Every Day Is Like Sunday

Any idea what day of the week it is? No, me neither, and here we are just three weeks into ‘lockdown’ and to borrow a lyric from Big Big Train, it seems like we are not even halfway through a month of Sundays. I’ve put ‘lockdown’ in quotation marks because in comparison with lockdowns in other countries, we are perhaps a little more permissive, which might explain why we aren’t ‘flattening the curve’ quite as much as the government hoped.

When you read stories about large gatherings – according to the BBC, Greater Manchester Police had to break up 494 house parties, some with DJs, fireworks, and bouncy castles, and 166 street parties between 25 March and 7 April – and see videos of people out enjoying the Easter weather in large groups, you wonder if the message is getting across. In part it’s that attitude that most people have, that bad things only happen to other people. This means that many people think it’s ok to visit or mix with family or close friends because they are sure they aren’t infected. It seems that there is a belief – conscious or not – that it’s only people you don’t know who might be carriers. But if everyone adopts that attitude, then sooner or later they will come into contact with someone who is.

To quote Morrissey, every day is like Sunday at present, and a 1960s Sunday at that, so what am I doing, what am I missing, and what am I looking forward to? Well, one thing I am not doing is all of those little jobs that I’ve been putting off, the ones I told myself I didn’t have the time for, because guess what, the reason I wasn’t doing them was because I didn’t want to! 

I’m going for a walk most days, and I’m grateful to have the country park on my doorstep. 

According to my Fitbit, my daily average mileage has dipped below five miles, and on the odd day I don’t go out, it has fallen off a cliff. I'm trying to do a minimum of three miles outdoors every day, so hopefully, when this is all over my average won't have fallen too far.

Our daughter has returned home from university and among the things she brought home was a printer, which I have set up and connected wirelessly to my laptop. This has come in handy as it means that the scanning of old Romford FC programmes that I have been doing, and posting the results on Facebook and Twitter, has been easier since I don’t have to book an appointment with the printer in the study!

A selection of Romford programmes through the years that I have been scanning and adding to Twitter and Facebook

I also shaved off my moustache – which I’d had since the late 1980s – as I thought it was making me look old(er). I did this a week ago; it took three or four days for my daughter to notice, but to date Val doesn’t seem to have spotted the change (or if she has, she hasn’t seen fit to mention it).

I’m doing more writing than usual, this is my nineteenth blog of 2020 whereas in the whole of 2018 I only published fourteen, and it was just twenty-seven in 2019. My preference of publishing new blogs on Thursday mornings has gone for a Burton, however, and they are now appearing almost at random; in part, this is because I’m not always sure what day of the week it is. Scanning old football programmes and doing some writing have become a new routine, and routine has long been important to me, so with not being able to do a lot of the things that normally form part of my schedule, I’m grateful to have been able to introduce new ones.

I’m not missing football as much as I might have expected. In some ways I am quite enjoying not to have to do the admin things that are associated with it, and if I’m honest, I’m not really missing going to games. The thing that I am missing about football is meeting up with my friends, but the online chats and calls that I’m having instead have softened the blow a bit. I am missing going to see BBC radio programmes, though. Val and I had trips to see Newsjack, The Now Show, and Brain of Britain lined up before lockdown, and when going to the BBC we would usually walk along the South Bank and have a coffee somewhere before going to Broadcasting House – I do miss that. I should also have been to a number of gigs by now – Fischer Z, Jump, and Fish among them – but they have been cancelled or rescheduled, not that I am entirely confident they will take place on the proposed new dates either. I’ve got a number booked for the rest of the year that I am not sure will go ahead.  I’m definitely missing going to live music events.

If Bioethicist Zeke Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives and director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania is to be believed, it’s going to be a long while before anyone is going to be able to watch live sports or concerts, unfortunately. Emanuel has said, “Larger gatherings – conferences, concerts, sporting events – when people say they’re going to reschedule this conference or graduation event for October 2020, I have no idea how they think that’s a plausible possibility. I think those things will be the last to return. Realistically we’re talking fall 2021 at the earliest.” He may have been talking about the US when he said that, and you may think that he’s just another ‘expert’ whose opinion is no more valid than those who think that come this September we’ll be back to normal, but I suspect that unless we want to risk further periods of high infection rates and lockdowns, his cautious view is one to which we should subscribe.

Getting back to normal is what I’m looking forward to, except what will normal look like? I very much doubt that we will return to a Britain we recognise from even just a couple of months back for at least a year, so although I am looking forward to going to the BBC, going to gigs, and going to football matches, I cannot see any of those things happening this year, or even next Spring. On a more mundane note, I’m looking forward to being able to go to the supermarket on the spur of the moment and not having to make plans for it, not having to remember the anti-bacterial wipes, and not having to queue up outside. I imagine that some of those restrictions will get relaxed sooner rather than later, but I tend to go along with the view that there will be periods in the coming months when restrictions have to be reintroduced.

The world that emerges from the coronavirus outbreak is going to be very different one from the world we are familiar with. Apart from the inevitable sense of loss – many of us will be touched by the loss of friends or family members – there will be businesses that we rely on or use regularly that will go to the wall. For those of us who follow football teams, the game as we know it will be changed to a large degree. Because of my interest in non-League football, I’ve been keeping up to date with the news from that part of the game, and following online forums that speculate about and discuss the end of this season and the next season. Sadly, it is inevitable that some clubs in non-League football, and quite possibly some in the Football League, will not survive this crisis.

Most importantly, I hope we emerge from this trying and testing time with a greater appreciation of what is important and what is not. One hopes that that includes an appreciation on the part of this government of how important a properly funded and supplied National Health Service is.