28 May 2020
The New Normal
What Does it All Mean?
by Shawsheet
This issue introduces a new type of occasional article called Focus intended to enable a number of different writers (and hopefully readers) to make a brief comment about a given topical theme.
When you have read their comments test yourself on the “New Normal” Crossword
We asked people to tell us what The New Normal means to them.
Julian Annis
It’s a pleasant novelty to have the house to ourselves in all this fine weather. We bought the guest house in a beautiful seaside town three years ago and enjoy welcoming holiday makers each season. Normally we re-open after Easter welcoming a growing wave of visitors, which peaks in high summer and ebbs until we close in late September. My partner relishes being a good host, welcoming guests to the house and town, recommending restaurants, pubs and places of interest, serving them breakfast and exchanging travellers’ tales.
Without guests this season’s “normal” is very different! Getting up is not dictated by them, no rush to serve and clear breakfast, no routines of cleaning and laundry, no locked doors, no rushing home to welcome new arrivals and of course no income! Instead we have the whole house to ourselves, all day and every day, life is simpler, choices minimal, social interaction limited and travel bounded by how far we walk. Looking after the house and garden, reading, walking in the town and re-watching boxed sets of DVDs fill the hours, and the days merge together.
Who knows when the guests will return, but when they do we’ll be ready. And we’ll be as keen as them to throw ourselves back into busy, seasonal, seaside town life. Or will we?
Barry Curtis
The early days of lockdown are so long ago that they already have a layered archaeology.
In the hall there is a landscape of boxes and bottles quarantining or waiting to be dumped.
All around, some items are surreally over-stocked; there is PPE equipment, so embarrassingly paranoid as to be unwearable. Memories of those first weeks linger, with their-grim unknowns. At best, there was a sci-fi – Ballardian anticipation of desolate cities and survivalist melodramas. There was the gradual adaptation to a new economy of time, with days stretching out and zipping by. There was the unrealised potential for books to be read and written. Now, in the steady sequence of indistinguishable days – a Zoomscape of glitchy meetings, family quizzes and zombie themed shopping trips. There are new, unstructured dress codes, a daily commute upstairs and along corridors and the cagey revealing of interior ‘sets’ from which to livestream and toggle sociability. In the third month, amnesia sets in and the old normal recedes. Pedestrians are menacing, front gardens are sociable venues, fellow passengers are potential assassins. With uneasy, risky resumptions various hopes fade – the air will grow thicker, traffic will return and the new normal will be a strangely familiar parody of the past with more debt, empty spaces, unease and the pressing need to re-learn the terms of sociability.
Stephen Wall
Much will depend on whether we control the virus, or it continues to control us. We may oscillate uneasily between lockdown and liberty.
The risk is that we return to life as it was: driving our cars, crowding on trains and buses. But we must safeguard the practical, economic, health and environmental benefits of reduced travel and remote working and conferencing. The economic landscape will be changed beyond recognition. Parts of our economic and cultural life may be permanently lost. The Conservative government will have to implement radical economic policies more usually associated with Labour. Maybe, we will finally be ready to spend on the NHS the money it needs. The better-off, including pensioners such as me, will need to pay more.
Even at Westminster, politics will be more local, with MPs conscious of regional needs at least as much as national ones. The combination of Covid and a probable hard Brexit will further expose divisions between the regions and nations of the UK, with potentially far-reaching constitutional changes over time.
The West’s relations with China will be re-examined. If Trump is defeated in November, a new US Administration will be better placed to lead a serious reappraisal that recognises the need for a working economic, but tougher political, relationship with China. In the UK, we cannot recreate lost manufacturing industries (and there would be a severe environmental penalty for trying to do so) but we should diversify our sources of supply.
Ted Sumner
Was Margaret Thatcher right when she said “Utopia never comes. We shouldn’t like it if it did”?
Perhaps.
But we should strive to create a fairer society if possible, build on successes and learn from mistakes
Much of the Old Normal should be transferred to the New Normal: the thriving, vivid and thrilling arts scene of theatre, music, cinema and popular culture; the human warmth and fun of meeting family and friends, of bars and restaurants.
