When the boss asked me if I wanted to take on this column I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
Not out of some long-held desire to bestow my wisdom on to a grateful world. Well, apart from on the subject of workplace dog creches, but we’ll come back to that when we all have a bit more time to consider its brilliance. It was more the suspicion that if I turned it down, they’d give it to some other shirt-sleeved bloke with his arms folded. No offence. And as any woman staring down the barrel of middle age will tell you, it’s such a novelty to be asked for your opinion on anything you’re damned right you don’t turn down an offer like that.
That was a month ago. Innocent times, eh? Oh the hours spent idly fretting over how I’d fill an 800-word space if it turned out to be one of those weeks when there was nothing going on in sleepy old Courier Country that was worth writing about. Coronavirus was a thing obviously. But it was a story for the international pages. Chinese people in face masks. Eighteen-month wait for a vaccination. Something about a cruise ship moored off the coast of somewhere because some passengers were sick or something.
And then last Wednesday night, we announced we were cancelling The Courier Menu Awards with 24 hours’ notice after the government issued fresh guidance on the avoidance of large gatherings. And in the course of 10 days, we’ve gone from preparing to welcome hundreds of people to a glittering celebration of the great and the good in the Tayside and Fife food and drink industry to restaurants, cafés and bars closing down and farmers urging sacked employees to sign up for fruit picking because they’re frightened to plant crops in case they can’t bring in the foreign workers to harvest them.
When my predecessor Stefan Morkis introduced me as “a pixieish Patrick Troughton” in his valedictory column last Saturday, I had no idea we would be stumbling through an actual Doctor Who hellscape by the time our regeneration was complete. But here we are. And it’s going to take more than a sonic screwdriver and a chirpy aside from Jodie Whittaker to get us out of this dark and confusing episode.
I’m writing this on a laptop at my coffee table, the rumble of traffic on the A9 across the playing field from my house still present but far from the usual level on a weekday morning. The last stragglers were sent home from work yesterday as social distancing shifted from “alright for some” to a three-line whip. I’ve no idea how we’re going to put out a newspaper every day, though I know we will and I know from the volume of calls and emails we’ve been receiving in the office this week that it’s never been more important.
And I’m hoping the headache and tightness in my throat and chest is symptomatic of a low-level panic attack rather than the virus, but there’s no way of finding out so like everyone else I’ll just keep calm and carry on. Because I’ve got it lucky.
My job has got way more complicated – a tiny dog LITERALLY just scampered across my keyboard – but I’m at home, where the risk of falling ill, or catching an infection that will harm the people I love is greatly diminished. I’ve got a job, there’s food in my cupboard, my mortgage is still being paid. There are people in our communities who no longer have that luxury and if we are going to get through this, we’re going to have to find a way of figuring it out together.
We have had the privilege of reporting on humanity at its best over the last few days. Support networks springing up in towns and villages across our area, neighbours delivering prescriptions and groceries, suppliers donating cancelled orders to charities.
But we’ve also seen supermarket shelves stripped bare, cornershop-keepers racially abused and hand sanitisers stolen from public buildings.
A week is an eternity when your society is in the grip of a pandemic, and as the days go on and tempers fray and fingers point it’s going to be get harder to navigate, but we must.
There’s a thread doing the rounds on Twitter this morning about an anthropologist who when asked what she considered to be the first sign of human civilisation, pointed to a thighbone that had been broken then healed. In the animal kingdom, a broken leg means the casualty is unable to run from danger, hunt for food or forage, so it dies. This healed femur was evidence that someone else had taken the time to care for the person and support them until they were well enough to look after themselves.
Social media being what it is, it will probably have been exposed as a hoax by now, but the sentiment holds true. Everything has changed, it’s about to get tougher. We’re in this together.
Be kind – to yourself as well as others. Wash your hands. And then remind me to talk to you about dog creches when this is all over.
