A year down the line- exactly a year since the first lockdown.

 A year down the line- exactly a year since the first lockdown.

So here we all are exactly a year down the line since the first lockdown. How has it been for you? Are you sore, bewildered, dazed, furious, indignant or just plain shocked? Do you just feel like exploding with frustration and anger? Is there a temptation to just go back to bed or hide in a dark room until the coronavirus has simply exhausted itself and the rapidly dwindling numbers of deaths becomes nothing and everything looks as if it could be the right time to stop this chronic global crisis from spiralling out of control. 

A year ago today all we knew was that in some far off wet market in China or some experimental science laboratory a seemingly innocent medical condition horrifically degenerated into a full blown, deadly virus that would, as we know now, kill millions of people leaving the rest of the world in utter paralysis when quite clearly none of us thought that a couple of poorly passengers aboard a cruise vessel would be just a temporary news story. 

But the fact is that we are now, to all intents and purposes, showing promising signs of a full recovery from Covid 19, the coast is almost clear and shortly the thumbs up could be given for a clean bill of health. Now let's not get ahead of ourselves here because the good news could become bad in a matter of days or weeks and we all know that. However, the proposed April 12 and May 17 dates should never disguise the raw truths. We have now been drawn into a game of possibilities, probabilities, guesswork, crucial contingency plans if it all goes belly up and the thought persists that this could be just a smokescreen. 

Yesterday our friends in the rest of Europe decided that they didn't particularly want to play ball with their British counterparts. Not for them the peaceful solution to the virus, more a case of awkwardness and stubbornness, a rigid, uncompromising stance to wind us up deliberately with a complete lack of co-operation and a readiness to just complicate matters when everything in the garden looked rosy. So we gritted our teeth, murmured our annoyance and threatened to give the rest of Europe the bloodiest nose they've ever received. 

Now what do you do when you look to your neighbours and you may need a helping hand, a push forward, a sign of encouragement. Everything in Britain seems to be on course for a triumphant day of re-opening the economy and switching the on button for normal everyday life again. But then our grumpy European allies make it abundantly clear that they're not going to play ball. Come April Britain will be alone, reduced in medical capacity, denied those important supplies of the life saving vaccine. Go figure, hey!

It was all going swimmingly well until those European interfering busybodies stuck their oar in and refused to budge. No, they insisted, we are not going to allow you to bulk up on the very vaccine that could take us out of this predicament sooner rather than later. So here we are now a couple of weeks away from the end of the first stage of this comeback, this rejuvenation of the world, this return to the good old days and there are some who simply don't want this to end here and now. 

Apparently the rest of Europe seem to be under the misapprehension that we're stealing its thunder, getting far more vaccines than we should and that's just not fair. So what do they do? Sulk? Quite possibly. They tell Britain that effectively we should slow down and wait until they're ready for another consignment of vaccines or merely suffer the consequences. We are now stuck between the devil and deep blue sea. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't. There are though no winners in this case. 

Suffice it to say that Britain is boiling, seething, red in the face with incandescent rage, not knowing how to react but intent on waging a petty war over something that should have been resolved much more quickly than it seems to be at the moment.  The crux of the matter is that at some point heads should be emphatically bashed together and an agreement set up in place that would hurry everything up and just sort out those childish differences of opinion. We're almost there now so it may be advisable to get on with it decisively and stop dragging your feet. How much longer can we take of this?

The truth is we've all been possessed of truly remarkable powers of stamina and endurance because quite frankly this  energy sapping infection, contagion, virus whatever it may be called, is just going around in ever increasing circles, tiring us, upsetting us and determined not to go without a fight. And yet we must be positive and not let anybody destroy our morale, discouraging us, undermining us because we must ignore those doom mongers.

Yesterday Boris Johnson, Britain's talking head and Prime Minister, warned of a third outbreak of Covid 19 washing up on our shores. Now when a British Prime Minister compares their country to a beached whale on some English seaside resort you know things have got really bad. Still, the blond one from Uxbridge with that proud crop of dishevelled wheat on his head, doesn't quite know what to say if truth to be told. He's heard about our the pesky intransigence of our European acquaintances and he fears the worst. Very few know what to believe anymore although perhaps Mr Johnson has lost his way. 

