To look back on the things we did in lockdown and cringe?

[Applescruffle]

Isn't it all just really cringeworthy when we look back?

The clapping on our doorsteps, all that false commradarie and "we're all in this together" and the drawings of rainbows in people's windows?
Condemning our neighbours for buying Easter Eggs because they weren't "essential" and wondering whether we would get arrested for sitting on a park bench?

At the time I, and probably loads of us, thought we were doing the right things but doesn't it all just look so false and hollow now when we look back and see that number 10 were having parties and Dominic Cummings was running around the country testing his eyesight? My kids missed out on so much while this was going on, my mental and physical health has still not recovered from the effects of lockdown, and for what?

Know what I mean?

YANBU

The only defence we have is we were led by raving idiots in Johnson and Hancock.

I loved Lockdown.

Just me and my daughter in our own private bubble.

We spent the time together learning online, watching films and TV shows, going for walks together in the woods away from everyone.
I'd go to Tesco and they had a one out - one in rule and a one way system all around the store, which I loved and wish they'd carried on with. No idiots blocking aisles for a chat, no crowds at the tills dithering about etc.

I didn't clap for key workers or bag pots. Any one with brain knew it was an empty gesture from the start, give the key workers a raise instead, they cant pay their rent with claps.

I don't look back and cringe, I look back and remember it fondly, as does my now 11 year old.

Ha ha, yeah, you’ve reminded me - ignoring H to get to go shopping together 🤣🤣🤣

I think “ easy” had a lot to do with attitude and what you made of it really.

Some of those sound great memories. Funnily enough, my grandmother said when her mother died, a lot of the best memories were actually wartime - blitz spirit and all that. That attitude angers many people now, but they approached it differently. It’s mindset I suppose.

Ha yes, it's like how everyone retrospectively claimed to be part of the French Resistance!

We did a bit of clapping. It was quite fun seeing all the different neighbours. We live in a city, with a very diverse street with a high turnover/highly transient population and normally everyone keeps to themselves and doesn't have anything to do with each other. There was something quite powerful about all doing something together. We made a whatsapp group for the street and helped each other out with shopping etc. especially if anyone was isolating. It was a weird time, but I think it's rude to say we were moronic.

I don't feel bad about anything I did in lockdown.

I followed the rules closely and don't really have any problem with that. I didn't clap or draw rainbows.

How other people behaved is up to them and had no bearing on what was actually the correct thing to do.

We're actually very lucky how the whole thing panned out I think. My main concern is that enough people feel done over by the experience that they feel they might not comply next time, and next time we might not be so lucky with the pandemic disease

Well though we didn't need it and we didn't ask for it abd yes it was cringe, the clapping and good luck kind messages still meant a lot to us who worked throughout

Hindsight is 20 20 vision. At start of pandemic, looking at deaths on northern Italy etc, I think caution was not unreasonable , and also then obviously, acknowledgement of those on front line.

Yeah my mum never clapped once, she doesn't have TV or social media so was largely oblivious to it. She was also a nurse, working in high risk wards despite being over 60 at the time.

According to social media she was simultaneously completing callous and vile for not clapping and a total saint for being a "key worker". She found both viewpoints utterly perplexing.

Yes. Many people were very scared - sometimes for themselves, sometimes for people they loved. People with compromised immunity, people who didn't have access to information, and many more: they did what they thought was right or sensible at the time, in those circumstances. We all did.

There are examples of extreme behaviour that are hard to understand then or now, but generally, most people were just doing their best.

I don't feel the need to mock people for clapping or lace into them for keeping to the 'rules.' I tried very hard not to judge people then, in various extreme circumstances, and I'm not about to start now.

I was lucky in so many ways but I loved it! (The first one). I didn't clap but I perversely quite enjoyed listening to others doing it. I never want to do it again but I am glad (on a personal level) that I experienced it.

YABU. The clapping was always cringe.

@OneTC

We're actually very lucky how the whole thing panned out I think. My main concern is that enough people feel done over by the experience that they feel they might not comply next time, and next time we might not be so lucky with the pandemic disease

I agree, people by and large voluntarily complied the last time. But given the stupidity of some of the rules, the lack of support for the 3 million excluded self employed and freelancers, and crazy "tiers", etc., I'd expect widespread non compliance if a future government tried anything like it again. I think the public will only accept rational and logical restrictions and not the illogical scatter gun approach of 2020 and 2021.

My dd did get blasted by a policewoman for sitting on a park bench to breastfeed her very young baby.

The daftest thing dh and I did, was to ‘cook’ our (delivered) newspaper every morning, by putting it in the oven for 15 minutes! Not too hot, obviously!

