Opinion

Anita Robinson: After so much sacrifice, let's not lose the run of ourselves

Shoppers queue outside Primark in Belfast as non-essential shops reopen in Northern Ireland following the easing of lockdown restrictions. Photo: Mark Marlow/PA Wire.
Shoppers queue outside Primark in Belfast as non-essential shops reopen in Northern Ireland following the easing of lockdown restrictions. Photo: Mark Marlow/PA Wire. Shoppers queue outside Primark in Belfast as non-essential shops reopen in Northern Ireland following the easing of lockdown restrictions. Photo: Mark Marlow/PA Wire.

Well, I suppose we got what we’d yearned for last Friday – a return to what passes for normality in these parts.

I had no intention of joining the Gadarene rush to the shops, but it was absolutely necessary for me to drive into town for a vital appointment, viz. eyebrow tint’n’tidy, since I bore a close resemblance to an anaemic version of the famously monobrowed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

What an ordeal it was, proceeding at a funeral pace, my foot aching on the clutch of my elderly asthmatic Fiesta, spirits dampened by the sight of every car park’s serried rows of vehicles and the fast-diminishing prospect of finding a space. You couldn’t have slid a knife blade between cars outside TK Maxx. Outside our local Primark was a modern re-enactment of the Siege of Derry. Women, purses at the ready, thronged the surrounding streets, up to, and even on, the city walls – a tidal wave of determined femininity, like a biblical plague of locusts hellbent on stripping the shop rails bare. Which they did.

The theory posited by experts was that our experience of pandemic would radically alter the way we lived and thought. If Friday last and previous brief relief from lockdown is anything to go by, they’re mistaken. We mean well, but we’re a nation of backsliders. Relief makes us reckless. Already, one person in three ignores the hand sanitiser at store doors, the two-metre rule has telescoped to a couple of feet and great lumps of teenagers march maskless into shops, giving dogs abuse to anyone brave enough to stop them.

Permission for outdoor drinking and dining has been hailed with enthusiasm by the hardy. In a climate as unpredictable as ours, alfresco eating has never really been part of our culture, though the memoirs of many recall the misery of grit-laden sandwiches consumed on windswept beaches. I’m not so desperate for company that I could be prevailed upon to sit outdoors on a pavement in defiance of the elements, inhaling exhaust fumes and getting a foundering along with my overpriced coffee.

Something terrible has happened to me during lockdown. I’ve turned into a curmudgeon – shouting at the television, despairing of the heedless young and consigning our politicians to perdition. Stormont – a hundred years in existence and still picking at the scabs of festering old sores.

What do most of us want? A decent house, secure employment, a good education for our children; efficient (and speedy) medical care, safe streets, mutually respectful cultural diversity, freedom to worship as we choose and live at peace with our neighbours. It’s called ‘stability’. Other places manage it. We, bedevilled by inherited suspicion of ‘otherness’, are a tiresomely insoluble embarrassment and a thorn in the side of two jurisdictions. For many generations now the most valuable of our exports are our young – an unstaunchable haemorrhaging of our brightest and best. A smattering of my contemporaries left in the Sixties, never to return. Of my daughter’s Nineties form class, fewer than a handful remain.

Lockdown brought out the best and the worst in us – a tide of neighbourly kindness and concern; for some, gladness of respite from perpetual getting and striving. Others, without the anaesthetic of routine felt cut adrift. Undiluted leisure, unless it be a holiday, breeds boredom and soul-sapping aimlessness. Knock away the scaffolding of our days and some of us crumble. Prolonged togetherness either seals or fractures relationships. My heart went out to those ‘working from home’ besieged by familial interruptions and the ‘furloughed’, devoid of legitimate excuses, having to tackle long-postponed renovations. As an ex-teacher, I confess to taking a certain vicarious pleasure in the discomfiture of parental ‘home schoolers’, discovering that it ain’t as easy as it looks.

Re-reading this, I’m in severe danger of realising that I’m old – but glad of it. Who’d want to be young in this benighted place these days? We Baby Boomers had the best of it – and even that wasn’t great. Let’s not at this late stage and after so much sacrifice, lose the run of ourselves. Remember – two jabs don’t bestow immortality. Mind how you go….