Dr Kristopher Lovell

9th June 2020

It’s been about two and a half months, I think, since I realized how big an issue this pandemic was. It’s not common for universities to shut down like this – even in terrible winter storms our campuses may remain open. And somehow, near the end of March, I woke up to learn that basically every major university had moved their courses online for the rest of the term; mine followed later that afternoon. Now the term is over and this is how I have graduated – online without ceremony in the middle of a global pandemic. I don’t know how I feel about anything right now. I feel like I am overreacting in one moment to not taking things seriously enough in the next. Now somehow we are in June. I keep forgetting about the pandemic now; I’m nervous about going outside at all, even though I still miss just being able to sit in a coffee shop or go get bubble tea with friends or exist in a library, but with the recent protests it’s so easy to forget that both these things are happening at once? I don’t know why. I know that doesn’t really make sense, and that major events can obviously happen concurrently, but reading or learning about this in regards to history is so different than actually living it.

I’ve stopped reading the news as much. Normally I’d like to keep track of what’s happening locally and elsewhere, but these days, I’m just too tired. I was already burned out from school, and now I’m sure I still am, but now I just feel… More unmotivated and apathetic? Lazy? I really don’t know how I feel other than just weird; it’s like I don’t have enough space in my brain to deal with everything that’s happening at once. It also feels a bit weird how I keep wondering what things will be like later. Once we get past this how will things have changed? Will things have changed? Whether they find a vaccine that works or whether we all have to learn to live with this somehow, what’s going to be different and how? I also find it weird, and therefore difficult to say to others, that I want to remember this? In that, I don’t want to forget how surreal and bizarre and deadly serious all of this is; I don’t want to look back one day (because I’m really hoping to survive this) and think, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad, people just overreacted,’ because it is that bad and people are not overreacting.

For now though, I’m just going to keep looking for a job and trying to figure out what, if any, career goals I have.

04/06/2020

The veneer is starting to lift.

My experience as a shop worker throughout the lockdown period has been mixed. On the one hand, we’ve had a number of fantastic customers that have been courteous, empathetic and vigilant. Conversely, the looming threat of contracting COVID-19 has been a constant source of stress. It’s been a wholly tiring experience, when one event has consumed your day, everyday for nearly 3 months it becomes hard to find any distance from it.

Which I think has gone some way to making the recent relaxation of guidance so much harder, it feels like a complete juxtaposition of my new norm. Maybe a bit of context is important.

My town isn’t a big town, it relies heavily on saturday tourist trade. Obviously this has been impacted by the lockdown. And honestly, it’s been a breath of fresh-air, my hours have been more sociable and we’ve been interacting with fewer customers. Which has made social distancing significantly easier.

With this in mind, since the PM allowed for greater travel there has been a big uptick in the number of people travelling into town, both from within the local area and also from neighbouring towns. I have found this stressful, my town which was basically empty 2 weeks ago now looks like a seaside resort.

It’s also raised another issue, people are being less generous. By this I mean that some of the customers that we’re serving are ignoring social distancing guidelines- they’re leaning over the counter. They’re not giving their other customers adequate space, and from my own experience, they’re being much more dismissive of myself and my colleagues.

This is what I mean by veneer lifting, there was an atmosphere at the beginning of this crisis in which it seemed like everyone was in this together. Now it feels like this is business as usual. Obviously, I’ve not accounted for the individual experiences of the customers in question. They might be having a really bad day, but when it’s impacting my day, I think it deserves recognizing.

I didn’t even know what the ‘holiday’ even was about, at first. We’d talked a lot, in class, about whether we would be getting a break for flu season, as half our class was missing, and that’s what I thought the break that was supposed to be two weeks long was about. We got some homework from our teachers, a few new things to.learn, and that was it. We started with online lessons about a month later, I think, and it was only then that I noticed that this break seemed to be etting much longer than two weeks. I’m not the best with time,and this quarantine has made it even worse, so that combined with the eternity that was March has left me very confused about when it was that online lessons started, and when I noticed that this supposed holiday only seemed to last longer.
And online school was absolute hell. In a very interesting metaphor (comparison?idk) I came up with in online class, ironically, was that my mind feels like a beach ball, and focusing feels like trying to push it underwater. In class, you actually have to stay focused. On zoon university, you just have to turn on your phone. Another problem is the seeming lack of consequences for anything: I keep putting off assignments, forgeting homework, secure in my remaining knowlege like a too-rich king ignoring the messages of loss from the wars and wasting the last of their money to spend their final days in wasteful opulence, in an endless chase for the past.
Once, I had to complete around thirty, I think, pages of math homework in one night, homework that should have been spread out over weeks, that I instead ignored, procrastinated, until the very last moment.
I am so bored.
So bored, and with so many things to do: tests and oral exams and projects and papers I completely forgot about and had to bullshit at midnight for tomorrow, without internet, only my stupid, forgetful self.
I got maximum grades on that one, though, so no need to worry.

