Me wearing a surgical mask I got in Japan. Not perfect, but it’ll help. Had to take off the shades as I looked too much like a thief and because breathing behind the mask makes them fog up.
There’s a sign outside the café-cum-shop appealing to customers that they’re only letting in a “maximum of six” at a time. I peek in the window and do a quick head count of 3, not including the staff, as I gently lower my mask. I don’t mean, like, socially letting my guard down and revealing my ‘real self’ or anything, I mean I was wearing, like, an actual mask.
Inside, the cashier is casually wiping down the counter and payment machine with disinfectant and a cloth. Everyone’s in on it.
I felt a bit foolish walking down the street wearing a mask, taking it off well before I’d made it to my destination. Well, foolish mightn’t be the right word – in a way I felt the opposite of foolish, I felt informed, in the know. A maverick even, making a statement. Powerful. Just a cheap Japanese surgical mask, perhaps not the best guard against the spread of germs, but better than nothing. Even a cloth or a scarf is better than nothing.
But it definitely felt like all eyes were on me, and for the whole five minute walk I did feel like a bit of a gimp.
It’s just not the done thing here, is it?
Already preparing my shpiel for if anyone asked me what I was at or if I bumped into I knew.
“Oh I lived in Asia for three years, so I get the whole wearing a mask thing.”
I’d have to suffer my own pretentiousness.
Except we can see what’s happening in other countries ahead of us. The rate of change has almost been predictable despite the rattling pace of it. I’ve been caught up in the social media hype and well up for believing anything I read, though it’d be a good idea to slow down and think long-term.
But it’s happening. Adaptability seems to be crucial, for individuals and businesses alike.
Second guessing myself bringing it in the first place, but by the end of the week everyone will be at it. Might as well act on what I do know, which is what we can all see coming towards us like a tsunami.
It’s inevitable, the wearing of masks. Some people in Asia just wear them all the time, as fashion statements. Most of us assume they’re overly fearful of their city’s pollution, though if you’d experienced the pollution of a major developing-nation city, you’d be wearing a mask as well. In Vietnam most foreigners were quick to adopt the practice of wearing face masks when riding their bikes through Hanoi’s suffocating traffic, but immediately whipped them off as part of their helmet-removing routine, to walk down or hang about the same streets with no protection at all. It’s just not the done thing for us, is it?
But it’s quite normal in many countries to wear a mask when you’re sick, for other people’s benefit. It’s not so you don’t get sick as much as so you don’t make anyone else sick.
Which is where we’re at here.
Remember most people carrying this illness won’t even know they have it. It’s the spread we’re trying to stop now.
We’re catching onto that kind of social conscience here, though I’m not convinced it was ever as bad in Ireland as people say, in an age where everyone allegedly hates each other for who they are and where they’re from. That’s only in phone land. Or maybe America. If you spend enough time looking at your phone, as I do, then you’re only going to be importing America and the rest of the world’s problems into your brain, where they mightn’t necessarily exist in the world around you.
Early stories and scenes confirmed our worst fears and expectations, people giving each other belts in Lidl over bog roll, Gardai called.
Pricks, all of us.
But that had changed by the weekend. People’s social consciences shining through the murk of misinformation. Maybe those bog roll pugilists had just been panicked, the government had done nothing and then something; they’d never even heard anyone in real life talking about this thing and suddenly everyone was afraid of it, this great unknown.
I’ve seen people getting thick with each other in Lidl at the best of times.
But it turns out we do care. People and businesses doing their bit for the cause, for their country – which at the end of the day, just means everyone else around you. There’s no escaping the island now, and the virus knows no borders, as Varadkar managed to slip into his chat with Arlene Foster, whose party’s worldview seems to be capable of pulling off the remarkable feat of travelling backwards in time.
It’s all I think of when I hear the word ‘devolution’. At it again, except they’re not even Brits.
So pubs voluntarily decided to close before they were asked, shops are doing everything they can with social distancing and disinfection and contactless payments, though some of them are a bit too pleased with themselves for my liking when they tell me they don’t accept cash.
And supermarkets are doing their best not just to accommodate, but care for the elderly.
Trade-workers’ vans being repurposed as delivery vehicles for other businesses and people to help resupply or give lifts to vulnerable elderly and sick people.
Remarkable.
Banks and landlords are going to have to go easy on mortgage and rent payments, or they might be swept away in the tsunami as well.
And now that the initial fear and panic and pessimism has subsided (though we seem to be only getting started) it seems like it’s going to be the businesses and people who show that initiative in caring for others that are the ones who’ll be repaid when things settle. When things go back to normal. Long way to go yet.
When workers go back to their offices, back to their commutes, when kids go back to their overcrowded classrooms, when people go back to ignoring each other and doing whatever they can to skip the queue in life.
All that normal stuff.
Maybe we won’t go back?
I stopped outside the shop to give my change to a young fella who seems to have been sleeping rough the last while, or is at least living rough. Depressingly, I’d now mentally know him as one of the ‘regulars’, like he has his own spot at the bar, and try to acknowledge him as such. I don’t know his name yet.
Tonight he was wearing a mask. I’d left mine at home, forgetting it when it came to quickly popping out to the shops and I didn’t have the duration of my morning shower to think about it. I was also just too self-conscious to do it again, I’d had enough of that for one day. I’d try again tomorrow.
“Thanks a mil’ bud, you didn’t have to stop. Are you not wearing a mask? You should get a mask.”
He must have gotten a glimpse of the RTE news cos he was able to tell me then how Italian doctors are telling us we need to change our lifestyle. No shit. He asked if the airports were really closed. I said not yet.
“Ah cheers pal, get yourself a mask, yeah?”
Everyone’s in this together.