Opinion

Bimpe Archer: Coronavirus has changed everything - but everything will change again

Who, a few weeks ago, knew we would end up with empty supermarket shelves and a full-scale public health crisis?
Who, a few weeks ago, knew we would end up with empty supermarket shelves and a full-scale public health crisis? Who, a few weeks ago, knew we would end up with empty supermarket shelves and a full-scale public health crisis?

AS I start writing this I am at home but I'm not working from home. I haven't seen anyone today and have cancelled a visit from my elderly parents but I'm not social isolating. My children are at home but school and the childminder are not closed, just paused.

When I finish writing this I have no idea if nothing or everything will have changed.

By the time you read this it is likely something will have changed. But what?

We have been living with uncertainty for so long now it's hard to remember what life before 'the fear' was like or when we lived it.

Chatting to a colleague yesterday I suddenly recalled Thursday February 27. I was on a working break with a friend who demanded to know whether I was "freaking out about coronavirus".

I looked at her baffled and said no, although I felt desperately sorry for the people in China and its neighbours who had caught it and were suffering or had died.

"What about Italy?" she had asked, going on to express concern about her husband who was still set on going on a trip to the US in March.

Some people would get sick and then most of them would get better, I had said. And not that many people, I had thought. Not there, not here.

My concern was focused on places in the world with fragile health systems and already vulnerable populations. That was where lives would be lost, or changed forever.

It was just the way things were. The way they had always been. Sars, swine flu, ebola - first came the fear and the panic and that galvanised scientists and health services in the developed world to shored up its defences and then dispatched help where it was really needed. Fatalities were limited as much as they could be. Life went on.

The worst thing about the uncertainty is that as much as I hate it I know it is another thing I will miss at some point in the near future

I can't remember what went on between February 27 and today. I can't pinpoint at what stage that became then and this became now.

I presume it was gradual or I would have another memory like that date seared into my consciousness.

Obviously my friend's date isn't the same. I wonder whether any of us share the last day we remember clearly feeling 'normal'.

I know on that date I had a diary full of things I 'knew' I was going to do. Now I literally don't know when I wake up what I am going to be doing by lunchtime.

A friend has taken to adding "If I see you again" at the end of all his goodbyes. I chose to believe my farewells are 'whens' not 'ifs', but I appreciate his point.

The worst thing about the uncertainty is that as much as I hate it I know it is another thing I will miss at some point in the near future.

I will remember this date as a time when I didn't know what I was going to be doing, who I was going to be seeing and where I was going to be going.

I will remember it as I move around the same rooms in my house, doing the same things with the same people for yet another day which has followed so many that I won't be able to pinpoint at what stage it became my routine.

I will be living a completely different life, one as unimaginable as the one I am living now was on February 27.

These are unprecedented times.

But if remembering February 27 has taught me anything, it is that all times change and all times end.

We are moving through a period of uncertainty with all the fear that brings. For the first time in a long time we are all moving through it together.

Times are changing, but the uncertainty will end, just as certainty did before it.

If I don't see you before that, I will see you afterwards, my friends.