Dr Kristopher Lovell

This is dead time. I feel dead. I feel like nothing but a bag of flesh and tissue and bones, all held together by skin. I’m sick of not going anywhere, not seeing anyone. I haven’t been further than the corner shop since March; I can’t drive, so if I can’t walk there, then I can’t go. My whole world could fit in four square miles.

And in those four square miles, there are bus stops with garish yellow posters and thick black fonts, and shop windows with warnings, and queues of people, some wearing masks, some not. SOCIAL DISTANCING. REMAIN 2M APART. And all I can think is: when all of this is over, these will be in museums, and in 30 years’ time, our children will look at those posters, those warnings about staying 2m apart at all times, those masks, and they will probably think how weird it was that their parents lived through that.

I remember going to an exhibition at the Wellcome Gallery back in February, perhaps a week or so before all this started in full earnest, and looking at the material artefacts from bygone eras, diseases we’ve since eradicated or controlled, treatments that we no longer use. Iron lungs and thalidomide and advertisements extolling the benefits of smoking. And I wonder, when I’m older, when all this has finally settled, what museums will say of it. What the legacy of this time will be, and how we’ll remember it, and how we’ll try and shape it into lessons to be learnt, lessons that can be shoved into a glass display cabinet and labelled ‘Covid-19 pandemic, 2020’.

I like thinking about the future, because it’s a distraction from the monotony of the present. I hate thinking about the future, because it’s such an uncertain thing, and it will either be brilliant or terrible or both.

And so many ways of saying things that I shouldn’t. ‘I feel dead.’ I’m sick of-.’ People are sick, and people are dead, and I’m not. I wonder, too, how our language will change after this. Our cultural reference points. Will things still ‘spread like a plague’, or will that be taboo? Will we remember the divide between the mask wearers and the people who thought that masks were a tool of the state, or those who stayed locked down for months and the people who went out and flouted the rules?

Sometimes, I feel like I’m forgetting how to be a person. Or maybe it’s just that it’s hard to feel like a person without a world to exist in.