Culture in a time of Covid
A silver linings playbook of the lockdown years
Another week, another anniversary to mark.
Two, in actual fact.
This is my 50th Substack newsletter. (Definitely happy to mark the occasion with a small fanfare this time round.) That feels quite the achievement. Much of my back catalogue came in early 2023 BH (before hiatus), so for any recent subscribers there is certainly plenty to read if you fancy a rummage round in the It’s All About the Words archives (this, this and this are particular old favourites—enjoy).
It would perhaps have been extra clever to align this milestone with my newsletter on anniversaries last week—but the calendar had alternative plans for me. And today’s newsletter does have an anniversary theme at its heart.
Sunday (23rd March) marks five years since the UK went into the first lockdown of the pandemic.
Let me interject quickly before you click away.
I know for so many Covid times are the last thing you want to revisit or read about. But my intention here is for this to be uplifting, to remember and share some of the positive cultural things that emerged from those ‘unprecedented’ months (how quickly we can segue back into the overused lingo).
As an introverted, homebody mother of an introverted, homebody then six-year-old, a pause in the relentlessness of noisy, busy human existence was not necessarily a hardship (and I fully appreciate that not everyone feels the same, or had the same easygoing experience). We read a lot, talked a lot, wrote a lot. We tended the garden, we tended the village phonebox library (people still mention what a godsend that was in those months). And we took full advantage of many of the clever ways creative people sought to bring culture to us, when we, sequestered at home, could no longer go and seek it out.
Poetry
By the time lockdown was in place, we had endured a steady ramping up of the news for weeks. We refreshed and refreshed, looking for information and answers—the lack of either creating a mental fog of fear and stress that sapped concentration spans instantly.
Bookworms and lockdowns should have been a match made in heaven, but initially this was not the case. Focus for anything but impending doom was lost. Writers couldn’t write. Readers couldn’t read.
A wise friend of mine prescribed poetry.
Poetry offered brevity and comfort. A bite-sized culture hit. A shot of feelings. A momentary shift from head to heart, where we could float above the catastrophising cycle.
My relationship with poetry before the pandemic was rudimentary at best. I had a few books collected over the years, but felt that I didn’t quite get poetry. I wanted to. And during this time I finally released that block and just let myself enjoy the words. Be an amateur enthusiast, like what I like and let that be enough. Poetry certainly served its medicinal purpose, and helped me bridge the gap back to reading.
It turned out my wise friend wasn’t alone in offering this prescription.
It’s that time of the newsletter where we sound the Sam West klaxon, for here he is again! Pandemic Poetry is an absolutely wonderful outcome and artefact of the UK lockdowns. Sam asked his Twitter followers to suggest favourite poems, and he and an incredible collective of his acting friends (including his sadly since departed father) read and recorded 600 poems over 196 days. There is huge variety here—so many favourites old and new. Pandemic Poetry is still available to access on Soundcloud (here and here) and I highly recommend it. I dip in often.
Queen of Dragons herself, Emilia Clarke, set up something similar on Instagram. Based on the hugely popular The Poetry Pharmacy anthology by William Sieghart, Clarke asked her celebrity friends to record videos of themselves reading poems in aid of various charities. I’m delighted to have found a couple of my favourites on YouTube.
I still often think about (and often watch) Andrew Scott’s beautiful rendition of the Derek Mahon poem Everything is Going to Be Alright:
And this is just a combination of absolute heartening classics—Helena Bonham Carter reading Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese:
Cultural events move online
The shift of in-person events to online, although I’m sure hugely disappointing for those with tickets and plans, did mean a democratisation of access for those usually unable to attend.
The Hay Festival went online in 2020 and it was absolutely incredible to have the opportunity to sit on my sofa and see so many different authors (in front of so many different bookshelves) discussing their latest works.
The wonderful opening event of the festival has stayed with me—A Night in with the Wordsworths, which celebrated Wordsworth’s work to mark his 250th birthday. So many favourite famous faces Zoomed in to read his work—Simon Armitage, Jonathan Pryce, Toby Jones, Stephen Fry, Tom Hollander. I remember being so pleasantly surprised to hear Monty Don, someone I’d never have associated with poetry, but whose readings were absolutely beautiful. Although I didn’t manage to find a video of Monty, I’m actually grateful to have stumbled on this one instead. Helen McCrory—what a voice, what a sad loss.
Life in squares
There is a huge place in my heart for the TV shows I watched during the pandemic. There was the enjoyment of heightened watercooler vibes (online of course) attached to anything fresh and exciting (rare at that point)—looking at you Normal People. Then there was our own personal binge watching odysseys, finally the time to devour a five- or six-season epic, for me that was Poldark and Schitt’s Creek (quite the heady combination).
