Before we went into lockdown, I was trying to persuade my mother to reduce her contact circle to five. It seems absurd, now that everyone of advanced age and comorbidities has been told to see no one at all, but way back then (three weeks ago), this seemed reasonable. She immediately bartered the number up to six. It was like negotiating with Tony Soprano: there was no way she was coming out of the deal without the upper hand. Then I asked her how she planned to tell the rest of her associates that they weren’t on the list, and she said: “Good heavens, I’m not going to tell them. That would be so rude!”
Then the list was reduced to zero, but mysteriously, one of the original six went round anyway to fix her letterbox. I asked what was the point of fixing her letterbox, when the only important letter she was going to get would be from the government, telling her not to have anyone round, irrespective of whether or not she had a defective letterbox. She said she would prefer to have less advice, and be given a lethal injection. “I wouldn’t mind,” she said, graciously. “I”m not sure whether the main impediment to euthanasia is whether or not you mind,” I observed, extremely calmly and not at all sarcastically.
My friend’s mum got a guy round to fix her cutlery drawer, which has been broken for two years. My sister’s neighbour, supposedly in full cocoon, still goes to the shop every day and, when she said she would go for him, he said: “I’m just in and out. It’s not like I’m asking anyone to dance.” Another cocoon-candidate in my life goes out before dawn every morning just to smell the sea, like the bloody French Lieutenant’s Woman. My uncle spent the night before the pubs closed in a Wetherspoon’s, which I disapprove of in 17 different ways. It is very annoying trying to get the people who should take this the most seriously to take it seriously at all. But it’s also sort of a duff judgment to make, because when you have a life-limiting condition, and even before this happened, you already felt like – in my mother’s words – a hot-air balloon with a terminal puncture, waiting to hit the ground, it is highly debatable and a completely personal matter whether you want to spend 12 of what is a finite number of weeks completely on your own.
Not everyone over 70 is in the same situation. For some, that “underlying health condition” means they wouldn’t even be admitted to hospital, nor want to be. It simply isn’t possible to adjudicate across the piece, from a distance, as if the elderly were one homogeneous mass.
Yet we are all trying to build new rules, at speed, and the easiest way to do so is to constantly, volubly judge each other. Since the sun came out, it has been like a new season of censoriousness. In any normal year, the spaghetti straps would appear and society’s sap would start to rise. This year, it’s a super-charged indignation. Families are furious with joggers, cyclists are furious with bipeds, everyone hates dog walkers, except anyone with a dog, who is wondering why dogless people have to be out at all. The usual great sunbather debate – regular human beings getting vitamin D, or spawn of Satan? (somebody get The Moral Maze on the case) – was less interesting to me than my own bugbear, people with huge gardens and/ or no clue what it’s like to live with a two-year-old and a four-year-old, waxing judgmental about why everyone couldn’t do the responsible thing and remain totally indoors, open a window if they felt so stir crazy. But I got my own comeuppance with that, when I launched full tilt into a fight on Twitter with one of the “just stay indoors” brigade, only to find that she was quarantined away from her own children, and had been for weeks, because she worked in a hospital. So yes, I was categorically the arsehole.
All bets are off, and there are no shortcuts: you cannot possibly guess why that person is behaving the way they are, or saying the things they do. You can’t know what pressures they are under, or whether it was the same or better or worse yesterday. You can’t know what they think about their own mortality, or why. You can’t even know for sure what bubbling tensions are driving your own reactions, until you wake up at 5am, dreaming about Harriet Harman trying to save a sinking island through the medium of dance, and realise it’s possible you are more anxious than you thought. There is really no alternative but to put our own finger-pointing on ice, or under lockdown, if you prefer.
My mother, incidentally, was right and there appears to be an unlimited number of people who wish they were on her list-of-zero. Someone left a bottle of rosé on her doorstep the other day, and she was worrying that she didn’t know who to thank. I said: “Put a giant sign on your door, saying, ‘Thanks for the rosé.’ That way, the person will feel thanked, and the whole street will know that you appreciate rosé.” I might be insensitive but I am also a stone cold genius.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
