It's
mid-afternoon in the first week of January and I'm walking through the campus
of Staffordshire University.
Everything
looks the same, almost, there is traffic on the roads and people on the pavements,
but nothing is really the same. The campus and the city have the grey,
decidedly sad look of a seaside resort out of season. Everything is shuttered
up waiting the Spring and life to return.
This is a
provincial city in England on the first full day of the country's third
lockdown in a little less than a year.
Overhead
the sky is overcast and although the snow has mostly melted it is still
bitterly cold. I am clean shaven and more than a little nervous because I am on
my way to get lateral flow test organised by the university. A requirement for
students returning after the Christmas break in these virus haunted times, even
those of us who haven't actually been away.
The tests
are being carried out in the LRV, a bar come music venue in happier times, now
re-purposed as a testing centre. To my immense relief the registration process,
which when I booked my slot looked like a bureaucratic nightmare in the making
is handled quickly and efficiently by a young woman armed with a smartphone.
The testing
itself was slickly done too half a dozen nurses occupy three rows of trestle
tables taking up most of the room. I am called forward and my allotted nurse
asks me if I have been swabbed before, sounding as if we were in a Harvester.
I reply
that I haven't, and she explains that they will insert one end of the swab into
my throat to touch my tonsils and the other into both my nostrils. There might,
she says, be some discomfort. A clinical euphemism that always makes me feel
nervous.
Thankfully
this time there was nothing to be nervous about, although not something I'd do
for fun the test was less unpleasant than I'd been led to expect. The worst
part is having the swab pushed up your nose since even though it isn't at that
moment it feels uncomfortably pointy.
From there
it is back outside to kick my heels along with everyone else who has been
tested as we wait the half hour it takes for the results to come through. It
feels a little like one of those moments in a film when the director moved into
real time to ramp up the tension.
All of a
sudden every otherwise inconsequential little thing going on around from the
couple chatting behind me to the builders erecting the new Catalyst Building
bashing a piece of metal suddenly seems important. A failed distraction from
thinking about the one thing you don't want to think about.
After what
feels like an eternity my phone buzzes, a text message giving me my results. I
have to read it at least three times before I can take it in and feel a huge
surge of relief. Negative. I'm in the clear, for now anyway.
The sense
of relief last until I get home and switch on the television to watch Prime
Minister Boris Johnson give a press conference on the unfolding crisis.
He looks
less exhausted than he did the night before when he addressed the nation to announce a new
lockdown, saying that even with 1.3 million
people vaccinated so far and plans to raise that to 2million a week by
the middle of February the next few weeks are likely to be the 'hardest yet'.
Despite his
best efforts to pretend otherwise it is becoming clear that the Tigger of
British politics has lost a lot of his bounce over the past year. After a
charmed rise to power and a surprise election win last December, he has been
handed a starring role in a national disaster.
The figures
are stark, 60,916 more infections and 830 more deaths, there are 26,000
patients in hospital with Covid, 50% up on last week. This is the eighth day in
a row when the UK has recorded more than fifty thousand new infections, a
record nobody wants because it is sure to translate into more deaths in a
couple of weeks time.
TS Eliot
famously wrote about the cruelty of September, thinking, I suppose, about the
old maxim about politicians being more likely to start wars once the harvest
has been gathered. He may well have been right, personally I have thought that
January and February, with their relentlessly grim weather and lack of anything
to look forward to give it a good race.
In 2021,
following on from everything we went through last year and all that may be to
come before the Spring; they might well beat slow old September into a distant
third place.
Since this
article was written the daily infection rate has started to, slowly, reduce,
although it is still usually above twenty thousand. Sadly, the UK has also
passed the awful landmark of one hundred thousand COVID related deaths since
last March, and so the picture still one where darkness outweighs light.
