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?

What if I told you some people died because of the expectation to stay in the house?

Restrictions put some people at risk, just as surely as not having restrictions did/does. There's no way to protect everyone. All we could do was choose which groups to protect and which ones to expose to greater risk.

I remember I got told to move by a policeman for sitting on a picnic bench in a park with my husband eating a sausage rolls 😂

I can't speak for others but FWIW I am absolutely not judging your mum. I am certain ypur mum is a lovely person and her motives were honourable. I am sure this was/us the case for lots of people.

But i just despair at how sucked in we all were and how much we believed in what we were being told and what was tbe right thing to do. I clapped too (once) but now I am disgusted that we thought that was good enough and wpuld make any difference. We should have been on our doorsteps banging pots in protest not in gratitude because the government did precisely fuck all for the NHS in real terms, as did the claps.

Yes but the discussion was so often just about maternity units, as if they were somehow special or different - if they were, it was only in the way that they had younger, healthier patients more able to cope with restrictions and appointments without support!

Discuss patients in general and I'll be right there with you, but I did find the focus on healthy pregnant women a little precious tbh.

I think we're so used to a life where there is an answer to any problem, often at our finger tips on a small device in our pockets. A worldwide crisis with no good outcomes, only less bad ones, is difficult for us to comprehend.

We did it for the kids as they enjoyed clapping and drawing rainbows 🤷‍♀️
We could hardly say they had to stay home but not do everything else we were told to do.

Never did any of those things and thought that the whole thing showed a lack of critical thinking and common sense in large swathes of the population.

For example my dd's school decided that parents were not allowed to go back on themselves during pick up. So people had to collect one child and then walk out the back entrance and round the street all the way to the front entrance to then pick up the next child. You had to do this to get bikes from the bike shed as well. All this was outside and the children were spending 6 hours indoors together anyway!

Also see people who were adamant you had to go up and down each and every aisle of the supermarket. If I needed bread and milk etc I just got them and left. Where was the sense in spending an extra 15 mins traipsing up and down for no reason?

As had been said the mantra was 'stay the fuck home' and anyone reasoning against this was roundly castigated.

The absolute worse thing that happened was during my DP's beloved grandfather's wake at a pub. We had a separate room just for us. We wore masks to go to the toilet through the public area but it wasn't enough for some pub goers who saw a couple of us moving between tables without a mask. These people complained and we got told off. They were on holiday so not shielding. Who puts in a complaint against an obviously grieving family?

The problem was, we didn't know how bad it was going to be. If it had turned out to be as deadly as, say, Ebola for example then all the distancing and staying at home would have been seen as the right move.
Hindsights wonderful!

I did clap for the NHS but barely followed any other rules...at the time me and my dh lived a 20 min drive apart...we continued staying weekends at each others houses even though we were not supposed to be seeing each other due to the 'roolz'.

Healthier? Loads of pregnant women are high risk!

I generally carried on pretty normally tbh and avoided all mn threads related to COVID as it was absolutely insane on here. I didn't do any clapping on the street or pot bashing, still took DD out as much as possible and met friends, nursery reopened after the first lockdown so DD went back.

The main thing I am angry about still is the people who died of undiagnosed or late diagnosed cancers and other illnesses (I know several) because GPs effectively shut up shop and then took years and years to get anywhere back to normal. Many still haven't from what I read on here. I also believe all the stats on death toll etc are nonsense, it's well known deaths were recorded as COVID related if the individual had COVID or had had it recently, even if their cause of death was completely unrelated.

😂😂 I remember the first week, I was cleaning the door handle as soon as my partner came in the door.

This was also around the time of mass protests, which surprisingly was allowed. However, grieving families couldn’t sit together at a loved ones funeral, could not even console one another. Nothing made sense about it and so I used my common sense and essentially continued on as normally as I could.

Remember the story about the Daughter who wasn’t allowed to get her elderly Mother out of a care home? Disgusting this happened, she just wanted to take her home.

Still lower risk than the hospital patients in general though. We're talking women in their 30s!

In situations like this, you can't rule for every individual person and have to make broad generalisations across a population. Compared to the general population visiting a hospital, pregnant women are healthier, less mentally impaired, more able to understand information given to them at appointments, able to get themselves to and from hospital without assistance etc.

It was shit, I'm not denying that for a second, like I said I lived through it.

Tbh I couldn’t bring myself to do the clapping. Felt too saccharine. We only say hello to a few neighbours so the idea of doing this group activity was very awkward. In my head I blamed the reactive dog for not participating.

We tried wiping down groceries but sadly laziness meant this did not last long.

