I suppose I still viscerally loathe people getting nostalgic about lockdown because of the sheer level of abuse and guilt tripping that was thrown at people who had the audacity to dare point out at the time that there were going to be lasting consequences... the impact on the economy, access to NHS services, children's education and social skills, mental health, grieving families treated so inhumanely, people living their last months or years under the isolation of lockdown. To mention all that was strongly shouted down. Granny killer! Selfish!
And here we are 5 years later, still paying for the NHS shutting down too rigourously for too many months. Still paying for the children denied education or early socialisation or support. Still paying after the economy was drained.
I came off lightly... we remained secure, but it still came at a cost of a depressed 7 year old sobbing with lonliness because it was illegal to have friends or go to school. It still came at a cost of never seeing MiL again because of travel and carehome restrictions. We tried in 2021, but only DH was permitted to see her (10 days earlier and we couldn't even leave the country). By the time restrictions eased in 2022, she was weeks away from death and too frail and wasted to recognise family anymore. The only time the DCs saw her again was open casket, but at least unlike the bereaved of 2020 she was allowed the final dignity of a proper funeral.
I wasn't abused. I wasn't denied access to open space like so many were. But still it dragged on like a living death. By 2021, not existing in some kind of passive way was an attractive concept.
Some regions got very little if any respite from lockdown in 2020. The tiers malarky showed up the lack of science involved in the restrictions.
The 2021 lockdown did not end until the July.
Many organisations continued restrictions well into 2022.
When I was hit by a string of bereavements in 2022, I was already on a low ebb. My friends that I would normally have considered a support were still burned out from their own battles from the Covid era. It wasn't until 2023 that we really had any communal energy to pull together beyond survival mode and to put into enjoyment and living more normally again.
We recently saw a 96yo relative who just didn't have the stamina to return to her previous pace of life before the lockdowns were imposed. So many older people were simultaneously aged by life stopping and unable to pick it back up.
Despite having above average means, it took 3-4 years to get DS back to the trajectory that he should have been on all along. His learning difficulties were brushed off "coz Covid" and he lost early interventions that his sibling had accessed as well at 6 months of schooling. In the winter, he sobbed on my lap daily, taunted by the videos of classmates that it was illegal to play with.
I'm still bitter about the cost to society, but at least it's a couple of years since I felt surges of raw anger about the whole topic. It's important to remember the multitude of costs of the political choices that were made when the government imposed such obstructive and long-lasting restrictions which limped on substantially after the highest risk people had access to vaccinations.
That's why I still find nostalgia for lockdown spring/ summer 2020 in poor taste.
Funny how it's never rose-tinted glasses about wading through the mud the following winter...
It was never illegal to have "a slower pace of life" and WFH. There's no external reason why people can't work at restructuring their lives to replicate it.
This spring has proven that it doesn't take destructive restrictions on society to have a long spell of nice weather.
Feel free to live your own life like that, but don't romanticise such drastic restrictions on basic liberties.