However, this pandemic has exposed major societal fault lines here and abroad to be addressed in a New Normal: a chronically underfunded NHS barely coping before but which has functioned brilliantly – reorganisation and funding on a not-for profit basis is essential; our total dependence on low-paid, “unskilled” workers must be recognised: the vulnerability of our BAME citizens requires investigation and measures taken to increase protection: shocking dependence on care homes for our elderly people and which have proved so vulnerable; the value of immigrants of all skill levels from the Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to care-workers and fruit pickers.
The pandemic has shown the importance of home-manufacture, of consuming less, of lessening global pollution. Efficient Zoom meetings could contribute to a slimmer Aviation Industry.
There has been an unprecedented involvement in our lives of state intervention and police activity without which COVID could not be contained. To what extent do we want this involvement to be rolled back? What should be the New Political Normal?
Richard Pooley
Superficially the new normal will look very like the old normal. Outside, people will be crowding together where necessary. Inside public places, a lot of people will be wearing masks. The British will have taken back control of their lives, unwilling to listen any more to politicians who so botched the Coronavirus crisis. They will have learned what our forebears knew from birth: we all die.
Blended work – say, three days a week at home and two in the office – will become the norm. House prices will plummet, especially in London. But they will still not be affordable for an impoverished younger generation. Negative equity will be back despite zero interest rates. Foreclosures will rocket. And the number of homeless. Estate agents will disappear. The Lucky Generation of Boomers will be paying for Covid-19 through a property-based wealth tax and a cut in the value of the biggest state benefit of all – their pensions.
Far fewer people will fly. Domestic tourism and visits to nearby countries will become the norm, trips to far-away places will evaporate. Cross-border Zoom meetings will replace face-to-face ones. Airlines will go bust. Those that survive will charge three times as much.
Universities will close, unable to survive the loss of income from international students and from fewer British students, unwilling to saddle themselves with debt.
Probability theory will be taught in every school. Applications for epidemiology and virology courses will soar.
We will be fitter and less obese.
Graeme Bowers
I love you
– I love you too
– When can I see you?
– You’re seeing me now
– No, really see you
– What socdis?
– Or socnodis
Julia smiled
– What’s your status?
– Testing tomorrow
– You were posnosympto weren’t you?
– Yeah.
– But that was a week ago, right
– 10 days
– So 4 days and you’ll be eligible for stat change
– Unless I’m sympto
Pause
– Did the food arrive?
– No
– Usual problem
– Yeah they found the driver’s body in his van.
– Eaten?
– No, but the Civil Guard found him, so I assume they did
– So what are you eating?
– Boiled carpet lasagne.
– Lucky you. I’ve been frying rats and mice
– In the north they’ve been stripping off old wallpaper. There’s a theory the paste is animal based.
– I heard that.
Pause
– Are you still scavenging?
– No. There’s nothing out there apart from sympto bodies and I’m not stooping that low
– Just carpets
– Winston smiled
– So when then?
– I don’t know
– You can still get a sexsuit
– My Boots is empty. And burned out now
– What about one from the dark web?
– What after Tom’s experience?
– No. I guess not.
– Winston looked up at the screen. The Big Smiley was On. He was always on. The chyron read ‘Popularity still at 100% with his world standard policies’
The clocks struck 13.
JR Thomas
To the south of the old North Riding is the pretty town of Malton. Across the River Derwent, connected by an ancient bridge, but in the East Riding, is the similar sized settlement of Norton. During the infamous (Peter) Walker local government reforms of the early 1970’s, some bright spark in the Department of Ripping-Up-and-Making-Anew, having redrawn the Yorkshire boundaries to include both towns, Malton and Norton, in the new bureaucratic dream county of North Yorkshire, decided that the towns could be merged as well. “Ah yes,” the Mayor of Malton reputedly responded, “And renamed “Normalton” ”. No more was heard of that idea.
