We started some new traditions in my family last week. Traditions we'll do every Lockdown Eve. It's like Christmas Eve only with more dread than excitement. Like Christmas Eve but you are not allowed to go to midnight mass, should you be that way inclined. Like Christmas Eve but instead of queuing at the posh delicatessen for the expensive cheese you only buy once a year, you queue up for toilet paper and tins of chickpeas. Maybe this Lockdown you'll actually get around to making that famous chickpea stew, the one broke the Internet. Lockdown Eve, like Christmas Eve only less magical, the novelty of pandemic living having worn very thin. We know too much now, our fingers firmly on the pulses.
Even if and when we open up briefly again before Christmas, the festivities are effectively cancelled
We started new traditions for Lockdown Eve because we knew this was not the last one. Might as well make something of the day when all our beloved old traditions are being decimated. Halloween is about to arrive like a box of damp fireworks and Christmas is gearing up to be a pale imitation of the real thing. So what’s the point? Even if and when we open up briefly again before Christmas, the festivities are effectively cancelled. But there will be more Lockdown Eves to mark. Might as well make them count. They are more real now than the holidays we can’t replicate. So we booked a table outside a local sushi restaurant for that night. Shivering over sushi. Another Lockdown Eve tradition locked down.
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Shopping, obviously, is a crucial part of our Lockdown Eve tradition. We had last-minute Halloween bits to get before the shutters came down on the shops. Walking through St Stephen’s Green shopping centre, we talked about what we’d do instead of going around the houses for treats. The children had seen a version of bobbing for apples on TikTok, where instead of trying to bite apples in water you try to bite doughnuts hanging from strings. “Sounds great,” I said enthusiastically. On Lockdown Eve, I felt like saying yes to everything for a change.
In Claire’s Accessories the staff couldn’t have done enough for us. We needed a red wig, and they found one reduced from €16 to €10. We needed fake blood and fairy wings which they easily found and a red unicorn horn which, miraculously, they also located. In Flying Tiger we bought candles and paper plates decorated with cobwebs. We went into a pop up shop Jill & Gill – maybe every retailer apart from the food ones are pop up shops now – and looked at the Ruth Bader Ginsbergh sweatshirts and the Mary Robinson t-shirts. The owner was wrapping online packages. “I like your shop,” my daughter said. “Sorry you have to shut it,” I said. “Good luck in the Lockdown,” we called out as we left.
Later my Lockdown-sceptic friend rang from London. “You do know there is no evidence that these lockdowns are effective in suppressing the virus in the long term?” he said.
I wonder what the people in Ireland who support the lockdown approach will say in a few years, when the recession is raging
He’s in tier 3 – the UK has tiers like wedding cakes instead of levels like video games – he’s allowed to go to a restaurant but only with members of his own household. As if restaurants can police that kind of rule. He’s already been out for dinner with the employees of his business to mark a great month in sales – he’s in a Zoom-a-like business that’s thriving in the current obnoxiousness – and his young staff joked that if questioned in the restaurant about restrictions my friend could pretend to be their dad. They weren’t questioned.
“All of Wales is locked down but the numbers of deaths are very low.” he said. These rolling lockdowns only make people feel like they are doing something. But what they are really doing is causing even more pain to people who will lose their jobs while businesses go to the wall. I wonder what the people in Ireland who support the lockdown approach will say in a few years, when the recession is raging because of this and the economy is decimated and there is mass unemployment and every young person is leaving the country?”
When I have these conversations, and they are happening more and more, I find myself growing uncharacteristically quiet. Generally rebellious in nature, never shy about questioning authority, it feels disloyal to even be listening to this critique. Disloyal to the families of the grieving, to our older people, to those with medical conditions, to the staff in hospitals and clinics facing into a winter in a health service that can barely cope in non-pandemic times. To question the Government/Nphet strategy feels unpatriotic somehow. To not question it? That doesn’t feel right either.
Earlier, my daughters and I had sat outside the cafe in the park of St Patrick’s Cathedral where we ate toasted cheese sandwiches. We have a tradition where we eat toasties on Christmas Eve in our friend’s house, so that made its way seamlessly into our Lockdown Eve itinerary. Then the girls had ice cream sundaes with watermelon jellies. That’s a good tradition, we reckoned. Everything evolves. Bobbing for apples turns into bobbing for doughnuts. Good luck in Lockdown, becomes a natural way to say goodbye. The girls licked the last of the caramel sauce from plastic containers, I drank the dregs of my coffee and talked about what sushi we’d have later, leaning in to the Lockdown Eve vibes.
A young man sat down close to us on the cold stone benches. “Sorry I’ve got my back to you,” he said, although he was actually sitting facing me.
“Another Lockdown starting tomorrow isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s hard on people”.
“Hard on people with special needs isn’t it?” he said.
“It is. It’s very hard.” I agreed.
When we got up to leave, he kept chatting . “Very hard when there’s nobody to talk to, isn’t it?” And we said yes and we said goodbye and we wished him good luck in lockdown.
And then we left him there, on Lockdown Eve.
roisin@irishtimes.com