Category: Diary of a Pandemic

I realised I'm making daily shit sandwiches out of this situation: a fluffy bunny and reasons to be grateful wrap around thoughts about life under a scary global pandemic.

I nearly didn't write a post today – I am so tired. But then things went quiet, and of course I started thinking about it all again. There are no conversations right now that aren't related to coronavirus in some way. There are few thoughts that aren't affected by it. It's kind of like going through a breakup with the normal world but you're the one who has been dumped and left to pick up the pieces of your life. It's doable but it's going to be hard for a while, maybe a long while.

Anyway, some quick notes. Because I'm tired and it's midnight. And now today is tomorrow. It was all I could to do remember what I was thinking about as I powered up the lap pie. My memory mantra was: "Hands books marks totes Friday nights loss."

Hands – things must be normalising because my hands which were red and stingy with all the hand washing are now back to normal.

Books – I had a flashback to before all this, when things were 'normal' (as in not so crazy you couldn't have a life). For some reason the memory that popped up was of Simpsons of Piccadilly, which was a department store turned vast bookshop in London. It had concave glass windows along the front, so you could almost lean into the store, endless floors of books and a café in the basement. My favourite bit was the travel section at the back of the store with its own frontage on to Jermyn St. I used to sit for hours on weekends reading and choosing a book to buy.

Marks – the sudden appearance floor markings everywhere as if to underline the social distancing rules, like chevrons on a motorway spacing us part. Sainsbury's had pavement marks for queuing outside but also in every aisle and right up to the tills. They didn't really work inside the store, only for queues. Marks were also spray-painted marks on the pavement outside cashpoints, banks and building societies in Kings Heath. Queueing is a very British thing and we take it very seriously. But it's the 2m thing we can't seem to measure. I want to photograph all the markings but I can't.

Totes – somewhere in the supermarket, 10 years' worth of tote bags fell of my trolley hook. Conferences, tech brand swag, crowdfunder rewards… there was history in those bags. I only spotted they were missing when I was in the till queue. I felt I had lost the equivalent of my iPhone. I panicked. I felt gutted. I left all my shopping and ran around looking for the lost and found. A kind, kind person had handed them in. I was so happy.

Friday nights – going out and socialising is a function of a hard working week. The past two weeks I've worked harder than usual – thanks to a bigger comms workload, longer hours, last-minute requests – but there is no Friday night outlet. I finished work at 7.50pm, brought the laundry in, did some bunny healthcare and – that's it. The reward system is changing. What is the new reward, the new outlet to expunge the stress? We need to let it out somehow. I worry that this lack will bottle up into something.

Loss – I can't even remember what this was. Memory loss? Ah, I think it was about the fact that Pete and I were finally maybe going to go to Berlin. I would so love to be on holiday right now, away from all this. It feels offensive to even think about these things when the real losses are stacking up in numbers every day – 39,000 UK cases, 3605 UK deaths, 684 yesterday. The numbers are still rising exponentially. There is a time lag and the effect of the (too late?) lockdown has not yet made a difference.

Today I am thankful for my bed. That I found some flour in the supermarket. And that someone handed my totes in. Small things.

Oh and yesterday's Virtual Moselele was quite amazing.

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I feel a bit zonked. Today was my first day off in a few weeks and I didn't know what to do with it. There is still a backlog of 'stuff', mostly chores. But they could wait another day. I've cut myself off from daily coronavirus news because I know what to do to stay safe and filling up on more news isn't helping.

So I got to not set the alarm. I watched a full episode of Mad Men over breakfast. I had a video call with family and a chat with an old friend ("Oi, less of the old" – Ray). Got called a bitch for suggesting he was in the risky age group.

I made up a story for my three-year-old nephew over FaceTime using props from around the home office. It turned out that a magic blue flying camel went to the zoo, then the park, then somewhere else and along the way picked up a cat, a digital mouse and a monkey to ride on its back. Only they all fell off his slidey hump when he did his magic flying trick. The end.

Then… a dose of BBC Doctors at lunch, which has been one of my regular shows since I started working from home 10 years ago. I groomed a bunny butt to help Old Man Bunminster with his hygiene.

I did watch a time lapse of the new Nightingale hospital being built at the ExCel centre in London, which is set to house 4,000 coronavirus patients and two mortuaries. Watch it here.

I talked to two friends at the allotment and it felt like a treat to see them. I miss my Stirchley people – it truly is a unique community in my experience. In the evening, we went back to the allotment and had a bonfire and a beer, and felt some kind of normal.

This whole thing feels like a reset. People are talking about the good stuff – the clean air, the car-free roads, the allotmenteering, goats coming into deserted towns and cities, the home-working and getting home DIY done, no costly commute. When this is all over… what will we take with us?