Those in power love the idea of the New Normal. Everything can be entrenched as they have always wanted it. The old habits can be sloughed off, the Whitehall new thrown over the population, with more controls, more public ownership, more rules, more “guidelines”, and lots of big beefy fines for not obeying the rules of New Normalisation. Not that it is just Whitehall newness of course. Your local council will be giving you less; not less restrictions, less assessing, checking and treble checking, less “protecting” – but certainly less service, less efficiency, less bang for your buck. So will large corporate enterprises – less product and services, higher prices.
Yes; the New Normal will make your life less pleasant and more costly. It was ever thus: war, recession, and plague are always an excuse to intervene and control. No New Normal, no thanks!
John Watson
It is easy to think of the New Normal as a series of adjustments and improvements to the way in which we live and the way in which we finance the living standards of our citizens. Should the Government take the opportunity to escape from its pledge on individual tax rates and its adherence to the triple lock on the state pension? Almost certainly. Should there be a proper analysis of the contribution the private sector can make to the provision of public services? Yes, certainly. Should regulators focus on leaving sufficient fat in industry for it to react to the unexpected as they do for banks? Possibly. Should home care provision be more centralised, or more diverse, or closer to city centres?…………One can go on and on, but in truth this is the small change. The tectonic plates of international relations need attention too.
We have a pandemic but the next crisis will be different. What happens if a nuclear armed dictator finds himself facing annihilation at the hands of his furious citizenry? We will find out soon enough. How will we deal with famine across large parts of the world? If we do not find a way of reducing carbon emissions, that is going to be an increasing problem. The international community has become gridlocked between the superpowers and the New Normal must escape that logjam. Otherwise even the most well – conceived program of domestic reform will be about as useful as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Don Urquhart
We are at a watershed. Rishi Sunak popped up in March to tell us the government was going to put its arms round us to protect us from Covid-19. He put in place measures to keep people employed while they couldn’t work and to stop people being thrown on the streets if they didn’t pay their rent. Statutory Sick Pay is very low if you can get through the DWP bureaucracy so the very poor remained just that. We suddenly had establishment figures on all sides fulsomely praising medical and care staff, bin men, bus drivers, delivery staff, many working on zero-hours low pay. In a couple of months’ time Covid-19 will be just another evil, like drug dealing and stabbings but will we still feel like going out to clap the people who are now our heroes? Will we make sure they are paid decently and in secure jobs?
I suspect that we will embark on a new austerity. Last time we could blame a reckless Labour government and a bit of bad luck in the financial system. This time the government will have a readymade invisible culprit.
Many will promote beneficial changes Covid-19 has provided – working at home, improved air quality, less dependence on fossil fuels. They might wrap it up in New Green Strategy plans. But the lobby fodder on the Tory benches is put there by people who just want to see profitable business based on a low wage economy. So we will have to wait for that Brave New World.
Dan Moondance
Nostalgia is, like any bad party, sometimes a yearning for what you have missed but more often a passing memory of what you haven’t.
Take the subject of kissing. As I grew up there were two types of kiss. There were the Comfort Kisses; the affectionate ones that you exchanged with your parents and close relations, and although you looked forward to the day when these would no longer be required they always made you feel warm and cuddly. Then there were the Carnal Kisses. These were the ones you discovered only when you grew older, and were quite, quite different, a presumption of fulfilment that still lingers in the evening air. We live in hope that both of these kisses will live to fight another day.
Not so the third. As time passed – was it yet another vile habit passed on by those tactile Europeans that the ERG always warned us against? – There emerged a third type, the Community Kiss. Never remotely spontaneous, this gesture of fond solidarity came to be exchanged with neighbours’ spouses or work colleagues, certainly before and usually after any form of social engagement. The challenge was to anticipate whether the kissee would prefer to be pecked on the cheek, smacked on the lips (closed of course) or (if all other means of navigation failed) greeted by a rubbing of ears. Its ritual would reach its annual climax shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve. Some were good at it, many were not. For these the New Normal is something to be very thankful for.
Vic Leader
The Lockdown has been eased. We are moving towards a New Normal. What might that look like? My crystal ball is very cloudy, and what is normal?
Humans are obsessed with “normal”. What is the normal height of a 12 year old, the best weight for adults, summer weather? These are convenient generalisations, to which there are as many exceptions as rules.
