As the COVID-19 pandemic gained momentum in the Spring of 2020, I was telling an acquaintance that I’d started keeping a detailed journal, documenting daily events, news, personal reflections and accounts of living under lockdown. ‘I suppose that might be interesting to read in five or so years from now’, was the rather sceptical reply.
It didn’t deter me.
Through much of 2020 I maintained the journal faithfully and in detail. I recorded daily observations, and in many cases added in material not only from the news, from pieces I was reading in the press and social media, as well as in academic outlets. In addition I included daily updates of population and epidemiological data about COVID. For some time my journaling remained private, but as my enthusiasm for such detailed daily documentation began to wane, I looked at one particular month with special interest and thought it might be worth sharing more widely.
As far as I am aware, April 2020 is the only month in which the entire United Kingdom was under the same set of COVID restrictions. That month encapsulated a brief moment when all the home nations, willingly or not, signed up to a common set of principles and actions. In effect it was a Petri dish in which all manner of public health thinking and guidance could be tested out, in the process surfacing multiple ideas about how a population might adapt to unprecedented state control over individual movements, practices and interactions. Some time before any vaccine for COVID-19 had been developed, April 2020 was likewise a time of fear, and anxiety, exacerbated by the multiplying effects of sometimes competing narratives which shaped our day to day circumstances. It seemed to me therefore to represent a particular pandemic time capsule, worth recording, and yes, possibly worth reading in times to come.
The result was The Febrile Month, a 30,000 word narration of my experiences during April 2020, brought together as a free-standing text with illustrations by Hugh Bryden and available on this site for anyone to read, without charge. I have been quite gratified at the interest it has generated over time. So now, five years on from when it was written, I offer it up once more: for quinquennial review.
I have of course been re-reading it myself. How assiduous is the memory in blocking out certain things, whilst retaining others. How eagerly we sought out ways to make sense of what was happening, to bring our own meanings to it and even to develop new rituals and cultural markers. How stark was the divide between the essential workers and those who worked from home or were furloughed. How quickly we cast off things that seemed so important at the time.
My account of April 2020 is hyper-vigilant. My disposition attentive. My purpose to record actions, processes, feelings and events, as they occurred and as they entered my thoughts. Looking back, the month was a portal through which I entered a new phase of writing. Not quite auto-ethnography, nevertheless as the month proceeded I was inclined more and more to deeper reflection, to making connections between the quotidian world of family and friends and the wider natural world or the written words of others. It is an approach I have subsequently tried to develop and deepen, whether in creative non-fiction, short stories, and especially in my debut novel.
April 2020 was Janus-faced. On one side looking anxiously for information, for certainty, for a triumph of scientific rationality. On the other, accepting ambiguity, searching for better things, seeking the best in human experience. But how enduring was that ‘new normal’? How sustained were our efforts to engage with nature, to be more compassionate, to find meaning in simple pleasures and activities, to be kinder? How thwarted were the rhetorics of mindfulness in the face of domestic violence, mental health crises, the exigencies of long-COVID, of bereavement, of lives ended without rites of passage or reconciliation?
There is still much to debate, not only about how the COVID crisis was managed but about its long-term sequelae, and how these vary from country to country. In that context, contemporaneous sources are invaluable. In a very minor way, The Febrile Month is one such resource. Please take a look at it here, and decide for yourself whether it has turned out to be worth reading—five years on.
Of related interest
Responding to Loss in the Time of COVID: the Shoreline to Shoreline project
Quotidian 