I don’t know how to feel when I hear the news that say the curfew will end, lockdown soon sfter, probably, coupled with the reports of twenty new cases today. On one hand, it’s good that we’re taking steps toward getting better, but on the other, a part of me can’t help but think of this as a trap. Like we should wait for it to fully die down, end completely, before we get careless. I’m lucky I live where I do; I’ve seen what’s going on in Britain and the US.
I want to scream at my parents, sometimes.
I went to the store one day and coughed so hard the day after, and I was so afraid I had the virus, that I would pass it to my family, to my baby sister, and the day after that, when we visited family for Eid, I kept thinking: am I going to give my sickness to these people too?
I am so tired, so infinitely bored, but I will stay. I will keep my boredom to the confines of my house. All I can do now is pray that I won’t have to do it for much longer.

I’m getting tested this afternoon. I don’t think I’m actually sick because I don’t have any symptoms, but I have to do it anyway: my mother has lung cancer and M. (my sister) and I are planning to visit her. She’s at risk and getting tested before seeing her is the right thing to do.
M. got tested yesterday. She’ll probably get the results later today or tomorrow.

I keep waking up, hoping that, to quote Biggie, ‘it was all a dream’. Instead Greggs is still shut. I hate eating at home. People are meant to enjoy their parents cooking. I struggle to. My girlfriend thinks I’ve got thinner, which isn’t the plan! I just want to be able to get on the train and go browsing in the city. Have time to myself in the noise. I went for a 5 hour walk yesterday into the countryside. It was glorious, just myself, the wind, the trees, the sun. I saw a hare, and heard a woodpecker. I used to find pagan notions of nature as a deity as strange, but as I get older I feel tangible connections forming between myself and the earth. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza himself postulated ‘Deus sive Natura’ – God or Nature. Today though I’m back in the house, with my mum. I hate my MA I’m chained to; on a good day I feel like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, lashed to the side of a breaching whale, dead arms waving at the onslaught of masturbatory academia. I just want to be able to roam, to not worry about the next sodding video call, or feel guilty about wanting a meal deal. But my moaning feels illegitimate; I have not lost anyone close, I have had good fortune thus far. That said a family member did pass away from Covid a few weeks ago, goodbye via Ipad etc. I felt very displaced at the time. I just want Greggs to reopen. I want to be able to eat again.

25th March, 2020*

I’ve had to check the calendar 4 times today because I have lost all sense of time. Structure and routine mean little to me when it feels like the world outside is falling apart.

The English Government are in absolute shambles, with one foul controversy after another, and Boris Johnson- idiot at large- feels like opening schools in the middle of a pandemic is a great idea to return to normalcy.

How many teachers and nurses and key workers and sanitisation staff and carers and families have to become infectious before it’s too late?
How many children have to die before they realise this isn’t right?

I am burning with anger and anxiety and fear and shame and so much confusion over how this lockdown has been fumbled by the ones who are supposed to care for the general public, but are too out of touch to know what true desperation feels like.

I feel I have missed out at University, truth be told; this seems to have happened at the worst possible time for someone in the final year of their degree, when we are supposed to be completing exams and handing in dissertations and final major projects.

I know this will affect my final grade, and thus my future is held in the clammy, trembling hands of my tutors and professors and aid staff who have done all they can in the uncertainty.
My future is trickling through the gaps of Boris Johnson’s grubby white fingers because he cannot hold our lives at the same time as his ambition and pride.

Right now the general populace are trapped, isolating in a snow globe, and Boris is going to shake the damn thing so hard trying to get money to fall out that he’s going to fucking shatter us.

People are dying, and I’ve already forgotten what day it is.