Of course, there is the bad. It's coming. A friend of a friend on Facebook has lost his wife. It's coming. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. And yet tomorrow I am going to a supermarket. My 84-year-old friend with dementia lives alone and can't get on the vulnerable list for online deliveries. Worse, he can't remember not to take the bus or go to the supermarket.

But I learnt a lot from going on a dementia course with him and that is to set weekly goals, weekly rewards and look for things that you are grateful for every day.

Today I am thankful for… nature, dead or alive. It is very grounding. Here are three things I photographed today: a large bumblebee burrowing into the lawn, a delicately decaying filigreed leaf and the fluffy flowerhead of a defunct globe artichoke. I'm also grateful for having a decent camera on my phone. We forget but modern technology is astounding.

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I hope I don't die. I just bought new glasses.

Today I am thankful for chocolate.

Bunnies, bloggings, blessings… that's the drill.

Three notes for today:

1. Sleeping. I got up at 10am after a long sleep. Medicated and breakfasted the bunnies, watched a Mad Men over toast and tea and then went back to bed from 12-3pm. It's been hard to mentally relax with coronavirus as a constant in the background. And I'm tired.
2. Pandemic catharsis. Some people are using their skills to entertain others in Instagrams and watch parties (see dancers and actors in yesterday's end bit). But writers gonna write. Many writers around the world are logging the lockdown, giving the thoughts a way to escape and our brains a way to process this. After I did my own brief history of COVID-19, I was glad to see the BBC have done a roundup of the past few weeks, too: Coronavirus: The month everything changed. Meanwhile, this post –A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future – echoes why I'm doing this. I'm writing a letter to my future self in the same way this writer is posting a letter to the UK's future. We're looking back and forward at the same time.
3. Dead badger. I saw a dead badger up close today. It is a large one that someone has placed under a tree at the roadside. It is beautiful and looks in perfect condition, as if it is sleeping. It's probably been hit by a car. With few vehicles about, wild animals are venturing further afield but with empty roads wild humans are speeding. (This was in a 20mph zone.) I've reported it to the council for collection. Death in black and white stripes.

Blessings!

Before the dead badger, a local corner shop was open and empty. I may have bought several bars of chocolate and a bottle of red to add to my Mad Men TV viewing lockdown strategies.

Also, I got to have a lovely video call with my youngest niece who is in Coventry. We haven't met up for about two years because life always gets in the way. And now here we are, talking about rabbit welfare tactics during a global lockdown. Strange days indeed.

Hire/commission me: fiona [at] fionacullinan.com

A bunny, a blog bit and a blessing, that's how this goes.

Yesterday it was Prince Charles. Today it's Boris Johnson who has coronavirus, the first world leader to be infected. We knew the UK death toll would start to jump and today it has by 181 people – to 759. Birmingham Airport is to become a mass mortuary. The NEC, a mass hospital. Stories of people dying are starting to come out. The people behind the numbers. I knew they were coming and now here they are.

On a West Midlands radio station, a Walsall man called in to report his brother (54, sporty, no underlying health conditions) had caught Covid-19 at a hospital checkup and died a week later. This is me. This made me scared.

In my local greengrocer's I had to tell a middle-aged couple to stand back, twice. They were so busy shopping for their Sunday dinner like it was important. Such a lack of awareness. This made me angry.

My great nephew, 3, hid behind his mother when I dropped off the supplies (they are self-isolating). He's gone shy and sort of forgotten me for the first time since he was born – three weeks is a long time to a youngster. Or maybe he's scared of me and people and the danger they now represent. This made me sad.

Announcements of financial support for the self-employed came out today. The UK, US and others are throwing money at this – and they need to. This made me feel a bit more secure.

But then I read my second cousin Jessica's blog post about the lockdown in Rwanda where she works as a maths/science tutor, and I realised how lucky we are.

"Rwanda is taking the situation very seriously, which is quite reassuring, if a little cumbersome to daily life. On the downside, they have about 39 ICU beds. Not per million. Altogether.

At some point lockdown will be unsustainable, and the country will have to allow some non-essential businesses to run. And that point is not very far away. Rwanda doesn’t have a social welfare system or a government who can borrow billions to keep it afloat while they contain the virus.

But so far they’ve been sensible and quick to act, and I hope they will continue to be sensible and quick to act."

Ramblings and What Not Blog

So yeah, perspective check.

Last weekend someone from France was ranting on a Facebook community forum that we in the UK were stupid idiots for going out for exercise (even though it is officially sanctioned, if restricted). They were being abusive because they thought we were all taking the threat too lightly. Now, seeing the US on the back foot, I can understand the insults were born of desperation. The US now has more confirmed coronavirus cases than China and Italy. We knew about this outbreak in early January. We knew it was potentially coming, after SARS and MERS, years ago. Why didn't our governments act more quickly? Why weren't they ready?

