Living without a goal

 I sent a text yesterday, to Jacqui, our hairdresser:

Hi Jacqui

Hope you are well and coping with the madness

Viv and I were booked for haircuts on Monday but we think you aren't supposed to be working?

We will call you to fix up another date when Boris makes up his mind that it's safe ... so probably in 2024!

Well hopefully sooner!

That 2024 reference was meant as a joke, but when I read it back to Viv it didn't really seem like one: the way things are now: we haven't even got a visit from the hairdresser to look forward to, let alone holidays or trips to see family - which are noticable by their absence from our planner calendar.

When lockdown struck in March last year we had four holidays planned and booked - two weeks in Germany in April, a week by the Essex coast in July, a week in Devon in September and one in the Isle of Wight at Christmas. We did manage Essex and Devon, not at the dates we had planned, but cancelled Germany and the Isle of Wight. 

Like many we experienced some difficulty in getting refunds; as a consequence we're not planning any nights away until lockdown eases.

But trips away, even day trips, are milestones in our lives. When Viv was in a wheelchair we had a holiday to look forward to, and hospital outpatient trips (!), marking out our passage through the year. We now have none of that: each day is only differentiated from the previous by having different repeats on the TV and alternative government scare stories in the news.

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How does this affect me?

I'm not looking at the outside world as much (even online, if that is truly a reflection of the world); I'm more nervous, perhaps paranoid; I drink more than I should (and more than I did before lockdown).

When not working, Viv and I used to spend our time researching and planning trips away, finding out about museums, galleries and the like, planning walks, contacting new people: the sorts of things that schoolmasters might once have considered might 'improve our minds'. That's all gone.

We spend much of our time online, and our internet use now - apart from this blog and my writing work - tends to be shopping and tidying emails: Amazon may be company with the largets turnover in the world, but mind-improving it isn't. 

We read a bit - but our book-buying is limited to online, where you can't just wander around and find a book title that interests you in the way you can in Waterstones or a charity shop. 

I'm worried. I'm worried that, when all of this madess is over, for one reason or another, I won't be able to go back to being the way I was. I may be too old. I may lose interest in travel. Shops and markets where I used to enjoy browsing and buying items of interest might have ceased trading.

This fear of the unknown, this may be as damaging as the virus itself. 

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Viv had a letter about her benefits yesterday. She was due to have them reviewed in March 2023; the DWP have changed that to December 2023 'because of Covid'. If the government have already admitted that they won't have their workers back up to speed soon, and the backlog of work cleared in over two years, that's a fairly clear sign that the mess from lockdowns (which I would distinguish from the mess from Covid.... if the government had had contingency plans in place for their DWP workers they wouldn't have needed to delay assessments by nine months) will continue for a number of years. 

At the end of this, will someone in power really be able to convince me that the lockdowns were worth it?

And, surely, the people in power must understand one of the most basic tenets of management - that it is important that people working for you know the value of what they are doing?

Am I the only person thinking like this?