Photo by Henrique Craveiro on Unsplash
“There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
They say that frogs in a pot of water being brought to the boil won’t notice the temperatures rising beyond a critical point until it’s too late. This logic is often applied to political situations which slowly but surely worsen for a group of people (maybe even a whole nation) until it’s too late to do anything about anything. It’s hard to see change as it happens slowly, slowly usually meaning as quickly as by the week.
We’ve been crying out for change since the election, and now we’re going to get it, though perhaps not in the form we’d imagined.
Well, now we know what it looks like, for the world to change over a week. We’ve had a real-time feed happening in front of us since January, but of course it doesn’t mean anything until it’s happening in your own country. A lesson in there about globalisation, one lesson of what I’m sure will be many.
But now it’s in Ireland.
Things have been changing at an exponential rate since January. From January to February first, and sure February goes by so quickly. first week by week, and then this week it became apparent that things were escalating, with an air of inevitability whereby we seemed to be able to make predictions for the first time, and even worse, they were coming true, except quicker than expected.
Outbreak numbers increased daily now; by Tuesday it was safe to assume that colleges and schools would be closed by Friday (looking ahead as someone not working in healthcare or civil service setting); by Wednesday it seemed like there was too little being done but that “an awful lot could happen by Friday”.
Everything was still normal on Wednesday; even if you could see what’s coming it’s hard to readjust your perception in the midst of the society’s mood. Everything was in the future, everything was normal in the present.
The streets were getting quieter, but you couldn’t really see it in real time. But by Wednesday, you noticed it was a little quieter than the start of the week, and by Thursday it was that bit quieter again. Walking around on Monday, half of everyone’s conversation was about the Coronavirus or self-isolation. By Wednesday more people were talking about it.
And then boom – it happened on Thursday, government announcing full closures of all creches, schools and colleges until the end of March. Thursday was giddy.
‘This is real’, people said, if not out loud or even in their heads then certainly in their bodily responses, even if that response was to counter-intuitively huddle in a cosy pub.
There was a difference between Thursday morning and Thursday afternoon even. A whole public’s mood had changed like the wind, which has been bemusingly changeable of late, even by our lofty Irish standards for weather (though ‘change’ in general isn’t high on our agenda). On Thursday afternoon, everyone was talking about it. These things rarely happen overnight; it’s much rarer to see such a change happen over the course of a day. Something that we all knew was coming anyway.
And unlike the very definite but curiously absent Storm Lorenzo, this is real.
All week it seemed like something was going to happen, like they’d have to cancel things, cancel St. Partick’s Day, but the government was doing nothing. In fairness it was hard to pull the trigger and do something. But the floodgates are open now. It’s been partly influenced by the media, both mainstream and other, but also the air in society. People know it’s bad now, it’s all anyone was talking about. The numbers of cases in Italy was increasing at a massive rate, and the deaths, and the reports of hospital conditions were emerging, and people were starting to self-isolate, and by Wednesday I was starting to get very annoyed at the government for doing nothing; Champions League games played behind closed doors, and then BOOM – Irish government closed schools and colleges on Thursday.
Nothing, then nothing, then nothing, then BAM – they’ve gone and acted quicker than you even hoped.
On Friday, things changed by the hour, rather than the day. I went for a walk up through Cabra and Phibsboro, to stock up on fresh air and sunlight. It felt as if things had changed by the time I’d come home, just an air later. Pubs in Phibsboro seemed to be still heaving nicely, the ones I passed anyway. Maybe it was the sunny afternoon, maybe it was the Gold Cup, maybe people were celebrating something momentous happening in the air around them, in spite of the fact that microscopic particles in that very momentous air could kill them. History in the making.
But not for a few weeks at least, and there’s been a very strange, Escher-like logic, going back several weeks now if you were an early adopter of the opinion that this whole thing was all going to (a) be global, and (b) be very serious. “Sure you wouldn’t have any symptoms for a couple of weeks.” “Sure if everyone else has it then you’ll have it.” “Sure you wouldn’t know you have it and then you’d pass it on. By the time you know you have it it’ll be too late. You won’t know where you got it from and you won’t know who’s gotten it.” And so on.
On Friday evening the world felt like everything was in slow motion and a Gladiator-style classical orchestra song was sound-tracking everything; like the sound had been sucked out of the air by an approaching tsunami, and we were in the bit where everything stops for a second;
everything goes silent, before a massive wave crashes in and wipes everything out. It did occur to me that maybe it’s because we’ve been reading about it online for the past few weeks. It’s hard to separate what you believe from what everyone else thinks, and what the media is saying, especially when every country is moving on a different timeline – and some countries are moving with a strangely different degree of urgency to others – but we’re all able to read the same news. In the UK, no-one can hear you scream.
But it’s here now.
