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IN these days of the coronavirus, the passage of time can be measured by the gradual emptying of a tube of toothpaste.
As in a sporting event, you can get a body count on the victims of Covid-19 to determine how the deadly game is progressing. The Dawn website carries a daily tally on its front page, giving a province-wise breakdown of the infected and the dead.
As I get the daily Guardian in the idyllic county of Dorset where I find myself under lockdown, I can only look forward to page after page of virus-related news. Op-eds and editorials contain little else. Even the sports pages have been reduced to only carrying reports of past sporting events. There are pages full of graphs and charts containing details of infections and deaths, broken down into cities and counties. Soon, all these lines and numbers blur into a single set of identical data.
I guess you can’t blame the editors for this Covid-19 overkill, but it makes for dreary reading. Also, there is very little to report or comment on: the opposition, led by the recently elected Labour leader Keir Starmer, does not want to be seen as playing politics at a time of national crisis when thousands have already died.
The only political argument these days is over when to return life to normal. After six weeks of complete lockdown, people are getting a bit stir-crazy with bored children at home with little opportunity for sports during an exceptionally warm and sunny spring.
One day morphs unnoticed into the next.
And yet, the fear of the disease has persuaded most to support the government in its efforts to enforce an extended lockdown. In a recent poll, only 17 per cent of Brits thought the conditions to impose the ongoing restrictions had been met, while 67pc thought the closure of schools, universities and restaurants should continue. I can see why people want to work from home as they can avoid long commutes and still get paid.
This is in contrast to all those running businesses of every kind. The media is full of interviews with the owners of cafes, bookshops, barbershops and bakeries to find out how they are coping. The inevitable response, of course, is that they aren’t. High rents and other fixed costs have hammered them, while staff — even though paid an 80pc subsidy on ‘furloughing’ by the state — still costs owners 20pc for staff doing nothing.
Fearful of the future, people are spending less, thereby reducing sales and manufacturing. The only companies to thrive are those that supply goods (Amazon) and entertainment (Netflix) online. Pubs have had to literally pour millions of pints of draft beer and ale down the drain as the freshly brewed stuff doesn’t keep over a few weeks.
But it is the staff of the National Health Service that is grabbing most of the headlines. Nurses and doctors are being interviewed daily, and eulogised as saints and heroes. The fact that BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) staff have suffered the heaviest casualties is repeated daily, and experts are called in to give the reasons for this anomaly.
Actually, I could have told them that first generation migrants tend to seek jobs in the NHS because the nursing profession is not very attractive to local Brits. And South Asian men gravitate towards medicine: after qualifying at home, they apply for jobs to the NHS to get British citizenship. As they send a large proportion of their income to family back home, they tend to occupy small homes and live frugally. This may be politically incorrect, but many of the black community are overweight as they generally eat readymade food. All these factors combine to produce conditions conducive to Covid-19.
If the newspapers are having a tough lockdown, spare a thought for major TV studios. Here, operating costs are high, and advertising income has fallen sharply, given the drop in business activity. Unable to air live shows, producers have been forced to trot out stale old dramas for the most part.
As some readers know, I am a foodie who loves to explore the restaurant scene. But even though our bit of Dorset was never rich in culinary flair and diversity, there were a few eateries worth the occasional visit. Now, even those are shut for the foreseeable future.
With very little to look forward to, one day morphs unnoticed into the next. It seems that time has stopped. In the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, Bill Murray enters a small town that is in a perpetual time loop. Here, each day repeats itself without its inhabitants being aware of it.
The lockdown, too, has similarly distorted time, with no distinction between one day and the next. In real life, it is events and people that make us aware of the passage of time. Without them, we are locked into a temporal stream from which there is no escape.
Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2020
