Male fantasies are weird. From the time I read the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, I felt a deep personal connection to the Egyptian Christians who responded to the edict of Milan in 313 AD, and the overnight acceptance and mainstreaming of their faith throughout the empire that followed, by fleeing to the desert. They recoiled at the prospect of their strange religion being tolerated or normalised, let alone popularised. Christianity is weird, and they understood this to a fault. Have I said weird too many times in this paragraph already? No matter; the repetition is deliberate. The weirdness of Christanity must be restated again and again in every generation, because it testifies to its divine origin. When our faith became domesticated, when it became something that your grandparents did because their grandparents taught them, and their grandparents before them, its downfall began. Even Chris de Burgh’s mildly heretical Christmas hit is preferable, because it captures some of the scale of this cosmic mystery. Yes, maybe the angels at the Nativity scene were aliens from outer space – it’s better than the chubby little babies of the Renaissance. Better still is Saint Symeon living in a pillar for 37 years, or the guy who prayed so hard that he burst into flames, or the guy who had his food delivered by the angelic version of UberEats. I devoured those stories, daydreaming about being a weird little hermit living in a cave in the Egyptian desert, weaving baskets and singing psalms all day long. Little did I know the day was coming when my fantasy would come true and the world was about to become a desert.
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Mr President
Happy birthday to you
And again.
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Mr President
Happy birthday to you
That’s what they told us on TV – Prime Minister Boris Johnson, both hands on the podium, bags under his eyes and sweating profusely under his thick blonde hair, desperately trying to sound confident and reassuring.
Will we have to wear masks?
We don’t know yet.
Will there be social distancing?
We don’t know yet.
Will they close the border?
We don’t know yet.
Will there be a quarantine like there is in Wuhan?
We don’t know yet.
What happens if businesses close and people lose their jobs?
We don’t know yet. Nobody knows yet.
Slowly but surely a quiet panic begins to set in as the questions pile up while the answers remain the same. Wash your hands, sneeze and cough into your elbow, and don’t touch your face. It all seems dreadfully inadequate, doesn’t it? I take a small amount of comfort in the fact that with my scientific background I already know how to wash my hands to a laboratory standard, and the movements which everybody else is only beginning to learn – around the thumb, between the fingers, rubbing the wrists together – are already wired into my muscle memory. Perhaps this is what it was all for. I’m not using my biochemistry degree for anything else, but maybe it will help me survive this...pandemic? Were we even saying the word pandemic back then? I can’t remember, but what I do remember is that everybody had already seen the Italian photo on Facebook.
Like most people in my generation I experienced the swine flu scare in 2009 with the sneering contempt of a teenager, just a playground joke about the banality of the pandemic that never was. The Italian photo, showing endless rows of coffins in a morgue, has dispelled any illusion that this will be another swine flu. Whatever is coming is very real and very serious even if we don’t know anything else about it. We enter the month of March and there are still no answers and no restrictions. By now our future is a daily topic of conversation at work and we all earnestly ask ourselves: will we still have a job next week? There is a rumour that there will be payments for businesses that close, if they close, but nobody has closed.
On the 11th of March, my boyhood team Liverpool are knocked out of the Champions League by Atletico Madrid. This is the same Liverpool team that won the competition last year, and are triumphantly marching towards their first league title in 30 years. This is not the real news. This fixture, the last game played on English soil with no restrictions, has delivered thousands of visitors from Madrid, the new hotspot for infections, to Liverpool. This is the news. As fans stream into Anfield, the 50,000-seater home of Liverpool Football Club, before the start of the game, the screen shows the breaking news: the WHO has declared a pandemic. Coronavirus, or Covid-19, is here. Within a month, 300 people in the city of Liverpool will die with the virus. Somehow nobody connected the dots, that Liverpol finally winning the league is so unprecedented that it must surely herald something dreadful.
