...and Corona is a black light. Not my words, but a tweet from Megan Abram from March 10th, 2020 (well, almost, I inverted it). That beautifully vivid metaphor stuck with me for the next year, as the cracks in society began to appear, and we realised how undervalued and underrepresented certain members of our society are. The idealist in me was hoping that shelf stackers, bus drivers, cashiers, and trash men would be recognised as indispensable members of our community, and be treated as such. I thought at the very least they would make things better for nurses and carers, as the whole country banded together once a week to applaud for them. It wasn't to be the case. The world's billionaires got richer whilst the rest of us thought over the thin end of the wedge.
Readers from outside the UK may not be familiar with Captain Tom Moore, the retired army officer who, in April 2020, decided to walk a hundred lengths of his garden as he approached his hundredth birthday, hoping to raise £1,000 for NHS Charities Together. He raised nearly £33 million (£39m after rebates), and became the Guinness World Record Holder for greatest amount raised for an individual charity walk. He received 1.5 million donations, 150,000 birthday cards, and a knighthood. He contributed to a number one charity single, received the Sports Personality of the Year award, and the Pride of Britain award. A film about him is being produced, and he has been commemorated in postmarks, New Year's fireworks, and flyovers, and has had his name given to everything from trains and boats to police dogs and horses. My grandad wrote to Piers Morgan suggesting the army stop using the word "captain" and use the word "captom" instead.
A motion to increase nurse's salaries was voted down in the Houses of Parliament shortly after, whilst COVID-19 was hitting us hardest. Maybe if we'd shouted for pay rises rather than clapping, maybe if instead of sending birthday cards people had sent letters to their MPs, maybe if we questioned why it took a pensioner exhausting himself for money to be allocated to support key workers, we could have made a real difference.
Captain Sir Tom Moore died a hero shortly before his 101st birthday, having caught the coronavirus while being treated for pneumonia, and Piers Morgan never wrote back to my grandfather.
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| "Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day." Sorry Tom, but that's not always true. |
Things weren't much better in hospitals across the pond that April. Hospital workers were making surgical gowns out of garbage bags and posting photos of how their faces were bruised from wearing the same pair of protective goggles all day. Refrigerated trucks were being used to store dead bodies. Things were looking grim.
