A year ago, at the start of the first lockdown, I wrote for UnHerd about suddenly discovering that I was afraid of dying. It was the letter from the NHS advising me to shield that did it. Despite being diagnosed with a chronic form of leukaemia six years ago, which had worsened steadily to the point that I started needing treatment two years ago, I had — how stupid can one be? — never really contemplated my mortality.
But the knowledge that my immune system was so shot that were I to catch Covid I would almost certainly die was a sudden jolt of terror. I had no idea what the next few months held in store; only that the most sensible thing I could do if I wanted to see my children grow up was not to see them. (To be specific: I could see them, but not be near them.) One slip that let Covid in would in all likelihood be my last slip.
Well, here I still am. So let me tell you about the past year. I doubt any of the other 3,792,969 people who have been advised to shield over the past year will disagree with me when I say that it’s been what my younger self would have called a “headfuck”. Each of our stories is obviously different, but we all have one thing in common: that, weird and awful as the lockdowns have been for everyone, shielding is a different level of weirdness and awfulness.
At its most basic, it is a form of solitary confinement. For most of last year, while shielding was in place, I was living with my then wife and our kids. Living with, in the sense that we were in the same house. But I was in a room. Alone and specifically told not to interact with them. That is, let me tell you, not easy. I am by nature a stoic, but even stoicism has its limits. Hearing my children’s giggles and not having a clue what they were laughing about does not sound like a big deal. But when it lasts weeks — and then months — it is soul-destroying. It is a pretty visceral reminder that you are not part of their lives.
And much as I never really experience traditional boredom — too much to see, read, or listen to, always — the same four walls for months on end, without any change, generates a different, overwhelming sense of intense tedium. Throughout the months of shielding, the only change of scene I had was a three-week stay in hospital when it seemed my chemo had started to play tricks on me. (It turned out to be something else altogether, but the care and attention I received from the doctors and nurses was truly astonishing, given how on the floors above and below me they were dealing with genuine catastrophe.)
Then the cloud lifted in August, and shielding was suspended. When I nervously asked if that really meant I could go outside, my consultant said it was about assessing risk; if I took proper precautions, I had his blessing since it was relatively difficult to be infected in the open air. So for a few weeks I felt a sense of relative freedom.
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