufi]

sort of, but i also feel like we locked into some behaviours during lockdown (like wfh, not going out, hanging about the estate) and can't really remember alternative ways to do it from previous eras

 

[Murphy]

Don’t think many will forget, certainly not from lack of trying

It’s like a communal tattoo, 23rd March, says it all. Work has changed permanently

Same time, people are only too keen to bury or rear-view any/all proverbial hiccups. Ah, it’s all in the past, brrrr, now where’s the booze…

 

[william kent]

I've more or less forgotten about it, but I see other people worrying about the effect it could have on the kids who've missed out on crucial periods of socialisation.

 

[luka]

everyones more frayed and anxious now i think.

 

[william kent]

My lifestyle didn't change at all. Everyone else just got brought into my world.

 

[shakahislop]

i've said this on here before, everyone wants to put it behind them. here and there when people talk about it there's what looks like a trauma response, the same things being said over and over, the need to explain again and again some of the things that happened, telling the same stories on repeat.

the fact is that there were a lot of people who were really scared. not everyone but quite a lot of people. especially in the uk the virus was a rollercoaster, went up and down, multiple waves, and it was hard to trust that the government knew what it was doing.

i find the lack of an annual memorial service quite strange, and surely it's something that will come along when people have had a bit more time to process the pandemic and move on. i do think sometimes there are things that happen that are too hard for a culture to deal with, to face up to directly.

 

[Benny Bunter]

With this neverending heatwave and the boy on school holidays I feel like I'm living through it again now, trapped in the house going a bit mad

Still working from home, and got into the bad habit of having beer in the fridge since then that I haven't shook off.

 

[william kent]

i find the lack of an annual memorial service quite strange, and surely it's something that will come along when people have had a bit more time to process the pandemic and move on. i do think sometimes there are things that happen that are too hard for a culture to deal with, to face up to directly.

I think it makes sense in Britain when you consider how anxious the Tories are for people to move on and stop talking about their handling of it.

 

[Benny Bunter]

So weird to think back how quickly it happened. One morning I walked into work and noticed a bottle of hand sanitiser on the table, opened emails to see one asking about what internet facilities we had at home, and literally the next day I had to book a taxi and load up all my stuff to take back to the house, never been back.

 

[william kent]

I remember Luke posting on here about suddenly feeling paranoid in Canary Wharf after that story about people being sent home.

 

[Benny Bunter]

We locked down earlier and much harder than in the UK too, no time to think about anything. Not even allowed to go out for a walk, fucking mental

 

[Benny Bunter]

I wonder what the reaction would be if ever something similar happened again? The speed of it and the intensity of the fear mongering caught everyone off guard last time.

 

[martin]

I miss it, I thought 2020 was a magical trip. Never mind the vaccines, I think the year itself altered my DNA.
I wish I'd recorded more online stuff for posterity, though. There's a fair bit of footage I just can't find anywhere now.

 

[Murphy]

First lockdown was easy compared to the second

Saw so much death from Sept 2020 into the new year 2021 on a scale never encountered before, like trees being felled by some chainsaw reaper. Doubt families have fully processed grief, compounded by being unable to visit hospitals at monstrous periods, fuckin grim

Jitter levels way up collectively, the world before is gone which feeds subconscious tension

 

[martin]

the world before is gone

I think this is the thing some (including the people I work for) don't get. I have to remind myself at times.

 

[william kent]

I was struck by people's adaptability during the whole thing. The idea we'd be locked down seemed like such a drastic change, but people slipped into it relatively easily. Some really suffered under it, others had ideological disagreements, but generally people adjusted and adjusted once again when it ended.

 

[luka]

We locked down earlier and much harder than in the UK too, no time to think about anything. Not even allowed to go out for a walk, fucking mental

the innate spanish authoritarianism raising its head again

 

[Mr. Tea]

We locked down earlier and much harder than in the UK too, no time to think about anything. Not even allowed to go out for a walk, fucking mental

Things went weirdly authoritarian here as well, though. We were only allowed out for an hour a day, which was completely arbitrary, and there were various daft rules about who you could meet with outside your own household. There was a news story about two women who got fined for having a 'picnic' because they were walking while drinking a coffee, and hot drinks made that count as a picnic, although they'd have been fine if it was a can of coke. Stupid shit like that. And all this despite the fact that that, as I remember it, there was something close to a clinical consensus fairly early on that as long as people weren't meeting in vast numbers for things like music festivals or sports events, there was virtually no risk of transmission from meeting socially outdoors.

The worst bit, I think, was relatives not being allowed to see the terminally ill, even when it was kids with cancer or other cases that had nothing to do with covid. That was just unforgivably inhumane.

 

[Slothrop]

Weirdly, I think the most vivid memories are probably the positive bits - bike rides around empty streets, time sitting out in the garden because there was nothing else to do. Rationally I'm aware of a lot of fairly shit stuff - my partner's family are mostly highly vulnerable in one way or another, so that was always a stress, really terrible things were happening to a lot of people. But the concrete memories are more about the weird lazy / surreal feeling of it.

Also, online kept seeming a lot weirder than real life in many ways. Like, I'd expect this place to be like a bag of angry geese, but even relatively normie people on fairly grounded forums seemed to be losing their shit about completely batfuck insane stuff, like people going out for bike rides for exercise who might have a mechanical issue and then need their partner to come and get them in the car and their partner might have an accident and be injured while coming to get them and BREAK THE NHS, or someone who was looking for validation for tearing into their teenage kid for going out to put some Amazon packaging in the recycling and then sanitising their hands and then touching the door handle again even though they'd touched the door handle after touching the packaging so it was potentially DRIPPING WITH VIRUSES, or all the people having nervous breakdowns on twitter after seeing people sitting on their own in parks or they'd seen someone kicking a stray football back to a kid who clearly wasn't in their bubble or whatever.