It's two years today since Britain started toppling into pandemic abnormality. When the day started things were still the strange side of normal, or the normal side of strange, but by the end of the day we'd all been advised to work from home and not go to restaurants and make only essential journeys, and the financial markets were tumbling and there was talk of those with underlying conditions isolating for 12 weeks and toilet roll was hard to come by, and I'm not saying society just tipped over in one day but in the morning I went to the library and took a train to Neasden and by the evening I knew I wouldn't be doing either for a while, and it wasn't proper lockdown yet because it was still legal to go to Cheltenham or sit in a pub, but this was where the unthinkable kicked in and I was having trouble sleeping and ffs where was all this heading?
We're well past that now, not the virus but the terrible bit, so by now we should be back into some kind of normality and I guess we are but it doesn't feel like it, society isn't back to where it was, a lot of things have shut and prices are shooting up at an alarming rate and there's always climate change and suddenly a big war's come out of leftfield and horrific things are happening and meanwhile a nasty virus that didn't previously exist is still waiting out there to take you down for a week, or worse, and none of it's good.
Inflation's not been this high since 1992 and that's a generation ago, expect it to eat away at your earnings and your savings and ultimately your lifestyle, and rising interest rates sometimes help balance things out but the interest rate on my bank account is still 0.01% and that's not even a Creme Egg a month, and we're all getting poorer and it can only get worse, the price of food and goods and services is climbing inexorably and especially petrol, blimey how much is a full tank now, and even if you don't have a car it's going to bite you when the increases are applied to transporting food and other goods, I can see the prices tick up every time I go to the supermarket, all the cheese went up last week and we still have to eat.
I got my letter from British Gas yesterday telling me how much my bill is going up and I knew it would be terrible but sheesh, the headline figure may say that the energy cap is increasing by 54% but my unit rate is going up from 4.4p per kWh to 7.9p per kWH and that's 80% and what the hell, and that's only for half a year the annual increase is going to be astronomical, and I see my standing charge is only going up by 4% and maybe that's how they balance things out to make 54% but my god, the very idea that turning the heating on is going to cost 80% more next month is the stuff of financial nightmares, so it's just as well it's April and I won't need to, but next winter... well, best stock up on jumpers.
We've just had well over a year when you knew what the top story on the news was going to be, it was going to be Covid, and everything else was crammed into a quick run-through at the end, indeed it was often like that previously with Brexit which was four years of tediously fractious bickering and no sooner had we got that out of the way than the virus came along and that dragged on for ages and when we did finally withdraw all legal restrictions there were only three hours (three hours!) before Putin invaded Ukraine and that's been dominant ever since, it's just all bad news all the way relentlessly like the world's in a downward spiral and where will it all end?
The war in Ukraine is monumentally depressing, a month ago it was just 'exercises' and "we're not invading honest" and then this jumped-up megalomaniac rolled his troops over the border and claimed he was doing the local population a favour as he started bombing them, and the dreams of a nation were put on hold as they ran for their lives or hid in cellars or knuckled down and fought back, and if they live in the wrong place their city can be seized and their power turned off or their home destroyed, and maybe Putin knows it's wrong but he also knows he can get away with it because the West won't dare stop him for fear of spreading the conflict to neighbouring countries or even wider, nobody knows what he might do, and it's been a long time since the world felt as dangerously volatile as this.
When I was in Croxley last week I found myself walking past a friend's house where in 1979 I remember being really frightened the world was going to end, we'd been invited round for drinks or dinner or something and it was all lovely and I remember we listened to Out Of The Blue by ELO all the way through, but all the time I was sitting on their sofa thinking "what if they drop the bomb right now?" and looking out of the window and listening out for telltale noises because I'd just got a book out of the school library about nuclear warfare so was suddenly petrified someone might push the button, and we lived within three miles of RAF Northwood so if it ever happened we were as good as dead, indeed I'd worked out I was basically human collateral, and it's OK this adolescent phase didn't last long and I soon came to terms with existential risk and eventually the Cold War thawed, but that spectre is somehow looming over us again and me being back where I'd had nuclear nightmares brought it all flooding back.
I'm not nervous right now because the threat of atomic weapons is just deluded bluster, indeed the war in Ukraine is most likely destined only to be intractably appalling, but one misconstrued tactical decision is all it'd take to nudge us towards unwise escalation or global conflict, even Armageddon, and it's not a likely outcome but the very fact the unthinkable is thinkable again is unnerving enough, not that I have any control over it, and once again I find myself living somewhere that'd be vaporised in the first few seconds, and obviously it won't happen but I know there's this slim alternative timeline where it might should the steamroller of events dictate.
Even the best-case scenario for the future looks bleak as prices soar and refugees flee and sea levels rise and governments continue to make self-serving decisions eroding our lives and the pandemic hasn't gone away either, and all we can do is battle on knowing it's not as bad as it could be and there's always joy in the everyday and we have to grasp the here and now and it might never happen, indeed I wish I could have told me back in 1979 not to worry because there is a future and it all gets better and the world has years of dazzling brilliance ahead of it, and that's also what me in 2022 needs to hear right now, best just knuckle down and trust we aren't suddenly toppling into calamitous abnormality again, or even forever.
