It's been five years since the pandemic and I have questions

[BaggyTrousing]

• will Paddington ever be investigated for his role in the departure of our dear old queen?
• was the woman who wrote "and the people stayed home" ever taken to task for her contribution to the awfulness?
• what about that nurse who was roaring about bread in a supermarket car park? Hopefully shunned and avoided at least
• how do you all feel now about protecting the NHS?

But there wasn't any flour!! 😂

I’m so glad you were able to get support as I can’t imagine having my own daughter in lockdown - I needed the baby classes and socialisation to stop myself going mad. I really felt, and still do, for parents of lock down newborns.

Having said that, it was rather fortunate for new parents that the Prime Minister’s now wife also had her first baby in April 2020 and that he wanted her to be able to see her family…

The pubs were still closed and we booked a "mobile" pub to have pints in the back garden. Great fun with the neighbours!
Next day handwritten notes were delivered into our letter boxes - "I hope you'll be happy with yourselves when people will die because of you"

You get out there and say it!!! Again and again and again. I will do this all the time. I will remind everybody of the appalling ways the government treated us.

I am anticipating that the brainwashing will happen very gradually to make us think "lockdown wasn't actually that bad". Yes it fucking was. And as far as I am concerned, ten times worse than lockdown was the relentless campaign of fear, and the swift silencing of anybody who dared to question lockdown. I and a few others stated AT THE TIME that lockdowns would cause massive harm. And they did. And what did we hear in return? "Shut up and stop murdering grannies!"

And the BBC told us that it was "a couple of hundred conspiracy theorists" who protested against lockdowns and possible vaccine mandates. I was on those marches, which were about 40 people wide and literally miles long, and I saw with my own eyes that it was hundreds of thousands of people. It is this kind of controlling the narrative that I find much more terrifying than any virus.

I first learned the word "government" at the age of six, when I heard the story of William Tell, and the "cruel governor". That story formed a strong impression on me. There were parallels to Saint Boris's regime in that story: the people having to stop and bow to the governor's hat, like they banged pots and pans, and woe betide anyone who refused. If television had been invented back then, the cruel governor would have been giving his daily briefings about how everybody must worship him. And as CS Lewis observed, tyranny can be much worse when it is supposedly in the interest of safety, because those in charge feel no conscience about what they are doing.

Some people took it a bit too far I think , but others were completely lax about it.
I suppose it depended on your personal circumstances and to who you believed but I do feel that at first it was pretty much followed by most people. The roads were a joy , reminded me of my younger days when you could drive on almost empty roads.

I took photos of QR codes but I'm old so I could just feign innocence and say I thought that was what you had to do.

Geeeeeeeeees!!!! Yeah it was a divisive time alright

😯

Yep. I still haven't forgiven her tbh which is petty of me.

I was shouted at in a garden centre restaurant for walking directly to the tills as there were only me, DH and the person serving. There was however a queue of people waiting to come into the restaurant. To follow the arrows I would have walked out of the restaurant and either joined the back of the queue or had to push past the people.

You could socialize in the back garden in the summer of 2020 as there was a huge debate on radio 2 over the use of bbq ' tongs' for the food prep! Best sanitize them was the consensus
You should still stay 2m apart and so on
Which was easy for me to do as I hate being close to anyone as it is! lol
Worst was the fact they said that masks were useless at first , then suddenly extremely important a few months later because they didn't have enough of them to go round at first
That narrative changed rather swiftly. The mask police was even worse than the loud hailer people, but again, we were told it had to be.

I was shouted at in a local co op because I dared to enter the same isle a woman was bent down choosing some seasoning.

My parents did this and it proved their eyesight was perfect 🤣

I actually think the biggest crime of the whole thing is that it was handled badly people now give less of a shit about spreading germs than they ever did.
Textbook case of The Boy who Cried Wolf.

It also turned me into a law breaker, when previously, I was a stickler for rules. I took down signs about social distancing in parks: I felt that there needed to be a visible resistance, and lots of these signs were flimsy and easy to remove. I ripped the 2-metre markers off the pavements (and some scientists have admitted that "two metres" was made up on the spot, just like Michael Gove made up "one hour's exercise a day" on the spot). I generally did it when it was dark and pouring with rain, so there would be fewer witnesses, and I could hide under my hood and umbrella. I used to snip the cable ties holding these signs up; often, the sign would then stay there, and fall down later. I would return some time later, and smile that the sign was gone. Only once was a sign put back; down it came again. After I had got bored of doing this, I learned later that there were groups of people who devoted lots of time to doing this.

It's been interesting reading this thread. I was diagnosed with cancer 3 days before the first lockdown. I had my surgery on lockdown day. To be honest, the whole thing made my treatment easier. The weather meant I could walk to the hospital and back and really enjoyed doing that. The roads were clear so when I had to travel to another hospital a distance away, it was stress free. I was happy in my bubble with my kids. It was a glorious summer and we live semi rurally so lots of lovely walks and spending time in the garden.

