Suzanne Harrington: What's the point of isolation if it's killing us?

The dog is on paracetamol again from all the lockdown walking – like the rest of us, she’s worn out, but won’t give up. 

The pile of compulsively purchased lockdown books threatens to topple like a giant Jenga tower, as the path to the front door wears ever thinner from the feet of delivery drivers. 

Lockdown, it has been pointed out, is basically middle-class people hiding as working-class people bring them things. Guilty as charged.

But some things can’t be delivered, no matter much you’d like to place your order. Like recovery. Having just finished the stupendously readable memoir of poet John Cooper Clarke, in which he travels the world in the close company of his raging heroin habit, doing show after show just so that he earns enough money to keep the horrors of withdrawal at bay, scoring from Chet Baker and using with Nico, his entire existence is for decades completely dominated by his drug addiction. 

Finally in rehab, after three months of grueling group therapy, he reaches a conclusion: thank God he’s not an alcoholic. “Booze must be the most difficult thing to quit,” he writes. “It’s everywhere.” And never more so than when there’s nothing else to do.

For those of us who struggle with alcohol, lockdown has been a tightrope walk in high heels. 

Unlike Ireland, face to face recovery meetings in much of the UK have not been happening - everything has been diverted to Zoom. And for many of us, recovery doesn’t really work on Zoom; it’s like being trapped in one of the Brady Bunch windows, when what you really need is to be with your real-life fellow alcoholics, face to face, in the same room. Drinking the same awful coffee, breathing the same Covid-y air. Isolation is the enemy of the addict.

Isolation isn’t just causing people to relapse on drugs and alcohol, however. It’s driving ‘normal’ people mad too. Especially older people. You don’t need to be prone to addiction, depression or any other kind of mental health stuff to suffer hugely by being forcibly separated from your loved ones, or even your casual acquaintances; we are not hermit crabs. 

We need interaction, no matter how trivial. Chit-chat and eye contact.

Obviously, this is a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis, with governments scrabbling to manage (and mismanage – see Johnson, Trump, etc) but as it continues, perhaps we should ask – at what price do we protect ourselves and each other from Covid? Mental health collapse? Addiction relapse? Relationship breakdown? Attack of the screaming ab-dabs?

Even if you’re not rocking in the corner surrounded by empty gin bottles – well done, by the way, if you’re not – is it really a good idea to isolate older people from each other? 

It’s one thing banning Millennial raves, quite another banning oldies from having careful outdoor coffees with each other in their gardens. Older people are not daft, and should be managing their own risk. What’s the point of isolation if it’s killing us?