So my thoughts are about the quality rather than quantity of any new normal. Can we keep the respect we have shown in Lockdown? Cleaners, delivery drivers are important as are doctors and nurses, and many others.
Can we encourage the continued innovation we have seen, factories re-purposed in an instant, repair rather than replacement, novel masks, faster trials. It would be good to see less regulation, more about principles, less bureaucracy.
We have shown that more can be done without travelling, we need to create the infrastructure to encourage that, the information superhighway needs supercharging, working from home for part of a week.
Cleaner air has been wonderful and will have ongoing benefits. Renewables, electric cars, better public transport, in the country as well as cities, need to be promoted, invested in.
There will be losers and winners. Education and training need to be better. Losing a job should not be an automatic exclusion from working, but an opportunity to redirect skills and energy.
Humans have moved from tribes to societies, but tribalism persists. We can co-operate when we need and make no mistake we still need.
George Marsh
For the past thirty years I have been a meditator. For holidays I go to a place with no electricity, on a mountain with no phone reception, and live the simple life in silence for a week, on retreat. I have no fear of prison, or a life sentence in a monk’s cell. I am enjoying Covid isolation, which is house arrest but with better food and a better library than prison, and a wonderful view. The only improvement I crave is a piece of spanking new Japanese technology: a paperless, clever, diagnostic toilet. We should all have them. Then we could sit back with a sigh, declare the real ‘end of history’, and cease our mad scramble for ever more luxury products and preposterously elaborate distractions.
I gather that this splendid armchair will read you audio books, spray you, wipe you, dry you photograph and analyse your finest effusions, give you dietary advice, fitness stats, printouts on every imaginable medical calibration and post all your proud achievements on Instagram for you before you rise from the throne. (Chinese made clones apparently add an Arsehole Recognition System and send data to an organisation reassuringly called Socialist Smiles).
Never mind theatres, public toilets are going to be the first casualties of permanent social distancing. We will need an entire new economy based on producing millions of well-separated super-loos with AI and robotics. The ideal place to start, as a test project, would be Fratton Park, my local football stadium, where the toilets are more ‘salut’ than salubrious.
I guess all this could be expensive. In the meantime, I think I’ll settle for a bidet.
Neil Tidmarsh
Watch out! There’s dog poo all over the place! Have you noticed? Dog-owners – a significant number of them at least – are no longer picking-up after their shit-machines. That’s the New Normal – dog-poo all over the pavements!
It was the old normal forty or fifty years ago. Walking to school in the 60’s and 70’s was an obstacle course of doggy ordure, a wade through the tail-waggers’ open sewer. But then – twenty or thirty years ago – an amazing thing happened. Dog owners started to bag up and take away their canines’ crappy colonic creations. Faeces-free pavements became absolutely normal. It was almost enough to convince you that the world wasn’t going to the dogs after all, that the human race was still on its forward march towards perfection, that civilization was indeed advancing year by year.
So what’s happened all of a sudden? How and why has self-responsibility and personal initiative been replaced by “Sod it, I can’t be bothered. I’ll let someone else deal with that. Someone from the government, or the council, or the unions. It must be someone else’s job, someone who’s paid to do it.”?
It’s as if Authority started making all our decisions for us a few months ago and lifted the twin burdens of freedom and responsibility off our shoulders so we can no longer be stuffed to get dressed in the morning but slob around in our pyjamas all day and only leave the house to walk the dog so he can dump outside and, oh, look, the streets are deserted, so we can leave Rex’s steaming pile where it is, no one will see us…
The New Normal? It stinks.
Lynda Goetz
Children
On Radio 4 they were discussing the problems of children returning to school. After several experts had pointed out how difficult it was to get young children to understand or cope with ‘social distancing’, someone else pointed out that it was actually not that difficult at all and that ‘nowadays’ children were well aware they were not supposed to hug or touch anyone outside their own immediate ‘bubble’. I am inclined to believe this expert over and above the others. Children learn fast. They quickly take on board parental fears and concerns; if it has become ‘the new normal’ not to hug granny or school friends ‘because of the virus’, children will take on board this warning. If Mummy is scared then she transmits that fear.
