Our writers share the life lessons they've taken from Covid

It's been a season like no other.

Sat, 29 Aug, 2020 - 08:00

Darina Allen

The Covid-19 experience has been different for everyone, these bewildering weeks in lockdown.

Some have actually enjoyed every moment of the forced isolation, but many others have found it deeply distressing and challenging, working from home, trying to occupy and home-school kids, overcome with loneliness, desperately missing grandchildren.

I personally gave heartfelt thanks to the good Lord over and over again for the gift of living in the midst of a working farm in the Irish countryside rather than in a high rise apartment in a city.

I found the initial weeks of cocooning to be the most stressful as did many other active 70-year-olds who had to come to terms with being constantly referred to as elderly. It was difficult not to feel that we were ‘over the hill’ and surplus to requirements although I know that was not the intention.

Funnily, for some considerable time, I had a deeply uneasy sort of ominous gut feeling that things couldn’t go on regardless, ignoring global-warming and the scientist’s predictions about the effects of climate change on the planet.

Among others Nostradamus and the Aboriginal grandmothers' predicted a huge disruption at the beginning of the 21st century. The Aboriginal grandmothers' spoke of a wave… it was not clear what form it might take. Nostradamus spoke of the world going back into the dark ages.

What other than a pandemic could have sparked so much fear, anxiety and grief and brought the entire world to a standstill and economies to their knees, forcing us all to rethink our lifestyle. Even in the ‘new normal’, life will never be the same again.

There has been much tragedy and unbearably heart-breaking stories but much goodwill also blossom from this enforced slowing down. I’m certainly enjoyed contacting friends that I hadn’t in some cases chatted to for decades.

Family and extended family and friends have become even more important. I’ve learned how to negotiate Zoom and made lots of cooking videos in my back kitchen to post on @ballymaloecookeryschool Instagram.

During cocooning, I became even more grateful and appreciative of those treasures who normally look after all my needs. I hadn’t realised the effort it takes to lug the hoover up the stairs or how heavy that garden hose is.

Plus I’d forgotten how much time is taken up with tidying, washing, cleaning, even dusting.

For a few days, I couldn’t find the floor mop in my own house, how shameful is that! I But as soon as I got over the initial shock, I started to make jams and jellies on my ancient Aga for the Farm Shop and found I was totally loving being a real housewife again.

I cooked and cooked and found myself longing for the foods of my childhood, rice pudding, rhubarb tart, roast stuffed chicken, currant bread, caraway seed cake...

Bizarrely I contacted a friend who makes a wonderful homemade furniture polish, he mixed me up a bottle of his secret potion, I enjoyed buffing my furniture, somehow I found solace in the comforting smell — it reminded me of my childhood home where there was a rhythm and routine to everyday and every season — washing, ironing, polishing the brass, spring cleaning. I remembered the excitement of unpacking the summer clothes chest at the end of May.

As in every household, jobs that had been put on the long finger for ages were tackled, plants that badly needed to be re-potted have been given a new lease of life.

In the midst of it all, one of my ‘horribly fit’ brothers decided that all nine of us siblings should do 10,000 steps a day for a month to raise money for research and frontline workers of the Mater Foundation public hospital so that’s been brilliant to force me to take walks on top of my usual daily effort, nothing like sibling pressure to keep us up to the mark!

At first I kept forgetting to carry my mobile phone but now that I have a Fitbit which records every step, the highlight of my day is when it starts to vibrate on my arm to announce that I have done my 10,000 steps — how sad is that – actually I’m loving it!

In conclusion, a part of me feels deeply grateful that Mother Earth has stopped us in our tracks and forced us to re-evaluate our lives and rethink many things — much good will eventually come from this disruption.

On Friday, March 13, in line with Government directives, we closed the Ballymaloe Cookery School, 60 plus students left to travel home to their respective countries, and our team of 55 faced the distinct possibility of no work but desperation can spark creative solutions.

