My car in for its MOT, today I had to get the bus to work. There is nothing much to say about the trip itself, aboard Bristol’s excellent, albeit expensive, Metrobus service. But everything else about the journey and my experiences at both ends gave me food for thought. And the thing I thought most was this: we are not in any kind of meaningful lockdown.
Walking down the back lane to the bus stop, I passed an incredibly busy nursery, packed with Chelsea tractors and mask-free parents, depositing their offspring before a day’s hard graft. I have walked past this nursery a thousand times before but never was it busier than today.
Then, crossing the road by way of the footbridge – which is absolutely necessary given the sheer weight of constant traffic moving in both directions – I managed to miss my intended bus, which I was surprised to learn was far from empty. The Metrobus service – did I mention before how excellent it is? – meant that I had a wait of barely ten minutes before another turned up. All the available seats downstairs were occupied so I went upstairs to find the only available seat.
The traffic on the ring road and by Bristol Polytechnic (the University of the West of England, known as UWE) was standard peak hour. Soon, we crossed the M32 which was very busy in both directions. Have you been able to detect a theme yet? I then walked the half a mile or so to my place of work, passed by huge volumes of traffic, where I stayed for the day. There were, for much of my day, no spare desks. It was COVID friendly in a sardine type way.
After work, I carried out the morning journey in reverse. Everything was the same except that things appeared even busier than they were earlier. There is a simple conclusion to be drawn here. To repeat the end of the first paragraph of this blog, we are not in any kind of meaningful lockdown.
I have absolutely no doubt that everyone on the buses was coming from or going to work. The same must surely be true of those driving around. It’s not the usual peak time gridlock but it’s not funereally quiet, as you might think it should be.
All this is why I tire at the government’s stay home message. For one thing, it should say stay at home, but this is not the time for pedantry. The experts, like Chris Whitty, and the idiot politicians, like Boris Johnson, regularly tell us we must stay at home and work from home, but here’s the rub. Few, if any workers, can make that decision. It’s the bosses who decide. We see the mutant variants threatening to undermine both the stay at home message, and terrifyingly the vaccines, yet twice as many people are working as they were during the first wave and twice as many people are using public transport.
Predictably, it’s the professional middle classes who are more able to work from home and adhere to the stay at home message and it’s the lower paid working classes who can’t. Inevitably, a terrible pandemic morphs into a form of class war.
With a mutant strain now arriving in Bristol, what to do next? No stay at home messaging will encourage low paid workers to stay at home without pay, just as only 20% of people self-isolate when told because otherwise they won’t be able to put bread on the table. Over to you, Johnson, although I expect you’ll do what you always do; nothing.
It was a depressing and distressing time today, being part of a normal world existing in a wholly abnormal one. I felt my whole day was spent in a human petri dish.
Luckily for me, I had my first Pfizer BioNTech vaccine shot nearly three weeks ago and if the old COVID has a pop at me, the odds are it won’t take me down. But this new mutant variant? Christ alone knows. Suffice to say, I rarely felt safe today and I was very glad to get off my return Metrobus journey, walk past the rammed nursery car park and finally close my front door behind me.
In my humble opinion, you either have a lockdown or you don’t. Nothing I saw about today said ‘lockdown’. If we carry on like this, we had might as well open the pubs, clubs and restaurants. I don’t really mean the last bit, but desperate people say desperate things and trust me, today I felt pretty desperate.