What I hated was stupid people. My neighbours mum committed suicide so her sister arrived so they could comfort eachother. Another neighbour called the police on them. Had no idea of the circumstances, just decided they were "breaking the rules". Stuck to their guns when they found out the facts and were nasty. Absolute dicks.

I also regret the last minute Christmas lockdown. I was due to host a friend and her kids and because I was vulnerable, I had no choice but to cancel. We should have just carried on. She was no risk to me. She had a shit Christmas and her mental health was bad. I will never not feel guilty about that. It feels like some distant dystopian dream now. My son was quite small at the time, only just turned 8 and he's only now questioning the enormity of it all. Very weird.

Oh gosh yes! I had forgotten about that madness.
Going for a walk: Acceptable
Going for a walk whilst holding a travel cup of coffee: Completely unacceptable and you’re going to kill everyone with Covid, you murderer.

This lighthearted thread has made me giggle this morning.

And, apologies for bringing the tone down, but honestly the thing that enrages me the most when looking back retrospectively, is that people weren’t allowed to spend last moments with their dying loved ones in hospital. A relative should have been allowed to PPE up and be there.

People also realised that it was a mechanism to get paid time off work and not actually bother observing the isolation requirements. I never downloaded the app, but when I was 19 living at home and working in a cafe for beer money I'd have absolutely used it as a vehicle to get SSP. And people did!

If schools had stayed open the whole thing would have fallen apart by mid March. A lot of what happened was because of the schools shutting down. If they had continued as normal ,nobody would have done any of the other things they wanted or followed any arrows or signs.
Just my opinion, but I'm convinced this was a big deciding factor in how they wanted lockdown to pan out.
My school was furious we were being paid not to go in : you'd have thought we had released Covid ourselves and I only earned a few pounds as non teaching staff / not many hours etc. I know many were not on board with any of it where I lived! It was very strange times.
I couldn't see my dad in his final hours ( he died of Covid as he was in a care home)
That will always haunt me tbh.

I drove down to London to collect my son from Uni - going via the back roads so no cameras could pick me up as we weren't supposed to travel. It was a crazy time

My daughter was stuck in London (also uni). Fortunately a family member who lived nearby brought her home after she'd isolated for a week in order to keep my home safe (cancer treatment). It took a month to organise though. I've never been so relieved to have her back. Her part time job also allowed her to switch to online so she was able to keep earning. Crazy times.

I’d completely forgotten being pinged. I went for dinner one time and got pinged a day later in account of it, but the friend I had been with didn’t get contacted until about three days later.

Visiting my aunt in her care home was heartbreaking. She was hard of hearing and had dementia, so she never understood why we wouldn’t hug her and stood so far away she couldn’t hear us.

Good for her. Anecdotally, I did notice a number of the very oldest people who simply weren't having it.

I never got pinged and to my knowledge I never had Covid until two weeks ago.

Excess death rates though - what’s your opinion on that? People died who wouldn’t have done.

In one way it feels so surreal like it never happened, but in other ways lockdowns completely ruined my DCs' mental health so I will never forget it (in terms of not being able to go out, not becacuse they were covid paranoid).

Completely agree with @Lancastrienne here, the way we behaved certainly gave some insight in to how previously sensible Germans got swept away with Nazi propoganda. We swallowed all the shite.

I remember sitting on a bench with a friend in the third? so maybe March 21 - lockdown when we could meet one other person outside but couldn't sit down or some such rubbish. We were in a local park, on a bench and we saw a police officer walking down the path and quickly got up and started walking. So Covid couldn't get us walking around closer to each other than we were sitting on a bench?

A couple of my friends went totally doollally re Covid - I met with one a couple of years ago so way past the lockdowns - she preferred meeting outside still so we got some takeaway food and walked to the park - bear in mind we were walking and talking next to each other for a good 15 mins. Then as soon as we get to sit down she sits the opposite side of the bench to me - I said, come on, we've just walked together here and now you're distancing - I wont even be able to hear you!! Thankfully this person had some therapy last year and will now sit next to me again!!

DH always says that people went Covid-mad and we just have to draw a line under it all.

Worst was the fact they said that masks were useless at first , then suddenly extremely important a few months later because they didn't have enough of them to go round at first
That narrative changed rather swiftly. The mask police was even worse than the loud hailer people, but again, we were told it had to be.
Yep. Perfect example of the government twisting the narrative when it suited them. They realised that masks were a symbol of fear, an easy way to spot the dissenters, an easy way to "appear to be doing something", another way to play divide and conquer, and yet another thing for the plebs to squabble over, so that they wouldn't think about what the government was doing. Reportedly, Saint Boris was "brainwashed" into wearing a mask by his own Behavioural Scientists: he was shown pictures of world leaders wearing masks, followed by pictures of himself not wearing one.

Two exhibits: one shop's shrine to Saint Boris (that shop is now out of business), and an infiltration of a bus stop by those who dared to speak against the pure madness. Somebody had actually managed to put this poster inside one of the advert spaces on a bus stop.