Caroline O'Donoghue: Three ways to talk about 2020
When I first agreed to take on this column at the end of 2019, I did so with a little bit of nerves. I’d been a columnist for other Irish papers, off and on, and over the years had often run into the same problem: that I was an Irish writer, living in England. I could not react to Irish news stories, because I didn’t have the context of living in the country they were affecting to draw on.
I couldn’t write about English news stories, because frankly, who wants that from an Irish columnist? I had often felt a little stuck between a rock and a hard place as a columnist, and worried whether I was taking the job away from a writer living in Ireland, who could do the job much better.
Then, three months into this column, the pandemic hit.
The pandemic has been awful for a lot of reasons, but it has been a columnist’s dream. For once, everyone in both England and Ireland was going through the exact same thing at the exact same time. The only differentiating circumstance was that sometimes England was out of lockdown and Ireland was in it, and vice versa.
But more than that, we all had developed a common language, a shared lexicon. For the first time in a long time, everyone knew exactly what everyone else was talking about. Even as I look back over the columns I wrote this year, I’m amazed at how quickly a shorthand was developed: in March, it was all about ‘unprecedented times’. By summer, it was jokes about how I met up with a friend “socially distanced, of course!” By autumn, there was almost no need for jokes or asides about distancing, just lots of references to walks and an unusual emphasis on stating whether I was inside or outside during an event.
I think pretty much every columnist has had the same journey, and I imagine all of our work being placed into a time capsule, to be opened by school children in a hundred year’s time. I can imagine them now, plodding their way through reading comprehensions: “In paragraph 2, the writer refers to washing her groceries with Dettol – please answer why she might be doing that in the space below”. And: “here, the writer asks her friends if they are ‘doing hugs’. Please explain why or why not a person may not have been ‘doing hugs’ in 2020.”
No year will ever be quite like 2020 again. We have been cursed, as the old Chinese proverb goes, ‘to live in interesting times’.
So I think it’s time we started making some decisions on how we refer to 2020, once it’s in the rear-view mirror of history. History is written by the victors, after all. And if you got through this year in one piece, you’re nothing but a victor.
When our grandchildren ask us about 2020 for their school project, we simply put down whatever plate we’re cleaning, and stare out the kitchen window. “It was a time of Great Stillness,” we will whisper. Depending on our mood, our language will grow increasingly folksy. “The Coughing Sickness spread across the lands like locusts, and the lady behind the Boots counter said that I couldn’t have a nail varnish”.
I’ve seen a lot of people refer to this year as like something from dystopian fiction, and I suppose we could lean into that if we wanted to.
We wouldn’t have to try hard. “Everything fun was a crime,” we can say, with accuracy. “We all took turns in being Quizmaster for weekly quizzes that almost no one enjoyed but. If you opted out you risked isolation from the whole community and people questioned your commitment to friendship.”
My late grandmother often insisted the war was one of the happiest times of her life: when everyone had nothing, and there was a lot to go around. She remembered her neighbours saving up their clothes vouchers to buy her a wedding dress. She remembered working at a hotel in Tralee and meeting the prisoners of war who were kept at a camp nearby. Apparently they were allowed down to the disco every Saturday night, the Germans and the English trotting off to see if they could bag a local girl.
While we didn’t experience anywhere near the glamour of wartime Europe, you can’t pretend that the pandemic didn’t bring out the best in people. My best friend hoarded ingredients to make me a birthday cake, back when salted butter was hard to come by, and an online shop had a three week wait list. More people are volunteering, more people are checking in, more people are making phone calls to relatives that, frankly, they usually have nothing to do with.
Because that’s what they miss, in all the dystopian fiction. They show The Big Bad thing happening, and then they show the human spirit rotting around it. But I don’t think the human spirit rotted this year. I think it was strained, but I think people got kinder, and softer, and slower, and more aware of how other people might be feeling. So after much consideration, perhaps the Utopia route is the best one to go for. See you in 60 years, for the great time capsule unveiling. I’ll be there with bells on.
