Strange Days

These are strange days: We live in unprecedented times. In the UK, only those Britons who lived through the Second World War can have experienced anything comparable, and if anyone had said at the end of January, when the first two cases of the coronavirus were detected in the UK, that by the beginning of April we would be confined to our homes except for essential shopping trips, work, and exercise, we would have found it hard to comprehend, but here we are.

How much longer we remain in this situation is anyone’s guess, although I would suspect it will be longer than the more optimistic estimates, especially as there still remain many people who are not taking isolation or social distancing sufficiently seriously. Many people are still travelling when they need not, and many have jobs that require them to commute however, I wonder how worse off we would have been had this pandemic struck thirty, forty years ago, or more?

In particular, had this pandemic happened during the 1970s, how would we have managed? The 1970s were a time when the UK was frequently short of something or the other, whether it was bread when the bakers went on strike, or potatoes when the harvest was blighted by bad weather, or oil when OPEC introduced an embargo. Along with power cuts, there was always seemed to be a shortage of something (see The 1970's: Part Two - Strikes, Shortages, and Substitutes).  In those days, empty shelves in the supermarkets made us shrug our shoulders and improvise.

Had 1970s Britain had to go into lockdown things would have been different from today in many respects. The biggest difference is driven by the internet, and it is largely thanks to that that even before this pandemic, 1.5 million Britons were working from home, and that figure will have increased significantly in response to coronavirus. In the 1970s, working from home was not an option except for a tiny minority. Given that many jobs that are now made easier by automation and computerisation were heavily manual during the 1970s, most employers would have expected their staff to carry on regardless in that era. For my part, having started work in 1976 and working in branch banking, there would have been little scope for me to do anything other than my normal job, in my normal place of work, and having to use public transport to get there.

In the 1970s cash was king. Most shopping transactions were complete with notes and coins; those that weren’t involved a different form of paper in the shape of cheques. In recent years we have become used to debit cards, Chip & Pin, and now contactless methods of payment, which is just as well since most shops are now only reluctantly accepting cash due to its potential as a means of transmitting the virus. Even before coronavirus, I had pretty much converted to paying with my phone except where that wasn’t an option and I currently don’t have a single banknote to my name, while all of my coins are quarantined.

If we had ended up in lockdown fifty years ago, we would not have had the number of diversions that we have today. We had just three TV channels (Channel 4 started broadcasting in 1982), and there was very little worth watching before early evening anyway. No streaming services, no videos or DVDs. No social media; really, we can have no complaints today about having to spend time at home, and we have no reason to be bored.

As is the case with almost every aspect of it, the internet has been a force for good, and not so good in these times. Apart from enabling people to work from home – including broadcasters, with radio and TV shows being recorded from kitchens and living rooms up and down the country – virtual exercise classes are being shown on social media. Ten days ago I’d not even heard of Zoom, but my wife has been logging on to it daily to join in with various classes being run by our local YMCA. We did a virtual pub quiz the other day, along with about 16,000 other people, and of course, Facetime and other video messaging services have been a boon for people who are self-isolating and thus estranged from family and friends.

But the internet would not be the internet without the negative, and social media highlights and amplifies this. Twitter is the worst for this in my experience, both in terms of original posts and the reactions to them; much of the content at present is extremely pessimistic about the prognosis of the current pandemic, and as ever, Twitter seems to attract the sort of person for whom logical argument and civilised debate can never replace abuse and ignorance in any conversation.

In fairness though, I did have some very civilised Twitter exchanges with people I know only through that medium on my birthday this week. In fact, social media made my birthday a much more convivial experience than it would have been otherwise, as apart from my immediate family, I didn’t see anyone. Having said that, that’s actually not that unusual!

For all its faults though, the internet is invaluable for keeping us up to date with news from official sources – and the not so official ones. In the 1970s we were limited to a daily newspaper and TV and radio news broadcasts, and if we think back to the Falklands conflict in 1982, the news we got from the frontline was heavily censored. Today, for good or ill, the official news we get is subject to a great deal more scrutiny, although as ever we must apply a good deal of scepticism to all that we read, whether it is the source or the critique.

Boredom and too much time on our hands browsing social media on the internet may mean being inveigled into doing quizzes, or answering those seemingly innocent questions that ask things like, where did you go on the first flight you took? Or, who were the first band you saw live? Or, the name of your first school, first pet, or the road you grew up in. Or, perhaps take the name of your first pet and your mother’s maiden name to make your movie star name. Do any of those things sound familiar? They ought to because those are the sort of things that your bank asks as security questions. Just for fun, why don’t you share a picture of your credit card, and post the three-digit code that’s on the reverse as well? Then we can all check back this time next week and see whose bank account was cleaned out first.

Coronavirus is a storm that we all hope and pray will soon abate. In the meantime all we are being asked to do to make sure we ride it out is stay indoors, watch TV, read books, play games, catch up on odd jobs, and chat with our friends and family (in person with those we live with, online with those we don’t). We don’t have to take to an air-raid shelter at night, and we don’t go to sleep wondering if we’ll have a house to live in the next morning. It’s not a big price to pay, so stay at home, and stay safe!