We live in the Upside Down now. A world turned topsy-turvy and this is our new normal.
Today is the 10th May 2020 and we are going into Week 8 of our lockdown here in the Cayman Islands.
Curfew is part of our everyday and strict social distancing rules are in place.
The police helicopter patrols the sky day and night and the marine patrol boat ploughs up and down the coast checking beaches are clear.
Fixed roadblocks quarter the island and act as checkpoints.
Everyone has to carry photo ID. There are strict penalties for anyone found out in violation to the rules.
Monday to Saturday we are under Soft Curfew from 5:00am to 7:00pm and over night Hard Curfew is in place.
We are allowed out of our homes three days per week, for about two hours to buy essentials and for one hour per day to exercise.
When you are allowed out you have to wear a mask if you cannot maintain the required social distancing gaps.
Hand washing or the use of alcohol gels and sprays are practiced with a rigour that would make OCD sufferers proud.
On Sundays we are under Hard Curfew and cannot leave our homes at all.
Only registered key workers with government passes are an exception to these rules.
All businesses are closed, apart from garages, supermarkets and restaurants (for delivery and collection only).
A number or well known local business have gone bust already and more will follow.
The beaches and swimming pools are closed.
There is no diving!
Schools have been closed for two months and we have two more to go before the summer holidays.
We are likely to be closed to cruise ships for the remainder of the year. In bound flights will be limited for the same time and anyone arriving will have a mandatory two weeks quarantine.
If the virus burns itself out and there is no more local transmission or community transmission we will be able to open up internally but we will remain isolated from the rest of the world.
An island literally and metaphorically cut off.
In the meantime we adapt and learn how to do things differently.
With school closed I have learnt a lot about working from home and running a school remotely.
My office mark one has given way to something more permanent.
The first lesson is that when you work from home during a lockdown, you never leave work. You are literally at work 24/7. You never get to switch off. You never relax. You phone rings and beeps at all hours. You are on call constantly.
The second lesson is that you have to work so much harder and everything you need to do takes longer to achieve. It’s frustrating, simple conversion that would normally take seconds now need a phone call.
The third lesson is that even though you are working your socks off the quality of your output and effectiveness still does not match that of your normal day to day role.
The forth and final lesson is that the solution to providing any form of education is dependent on so many different factors. Ranging from the age of the children, the level of technology at home, how much support their parents can give, the home language, the teacher’s level of confidence with new technology, how many siblings there are in the house, poverty levels, social vulnerability and even the price of data.
Some houses only have a mobile phone and that’s it.
I have said before that WhatsApp and Zoom have been the heroes of the piece enabling frictionless uncomplicated two way access between home and school.
But to try to make remote learning work teachers are literally working seven days a week and long into the evenings.
The challenges are enormous.
Oh and we are being audited by the school inspection service.
Everyone feels guilty because they feel they are letting the students down.
Everyone is exhausted and close to burnout.
Everyone is anxious.
It is mentally and emotionally draining and I think we all have Stockholm Syndrome.
Some bake, others make, I write because it’s calorie free and less messy than painting.
I don’t write this blog because I have any illusions that I am a budding author, or a master wordsmith. I do it simply because I enjoy it and I wanted to capture this chapter in my family’s life.
It is in short, a self-indulgence.
Four years ago, when we set out on our adventure to experience life in another country, to widen our horizons, I started this blog.
There have been highs and lows, as you can see from this account, but when weighed in the balance it has been pretty amazing and we have been lucky.
This time has brought us closer together as a family. We have all grown and changed I think for the better.
But right now, like everyone else, I feel numb.
I cannot tell you how many times in the last month I have set out with the intention of writing and failed.
I have felt an an overwhelming compulsion to try to put into words the events and feelings of the last three months. Yet, emotional exhaustion and the realisation that nothing I could ever write can even begin to capture the magnitude of what is happening around us have halted me every time.
Telling tales of our little lives seems utterly frivolous. One questions the value of sharing my perspective at this time. I find myself thinking that in the face of what is happening in the world “what can I add?”
The scale of events is so massive, so incomprehensible. I might as well not bother.
Let’s face it, this is a global story with a cast of billions, with so many twist and turns as to make any attempt to record it meaningless.
How then does one even begin to write about their personal day to day experience of this? It is hubris to even consider it.
We are each but specks.
Motes of dust floating on a sunbeam.
Inconsequential.
Tiny.
But then so is a virus.
Maybe through the act of expression I can show defiance. Even if it only makes me feel a little bit better, then that’s enough. A sense of taking back some small measure of control at a time when we all feel pretty helpless.
So, here goes…
2020 arrived welcomed with fireworks and parties around the world. The dawn of a new decade. The world economy was buoyant and the roaring twenties were here. But along with the optimistic headlines news articles about a potentially new virus began to seep into the media and our collective consciousness. A few small articles at first about a disease in a China. A cluster of cases of a flu like disease in a place called Wuhan. So far away, so remote. Sad, but no threat.
Unwittingly we all watched the first embers of that distant fire fanned into flames.
Hundreds, then thousands became sick. The region was closed. The number of dead mounted and with morbid fascination we witnessed events unfold, oblivious to the true nature and scale of the threat. It was like something out of a film, and felt about as real.
