Covid-19 changes everything—or does it?

It was the queue that did it. The long, silent queue, more or less regularly spaced, curving round the outside of Sainsbury’s, the place I have been successfully hunting and gathering first for my wife and I, and subsequently for two children, two cats and a dog, for almost 20 years. It is a small and unglamorous corner of south London, but it is mine.

Well, it was. Because on this day, for the first time, I could not casually ride up the escalator, grab a trolley and walk in, my mind focused on corn-fed chicken, feta and spinach parcels and chair de tomate. (Have you even seen any chair de tomate recently?) No. This was it, the reckoning. The party was over. Covid-19 has shut us down.

Each of us has had their own moment of recognition, the sudden, sick-making realisation that things have changed. Favourite pubs and restaurants closing. Even that cracking Chinese takeaway. You turn to the sports section of the newspaper and find just a handful of pages, with no match reports or pre-match speculation.

Zoom and Skype calls, jostling with members of the household to find a quiet spot and enough broadband to work—these are the new markers of the working day. And this shock is all the greater for those who, unlike the stay-at-home hack, are used to commuting and travelling and sitting in busy offices all day.

Is it shock, or is it a kind of grief that we are living through? A much-read Harvard Business Review interview with the author David Kessler touched on this idea. “The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively,” Kessler said. He also mentioned another aspect of all this: anticipatory grief, a kind of anxiety which involves “the mind going to the future and imagining the worst.” Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. The present is bad enough without anticipating further problems.

I asked some friends what their punch in the gut moments of realisation had been in recent days.

“Double-decker buses riding past, at rush hour, completely empty,” said one. “Not being there to hear friends’ laughter in person,” said another. One friend said she was sad about her favourite TV soap cutting back its number of episodes—“I mean, I know it’s silly. People are dying. But it was an anchor back to normal, so knowing it’s [been] reduced just got to me a bit.”

It’s not all downside, though. Some are detecting new levels of friendliness among neighbours and passers-by. One mother has discovered to her surprise and delight that she enjoys making things with her child. Another, equally surprised, said the family was all getting on really well and was happy. You can hear the birds singing. The skies are clear. Some people smile at you in the shops. “Will we keep making these connections when all this is over?,” a friend asks, nervously.

It is not just our own mortality and the fragility of life that we have been confronted with. It is also the startling possibility that the way we have been living is wrong. Too much exploitation of limited natural resources. Miserable inequality. Unsustainable carbon emissions. Choking air. And toxic politics.

Is this the much-delayed and much-anticipated final crisis of late capitalism? I’m not sure. Part of people’s frustration, and panic, has had to do with the restricted ability to shop, not revulsion at the waste and greed inherent to mass consumerism. Shopping is in itself a kind of self-actualisation, and if you don’t believe me, remember how you felt when you finally got hold of some decent pasta or a nine roll pack of toilet paper after a long wait.

For those of you worrying about the state of the economy, know this: economic recoveries are often “consumer-led.” If we can’t start shopping more or less normally again, recovery will be delayed.

What may change is our attitude to big business. Big businesses too often let you down. They are remote, impersonal, at times even inhuman. But how about those neglected dusty corner shops which have kept going all this time, the ones which did have milk, eggs and, yes, loo roll, and were still open at nine just when you needed them? Being shut down in this big scary world has reminded us to value and respect the small and the local at least.

What will we really learn from this experience? To change our ways? Perhaps, for a while. We may think (a bit) harder before travelling. We night not (always) insist on face-to-face meetings when we have become expert Zoomers. But I wonder how many people secretly yearn to recreate almost exactly what they used to enjoy complaining about until a few weeks ago. The next new normal—after our current eerie new normal passes—may turn out to look quite a lot like the old normal.

Until then, where I live, the usually constantly busy main road has become like a country lane, with barely a need to look right or left before crossing. You dread the moment you realise you have turned up at the supermarket without gloves, again. (“I touched the trolley. I’m dead.”) You sit around the house, trying to remember what day it is.

And in Colliers Wood, south London, just like in Casablanca, we wait, and wait, and wait.