The Last ‘Normal Day’ – Lockdown London holds its breath
‘This is actually the last day that we’re going to be open for a while’ I hear the barista tell a customer at my local coffee shop as I sit down with cappuccino.
‘This is actually the last day that we’re going to be open for a while’ I hear the barista tell a customer at my local coffee shop as I sit down with cappuccino. It’s an awfully comfortable leather sofa, one of life’s little luxuries I’m going to miss terribly once London goes under lockdown. I’ve heard chatters of military mobilisation over the last few days – a few of my friends work for the government and even though they were hesitant to confirm these rumours in any clear terms, I found their elusive answers more than telling.
Sure enough, the news broke this morning – 20,000 troops have been placed on standby, ready to be mobilised at any moment to support quarantine zones across the UK and enforce what one can only assume is going to be a response package modelled after measures put in place by some of the most heavily affected EU countries.
There are whispers of an Italian-style quarantine regimen; it sounds a lot less outlandish now that British schools were announced to close their gates for the foreseeable future and food items went flying off the shelves of every major supermarket and corner store across the UK the same night. (‘Oh, that one?’ asked a gent in his 30s, sizing up the last lonely box of healthy-ish biscuits left on the shelves of the confectionery aisle. ‘Might as well give it a whirl, Joe’ a brunette lady, presumably his partner, shrugged before grabbing a pack. ‘I never noticed those before – funny how it took Corona to get me to try Weight Watchers’ biscuits’ he joked before the pair headed off to join the queue at one of the few tills still open after the evening rush.)
It’s not so much a question of if but when the lockdown of London goes into effect and all but essential business is halted until further notice – at least as far as Crystal Palace residents are concerned. There’s a gentle buzz of keen anticipation, a sort of quiet before the storm underlying the comings and goings of local residents – who, to their merit, seem a lot calmer and considerably more composed than inhabitants of some of the other neighbourhoods I visited in the last few days. Peckham’s a warzone and so is Hornsey from what I was told.
Local coffee shops opened this morning for what could be the last time for a while, and healthy residents are doing their bit to support their local businesses before a possible quarantine goes into effect. For the onlooker, it’s a day like any other – coffee saucers, croissants, people sitting and enjoying their lattes with their laptops open, feet tapping along to one of Frank Sinatra’s classics before some 1930s jazz music comes on and everyone goes still for a moment.
I can only assume what they must be thinking but my mind immediately reverts to a bit of an unlikely scenario as I take a quick look around, still perched on my comfy sofa next to a life-sized painting of two ladies enjoying a coffee on a balcony somewhere, in what appears to be a continental European city (Venice, perhaps?), and a lazy baritone overlays the double bass melody playing in the background – is this what it was like in 1939?
Sitting in a coffee shop somewhere in Europe, waiting for the news to break – a lot like today, it wasn’t a question of ifback then, either. And while life flowed on in interwar Europe just like it does in London this very afternoon, the lacquer of normalcy was wearing very thin over the turmoil brewing within the collective psyche of its peoples.
It’s only now that I notice that people are sitting a little further apart than usual – I exchange a telling glance with an older gentleman sitting opposite from me while a 20-something barista religiously disinfects every single table for the third time in an hour. All of a sudden, it’s hard not to feel like an unwitting participant re-enacting a part in a clumsy rendition of Life As We Remember It.
Whatever we’re doing right now can no longer masquerade as the organic life process once you slow down the tape and zoom in on the details. It doesn’t feel like everyday life at all, there’s too much attention being paid to appearances and making sure that every single detail is just how it should be – there’s a lot of room for error once you start re-enacting sequences and recycling dialogue from what you remember a normal day to be like.
In this brilliant new piece of the Theatre of the Absurd, we’re all Waiting for Godot.
He may never come – he might be right around the corner. However, one thing is for certain; ‘the last normal day’ before his arrival slipped past all of us, unnoticed. We’re locked within the Roche now, inescapably trapped by the retroactive pull of the gravity of the future.