The city was locked down, a hospital thrown up in mere days. We watched hazmat suit clad figures spraying chemicals, the army mobilised and Wuhan province turned into a police state. Drones were deployed to enforce lockdown.
We shook our heads at this over reaction to a ‘cold’. Sneering and arrogant in our united belief that it could not happen here. (Wherever here is for you). Confident that if in the unlikely event it did reach us we would deal with it just fine. Better than them.
In China, the fire raged but it was contained. No threat, we all thought.
Then it jumped the fire break.
The genie was out of the bottle. A case here, a case there and the floating embers ignited new fires wherever they touched down. Finding in our packed cities and busy lives the perfect tinder for a firestorm. Fires quietly started that would grow and make those in Australia months before seem insignificant.
Yet when the other countries began to close schools, introduce curfews and social distancing, to ‘lockdown’ we still looked on in disbelief.
“Surely it’s not that serious?”
Silently the fire spread and in so many cases the response to the spread still seemed like an over reaction. Increasingly it was becoming apparent, particularly as we learn more, we were all asleep at the wheel.
Then suddenly it all burst into flame and it became apparent that this wasn’t an outbreak it was a pandemic.
We finally woke up to the threat.
As the fires spread so did the panic and countries began to close down in earnest.
Too late to avert disaster. We had missed the early opportunity to limit the damage.
As a result we have seen ‘modern’ first world countries hit hard, Italy and Spain saw their health systems overwhelmed.
We have all watched agog as the death toll in Britain and America have continued their inexorable climb.
Today, in mid May, 31,000+ have died in the UK. That’s more than died in the Blitz. An event so seared into our collective consciousness that this week, the week of the 75th Anniversary of VE Day (Victory in Europe), this near mythical wartime spirit, the ‘Blitz Spirit’ is once again being evoked to in an attempt to bind the country together in common cause.
The concept of ‘flattening the curve’ has became a mantra, a rallying call and a war cry.
‘We are all in this together!’
As a result of missed opportunities this virus hasn’t just attacked us, it has put the global economy into intensive care.
It has divided countries and exposed an ugly side to societies. The debate is shifting and uncomfortable questions are being asked, uncomfortable views expressed.
“It effects the old more, I’m young and fit I’ll survive. I’d rather take my chances with the disease than go broke or be poor.”
“If the choice is life or lifestyle. I choose lifestyle, even if it means others die!”.
The debate is shifting, testing the ground between collective responsibility and individualism. Trying to save everyone vs saving ourselves.
Maybe that’s human nature.
Maybe that’s how we will survive as a species.
Maybe that’s just nature.
“We forge on, yes there will be many loses, loved ones will die, friends will die, the old will die but as a species, as individuals we will survive.”
“There may be a few million less of us, maybe even billions less. But maybe that’s the price we pay and won’t that be great for the environment and the economy?”
How many are we willing to allow die to keep capitalism alive? To keep some semblance of the old order?
As we are all sat at home worrying and alone with our thoughts we each face these questions in our own way. The uncertainty is eating us making us look back through rose tinted glasses at our recent past.
We somehow have forgotten the existential crisis that we were already facing runaway pollution, global warming, sea level rise, the death of coral, mass extinction, the global wealth vs polity gap. The 1%.
But somehow the fact that the threat was forty years away meant we did not have to think about it now, we could just drown out the gnawing anxiety with stuff. We could distract ourselves. After all there was nothing we could do as individuals, we were helpless.
The brainwashing of our consumerist society taught us to abrogate responsibility for tomorrow and live in the moment. And yes there were poor folk living in grinding poverty, but not us.
Tomorrow will take care of tomorrow.
There will be a solution before the crisis really happens don’t worry.
The more the issues were pushed in our faces, the more aware we became, the harder we tried to deny. The more strident the warning, the more strident the denial and the greater the attack on the credibility of individual messengers. Personal attacks on the individual designed to show they were unlikeable then we could legitimately ignore what they were saying.
Yet these same scientists are the ones who were going to magically solve all the problems down the line.
Collective cognitive dissonance.
The big difference now is the threat is here today, it’s affecting us now. We have to face it and we are just not emotionally prepared.
Life has changed and we talk about ‘a new normal’, but that’s an illusion. ‘Normal’ speaks of stability, surety even predictability. This disease does not allow that. Even now close to six months after the first cases in China we are finding new ways it expresses itself. New ways it effects and impacts us. Strokes, rashes, life long internal damage, impacting men more prevalently, it seems almost chimeric, capricious in nature.
But then it is the hybrid bastard child of a bat, a pangolin and human, like a terrible creature out of myth made real, given flesh from our flesh.
Covid takes its place in our collective imagination alongside nightmares like the Minotaur, Naga, Werewolf, Medusa, Harpy, Manbearpigc or Cockatrice. Every culture has them, they have been with us since we first became aware. Just the latest mix bred horror from the of the pantheon unleashed when Pandora’s box was opened.
But this nightmare really stalks among us turning our daily lives on their heads and we now live in a too topsy-turvy world where the mundane has become murderous. Life has become a game of Russian Roulette.
Under an Endless Sky 