Take, for example, a young child examining a newly-landed dead fish. They will naturally explore texture; the feel of the scales brushed one way; the totally different feel of scales stroked in the opposite direction; the ‘squidginess’ of eyeballs and so on; until an adult squeals, “Ugh! That’s gross! Don’t touch! Leave that alone!’ It is not simply the admonition. It is the tone of voice; the disgust; the fear. In the same way, fear transmitted from a parent at the idea of handling an unsanitised object, of stroking someone else’s dog or hugging a non-family member will become embedded in a child’s psyche. This is not only wrong, it is damaging. Already we live in a world where parents fear risk for their children (don’t climb that tree you’ll fall; don’t pick up that stone it’s dirty; don’t climb on that wall, it’s dangerous); Coronavirus will add to that – to the detriment of the young.
WG Grace
The crowd was silent. There was no crowd. From the Nursery End, soon to be sold to fund the Windfall Tax, the bowler trundled in, a sponsor’s logo catching the light. Ah! The joy of being back to normal, even if nothing felt quite the same.
At the station that morning, an IR thermometer had failed and there had been a rush of masked commuters to change ticket gates whilst social distancing, their macabre dance made easier because of so many redundancies, working from home, shops that had closed and the absence of tourists.
Schoolboys greeted each other with a bump of shoulders. They were the mid-day shift, heading for half a day of classes to be followed by online tutorials. Many carried smart phones with contact-tracing apps. The surveillance cameras tracked their every move.
At St John’s Wood, an ethnic mix of passengers headed for their hospital jobs, a tinnitus of handclapping and pan-banging in their ears. In Parliament, there were questions, enquiries, committees and commissions but little to address the shameful injustices that the pandemic had highlighted. We were in any event too poor to do much. The bungled Brexit had not helped
At the Grace Gates, a notice told readers that the safety of all employees was paramount, as though this were an innovative thought. There would be no Tests until various tests had been met. In any event, foreign teams would share the problems of would-be holidaymakers: few flights and quarantine restrictions at each end. Stay Home. As a concession to Coronavirus, polishing the ball with spit would be forbidden.
The bowler reached the standing umpire and delivered an outswinger that caught the edge and thudded into the wicket-keeper’s gloves. “Owzat! “. “Not Out” said the umpire. Actually, nothing had really changed.
Peter Carty
It’s been 10 weeks since Boris changed his mind about herd immunity and declared the UK was to “stay at home, protect the NHS & save lives”, all non-essential businesses were to close. We were quick to adapt to the “new normal”: staying home except for our daily walks, queuing round the supermarket car park for our weekly visit to buy food, and for the lucky few, Working from Home (WFH). Keeping away from relatives has seen a surge in video calling as we all look to connect with those we love. We are told the NHS has ‘been transformed’, implementing more efficient working practices, GP’s adopting technology to be able to diagnose patients remotely (why did it take a pandemic for this to happen?).
As restrictions start to ease the media are putting a positive spin on the future: technology will ‘transform our lives’, WFH is here to stay, no more cramming into carriages twice a day, walking & cycling will replace the car. The community spirit will live on and the furlough scheme will enable people to return to their jobs having kept their heads above water.
Unfortunately the new reality is likely be a re-enactment of the 1970’s: mass unemployment, and social unrest as the majority suffer at the hands of the minority seeking to take advantage of the ‘free’ money the government was so quick to print. Perhaps I am wrong, and our brave government will take bold decisions that will mean this crisis reduces the inequalities in our society, but I’m not holding my breath.
John Dylan
Shortly before he was murdered by Fascists as he sought to escape from Nazi-occupied France, the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that:
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.”
For Benjamin, there had never been a normal. The Jews of Europe had existed in a state of endless persecution and repression. The working classes of Europe had – since the birth of capitalism – been constantly buffeted by depressions, ruling class oppression, wars, and the everyday attrition represented by industrial labour.
More recently, the condition of European labourers and Jews has immeasurably improved. But the emergency has never been lifted.