The fact is that there are some people who believe that a whole year has been criminally stolen from their lives, a year with no substance, no excitement or drama to look back on. But hold on, we're all still here aren't we? Nothing untoward has happened to us, nothing evil or heinous has taken place and we're still living, the pulse and blood pressure at its healthiest and the BBC are still giving us incessant news bulletins about the obvious. We have to be grateful and we have to just keep making allowances.

It may be as well to cast back our minds to what happened last year. We're all familiar with the story of that cruise right at the beginning of last year if not further back to the year before that one. The images of several passengers being taken aside into quarantine because they were seriously ill at the time, are now graven onto our minds. We can remember them as if it were yesterday which of course it wasn't. But what we didn't know at the time that this would get significantly worse before it had a chance to get better. 

At the beginning of March, after a brief lull in the proceedings, concerns were being expressed. By the time of the Cheltenham horse racing festival it was all too late. Hundreds and thousands huddled together in rural Gloucestershire and the rest is history. The outcome of that one horse race meeting was so nerve jangling and disastrous that you'd have thought the world had come to a screeching end. Cheltenham was singularly blamed for the deterioration of a condition which none of us had ever heard of before and weren't going to worry about for any great length of time. 

Then there was the episode at Liverpool's Anfield ground. Liverpool were playing Atletico Madrid in a Champions League game. Nothing wrong with that or so it seemed at the time. What became clearly evident though was that thousands of Spanish supporters had flown into Merseyside, plonked themselves ludicrously in the middle of a vast Liverpool throng and it all got out of hand. Flares were lit in the Madrid end of Anfield and thousands of away supporters mingled quite happily. It wasn't the best idea in the world even by the visitors admission. 

The next day a profound sense of disgust and condemnation lingered around Liverpool like the most vile smell of all time. How on earth were those Spanish supporters permitted to congregate together in such numbers and huge multitudes. It seemed that a mass migration of Spanish supporters had come to rest in England when they hadn't been invited. It must have felt the whole of the Iberian peninsula had landed in Britain and weren't going anywhere for a while. 

Then there followed a year that even now feels as though it must have been some terrifying return of the 1950s sci fi TV programme Quatermass where the world is taken over aliens or men in masks with horns sticking up from their heads. It felt as if the Great British public were being held hostage for a crime they had never committed. 

Suddenly supermarkets were being emptied of toilet rolls, egg boxes and every other edible product it could find as if a real emergency had been declared. Then the rest of the retail world found itself teetering on the edge of almost instant extinction. Shops were closed for ages and ages while London began to resemble a mausoleum, a gloomy old monument that looked as if somebody had pulled the plug out of the electrical socket and left it looking like the Sahara desert. Then 10 Downing Street got into the act, highlighting the problems we would become familiar with and we already knew anyway. Boris Johnson kept telling us to stay at home rather like a parent tells its child that if they're not up for going to school the next day they should stay in bed and sweat out the fever. 

There then followed that daily fiasco, three men walking into the room and a constantly evolving virus that eventually overwhelmed everybody. The chief medical and scientific officers did their utmost to be cheerful but then just got fed up with it all, urging extreme caution and not to go out at all. In fact there were times when you felt so scared to go out that for a while even the supermarkets represented a very real moral dilemma. Surely we wouldn't be expected to starve. Thankfully not. 

Still, here we are two or perhaps three lockdowns in if you include the one that only lasted for a while and April 12 seems like the impossible dream. So we'll hunker down in our bunker, contemplate re-reading another chapter from War and Peace before looking for an alternative hobby such as kite flying, bungee jumping, tackling the Times cryptic crossword or just basket weaving. What about counting to a million and then climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro or perhaps a hike around the United States of America? It can't take that long surely. 

Anyway this is the first entire year of coronavirus which doesn't sound as though it should be regarded as a noteworthy achievement. Instead we will now start counting the days down before we can be released back into a world of instantly identifiable humanity. Some of us will be back at our local gym all being well on April 12, eager as a beaver. Ladies and Gentlemen. Please don't panic over that yearly expedition to your favourite holiday on Spanish, Italian, Greek, Cypriot or American shores. Just keep hoping and believing but try to put on a happy face. This must work out for the best, hopefully.