Many Kiwis packed up their flats and flew back from the UK as Covid-19 took hold but what is life like right now for the ones who stayed? Rozzy Middleton reports from the English capital and describes a deeply confusing situation.
The way the lockdown has unfolded in the United Kingdom is the polar opposite of New Zealand.
Unlike Kiwi hero Jacinda, in England the clowns are in charge.
Through January and February (and most of March) the Brits continued going to work, riding on packed tubes and crowding into bustling pubs and restaurants as the weeks went on and the situation appeared to become ever more serious.
Whilst both countries went into their strictest versions of the lockdown at around the same time in late March, the difference was that New Zealand had already shut its borders and restricted entry. The UK still hasn’t shut or restricted movement in or out of a single airport.
Boris – our clown leader in chief – started by proposing a herd immunity. He then said to wash your hands but admitted to shaking those of the people already hospitalized with Covid-19. Me and my peers watched with increasing disbelief as each day passed and Boris refused to take any demonstrable lockdown actions to keep the infection rates at bay.
Finally, after two weeks of blustering, he announced that all non-essential businesses – including that almighty institution, The British Pub – would shut for at least three weeks and that an employment scheme would be provided to ensure jobs were not at risk.
And thus our lockdown began.
From the very beginning the lockdown in London was a very different story to that in New Zealand. I can’t vouch for the rest of the country, but London is simply too big a city – with too young a population – to properly enforce.
The pubs were shut, the streets were much quieter, regular bustling shops were shuttered. But the quietness lasted at its peak for about two weeks. Living in vibrant Hackney, with its very young population, businesses started to make tweaks and ‘innovations’ here and there to stay afloat. With corner stores and food delivery drivers deemed ‘essential’ workers, you could still get gourmet pizza delivered, takeaway cocktails on your hourly walk and freshly cut flowers from around the corner.
The parks at first were empty, but gradually over the Easter weekend (and beyond) they started filling up and pubs started to reappear with socially distanced lines for takeaway beers.
Daily lockdown life has been as challenging as anywhere else where we take going out and socialising for granted. The weeks would be structured with endless Zoom calls and urgent digital strategies but the weekends would come and you would be facing into the abyss of either closing your laptop and staring aimlessly into space, or getting on another Zoom call for your end of week work Zoom social.
The hardest part, I feel for Britain, is yet to come. Warmer weather is here, the Government’s unclear and constantly changing instructions are confusing and hard to follow. And when the Prime Minister’s own chief aide is not reprimanded for breaking the very rules he helped to set up, it’s hard to take any of it seriously.
A second wave will come in Britain, as rumours swirl that the country is on course to crash out of the EU with no deal. But there are too many people, and too much confusion to make another lockdown or any other measures to control the spread of the virus have any effect.
Plenty of my friends have already ‘jumped ship’ and headed back to New Zealand and with the future of the economy and the nation’s health feeling incredibly uncertain, there may be many more following suit – myself included.
