The process and ceremony of grief was disrupted. To drown the silence, a clatter of VE day celebrations were confected, to promote a national self image that was partly a product of folk memory, and partly of a conscripted adaption of its broader tropes. Keep smiling through; through what though? A synthetic , sepia tinted mist fell , softening the edges of pain, blurring and conflating national resistance to invasion with a response to pandemic driven by political exigency.
Those of us of a certain age had rehearsed this at some point or other, but with different ends in mind. We had imagined ourselves - seen ourselves in films and in televisions own imaginings - queuing nervously, loading up, maxing out, just on the foothills before the ascent to panic.
We had rehearsed this with rubble and wreckage, bruises and rags in mind, but here we were watching the streets thin out and drain, watching the shutdown, the mothballing, the press of the pause button; watching for a sign that anything was happening at all.
There were things to do we decided, and we began to do them; social lives to be maintained , bounced from masts and shouted across walls and hedgerows. Lists and registers were to be made, we signed up for things; we did things independently; we helped each other; we did nothing; we had things done for us.
We got used to each others kitchen walls, to pausing, to hearing others pause. To eyes following kids in the periphery, to screams off. We were sheepish about all the rice, all the loo roll, all the paracetamol.
We felt bad about not minding the separation too much; we envied the spaces we saw that seemed available, but which we could not slip into. We slept alone some nights. We listened to the updates, which were never updates, just reinforcement. We slowed down; we were content; we developed edges and hard skin; we had no idea.
We got used to spinning on a heel to talk, launching a retreat in the middle of a greeting. Intimacies we saved for the phone, for the out of sync online exchanges: who is ill, who is recovering, whose aftershock is roaring down the empty streets towards us.
We queued outside shops. We wore masks, some of us. We agreed on Passing Points in the aisles. We clapped on thursday nights. We made a spiky bubbly waveform, Some of us edged into it, tried to co-opt it, tried to tell us who we should clap for. Tried to lead it. It didnt work.
Our Clapping bounced off the sides of narrow streets and back, we waved from our nests from upstairs windows and watched each other. Sirens and foghorns rose into the clouds and crossed the bay.
We panicked a bit. We attacked 5g masts. One night a van pulled up, a driver got out to applaud the NHS, and then knelt down with his toolkit to repair a broadband box that someone had cracked open, perhaps to see if a devil came out.
We were confused. We wanted to trust. We were confused by the people we wanted to trust.
The weather was beautiful, we walked in it if we could. If not it stayed on the outside waving through the glass, while we saw nightmares walk in and walk around, picking up our stuff, ordering us around. Our space shrank around us.
We thought about what we would see when we stepped outside again. We thought about what we would change. We just wanted to step outside and find things hadn't changed at all. Because they were all we had.
The "we" thing was wearing thin, fraying a little.
We picked and rehearsed fights carefully, looked for the likely consequences. We argued about masks, we picked on Teachers, Doctors. Experts. We wondered about the people we were clapping with.
We were invited to parks to protest. We knew who sent the invites. We'd seen them before. We went along. We watched from home.
Things were fraying further and looked for guidance; the people we looked to were the ones pulling at the threads. We were told it didn't matter. We were angry, we protested. We agreed. The same day, we had a visit; they came north in a convoy, horns blaring, tins of angry wasps whipping up bad air outside our bubbles.
The 'We' thing frayed further. It had been a while since we'd seen anyone that wasn't us. Turns out they were here among us all the time.
The clapping stopped after 10 weeks, there was some sort of consensus that it had been played out. There was a suggestion that things were not fraying at all, but simply being loosened, that this was to be celebrated, that we should congratulate ourselves. But we had seen the threads being pulled and we had seen and heard the angry wasps.
As the stumpy fascists went back south, Vans from the shops and the supermarkets went out into the sticks. There'd been a rush early on, and delivery slots were still scarce. In the hamlets and around the greens were Honesty shops, bundles of veg and boxes of eggs for a donation: Micro economies at work between delivery days.
The yearning for Normality grew. And not just in us. We were getting tired now of restrictions, but also of wartime exhortations to a spirit we didnt recognise, that simply wasnt appropriate. There was panic in the faces of those in charge. Scared of looking less than in control.,they did nothing. ( There was clearly a 'they' by now) Scared of the damaged economy, and of owning up to damage yet to come we were harried and patronised into spending. they gambled on the timing, hoping that economic imperatives were some how in tandem with those of an indifferent agent. They tried not to learn from the rest of the world, from those who regretted their own gambles and would have told us to step away from the table. There were shameful attempts to shift responsibility, to present failure as a fait a'ccompli. To blame the poor and weak, to reassign us as stupid. To align dissent and opposition with a perceived wider political agenda. An enemy within.
There had been an attempt at one point to revive the clapping. It came from the wrong place; it looked like electioneering, like the real point was the gathering of images for facebook. No we said, dont clap us, pay us. Equip us.
We - and they - were becoming aware of a single, unspoken truth. We saw it and thought about it; they did too, if only in private and accompanied by the 3am horrors; that Normality wasn't something that would 'return'; Normality was already here.
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