Did covid screw anyone else's life up?

[girlmeetsboy]

Interested to hear on this as I have been reading a thread where people loved the solidarity of it all. For me it was redundancy, house lost, business lost and savings...

This is what happened to a teenage girl I know . Awful.

Yes. I can recall threads where 95 percent of posters insisted school closures were fine, that kids wouldn’t be affected, that if your kids were affected that was your fault, that education is parents’ responsibility, that school isn’t childcare, and that children having no in-person social interaction for months on end wasn’t an issue. The small number of dissenters were shouted down. Without the anti-dementor threads I would have gone insane.

I probably should have just posted on there rather than get the harassment / abuse that was flying around. What a shame it was like that.

What scares me (much more than covid) was the general populations willingness to adhere to rules that were clearly crazy, disproportionate and cruel from day 1.

That is terrifying as is the fact that so many people actually relished in keeping to the rules and dobbing their neighbours in

Understandable, and many people behaved appallingly. That said, it's worth pointing out that people who weren't going along with it and were quietly continuing to see loved ones etc weren't really visible.

I saw it for what it was pretty early in the day, early enough that I was having illegal gatherings even before the Tories were. I never made a fuss on social media or went to any protests, just as I wouldn't have if I bought into it all. Just had drinks in the garden with my family, participated in informal childcare networks, made sure all the kids had parties and major events were celebrated etc. Generally balanced retaining as much normality as possible with carrying on work and looking after my DC who were not amongst those considered worthy of education. That actually took up a lot of time and energy in itself. And it also matches the majority of what I saw around me. But it was never measured.

Fwiw I do think having been through that, the chances of the population submitting to another lockdown are roughly zero.

I’ve commented before on this thread about late dh but one of the things about his death that will forever haunt me was I had to choose which child out of my four kids was allowed to attend our hospital wedding.

we were only allowed five people there and I was only allowed to choose one child

i chose dd18 in the end as she was vaccinated but it was very hard.

@blackheartsgirl 💐 I’m so very sorry.

@bookworm14 They were my life line. I remember posters saying they should be banned and deleted.

Arseholes. I really have much more respect for people who understood exactly what was happening, what the impact on children would be and had the guts to say they thought the collateral was worth it and it was the lesser of two evils. At least that was honest. Nothing worse than the bullshitters.

I think the "space for reflection" is possible now because the crisis has been averted. At the time, it really started to look as though anything could happen next, like living in 1944 and not knowing how WW2 would turn out.

I wasn't living in the UK and found it distressing to read about people not allowed outdoors, and snitching on each other. It all sounded proper crazy and I can't imagine how families coped in blocks of flats etc.

blackheartsgirl I'm so very sorry.

I think the "space for reflection" is possible now because the crisis has been averted. At the time, it really started to look as though anything could happen next, like living in 1944 and not knowing how WW2 would turn out.

Yes, completely. I won't forget how terrifying and unknown everything was at the beginning.

Oh, and I just want to add how sorry I am for those who lost loved ones, especially when you weren't able to be with them. That must be extremely hard to come to terms with.

I think the craziest thing was how people turned on each other!
my friend had to work the odd day during lockdown and as a young couple we volunteered to have her daughter for those days…. We took her and our daughter out for a cycle ride in the vast forest that is a stones throw from our house… her mother prepared her lunch so we didn’t even touch the food she ate… the whole ‘baby sitting’ was outdoors …. We got slagged off by ‘friends’ on Facebook and when I pointed out it was not against the law for workers to leave their children with someone while they worked I got abuse and lost that ‘friend’ permanently!…. I’m guessing she feels like the idiot now as I did far more for her and her kids than she ever did for me.. (drove them to school in the rain, when she was sick I took the kids, took them to parties, attended their show and tells at school when she couldn’t! etc)… she never once did anything for me…. I do feel some satisfaction now when we drive past her walking in the rain! Or when her partner comes out of work to pick kids up from school and then goes back to work after! (What an inconvenience just because she was a dick to me!).
what made it worse was her partner worked throughout lockdown in the office despite being more than capable of working from home!…. She only works weekends but sent her kids to school claiming to be a keyworker…. So while I don’t care what rules she broke, it was very hypercritical when I was criticised for having a child OUTDOORS twice so the mother could attend work!
so many double standards

We got slagged off by ‘friends’ on Facebook and when I pointed out it was not against the law for workers to leave their children with someone while they worked I got abuse and lost that ‘friend’ permanently!….

