Pandemic time

Every Thursday evening throughout April and May, Britain paused to applaud the people working on the frontlines of our National Health Service. We stood at our front doors, we leaned out of our bedroom windows, and we clapped. We clapped a Health Service that has been steadily underfunded by a series of governments that we and our clapping hands voted for. We clapped a Health Service that can’t provide its doctors and nurses with adequate protective equipment, that can’t test them when they feel sick, and that can’t save them when they fall ill and die. We clapped the Health Service’s staff, of whom over one in ten are immigrants, even as we demanded that people at our borders be treated with ever-increasing suspicion. The National Health Service is rightfully Britain’s most beloved institution, but it is also its least politicised. Our love for the NHS is ultimately what will kill it. We will no doubt clap its corpse.

I am inhabiting the temporality of a dog. For the last fourteen weeks, my time has revolved around meals and once-daily walks. Everything else is mush. Sitting at my laptop in my living room window, I can see neighbours in the tenements opposite, sitting at their laptops in their living room windows. I’m not getting much work done, but my performances of professionalism do at least give some sort of glutinous, doughy structure to days that would otherwise be without form. I wonder if my neighbours are enacting similar performances beneath the proscenia of their window-frames. Maybe they’re occupying that imagined state of manic productivity against which I am constantly measuring myself?

The rhythms of everyday life have been altered over the last few months for all of us, but not to the same extent, and not in the same way. It’s hard to reconcile the unbounded shapelessness of my life at the moment with the furious hyper-urgency faced by medical professionals, or with the chaotic and uncertain horror the sick and their families must now be navigating. As a childless university lecturer, I am similarly insulated from the gnawing anxieties of unemployment or eviction, and from the frantic plate-spinning suddenly required of parents, carers and many others. These vast disparities bring the temporal dimensions of pandemic politics into sharp focus. I am finding it impossible to think about the virus - its epidemiology, its economic and social effects, and the measures taken to contain it - without considering its impact on people’s perceptions and experiences of time.

I took part in the NHS clap until the end, but after a few weeks the occasion came to feel like a hollow act of self-gratification: a complacent wave breaking across a howling, burning shore. Notions like ‘Thursday’ and ‘8pm’ belong to another time: a time defined by the rhythms of work and leisure, week and weekend, and by academic and religious calendars. Their invocation at a time of crisis feels quaint, which is no doubt part of the reason why they have been invoked so urgently. To do something together, at a defined hour, is briefly to re-enact the tempo and cadence of a time we left behind several months and many thousands of deaths ago. This is understandably comforting - but is it also enervating? Might a collective desire to return to normal obscure the pervasive injustices that structure ‘normality’ for so many, or blind us to the opportunities for social transformation that our present moment presents?

There remains a commonly held assumption that social and professional patterns will at some point begin to re-establish themselves. Let’s go for a drink once this is all over, my friend idly messages - though what ‘this’ is exactly, and what it being ‘over’ could possibly mean in the context of a five-figure national death figure and a global recession is anyone’s guess.

But a much more pressing question than when we might be able to go back to ‘normal’ is whether such a return is desirable or even possible. If not, then one must also ask what changes...