Reflections on a students life in lockdown. – 1st May 2020.
For myself and the four other students I live with, we went into personal lockdown a few weeks earlier than the rest of the nation due to one member of the household falling ill of covid-19. I tried to ignore it at first. I thought surely the 14 day incubation period cannot apply to us. I had a dissertation to write, exams to revise for, books in the library with my name on it. It took many strange phone calls home for me to come to the realisation that doing anything but staying at home was being selfish. It began to sink in more. My mum was on the front line and I am sat worrying about seemingly mediocre things in comparison. I felt awful.
For a while it was almost bearable. I set myself daily targets so that I would not miss important deadlines, I tried not to get bogged down with the fact that all of my third year holidays had been cancelled. After all, me and my friends were fuelling off the naivety that after our 14 day period life would return to normal. On March 23rd it all became clear how untrue that reality would be. But of course we carried on. The kitchen table was converted into a library silent floor desk, the living room became the new gym, using chairs and sofas as equipment. Gifts and deliveries from friends and family came nearly everyday, and every phone call felt more important than before.
It’s hard to imagine now what structure we’ll have when our dissertations have finally been submitted. The document of stress will finally be gone, but so will also the only form of pre-lockdown structure we have left. We try not to dwell on it. I signed up for the volunteer scheme last week, I feel it’s finally time to help out those who need it most. I keep hearing news stories occasionally, amongst all the noise, that nature is thriving amongst all the pain the humans are suffering. I do hope some climate change enlightenment will come out of this. I can’t bare to think the world could sit in silence after it was put on hold by a disease that is less a threat to human life than global warming. Naivety cannot surely be that powerful.
Dr Kristopher Lovell 