Some of it was probably misguided, but "cringeworthy" sounds smug and unkind frankly. I don't think it's an appropriate term for actions and decisions that ordinary people took largely in good faith.

And I think that people forget that covid in March 2020 was a very different disease to covid in April 2024. Not just in our perception but the reality too - no vaccines, no immunity, no treatments, healthy young people dying.

100% this!

I didn't do any of the above because I knew at the time it was a crock of shit.

The things that were said to me as a result - from supposedly 'caring' individuals in real life and on social media - gave me first hand experience of how truly vile a person could be towards another human being.

Those same people now just want to 'forget any animosity and move on'...

Not. A. Chance!

It's not a case of holding a grudge, it's a case of 'I saw who you were and I can't unsee it!'

Yes, I think we were similar, although I did go out and clap - as my DB was in the thick of it in the NHS, and it was a chance to have a chat with the neighbours.

I have no memory of Easter eggs being an issue, but I wasn’t on mumsnet then.

We stuck to the rules -DS2 stayed where he was at uni so we didn’t see him for months. We embraced zoom calls - and did a zoom party for DB’s 50th. Our silver anniversary just passed by. But we weren’t worried when next door broke the rules and had their brother round after neighbours’s mum died. You’d have to be petty to complain about that.

I think we’re at risk, though, of forgetting why some things were as they were. Yes, home schooling was awful. But I think some folks have forgotten that many schools would have had to close as too many staff were ill or CEV.

Yep. We never did the clapping. Mega cringe, can’t bear virtue signalling, and even NHS workers were saying don’t applaud us, give us decent money.
A friend of mine actually got moved on by the police from a park bench where she was sitting alone drinking a cup of coffee after a walk! I know it was all new to us. but so much of that rubbish had absolutely no basis in logic.

I didn't bother with the clapping more than once or twice as it was ridiculous and I cba but some of the stuff that went on was bat shit! You could walk around a pharmacy (Super drug I'm looking at you) and buy toothpaste, deodorant etc but you couldn't walk down another aisle to buy hairdye and when I questioned that I was told it was to "be sensible" what did that even mean?? That if I left the mouthwash and toothpaste aisle I would suddenly spread/catch COVID? The staff on our local store were so OTT and rude ive never returned.

Luckily our neighbours didn't do any of the silly shaming if you didn't go outside and clap, that's awful! But I do remember feeling guilty for leaving the house twice in a day as my DDog wouldn't poop at home and only on walks.

I’ll admit to being a doorstep clapper and following the rules. I don’t think this makes me worthy of being looked down on by those who didn’t, but I also think those who questioned things at the time should not have been hounded and made to feel bad. Everybody reacted differently influenced by their very individual circumstances. For me personally, I was just so scared and overwhelmed. Seeing my young, otherwise healthy friend fight for his life on a ventilator and have to learn to walk again afterwards was terrifying. I was a mum to young children and juggling a job and homeschool and my husband’s redundancy ( like many others) and I just did not have the headspace to question. Clapping on the doorstep felt like something I could do to express thanks or some positive feeling at a time when there was very little. I know that it achieved nothing in reality but at the time it felt like something to do in a time when everything was so very out of control.

It such a hard time for everybody and everybody had their own ways of coping. Even the curtain twitchers and those who reported people were most likely acting out of fear and believing they were doing the right thing.

It all feels like a lifetime ago and yet it still so hugely impacts so much of how we live now.

Thank god, we never succumbed to the clapping on the doorstep bollocks.

It was mad yes, but I also remember listening to Italian doctors saying the triage they had to do was more akin to a miliary operation. Only those they they thought had a good change of survival were treated. Mass graves in NYC. China shut down.

I don't recall being told not to buy an Easter egg.

I did have 2 miscarriages and had to go through the hospital appointments alone. Including and D&C which was awful since I needed to stay for a few days. But I didn't have children during covid and I think that would have been very difficult.

We don't know what would have happened with out lockdown good or bad. I personally think it would have been worse, in terms of a lot more deaths. I had no one close to me die but my friends dad in his late 50s in reasonable health did.

My aunt was working on a covid ward though. And it did not sound good, at all to put it mildly.

Seems to have been good for babies "Only 17 per cent of the babies included in the study, who were born during the first three months of the pandemic in 2020, required an antibiotic during the first year of their life. This compares to 80 per cent of babies in the UK requiring an antibiotic in the first 12 months of life, based on a pre-pandemic study." https://www.irishtimes.com/health/2024/02/29/covid-19-pandemic-babies-more-likely-to-have-healthier-guts-to-suffer-fewer-food-allergies/

What the fuck?? I would have called the police