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?

Oops I mean @WinterDeWinter

Plenty on this thread are basically saying 'look how right I was to not have the intelligence to imagine how bad it could get.'
This is so true
we did a lot of the now derided things like quarantining our shopping because at the time we didn't know how covid spread and it was a simple thing to do- have people forgotten the news reports from Italy, where people were dying and the hospitals couldn't cope?
we did the clapping because it built solidarity and community and was the only way we had to appreciate the people risking their lives in the hospitals- of course they should have been paid more, but that wasn't in my power to do
I put teddies in my window because it amused passers by, and me too
I found ways round the rules I considered pointless or where the risks of following them outweighed the risk of breaking them- I regularly met with an isolated neighbour who lived alone we would 'bump into each other' by accident in a community garden and happen to have a flask of tea with us. I would go out once a day and stay out for hours, chatting with people at a distance.
I wasn't at all surprised to learn what that gang of self serving corrupt crooks were getting up to in Downing street and I have every sympathy for the actual scientists and public health experts who had to figure a way to make them act responsibly. Just because we are led by idiots doesn't mean we have to behave like idiots ourselves.

I always found the clapping on the doorstep pointless. I didn't take part. What nhs doctor or nurse on the front line doing their shifts at the hospital will see you for one and tbh I found it quite patronising towards them. Like a little pat on the back whilst we sat at home and they risked their lives

Several of my husband's friends are doctors who were working in research and also in hospitals. From day one they said the lockdown was a pointless and hysterical reaction and they couldn't have cared less about the clapping and saucepan bashing. Although one did point out that it made it easy to at least identify which of their neighbours and acquaintances were hard of thinking.

It was chilling to see just how eager average people were to enforce pointless rules and report others to the police. The rabid, pack mentality was strong where we live and even now there are several people who I avoid because I saw their true colours. They are deeply malicious, resentful, twisted individuals and it's concerning that they pass as normal among us.

I haven't RTWFT but it's interesting reading - people thinking they sound cool and intelligent because they didn't "clap the NHS". I appreciated hearing support from my neighbours, especially as I was going to work every day and a lot of them were furloughed. We had a nice sociable (distanced) time out in the street and I think it brought us closer as a community.

I think a lot of people don't appreciate how serious the situation was to start with. I saw some very senior hospital managers and clinical staff absolutely terrified about what might be coming.

We loved walking the dogs in the peace and quiet in the local woods, without traffic and air noise, and waving at people from a distance.

Admittedly, things went a bit bonkers with some of the daft rules, but we were all doing the best we could (well, some of us were - others didn't seem to care)

Oh that is so awful 💐

You can see why people were accused of witchcraft just a few centuries ago - collective madness and fear of the unknown.

If covid killed children the way Spanish flu did you can bet people wouldn't be on here whining about lockdowns

Spain didn't let the kids outside for weeks and weeks at the beginning.
Care homes were found half abandoned with people dead in their beds.
Before the vaccines, it was really an unknown.
Even so, it was rubbish. The clapping. The corruption. The insufficient PPE. The mental toll of it all.

No I don't cringe.

I had stage 4 cancer and was terrified. My consultant told me in no uncertain terms I could not catch the virus. I sat in the house wondering if these would be my last week's on earth.

Clapping and banging pots in the garden and hearing other people do it too made me feel like there was still a connection with the rest of the world. I loved the messages of hope the kids drew in the walls and stuck on the windows.

I'm sick of how everybody eyerolls now. I'm recovered and grateful to everyone of my friends who said things to me like "when I feel like going out and breaking the rules I imagine that I might be passing it to someone who lives with a person in your situation and I reconsider".

They were horrendous times and we all did our best with the information that we had. Well apart from Boris and his boys obviously.

Then how much money was wasted? Crap PPE contracts, Nightingale hospitals (cost half a billion and only treated about 950 people)

@zizza

I wasn’t ‘cool’ for not clapping. I thought it was disingenuous propaganda disguising the abhorrent conditions our NHS staff were forced to work in for a pittance.

Clapping felt like an insult. I supported them but doing my best not to end up in hospital.

I don’t think it makes me sound either ‘cool’ or ‘intelligent’, what an odd thing to say. I just thought it was a pointless and faintly ridiculous thing to do. That’s just my opinion. I also had 3 young children who were in bed at that time and people banging saucepans and honking car horns was fucking annoying.

I'm so sorry for your loss.
My sister and I did all we could to keep our beautiful mother safe and lost precious time with her only to lose her to covid 18 months after the shitshow started. We'll never forget either 💗

Buying Easter Eggs is one thing but I absolutely did and continue to judge those who went out on extensive shopping trips in the run-up to Christmas 2020, at a time when the pandemic was at its peak (with 1000 deaths a day) and no vaccines in place yet. It was quite shameful that we weren't willing to cut back on Christmas just for one year.

ThisMauveHiker I don't really have the words, but I'm so sorry. I hope you continue to improve. It sounds so incredibly difficult.

Some of that stuff was just a way to get through it I think, drawing rainbows and the like. I don’t think there was any harm in that.

Judging people for buying non essentials, having more than one walk or sitting down in the park was insane, but I thought that at the time. I didn’t do any mixing that wasn’t allowed but we did do things like drive a bit of distance for a walk, ordering in shopping that we wanted etc and I don’t regret any of that.

Yes, this.

There are plenty more who have more examples to hand than the scariest events of the last thousand years.
It's a failure of imagination, of historical knowledge, to believe each present crisis as a Hollywood film

If it happened again, I would have fought tooth and nail to keep my youngest in school, at least part time. It turns out he has adhd and dyslexia and NEEDED to be there as a vulnerable child. Plus I have a public sector job that can’t be furloughed but was unaccountably not seen as key in the first lockdown - why did I have to keep doing it as before then if not key?

Yep I remember washing the shopping which had been delivered

They wouldn't take my youngest who has a dx of asd, although he coped really well with the change. Home schooling did go out the window by the last lockdown though

The clapping and the pan bashing got louder and louder every week round here. It sounded quite frightening actually and wasn't the sound of support at all but the sound of a mob. Even fireworks at the end (in summer, in the light).

I used to go on a very long walk in the countryside on Thursday evenings.

ThisMauveHiker

Thank you for sharing your story. It needs to be heard, far and wide. Deaths from Covid are only a part of the fallout. It was, and is, a mass disabling event and the ages of people affected somewhat unpredictable (though women outnumber men, as with most autoimmune conditions, which it is likely at least some long covid is).

I think the notion that Covid infections are a game of Russian roulette is too big and too painful for some people to contemplate, hence the heads in the sand.

Pleased to say we never did the 8pm worship of people doing the job they chose to train for and are paid to do

Whereas my opinion is if it was a bad as was being made out by all the propaganda there’s no way the government would have been breaking all the rules. They only did it because they knew they were at minimal risk. Yet they chose to deliver the messaging that put the fear of god into the rest of us. Trust has been very badly broken.

as for complying with future lockdowns to an extent this will be imposed on us but never again will I be adhering to a state directive telling me I can’t have my friends or family into my own private home. They can fuck off. Massive overreach.