Here in France, the lockdown ended 10 days ago. The weekly market was back to full strength today (and busy), shops are mostly open, many of the restaurants are doing takeaways and people are back on the streets. My local takeaway pizza guy is reporting business almost back to normal. The local music college has its students back into their accomodation, ready for the full college reopening in a week’s time, and meanwhile they seem to be enjoying the sunshine in the local parks with few concerns about social distancing. We even have a few French tourists here, presumably from within the regulation 100km travel radius. Next week bars and restaurants expect some kind of opening, perhaps outside space only. It is all good to see.
But it is not ‘back to normal’ by any means; there are very few cars about, people seem more subdued and it is less easy to recognise and greet people when you can’t see their face behind a mask, let alone the usual handshake. Others I’ve spoken to are finding it strange too.
I am surprised to find that I have found it harder to deal with the end of lockdown than the lockdown itself. Before I was waiting for lockdown to end, a short term task. But once it was ended, we all entered a future of second waves and masks and social distancing that looks far less structured, more uncertain, and with plan and no milestone to wait for, when it all might get better. Maybe you guys in Britain will find the same.
This report below suggests Britain will take years to get back to what we used to call ‘normal’ just 6 months ago. But in fact it is increasingly difficult to see anything other than the ‘L’ shaped world recession where there IS no recovery for many years to come, just a new, lower level of ‘normal’. With 20% or 30% unemployment, many people won’t be contributing to the economy as either producers or as buyers and, with that much less business about, many companies will become unprofitable, more out of work - the dreaded downward economic spiral.
There are two things that always follow increased poverty: increased crime and increased mortality, and we can expect that everywhere. In Britain, after years of austerity cuts and a greatly reduced police force, criminality has less to constrain it. A local robbery last year when I lived in England took 3 days for the police even to arrive and they admitted they would do nothing - they just didn’t have the resources.
A number of studies of homelessness in Britain have suggested many years of life reduction, even decades for those young people on the streets, and the charities that try to support them have now suffered a huge cut in contributions from all sources.
Neither of these situations show any signs of getting any better through a recession.
But if all that sounds bad, spare a thought for the developing countries that rely on selling raw materials or products to the West, and remittences received from migrant-relatives already in the West, and on charities, and on international development funding. For them, this crisis means a semi-permanent decline back into poverty and even starvation, with thousands, perhaps millions of lives at risk. Poverty will unsettle their politics and generate wars, both local revolutions overthrowing governments, and inter-country wars over basic resources.
To put all this into some kind of context, I suspect all this may be the turning point, and that we’ve just passed Peak everything; in world population growth, life expectancy, world health and wealth and a dozen other indicators of former progress (whatever that means).
It is not unexpected - the Peak Oil followers have forecast such an event for decades, and the famous scientist, James Lovelock of Gaia Theory fame, has forecast this pandemic scenario and, although he’s now 100 years old, I’m sure will be watching events unfold with great interest. (
http://www.jameslovelock.org/ )
I kinda expected it too but there is a big difference between an intellectual exercise and an imminent reality. I feel fortunate to be in what I think is the right place to weather these storms (as best I can tell) but who knows what will happen next.
I have a saying;
‘You can only be disappointed if you started out with unrealistic expectations.’
It helps to stop me blaming other people when shit happens! However hard it is, I would recommend realistic expectations in the current circumstances, and make your plans and preparations on that basis. Then who knows, maybe we’ll all end up being pleasantly surprised! 🙂
