Five years ago today: the introduction

It’s never struck me as odd that, as many times as we recognized that we were living through turbulent and possibly unprecedented times, many scholars of the past didn’t meticulously clock the pandemic. I didn’t. I stopped writing in my journal, full stop, and still haven’t picked it back up. The day to day were both so terrifying and mundane. I didn’t want self-reflection. I didn’t have any space in me to spare for it.

My feelings about the onset of the pandemic are thus mixed up. There are a lot of feelings, a lot of watercolour images in my mind. Marking online exams in the garden while my partner had meetings in the upstairs spare room. Long walks in hot weather. The eerie quiet of walking over the bridge over the Itchen on The Broadway – the one with notorious, one-person-width pavements – in the middle of the street because there were no cars. Zoom get-togethers. The start of the wine club. Panic because pain in my sinuses – always rotten – might spell death rather than another sinus infection.

Historical anniversaries, as we teach our students in history classes, serve a lot of purposes for the living and for the remembrance of the dead (which is also in the service of the living). They can be used for political purposes by governments or organizational entities; they can be community, grassroots and meaningful. What we chose to commemorate and why we do it is important.

People are starting to note the anniversary of the start of the pandemic. Different times in different places, of course, marked in different ways. For me, the start of the pandemic was when UK universities starting going online. I don't even know when the official 'start' date was, or which any kind of statuses were declared by the government, UNWHO, or anyone.

But I can’t figure out why, five years on, I’m now feeling more reflective about the pandemic.

It may be because I have taken on a new job and am feeling transitional about a lot of areas that are affected by my work and career. Five years ago, at the start of all things, most of UKHE was just coming out of a grinding, four-week strike for better conditions. The world felt like it could change. It did, but not in the ways that we hoped, optimistically, it could. Much of what happened to me, personally, five years ago is tied up between the mundane of the job, the terror of the world around us, the loneliness and pain of missing family, and the stress of suddenly doing your entire job entirely different. And hoping you, and your students, and your loved ones, didn’t die.

The beginning days of the pandemic changed us all. I’d like to use this space to talk about it. What it went for me, for my thoughts and feelings about UKHE, and how we trundled through, day after day, trying to teach and research like any of it made any sense. In a lot of ways, it didn’t make any sense at all. And I can’t make sense of it now either, so I won’t try. Here’s just what it was to me.

Part One: Picket Time is here. Parts two and probably three will be forthcoming.