I read a couple of posts yesterday, and have been speaking to several people over the last few weeks, who mentioned about how the isolation due to lockdown is driving them crazy.
My wife doesn’t like it for the same reason. She explained to me, It’s not that I’d go out anyway, but just the feeling that there is somebody there saying “you can’t do that”.
I can kinda see that. But it is never something I felt. To be honest, I have never really felt as though I am locked down.
Now, this is not to say that I have been out partying every night. At the start of all of this, I decided that my best ploy was to understand the virus, as best I can. From that point, I have been happy to stay indoors. But I feel that I have made that decision for myself. I don’t feel like a politician made it for me. In fact, looking at the timeline, I was isolating for a full two weeks before BoJo!
I’m quite convinced that this is a factor, at least, in our respective mental health. I don’t feel any imprisonment whatever, I am quite happy that I can walk down the lane outside my house, to go for a walk, as often as I feel like, and not meet anybody. After all, it is the not meeting anybody here which is important. As it happens, most days I have just stayed at home, or gone into the garden, but this is not because I feel somebody is standing over me saying no.
In a similar vein, I have decided that, whenever BoJo opens the shops, it will still be unsafe. He never wanted to shut anything in the first place, so his instinct will be to re-open asap. So, my decision is that whenever things open, I will stay locked down for another six weeks. Even then, I’ll only come out if the numbers look good. Six weeks? Because that should be long enough to start seeing new spikes. But again, my decision. So, BoJo might be firing the start pistol, but I’m the one deciding when to go.
I don’t know. Maybe I am the worst kind of idiot, the guy who wants to understand everything for himself instead of just doing what he is told. But the stakes are my life or death, let’s not forget. Am I really going to entrust that to some guy I never even met? Not to mention that in the UK at any rate, the politicians have distinguished themselves just in terms of one thing – their irrelevance.
I’m kinda reminded of that old quote attributed to FDR: Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds. If one day you read about me getting banged up in jail, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.
