“Don’t move house during a national lockdown”, they said…

Oh wait, they did say that. In fact, it took several trips to the Government’s website to convince us that we were not breaking the law by moving into an already empty home at this time of crisis.

Most of our loved ones assumed the worst – that COVID-19 would put paid to our plans and force us to remain captives of Manchester city centre. Not that there’s anything wrong with Manchester city centre, of course, but when there’s a potentially lethal virus going around, you’d rather be in leafy suburbia than a major conurbation. That’s probably why the protagonist in War of the Worlds was able to survive. Yes, the initial meteor landed near Woking, but you never felt as though conquest of Surrey was likely to be the Martians’ primary objective.

Anyhow, our removal plans were not scuppered – merely distorted. We managed to get our things from one flat to the other, almost entirely avoiding our removal people (at their request) and leaving them to pack up and lock up in their own good time. It’s the first house move I’ve ever undertaken by walking. Actually, it’s the second, but the first one was a move of about 200 metres – from Camden to Camden.

It is remarkable to think that I penned Part One of this house-related musing just two short months ago. There was no reference to the pandemic in my earlier entry – it was something that affected only the lives of others, in Wuhan, Hong Kong, Brighton…

How unprepared we all were. And how uncertain the future looks, home or no home.

It’s hard to settle into the new place when everything around you feels so distinctly unsettled. You can establish a routine, but it’s by definition an abnormal routine and not something you feel any great joy in pursuing. Get up in the morning, check the latest global death toll, check to see if the Prime Minister is out of hospital… Go for a short walk, crossing the road to avoid the BT engineers digging up the pavement, veering around any other keen walkers and saying thank you to anyone considerate enough to steer clear of you… Go to the shop and form a ridiculous-looking social distancing queue. Be careful about what you buy, lest anyone judge you for selecting something non-essential or trying to sneak too many supplies into your trolley. Go home, sit down, check the UK death toll… is it time for wine yet?

Much is being written about what will happen when we emerge from this crisis, and whether this truly is a chance to start anew; to reshape society, capitalism, education systems and football schedules; to finally start fixing the environment. If you google ‘from great crisis comes opportunity’, you’ll get 369 million search results, including a whole host of recent media editorials.

But I find it a bit perverse to be viewing the pandemic in these terms. The death toll is just too high. It’s like saying World War Two provided a great opportunity to rethink pan-European political and economic relations.

No, I see it as a period of enforced reflection on what we have, what we don’t have, what we have lost and what we would like (if possible) to get back again. So I’m grateful for our new home, grateful that we were able to move, and grateful for the possibility that – at some stage in the coming months – many of the things we love to do, like spending time with family and friends, will be restored to us.

They’ll make a stoic out of me yet…

Photo credit: Michael Tuszynski