Four days later, on the 15th, I message Mark. We had planned to go to the chaplaincy dinner after the 6pm Mass, but the chaplaincy is now closing indefinitely. All Masses cancelled. Since we had finally been introduced in January at Dick Cheney’s birthday he showed me the hidden gem that is Turnbull Hall. My visits to Mass in Holy Cross since last autumn were greatly comforting, for they demonstrated the feasibility of crossing the Tiber, and made the journey feel a little bit less wild and tumultuous. All of those Masses in the church on Dixon Avenue carried the gentle whiff of a homecoming, like the smell of your grandmother’s cooking, the half-dead flowers in the vase, the old feather duvet, and the family cat. In Turnbull Hall, that whiff became an overwhelming aroma. Now I was like a police dog tugging on the leash, straining towards the source of the scent. There aren’t enough turns of phrase to describe the euphoria of discovering a place like the chaplaincy on Southpark Avenue: a liturgy celebrated with care and reverence; interesting and well-researched homilies; a priest who loves God and knows how to do his job; but most of all, a congregation of young, intelligent, passionate, and articulate Catholics. Five minutes speaking to the charismatic and gregarious president of the student society and I am in. Like everything else in life, the real thing is better than the books, and seeing a real, vibrant, functioning church community is the last piece of the puzzle. Soon afterwards, I resolve to speak to the priest in Holy Cross, the very jovial and rotund Chesterton-like figure, about signing up for RCIA. My social anxiety is holding me back for we had not been introduced yet and so I delay my decision – next week, I will speak to him next week, and so on until there is no next week because the church had to close. The fateful day finally comes on the 23rd of March when our sweaty, sleep-deprived, anxious mess of a Prime Minister appears once again in front of a podium now bearing the slogan:
STAY AT HOME
PROTECT THE NHS
SAVE LIVES
And so lockdown begins. The desert is here. God got tired of my dithering; I can’t join RCIA but I can live out my hermit fantasy as all the noise of the world draws down into perfect silence. I explain the announcement to my disbelieving mum.
“What about work?”
“They will pay us.”
“Who?”
“The government.”
“What?”
“Yes, they’ll pay us to stay at home.”
Slowly the penny drops. Not in that moment, or even that day, but by the end of the week the panic and uncertainty eventually gives way to joy. For the pair of us, who have been stressed and overworked for months, this is the best thing that has happened in a long time: our long awaited Sabbath rest. Of course the grim reality must not be forgotten - this respite is paid for in other people’s blood. But is that my fault? All I know is that were it not for this sudden and dramatic rest, my mental health might not have lasted another month.
The rules are few and fairly simple. We are allowed to leave the house for essential shopping, and one walk a day for leisure. No indoor gatherings between households. Two metre social distancing applies and masks must be worn indoors. Every shop has limits on customer numbers so naturally there are queues everywhere, and there are sporadic shortages of basic items, until every shop introduces rationing. The irony is not lost on me - I grew up on stories from my parents’ generation about martial law that are now echoing into my present. Of course this is different – this time it’s for the greater good. I mean it always is. General Jaruzelski thought that if he didn’t suppress Solidarity, the Soviet Union would invade and slaughter hundreds of thousands of people. He thought he was saving lives, and maybe he was even right. We are better because we are saving lives and having fun while doing it. Of course some other people suffered under lockdown. The very nature of the phenomenon, which we all experienced as isolated households, means that we do not and cannot have a common narrative on those long months. The way that we make sense of anything at all that happens is to meet up with other people and talk about it – at work, in church, in the pub, at the football. But what if something happens and you can’t talk about it to anyone else until a few months afterwards? You retreat into yourself and double down on your version of events, unverified by the test of conversation. You read this on the internet? I read something else. I don’t agree with that, I think there’s another explanation – I think you’re giving them too much credit – oh but you haven’t read about this other thing that I saw on the TV – I don’t this that’s a good source - and so on and so on, until a kind of healthy, commonsense narrative emerges by natural selection. It‘s hard to deny that this brief pause in conversation was like a great wound to our collective psyche – it was as if, in one fell swoop, a great portion of society became incapable of critical thought, and this pandemic was arguably as bad as the other one.
Anyway, my lockdown is great. I have a whole plan made up. In the mornings I read fiction, starting with the big stack of Polish classics from the 19th century that I had bought all the way back in June 2019. In the afternoon I take a break from reading and do some exercise with the resistance bands I’d bought from Amazon. Then I go to Lidl or Asda with my mum, then we have dinner and play chess. In the evenings I read, mostly non-fiction. Bit by bit I manage to clear up a good portion of the unread books sitting on my shelf. Every few days we go on a longer walk with my mum and we call our family in Poland from the park. Uncle Marek recognises the birdsong over the phone. Everything is peace and bliss. It’s not perfect and I miss my friends, but this is nice. It's different. It's nice different.
This is a serial fiction project published fortnightly with Ross Anderson at The Broken Quill.