THE pandemic was a time of fear, uncertainty, and weird shit you did which you’d rather forget five years later. Such as these bizarre behaviours.
Banging pans with the neighbours
Applauding the NHS was commendable and long overdue, but in typical British fashion the public turned their praise into a mawkish display of kitchenware. No sane person would even consider banging pots and wooden spoons together today, let alone on their doorstep for the whole street to see. For the sake of your self-respect, that memory should stay repressed forever.
Singing Happy Birthday twice while washing your hands
A tragic approach to basic sanitation made even worse by the fact that you had to follow little instructions showing you how to scrub under your nails. You were a grown adult in 2020 and should really have mastered washing your hands by then. Now you’re back to your old ways of just wiping your hands on your trousers after going for a piss.
Genuinely wanting Boris Johnson to get better
You may loathe Boris Johnson now for all the lockdown parties and generally being a useless arse, but when it looked like Covid might kill him you considered touching his picture in the paper and praying for his recovery. The lying bastard undoubtedly just had a sniffle, and was that all it took for you to abandon your righteous anger towards a man who was prepared to let the bodies pile high? That’s pathetic.
Wearing a facemask in a queue outside Tesco
Not that you were an anti-masker or anything, but waiting in a long line to buy the last remaining tin of chopped tomatoes while wearing a face covering like you’d suddenly become a bank robber, a surgeon or a ninja was pretty unusual. And now nobody talks about it. That’s sure to leave a permanent scar on the nation’s psyche which will never heal because everyone’s too emotionally repressed. Oh well, we’re used to that.
Jamming lateral flow swabs up your nose
For the sake of your wellbeing, your brain has redacted all those times you hunched over your kitchen table with a swab lodged in your cranium before anxiously watching for the little lines to find out if you were about to be dead. As far as your brain’s concerned, 2020 was a jolly rollercoaster of binge-watching Tiger King and learning new stuff like making banana bread. Aah, good times. For your cerebrum, anyway.
Obsessing over social distancing on your daily walk
All of the rules surrounding social distancing brought out your most pathetically pedantic tendencies. While barking at strangers to maintain a two-metre distance was worrying enough, it’s more disturbing to think about what this says about you in a broader sense. You’d secretly love to be a complicit citizen in a police state, wouldn’t you?
