Testing Times as the UK Enters a Third Lockdown.

 

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.