Our next door neighbours were continually breaking the rules by having several guests round for barbecues, in their tiddly little patio garden. But we couldn’t be arsed to get steamed up about it.

I genuinely do not know how anyone in charge does not feel like a worthless shit for keeping people apart from their dying loved ones whilst they quaffed champagne, fingered the staff in a closet and had umpteen effing parties

In the words of my GP, it became a mass experiment in what the public could be made to accept and therefore what they could get away with

The Number 10 parties came as no surprise, but it's worth thinking what they said about the government's own belief in some of the rubbish they were spouting

Yeah. The day my dad died, alone, was the day that Johnson and co held a garden party, complete with cases of alcohol, a buffet and music.😡

I’m pleased it did. I can’t pretend we did the clapping or had a rainbow but I assure you we nonetheless had tremendous respect and gratitude for people who worked through on the frontline. Tbh so much so the pot clanging felt faintly disrespectful ( you work in the thick of it masked up and I’ll have a little clap from the safety of my front door making a racket like a preschool playgroup); but I’m glad it wasn’t taken that way.

It’s such a cliche to say the frontline workers were this war’s soldiers, but they really were.

I did not like the Clapping on the Doorstep thing - far better today and equip frontline staff properly, imo.

But I am more conflicted about the lockdowns. Yes, I hate the hypocrisy of it - most of us were following the rules as best we could whilst the over meant were partying etc. And I can see how difficult it made things, and how much pain it caused for people. But I don’t regret following the rules because, as far as I know, they helped to reduce the impact of covid on the hospitals and health service.

I had covid, and was hospitalised for a few days, because my oxygen saturations were too low and I needed oxygen. And even now, I am still suffering from long covid - I get breathless walking down the hall or upstairs, I can only walk a short distance before it feels as if my legs are giving out from under me, and doing anything leaves me shaking with fatigue - even sitting at the kitchen table, preparing the veg for Christmas dinner was too much for me.

I believe that locking down and self isolating must have helped prevent more people from getting covid - and given that even mild cases of the actual disease have gone on to cause life-changing long covid - and that there seems to have been no way of predicting who would get long covid, since some people had it really badly and recovered completely, but others had it much more mildly and are still badly affected, I am glad more people didn’t get covid.

When I was in hospital, the charge nurse told me what it was like on that covid unit, at the peak of the wave, when they had a queue of trolleys and ambulance crews waiting to get patients admitted to the unit - and that queue stretched a long, long way - it was so long that there were almost no ambulance crews left on the roads - they were all in the queue. Their manager even came down to see if there was anything that could be done to speed up the admissions, so he could get some crews back out on the road. The service was at crisis point, and if more people had been getting covid, I think it couldn’t have coped.

What I think we need to learn from covid is that, if this ever happens again, much, much more must be done to support individuals and the community, to prevent the same harms happening again. It is easy to look back and say what was done wrong - but it was a highly unusual situation that none of us, nor our governments, had faced before, and I do think that, in general, people were doing their best with the information they had at the time.

Clapping and banging pans on doorsteps saved lives?
People seem to be interpreting this thread as saying that all measures were stupid and pointless. That’s not what the OP is about. It’s about the additional stuff like quarantining shopping, clapping for the NHS and spying on neighbours.

I told a group of elderly people off for not social distancing outside Tesco's 😂 it came up on Facebook Memories the other week and I was cringing at myself.

In fairness, at the time we didn't know much about covid other than that it was pretty scary and dangerous for older people.

It might have felt more worth it if we had locked down earlier and saved more lives, like New Zealand did. Instead we had thousands of needless deaths and the effects of lockdown on our mental health, economy, etc.

All because we were led by vacuous politicians who quickly saw an opportunity to make a quick buck.

I disagree. A lot of people had an ‘easy’ lockdown because of their circumstances. I was stuck in a TINY house with 2 small autistic children, husband still having to go out and work every day and it was absolutely awful and claustrophobic. Everyone I know in a nice, spacious house with a garden, nt kids, no health concerns etc generally had an enjoyable time of a lockdown because why wouldn’t they.

Fuck knows. No one on my street, thankfully.

I went out twice to clap and found myself on my own - I'm on the corner of 2 roads and the other neighbours had filtered further down the street to be closer to others. I felt a bit of an idiot the second time, so I came straight back in and made a donation to the NHS, telling myself it would be far more useful, and I never went out again.

Oh that made me laugh!

I once tried the wiping the groceries thing then gave up thereafter and parked the non perishables in an unused cupboard for 72 hours. But my best friend was doing the same and we swapped techniques for it all and actually remember some if it fondly.