Covid reflections

No gratitude, no pride, no relief … just quiet seething

GIDEON HAIGH

For the past 18 months, I have been taking the same walk through the same Melbourne ­suburban streets in the same ­direction at roughly the same time every day.

I’ve thought at times of varying it but always refrained. It wasn’t a pleasure, nor was it a “freedom”, except in this word’s modern sense as a privilege granted by a premier. So I wasn’t prepared to perform it other than mechanically, in precisely the mean and grudging spirit of its permission.

I’m well aware this sounds perverse. It is perverse. I don’t care. We each had a way of coping with the world’s most protracted lockdown, and this was mine, with an interior monologue of quiet seething to match.

“It must be unbearable in Melbourne,” friends from interstate would say. No, I’d tell them. It was, just, bearable. You could get by, providing you expected nothing good to happen, everything to take twice as long as it should, and no useful end to be served. I’d note the emptying shopfronts, the increasingly bedraggled gardens, the looks of fellow pedestrians, like Eliot’s crowds flowing over London Bridge: “So many, I had not thought death had undone so many/Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”

Like a body adapting to starvation, you rationed expectation, postponed pleasure, concentrated on the little you could control in your unkempt lethargy, and thought sympathetically of the worse-off, if in an abstract sense.
For best not to think too much about the businesses being ruined, the proudly independent people being reduced to mendicants, and the volunteers battling on, with nothing to see for their efforts.

Best not to brood on the educations being undermined, the married couples buckling, the elderly dying alone, the debts being accumulated for future generations to pay for.

Best not even to enquire too deeply into how others were faring, lest you touch on a sore spot or pick a disagreeable theme.

Some in lockdown seemed to thrive on disagreement. Me, not so much. One kept things trivial and superficial, focusing on shared irritations, which drew the day’s sting.

Instead, I grew hypervigilant around language, especially the technocratic bullshit of measures (always broad), steps (always targeted), exposure sites (always that place you had just been to) and community transmission (people living).

Remember when they were suburbs rather than LGAs? Remember when we had not “road maps” but just plans? Alas, the self-inflating propensities of bureaucratic language now preclude anything so simple.

Milestones? Always grim. Deaths of nonagenarians? Always tragic. “The science”? Always guiding. Except for the weird ­anthropomorphism of the virus, variously “cunning”, “clever”, “wicked”, “evil” etc. And who could forget crowd pleasers like “creeping assumptions” and ­Unified Security?

If largely for their own partisan reasons, people bought the idea of one masterstroke after another. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

It remains unclear what Premier Dan Andrews’ reputation as a communicator is based on, except repetition, and his crediting with more than 200 Covid press conferences.

It sounded to me like he conducted the same press conference 200 times, replete with abundances of caution, people working incredibly closely together, and instructions so full of qualifications, exceptions and caveats that one ended up feeling capable of nothing. Did anyone else try the government’s Covid helpline? I’m still on hold. But, of course, this was not the point. The standard Andrews press conference was not a public health message but a political message. Dan good. Dan strong. Dan win.

And it worked. If largely for their own partisan reasons, people bought the idea of one masterstroke after another. There would follow the ritual hoisting of the #DanYay pennant to the top of the Twitter mast for the choreographed mass salute, the denunciation of “traitors”.

Actually, I had to respect this antic enthusiasm, doubtless as therapeutic to the DanStans as my daily walk – so many people with so little else to do! And Matthew Guy, I mean, wow. When he arrives, as they say, it’s like someone else has left. Except that even with a shrug and a grumble, you continued feeling that weight, of curtailment, of disappointment.

So that when some self-consciously perky radio presenter or cheery columnist reminded you again of the importance of keeping positive and enjoying the little things in life, you wanted, frankly, to throw up.

You looked on with corresponding detachment as self-­indulgent lumpenmorons roamed a CBD you only vaguely recalled anyway. You’re angry, are you? Cry me a river.

So, no, let’s just say that these past two years in Victoria haven’t been a vintage period for empathy. But perhaps that goes to Covid’s harshest sting, which has been reversing the standard dynamic of crisis – an instant, by convention, for rushing to one another’s aid, for arms round shoulders, for the sharing of time and belongings.

Instead, the Newspeak of working together by staying apart, unification in isolation, anathematising every visible gathering, however innocent, however necessary. Thus possibly the nadir of lockdown, August’s playground ban, imposed under the guise of protecting children, but later justified by chief medical officer Brett Sutton as because attending adults might “hold de facto meetings” – ie, talk.

Playground equipment was wrapped in crime-scene tape as police patrolled nearby – try explaining to your children that this was in anyone’s best interests, that their very swings and slides were a source of community endangerment.

Nothing, of course, caused more anguish than the lockdown predicament of children, than watching the soi-disant “education state” idly squander irrecoverable years of development and socialisation.

This, sealed up in our homes, suffered in private, is lockdown’s ugly secret: how disciplines around screen use collapsed; how dependence on social media deepened; how kids further absorbed the message of the world being a dangerous, frightening place; how kids already anxious about body image were exposed to it daily on their Zoom screens.

These were the hardest, most exhausted conversations of lockdown, with parents of children reaching the end of Grade 1 having hardly been at school, with parents of screen-deadened teenagers now about to be whirled into VCE exams.
You looked on with corresponding detachment as self-­indulgent lumpenmorons roamed a CBD you only vaguely recalled anyway. You’re angry, are you? Cry me a river.

But here the government showed its meanest, pettiest, and frankly stupidest streak. After all, marathon press conferences are pretty easy to hold when someone else is handling the remote learning, eh?

Even the vaunted “end” of lockdown is more of a tentative first step: basically involving not much more than a few restaurant seats inside, the chance of a haircut, the repeal of a pointless curfew. More dreary days of screen-based busywork await my 11-year-old until school resumes full-time. I still can’t see my mother, in regional Victoria, or my partner, in another state. It also means suffering Andrews’ pivot from tedious admonition to old-fashioned political oiliness. He’s so proud, so thankful, so grateful, so sickening.

Seriously, what’s he got to be grateful for? We did as we were told, to avoid draconian fines for non-compliance. You might as well thank us for obeying the law of gravity.

Still, at least it’s not quite as weird as people’s professions of gratitude to Andrews for their sacrifices. That’s pure masochism.

This doesn’t feel like a moment for gratitude at all, save perhaps to frontline carers, and to supportive friends and family.

The losses have been too great for celebration; the mistakes have been too numerous for congratulation; the future is too uncertain for relief. It’s just another provisional permission slip, maybe for a slightly different walk.

GIDEON HAIGH


SENIOR CRICKET WRITER
Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for almost four decades, published more than 40 books and contributed to more than 100 newspapers and magazines. But who’s counting? He is also co-host of podcast Cricket, Et ... Read more