Sounds like you were well rid tbh.

But that was so often the way with people critical of others doing things they didn't approve of: they were a lot less forthright when it came to them being expected to give something up. There was a poster on here last year who was going to a big gathering of a wedding and was complaining about the risk due to there being a choir, but the idea that she might sacrifice going if she were that bothered or wear an FFP3 mask and stay away from everyone else was clearly a gross imposition. What I want to do is reasonable and sensible, what other people want to do is irresponsible and selfish. It's the whole I'm not traffic I am stuck in traffic mentality.

My views have always been the same. But you'll find a great many people avoided the COVID boards, and still others became irritated when the COVID-Police started plastering them over the rest of the site when they had their own designated area. This is because they were repetitive, tedious, aggressive, unpleasant, self-righteous in tone and completely unproductive. Arguing on threads like that is tantamount to pounding away on a treadmill to nowhere.

Out of care for my own mental health I avoided them like the plague. I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

This is absolutely tragic. I'm so sorry, both for your awful loss and the impossible choices you've had to make

It took me a while to avoid specific threads, notably a certain type of education one. It was exactly as you say on one hand and on the other we were letting dc down, I probably should have avoided earlier on.

Some of the posters used unbelievably aggressive harassment tactics.

You can see how a society ends up ignoring those without a voice, ie children, sadly.

I think far more people weren't complying than we realise, once it dawned on many of us that we weren't actually dealing with the bubonic plague and that the effects of the (mostly ridiculous) restrictions were far more damaging in most cases than the virus itself. I certainly didn't broadcast my rule breaking, unlike those who were slavishly following the rules. I think that's the difference.

@blackheartsgirl thats heartbreaking. Im so sorry for your loss.

I spent Christmas Day and Boxing Day 2020 at my parents house. We were in tier 4 Which was just fucking obfuscation and a lockdown in all but name which made me incredibly angry. By this time as a full time carer i was allowed to choose one other house to go to. But when i stupidly mentioned this on the Covid board they treated a Christmas dinner with a couple in their 80s as if i was going to a crowded all night rave!!! It felt to me like a papers please society as i was carrying a print out of the rules in my handbag in case i got stopped by over zealous plod. So i was already feeling like i had to carry papers around and i bet i wasnt the only one.

Mmm, most noncompliance was by definition in the private sphere. Plus also in the period between lockdowns people did stuff like travel between tiers depending on restrictions. My friend was actually fairly scared of covid, to the extent that she chose to hold her toddlers birthday outside in summer 2020. She lived in a local restrictions area, so just had the gathering at a park in the neighbouring local authority. You'd need to have been really paying attention to clock that as illegal, and indeed for some of the guests it wouldn't have been.

twitter.com/mcortonscott/status/1590373063170097152?s=20&t=yoF9QD6pwpO0xJlO-r9teQ

Megan Corton Scott
@mcortonscott
·
4h
In Christmastime 2020, a 70 yo man who lived in Staffordshire (Tier 3 restrictions) sold mince pies in a Cloudside Rd premises that he believed were in Cheshire (in Tier 2).
Cloudside Rd is just in Staffordshire (map below).
Anyway, he's just been given 6 months in prison.

Sorry to hear that. I read somewhere recently that hypnotherapy can be very effective for Eating disorders. (I was v sceptical but it helped me massively with a phobia years ago.)

Mmm, most noncompliance was by definition in the private sphere. Plus also in the period between lockdowns people did stuff like travel between tiers depending on restrictions. My friend was actually fairly scared of covid, to the extent that she chose to hold her toddlers birthday outside in summer 2020. She lived in a local restrictions area, so just had the gathering at a park in the neighbouring local authority. You'd need to have been really paying attention to clock that as illegal, and indeed for some of the guests it wouldn't have been.

Exactly. I knew a few people who were sticklers for the rules. They had no idea I had broken any and probably wouldn't be speaking to me now if they did! It wasn't something most people would readily admit to.

Actually, his sentence had nothing to do with mince pies. He was convicted (and sentenced) for destroying evidence and perverting the course of justice. That's a tad more serious.

But of course, it does sound better to you if it was just mince pies.

There's that, plus also many of us were just never in an 'admitting' situation in the first place iyswim. I wouldn't have denied it to someone I knew but wasn't seeing if asked, but I never was.