Terry Prone: Going back to ‘normal’ isn’t always right

Nigella Lawson annoyed viewers with her pronunciation of ‘microwave’. Picture: PA

DAY 68 

Standing in LIDL, I try to persuade one of their shelf loaders that they don’t have something they promised to have. He is being punctilious, showing me at arms length his phone so their catalogue can prove I’m imagining things. I’m not. I’m just in the wrong shop. I should be in Aldi.

Either way, pretty much the safest place to be, right now, is one of the big supermarkets. Masks and protocols and mutual shaming rule. Safe as houses. In fact, a lot safer than many houses.

DAY 69 

Nigella Lawson annoys her followers by referring to her microwave as the “mic-roe-ahvee.” When they suggest she needs to get a grip, she explains it’s a camp joke that stuck around. 

I wonder if this isn’t a family thing. In our house, we always pronounced “berserk” as “beresk” and “debris” as “derbis.” Nothing sunders a friendship faster than a pal gently pointing out the correct pronunciation, because even if you yell “I KNOW,” they still think you didn’t and you hate them for ever.

DAY 70 

Negotiation challenge of the week. Or maybe of the year. A woman who’s just received a stellar review from her boss. Problem? That same boss is likely to insist on her working in the office fulltime when the pandemic ends. 

He insisted everybody head for HQ during the summer, when things were looking less hairy. Not just her. Everybody, male and female, reporting to him. And not just him. All of the four departmental heads bosses, one of whom, at the first meeting of the previously scattered staff, spoke of the heroism, flexibility and capacity to manage change demonstrated by the staff in not just working from home and on Zoom, but increasing the collective sense of pride in the process. 

With luck, he added, there’d be no more of that. In other words, noses to the grindstone and the grindstone is right here at corporate HQ. Fortunately for many of the staff, their grindstone commute was quickly abandoned as the virus surged again and they found themselves back home.

My client dreads the thought of at least two hours on the road each day and is trying to work out how to negotiate her boss out of his coercive assumption that this working from home thing was fine when we had no choice, but that, come the vaccine, we’ll all get back to normal. 

Nobody’s consulting the much-lauded workers.Nobody in management is saying “That working from home thing worked amazingly well. Maybe we should learn from what we did in extremis.” 

The need for overt control, for the presence of the workers in a context where they can be seen to be working, is more important, cloaked though it is under eye-rolling gratitude for “a return to normal,” underpinned with an assumption that the familiar, the“normal” is always the best. 

It isn’t. Sometimes normal is sub-optimal. Sometimes normal needed a pandemic to prove just how bad it was. Sometimes the people who prate about the benefits of disruption should put their money where their mouth is.

DAY 71 

Talking with a couple in their forties I know have an overseas holiday home, I laughingly ask when they plan to hit the airport. Autumn, maybe, is the answer. When I look surprised, she says, resentfully, “It’s only people like you who’ll get vaccinated by February.” We stand considering the vision of planes filled with pensioners. It’d be like trains used to be with grandfathers going from Cork to Dublin for free to have lunch with their daughter. The freshly vaccinated won’t get free flights, but you have to figure much of their savings are going to go on air tickets.

DAY 72 

People who want “national conversations” about particular issues don’t really. They just want to bore the opposition into surrender.

DAY 73 

Journalists writing profiles are always on the lookout for the moment in the narrative where the celeb changed radically. Where some event or some person made them stop in their tracks and re-evaluate who they were and what they were doing. This week I learned the determinative term for such life-changing events: Cannonball moments. 

So named after a guy who came of a rich family and had damn all interest in anything other than military maneuvers and winning whatever contest he was involved in. Action man. Until the day outside Pamplona when a cannonball got him in the legs. Now, cannonballs were hot and heavy. 

They mangled bone and burned flesh to such an extent that surviving one, up close and personal, meant a lot of surgery, conducted without anaesthetic, followed by months and months of confinement to one’s home, room and bed. The clever ambitious guy who encountered the Pamplona cannonball was one of the Loyolas (they owned the castle in which he was born) by name Ignatius.

If you think the worst had happened this lad, stick with me. The worst is yet to come. Because someone had to take care of him, stranded and isolated as he was, his sister got the job and did it pretty well in the sense that her brother didn’t die of gangrene or other infection.The bad news, though, was the reading matter she brought him. Which was kind of holy. Exactly the kind of stuff an incapacitated soldier needs like a hole in the head, particularly when he’s already got himself a hole in the legs.

However, the reading matter and forced isolation changed him utterly and when he learned to walk again, he walked in a different direction, setting up the Jesuits, who are still with us. In fact, one of their members is now Pope, a hell of a turnaround, given that the Vatican for centuries regarded the SJs with fear and loathing. (There’s a good possibility many in the Vatican today regard the SJs with renewed fear and loathing because of this smiling reformative pope, but that’s for another day.) 

Next year is Ignatian year – 500 years after the encounter with the cannonball, and the Jesuits want people to consider their own cannonball moments. Oh, puh-lease, I thought, listening to a Belgian Jesuit named Pascal making a presentation on the concept during a course I was giving via Zoom a few days ago. 

Except that in the following days, I couldn’t but spot the similarities between a soldier put out of commission by a cannon ball and a generation put out of commission by a virus with the same shape.

I would be deadly curious to learn from readers who’ve radically changed their life plan because of Covid-19. Who’ve decided not to waste a good cannonball moment.

DAY 74 

Puzzled by Joseph, in my crib, wearing gladiator sandals, which seem a little frivolous for a senior citizen, I probe the issue and find Joseph out on the cotton wool snow while a shepherd is warming himself up indoors. That gets fixed, fast. Shepherds should know their place.