Starting to Embrace My New Normal

I'm going to be honest. I don't want to go back to the Old Normal.

The Old Normal, at least in the major towns, in February 2020, was over-crowded, nea rammed. From the train, to the tube, to the office, to the streets at lunchtime, and back again, never any space, always someone in your face. People who drove did not stand on packed trains, instead their cars stood in traffic jams. Every day. Both directions.

The Old Normal office was over-crowded, noisy, distracting and un-productive. And it smelled of micro-waved food from midday onwards.

The Old Normal cafes were full of other people all the time. So were the Old Normal restaurants. And shops.

It didn't used to be that bad. Not in the 1980's or even the 1990's. Pubs and clubs on a Saturday night were rammed, but that was the point of Saturday night, while the rest of the week was either quiet or busy. From about 2015 or so, almost every evening in Soho was bustling (one step up from busy), and from Wednesday to Saturday it was rammed. It got so I gave up trying to find somewhere to have supper after my early evening Meeting.

The Old Normal had people from all over the world packed into a handful of cities - Amsterdam, Paris, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Milan, Rome, Florence - every weekend. If Patient Zero showed up on Saturday in Amsterdam, by the next Saturday whatever it was would be all over Europe, America and Russia.

It didn't used to be like that even at the start of the 2000's. Those towns were busy, had a nice buzz, but were not rammed as they were in 2019.

And don't get me started on traffic.

My New Normal will be that I work from home. I am starting to like a lot about it. I can get a walk in the morning, followed by a short weights session, a shower, breakfast and some time reading, before getting back on the laptop, because I do routine stuff on it first thing. Good start to the day.

I'll be making some more changes to what I do as the time goes on, after I can actually get a haircut and a massage. There is no way my employer will even try to get us all back in the office until at least November, and if the Government builds Anti-Social Distancing into the New Normal, there won't be the space to bring us all back. I will be serving Capitalism by staying home, and SouthWest Trains can figure out how to run at a profit without my fares and car parking fees.

If you're smart, you will not go back to the over-crowded Old Normal. You really want those traffic jams? To stand on the train for twenty minutes? To sit between two other people each less than three feet away and both yammering corporate nonsense on their phones? To hang around for other people to get off the machines at the gym?

I could have gone back to the Old Normal if the lockdown had ended after three weeks. It was in the second three-week period I started to mail-order stuff I needed, and switched my shopping around, and started to understand what my New Normal could be. Six weeks is all it takes to get used to new circumstances. Or not, and go back to the old ways. I might have gone back after six weeks. But when it was obvious from the Government's plan that whatever the New Normal was, it was not going to start until November, I gave up.

I'm not going back.

But then I'm single, I'm still employed, and I'm close to retirement. I'm an insignificant old codger with a data-crunching job in an FTSE-100 company. Heh. The lack of responsibility is positively liberating.

Boris and his cabinet got us into this mess, and it's their job to get us out of it. They have, to their eternal credit, taken the responsibility and handed out money the taxpayer doesn't have, to keep people from poverty and bankruptcy. They are not rocket scientists - if they were they would never have trusted that twat from Imperial College - but they are shrewd political operators. I suspect they knew somewhere in their political lizard-brains that the Old Normal of ever-increasing crowding and 'productivity' had stopped working in about 2016 or so, and everyone was just doubling-down on a dumb trade. I suspect they are now in the social change game. They don't know what they want, but they do know what they don't want, which is why they are making a fetish of Anti-Social Distancing. With that, they can destroy the Old Normal. Because just maybe, anything is better than that.