But the show that so beautifully captured the trapped-in-a-house, trapped-in-a-box-on-Zoom lives we were living, and then ramped it right up for comic effort, was the BBC’s Staged, starring two of the UK’s most excellent humans, David Tennant and Michael Sheen. They were bored and bickering and getting to grips with lockdown life in ways that were (and weren’t!) relatable. It made for very clever, funny, warm TV—and featured a very sweary Judi Dench in series 2, which is always worth tuning in for.
Stage to small screen
Another event TV memory of lockdown was Hamilton appearing on Disney+. To be able to see this show at home felt huge. I watched it on repeat in the summer of 2020 (I’m very much due a rewatch and have noticed there’s now a singalong version available).
John Krasinski’s lockdown YouTube web series Some Good News was always an uplifting watch, and this surprise for a young Hamilton fan was particularly wonderful—and perhaps demonstrates how reliance on Zoom made us think differently about what was possible (would they have been able to gather the whole original cast together again otherwise?). Also love how Emily Blunt couldn’t resist making an appearance to watch this one unfold.
The National Theatre offered an incredible opportunity for us to see hit plays and huge stars on the small screen when they started sharing recorded theatre performances on YouTube. The NTLive programme that was a huge success in cinemas became NTathome. I watched One Man, Two Guv’nors, Small Island, Twelfth Night, Amadeus and A Streetcar Named Desire to name but a few. Again this offering has really democratised access to London theatre and NTathome was so loved it is now available as an online subscription service (I mentioned in an earlier newsletter, I received a gift subscription for Christmas and it’s worth its weight in gold).
Pandemic fiction
I don’t really intend to linger too long on pandemic fiction. While it is certainly a creative product of lockdown-lived experiences, it isn’t really part of what got us through that time.
Initially, the early to emerge poetry and fiction that captured in some way a Covid story felt like an affirmation that these strange times were experienced pretty universally.
Think Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, which ends, quite abruptly, in lockdown. But that seemed fitting. Lockdown was abrupt, pausing and ending stories everywhere. Or (no stranger to speeding a zeitgeist tale to print) Ali Smith’s Companion Piece, with one strand of the narrative firmly rooted in the pandemic.
In Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout (my writing hero) sets Lucy and her ex-husband in a cabin in Maine to ride out isolation away from the city, deftly capturing so many thoughts and details that resonate—simultaneously small and domestic, and enormous and incomprehensible.
And as more time passes, the list goes on and on and on. I suppose if you’re writing contemporary fiction set in this decade how can you not mention Covid? But interestingly maybe we have as an audience moved away from finding the pandemic interesting to read about, whether out of a search for resonance or morbid fascination. It perhaps already feels like a time passed, yet also not passed enough.
With this newsletter’s subject matter on my mind, I was interested to spot this observation in
’ newsletter earlier this week in discussion with a friend about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest book, Dream Count:I don’t like reading pandemic fiction. It is too recent. It needs time to embed into history, to breathe, before I can find literature about it interesting. Also, I just lived it. It was both terrifying and dull. I don’t need to read a book about it yet.
It’s five years on from lockdown.
This morning, before I start to edit this newsletter, I pick up my current read—the piercingly relatable You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Substack’s wonderful poet-in-residence
—and lo and behold Maggie’s story has suddenly become boundaried by lockdown. Of course it has. I am an interconnection magnet in human form.Maggie Smith takes us neatly back to the start of this newsletter as Sam West read her beautiful (and ever relevant) poem Good Bones—the final line of which gives her memoir its title—for Pandemic Poetry.
There really were lockdown silver linings to be found if you looked hard enough. I’ll leave the last uplifting example to Maggie:
Quarantine was a learning experience. Among its lessons: I can roller-skate backward with a margarita in one hand.
I loved lockdown. For the first time I felt I was not some kind of alien hermit creature on the wrong planet. I love how nature reclaimed her space. I wrote a lot, for the first time in years I wrote poetry. I kept a lockdown diary. This is something I wrote when we went from Level 4 to Level 3, when the roads opened for trucks.
"I woke before dawn to NOISE! Trucks thundering past, their arrogant voices hurting my whole being. I started out on my usual "almost light" walk, cowering into the side of the road hands over my ears as the monstrous creatures came well within the 2-metre social distancing law.
While walking I questioned my dislike of trucks, and how much I use in my life that involves trucks, you know trying to conjure up some spirit of truck forgiveness. I think my forgiveness will allow for 2 trucks... a month. I questioned my love of lockdown, as sometimes this love feels like a nefarious thing. I decided lockdown should be compulsory, twice a year at least, for say, 2 months each time."
I’m absolutely with Pandora - I need time before reading about lockdown - maybe in about 20 years 🤣. That Hamilton video was brilliant. I’ve not seen that before. Lovely newsletter, Claire (as usual).