Sean Moncrieff: Is it too soon to hope?

Is it too soon to hope?

Any other year: the advertising slots on TV are crammed with pictures of families in sunny climes, jumping in pools, riding bikes and drinking wine at sunset. We think: must book something.

This year: the first week of 2021 turns out to be a coked-up version of what happened over the previous 12 months. Another super lockdown, but now with added bitching. Everyone’s an epidemiologist, keen to tell the epidemiologists just how wrong they are. (Pointing this out often prompts the SWCEON defence: so, we can’t express opinions now?)

There’s an annual media trope that the third Monday of this month is the most depressing day of the year: Christmas is over, the weather is terrible. Everyone’s broke. We’re laying off the cake and the booze. Blue Monday is actually based on pseudoscience and was dreamed up by a travel company. Yet that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an element of truth to it. Especially now.

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We need hope. We cling to it. People hope that the big wedding or the birthday party might still go ahead. Herself says to hell with the uncertainty: let’s book a late summer holiday.

I’m reluctant. There are too many unknowables; about here or anywhere we might choose to go. If there’s one thing we know for certain, it’s that we don’t know anything for certain. There might be a catastrophic delay in the rollout of the vaccine, or a new vaccine-resistant variant. Or we might repeat the Christmas disaster of opening everything up. There might be an earthquake, or a coup or an alien invasion. Anything can happen.

My best guess had been that the first six months of this year would be a write-off. Now I’m not so sure. It could be the whole year. The infection rate is terrifying. Depressing, I know. But it’s what I think. We can’t express opinions now?

I’m reluctant to book a holiday because I’m reluctant to hope. Hope is dangerous. We can over-medicate with it, fail to balance it against the grim lessons of reality.

Morsels of joy

It can also seem wasteful. By leaning too heavily into the future, we can overlook even the morsels of joy we might get from the present. All life is precious; even the crappy constrained version we are in now.

Good thing, then, that I’m not in charge of anything. We’d still be burning witches and dying of smallpox with my attitude. People have got through far worse than what we are enduring now by embracing hope: even when there was no evidence that things might get better. Even when things didn’t get better. Hope has been one of the main drivers for human civilisation.

I’m not saying I’m devoid of optimism. Like, I imagine, most people, I have a generalised sense that this will come to an end, and that there will be a brief period when we derive a fantastic sense of joy from the simple things we had all but forgotten about. Shaking hands. Being served a pint in an empty bar. The cinema. The non-essential shop. The presence of other people. All those things will come back. We just don’t know when.

There’s no finish line to aim at and the compounding worry of what damage is being done in the meantime. You hear it in the media every day: the politician/virologist/public health expert is asked when we might come out of lockdown or get X per cent of the population vaccinated and the answer is invariably a word salad, the result of a bizarre media-training rule that you should never give a straight answer to a straight question. You must never say: I don’t know.

Still: there’s no harm in looking at holiday locations. Herself put it into my head and now I’m mildly addicted. There are some lovely places. And, given the circumstances, some bargains too. But I’m not booking anything. No. Definitely not. No.