We reinvented ourselves overnight and the Farm Shop and NeighbourFood online markets have kept over 30 of us gainfully employed working together, cooking, gardening, sowing, fermenting, baking, and teaching online. Once again, I’m acutely aware of the value of life skills and resilience to sustain us through an emergency. One of the many silver linings that we can hold on to.

Louise O'Neill

When Taylor Swift released a surprise album last week, confirming she had written and recorded it during lockdown, I felt like such an underachiever. Why hadn’t I written an entire novel over the last few months? Why had I spent weeks gripped with fear, unable to read or write, scrolling through my phone in a state of paralysis?

As much as I would like to tell you otherwise, I didn’t emerge from lockdown grasping a piece of art in my hands. Nor did I learn another language or add headstands to my yoga practice. I am exasperated by people telling me what they learned about themselves, even if it’s as mundane as realising their daily coffee habit is actually quite expensive.

I didn’t learn anything about myself. I am the same person I was in March only I feel about 50 years older.

I think there’s something interesting about a capitalist society that even in the midst of a global pandemic, we’re expected to be productive, to make something worthwhile of what was an incredibly difficult experience for millions of people.

They lost their jobs, they grieved the loss of loved ones, and yet, still, we ask — what did you learn from all of this?

I think we need time to process this strange, unsettling year before we can talk about the lessons learned… but if you’re determined to ask, then the only quarantine cliché that I did indulge in was baking. I saw a recipe on Colm O’ Gorman’s Instagram, a brown soda bread with hazelnuts, and I made it every week without fail.

It didn’t require a sourdough starter or kneading or anything complicated. It was easy, and I needed easy then. A wet mix of ingredients spooned into a tin, placed gently in the oven afterwards.

And then I waited for it to be finished.

Joe McNamee

When ‘The Covid’ came, many of us lived out our own version of the same story; save essential workers, daily routines ground to a halt, worlds closed in, we refocused on infinitely reduced spaces. We truly discovered all both foul and fabulous about nearest and dearest, while holding our breaths, praying not to be directly affected or, most of all, bereaved.

When the treadmill suddenly seized up, it was as if I’d been catapulted off, stunned, dazed, but when equilibrium was regained, I realised I had been an extremely busy fool, trying to work all the hours and also play SoccerMom to my youngest pair. This new-found space to think and do stretched out before me like a wide-open prairie.

I earn my living writing about food and consulting with small producers and restaurants. Food is also my personal passion, rarely far from my thoughts, from first waking ’til head hits pillow — even then I can devise an entire dinner party menu before drifting off.

However, I despise the word, ‘foodie’; it makes a passion sound like a hobby. Food is far more serious than that. Though my epicurean excesses have bequeathed me sufficient blubber to see a whale through an Arctic winter, I equally view access to tasty, nutritional food as a fundamental human right, to which too many are deprived, even in Ireland.

I firmly believe in the primacy of freshest, local seasonal produce. Not only does it taste better than imported inferiors on supermarket shelves but it is also more nutritionally sound and sales directly benefit local producers and communities.

Accordingly, I source as much as possible from farmers’ markets, producers, independent and specialist retailers (craft butchers, fishmongers, etc), with supermarkets being the place of last resort. I also believe in eating as little processed food as possible, preferring to cook from scratch.

But when you are ferrying children to school and a bewildering myriad of extra-curricular activities just short of witchcraft and hang-gliding to complete the set, it was hard to always practice what I preached.

Now, I found time and space to go further. Baking daily bread became routine. I began to ferment, pickle and preserve gluts of vegetables and fruit.

I joined a buyer’s co-op to purchase staples (flours, pulses, grains etc) in bulk and batch-cooked for the freezer. During all of lockdown, we made just three trips to the supermarket, the last for toilet paper, washing powder, and dishwasher tablets. Bananas were the only foodstuff.

Even as the post-lockdown pace begins to hot up once more, these new habits now feel ingrained for life — I thank lockdown for allowing me to find them.

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