CHARLES BANNERMAN: Our columnist found aspects of lockdown strangely fulfilling with new book Made in Inverness penned during the earlier part of the Covid-19 pandemic
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Any time I’m surfing Freeview and hear the Minder theme, it invariably sends a chilling deja vu throughout my entire being.
Now I really like Minder, but that theme instantly takes me back two years, to the bleak days of the gruesome uncertainty of that first wave Covid peak in April 2020.
Everyone was under strict house arrest with a new and unknown virus apparently lurking on our very doorsteps, ready to fill all these field hospitals and makeshift mortuaries we’d been told to expect.
It was a horrible period of mandatory confinement and I initially sat in front of a TV for most of the day beginning with Minder, hence my association of that tune with the dread of yet another 24-hour cycle of extreme boredom and chronic cabin fever.
One palliative was the illusion that it would all be over in a few weeks and we were just doing our public duty by “flattening the curve”. Little did we know.
These dark days of spring 2020 were all about retaining sanity and understanding that this wasn’t bubonic plague or Ebola and, despite alarmist propaganda about “cytokine storms”, the overwhelming majority could contemplate life thereafter.
My sanity was eventually retained through studying the very cause of all the trauma, the SARS-Cov-2 virus. The problem hence became part of the solution through this personal education project. Although also venturing into the uncharted territory of the medicine and biology, I focused principally on the rash of official Covid statistics.
Before long, I’d moved on from undiluted Freeview to publishing daily Facebook Covid updates. This prompted several friend requests and messages of thanks declaring my unofficial analyses a bit clearer and more reassuring. In particular, wave by wave, I was able to identify case peaks and improving scenarios such as in hospitalisations and deaths at a very early stage. However, I still sought personal reassurance in a calculation of my chances of surviving infection at 99.78 per cent.
Two years on, and mercifully all but restriction free, I now know a great deal more about epidemiology, virology, statistics, medical practice... and about how Downing Street partied on.
One further self-protection against lockdown came from writing another book, Made in Inverness about my Highland capital upbringing. However, I delayed publication until last October to be quite confident of no further closures of the economy.
I therefore managed to render lockdown strangely fulfilling. And, fully exploiting the lifeline of that hour a day allowed for outdoor exercise, became fitter than I’d been for years.
That created one of several unexpected and sustained behavioural changes during these two Covid years. Just as I’ve never been back to the gym after enforced outdoor exercise, nor have I returned to using cash, and trainers still replace leather shoes. My alcohol consumption, already modest early in 2020, now remains happily at pretty well zero, although I no longer wash my hands quite with that earlier fervour of Lady Macbeth.
And gone forever, ruined by the non-event which was 2020, is the continuity of the unbroken mental timeline on which I previously placed all my life’s events in sequence.
That, however, may not be a bad thing because the void helps eradicate the agonising uncertainty of these desperate early weeks when psychological equilibrium depended on Minder, The Professionals and The Sweeney.