Things have been changing by the hour, even my attitude to work and college – the news of ‘work from home’ can very quickly mutate in your head into ‘work’s been cancelled’, and this wave of emails and such hitting the inboxes now to implement online procedures feels like trying to bail water off the Titanic. I suppose it’s important not to slack off but even that disease of the mind is infecting me slowly – changing by the hour. The whole situation should be a massive boost for me in terms of freeing up my time to study and write, but within a couple of days it seems more important – at least for a few days – to keep abreast of the news, to contact friends and family, to share information, to do one last shop, before doing another the next day and one last one for good measure today (it’s not panic buying, I’ve just picked up a few bits whenever I’ve been out). Just one more day of panic, then I’ll back to work. It’s strangely giddy times.
It seems now the infectious spread of information has me convinced that real-life is going to be put on hold for a while. Just one more day of news.
Sunday, and it already feels like the longest weekend. Everything is even more instant than ever; news, whatsapp chats, twitter. The only way to stay off it is to put your phone on airplane mode, or leave it in another room; there’s always something else to look up. At least this time it seems like it’s for the good of your health and society at large, elections really don’t matter this much. Wednesday’s opinions and predictions mean nothing.
Stories of Gardai being called to keep order as shoppers fought over toilet paper have already turned to scenes of genuine compassion amongst strangers, a shift as the week – or just the days, or even the hours – has progressed slowly, so slowly, but the progression has been with the eerie predictability of a runaway train, or an oil slick which knows no borders. Information has been coming from Italy, but soon it’s going to catch up and we’re going to have our own real-time information. Thursday’s stories are old news.
Even this article is going to be out of date quite soon.
And so much for being a travel writer – maybe I’ll be out of date soon.
Like everything else this week, priorities have been re-assessed at an exponential rate, and it’s happening in real-time. No-one cares about St. Patrick’s Day anymore. Some pubs and restaurants began ‘self-closing’ on Thursday, just after the government put those rules in place for educational centres. On Friday some were full, supposedly, but by Saturday many more businesses were following suit. Uproar on Sunday at Temple Bar, people couldn’t wait to have a go at the place. And as I’m writing this Temple Bar pubs have announced they’re self-closing, as are pubs in Galway and Westport.
The schools were closed by the government on Thursday; by the end of the weekend the people are telling the government what to close. Everything’s happening at an exponential pace, now people are doing things faster than they can be told to do them. It’s been a long week.
Rumours of total lockdown, at the rate we’re going people will be begging for it before the government enforces it. Maybe this is exactly what they predicted and hoped for. If behavioural economists’ theories are that good, then fair play to them.
This rate of change is bewildering. Someone my age isn’t used to it, but by definition nobody is used to, because part of it is caused and described by our modern technology: planes bringing international travel; a higher pace of life meaning greater chance of spread; instant communication bringing news as it happens direct to a little fold of fabric next to your genitals. You wouldn’t have seen the Spanish flu coming. The fella who delivered the news to you probably gave it to you, the little bollocks.
The virus has spread over the last few weeks, concurrently to but outpaced by the spread of the news of its imminent approach online. The two following different trajectories, like planets circling the sun in different ‘years’. The rates of diffusion of virus and information converged like an eclipse at the point of the first officially diagnosed case, and now the information is spreading much faster again, to the point where now people are telling the media what’s happening and not the other way round. Hopefully this proves to be something good and useful in the age of internet ubiquity.
Last Monday half the conversations you’d hear out and about were about the virus; by Wednesday it was almost all of them. On Thursday Ireland started taking its extreme measures, actually slightly ahead of cue going by news and infection cycles from other countries. By the weekend people are talking to each other – on the phone, on whatsapp, maybe in person – more than they ever would. Truly infectious news.
Consuming the big news is just as exhausting as scrolling through irrelevant news, and it seems now that many of us have been living through irrelevant times until now. Thankfully in Ireland we’re not at the stage where news needs to be instantaneous – yet.
If you want to make the most of your time at home, then leave the phone down. Or you’ll be one of the ones who got even sicker during quarantine. Read all the books in your house; learn something long-lasting and useful online, talk to your housemates, call people (I understand the phone or internet is used for some of these things, but try to give your brain a break and make them useful long-form activities. There’s a difference between scrolling and doing something, and responding instantly to every whatsapp and news item isn’t doing you or anyone. I know because I’m doing it myself.
We know that it’s in Ireland now; and it’s not just people who’ve been on ski trips or business trips to central China who might have it.
At the end of the day, it could be good to give your brain a break from this glut of information, all of it relevant but not all of it either. I’ve got enough food for the week, therefore I don’t need to know about the news of supermarket deliveries and so on. I’m not going to the pub anyway, therefore I don’t need urgent relay of the news that another pub is self-closing (though fair play to them). Once or twice a day should be enough to stay meaningfully informed. And so on.
Away from hospitals and healthcare centres, the need for news is not quite urgent – yet. But it wouldn’t hurt to check just this time, would it?
It could be good to slow your brain’s early adaptation to the onset of change it’s going to experience over the next few weeks and months. It’s already starting to feel like it’s going to be off the charts. Or maybe not. All this information and still no-one really knows anything; the more we find out the more uncertain the future. Lesson in there.