Before COVID hit, the FAO reported that over 800 million people worldwide were malnourished – that is, they were slowly dying through lack of calories. The powerhouse of capitalist production, and the source of most stock market value in the USA, was a brutal prison camp, dependent upon regimented, endlessly surveilled labour.
The biosphere itself had awoken to the emergency, threatening to render India and swathes of Africa totally uninhabitable (at least overground) within decades.
Now, we are discussing a “new normal”, as if that is possible. Normal for us, perhaps. But when the notion of the old normal rested upon a perpetual emergency for humanity and the natural world, is the concept of a “return to normality” not a form of obscenity?
Perhaps we must listen to Benjamin and seek not to restore our secure existence, but to subvert the emergency in the service of humanity and ecology. Only then can we start to work together to create a normality which – when we take a proper sense of perspective – has always been little more than a comforting ruling class illusion.
Paul Branch
Dear Santa
Mummy and daddy have helped me think about the one thing I would like for Christmas please when all this nasty virus thing has gone away. In the end they came up with a long list that had on it stuff like help poor people in the whole world have enough water to drink and food to eat and medicines, make our planet cleaner so everyone can breathe and we can stop climate change just like that girl Greta has been talking about, stop all the wars, be more tolerant and friendly towards each other and stop thinking mostly about ourselves.
Now that wasn’t very helpful, so I tried to think of just one thing that would help make a lot of these happen. And suddenly it was easy – there is one person in this big world of ours who could really help make that happen, just by not being there any more.
So, job done Santa – for Christmas I would like someone else to be King of America please instead of that nasty Mr Trump.
Thank you, and hope you and Mrs Santa and all the Elves and reindeer are keeping safe and well.
Paul (aged 73)
Santa’s reply:
Dear Paul: thank you for your long letter – I think mummy and daddy must have helped you with some of the bigger words. What you ask for is very appealing, but I think we can let all the nice people in America make your Christmas wish come true. I’ll bring you something else instead, maybe an electric Ferrari, but you can help by asking everyone you know just to be that little bit kinder to each other, to think about poor people, and to think about how to look after that lovely planet of yours. Where we live we don’t have the virus, and maybe one day you can see it for yourself.
Love from Santa and everyone else in Santaland.
R Vazey
When all this first started, back in those halcyon days of December/January, we were filled with pity at the stories coming out of China, but basked in the relative safety of the West, thinking that it would never come here. After all, what happened with SARS? A massive impact on the Far East, but little or nothing here.
Then the first home-grown cases started to occur.
Did we use any of the knowledge gained from China, who had, after a bit of a delay, provided us with the requisite knowledge about what to do, or the procedures used in Singapore and Hong Kong to mitigate pandemic threat? Did we even pay any attention to the evidence provided by our relatively near neighbours in Italy, when things got out of hand? Did we collaborate with our European partners, to whom we were still joined at the outset? Did we even consider the evidence of the pandemic testing done in 2016, albeit to face a flu epidemic (which, I would add, was what Covid19 was compared to at the outset and still is by some less well informed people)?
No. We are British (and ever increasingly, English) and we can do it ourselves from scratch, with tin cans, bits of string, etc. The government pulled in the Old Boys Club, coerced the media into making out everything was fine, and gaslit the nation.
So, when someone asks me how do I think the New Normal will look, it is my profoundest wish that we will learn a new compassion and put people before profit, lives before lucre.
I would like to think that the plans being touted by the government are the carefully considered opportunities to do the best for the maximum number of people, rather than shadowy ways to make sure that their buddies don’t lose too much money or, indeed, some way for them to profit.
However, that would be to deny the old maxim regarding insanity; Doing the same thing again and again, but expecting a different outcome. This party in government were not the people to create the NHS; that came from a more people-centric direction. This party in government, when given the choice to invest its way out of difficulty in 2010, chose the path of austerity instead. It kept the money in the pockets of the 1%’ers. It played to its base, with the dog whistle of it all being someone else’s fault, whether Labour, the LibDems, the Chinese, the EU.
Why would we expect anything different?