*Received 25 May 2020

Friday 2020-05-01

There are things I knew I’d have to teach my future children, things I knew I’d have to say.
But I never thought I’d have to teach them how to wash their hands for 20 seconds. I never thought I’d have to sit down with the plastic gloves and the paint to show them how the soap is distributed.
I never thought I’d need to teach them how to eyeball six feet, or how to properly wear a mask, or how to apply hand sanitizer.
I never thought I’d have to explain why I have a second freezer full of vacuum-packed meat and veggies, or why I’m conserving just about anything I can get my hands on that can be conserved.
Never thought I’d have to explain the veritable mountain of toilet paper and canned food and sanitation wipes. Because I will stockpile.
As soon as I have the space for it, I will hoard just about anything that will last for a decade or more. Because I refuse to live with the insecurity of if I’ll have enough to eat, enough to wash myself with, enough to keep my home clean.
I never thought I’d have to explain behaviors I didn’t have before all of this.
I never thought I’d have to explain the exact spread of bacteria.
All before they’re five, seven, ten.
And if they’re anything like me. They will ask the question: “Why didn’t anyone do anything?” “Wasn’t there something that could be done?” “Why didn’t everyone do this?”
And I might stall that conversation. I might have to evade it. Because I don’t want to tell my five year old that large parts of the world failed us. I don’t want to make them sad, I don’t want…
I never thought I’d say these things, explain, show, gently, as gently as is possible, tell them that while people banded together and helped, and there are heroes in every corner… that those we are supposed to be able to trust did nothing.
They did nothing.
I used my long sleeves to touch public surfaces long before Corona.
But I didn’t freak out when a knuckle accidentally touched the shopping cart handle.
I didn’t use sanitation wipes on the self-scanner in the store, or on the cart handles and edges.
I didn’t use sanitation wipes to wipe down everything I bought that could be wiped down, every surface the bags had touched, the handles, the door handle, my keys.
I know the statistics, how many people wash their hands properly, how many different kinds of bacteria are on public surfaces.
I used to change my pants every time I came home long before this happened.
But I didn’t fold them and put them in a bag, I didn’t wash my hands afterwards, I didn’t…
There is so much I didn’t do.
So much I will do for the rest of my life.
I’m not scared for me. Not really. But I’m scared to be asymptomatic, accidentally spreading the virus to others, no matter who.
My touch couldn’t kill unless I was sick…
It can now.
There’s a very high chance that I’ve already had it. That week I was sick at the beginning of April or end of March. That sneezing and that cough were similar, yet different, from any cold or flu I’ve ever had. It was both milder and harsher at the same time.
It doesn’t matter anymore. I was isolated, I stayed isolated afterwards, I was more careful.
And even if I have antibodies now, which might not help anyways, it doesn’t matter. I could still carry the virus.
And that scares me.

I don’t want to have to explain that fear to someone who is old enough to ask, but young enough that they shouldn’t be afraid.
I don’t want my children to think there’s nothing good in the world, and yet, right now… I have a difficult time seeing the good.

Everything else is so much bigger. The rising numbers, the restrictions, the laws. Everything is changing, and I have no idea where it’s headed.
Things won’t be the same, for good or ill, things will change. I have no idea where I’ll end up after all of this is over, if it’ll ever even be over.

Mom said something along those lines, she said they’re speculating that this won’t end, that we will have to learn to live with it. I don’t know how true that is, and for my own sanity I refuse to watch the news.
I go in, sometimes, just to check the registered cases and the death toll.
Instead I trust that mom will relay the news when we speak, or someone else I trust will mention something. I’ll verify, but the new articles and videos and interviews?
They grate on me, I hear the artificially cheery yet serious voice of the news anchor and I want to fling the remote at the TV and scream. I can’t stand it, I can’t read it or hear it or see it.

I’m grateful every day for my loneliness now, for the isolation, because I don’t want my friends to see me like this, harried, questioning the world, absolutely losing it at random moments.

I’m the calm one, the sensible one.
It’s not so calm or sensible to be terrified of shattering that illusion. But I can’t let them see me now. So at least I can be alone, thinking about all of these things.

Will this ever end?
What will I have to tell my children?
Which loved one will die before it’s over?
Am I going to survive?

I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know. And so much I don’t want to find out, because sometimes ignorance truly is bliss, and I’ll try to keep that for as long as I can.
I both hate and love that decision.

It’s getting worse by the day.