We're in the rising phase. It remains to be seen how much we have been able to flatten the curve. But we are late – how much flatter could it have been had we all acted sooner?

Thanks for the dance

Today I am thankful for the Birmingham Royal Ballet dancers I've been stalking on Instagram. Seeing principal Tzu-Chao Chou dancing around his garden patio made my day. See it here. (He also does amazing Christmas videos each year.) Or how about principal Yasuo Atsuji doing 100 press up leap things. See that here. Or principal Cesar Morales and his lawn mower ballet. Here.

Actor Sam Neill is also being entertaining, playing ukes and reading stories and poems. Today he read a Hairy Maclary children's book, interspersed with 'stay at home' messages, and it was great. Hear it here.

Diaries are for logging the craziness now so you can process it sometime in the future. Bunnies are for soothing frayed nerves. And the ending is always upbeat.

I checked back in my proper diary and the first mention of coronavirus was on 3 March 2020, three weeks ago. (I keep a proper old-school written diary, as well as a secret digital diary, as well as this blog).

But back to 3/3/20. I noted it as an anxious day 'that will potentially overwhelm the NHS' and 'endanger hundreds of thousands of lives'. Panic buying of toilet roll had started and no one knew why. Then I wrote about property repairs and financial ball juggling and a pleasant session helping old folk get on the internet at the Stirchley Baths community centre.

On 6/3/20, I was joking about a Dexy's Midnight Runners ear worm of Covid-19 to Come On Eileen. Birmingham had just had its first case and radio talk shows were spending hours talking about hand sanitiser and people's hand washing hygiene. I wrote: 'People panic about this and not climate change? Humans are a strange species in their perception of threats and their responses.'

On 12/3/20, we moved from containment to delay with 600 confirmed cases in the country (today, the UK death toll has hit 578). 'No hugs, no handshakes' I noted. A friend messaged to say they had cancelled their wedding next month. The local care home shut its doors to visitors. Loaf community bakery posted its coronavirus plan. Pete cancelled all his PhotoSchool Birmingham courses. Our family started planning who will visit who and how. And the government is lagging behind the actions of its people.

On 18/3/20, things were escalating quickly. I was 'feeling down, anxious, fearful, panicky – and the only comfort is that this is a normal human response to a pandemic situation'.

Social spaces started closing, schools were closing at the end of the week. The panic buying was ramping up. Volunteer initiatives using new technology and social media were springing up to help each other in the community. It felt as if we were teetering on the brink; we are all interconnected and dependent on each other after all, not only within my own family and local community but right up to the macroeconomic and social level.

And on top of all this is the virus itself. Countries are closing their borders and Europe is in lockdown. The UK is probably next but the government is being slow. We are all trying to 'flatten the curve' of deaths that will occur if we continue to mix. Even a 1% mortality rate doesn't bear thinking about. I asked my diary: if you don't trust the government or the health system, what can you do?

By 22/3/20, the country is going crazy, and so am I, to get things done before a predicted lockdown (the MOT and pet vaccinations are due, we need shopping basics). Bars, cafes and restaurants have closed. Livelihoods are being impacted. People are not keeping to the 2m social distancing rule. I held back in a Coop queue and an elderly woman stepped into the gap.

My family has now broken down into sealed off units and I wonder when I will see them again. One is already in self-isolation with mild symptoms. There is a new baby who none of us can visit. News of a pregnancy is announced, and then another – happy news but now also fearful. Everything and everyone I care about is under threat.

On 24/3/20, I started a pandemic diary when I couldn't keep track of all the thoughts flying around my head. (It's easier to type than write.) There was a domestic over the road the day after the lockdown was announced on the 23rd (was that only two days ago?!). Then I wrote about being germ-phobic long before any of this pandemic shit hit the fan. And now here we are. Hello!

Today I am thankful for people on our road coming out onto their doorsteps at 8pm and clapping the NHS workers. I had no idea it was a national thing happening but it was heartwarming, even if we were giving the NHS the clap. (Sorry, bad joke, unavoidable.)

I'm also thankful for the empty streets. Animals are coming back into cities. There are dolphins in the Venice canals. Stirchley B30 has its pigeons and was isolating like a boss! I start to wonder if I actually like people.

Finally, if anyone reads this far, I highly recommend keeping a diary for stress relief – just get all these thoughts out of your head and then forget about them.

Go on, do it, it's lockdown time.

Hire/commission me: fiona [at] fionacullinan.com